Pragmatics

A central goal of pragmatics is to identify the capabilities that underpin our ability to communicate 'non-literal' meanings. Guiding students through the many facets of English pragmatics, this textbook discusses the ways in which people successfully convey and recover meanings that are not simply associated with the combinations of words that they use.
The book draws on a broad range of data, including psycholinguistic experimentation, studies of acquisition and corpus research, and uses real examples from English to illuminate contemporary debates in pragmatics and related fields. With exercises and discussion topics at the end of each chapter, it invites students to explore how pragmatic meaning can be explained in theoretical terms and contemplate whether these explanations command empirical support.

Chris Cummins is a lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh.