Pragmatics
Etymology
From Greek pragma ("a deed, a thing done"), from prassein ("to do, act"). The philosopher Charles Morris, dividing the study of signs in 1938, gave the name pragmatics to the branch dealing with the relation between signs and their users. The root in "action" is apt: pragmatics is about language as something people do, in a place, to each other.
noun · /prag-MAT-iks/
The study of how context, intention, and situation shape what an utterance actually means.
What it names
Why "Can you pass the salt?" is a request, not a question about your abilities — the gap between the literal words and what a speaker is really doing with them.
Example
A student of pragmatics knows that "we should hang out sometime" rarely schedules anything.
Related idea
Semantics asks what a sentence means in the abstract; pragmatics asks what a person means by saying it here and now. "It’s cold in here" may semantically report a temperature while pragmatically asking you to shut the window.