Among the recent developments in the language sciences, the coming-of-age of the field of pragmatics and its official inauguration in the mid-seventies stand out as some of the most significant ones. The present work endeavours to sum up the development of the youngest offspring of linguistics in a number of conscientiously chosen, well-elaborated concepts that may be said to characterize both the discipline and its most famous practitioners. The increasingly complex notions and devices developed by linguists to cope with the description of naturally occurring language phenomena, have been joined with techniques and approaches due to the socially oriented schools of thought that see language first of all as a means of communication between human users. Based on the highly acclaimed and award winning Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics this volume provides a collection of articles throughout which the vast scope of the field of pragmatics is unfolded and explained in
up-to-date terminology and authoritative interpretation. It covers the history and the development of pragmatics and also looks at the future perspectives.
Read English at Cambridge, joined the British Council and worked in Uganda. He then taught at the University College of Cape Coast in Ghana before moving to Edinburgh, where he took his PhD in linguistics and subsequently taught in the Department of Linguistics. In 1984 he moved to the University of Essex, where he was Research Professor in the Department of Linguistics, and then to the University of Cambridge where he was Senior Research Fellow in the Research Centre for English and Applied Linguistics. He is now an Associate Lecturer in the Faculty of English at Cambridge. He has held visiting professorships at the Universities of Heidelberg, Vienna and Düsseldorf. From 1990-94 he was President of the Linguistics Association of Great Britain, and has been a member of Council of the Philological Society since 1998. He is Chairman of the linguistics committee of the Subject Centre for Languages Linguistics and Area Studies. He is co-editor of
Transactions of the Philological Society and sits on other editorial boards. He is author of
Linguistics Today (Fontana 1984) and co-author, with Jim Miller, of
Syntax: A Linguistic Introduction to Sentence Structure and Syntax: Generative Grammar (Hutchinson 1981). He was syntax editor for the 1st edition of
The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics and was joint editor, with Jim Miller of
A Concise Encyclopedia of Linguistic Theories and
A Concise Encyclopedia of Grammatical Categories (Pergamon Press 1997 & 1998). He was joint editor of
Common Denominators in Art and Science (Aberdeen University Press, 1983) and
Language, Reasoning and Inference (Academic Press, 1986).
