Understanding Pragmatics

Understanding Pragmatics takes an interdisciplinary approach to provide an accessible introduction to linguistic pragmatics. This book discusses how the meaning of utterances can only be understood in relation to overall cultural, social and interpersonal contexts, as well as to culture specific conventions and the speech events in which they are embedded. From a cross-linguistic and cross-cultural perspective, this book: debates the core issues of pragmatics such as speech act theory, conversational implicature, deixis, gesture, interaction strategies, ritual communication, phatic communion, linguistic relativity, ethnography of speaking, ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, languages and social classes, and linguistic ideologies incorporates examples from a broad variety of different languages and cultures takes an innovative and transdisciplinary view of the field showing linguistic pragmatics has its predecessor in other disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, ethology, ethnology, sociology and the political sciences. Written by an experienced teacher and researcher, this introductory textbook is essential reading for all students studying pragmatics.

1. Pragmatics and Philosophy: Speech Act Theory and the Theory of Conversational Implicature 2. Pragmatics and Psychology: Deictic referenceand Gesture 3. Pragmatics and Human Ethology: Biological foundations of communicative behaviour 4. Pragmatics and Ethnology: The interface of language, culture and cognition 5. Pragmatics and Sociology: Everyday social interaction 6. Pragmatics and Politics: Language, social class, ethnicity and education and linguistic ideologies 7. Understanding Pragmatics: Summary and Outlook

Gunter Senft is senior investigator at the MPI for Psycholinguistics in Nijmegen and extraordinary professor of general linguistics at the University of Cologne. His main research interests include Austronesian and Papuan languages, anthropological linguistics, pragmatics, and semantics.