Amazon.com Product Description (ISBN 0195058984, Paperback)

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 new 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.