Introduction to Pragmatics guides students through traditional and new approaches in the field, focusing particularly on phenomena at the elusive semantics/pragmatics boundary to explore the role of context in linguistic communication.
Offers students an accessible introduction and an up-to-date survey of the field, encompassing both established and new approaches to pragmatics
Addresses the traditional range of topics – such as implicature, reference, presupposition, and speech acts – as well as newer areas of research, including neo-Gricean theories, Relevance
Theory, information structure, inference, and dynamic approaches to meaning
Explores the relationship and boundaries between semantics and pragmatics
Ideal for students coming to pragmatics for the first time
About the Author
Betty J. Birner is Professor of Linguistics in the Department of English at Northern Illinois University. She is the author of several books, including The Discourse Function of Inversion in English (1996), Information Status and Noncanonical Word Order in English (with Gregory Ward, 1998), and Drawing the Boundaries of Meaning: Neo-Gricean Studies in Pragmatics and Semantics in Honor of Laurence R. Horn (with Gregory Ward, 2006).
