Understanding Utterances

Diane Blakemore is Lecturer in Linguistics at Southampton University. Her book on Semantic Constraints on Relevance was published by Blackwell in 1987.

"A clearly written textbook. Punctuated with straightforward exercises and a useful recommended reading list." Journal of Pragmatics

• Preface. Acknowledgements.Part I: Fundamentals:.1. Communication and the Context.1.1. What do Speakers Communicate?.1.2. Understanding and Inference.1.3. The Context.Recommended Reading.Notes.2. Relevance.2.1. Standards in Communication.2.2. The Principle of Relevance.Recommended Reading.Notes.3. Pragmatics, Linguistics and Literature.3.1. Carving up Meaning: Semantics and Pragmatists.3.2. Promises and Poetry.Recommended Reading.Notes.Part II: Explicature:.4. Explicating and Implicating.Recommended Reading.Notes.5. The Proposition Expressed.5.1. Assigning Reference.5.2. Enrichment.5.3. Explicatures and Coherence.Recommended Reading.Notes.6. Higher-Level Explicatures: Attitudes and Speech Acts.6.1. Speech Acts and Pragmatics.6.2. Performatives.6.3. Saying, Telling and Asking.6.4. Interpretive Use.6.5. Non-Declarative Utterances: Imperatives.6.6. Non-Declarative Utterances: Interrogatives.Recommended Reading.Notes.Part III: Implicature:.7. Types of Implicature.7.1. Introduction.7.2. Implicated Premises and Implicated Conclusions.7.3. Strong and Weak Implicatures.Recommended Reading.Notes.8. Constraints on Implicatures.8.1. Connections in Discourse.8.2. Discourse Connectives as Constraints on Implicatures.8.3. The Classification of Discourse Connectives.8.4. Parallel Implications.8.5. Non-Truth-Conditional Meaning: Semantics and Pragmatics.Recommended Reading.Notes.9. Implicatures and Style.9.1. Poetic Effects.9.2. Metaphor.9.3. Irony.9.4. Style.Recommended Reading.Notes.References.Index.