Introduction

This chapter explains the components of pragmatics and characterizes the types of children and adults for whom pragmatic difficulties pose a significant barrier to effective communication. So much of everyday communication involves fine-grained judgements about the meaning of utterances that it is remarkable that misunderstandings are not the norm rather than the exception. Language is situated in a multifaceted context that has spatial, temporal and social dimensions. Naturally, speakers need to ‘point’ to these aspects of context in order to convey messages to hearers. This pointing function is called deixis and is a key pragmatic feature of language. Most speakers and hearers have little difficulty negotiating the pragmatics of verbal and non-verbal communication. For many other individuals, pragmatic language skills are acquired normally in the developmental period only to become impaired in adulthood as a result of injury, illness, or disease. These events can result in an acquired pragmatic disorder.