Focusing on the intricacies of linguistic meaning, the work explores the significance of speech acts and their relationship to semantics and prosodic meaning. It emphasizes the importance of the co-operative principle, context, and background information in understanding meaning. Additionally, it delves into the concepts of sense and denotation, analyzing meaningful properties and meaning relations. The book concludes with a comprehensive summary of its main arguments, providing a thorough examination of the theory of linguistic meaning.
This volume offers recent developments in pragmatics and adjacent territories of investigation, including important new concepts such as the pragmatic act and the pragmeme, and combines developments in neighboring disciplines in an integrative holistic pragmatic approach. The young science of pragmatics has, from its inception, differentiated itself from neighboring fields in the humanities, especially the disciplines dealing with language and those focusing on the social and anthropological aspects of human behavior, by focusing on the language user in his or her societal environment. This collection of papers continues that emphasis on language use, and pragmatic acts in their context. The editors and contributors share a perspective that essentially considers language as a system for communication and wants to look at language from a societal perspective, and accept the view that acts of interpretation are essentially embedded in culture. In an interdisciplinary approach, some authors explore connections with social theory, in particular sociology or socio-linguistics, some offer a political stance (critical discourse analysis), others explore connections with philosophy and philosophy of language, and several papers address problems in theoretical pragmatics.
