Abstract

Discusses the scope and development of pragmatics, the theory of utterance interpretation, as a branch of cognitive psychology. Work done in the field so far is seen as falling into 3 categories -- theoretical work aimed at providing an account of such questions as how human beings interpret utterances, how reference is assigned, how sentence fragments are interpreted, how ungrammatical utterances are dealt with, and the role of presuppositional phenomena; empirical work, generally of limited scope; and formal work, which is almost always explicit but rarely directly relevant to the goals of pragmatic theory. Divergences between the views of pragmatics researchers and theorists and those of H. P. Grice (1975, 1978) on utterance interpretation and general communicative principles are examined.