Tóm tắt nội dung

The plan of the book is as follows. Chapter 1 is an introductory chapter. The remainder of the book is then divided into two parts. Part I covers those topics that are standardly included in a pragmatics textbook. Within this part, Chapter 2 is concerned with classical and neo-Gricean pragmatic theories of implicature. The focus of Chapter 3 is on presupposition. Chapter 4 is devoted to speech act theory, concentrating on the classic work by Austin and Searle. Chapter 5 provides an in-depth descriptive analysis of various types of deixis. Of these chapters, Chapters 2, 4, and 5 are relatively self-contained, and can be used independently. But Chapter 3 should ideally be read after Chapter 2, and certain sections of Chapter 1 such as Section 1.2 should be revisited after Chapters 2 and 8 have been read. Part II deals with topics which represent new ground in pragmatics, but which are under-represented in any of the existing pragmatics textbooks. In particular, it focuses on various interfaces between pragmatics and other (core) areas of inquiry. Chapter 6 discusses the pragmatics– cognition interface, concentrating on relevance theory. The interface between pragmatics and semantics is the topic of Chapter 7. Finally, Chapter 8 examines the interaction and the division of labour between pragmatics and syntax, focusing on anaphora and binding.