Pragmatics concerns the study of linguistic production in specific contexts. This means that language is examined in its contextual framework, i.e., in relation to participants, time, place, etc. Thus, emphasis is placed on the interactive nature of language and its dependence on the needs and goals it serves in our everyday conversations. Pragmatics has philosophical origins and initially was incorporated into linguistics to fill the gaps of formalistic approaches to linguistic phenomena. However, it soon became autonomous and evolved into a separate field of study with a particular interest in the implicit and negotiable aspects of linguistic meaning. The most recent research has a social and cognitive direction, approaches that this introduction deals with. In this introductory book, readers will find a comprehensible critical overview of the phenomena concerning pragmatics, such as how we move from the meaning of a word to its specific contextual meaning in a usage situation; how we do things with language, such as invitations and compliments; how we convey more information than we conventionally encode in our speech; how we attribute meaning to expressions like "I," "here," and "now"; what consequences our knowledge of the world has for linguistic production, and for what reasons our linguistic behavior may be characterized as polite (or impolite).