From Longman Dictionary of Contemporary Englishpragmaticsprag‧mat‧ics /præɡˈmætɪks/ noun [uncountable] technicalSL the study of how words and phrases are used with special meanings in particular situationsGRAMMAR: Singular or plural verb?Pragmatics is followed by a singular verb: Pragmatics includes the theory of speech acts.
Examples from the Corpus
pragmatics• As regards metaphor, the cognitive approach appears to share something of both semantics and pragmatics.• The distinction between sentence and utterance is of fundamental importance to both semantics and pragmatics.• To this day, most of the important concepts in pragmatics are drawn directly from philosophy of language.• Unlike many other topics in pragmatics, implicature does not have an extended history.• This involves information about syntax, semantics, discourse structure, pragmatics and knowledge of the world.• So the notion that pragmatics might be the study of aspects of meaning not covered in semantics certainly has some cogency.• A central question that remains, though, is whether the study of deixis belongs to semantics or to pragmatics.• Yet pragmatics tends only to examine how meaning develops at a given point. 