Until recently, pragmatics--the study of language in relation to the users of language--has been the neglected member of the traditional three-part division of the study of signs; syntax, semantics, pragmatics. This volume--the first of its kind--brings together the most important literature in this rapidly expanding field, including both classic papers and the work of the best-known contemporary theorists. Extremely broad-based, the book draws on the work of philosophers, linguists, and psychologists, and includes seminal papers by some of the most important writers on pragmatics over the last twenty years, among them H.P. Grice, J.R. Searle, Saul Kripke, David Kaplan, Deirdre Wilson, and Dan Sperber. Covering all aspects of the subject, Pragmatics: A Reader offers essays on speaker meaning, speaker reference, presupposition, speech acts, metaphor, and irony. It will be an indispensable resource for courses in linguistics, the philosophy of language, poetics, cognitive science, artificial intelligence, and psychology.

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Steven Davis is at Simon Fraser University.

"Provides an excellent sense of substance of pragmatics, as well as its domain boundaries. [Davis] is careful therein to distinguish between semantics and pragmatics, assigning to pragmatics both the speaker's communicative intentions in production and the listener's processing strategies in comprehending language formats which convey those intentions."--Canadian Journal of Linguistics

"It is about time! This was a much-needed anthology-- Excellent choices."--Sylvain Bromberger, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

"An excellent text....The selection is very good."--Barbara Abbott, Michigan State University

"It is...with some gratitude that we turn to Steven Davis for editing a first collection of canonical texts the knowledge of which any self respecting pragmaticist should have, presumably, at his or her fingertips....This is a good collection for argumentative types. It might even provoke one of them to edit and introduce his or her own selection of canonical texts."--Iral

"This book includes most of the classic articles on pragmatics from early Donnellan and Grice on meaning and implicature to current work on the development of pragmatics and its interfaces with psychology and theories of metaphor. It is well organized and contains valuable sections on presupposition and indirect speech acts."--Patricia A. Lee, University of Hawaii at Manoa

"Terrific collection! All classics plus those that deserve to be."--Alice G.B. ter Meulen, Indiana University

"An extremely well-conceived collection of work at the cutting edge...in the philosophy of knowledge!"--Harold Morick, State University of New York, Albany