Those aspects of language use that are crucial to an understanding of language as a system, and especially to an understanding of meaning, are the acknowledged concern of linguistic pragmatics. This textbook provides a lucid and integrative analysis of the central topics in pragmatics – deixis, implicature, presupposition, speech acts, and conversational structure. A central concern of the book is the relation between pragmatics and semantics, and Dr Levinson shows clearly how a pragmatic approach can resolve some of the problems semantics have been confronting and simplifying semantic analyses. The exposition is always clear and supported by helpful exemplification. The detailed analyses of selected topics give the student a clear view of the empirical rigour demanded by the study of linguistic pragmatics, but Dr Levinson never loses sight of the rich diversity of the subject. An introduction and conclusion relate pragmatics to other fields in linguistics and other disciplines concerned with language usage – psychology, philosophy, anthropology and literature.
Author(s): Stephen C. Levinson
Series: Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year: 2008
Language: English
Pages: 435
Contents
Preface
Acknowledgements
Notation conventions
1.1 The origin and historical vagaries of the term pragmatics
1.2 Defining pragmatics
1.3 Current interest in pragmatics
1.4 Computing context: an example
2.0 Introduction
2.1 Philosophical approaches
2.2 Descriptive approaches
2.2.1 Person deixis
2.2.2 Time deixis
2.2.3 Place deixis
2.2.4 Discourse deixis
2.2.5 Social deixis
2.3 Conclusions
3.0 Introduction
3.1 Grice’s theory of implicature
3.2.1 Tests for implicature
3.2.2 Implicature and logical form
3.2.3 Kinds of implicature
3.2.4 Generalized Quantity implicatures
3.2.5 Metaphor: a case of maxim exploitation
3.2.6 Implicature and language structure
4.0 Introduction
4.1 Historical background
4.2 The phenomena: initial observations
4.3 The problematic properties
4.3.1 Defeasibility
4.3.2 The projection problem
4.4.1 Semantic presupposition
4.4.2 Pragmatic theories of presupposition
4.5 Conclusions
5.0 Introduction
5.1 Philosophical background
5.2 Thesis: speech acts are irreducible to matters of truth and falsity
5.3 Antithesis: the reduction of illocutionary force to ordinary syntax and semantics
5.4.1 Semantic problems
5.4.2 Syntactic problems
5.5 Indirect speech acts: a problem for Thesis and Antithesis
5.6 The context-change theory of speech acts
5.7 Beyond theories of speech acts
6.0 Introduction
6.1 Discourse analysis versus conversation analysis
6.2 Conversation analysis
6.2.1.1 Turn-taking
6.2.1.2 Adjacency pairs
6.2.1.3 Overall organization
6.2.2 Some remarks on methodology
6.2.3 Some applications
6.3.1 Preferred second turns
6.3.2 Preferred sequences
6.4.1 General remarks
6.4.2 Pre-announcements
6.4.3 Pre-requests: a re-analysis of indirect speech acts
6.5.1 Conversation analysis and linguistics
6.5.2 Some remaining questions
Appendix: transcription conventions
7.0 Introduction
7.1 Pragmatics and ‘core’ linguistics
7.2 Pragmatics, sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics
7.3 Applied pragmatics: pragmatics and other fields
Bibliography
Subject index
Index of names
