Title Details

This textbook provides an introduction to pragmatics from the point of view of Sparber and Wilson's Relevance Theory. The first part lays down the foundation of a relevance theoretic approach to utterance understanding, which is then applied to the analysis of a range of phenomena which are central to pragmatics - such as implicature, speech acts, the coherence of discourse; to the analysis of phenomena which have raised problems for the relationship between semantics and pragmatics - such as reference, presupposition, non-truth-conditional meaning; and to the analysis of phenomena traditionally discussed in literary theory, including metaphor, irony and other stylistic effects. While her aim is not to present an overview of current pragmatic theories, Diane Blakemore indicates where and how Relevance Theory diverges from other approaches both in its general approach to communication and on specific issues. Her book includes numerous exercises and discussion topics.