This book presents a rhetorical model of pragmatics: that is, a model which studies linguistic communication in terms of communicative goals and principles of 'good communicative behaviour'. Geoffrey Leech argues for a rapprochement between linguistics and the traditional discipline of rhetoric, maintaining that the language system in the abstract must be studied in relation to a fully developed theory of language use, including politeness, irony, phatic communion, and other social principles of linguistic behavior.