Those aspects of language use that are crucial to an understanding of language as a system and especially to an understanding of meaning are the acknowledged concern of linguistic pragmatics. Yet until now much of the work in this field has not been easily accessible to the student and often written at an intimidating level of technicality. In this textbook however Dr. Levinson has provided a lucid and integrative analysis of the central topics in pragmatics-deixis implicature presupposition speech acts and conversational structure. A central concern of the book is the relation between pragmatics and semantics and Dr. Levinson shows clearly how a pragmatic approach can resolve some of the problems semanticists have been confronting and simplify semantic analyses. The complexity of these issues is not disguised but the exposition is always clear and supported by helpful exemplification. The detailed analyses of selected topics give the student a clear view of the empirical rigour demanded by the study of linguistic pragmatics but Dr. Levinson never loses sight of the rich diversity of the subject. An introduction and conclusion relate pragmatics to other fields in linguistics and other disciplines concerned with language usage-psychology philosophy anthropology and literature. Many students in these disciplines as well as students of linguistics will find this a valuable textbook

Preface; Acknowledgements; Notation conventions; 1. The scope of pragmatics; 2. Deixis; 3. Conversational implicature; 4. Presupposition; 5. Speech acts; 6. Conversational structure; 7. Conclusions; Bibliography; Subject index; Index of names;