Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book discusses the nature of human language. In a narrower sense, it is about one aspect of human language. This aspect is General Pragmatics. The book examines formal-functional paradigm, explains their prima-facie plausibility, and justifies them in more detail through analysis of particular descriptive problems. The book introduces a Cooperative Principle (CP) and other principles, such as a Politeness Principle (PP). The interaction between these two principles, the CP and the PP, is concerned. The book accounts what H. P. Grice has called Conventional Implicatures, ie pragmatic implications which are derived directly from the meanings of words, rather than via conversational principles. The term Pragmalinguistics can be applied to the study of the more linguistic end of pragmatics, where people consider the particular resources which a given language provides for conveying particular illocutions.