Pragmatic analysis is the final stage in natural language processing which tries to make sense of an utterance in context. This may in part be used to disambiguate an utterance, for example, the word 'America' may mena the whole continant, North America as a whole or the USA depending on the speaker and context. This can also be important for understanding what an utterance is for. For example, the statement "it is cold" can be interpretted as a simple fact about the temperature in the room, or as a speech act that means "please shut the door". Pragmatic analysis may follow semantic analysis in a natural language processing process, but also may be addeessed directly, for example by looking for particular patterns or terms in text.
Defined on page 306
Used on pages 289, 290, 306