Speech act theory, developed by Austin and Searle, categorizes utterances based on their function, distinguishing between their literal meaning and their intended communicative force.

Pragmatics deals only with the literal truth-value of sentences in isolation, ignoring the social relationship between speakers or the physical setting of the discourse.

Deixis refers to words that have a fixed and absolute meaning in every context, such as "here", "now", and "I", which never change their reference regardless of who is speaking.

The cooperative principle, formulated by Grice, establishes that participants in a conversation must always use the most obscure and ambiguous language possible to test the listener's intelligence.