Introduction
Pragmatics is that part of linguistic studies, which deals with knowledge about meaning in context. So it goes beyond semantics which is concerned with meanings of words and phrases.
Pragmatics pays attention to the fact that there is always more being communicated than what is said. In order to understand an utterance, we have to grasp the “invisible meaning” (Yule, p.112) of it, i.e. the intention of the speaker, shared assumptions and expectations of speaker and hearer, or more general what the speaker means by uttering something in a given context.
In the following we will only deal with three aspects of pragmatics, namely: