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Pragmatics By Chris Cummins Headline: An exploration of the major topics in English pragmatics and survey of relevant experimental research Blurb: 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. Key Features: * Wide-ranging treatment of the major topics in English pragmatics * Thorough integration of theoretical and experimental research * Accessible introduction to relevant empirical methods, assuming no prior expertise * Extensive reference to real examples of usage * Exercises and discussion topics Chris Cummins is a lecturer in Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh
List of contents
AcknowledgementsChapter 1: What is pragmatics?
Chapter 2: Pragmatic theories
Chapter 3: Implicature
Chapter 4: Presupposition
Chapter 5: Referring
Chapter 6: Non-literal language
Chapter 7: Arranging information in coherent discourse
Chapter 8: Speech acts
References
About the author
Chris Cummins is Reader in Linguistics and English Language at the University of Edinburgh. His other works include Pragmatics (EUP, 2019) and Constraints on Numerical Expressions (2015), and he co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Experimental Semantics and Pragmatics (2019) with Napoleon Katsos.
Summary
The first truly multidisciplinary text of its kind, this book offers an original analysis of the current state of linguistic pragmatics.
