The Handbook of Pragmatics provides up-to-date information on research in the field of linguistic pragmatics, conceived as the interdisciplinary (cognitive, social, and cultural) science of natural language use. This electronic encyclopaedia of one of the major fields of language studies is a continuously updatable source of state-of-the-art information for anyone interested in language use. The Handbook of Pragmatics Online is variously searchable and flexible to meet the needs of both beginners and established scholars in the field.

It consists of topical articles (from anaphora and bilingualism to codeswitching, cohesion, discourse markers, implicitness, mass media, negation, social institutions, and terms of address) and brief biographies of eminent scholars (such as Austin, Bühler, Grice, Morris, Sapir).
In addition, it offers an extensive overview of research traditions that belong or have contributed to pragmatics (from accommodation theory, analytical philosophy and anthropological linguistics, to cognitive linguistics, construction grammar, conversation analysis, discourse analysis, literary pragmatics, neurolinguistics, psycholinguistics, relevance theory, sociolinguistics, speech act theory, and universal and transcendental pragmatics, to name just a few), of research methods (from contrastive analysis and corpus analysis to ethnography, experimentation, logical analysis, statistics, and taxonomy), and of notation systems (from formal semantics to transcription systems for spoken discourse).
The index is analysis-driven: it is not so much based on words and phrases that occur literally in the contributions to the Handbook; rather, it provides a conceptual road map with extensive cross-referencing.

The Handbook of Pragmatics now offers reference interlinking through DOI/CrossRef.

The Handbook of Pragmatics Online incorporates all information from the Handbook of Pragmatics (Manual & Installments). Future online versions will add further entries, and will include updates, rewritings and extensive revisions of already available entries.

The Handbook of Pragmatics Online is published by John Benjamins Publishing Company.