Chapman's Pragmatics provides an introduction to the basic concepts, questions, topics, and debates in the contemporary study of pragmatics and its neighboring disciplines in an accessible way that can help a newcomer in this field acquire a general picture of this branch of linguistic study.
As a basis for discussion, Chs. 1, 2, and 3 introduce, define, and explain pragmatics. Ch. 2 uncovers the borderline between semantics and pragmatics by defining pragmatics as an independent discipline in linguistics. Ch. 3 presents a historical review of pragmatics and discusses the contribution of ordinary language philosophy to the birth of pragmatics. Chs. 4 and 5 give an overview of some of the main theories and schools of thought in the history of pragmatics. In Ch. 4, Chapman reviews John Austin's theory of speech acts and Paul Grice's theory of implicature as two representatives of classical pragmatics. Ch. 5 outlines neo-Gricean Pragmatics, which inherits Grice's insights and basic approaches but simplifies the number of pragmatic principles, and Relevance Theory, which, developing on the opposite route, provides a radical response to Grice's proposals and seeks an account of the production and interpretation of speech in terms of general human cognitive tendencies.
Chs. 6 and 7 are concerned with the applications of theoretical pragmatics within linguistics and beyond. In Ch. 6, four aspects of language use and interpretation are mentioned as a window through which we can see how pragmatic theories can be put into use. The first is the use of the fundamental proposals in classical pragmatics about speech acts and implicature to study politeness. The second deals with the interaction between pragmatics and literary studies, stylistics and critical theory. As the study of language acquisition has expanded its research scope from the acquisition of the forms of language to the acquisition of the meanings of language, the third aspect shows the interaction between pragmatics and developmental psychology. The entry of clinical psychology into the field of pragmatic studies has give birth to experimental pragmatics, within which pragmaticists rely on experiments to test their hypotheses and construct their theories. Ch. 7 summarizes the relationship between pragmatics and related branches of linguistics that study language in use, such as conversation analysis (CA), discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, and corpus linguistics. Between the lines, Chapman stresses the status of pragmatics within linguistics, not as a marginal or specialist interest, but as a central and persuasive element.
