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. 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 has a complicated range of data to deal with. It must not only chart the complicated uses of pronouns, tense, and the like, but solve the general problem of disambiguation. Charles Morris divided linguistic study into syntax, semantics, and pragmatics. Semantics has always focused on sentence meaning, the meaning of a sentence type in abstraction from any particular use to which the sentence might be put. M. J. Cresswell distinguished between two kinds of pragmatics: semantic pragmatics and pragmatic pragmatics.
