This is a book about how English enables people who know the language to convey meanings. Semantics and pragmatics are the two main branches of the linguistic study of meaning. Both are named in the title of the book and they are going to be introduced here. Semantics is the study of the "toolkit" for meaning: knowledge encoded in the vocabulary of the language and in its patterns for building more elaborate meanings, up to the level of sentence meanings. Pragmatics is concerned with the use of these tools in meaningful communication. Pragmatics is about the interaction of semantic knowledge with our knowledge of the world, taking into account contexts of use.