Using and understanding language

Using a mixture of self-discovery and author explanation, this chapter invites the reader to consider several examples of everyday talk from a pragmatic point of view. Rather than simply considering the literal meaning of sentences, pragmatics explores what utterances, i.e. sentences used for real-world purposes, actually do and what additional non-literal meanings they convey. The chapter therefore focuses on the distinction between sentence meaning (semantics) and utterance or speaker meaning (pragmatics). The chapter gradually introduces key terms in pragmatic description as a preparation for the chapters that follow and concludes with a short section which discusses the relationship between pragmatics, semantics, conversation analysis and discourse analysis.