This volume provides a comprehensive overview of the research carried out over the past thirty years in the vast field of legal discourse. The focus is on how such research has been influenced and shaped by developments in corpus linguistics and register analysis, and by the emergence from the mid 1990s of historical pragmatics as a branch of pragmatics concerned with the scrutiny of historical texts in their context of writing. 

The second edition of this hugely successful textbook provides comprehensive coverage of a wide range of topics in theoretical and applied linguistics. Written by leading academics in the field, this text offers a firm grounding in linguistics and includes engaging insights into current research.
It covers all the key areas of linguistic analysis, including phonetics, morphology, semantics and pragmatics, and core domains of study, comprising the history of the English language, regional and social variation, style and communication and interaction.

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".

This book provides an introduction to the study of meaning in human language, from a linguistic perspective. It covers a fairly broad range of topics, including lexical semantics, compositional semantics, and pragmatics. The chapters are organized into six units: (1) Foundational concepts; (2) Word meanings; (3) Implicature (including indirect speech acts); (4) Compositional semantics; (5) Modals, conditionals, and causation; (6) Tense & aspect. Most of the chapters include exercises which can be used for class discussion and/or homework assignments, and each chapter contains references for additional reading on the topics covered.

Pragmatics is one of the rapidly growing fields in contemporary linguistics. Huang provides an accessible and comprehensive introduction to the central topics in pragmatics - implicature, presupposition, speech acts, and deixis.