Introduction to Pragmatics

Pragmatics is the study of language use in context. It concerns itself with the relationship between language and the humans who use it, and specifically how their beliefs and intentions affect both the form and the interpretation of their utterances. This introductory textbook presents an up-to-date survey of the field, addressing the traditional range of topics within pragmatics - such as implicature, reference, presupposition, and speech acts - as well as newer areas of research including neo-Gricean theories, Relevance Theory, information structure, inference, and dynamic approaches to meaning.

Throughout the book the relationship between semantics and pragmatics is continually addressed and reassessed. By encompassing both traditional and new approaches, and focusing particularly on phenomena at the semantics/pragmatics boundary, Introduction to Pragmatics sheds light on one of the major issues in the field: the role of context in linguistic communication.