Pragmatics (Oxford Textbooks in Linguistics)

Very useful overview of pragmatics (in North America). I would absolutely use this as a coursebook for an intro pragmatics course for undergrads or as a recommended reading for grad students, to be used in conjunction with primary sources.

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I'm using this book as part of my pragmatics class for a Japanese grad school and have found it quite good. There is some unfortunate occasional mistakes (like "Donaldson" for "Davidson"), but the questions in the exercises are quite well thought-out (although they might need some updating -- not many young people are familiar with the names of the past American or British politicians mentioned in the questions). I'll recommend it to anyone who is interested in pragmatics (Neo-Gricean pragmatics in particular).

Writing a textbook on pragmatics cannot be easy, as pragmatics is the study of language in current use, and that current usage is a shifting sandbank. But this book does a very good job. The first part deals with the central topics in pragmatics: implicature, presupposition, deixis, and the new section in this second edition, on reference. The second part looks at the interfaces of pragmatics, with cognition, semantics and syntax. The book is authoritative, giving numerous references for current debates in literature on the various topics covered. Each chapter concludes with a summary, list of key concepts covered, and exercise questions (for which suggested answers can be found at the back). I found the exercises particularly useful. I have never studied pragmatics, on English language beyond High School (although I have covered other languages). And yet I was able to follow the book, and improve my understanding through the use of the questions. I didn't get them all right - and there were one or two points I would have liked to have taken back to a tutor to discuss - but on the whole, I felt I was able to use this textbook to get a real handle on the subject.The book does not just cover the English language, but notes how the different concepts relate to other languages. I found this particularly fascinating. I hadn't realised that Greek, in particular, had the widest variety of lexicalized deictic names of days (rather than referring to just today, yesterday and tomorrow, there are words for the day before yesterday, and the day before the day before yesterday - and similarly for the day after tomorrow and the day after the day after tomorrow. If I was going to be picky, I would have liked the book to comment more on how these differences arise in the cultural development of language within the identity of the population, although perhaps that would have been straying into anthropology.I have one other picky point - I dislike the transliteration of languages which use a different alphabet into the English alphabet - at least without including the original. I find it difficult to read, as these can be hugely open to disagreement in the choice of letter used. There was also a transliteration error in the table (5.29) on page 185: the Greek for today is σιμερα, which transliterates as simera, not sinera, as in the book.However, the book was authoritative, interesting, and written clearly enough to enable me to access and follow the arguments and key concepts. It would provide a great basis for the student of pragmatics from which they could extend their studies using the references given. So I would highly recommend this book.

This is an interesting book.First off it's a university level textbook and it feels like a well written and balanced book. The author presents the subjects, with balance, and fair acknowledgement of the viewpoints of many authors over time. It's clear he's made his own contributions to the discipline- but he is always balanced and giving credit to other workers- and referencing their work. He describes well the key divisions of linguistics and pragmatics. If you were studying linguistics you could understand the key ideas reasonably quickly from this book.But there's a reason for non-specialists not to leave linguistics entirely to the experts. We all talk and communicate. We cannot not communicate. Even when we are silent we are communicating something. We are a language using and meaning making species.The linguists have been studying how we do this and how we use language to describe, make sense of and respond to the world. Our speech is full of meaning, along with ambiguity, implication, connotation, inferences, implications and so on. It's complex, a bit messy, and having a way to think about our communication and how to master it is useful. At some stage for those of us who are communicators we will dip into linguistics and its associated philosophy. This book helps us to learn how to see the structure of language, and so allows us to reflect on how we can shape it better ourselves.This book will mainly be useful to students of linguistics. It's also useful to those who want an overview of how language can be structured, interpreted and analysed. It's a great reference source, and may trigger a few ideas for those of us outside the field, but aware of its importance. The fact the book is well enough written that a non-specialist can see its structure quickly is a sign of how well the book is written.

This is a superb and comprehensive textbook for any serious student of language and linguistics and any subject linked to it.As a lay person I found the subject fascinating. Most people are aware that language evolves and changes with time but most of us don't have a second thought about how we convey meaning and understand language as we use it - we just do it - and it works. Mostly. This book explains in depth and detail, and with clear examples, how this works in practice. It certainly makes it very clear how much we assume and thus how easy it is to actually misunderstand others' communications. Obviously the book is far more scholarly, deep and detailed than just this level of insight, but what I am saying is that there is a lot to be learned here for any interested lay person as well as the serious student, if you are not afraid of reading an academic text.

An in-depth study of how language actually works, this is an excellent book that manages to be academically orientated yet still provide enough of challenging interest to the lay reader interested in Linguistics.Students or indeed any reader can use the study exercises that conclude each chapter to consolidate and further enhance their knowledge and so, overall, this a useful and valuable textbook for both structured academic study and those secondarily interested in the subject of linguistics alike, which is quite an achievement. Well worth a look if this is your field or you have an interest in it.