This book addresses the topics of interest in the discipline of pragmatics, including the cognitive and sociocultural factors influence the use of the language. Pragmatics deals with analysing language in context. If semantics is the study of meanings as stored in language, waiting to be put to use, then pragmatics focuses on how speakers and writers use their knowledge to convey meanings. In short, pragmatics studies how language is used in the interpretation of actual utterances.
This means that people who study pragmatics are interested in when language is used, where is it used, who it is used by, how it is used, what it is used for and, perhaps most importantly, how it gets interpreted as doing the thing it is used for by the people who use it when they do so