This book is written to serve as a comprehensive textbook, covering a broad range of existing theoretical perspectives, from philosophical/linguistic to cognitive to sociocultural, including useful discussion of the cross-fertilization with other disciplines such as discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics. In addition, the authors place a very strong emphasis on the critical evaluation of methodological approaches in the study of pragmatics and on the question of what counts as evidence for the types of claims that can be made.

Central topics in pragmatics are discussed and revisited in each of three main sections—“Introduction,” “Extension,” and “Exploration”—organized to illustrate the ways in which major themes, perspectives, and analytical techniques overlap and are interwoven in the discipline. The “Introduction” section presents an overview of the field of pragmatics and addresses its main concepts and applications, emphasizing the quickly developing nature of the field. The “Extension” section presents extracts from books and articles that help to illustrate the concepts introduced in the introduction and explain how they are relevant. Included here are tasks meant to help students to critically evaluate the readings as well as helpful suggestions for further reading. The “Exploration” section contains questions, activities, and research projects designed to give students experience with experimental methods, with using a wide range of corpora, with the inherent problems involved in carrying out empirical studies in pragmatics, and with applying a strong understanding of pragmatics to the social and cultural contexts in which pragmatics occurs.

Throughout each of these three sections, the authors present and critically discuss the following twelve topics: (i) the foundations and development of pragmatics, including the definition and delimitation of pragmatics, as well as the notions of speaker meaning, sentence meaning, context, and function; (ii) research methods, authenticity, and the collection of empirical evidence, including corpus creation, transcription, and annotation; (iii) the study of reference, deixis, and presupposition and the semantics-pragmatics boundary dispute; (iv) speech acts, with illustrative examples and readings taken from studies on compliments, requests, and giving thanks; (v) the study of implicature, including nonce and generalized implicatures, and scalar implicatures; (vi) the structure or organization of discourse, with special attention given to turn-taking, opening, closings, responses, and adjacency pairs or triplets; (vii) the prototypical features and social functions of pragmatic markers; (viii) the concepts of facework and im/politeness, including the question of their cross-cultural validity; (ix) intonation, gesture and nonverbal communication, especially as they relate to speech acts, implicature, discourse markers, and conversation management; (x) cross-cultural pragmatics, including the distinction between pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics, and the cross-cultural meaning of discourse phenomena such as backchannel cues, silence, and interruptions, and prosody; (xi) the principles of historical pragmatics, with useful examples taken from historical pragmatic studies on speech acts, address formulae, and grammaticalization; and (xii) the pragmatics of power relations in interaction and in media.

The book is supported by a companion website that provides additional guidance, data, readings, and activities to aid students in delving further into the material.