Concise Encyclopedia of Pragmatics

Reviews / Votes

Roger Schank, Northwestern University, USA
Jacob Mey and his contributors have produced a treasure trove! Freud and e-mail in one volume: the Concise Encyclopedia of Pragmatics is an invigorating reminder of the essential diversity of language use.

Richard W. Janney, University of Munich, Germany
No one is better qualified to sort out the pragmatic wastebasket than Jacob Mey, co-founder of the Journal of Pragmatics, editor of one of the earliest collections of articles on pragmatics, and author of the first accessible pragmatics textbook. His new Concise Encyclopedia of Pragmatics is another impressive achievement, containing hundreds of excellently written articles reflecting the broadest possible spectrum of pragmatic interests. Students of pragmatics will appreciate its clear treatment of basic concepts, principles, theories, and methods. Professionals will profit from its comprehensive, authoritative, thematically organized overview of historical developments and future research perspectives. With this breadth and depth, the Concise Encyclopedia of Pragmatics is predestined to become the standard pragmatics reference work for the turn of the millenium. Anyone interested in pragmatics must have it in their personal library.

Ken Turner, University of Brighton
...a book that contains much of interest to students of linguistics and to the discipline's more seasoned professionals. ...readers who share the editor's preference for a sociological perspective will find much in this book for them to consult with frequency.
Journal of Linguistics
The Concise Encyclopedia of Pragmatics is a rich and rewarding introduction to the dizzying range of issues, methodologies and topics that have come to fall under the general rubric of pragmatics. Ranging from such traditional topics as Anaphora, Aspect, Entitlement and Tense, to highly politicized issues such as Emancipatory Linguistics, Power and Language and Hegemony, the Encyclopedia is not so much an overview of an established academic field as an invitation to a debate over the question, "What is pragmatics?"... Useful for both experts and students, the Encyclopedia represents well the current state of pragmatics: variously diverse, rigorous, politically engaged, critical, formalistic, analytic, contemporary, and always challenging.
Phenomenology and the Human Sciences
Edwin Battistella, Wayne State College
In the preface, Mey notes that encyclopedias have traditionally been fact books that allowed a wide audience to judge intellectual endeavours for themselves. In the Concise Encyclopedia of Pragmatics he has certainly accomplished this.
Language
Sergio Zanini, International School for Advanced Studies, Trieste, Italy
...the Concise Encyclopedia of Pragmatics represents an important book. It is impossible not to appreciate the contents and the format of the volume. Authors present, with competence and effectively, both classical and new issues of pragmatics. ...extremely positive opinion on the Concise Encylopedia of Pragmatics, which offers, a coherent, modern and pragmatic view on human communication behaviour... an important milestone in pragmatics and represents a reference book both for experts and for people not deeply involved in this linguistic research field.
Clinical Linguistics & Phonetics