In linguistics and related fields, pragmatics is the study of how context contributes to meaning. Pragmatics encompasses phenomena including implicature, speech acts, relevance and conversation. Theories of pragmatics go hand-in-hand with theories of semantics, which studies aspects of meaning which are grammatically or lexically encoded. The ability to understand another speaker's intended meaning is called pragmatic competence. Pragmatics emerged as its own subfield in the 1950s after the pioneering work of J.L. Austin and Paul Grice.