This textbook provides an introduction to pragmatics from the point of view of Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory. The first part lays down the foundations of a relevance theoretic approach to utterance understanding, which is then applied to the analysis of a range of phenomena which are central to pragmatics.

Diane Blakemore is Lecturer in Linguistics at Southampton University. Her book on Semantic Constraints on Relevance was published by Blackwell in 1987.