Re-systematizing Pragmatics

The publication of Levinson’s celebrated Pragmatics in 1983 systematized the field of pragmatics and marked the coming of age of pragmatics as a linguistic discipline in its own right. Today pragmatics is one of the most vibrant and rapidly growing fields in linguistics and the philosophy of language.It is also a particularly complex subject with all kinds of disciplinary influence, and few, if any, clear boundaries.The aim of this article is to survey the representative research areas in contemporary pragmatics and present an authoritative and up-to-date description of the contemporary landscape of pragmatics, in the hope that it will help shape the development of the discipline in the next decade or so.