An introduction to linguistic pragmatics. The history of pragmatics is traced through American pragmatism, logical empiricism, ordinary language philosophy, the philosophies of K.-O.Apel and J.Habermas to Marxist theories, the social sciences and transformational grammar. Then an overview is given of the tasks and achievements of pragmatics as a universal theory and as an empirical enterprise. Finally, the relationship of pragmatics with semantics, text linguistics, sociolinguistics and language teaching is touched upon.