In linguistics, pragmatics is concerned with bridging the explanatory gap between sentencemeaning and speaker’s meaning. The study of how context influences the interpretation is then crucial.
"Context" here must be interpreted as situation as it may include any imaginable extra-linguistic factor, including discourse, social, environmental, and psychological factors.
Methodology and presuppositions
Pragmatics is interested predominantly in utterances, made up of sentences, and usually in the context of conversations.
A distinction is made in pragmatics between sentence meaning and speaker meaning. Sentence meaning is the literal meaning of the sentence, while the speaker meaning is the concept that the speaker is trying to convey.
Prolegomena to a Theory of Communicative Competence - Text of the 1969 paper by Leon James, which is concerned with the implications for psychology of Chomsky's distinction between competence and performance.