Description: This is a succinct introduction to the burgeoning field of pragmatics -- the study of language from the point of view of its users, of the choices they make, the constraints they encounter in using language in social interaction, and the effects their use of language has on other participants in an act of communication.

Pragmatics reviews the work of Austin, Grice, Searle, Sacks, and others, and examines the implicit meaning of the irregularities of everyday conversation, as well as the social importance and the societal determination of even the least consciously proffered "act of language". In this thoroughly updated and revised edition, Mey extends the treatment of metapragmatic phenomena to the phenomena often referred to, in the US anthropological-pragmatic tradition, by the term "indexing". He has also given full-fledged treatment to the theory of Pragmatic Acts, and has included new chapters on literary pragmatics and pragmatics across cultures. The final chapter on social aspects of pragmatics covers extensive recent research in the rapidly evolving "critical" orientation.

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