REFERENCE

We have to define reference as an act by wich speaker (or writter) uses language to enable a listener (o reader) to identify something. 
To perform an act of reference, we can use:

• Proper nouns: As Chomsky, Jennifer, Whiskas...
• Other nouns in phrases: A writter, my friend, the cat...
• Pronouns: He, she, it...

We sometimes assume that these words identify something or someone uniquely, but is more accurate to say that, for each word or phrase, there is a "range of reference".

DEIXIS

Some sentences of English are virtually impossible to understand if we don´t know who is speaking, about whom, where and when.
Expressions such as tomorrow and here are obvious examples of bits of language that we can only understand in terms of the speaker´s intended meaning. They are technically  know as deitic expressions, from the  Greek word DEIXIS, wich means pointing via language.

Kind of Deixis:

• Person Deixis: We use Deixis to point to things, (it, this, these) and people(him, them, those).
• Spatial Deixis: Words and phrases used to point to a location (her, there, near that).
• Temporal Deixis: Those used to point to a time(now, then, last week).

All these Deictic expressions have to be interpreted in terms of wich person, place or time the speaker has in mind.

People can actually use Deixis to have some fun. The bar owner who put up a big sign that reads "Free Beer Tomorrow" can always claim that you are just one day early for the free drink.

CONTEXT

There are different kinds of context:

• Linguistic context: Also know as co-text. The co-text of a word is the set of other words used in the same phrase or sentence. The surrounding co-text has a stronger effect on what we think the word probably means.
• Physical context: "If we see the word bank on the wall of a building in a city, the physical location will influence our interpretation.

ANOTHER POINT OF VIEW OF PRAGMATICS: Roman Jakobson

•  Pragmatics: How utterances are used, (liteally, figuratively), in speech acts.
• Language Elements:

1. Contact: Between Adresser and Adresee, (Hearing words, printed pages).
2. Code: Connections of meanings along with an organization pattern of the discourse as a whole.
3. Context: Is the general subject that the message is about and what the speaker is referring to.

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.