This six-volume, beautifully bound, boxed set contains 112 reprinted papers covering the history and development of modern theoretical pragmatics from its beginnings back in the 1940s and '50s with Charles Morris, Rudolf Camap, Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, via the major works in the 1970s of those such as Stalnaker, Bach and Hamish, J. L. Austin, John Searle, and Paul Grice, to the more recent contributions of, among many others, Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson, François Recanati, and Anna Wierzbicka. The bulk of the contributions, either free-standing papers or sections from books, come out of what one might term a philosophical approach to pragmatics, but toward the end of the collection there is an attempt to cover more ethnographically rooted approaches and even to get into applied pragmatic issues related to aphasia, first language acquisition, second language acquisition (one paper), and politics.