Pragmatics
How context and intention determine what is communicated beyond the literal words — the level where most prompt frustration actually lives, and the one models handle least evenly.
Reviewed July 16, 2026Stable
When not to use it
- As an explanation for failures that are representational, such as character counting, where the information was destroyed before the model saw it.
- To excuse an underspecified prompt. If the instruction was ambiguous to a person too, that is not a pragmatics failure.
Reach for something else instead
- Explicit instruction stating the speech act, quantity and constraints directly.
- Structured output formats that remove the inference entirely.
- Few-shot examples demonstrating the intended reading.
Sources & further reading
- Grice (1975), Logic and Conversation — the maxims and the cooperative principle.
- Hu et al. (2023), A fine-grained comparison of pragmatic language understanding in humans and language models — the conventional versus novel split.
- Ruis et al. (2023), The Goldilocks of Pragmatic Understanding — implicature performance across model scales and tuning.
Primary sources, listed so you can check the claims on this page rather than take them on trust.
Where people go wrong
- Assuming politeness is neutral. Indirectness is how politeness works in English, and it is exactly what fails.
- Reading strong benchmark results as competence, since most measure recognition under instruction rather than pragmatic behaviour in use.
- Expecting a better model to fix it, when the evidence for monotonic improvement is weak.
At a glance
FieldLanguage & LLMs
OriginGrice 1975
Maximsquality, quantity, relation, manner
Handled wellquality violations
Handled badlymanner violations
DifficultyPractical
Where this sits
A destination. 1 concept lead here, and nothing in the corpus depends on it.
1Levelsteps in
1Needs firstconcepts
0Opens upnothing further
1Areastays here
Learn these firstNatural Language Processing
Computed from the prerequisite graph, not assigned. How this works