Pragmatics is a relatively young branch of linguistics and it’s the study of how more meaning gets conveyed than with just the words spoken. It’s the study of secret or hidden meanings, if you like. But my favourite definition of pragmatics is it’s the study of how we don’t say what we mean.
And that’s often true. We’ll say one thing when we mean another. Here’s a video where we look at how we make indirect requests. We look at some common ambiguous English phrases and explore the social benefits that ambiguity can bring.
In today’s English show with Fluency MC, we were joined by Craig Wealand of the award winning podcast 
How many English tenses are there? Well, technically speaking, there are just two: the past and the present. When we talk about the future we often use a present tense or a modal verb (like could, will or might) or expressions like ‘going to‘, ‘about to‘ and ‘bound to‘. And we have verbs we might use as well like ‘hope‘ or ‘expect‘. Find out more in this week’s English Show where we practice lots of these words and phrases, play a game and rap with FluencyMC as well.