In contrast to semantics, which studies the meaning of words and sentences without focusing on the extra-linguistic situation, pragmatics considers a statement's specific meaning and effect in a particular language situation. Thus, an important part of pragmatics is the analysis of conversations and, in addition, the attempt to decode the norms and rules guiding us when we encode and try to understand meanings that are related to context. Another aspect of pragmatics is the comparative study of communicative conventions in different societies, e.g., ways to express politeness. What is considered polite in German could be regarded as impolite in English. Sociolinguistics studies the influence of social variables on language usage.
Social variables are, for instance, socioeconomic or ethnic group, age or sex.
Labov observed that the upper classes kept to the national standard, while the lower classes used the regional dialect. Text linguistics or discourse analysis deals with the question of how single words and sentences combine to form texts, and what linguistic elements are responsible for a text's constitution. It starts from the premise that not every arbitrary stringing together of single remarks will result in a complete text. This means that written and spoken texts cannot simply be described as chains of sentences, but are structured in a more complex way. Text linguistics is concerned with adequate formal combinations of individual text elements, which make up what is called cohesion.