The Handbook of Pragmatics

The Handbook of Pragmatics is a collection of original articles that outline the central themes and challenges for current research in the field of linguistic pragmatics. The 32 articles, written by leading scholars, provide an authoritative and accessible introduction to the field, including an overview of the foundations of pragmatic theory and a detailed examination of the rich and varied theoretical and empirical subdomains of pragmatics. This Handbook is a valuable resource for both students and professional researchers investigating the properties of meaning, reference, and context in natural language. It will be of particular interest to those exploring the interfaces of pragmatics with syntax, semantics, lexicon, philosophy of language, information theory, and cognitive psychology. The extensive bibliography serves as a self-contained research tool for those working in the general area of pragmatics and allied fields in linguistics, philosophy and cognitive science.

Laurence R. Horn is Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Yale University Department of Linguistics. His publications include A Natural History of Negation (1989/2001) and numerous articles addressing the union (if not the intersection) of lexical semantics, negation, and neo-Gricean approaches to meaning in natural language. He is currently working on a new book, Lexical Pragmatics.

Gregory Ward is Professor of Linguistics at Northwestern University. His extensive publications in the area of pragmatics and information structure include Information Status and Noncanonical Word Order in English (with Betty Birner, 1998) and The Semantics and Pragmatics of Preposing (1988). He is also editor of a new series on language in the real word and currently serves as Secretary-Treasurer of the Linguistic Society of America.