Acquiring Pragmatics ─ Social and Cognitive Perspectives

During the past decades, pragmatics has been a rapidly growing field of study, and considerable paradigm shifts have occurred. From the study of socially determined rules governing the production of speech acts, pragmatics has now also become part of thecognitive sciences, and aims at understanding how listeners bridge the gap between the under-determined linguistic meaning of utterances and the full-blown speaker's meaning. Acquiring Pragmatics is a comprehensive synthesis of state-of-the-art research on the acquisition of pragmatics, covering both social and cognitive dimensions. The text introduces advanced undergraduate and graduate students, as well as scholars from neighboring fields of study to the current topics of research in theoretical pragmatics, the issues they raise for language acquisition research and the new experimental designs that have been developed to address them empirically.

Sandrine Zufferey is a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. Her research focuses on the acquisition and processing of discourse connectives. Her work takes a cross-linguistic perspective in order to study the way linguistic encoding affects cognitive processes.