ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book presents a general panorama of pragmatics in its cognitive and social dimensions, with the objective to provide a global and coherent picture. The main criterion used at the time to characterize pragmatics with respect to other fields of language study was that pragmatic phenomena have to be accounted for by referring to the language user. Most scholars agree that pragmatics truly began with the work of John Austin, a philosopher who reacted against the dominant view of his time in the philosophy of language. It argues that acquiring pragmatic competencies requires the cognitive abilities to reason about mental states, to draw inferences, and to integrate contextual information from various sources. Social models of pragmatic development emphasize the role of caregivers and peers as a means to acquire socially adequate behaviors, in other words to 'pragmatic socialization'.
