Acquiring Pragmatics

Sandrine Zufferey is a post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland. Her research focuses on the acquisition and processing of discourse connectives. Her work takes a cross-linguistic perspective in order to study the way linguistic encoding affects cognitive processes.

• Part I: IntroductionChapter 1: Interfaces between pragmatics and language acquisitionChapter 2: Aspects of language acquisition researchPart II: Acquiring social aspects of pragmatic competence Chapter 3: Learning how to do things with words: Speech actsChapter 4: The pragmatics of conversation and discourse structurePart III: Acquiring cognitive aspects of pragmatic competenceChapter 5: Understanding communicative intentions: Theory of mindChapter 6: Non-literal language useChapter 7: Pragmatic enrichmentChapter 8: Procedural meaningPart IV: The acquisition of pragmatics under specific constraintsChapter 9: Pragmatic impairments in autistic spectrum disordersChapter 10: Pragmatics and second language acquisitionConclusion

Sandrine Zufferey has done the fields of pragmatics, language acquisition, and cognitive science an invaluable service. Her book covers a remarkably broad range of results and ideas that she skillfully integrates into a beautifully structured, impeccably researched, and engaging synthesis. An authoritative and endlessly fascinating exposition of the state-of-the-art, Acquiring Pragmatics should be required reading for anyone interested in the study of pragmatics, its acquisition, and its place within the sciences of the mind.Julien Musolino, Rutgers University, USAThis book gives a very readable and up-to-date review of a field in language acquisition that deserves more attention: pragmatics. I highly recommend it.Ted Sanders, Utrecht University, The Netherlands