Key Terms in Pragmatics

Reviews / Votes

Key Terms in Pragmatics provides a brilliant, sophisticated and highly readable overview of the current state of the art in pragmatics. Highlights include a wide-ranging, accurate and fair-minded introduction to the main current approaches to pragmatics, illuminating (and entertaining) intellectual biographies of key thinkers in the field, and concise characterisations and illustrations of every term in pragmatics that you might ever have wondered about. Essential reading for students and researchers in pragmatics, linguistics, philosophy of language and psychology of communication. -- Professor Deirdre Wilson, Division of Psychology and Language Sciences University College London, UK One good feature of this book is the cross-references, which create connections between the current term and other related or contrasting terms. This feature will help beginners to understand the relationships among concepts and terms in pragmatics. Allott also presents clear and helpful explanations of important or complex terms such asmetaphor, context, conventional implicature, conversational maxims, and deixis...This text provides more than explanations and definitions of key terms. It also aims at a truthful representation of the controversies in the field of pragmatics and a clear trace of the historical development of this discipline. Overall, this useful resource book serves as a complementary toolkit for undergraduate students studying pragmatics. -- Jun Zhao, Marshall University * The Modern Language Journal *