This encyclopaedia of one of the major fields of language studies is a continuously updated source of state-of-the-art information for anyone interested in language use. The IPrA Handbook now contains nearly 5,000 pages. It provides easy access — for scholars with widely divergent backgrounds but with convergent interests in the use and functioning of language — to the different topics, traditions and methods which together make up the field of Pragmatics, broadly conceived as “the cognitive, social and cultural study of language and communication”.