Book Description

The volume brings together twenty articles written by established linguists, language philosophers, sociologists and psychologists, sharing their academic interest in a broad and interdisciplinary field of linguistic pragmatics. The collection consists of four thematic parts: “Pragmatics and Cognition,” “The Semantics-Pragmatics Interface,” “Conversational and Text Analysis” and “Pragmatics, Social Research and Didactics.” It aims to contribute to the debate on the present-day status of pragmatics, by examining three fundamental issues. The first involves the question of the current explanatory power of pragmatics, namely, how successful is the existing apparatus of pragmatics and the basic-level parameters (theories of speech acts, relevance, implicature, presupposition, deixis, politeness, etc.) in the elucidation of various aspects of meaning. The second issue involves the methodological assistance that pragmatics might need in order to enhance its explanatory power. The third has to do with the fuzzily defined boundaries of the discipline of pragmatics and the resulting temptation for analysts to concentrate solely on its fragmented sub-domains. As the collection unfolds, these issues form a continuum which, it seems, is often a process that a linguist goes through as his or her methodological awareness deepens. Thus, the orientation of the volume towards the analyst and the analytic mind-set, as well as the attempted balance in presentation of the alternative approaches, seem the major theoretical characteristic of the book.