Acquiring Pragmatics

by Sandrine Zufferey

During the past decades, pragmatics has been a rapidly growing field of study, and considerable paradigm shifts have occurred. From the study of socially determined rules governing the production of speech acts, pragmatics has now also become part of the cognitive sciences, and aims at understanding how listeners bridge the gap between the under-determined linguistic meaning of utterances and the full-blown speaker's meaning. Acquiring Pragmatics is a comprehensive synthesis of state-of-the-art research on the acquisition of pragmatics, covering both social and cognitive dimensions. The...