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Robyn Carston on semantics, pragmatics and ‘encoding’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 June 2005

NOEL BURTON-ROBERTS
Affiliation:
University of Newcastle

Abstract

Robyn Carston,Thoughts and utterances: the pragmatics of explicit communication. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002. Pp. x+408.

Robyn Carston's Thoughts and utterances is, in every sense, a big book. The result of years of thinking about communication from a relevance-theoretic perspective, it is long, wide-ranging, rich, intricate, demanding and radical. And it is (or should be) controversial. Essential reading therefore for anyone with any interest in language and communication, philosophy of language, semantics and pragmatics.

Type
Review Article
Copyright
2005 Cambridge University Press

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Footnotes

I am grateful to the Journal of Lingustics referees, Diane Blakemore, Phil Carr, Deirdre Wilson, David Young and, particularly, Robyn Carston herself for discussion.