The Routledge pragmatics encyclopedia covers the history and present situation of pragmatics and also provides guidance for its future development. There are over 200 entries written by more than 130 leading academics from around the world. For example, the entry for “anaphor, pragmatics of” is compiled by Yan Huang, “Internet language” by David Crystal, and “Semiotics and pragmatics interface” by Kasia M. Jaszczolt. This reference book is authoritative and will be helpful for both learners and scholars in the field. Each entry has a list of relevant terms in similar fields (“see also”) and “suggestions for further reading” (two or three books are recommended, all either recently published or classic),which ensures that the interested reader can pursue additional topics to study. Since there is no universal logic, the authors have found it most convenient to compile the book in alphabetical order. It might have been better to divide the book into sections to provide the readers with a categorized picture of this field. In an earlier handbook, Horn and Ward (Reference Horn and Ward2004) divided the entries into four categories: “The domain of pragmatics”, “Pragmatics and discourse structure”, “Pragmatics and its interface”, and “Pragmatics and cognition”. Through a similar kind of categorizing, the answers to some basic questions in this field and other relevant fields could have been made more evident.

The Anglo-American and European Continental circles have different traditions in pragmatics that can be called component and perspective views, respectively. The Anglo-American circle takes a narrower perspective, mainly arising from analytical philosophy. In Europe, disciplines like sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics are involved. According to Verschueren and Ostman (Reference Verschueren and Ostman2009:10–11), the most straightforward plea for multidisciplinarity in a pragmatics textbook is no doubt offered by Cummings (Reference Cummings2005), who declares her understanding of pragmatics in the preface of this book: “The pragmatics encyclopedia aims to capture the multidisciplinary influences that have shaped and continue to shape the field of pragmatics” (xxii).

The main focus of this book is, of course, pragmatics. There are twenty-one entries that include the term “pragmatics”. Through this list, not only is the discipline of pragmatics established and extended, but also directions of its development are indicated. These entries can be divided into several categories. Some are the subfields based on research focus and theoretical background, such as “Societal pragmatics” and “Cognitive pragmatics”. Some are different approaches to pragmatics, either taking the Gricean inferential approach to communication as their starting point (e.g. Relevance Theory), or functioning with some version or other of the original Gricean maxims (e.g. the Cooperative Principle): “Post-Gricean pragmatics”; “Neo-Gricean pragmatics”. Some are concerned with research methodology or perspective, for example, “Experimental pragmatics”, “Historical pragmatics”, and “Metapragmatics”. With the appearance of these new, related branches of pragmatics, many questions can be answered that the traditional, relatively narrow understanding failed to answer.

The second focus of the book lies in discourse. Among sixteen entries, ten are on the branches of discourse studies, and the other six are on important concepts having to do with discourse. Pragmatics and discourse studies are closely related. A lot of pragmatics researchers are actually doing discourse analysis. Cutting points out one feature that pragmatics and discourse analysis have in common:

“Discourse coherence” and “Relevance theory” both appear in this book. However, there is less emphasis put on the cognitive nature of discourse coherence, focusing more on a pedagogical framework for analyzing discourse. Since elements like context, macrostructure, and global discourse markers are just means to investigate the cognitive process of discourse construction, “Discourse coherence” could perhaps be replaced with “Information coherence”. Cutting (Reference Cutting2002:3) also points out that discourse studies and pragmatics “are both concerned with function: the speakers' short-term purposes in speaking, and long-term goals in interacting verbally.” This means both are concerned with rhetorical effect. Thus we infer that both should be interested in criticism after the critical turn. However, neither “Critical discourse analysis” nor “Critical pragmatics” is included in the volume.

There are no entries specifically about “text”, though sometimes “text” is used to indicate written discourse. For example, “legal text” is used in “Legal pragmatics” (245–47). This suggests that pragmatics is more interested in conversations than written language, though the latter is also under examination, in the Anglo-American tradition particularly.

The genres of discourse under analysis in pragmatics are also extended in this book. For example, “Journalistic discourse” is replaced by “Media discourse”, which may involve more genres of discourse, especially in the field of new media. Some quite specific discourse genres have become popular with scholars in recent years. For instance, the study of discourse on the internet has gained momentum. In this book, both “Electronic health discourse” and “Internet language” are on the list of entries. However, umbrella terms like “e-discourse” or “World-Wide Web discourse” are missing, and although “Legal pragmatics” is fully introduced, we do not see “Legal/forensic discourse” or “Forensic linguistics”, perhaps due to similarities in research content and approaches.

More and more attention is being paid in pragmatics to the cognitive basis of pragmatic notions; many scholars in this field find it important to adopt the cognitive approach to pragmatic meaning. There is a journal entitled Pragmatics & Cognition and its basic assumption is that “the proper understanding of mental life and inter-personal relations requires an intensive and thoughtful exchange of views across disciplines” (http://www.benjamins.com/cgi-bin/t_seriesview.cgi?series=p%26c). This book greatly contributes to helping its audience make the demarcation between the research content and focus of the following fields: “Cognitive anthropology”, “Cognitive linguistics”, “Cognitive pragmatics”, “Cognitive psychology,” “Cognitive science,” and “Artificial intelligence”. On the relation between cognition and pragmatics, Mey and Brown (Reference Mey and Brown2009) think that the “ecological turn”—that is, the focus on users' endeavors to maximize their results with minimal efforts while respecting their linguistic and social environments—has inspired differing models, including Relevance Theory and Default Semantics. Relevance Theory is widely recognized as a cognitive perspective on pragmatics. Entries on “Defaults in utterance interpretation,” “Knowledge”, and “Sharedness” reflect this tendency. But since pragmatics is anchored in concerns about information processing, an entry on Accessibility Theory, which has advanced considerably in the past decades and focuses on individual differences in how speakers access the linguistic elements, would have been worth including as well.

Communication is another key field covered in this book. Pragmatics not only focuses on what is communicated, but also describes, interprets, and analyzes how it is communicated. Over the past generation, the study of linguistic elements has become only one approach of many for the study of communicative interaction. A focus on linguistic structures alone is too narrow to capture communicative phenomena adequately (Verschueren & Ostman Reference Verschueren and Ostman2009:71).Thus there have been attempts to expand linguistics to accommodate nonlinguistic communication, and the same is true of pragmatics. This volume clearly puts forward the significance of considering communicative interaction as the main focus of pragmatics instead of considering only the role of language in the process. “Non-verbal communication”, “Gestural communication”, “Phatic communication”, and “Communication failure” are some entries that extend pragmatics beyond language study. Thus, this volume tries to promote the pragmatic examination of communicative interaction through social, cognitive, and structural analyses.

In conclusion, the editor spares no effort to provide the audience with both the latest and the classic concepts and theories. Through reading this book, more concepts, theories, and important figures come into view, even though they are not established as independent entries.