Understanding Utterances: An Introduction to Pragmatics

Blackwell Textbooks in Linguistics

by Diane Blakemore

This textbook provides an introduction to pragmatics from the point of view of Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory. The first part lays down the foundations of a relevance theoretic approach to utterance understanding, which is then applied to the analysis of a range of phenomena which are central to pragmatics.

Genres: Linguistics

Paperback

First published January 1, 1992

Reviews

[ネリ · Rating 2 out of 5]

I am sorry to say that this book sucks.
Even if I had understood pragmatics to some extent before getting my hands on this book, now that I have finished it, i don’t know what the hell is going on. I am so confused.
She keeps giving promises that something will be further discussed in future chapters, but in the next chapters what happens is that these promises multiply and keep multiplying and you’re left with so much confusion.
Her writing style is defined by very unnecessarily long sentences.

It personally felt like she was very engaging in the first few chapters, then i don’t know if her life got busy, or just wanted to get this over with, but she seems to have lost interest. It felt like writing this book was an obligation to her maybe.

If you’re interested in pragmatics, stay away from this one.