Pragmatics and Natural Language Understanding.

Lawrence Erlbaum, Hillsdale (...), 1989. XI,189p. Paperback. Small personal library mark and name on free endpaper. 'This is a useful textbook to introduce undergraduate students to the issues of meaning and interpretation in which the communicative exchange of information is a central concept. Pragmatics is characterized here as the mechanisms that allow more to be communicated than is actually said. The book is well-organized into eight chapters on more traditional pragmatics topics as indexicals, demonstratives, speech acts, presupposition, implicatures and Gricean maxims, but also on clearly semantic concerns as reference and indeterminacy of sense, reference to kinds, and anaphora. (...) It is interesting that the author emphasizes early in the book that the content of linguistic expressions can only be specified in a nondeterministic way. Even a fully competent user cannot always tell what is meant by a certain assertion and this leaves room for intentional ambiguity, vagueness, and does justice to the fact that understanding involves real work and presents a real risk of failure.' (ALICE G.B. ter MEULEN in Noûs, 1993, p.550). From the library of the late Sir Kenneth James Dover.