The Oxford Handbook of Pragmatics

Abstract

The best one-volume overview of the field ever published, The Oxford Handbook of Pragmatics brings together the world’s most distinguished scholars to present an authoritative, comprehensive, thorough, and yet accessible state-of-the-art survey of current original research in pragmatics—the study of language use in context, one of the most vibrant and rapidly growing fields in linguistics and the philosophy of language. Covering a wider range of subjects than any other one-volume pragmatics handbook on the market, this one is divided into five thematic parts. Part I is concerned with schools of thought, foundations, and theories. Part II deals with central topics, with chapters discussing implicature, presupposition, speech acts, deixis, reference, and context. Cognitively oriented (macro-)pragmatics, such as computational, experimental, and neuropragmatics, is the topic of Part III. Part IV takes a look at socially and/or culturally oriented (macro-)pragmatics, such as politeness/impoliteness studies, cross- and intercultural, and interlanguage pragmatics. Finally, the chapters in Part V explore the interfaces of pragmatics with semantics, grammar, morphology (morphopragmatics), the lexicon (lexical pragmatics), prosody, language change (historical pragmatics), and information structure. The handbook will be an indispensable reference for scholars and students of linguistics and the philosophy of language, and a valuable resource for researchers and students of language working in cognitive science, artificial intelligence, computer science, anthropology, and sociology.