Introduction

The field of pragmatics is a continuously advancing, dynamic conglomerate of frameworks and approaches. The field of pragmatics has come a long and windy way since the 1960s, essentially witnessing a shift from contextualism to context, or, more simplistically, from sentence to utterance. This chapter establishes corpus linguistic and scientometric resources and tools. Our self-compiled corpus of AMPRA conference abstracts (ACAC) provides assuring and more in-depth evidence of the salience of certain topics in current pragmatic research. The ACAC data confirms to a large extent the topics and research directions that leading handbooks and journals promote. From the perspective of pragmatics, disciplines like philosophy of language, anthropology, ethnomethodology, European sociology, psychiatry, psychology and ethology were confluent streams, generating a think tank of pragmatic ideas and research desiderates. The chapter also presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in this book.