The best one-volume overview of the field ever published, The Oxford Handbook of Pragmatics brings together the world’s most distinguished scholars to present an authoritative, comprehensive, thorough, and yet accessible state-of-the-art survey of current original research in pragmatics—the study of language use in context, one of the most vibrant and rapidly growing fields in linguistics and the philosophy of language. Covering a wider range of subjects than any other one-volume pragmatics handbook on the market, this one is divided into five thematic parts. Part I is concerned with schools of thought, foundations, and theories. Part II deals with central topics, with chapters discussing implicature, presupposition, speech acts, deixis, reference, and context. Cognitively oriented (macro-)pragmatics, such as computational, experimental, and neuropragmatics, is the topic of Part III. Part IV takes a look at socially and/or culturally oriented (macro-)pragmatics, such as politeness/impoliteness studies, cross- and intercultural, and interlanguage pragmatics. Finally, the chapters in Part V explore the interfaces of pragmatics with semantics, grammar, morphology (morphopragmatics), the lexicon (lexical pragmatics), prosody, language change (historical pragmatics), and information structure. The handbook will be an indispensable reference for scholars and students of linguistics and the philosophy of language, and a valuable resource for researchers and students of language working in cognitive science, artificial intelligence, computer science, anthropology, and sociology.

Yan Huang's highly successful textbook on pragmatics - the study of language in use - has been fully revised and updated in this second edition. It includes a brand new chapter on reference, a major topic in both linguistics and the philosophy of language. Chapters have also been updated to include new material on upward and downward entailment, current debates about conversational implicature, impoliteness, emotional deixis, contextualism versus semantic minimalism, and the elimination of binding conditions. The book draws on data from English and a wide range of the world's languages, and shows how pragmatics is related to the study of semantics, syntax, and sociolinguistics and to such fields as the philosophy of language, linguistic anthropology, and artificial intelligence. Professor Huang includes exercises and essay topics at the end of each chapter, and offers guidance and suggested solutions at the end of the volume. Written by one of the leading scholars in the field, this new edition will continue to be an ideal textbook for students of linguistics, and a valuable resource for scholars and students of language in philosophy, psychology, anthropology, and computer science.