The Handbook of Pragmatics was first published by John Benjamins Publishers in the form of a bound Manual and eight annual Installments 1995-2002. The manual and the first installment were edited by Jef Verschueren, Jan-Ola Östman, and Jan Blommaert; the other seven installments were edited by Jef Verschueren, Jan-Ola Östman, Jan Blommaert and Chris Bulcaen.

There is a clear historical connection between the Handbook of Pragmatics, the online version, and the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA). From the very first announcements of the establishment of the Association in 1986, a project was anticipated which ought to result in the publication of a Handbook of Pragmatics, intended to be one of the major tools to achieve the Association's goals

1. of disseminating knowledge about pragmatic aspects of language, not only among pragmaticians of various ‘denominations’ and students of language in general, but in principle among everyone who, personally or professionally, could profit from more insight into problems of the function and use of language;
2. of stimulating various fields of application, ranging from language teaching and problems of intercultural communication to the construction of computer communication systems and the treatment of patients with language disorders, by making this knowledge accessible to an interdisciplinary community of scholars approaching the same general subject area from different points of view and with different methodologies; and
3. of finding, in the process, a significant degree of theoretical coherence for the discussion and comparison of the results of the fundamental research carried out by those dealing with aspects of language use or the functionality of language in fields such as linguistics, text linguistics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, ethnomethodology, the ethnography of speaking, anthropological linguistics, procedural and developmental psycholinguistics, artificial intelligence, neurolinguistics, semiotics, the philosophy of language, speech act theory, communication theory, rhetoric, stylistics, and even in the wider fields of sociology, political science, and history, to name only a few.