In linguistics and semiotics, pragmatics is concerned with bridging the explanatory gap between sentence meaning and speaker's meaning. The study of how context influences the interpretation is then crucial. In this setting, context refers to any factor — linguistic, objective, or subjective — that affects the actual interpretation of signs and expressions.
Pragmatics is interested predominantly in utterances, usually in the context of conversations.
A distinction is made in pragmatics between sentence meaning and speaker meaning. Sentence meaning is the literal meaning of the sentence, while the speaker meaning is the piece of information (or proposition) that the speaker is trying to convey.
The ability to understand another speaker's intended meaning is called pragmatic competence.
An utterance describing pragmatic function is called metapragmatic.
It is also regarded as one of the most challenging aspects for language learners to learn and grasp, and can only truly be learned with experience.
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