In 180 pages, G manages to lay out in a very clear and concise manner the basic principles of modern pragmatics, including what are now generally taken to be six central topics of the field: reference, including anaphora, deixis, and (in)definiteness implicature presupposition speech acts conversational structure and functions of syntax. I am pleased, but not surprised, to report that G's book provides an excellent solution to this 'Levinson problem'. I had for some time felt the need for an alternative to Levinson's Pragmatics (1983), long the standard text in this area in a nine-week quarter, undergraduates in an introductory course gen- erally cannot assimilate Levinson's dense coverage of the field. Ward, Northwestern University When Georgia Green's textbook Pragmatics and natural language understanding (hereafter P&NLU) first came out in 1989, I immediately ordered it for my undergraduate Pragmatics course. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1989. If such contact did occur, then it might have influenced the cultural evolution of the languages. This raises the possibility of cultural and linguistic contact between the two human lineages. REVIEWS345 Pragmatics and natural language understanding. Dediu and Levinson (2013) argue that Neandertals had essentially modern language and speech, and that they were in genetic contact with the ancestors of modern humans during our dispersal out of Africa. I share G's impatience with linguists-especially those working in discourse-who continue to claim, In addition, G clears up several misconceptions and misunderstandings that have plagued the field for a number of years.
REVIEWS345 Pragmatics and natural language understanding. Green (review) Pragmatics and natural language understanding By Georgia M. Smith, Neil (ed. (1987b) 'Pragmatics and the grammar of anaphora', Journal of Linguistics 23:379-434. Bertuccelli-Papi (eds.), The Pragmatic Perspective, John Benjamins, 61-129. (1987a) 'Minimization and conversational inference'. Pragmatics and natural language understanding By Georgia M. (1983) Pragmatics, Cambridge University Press.