Ten leading scholars provide exacting research results and a reliable and accessible introduction to the new field of optimality theoretic pragmatics. The book includes a general introduction that overviews the foundations of this new research paradigm. The book is intended to satisfy the needs of students and professional researchers interested in pragmatics and optimality theory, and will be of particular interest to those exploring the interfaces of formal pragmatics with grammar, semantics, philosophy of language, information theory and cognitive psychology. DAVID BEAVER Faculty member at the Linguistics Department, Stanford University and Affiliate of the Symbolic Systems Program, USA HELEN DE HOOP Assistant Professor in General Linguistics, University of Nijmegen, The Netherlands HANS-MARTIN GRTNER Assistant Director at ZAS, Berlin PETRA HENDRIKS Assistant Professor at the Departments of Dutch and Artificial Intelligence, University of Groningen, Sweden GERHARD JGER Privatdozent, Computational Linguistics Department, Potsdam University HANJUNG LEE Postdoctoral Fellow in the Cognitive Science Program, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, USA JASON MATTAUSCH Research Assistant, Zentrum fnr allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Berlin JENNIFER SPENADER Graduate Student, Computational Linguistics, Department of Linguistics, Stockholm University ROBERT VAN ROOY is a KNAW-Fellow working on the project Games, Relevance and Meaning at the Department of Philosophy of the University of Amsterdam RALF VOGEL Resea rch Assistant, Institute of Linguistics, University of Potsdam