What is Pragmatics?

Pragmatics is the branch of linguistics that studies the use of language in context and how it is used to convey meaning in social interactions. It examines the ways in which speakers use language to achieve their communicative goals and how language is used to convey meaning beyond the literal meanings of words.

It looks at how meaning is affected by context, including the speaker, the listener, and the situation in which the language is used. It also examines how speakers use language to convey social and cultural information and how language is used to convey politeness, indirectness, and other pragmatic features. It also deals with the study of speech acts, which are the ways in which language is used to perform various types of actions, such as making requests, giving orders, making promises, and so on.

Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics that deals with the study of language in use, and is closely related to semantics and syntax. Semantics deals with the meaning of words and sentences, while syntax deals with the structure of sentences and how words are combined to create meaning. Together with semantics, syntax and phonology, morphology, and phonetics, pragmatics forms a part of linguistic study. It is also closely related to fields such as anthropology, sociology, and psychology, which study the social and cultural aspects of language use.