Robyn Carston on semantics, pragmatics and ‘encoding’

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.