ABSTRACT
Meaning is a complex notion indeed. Its complexity is reflected in the range of academic disciplines that has converged on the study of this notion. Thus, Cruse (2000) cites philosophy, psychology, neurology, semiotics and linguistics as disciplines that exhibit an academic interest in meaning. Moreover, within certain of these disciplines meaning is studied within specialised branches (e.g. semantics and pragmatics in linguistics). Even within the specialised branches of disciplines meaning is analysed differently according to perspective or tendency. Marmaridou (2000) describes how pragmatics, for example, is characterised by philosophical, radical and neo-Gricean, cognitive, interactive and societal tendencies. As well as revealing something of the complexity of meaning, this multiplicity of approaches to the study of meaning can result in conceptual impoverishment when issues of meaning, which are properly interrelated, are studied in isolation from one another. The correction of this conceptual impoverishment, through a reversal of the disciplinary isolation that creates it, is the primary aim of this multidisciplinary study of pragmatics.
