Abstract

Pragmatics is one of the most vibrant and rapidly growing fields in linguistics and the philosophy of language. It is a particularly complex subject with all kinds of disciplinary influences and few, if any, clear boundaries. This chapter provides an authoritative, comprehensive, and up-to-date overview of the contemporary landscape of pragmatics. It starts with the question of what is pragmatics. It then surveys the two main schools of thought in pragmatics: the Anglo-American and European Continental traditions. This is followed by a review of macro-pragmatics, which covers cognitively oriented macro-pragmatics, such as experimental, computational, and clinical pragmatics; socially and/or culturally oriented macro-pragmatics, such as politeness and impoliteness studies, cultural, cross- and intercultural, and interpersonal pragmatics; and those branches of macro-pragmatics that are not easily and/or neatly placed in the first two categories, such as historical, corpus, and literary pragmatics. The final section addresses the organization and content of this handbook.