The pragmatic perspective

Jef Verschueren
Table of contents

In the preface to this volume, pragmatics was defined briefly as the cognitive, social, and cultural study of language and communication. This introductory chapter is intended to explain, as succinctly as possible, what that means exactly. To that end it presents, in the following order: an historical note about pragmatics as a wide and highly interdisciplinary field of inquiry; a discussion of problems related to the delimitation of this field as well as to methodology and the status of evidence in pragmatics; a full explanation of the notion of ‘pragmatics’ underlying this publication, i.e. one that defines pragmatics as a perspective on language rather than as a component of a linguistic theory; a sketch of a proposal as to how such a perspective could lead to a general frame of reference within which a diversity of research results can be fruitfully compared and which may itself lead to the formulation of useful research strategies; and an exposition of some basic scientific options that follow from the presented perspective and that lend structure to the Handbook.

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