Pragmatics studies how language is used in context — how speakers convey meaning beyond the literal content of their words, and how listeners infer the intended meaning. When someone says "Can you pass the salt?", semantics tells us this is a question about ability, but pragmatics tells us it is a request for action. Pragmatic competence — the ability to use and interpret language appropriately in social context — is essential for effective communication.
Grice's Cooperative Principle
H. P. Grice proposed that conversation is governed by a Cooperative Principle: speakers are expected to be cooperative and make their contributions appropriate. He formulated four maxims: Quality (be truthful), Quantity (be appropriately informative), Relation (be relevant), and Manner (be clear). Listeners assume speakers follow these maxims and use this assumption to derive conversational implicatures — meanings that go beyond literal content. When a professor writes "The student attended class regularly" in a recommendation letter, the violation of the Quantity maxim (too little information) implies the student has no other notable qualities.
Speech Acts
Austin and Searle's speech act theory analyzes utterances as actions. Every utterance has a locutionary act (the literal content), an illocutionary act (the intended function: requesting, promising, warning, apologizing), and a perlocutionary act (the effect on the listener). Indirect speech acts (using one form to perform another function, as in "Can you pass the salt?") are ubiquitous and require pragmatic inference to interpret correctly.
Pragmatic competence requires theory of mind — the ability to understand others' mental states, beliefs, and intentions. To interpret what a speaker means (as opposed to what they literally say), listeners must infer the speaker's communicative intention, taking into account their knowledge, perspective, and goals. Children's pragmatic development parallels their theory of mind development, and pragmatic difficulties are a hallmark of autism spectrum disorder, where theory of mind is impaired.