Reddit reviews Semantics (Modern Linguistics)

> The study of linguistic meaning is generally divided in practice into two main fields, semantics and pragmatics. Semantics deals with the literal meaning of words and the meaning of the way they are combined, which taken together form the core of meaning. Pragmatics deals with all the ways in which literal meaning must be refined, enriched, or extended to arrive at an understanding of what a speaker meant in uttering a particular expression.

Source. Example:

He's not the sharpest knife in the drawer.
Semantic meaning: There exists some possible world in which X is male and part of the set of all knives and part of the set of all things within drawers and there exists at least one other entity in this possible world that is part of the set of all knives and part of the set of all things within drawers but is sharper than X.

Pragmatic meaning: You're not very clever.