Customer Reviews

Pragmatics (Oxford Introductions to Language Study)

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The series in which appeared this book is designed to give a large-scale view of different areas of language. It should be used as an introduction to more specific ... introductions. The titles in the series are all divided into four sections: Survey, Readings, References and Glossary.

The Survey of Pragmatics contains nine chapters, each of roughly 10 pages: 1) Definitions and background; 2) Deixis and Reference; 3) Reference and inference; 4) Presupposition and entailment; 5)Cooperation and implicature; 6) Speech acts and events; 7)Politeness and interaction; 8) Conversation and preference structure; 9) Discourse and culture.

The Readings are one-page texts extracted from the specialized literature and are followed by a couple of questions. The References help the reader providing him with a selection of titles for every chapter of the Survey. The proposed books are classified in terms of difficulty, from introductory to advanced level. Technical terms are in bold and are explained once more in the Glossary at the back of the book.

I think the author has succeeded in giving a bird's view of several fields of pragmatics. Of course, the discussion is somewhat condensed and could, at least at some points, be clearer or give some more details. But one should be aware of the difficulty of explaining a lot of stuff to people with no assumed prior knowledge of the subject and having only 90 pages at one's disposal! Nonetheless, I missed formal definitions of technical terms in the Survey. The author often gives them only indirectly, and the reader must extract them himself from the text. Sincerely, I did not find the Readings useful at all and I would have wished to find more titles and more details in the comments under each of them in the References.

George Yule's "Pragmatics" is a great little introduction on the topic of English pragmatics, but that is all it is. It is a brief insight into some of the key concepts of the field and one that I found very useful. For this reason, I would recommend it.

However, it is a very short book, and those with more experience, (or any experience at all, for that matter), would probably prefer something more substantial. It is really a whirlwind tour of pragmatics and nothing more.

That said, I found it very readable and easily understood. It was certainly not all that taxing on the reading skills, and the main concepts and definitions were well explained.

This is a good book to start with, and I recommend it for a launching point to further reading.

This book is all you could ask for in terms of an easy introduction to pragmatics. It is concise, simple, well-planned, clear, and full of useful examples.

Slightly over a hundred pages, this is an ideal read if you're looking for basic knowledge on pragmatics in general. I know no better book for that.

Highly recommended. In addition, this was the reference book in one my classes on pragmatics, so if university teachers consider it good enough for their classes, you can consider it good enough for yourself. And good enough, it sure is.

Actually I wanted a more detailed book as source but this book is just a brief source. When I looked online, I thought it was a normal book but unfortunately it appeared to be like a booklet, or a small book so to speak. Still, it is OK and I like it because I can make use of it too.