Pragmatics is the study of the ability of natural language speakers to communicate more than that which is explicitly stated. The ability to understand another speaker's intended meaning is called pragmatic competence. An utterance describing pragmatic function is described as metapragmatic. One thing we might add, is that pragmatics deals about how to reach our goal in communcation. Suppose, we want to ask someone beside us to stop smoking. We can achieve that goal by using several utterances. We can say, 'stop smoking, please!' which is direct. We can also say in an indirect way, just like 'sir, this room has air conditioners'. In this way, we want the smoker to understand that he or she is not allowed to smoke in an air conditioned room.
Pragmatics is regarded as one of the most challenging aspects for language learners to grasp, and can only truly be learned with experience.

Origins
Roman Jakobson identified six functions of language, only one of which is the traditional system of reference.
Émile Benveniste discussed pronouns "I" and "you", arguing that they are fundamentally distinct from other pronouns because of their role in creating the subject.
Michael Silverstein has argued that the "non-referential index" communicates meaning without being explicitly attached to semantic content.

referential: conveys information about some real phenomenon
expressive: describes feelings of the speaker
conative: attempts to elicit some behavior from the addressee
phatic: builds a relationship between both parties in a conversation
metalingual: self-references
poetic: focuses on the text independent of reference Related fields
Pragmatics helps anthropologists relate elements of language to broader social phenomena; it thus pervades the field of linguistic anthropology. Because pragmatics describes generally the forces in play for a given utterance, it includes the study of power, gender, race, identity, and their interactions with individual speech acts. For example, the study of code switching directly relates to pragmatics, since a switch in code effects a shift in pragmatic force.

Linguistic Anthropology
Jaques Derrida once remarked that some of linguistic pragmatics aligned well with the program he outlined in Of Grammatology.
Linguistic pragmatics underpins Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity. In Gender Trouble, she describes how gender and sex are not natural categories, but called into being by discourse. In Excitable Speech she extends her theory of performativity to hate speech, arguing that the designation of certain utterances as "hate speech" affects their pragmatic function.
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari discuss linguistic pragmatics in the fourth chapter of A Thousand Plateaus ("November 20, 1923--Postulates of Linguistics"). They draw three conclusions from Austin: (1) A performative utterance doesn't communicate information about an act second-hand—it does the act; (2) Every aspect of language ("semantics, syntactics, or even phonematics") functionally interacts with pragmatics; (3) The distinction between language and speech is untenable. This last conclusion attempts to simultaneously refute Saussure's division between langue and parole and Chomsky's distinction between surface structure and deep structure.

Pragmatics in Philosophy

Paul Grice's cooperative principle and conversational maxims
Brown & Levinson's Politeness Theory
Geoffrey Leech's politeness maxims
Levinson's Presumptive Meanings
Jürgen Habermas's universal pragmatics
Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson's relevance theory Significant works

Entailment
Deixis
Implicature
Practical reason
Presupposition
Speech act Topics in pragmatics

Bibliography

Charles Peirce
Charles Peirce (Bibliography)
Paul Grice
Semiotics
Sign relation
Sitz im Leben
Stephen D. Levinson
William James