Includes bibliographical references.

Preface; SECTION 1; Survey; Syntax, semantics, and pragmatics; Regularity; The pragmatics wastebasket; Person deixis; Spatial deixis; Temporal deixis; Deixis and grammar; Referential and attributive uses; Names and referents; The role of co-text; Anaphoric reference; Presupposition; Types of presupposition; The projection problem; Ordered entailments; The cooperative principle; Hedges; Conversational implicature; Generalized conversational implicatures; Scalar implicatures; Particularized conversational implicatures; Properties of conversational implicatures; Conventional implicatures; Speech acts; IFIDs; Felicity conditions; The performative hypothesis; Speech act classification; Direct and indirect speech acts; Speech events; Politeness; Face wants; Negative and positive face; Self and other: say nothing; Say something: off and on record; Positive and negative politeness; Strategies; Pre-sequences; Conversation analysis; Pauses, overlaps, and backchannels; Conversational style; Adjacency pairs; Preference structure; Discourse analysis; Coherence; Background knowledge; Cultural schemata; Cross-cultural pragmatics; SECTION 2; Readings; SECTION 3; References; SECTION 4; Glossary

This is an introduction to pragmatics, the study of how people make sense of each other linguistically. The author explains, and illustrates, basic concepts, such as the co-operative principle, deixis, and speech acts, providing a clear, concise foundation for further study.