This introductory essay is intended to explain, as succinctly as possible, what linguistic pragmatics, defined briefly as the cognitive, social, and cultural study of language and communication, exactly means. To that end it presents, in the following order: an historical note about pragmatics as a wide and highly interdisciplinary field of inquiry; a discussion of problems related to the delimitation of this field as well as to methodology and the status of evidence in pragmatics; a full explanation of the notion of ‘pragmatics’ underlying this publication, i.e. one that defines pragmatics as a perspective on language rather than as a component of a linguistic theory; a sketch of a proposal as to how such a perspective could lead to a general frame of reference within which a diversity of research results can be fruitfully compared and which may itself lead to the formulation of useful research strategies; and an exposition of some basic scientific options that follow from the presented perspective and that lend structure to the Handbook. These different topics imply that this essay performs at least three different functions. Its first function is theoretical in the sense that it tries to clarify the scientific status of linguistic pragmatics, as seen by the editors of this Handbook, without formulating a strong and compelling ‘theory’ that would unduly restrict the possible orientations taken by the contributing authors. Secondly, this chapter serves an organizational function, succinctly describing some options that inevitably had to be taken for presenting the recorded research as coherently as possible, while trying not to impose specific viewpoints. Thirdly, there is a heuristic function as well. The ‘organization’ itself is meant to facilitate the tracing of significant gaps in the research that has been carried out so far, which is hoped to have a beneficial effect on the systematicity of future work.