Plain-language explanation.
Pragmatics studies how people use language in context — how the same words can mean different things depending on who says them, to whom, and where. "Can you pass the salt?" is technically a yes/no question about ability, but in context it is a polite request. Pragmatics explains how people communicate far more than they literally say.
Core concepts and standard treatment.
Speech act theory (Austin, Searle): utterances perform actions — assertions, questions, requests, promises, declarations. Illocutionary force (what act is performed) is distinct from locutionary force (what is literally said) and perlocutionary effect (what the act causes). Grice's Cooperative Principle and its maxims generate implicatures — meanings inferred beyond what is literally said. Relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson) proposes a single principle (cognitive relevance) subsuming Grice's maxims.
Deeper theory, debates and edge cases.
Politeness theory (Brown and Levinson): people manage face (positive face — desire for approval; negative face — desire for autonomy) through positive politeness and negative politeness (deference strategies) in face-threatening acts. Cross-cultural pragmatics documents systematic variation in directness, formality, and face management across languages and cultures. Discourse coherence (cohesion devices, rhetorical structure), genre structure, and conversational organisation (turn-taking, repair, adjacency pairs) are discourse pragmatics topics.
How it is applied in practice.
Pragmatics in clinical contexts: pragmatic language impairment in autism spectrum disorder (difficulty with inference, implicature, and non-literal language) is a primary diagnostic feature. Forensic pragmatics examines confession statements and police caution interpretation. Political communication analysis uses pragmatic tools to examine framing, presupposition manipulation, and indirect speech act strategies. NLP pragmatics: dialogue systems require understanding user intent beyond literal meaning, managing discourse coherence, and generating contextually appropriate responses. Sarcasm and irony detection remains a benchmark NLP challenge.