Beyond Words (Mouton Series in Pragmatics, 15)

In pragmatics, it is widely accepted that the overall meaning of an utterance performed as part of a verbal interchange is underdetermined by the meaning of the sentence uttered. Speaker meaning has to be considered as a complex utterance level combining semantic knowledge and context-driven, pragmatic information as an integrated whole. The focus of this book is on the nature, function, and acquisition of pragmatic inferencing strategies.