This is a succinct introduction to the burgeoning field of pragmatics, the study of language from the point of view of its users, of the choices they make, the constraints they encounter in using language in social interaction, and the effects their use of language has on other participants in an act of communication. Pragmatics reviews the work of Austin, Grice, Searle, Sacks and others and examines the implicit meaning of the irregularities of everyday conversation; and the social importance and the societal determination of even the least consciously proffered "act of language".

With her theory of 'Language as Dialogue', Edda Weigand has opened up a new and promising perspective in linguistic research and its neighbouring disciplines. Her model of 'competence-in-performance' solved the problem of how to bridge the gap between competence and performance and thus substantially shaped the way in which people look at language today.
This book traces Weigand's linguistic career from its beginning to today and comprises a selection of articles which take the reader on a vivid and fascinating journey through the most important stages of her theorizing.

This new edition builds on the foundation established in the previous three editions. The reader will find the writing style of this edition easy to follow, with special focus given to ensuring that each page is user friendly and accessible to all levels of learning. As educators, we wanted to be sure that students found the content manageable, interesting, and understandable.

The crises of faith that fractured Reformation Europe also caused crises of individual and collective identity. Structures of feeling as well as structures of belief were transformed; there was a reformation of social emotions as well as a Reformation of faith.
As Steven Mullaney shows in The Reformation of Emotions in the Age of Shakespeare, Elizabethan popular drama played a significant role in confronting the uncertainties and unresolved traumas of Elizabethan Protestant England. Shakespeare and his contemporaries—audiences as well as playwrights—reshaped popular drama into a new form of embodied social, critical, and affective thought. 

The poems are ordered chronologically according to their first appearance in book form. Thirteen new poems are included in this edition, with Pauline now printed in its entirety. Annotations have been revised throughout to clarify Browning's references and vocabulary. "Criticism" retains the important contextual perspective of the First Edition. The twenty-three essays, nine of which are new, are divided into three sections: "Victorian Views," "Modern Essays in Criticism," and "Interpretations of Poems." A Chronology, Selected Bibliography, and Index of Titles and First Lines are also included.