Yan Huang’s book represents a thorough introduction into the study of pragmatics. It focuses on the key areas of pragmatic research, implicature, speech acts, deixis, and contextualism, analyzes the relationship of pragmatics to cognition, semantics and syntax. The scholar systematically explains different approaches to understanding the complexity of human communication, pointing out their strong points and issues using many examples taken from materials from around the world.
This textbook is very helpful, summarizing the key notions after each segment, allowing readers to verify their understanding through a number of exercises with proposed solutions. It is suitable mainly for students of linguistic disciplines as well as those interested in the philosophy of language and communicative aspects of many related disciplines.