ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to discuss what we mean by pragmatics and how the pragmatic turn in linguistics has had an impact on other disciplines including English studies. Pragmatics is a relative newcomer to the field of English studies that opens up new perspectives, approaches and research problems. This new discipline describes, for example, how speakers use language to make requests, to thank someone or to apologize and how the use of language is affected by social and cultural context. The present chapter will discuss the definition of pragmatics, its historical origin in philosophical speech act theory, methods and topics.
