In Chapter 1, we introduce the subject of pragmatics and cover some basic concepts, definitions, and topics that will be central to the ideas discussed in the rest of the book. We begin with some definitions of pragmatics, and a key distinction is made between approaches which focus on social factors, and those which take a more theoretical approach. We move on to think about the role that context plays in interpretation. This leads us to a key distinction between sentences and utterances, with utterances as the focus of pragmatics. We then consider two different ways in which meaning may be communicated: via code and via inference. As we will see, inference plays a central role in the interpretation of utterances. Next, we discuss the idea that the identification of intention lies at the heart of utterance interpretation. This leads to a discussion of the cognitive abilities that are thought to underlie inferential processes, including mindreading, metarepresentation, and theory of mind. We look at what it means to be able to have thoughts about other people’s thoughts and why this is key for pragmatic processing.

This chapter considers how the Romance languages can contribute to our understanding of the encoding of discourse-oriented meaning, both structurally, at the level of the sentence, and, interpretatively, at the level of the utterance; more precisely, it focuses on the discourse-oriented meaning that interfaces between the wider extra-sentential discourse context on the one hand, and the propositional core of the utterance and the sentence-internal discourse context on the other. We present an overview of the contribution of Romance languages to a number of the key issues associated with theories of discourse at the level of the sentence/utterance, such as the grammatical expression of clause type, the codification of illocutionary force, and the mapping between form and function in the realization of speech acts, which are the communicative actions effected through the production of an utterance; in particular, we distinguish the morphosyntactic notion of clause type, meant as the formal or grammatical structure of a sentence codified through the lexicalization of dedicated functional slots within the left periphery of the clause, from that of illocutionary force, a pragmatic notion which refers to the communicative function attached to that expression.