Pragmatics is the study of how context influences language meaning. It examines utterance meaning, language use in context, and how sentence meaning interacts with speaker intentions, discourse context, common ground, and world knowledge. Grice proposed that speaker meaning consists of both sentence meaning and conversational implicatures. Pragmatics allows language users to convey intended meanings implicitly through context rather than being overly explicit, helping keep language interesting and relevant to listeners.

2. Pragmatics
 utterance meaning
 language in context
 interaction of sentence meaning, speaker
intentions, discourse context,
common ground, world knowledge

3. Grice (1967):
1. sentence meaning (what is
said) vs. speaker meaning
(what is meant)
2. speaker meaning consists of
conversational implicatures
in addition to sentence meaning

4. (1) Al: What time is it?
Trixie: Some of the guests are
already leaving.
It's late.
(2) Al: Is the party fun?
Trixie: Some of the guests are
already leaving.
The party is boring.
(3) John: Do you want to go skiing?
Mary: It's snowing!
a. No. (because Mary only skis when
it's sunny)
b. Yes. (because the snow is better
and there are less people
on the slopes)

5. How do we infer what the speaker
meant?
(4) a. John: Do you want to go skiing?
Mary: It's snowing ( no): : : but I didn't mean to say
that I don't want to go skiing. In fact, I love skiing
when it snows.
b. John: There's a red cube on the table (! there is a
cube on
the table): : : but there is no cube on the table.
strange

6. “Pragmatics is an important area of study for your
course. A simplified way of thinking about
pragmatics is to recognise, for example, that
language needs to be kept interesting - a speaker
or writer does not want to bore a listener or
reader, for example, by being over-long or
tedious. So, humans strive to find linguistic means
to make a text, perhaps, shorter, more interesting,
more relevant, more purposeful or more personal.
Pragmatics allows this. ”
Steve Campsall