Language Use

What is the relationship between the meaning of a sentence, our abilities of inference, and the practical use of the sentence in everyday circumstances? The answer from pragmatics, which is scrutinized in this work, is that meaning and inference guide our practical use of language.

Drawing on Ludwig Wittgenstein's approach to philosophical problems, Language Use offers a detailed examination of the conceptual framework of central pragmatic fields of research such as deixis, implicatures, speech acts and presuppositions, and contrasts this framework with investigations into numerous examples of everyday practices of language use. The originality of the book lies in its treatment of general theoretical issues in terms of descriptions of examples and particular cases.