Cover -- Contents -- Acknowledgements -- Chapter 1. Introducing Key Concepts -- What is hermeneutic pragmatics? -- Speech act theory and beyond -- The place of situation modelling in pragmatics -- Beyond the typical -- Intentions and outcomes -- The relationship of semantics to pragmatics -- Authorship and text-as-action -- Chapter 2. Beyond Rules: The Necessity of Interpretation -- Austin's guide to practical reason -- Searle's rule conceptions -- The critique of rules -- When is a 'rule' simply an observation of a regularity? -- Are descriptions and definitions kinds of rules? -- When is a rule quite explicitly a rule? -- Rules and the constitution of communicative behaviour -- The place of rules in linguistics -- Chapter 3. Intention and Interpretation -- Problems of normativity -- Intention, purpose, motivation -- Convention, culture and a note on Grice's categories and maxims -- Chapter 4. The Structure of Agency in Language, Communication and Society -- Agency in grammar -- The social nature of agency -- Communication and narration of communication -- Chapter 5. Agency, Habit and Genre -- Habit and habitus -- Genre as habitus -- Intentionality and other properties of genres -- Chapter 6. The Evolution of Narrative Genres -- Genre as a type-structure for action -- Chronotopes -- Adventure-time -- From the medieval to the modern -- Elements of fictional genres -- Chapter 7. Hermeneutic Elements of Reading -- Variation in 'reading' -- Variation in comprehension -- Intertextual relations: Adhesion and adherence -- The relationship of abstraction to narrative -- The nature of hyper-abstraction -- Quasi-conventional structures -- Chapter 8. An Author is an Agent and an Agent is Purposive -- Intentionality in secondary genres -- Towards a hermeneutic pragmatics of fiction -- Fiction as a problem case for pragmatics -- Character and milieu.

The presence of the author -- Chapter 9. The Worlds of Author, Character and Reader Intertwined -- Character and characterization -- Who knows what in fiction? -- 'Omniscience' -- Beyond the narrator, beyond omniscience -- Chapter 10. Summary of Implications and Testable Hypotheses -- Looking ahead -- Purposiveness -- Intentions -- Habitus and iteration of genres -- Shifting focus from the language of performance to the language of description -- Semantics and pragmatics -- Contradiction and change -- Intertextuality -- Lure and disclosure in fiction: Intention"1" -- Purpose in fiction and intention"2" -- Public and private in the novel -- Bibliography -- Index.