Discourse Analysis and Pragamtics

A. Discourse Analysis
Discourse is the study about language in use for communication. This field investigates the sequences of utterance or the consequence of speech act, which expose something (subject) presented regularly, systematically in a unity and coherence.

In addition, discourse is related to the linguistic behavior or language in use in a society that is usually formed by a coherence and cohesive sequence of sentences, consists of linguistic units and conveyed either in spoken or in written language.

B. Pragmatics

While discourse analysts explain the interpretation of the elements in question without going outside language, pragmatics resorts to other ambits of human activity. Pragmatics investigates how the transmission of meaning based not only on the linguistic knowledge of the speaker and listener, but also on the context of the utterance, knowledge about the status of those involved, the inferred intent of the speaker, etc.

Basically it also relies on the speaker's interpretative strategy, in which the latter attributes qualities and moods such as rationality, desires and mental states to other speakers. Such interpretative strategy is orientated towards predicting other speakers' behavior, above all their interpretative behavior. In this way, pragmatics discuss how language users are able to overcome apparent ambiguity, since meaning relies on the manner, place, time etc.

For example, the sentence "James saw the man with binoculars" could mean that Sherlock observed the man by using binoculars; or it could mean that Sherlock observed a man who was holding binoculars. The meaning of the sentence depends on an understanding of the context and the speaker's intent.