Pragmatics: A Reader

This is an anthology of readings on the subject of pragmatics - the study of actual utterances or 'speaker's intended meaning'. Pragmatics is relevant to a variety of disciplines and specializations, including linguistics, poetics, the philosophy of language, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and psychology. Davis's collection brings together the most important literature on pragmatics, including classic papers as well as the work of the best contemporary theorists. The selections are organized according to such topics as conversational implicature and relevance, speaker reference, indexicals, presupposition, direct and indirect speech acts, and non-literal uses of language. Informal and philosophical, rather than formal or technical, approaches to pragmatics are emphasized.