Yan Huang’s Theoretical and Disciplinary Contributions to Pragmatics

This article is an analysis of Yan Huang’s contribution to pragmatics. On the basis of his publications, we conclude that Yan Huang’s contribution to pragmatics is two-fold: theoretical and disciplinary. On the theoretical side, his neo-Gricean pragmatic theory of anaphora is his most celebrated heritage to pragmatics. It not only undermines Chomsky’s syntactic model of anaphora, revises Levinson’s pragmatic model of anaphora and advances neo-Gricean pragmatics, but also brings novel perspectives on pragmatics-syntax and pragmatics-semantics interfaces. On the disciplinary side, Yan Huang’s explication of the nature and theoretical foundations of pragmatics, delimitation of the scope of pragmatics, and clarification of the terms and notions in pragmatics all help to further systematize pragmatics as a component of linguistics.