ABSTRACT
The domain of PRAGMATICS concerns the process whereby meanings richer than the encoded conventional meanings of signs arise in real contexts. Pragmatic meanings are semiotically accessible and/or logically derivable, but are not semantically encoded. They include contingent aspects of context and common ground (things one knows and things one can see and hear), on the one hand, and derived inferences on the other. Context and common ground constitute input for deriving inferences from encoded meanings . . . The term IMPLICATURE refers to the process or product of such inferences. Implicatures are contingent and context-dependent, arising from given common ground, including speakers’ knowledge of the linguistic system and associated expectations of what a speaker ‘could have said’ but didn’t. (Enfi eld, 2003b: 84; emphasis in original)
PRAGMATICS is the area of linguistic and sociolinguistic study that is concerned with the ways in which speakers/hearers and writers/readers (in any modality of discourse) both create and derive meaning from non-literal interpretations of discourse, while engaged in contextually situated interaction .
