Chapter 3: pragmatiCs FUrther reaDiNg

There are many textbooks on pragmatics. Pragmatics (Peccei 1999) is an excellent entry level book full of good examples. Pragmatics and Discourse (Cutting 2002) is also a very accessible resource book for students, crammed with interesting examples and activities as is the most excellently titled Introducing Pragmatics in Use (O’Keefe et al. 2011), though that has no dedicated chapter on Gricean pragmatics. Overall, we think Doing Pragmatics (Grundy 2008) offers perhaps the best all round introductory coverage: it is detailed, well exemplified, well written and, most of all, eminently understandable. That said, Meaning in Interaction: An Introduction to Pragmatics (Thomas 1995) covers some interesting ground and is especially good for aspects of indirectness. More comprehensive textbook coverage is offered in Mey’s (2001) 392-page textbook, Pragmatics. Finally there is Levinson’s (1983) 420-page Pragmatics. Despite (or maybe because of) its age, this is probably the widest referenced textbook on pragmatics – used both by lecturers and students. It is very thorough, but occasionally a little too technical for the novice. All serious linguists should own a copy eventually, though!

This chapter has mainly covered speech acts and conversational implicature. Any serious investigators of these areas should really go to the original sources. How To Do Things With Words covers speech acts. Although it is written by Austin (1975), the father of speech act theory, it is really quite accessible and is certainly worth looking at. Grice’s (1975) ‘Logic and conversation’ is the canonical work on implicature (Grice 2006, 2011 are edited versions): every student of pragmatics should read it (at least once). There are two useful readings in our Reader (➔ R 1.2 and ➔ R 1.4): the first is by Davies who explains how Grice was actually less interested in cooperation and more concerned with rationality; the second is by Butters who has an interesting paper on applied pragmatics and mis understanding. An excellent collection of papers on pragmatics can be found in The Pragmatics Reader (edited by Archer and Grundy 2011). Another is The Cambridge Handbook of Pragmatics (edited by Allan and Jaszczolt 2012). A fine collection covering wider aspects of analysing discourse can be found in The Discourse Reader (edited by Jaworski and Coupland 2006).