Reviewed by Eric A. Anchimbe, University of Bayreuth

After the resounding success of the Handbooks of applied linguistics series, De Gruyter Mouton is publishing a new nine-volume series, Handbooks of pragmatics, which like the earlier series is a solid mix of traditional and innovative approaches to, and investigations of, both old and contemporary topics in pragmatics. With most of the nine volumes already published, these self-contained collections promise to supplement and add new directions to existing handbooks of pragmatics in the market and to a field of linguistics that is exceptionally heterogeneous, constantly expanding, and progressively multilingual.

The volume under review here is the first in the series and as the editors write, it ‘provides a comprehensive overview of the foundations of pragmatics…the roots and evolution of those central theories and approaches as well as key concepts and topics that are characteristic of twenty-first century pragmatics as an approach to the means and ways of using language in authentic social contexts’ (1). In addition to covering twenty-first century pragmatics, the contributions in this volume also focus on topics that emerged earlier, for example, the ‘Semiotic foundations of pragmatics’ (Winfried Nöth), ‘Pragmatics in Habermas’ critical social theory’ (Maeve Cooke), and ‘Foundations: Ethnomethodolgy and Erving Goffman’ (Christine Domke and Werner Holly), among others.

This handbook consists of twenty-three articles divided into five thematic parts:  conceptual foundations, theoretical foundations, key topics in pragmatic description, the place of pragmatics in the description of discourse, and methods and tools. The articles are written by experts not only in pragmatics but also in adjacent fields and sub-disciplines that lend themselves to pragmatic interpretations, such as semiotics, sociolinguistics, philosophy of language, functional linguistics, critical social theory, and literature. The handbook traces the long journey of the evolution of the field of pragmatics from its early beginnings (see ‘Pragmatics as a linguistic concept’ by Anita Fetzer and ‘The rise of pragmatics: A historiographic overview’ by Wataru Koyama) through its struggles to establish itself as an independent field (see ‘Pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics’ by Sophia Marmaridou).

This journey continues with the theoretical frameworks that shaped pragmatics (e.g. ‘Pragmatics in modern philosophy of language’ by Nikola Kompa and George Meggle and ‘Foundations of pragmatics in functional linguistics’ by Saskia Daalder and Andreas Musolff), as well as traditional key topics in pragmatics (e.g. ‘Deixis and indexicality’ by William F. Hanks and ‘Speech acts’ by Elena Collavin). A rather recent phase in this evolution is the pragmatic focus on discourse (see ‘Pragmatics and literature’ by Jacob L. Mey and ‘Pragmatics and prosody: Prosody as social action’ by Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen). An even more recent phase is the application of corpus-based and experimental tools to pragmatic analysis (see ‘Experimental pragmatics’ by Richard Brehneyand ‘Corpus-based pragmatics: Quantitative studies II’ by Christoph Rühlemann).

What makes this handbook different from many others is the expanse of the topics covered, especially the inclusion of a whole section on methods and tools. We are presented innovative and scientific methods and tools designed to facilitate data collection and processing, for instance, experiment-based tools as well as qualitative and quantitative corpus-based methods. With these methods, our study of pragmatics as intentional social interactional behavior in context across time and cultures will benefit from optimal and reliable findings that reflect authentic human behavior. This volume is, therefore, relevant to pragmaticians from both the traditional theoretical background and the modern, machine-mediated, corpus-based inclination.