Betty J. Birner, Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science, Northern Illinois University

Betty J. Birner is a Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science in the Department of English at Northern Illinois University. Her previous books include Information Status and Noncanonical Word Order in English (with Gregory Ward; Benjamins 1998), Introduction to Pragmatics (Wiley-Blackwell 2013), and Language and Meaning (Routledge 2018). Her research focuses on pragmatics and information structure.

"Summing up, Pragmatics: A slim guide is a valuable tool for anyone interested in the study of pragmatics." -- Nicolas Ruytenbeek, Ghent University, Linguist List

"Just what a slim guide should be: brisk, authoritative, even-handed, accessible, entertaining. Birner deftly traverses the theoretical and empirical landscape of contemporary pragmatics from (non-)literality to speech acts, from presupposition to implicature, from reference to information structure, enlivened at each stop with illustrative data from Poe's tales to political innuendo." -- Laurence R. Horn, Yale University

"Combining elegant exposition and well-chosen examples, this book serves not only to introduce the study of pragmatics to a new audience, but also to shed new light on several widely-discussed topics." -- Chris Cummins, University of Edinburgh