ABSTRACT
Pragmatics, the study of the interaction of context and meaning, looks at the practical use of language. By using particular words or phrases, speakers give an utterance social meaning, which tells more about themselves than about the referent. They can also give an utterance affective meaning, which conveys their emotions or attitude. Speech acts are performative sentences in which the speaker is using the force of language to perform an action and not merely conveying information by speaking the sentence. Politeness theory proposes that every speech act involves the concept of social "face" such as positive face and negative face. Discourse analysis also includes study of implicature, the maxims of conversation, and the cultural expectations that guide people when they are conversing. Based on the cooperative principle, some of the maxims of conversation in English are quantity, quality, relevance, and manner. People on the autism spectrum may have difficulty with the pragmatics of communication.
