ABSTRACT
In Chapter 8, readers are introduced to a branch of linguistics which is one of the most relevant fields for students and researchers of translation: pragmatics. You will first be given a definition of pragmatics and a brief historical description of the development of this field. Then you will learn about the main concepts in pragmatics: ‘deixis’, ‘reference’ and ‘inference’, ‘presupposition’, ‘conversational implicature’, ‘cooperative principle’ and ‘conversational maxims’, ‘speech acts’, and ‘cross-cultural pragmatics’. After studying this chapter, readers should be able to understand how people manage to understand one another, how what is NOT said is often as relevant as what is actually uttered, and how all these pragmatic areas vary across different cultures.
