ABSTRACT
Linguistic pragmatics is characterized as studying linguistic expressions’ uses in social contexts. But there are two importantly different ways in which an expression’s use depends on context. First, owing to the presence of such deictic elements as personal pronouns and tense, a sentence’s propositional content varies from context to context (recall that “I am sick now” says different things depending on when it is uttered and by whom). Second, even once the sentence’s propositional content has been fixed, there are several other important aspects of its use that will still vary with context. Semantic pragmatics studies the former phenomenon, the determination of propositional content by context; pragmatic pragmatics studies the latter.
