Customer Reviews

Pragmatics (Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics)

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I would highly recommend this very readable introduction to the pragmatic revolution in linguistics. The book is organized incredibly well with each chapter dealing with a curiously inexplicable lingusitic phenomenon that just happens to have a clean, pragmatic answer. Levinson weaves linguistic theory and philosophy of language well with a very readable format and style. I found it especially useful as a primer for recent philosophy of language.

I used this book in a Semantics/Pragmatics graduate class at my university. It was a very difficult read, which makes sense, since Pragmatics is a very complex subject. The field is ill-defined and it's always hard to tell whether a topic is better thought of as a Semantics topic or a Pragmatics topic. The book itself spends a chapter discussing how to define this field, whether it is really part of linguistics, and how it relates to Semantics. It also spends much time on the topic of Harvey Sacks' conversation analysis (my professor's specialty), relating it to Searle's speech act theory, and other non-traditional approaches to linguistic meaning. In this way, the book borrows much from philosophy of language, sociolinguistics, and other (loosely?) related areas of linguistics.

If you are a serious linguist who is interested in meaning outside of predicate logic, this is the book for you. For anyone looking for an easy introduction to field, look elsewhere.

For the reader with no time to lose, I'll start right away by telling you which book on Pragmatics you ought to get if you want a good introduction to it: "Pragmatics" by George Yule, because it is much more concise, to the point, covers a lot of ground quickly, deals with the essential.

Now, Levinson's book is a book I read twice, and from which I never retain anything. The first time I read it - entirely - I could not mention anything I had read in there. I thought I was simply a bad reader, but after having studied pragmatics for a long time, I realised that the book was simply not well written. It goes into complicated details too fast, before the reader has any real grasp on the matter, and gets lost in discussions that readers usually aren't able to understand, nor care for.

Typically, I'd say that Levinson's book is an "introduction" written by someone who knows not what it is like to know nothing about pragmatics. And even when you know of the subject, you still find his book rather difficult to follow.

I strongly urge you to consider George Yule's book on pragmatics rather than this one.

While this book is dated since it has not been updated since 1983, it remains as a classic introductory text for the field of pragmatics. The book does a great job of introducing the reader into various areas of the pragmatics field in an interdisciplinary fashion but with an explicit focus on linguistics. The major problem of the book is that someone lacking a background in syntax/semantics will find the book challenging to read. Moreover, the book requires a solid grounding in logic to understand well. In sum, I would recommend this book as an excellent introduction to pragmatics, but I would caution the buyer to read an introductory linguistics text prior to buying this book.

I am currently using this book, along with Relevance by Sperber & Wilson, for a Linguistic Pragmatics course. The material is interesting but the manner in which it reads is not very engaging. That makes for a challenging time trying to grasp the points the author is trying to convey.

The author's style is needlessly complex, with elaborate sentences and odd words that could have been replaced with much simpler and clearer ones to a reader being introduced to a new field.

The book's datedness is evident with references that are at least 30 years old.