Chapter draft for the Oxford Handbook of the Portuguese Language, ed. by Ana Carvalho & Lívia Oushiro, please do not cite without permission! 1 Pragmatics Scott A. Schwenter The Ohio State University Introduction Pragmatics is concerned with the relationship and interaction(s) between language and context. It is one of the few modern linguistic subfields that mainly originates from the work of one scholar, and more specifically, from one article/chapter by that scholar, namely the famous paper Logic and Conversation by the British "natural language philosopher" H.P. Grice (1975). Pragmatics contrasts with semantics (Ch. 5) in that the latter examines conventional, context-invariant meaning; nevertheless, the boundaries between pragmatics and semantics are highly debated (cf. Ariel 2008), and determining which meanings are (en)coded and which are contextual is not a trivial matter. This relationship can be construed from a nearly infinite number of ways, from the broadest types of sociopragmatics (e.g. how a given culture expresses certain kinds of speech acts, like thanking, requesting, or apologizing) to more narrow approaches interested in situating the empirical and theoretical boundaries between pragmatics and semantics. In this chapter, I will center my attention more on the latter, narrower end of this continuum, to what many would call "linguistic pragmatics", as is typified by relatively recent textbooks such as those of Ariel (2010), Birner (2013, 2021), and Cummins (2019), among others. Some of the theoretical topics that form the core of this particular approach, such as scalar implicature (Geurts 2010; Horn 1989; Levinson 2000) have not been central to pragmatic work on Portuguese, but some of the linguistic phenomena that this approach has been employed to tackle have been (e.g. negation or anaphora). This situation means that the both the theoretical and the empirical coverage of pragmatic analyses of Portuguese, whether European or Brazilian, 1 is extremely uneven. To understand the import of pragmatics, and especially how it contrasts with semantics, consider a sentence like that in (1): (1) Ainda não almocei. 'I haven't eaten lunch yet.' For pragmatics to have any meaning or utility at all as a subfield of linguistics, it is necessary to consider this sentence as a situated utterance, realized at a specific time and place by a specific speaker in the presence of specific addressees/hearers. Sentences are abstract structures that are context-free and (at least in theory) fully compositional; utterances, on the other hand, are contextually-bound and require (sometimes considerable) pragmatic "work" for their interpretation. As noted by many scholars, our knowledge of the world tells us that (1) probably isn't meant to convey that the speaker has never in their lifetime eaten lunch (even though the utterance is indeed compatible with that interpretation); rather the utterance will normally be understood as conveying 1 I am obviously well aware of other (e.g. African) varieties of Portuguese, but these have essentially received no attention in the pragmatics literature.