The Distinction Between Semantic and Pragmatic Meaning With reference to the third year students - Dept. of English, College of Basic Education: A Practical study

Abstract

Pragmatics and Semantics are inter-related subjects and the distinction

between them is necessary to provide a framework for explaining the variety of

ways in which what a speaker conveys can fail to be fully determined by the

(conventional) linguistic meaning of the sentence he utters.

In a more positive vein, the distinction between semantics and pragmatics

has served to separate strictly linguistic facts about utterances from those that

involve the actions, intentions, and inferences of language users (speaker-

hearers). However, there are some linguistic phenomena that seem to straddle

the semantics-pragmatics boundary.