A Bibliometric Research on International Pragmatic Inference based on Web of Science

Abstract

With the help of the bibliometric software CiteSpace, this paper combs and analyzes the pragmatic inference research in the core periodicals retrieved in core collection of Web of Science from 1977 to 2018. Co-author network, the keywords co-occurrence network and co-citation network in the field of international pragmatic research were displayed in the form of knowledge map, for the purpose of detecting research hotspots and trends in this field. The results reveal that: 1) International research on pragmatic inference has been steadily increasing for over forty years and keeps vigorous. 2) Researchers combine theoretical research and empirical research and pay special attention to adult’s utterance, children’s utterance as well as patients’ utterance. 3) The interdisciplinary phenomenon is quite obvious. Issues on linguistics, pragmatics, philosophy, psychology and pedagogy are involved in.