Thoughts and Utterances

Introduction.

1. Pragmatics and Linguistic Underdeterminacy.

2. The Explicit/Implicit Distinction.

3. The Pragmatics of 'And'-Conjunction.

4. The Pragmatics of Negation.

5. The Pragmatics of On-Line Concept Construction.

Appendix 1: Relevance Theory Glossary.

Appendix 2: Gricean Conversational Principles.

References.

Index.

"This book serves to advance the status of pragmatics, as in
addition to presenting a theory free from serious errors, it is
also a good example of a methodologically sound book. I heavily
applaud this volume - which places students on the right path and
is also a rare example of scholarly eminence. I believe the author
must have had many sleepless nights to finish it - now she can take
her rest and enjoy the success and the praise she fully deserves."
Linguistics

"Challenges current philosophical approaches to pragmatics and
makes a substantial contribution to cognitive pragmatic theories
such as relevance theory." Moderna Sprak

"The book brings together a wealth of empirical observations and
new analyses and is impressive in breadth and depth. It is also one
of the most detailed and powerful expositions of relevance theory
and enriches the framework in considerable ways."
Lingua"This long-awaited treatise is the best case ever made
for relevance theory, and a most stimulating piece of work on the
semantics/pragmatics interface. I enjoyed it enormously."
François Recanati, Institut Jean-Nicod

"You don't have to be a relevance theorist to appreciate
Carston's challenge to influential Gricean views on the
interaction of pragmatics with semantics. This book, with its
breadth of coverage and depth of analysis, raises a good many
questions and offers many good answers." Kent Bach, San
Francisco State University

"Robyn Carston's combination of meticulous scholarship
with deep insight has led her to cast new light on the vexed
distinction between semantics and pragmatics, to provide new
analyses of a range of problems in linguistics and the philosophy
of language, and to illuminate the relation between language and
thought more generally. This elegantly written and original work is
the best book on pragmatics for a generation." Neil Smith,
University College London

"The author directly tackles the by now central issue of the
interface between semantics and pragmatics... and addresses such
important theoretical problems, within all of pragmatics, as the
distinction betwen explicit and implicit communication."
Pragmatics

"As is usual with excellent books, Carston's book leads us to
think further deeply and raises a good many questions... this book
takes a resolutely cognitive viewpoint, sheds a new light on the
semantics/pragmatics interaction and succeeds in elucidating the
roles of language and inferences in communication. i strongly
recommend this book not only to pragmatists, of course, but also to
everyone who is interested in human communication." Akiko
Yoshimura, Nara Women's University, Studies in English
Literature

Robyn Carston is Reader in Linguistics at University College London. She is co-editor of Relevance Theory: Applications and Implications (1998).

R. Carston, University College London