Studies in the Way of Words

Rating:
Summary: Grice as father of a field of linguistic philosophy
Review: Studies in the Way of Words, by Paul Grice, is a collection of papers by the late British philosopher of linguistics. His concepts such as the Maxims of Conversation and the basic ideas behind presupposition and implicature are vital to a robust understanding of communication through language.

As a philosophical text, Grice's work is a bit difficult to plow through. His prose is quite full of flourishes and there's enough amusing references in there to keep an interested reader going, however the reader must indeed be interested for this book to be of much use. Anyone expecting to fully digest any of the papers in this book would do well to plan on reading it 3 or 4 times. However, if done successfully, the concepts you'll take from it will indeed do much to expand your view of how linguistic communication works.

Rated 5 stars for its philosophical importance and 2 for readability, the 4-star rating given here is a sort of weighted average.