Introduction to Pragmatics Betty J. Birner is an English-language textbook that offers a thorough introduction to the field of pragmatics. This reference work is intended for students in higher education and professionals who want to gain insight into the role of context in linguistic communication.
The book addresses traditional and new approaches in pragmatics and focuses on the boundary area between semantics and pragmatics. Topics include implicature, reference, presupposition, and speech acts, supplemented by subjects such as neo-Gricean theories, Relevance Theory, information structure, inference, and dynamic meaning assignment. This makes it a current overview of the field.
Introduction to Pragmatics is applicable within disciplines such as linguistics, discourse analysis, and stylistics, and aligns with topics such as semantics and linguistics. The edition is part of the Blackwell Textbooks in Linguistics series.