ABSTRACT
The term pragmatics has been burdened with covering the enormous domain of the study of how language is used: all the choices that speakers are “free” to make-that is, those that are not fixed by the lexicon, the grammar, or the phonology. The term subsumes sociolinguistics as it applies to the behavior of individuals, intersects with diachronic linguistics in matters of style (e.g., Is it correct to split an infinitive?), collides with conversation analysis and discourse analysis, and so on.
