Pragmalinguistics and Stylistics

While the field of pragmatics in its widest sense is constituted of many diverse approaches (without clear-cut boundaries) united by a common  functional (social, cultural, cognitive) perspective on language in communication (cf. Verschueren 1999), pragmalinguistics (linguistic pragmatics, pragmatic linguistics, internal pragmatics) focuses primarily (though not exclusively) on the study of linguisitic phenomena (i.e., code) from the point of view of their usage. As it is impossible to offer an exhaustive definition of pragmatics, it might be easier simply to present a list of the topics studied: deixis, implicature, presupposition, speech acts and aspects of discourse structure (cf. Levinson 1983; for the scope of pragmatics and the detailed coverage of its major topics see Tárnyiková 2000).