The Pragmatics Encyclopedia

Ten consultants and 132 contributors, scattered worldwide, support editor Louise Cummings, Reader in Linguistics at Nottingham Trent University, in this major new work of reference, the field of which may not be familiar except among disciplines of theoretical linguistics. The Encyclopedia's own understanding of the relatively new discipline of Pragmatics (pp. 341‐345) needs to be considered along with entries such as Pragma‐Dialectics, Pragmatism and Primary Pragmatic Processes. Simplistically, pragmatics can be defined as the study of language in use. This may, however, be far too general a definition to be of much use. Since the early 1980s, the study of...