How long does it take to read Principles of Pragmatics?
Principles of Pragmatics by Geoffrey Leech takes about 4 hours 43 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 4 hours 43 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1983. 257 pages, about 70,675 words.
10 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 7 hours 51 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 4 hours 43 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 2 hours 57 minutes |
The page count is the median across 5 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
This book presents a rhetorical model of pragmatics. Geoffrey Leech argues for a rapprochement between linguistics and the traditional discipline of rhetoric, maintaining that the language system in the abstract must be studied in relation to a fully developed theory of language use. Over the years, pragmatics -- the study of the use and meaning of utterances to their situations -- has become a more and more important branch of linguistics, as the inadequacies of a purely formalist, abstract approach to the study of language have become more evident. This book presents a rhetorical model of pragmatics: that is, a model which studies linguistic communication in terms of communicative goals and principles of 'good communicative behaviour'. In this respect, Geoffrey Leech argues for a rapprochement between linguistics and the traditional discipline of rhetoric. He does not reject the Chomskvan revolution of linguistics, but rather maintains that the language system in the abstract -- i.e. the 'grammar' broadly in Chomsky's sense -- must be studied in relation to a fully developed theory of language use. There is therefore a division of labour between grammar and rhetoric, or (in the study of meaning) between semantics and pragmatics.
Subjects: Pragmatics, Study and teaching, Pragmatique, Étude et enseignement
