Most definitions of pragmatics have been inspired by Charles Morris's definition of pragmatics as "the study of the relations of signs to interpreters" (1938) (Mey, 1996, p. 35). Morris added “pragmatics is about everything human communication process, psychological, biological and sociological". In Levinson's words, "pragmatics is the study of those relations between language and context that are grammaticalized, or encoded in the structure of a language" (Ibid, p. 39). It is the systematic study of meaning depending on the use of language. The main topics of pragmatics are: implicature, presupposition, speech acts and deixis (Huang, 2007, p. 3). Pragmatic factors such as context, real-world knowledge and inference are essential to fill the gap created by linguistic underdetermining. It's for this reason, pragmatics has to be included as a component in an overall theory of linguistic ability (Ibid, p. 6). In this sense, Yule (2010, p. 128) stated that pragmatics studies the hidden meaning, or how we recognize what is meant even if it isn't actually said or written. Therefore, the speakers (or writers) must be able to depend on a lot of shared presuppositions and expectations when they communicate. In order to understand the messages that are intended to be conveyed, we must use the meanings of the words, the context in which they occur and some pre-existing knowledge of what is intended to be conveyed. Our interpretation of the meaning of the sign is not only based on the words, but on what we think the writer intended to communicate (Ibid, p. 129). Pragmatics assumes that when people communicate with each other they follow some sort of co-operative principle; that is, they have a shared understanding of how they should co-operate in their communications.
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