Читать книгу Pragmatics and its Applications to TESOL and SLA - Salvatore Attardo - Страница 21

In this introductory chapter, we have outlined some central ideas of semantics. Our treatment is by no means comprehensive, as there are many more theories and approaches to semantics that we might have covered. Our purpose here has been to provide the novice reader with a general understanding of the kind of issues that semantics deals with; for example, the question of “how do words convey meaning?” or the extensional and intensional approaches to semantics. Moreover, we considered how these issues are related to some more specific subjects, such as the idea of context, modularity, and grammaticalization, that can help us define pragmatics. As we have seen, some of the basic definitions of pragmatics assume knowledge of such concepts as “truth function” and thus would be almost impossible to understand without the information provided in this chapter. With the next chapter, on the contrary, we turn to more concrete issues that directly concern the interplay between language teaching and pragmatics.