DEFINITION OF PRAGMATICS

A subfield of linguistics developed in the late 1970s, pragmatics studies how

people comprehend and produce a communicative act or speech act in a

concrete speech situation which is usually a conversation (hence *conversation

analysis). 

It distinguishes two intents or meanings in each utterance or communicative act of verbal communication. One is the informative intent or the

sentence meaning, (Recognize the meaning of words), and the other the communicative intent or speaker meaning,(Leech, 1983; Sperber and Wilson, 1986).

The ability to comprehend and produce a communicative act is referred to as pragmatic competence (Kasper,1997) which often includes one's knowledge about the social distance, social

status between the speakers involved, the cultural  knowledge such as

politeness, and the linguistic knowledge explicit and implicit.