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Cognitive Pragmatics
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Journal of Pragmatics 51 (2013) 40--46 www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma
Book review Cognitive Pragmatics Hans-Jörg Schmid (Ed.), Handbooks of Pragmatics, vol. 4, De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin/New York, 2012, 648 pp., ISBN: 978-3-11-021420-8, EUR 199.00 (hardback) Cognitive Pragmatics is the fourth volume in the series Handbooks of Pragmatics edited by Wolfram Bublitz, Andreas H. Jucker, and Klaus P. Schneider. The series consists of nine volumes that provide an interdisciplinary coverage of the multifaceted discipline of pragmatics. In its comprehensive scope, the series maps the field of pragmatics from the perspectives of speech action, interpersonal relations, discourse, cognition, society, culture, history, and computer mediated communication. The current volume under review takes up the challenge to elucidate the interface of cognition and pragmatics dealing with ‘‘the cognitive aspects of the construal of meaning-in-context’’ (p. 3). In the introduction to the volume, the editor, Hans-Jörg Schmid, sets the scene for the pairing of cognition and pragmatics which, at first sight, emerges as a Janus-faced combination. On the one hand, Schmid observes that the term Cognitive Pragmatics is not well established in the linguistics community, thus stressing the need for filling this obvious gap with the present handbook. On the other hand, the editor notes that the concept of cognitive pragmatics comes close to being a tautology since fundamental work in the field has always considered cognitive aspects as essential to the analysis of linguistic behavior. This is exemplified in Grice’s description of implicatures (1975), in Searle’s (1975) elaboration on indirect speech acts, and in Sperber and Wilson’s (1986/1995) seminal work on relevance. In addition, Schmid highlights the fact that pragmatic theories which were originally not concerned with the cognitive side of construing meaning in context have nevertheless inspired a range of approaches in the domains of cognitive science and cognitive linguistics over the last three decades. The picture emerging from this discussion shows that even though cognition and pragmatics are intertwined, the discipline of pragmatics and linguistic approaches to cognition such as cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neuroscience have developed as independent domains of research. In light of this, it is a particularly laudable aim of the present volume to couple insights of these disciplines in order to ‘‘identify the general cognitive-pragmatic principles and processes that underlie and determine the construal of meaning-in-context’’ (p. 4). Schmid himself sets out to address this aim in the introductory chapter, as he takes the example of a brief conversational exchange from the movie Last Chance Harvey as a point of departure to analyze the interaction in terms of cognitive prerequisites and abilities that the interlocutors must rely upon in order to co-construct their exchange and to understand nonliteral meanings and ironic implications. His analysis leads Schmid to postulate a general overview of cognitive prerequisites and abilities that a cognitive-pragmatic theory has to take into account, and he builds upon this overview to postulate four types of input factors and three major targets for the construal of meaning-in-context. Among the input factors, cognitive principles are on par with the actual utterance/text/discourse, the non-linguistic environment, and the linguistic system in the sense of a cognitively determined structure. All of these input factors play a role for the construal of underdetermined, nonexplicit, and non-literal meanings, which are primary concerns in pragmatics. By considering the effects of the different input factors on the major targets of construal, Schmid arrives at four broad domains where cognition and pragmatics interact, and these four domains form the structural backbone of the volume: (1) cognitive principles of pragmatic competence, (2) psychology of pragmatics, (3) the construal of non-explicit and non-literal meaning-in-context, and (4) the emergence of linguistic structure from the construal of meaning-in-context. After having convincingly motivated the structure of the volume interlacing cognition and pragmatics, Schmid concludes his introductory chapter with a brief outlook of each of the twenty chapters in the volume. These contributions have been gathered with the intention of unifying research in pragmatics with insights in psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics to create a holistic approach to language analysis. The first part of the volume is dedicated to basic pragmatic and semantic principles which offer an overview of some of the major concerns and theoretical notions in pragmatics and cognitive linguistics. In fact, the three contributions on semantic principles are strongly rooted in the discipline of cognitive semantics (see the discussion further below) while the three contributions on pragmatic principles deal with the fundamental notions of relevance, implicature and explicature, as well as inference and reasoning. In the opening contribution on Relevance and neo-Gricean pragmatic principles 0378-2166/$ -- see front matter http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2013.03.002
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(chapter 2), Yan Huang zooms in on the maxim of Relation as originally postulated by Grice (1975) and discusses its ramifications for Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory before contrasting the latter with Horn’s and Levinson’s neoGricean pragmatic models, which do not give any particular weight to the maxim of Relation. A central point in Yang’s comparison between Relevance Theory and neo-Gricean pragmatics is the notion of conversational implicatures, and it is their important role in neo-Gricean models which appeals to Yang as more convincing than the distinction between explicatures and implicatures as originally put forward in Relevance Theory. Yang’s conclusion supporting a neo-Gricean postulate of conversational implicatures stands in contrast to the following chapter on Implicature and explicature by Robyn Carston and Alison Hall. In their contribution, the authors advocate a differentiation between explicatures and implicatures as proposed in the framework of Relevance Theory. The authors explain explicatures as additional elements that are not linguistically encoded but are contextually triggered to complete an utterance. As such explicatures form part of the propositional content of an utterance. Thus, to take an example from Carston and Hall, the simple sentence of ‘‘There’s milk in the fridge’’ could have the following explicature: THERE’S MILK IN THE FRIDGE OF SUFFICIENT QUANTITY/QUALITY FOR ADDING TO COFFEE(p. 56). A possible implicature of that utterance, on the other hand, refers to the speaker performing an indirect request directed at her/his interlocutor. While, intuitively, the argument of Relevance Theory for a qualitative difference between explicature an implicature is appealing, the postulate of these two inferential processes hinges on the difficulty of differentiating between the two. Some tests, particularly the notion of scope, are discussed in the article but are not fully convincing as Yang has pointed out in the preceding contribution. Even if there is a qualitative difference in the inferential scope of implicature and explicature, they are, from a cognitive point of view, the product of the same general process of inferencing. The process of inferencing is the topic of the final chapter in the section on pragmatic principles. In Inference and reasoning in discourse comprehension, Murray Singer and R. Brooke Lea explore the fundamental cognitive process of drawing inferences for understanding discourse. The authors provide an open-ended discussion that highlights the role of reasoning and deduction in discourse comprehension as well as the major types of bridging inferences (i.e. inferences that allow the mental connection of discourse units) and elaborative inferences. The latter are based on world knowledge, which is an important notion in cognitive semantics as well, for instance in the construction of lexical frames (cf. Barsalou, 1992). Surprisingly, from the perspective of discourse comprehension, elaborative inferences that draw on the interlocutor’s world knowledge have much smaller effects on facilitating comprehension than bridging inferences (e.g. anaphora as well as semantic inferences on cause, space, and time). This is explained by the fact that elaborative inferencing is solely grounded in the context or situation of the ongoing discourse whereas bridging inferences are also encoded in the surface and propositional levels of discourse representation. The authors conclude their account by sketching some areas of current research on discourse inferences, including some that are of relevance to cognitive linguistics and cognitive science, such as the role of embodied cognition and cognitive constraints on discourse inferences. Małgorzata Fabiszak’s contribution on Conceptual principles and relations is the first one in the section on semantic principles in part 1 of the volume. Her account is rooted in the tradition of cognitive semantics, and she provides a brief discussion of the major theories in the field touching upon categorization and prototypes, idealized cognitive models (ICMs), image schemas, semantic frames, metaphor, conceptual blending, and metonymy. In contrast to the previous chapters on pragmatic principles, which remained more closely focused on concerns in their own field of research, Fabiszak’s contribution stands out for its attempt to show how insights from cognitive linguistics can add to understanding pragmatic aspects of anaphora, deixis, speech acts, modality, and the processes of presupposition and inferencing. The most convincing link between cognitive linguistics and pragmatics is drawn in her summary of Panther and Thornburg’s depiction of inference patterns as metonymies in speech act scenarios and in the notion of illocutionary metonymy (Panther and Thornburg, 1998:757--758), which means that one speech act can stand for another speech act. This insight is further elaborated in Ruiz de Mendoza-Ibáñez and Baicchi (2007), who discuss illocutionary acts by drawing on cognitive linguistic notions such as prototypicality and gestalt. While Fabiszak’s contribution provides an overview of the possible relations between key notions in cognitive semantics and in pragmatics, John Taylor’s article on Contextual salience, domains, and active zones highlights the interwoven nature of semantics and pragmatics and the inherent difficulty to draw a dividing line between these domains. Taylor builds his lucid account on two divergent interpretations of the sentence ‘‘I left the university a short time ago’’ where the meaning of the individual constituents of the sentence changes depending on an interpretation of the scene as an ego moving away from the building or as an ego that has severed its relation with the institution (e.g. by graduating, or quitting a job at the institution). Taylor’s clear description of the senses invoked in this scene leads into a discussion of polysemy that is contrasted with the cognitive semantic notions of active zones (Langacker, 1991:189--201) and metonymy, domain activation, and usage-based factors. In tying these notions together, including an excursus into phonology showing the parallelism between variation in phonological representations and semantic variation, Taylor draws the convincing conclusion that word meanings constitute areas in a conceptual network, and the usage context of a word activates some specific links in this network. Furthermore, memory of usage events also influences the type of activation in the network,
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which means that the representation of words can follow from an exemplar model of language use as evident in the existence of collocations. Finally, Taylor concludes with the important observation that the belief of words having certain fixed meanings fails to capture the reality of language use. Instead, ‘‘word meanings are the creations of context, where ‘context’ ranges over conceptual structure, the linguistic environment, and embodied cultural practices’’ (p. 168). In a similar, albeit more general, vein, Istvan Kecskes stresses the central role of cultural models for understanding human interactions. In Encyclopaedic knowledge and cultural models, he follows Evans (2006) in arguing that there is no principled distinction between semantics and pragmatics but that encyclopaedic knowledge is at the core of meaning and language use. Thus, words are mere points of access to vast repositories of encyclopaedic knowledge, which, in turn, provides the basis for the formation of cultural models. These emerge in practices and routines of communal interaction providing individuals with schemas that guide interpretation and behavior in different life situations. At the same time, cultural models are dynamic and subject to individual manipulation, long-term change, and situational contexts. Altogether the contributions on pragmatic and semantic principles in Part II of the volume provide a valid overview of some essential notions in both pragmatics and cognitive semantics. While the chapters on pragmatic principles remain more narrowly focused on traditional questions in the domain of pragmatics, the articles discussing a range of insights from a cognitive semantic point of view create a more solid link between cognition and pragmatics in line with the aim of the handbook. After these foundational contributions, Part III focuses on the connection between psycholinguistics and pragmatics. As in the previous part, the six chapters on The psychology of pragmatics are equally divided in two subsections: the first one on Processing and acquisition and the second one on Disorders. In The processing of pragmatic information in discourse, Ted Sanders and Anneloes Canestrelli focus on psycholinguistic, experimental approaches to coherence relations in discourse. They discuss two aspects of coherence in discourse, that is referential coherence, i.e. establishing relations to referents, and relational coherence which comprise logical relations between discourse segments (e.g. CAUSE--CONSEQUENCE relations). Discussing a wide range of studies, the authors bring psycholinguistic evidence to bear on the fact that referential coherence is enhanced if pronouns have only one possible referent, if they refer to proximal referents, and if they relate to topical concepts (i.e. frequently the subject in a sentence) rather than to less topical ones (e.g. reference to an object). On the other hand, referential coherence (as measured in processing effort) decreases when topic changes are unmarked in discourse and when temporal adverbials create chronological distance between the topics expressed in a discourse unit. These psycholinguistic findings thus confirm similar observations in other linguistic disciplines. When it comes to relational coherence, however, psycholinguistic studies show different results for measures of discourse processing, particularly in the area of objective vs. subjective connectives. The authors partly explain these differences in terms of possible methodological pitfalls, and they call for a closer cooperation of linguists, especially cognitive linguists, and psycholinguists for conducting further experimental research on relational coherence in discourse. Rachel Giora’s contribution Happy New War -- The role of salient meanings and salience-based interpretations in processing utterances is concerned with a very specific psycholinguistic debate, which makes her contribution very narrowly focused compared to the wider scopes of the contributions in the handbook so far. Her discussion revolves around the issue of whether The Graded Salience Hypothesis (Giora, 1997) or The Direct Access View (Gibbs, 1986) and Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1986/1995) can better account for the types of meanings that speakers activate when processing language. Throughout the chapter, the author repeats her main claim, which is that salient meanings are always activated when processing language, even in contexts where the salient meaning leads to an incompatible interpretation. She presents evidence from psycholinguistic studies and some corpus linguistic investigations on the interpretation of irony, metaphor, and visual negation, which, according to her, are incompatible with the Direct Access View and Relevance Theory. The latter two assume that our mind is able to swiftly concentrate on a single contextually appropriate meaning when processing language. Since Giora’s examples that give support to her theory are for the most part based on the processing of irony and metaphors, a brief comment is necessary at this point. First of all, it is not surprising that the processing of ironic language use and of (novel) metaphors has to draw on generally salient meaning components; by definition irony and metaphors exist due to an implicit comparison with a salient, i.e. non-metaphorical or non-ironical, meaning of an expression. It is precisely the novel or, in the case of irony, the counterfactual use of an expression that characterizes this type of language use. Proponents of the Direct Access View and Relevance Theory would not deny this. However, what the latter two approaches emphasize is the fact that a language user can easily focus on the relevant part of the meaning emerging from the particular usage context, blinding out other, irrelevant parts of meaning. So, it seems that these theories do not really stand as strongly in conflict with each other as discussed throughout the chapter; instead, they appear to focus on different aspects of the processing stage and, in part, on the processing of different language phenomena (cf. Gibbs, 1980 on the processing of idiomatic expressions). In contrast to Giora’s contribution, the chapter on Components of pragmatic ability and children’s pragmatic language development by Daniela O’Neill fits very well to the purpose of the handbook. O’Neill provides an overview of previous studies on the development of children’s pragmatic skills, which is supported by her own global framing of pragmatics as emerging from the interlacing domains of social knowledge, social-cognitive knowledge, and cognitive knowledge. Some
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of the evidence she discusses centers on the crucial ability of children to develop an understanding of mental states and their interlocutors’ minds. The author also touches upon evidence from developmental disorders (such as autism) where this type of understanding can be missing. This provides a fitting link to the next section which focuses on disorders. The three chapters on pragmatic disorders begin with an overview by Louise Cummings, who describes research in the relatively recent field of clinical pragmatics. She takes the pragmatic key notions of speech acts, implicatures, deixis, presuppositions, non-literal language, context, and non-verbal communication as a point of departure to summarize some of the key findings and to highlight the necessity for more research in some of these areas. Her contribution paves the way for the following two chapters, each of which focuses on a specific impairment that gives rise to research on the interface between cognition and pragmatics. In Autism from a cognitive-pragmatic perspective, Anne Reboul, Sabine Manificat, and Nadège Foudon provide a very lucid account of Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASD) and their relation to social-pragmatic deficits in language acquisition. In general, autistic children are delayed in both onset of language (first word stage) and in the ensuing development of first word combinations and syntactic competence. According to the authors, this delayed development is due to difficulties in carrying out joint activity with adults, i.e. autistic children are not able to engage in shared attention. As a consequence, autistic children suffer from deficiencies in mapping other people’s intentions, or, in other words, they experience difficulties in establishing a theory of mind, which generally allows humans to predict and explain other people’s behavior. Such difficulties in ‘‘mind-reading’’ are at the base of pragmatic disorders of autistic people as they also limit the capacity to understand humorous and non-literal language use. Apart from autism, aphasia is another impairment that has significant effects on the pragmatic domain of language use. Suzanne Beeke offers a comprehensive and highly engaging overview on the pragmatics of everyday conversation between people suffering from aphasia and people close to them. After a concise review of research into aphasia and pragmatics, the cornerstone of her contribution lies in the application of Conversation Analysis (CA) to real life interactions including aphasic interlocutors. An impressive analysis of two excerpts of her own data allows the author to highlight the groundbreaking progress made by the application of CA. Part IV of the volume shifts the focus of the handbook back towards traditional topics in pragmatics on the one hand, and cognitive linguistics on the other. The four contributions in this part are separated into two sections, one on The construal of non-explicit meaning-in-context, and a complementary one on The construal of non-literal meaning-incontext. While the former contains two chapters that are more closely aligned with pragmatics, the contributions in the latter section are more strongly tied to cognitive linguistics. On the pragmatic side, William Horton discusses the crucial role that shared knowledge plays in conversation. He provides an insightful introduction to the importance of mutual knowledge, or common ground, and traces the history of research and theoretical approaches to understanding mutual knowledge. Early accounts of mutual knowledge as shared, direct representations of knowledge led into the so-called mutual knowledge paradox of infinite recursion. This problem was successfully addressed by Sperber and Wilson’s (1986/1995) postulate of mutual manifestness, which stresses that an interlocutor’s capability of representing information and of accepting the truth of such representations lies at the core of generating shared knowledge. Apart from this, the author discusses Clark and Marshall’s (1981) set of copresence heuristics which guide the formation of common ground based on physical and linguistic copresence as well as community membership. These conditions allow speakers to draw inferences on the knowledge of others. To this, Horton adds insights from his own research (Horton and Gerrig, 2005) on the relevance of memory search and retrieval in inferring shared knowledge, and he discusses this memory-based view in relation to Pickering and Garrod’s (2004) stance of interactive alignment, which highlights the automatic online generation of common ground. At the end of the chapter, the author draws the reasonable conclusion that speakers most likely rely on different ways of constructing common ground including overt knowledge of specific situations and more schematic representations of information. The chapter on Conversational and conventional implicatures by Jacques Moeschler completes the pragmatic section of Part IV. In fact, Moeschler’s contribution stands out as being most firmly rooted in traditional pragmatic theories. He provides an engaging reprise of Grice’s foundational work and the observations he put forward regarding implicatures. In addition, Moeschler shows how Grice’s account of implicatures inspired further significant work in pragmatics, particularly on scalar and informative implicatures (cf. Horn, 1989, 2004; Levinson, 1983, 2000), as well as on their relation to explicatures and weak implicatures as proposed in Relevance Theory. Due to its concern with fundamental notions in pragmatic theory, Moeschler’s contribution would have fit very well into the section on pragmatic principles in Part II of the volume. Similarly, the opening chapter of the next section on The construal of non-literal meaning-in-context by Alice Deignan resonates with the topic of semantic principles in Part II of the handbook. Thus, her chapter on Figurative language in discourse provides a concise but comprehensive overview of research that studies the use of metaphors in different types of discourse. Applying the Hallydayan framework, she provides evidence for the ideational, interpersonal, and textual functions of metaphors and also shows their relations to the register variables of field, tenor, and mode. Overall, Deignan’s chapter is nicely tuned to the demands of the handbook in that she gives an overview of research on figurative language in
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discourse. This makes her chapter very informative and coherent with the tenor of the introductory contributions on semantic principles in Part II of the volume. The chapter on Humour and irony in cognitive pragmatics by Geert Brône gives an overview of existing approaches of research on humour and irony, charting the field from the seminal work by Raskin on Semantic Script Theory of Humour (1985) and its later extension into the General Theory of Verbal Humour (Attardo and Raskin, 1991) to a range of cognitive linguistic and pragmatic explorations. Brône’s discussion is very dense and informative and provides a wealth of stimuli for the reader interested in humour research. The author states that he primarily focuses on the cognitive linguistic contribution to the field, and he does clear justice to that by describing the application of conceptual metaphor and metonymy, conceptual blending, and construction grammar to research on humour and irony. Furthermore, the author highlights the important contribution of the marked informativeness and optimal innovation hypotheses (Giora, 1991, 2003), and he also touches upon Sperber and Wilson’s approach to irony (1986/1995), which regards ironic speech acts as echoic mention of previous speech. In discussing the various theories, Brône lays special emphasis on showing the links between them and on highlighting the cognitive motivations for each of these. This makes his contribution a clear example of the intricate relation between cognition and pragmatics as outlined by the editor in the introduction. While the contributions in the first four parts of the handbook are concerned with discussing important processes and theoretical concepts in cognition and language use, the final part of the volume shifts the perspective onto the emergence of linguistic structures and, in four separate chapters, portrays how cognitive pragmatic processes can shape the constructions and forms of language. In the first chapter of Part V, Peter Harder discusses the evolution of the study of grammar in modern linguistics. He observes that approaches to grammar as a set of cognitive principles and parameters have been superseded by a general usage-based orientation of modeling grammar, which stresses the emergent nature of grammar. This is not to say that Harder conceives of grammar as purely emergent from language use and without inherent structure. Instead, he sees language as a system determined by sociocultural affordances (cf. also Harder, 2010). Thus, the actual expressions and constructions a speaker uses depend on the sociocultural conditions in which an utterance is made. At the end of his contribution, Harder raises the issue of empiricism vs. intuition in language analysis, and he puts forward an inspiring reframing of the dichotomy between the two: In order to avoid reductionism, usage-based linguistics must reject not only purely quantitative empiricism, but the whole idea of a cline from a more statistical to a more interpretive methodology. [. . .]; the usage-based agenda means that the time has come to break down the barrier between language as a mental fact and language as a social fact. The aim is therefore to include the quantitative and variational and the mental dimensions in one integrated field of inquiry, not to play down either intuitive understanding or attested events. (p. 525) Harder’s programmatic outlook on the future of usage-based grammar research is followed by Graeme Trousdale’s chapter on Grammaticalization, lexicalization and constructionalization from a cognitive-pragmatic perspective. As the title promises, Trousdale elaborates on the process of grammaticalization, which he ties to three Langackerian notions of cognitive construal: specificity, viewpoint, and subjectivity. Of these three, specificity seems particularly relevant as Trousdale notes that semantically more general expressions tend to undergo grammaticalization more easily. After discussing the differences between lexicalization (essentially a process of creating a new referential meaning for an existing expression) and grammaticalization (where a lexical form assumes procedural or indexical functions), the most engaging section of Trousdale’s chapter is on the notion of constructionalization. The author illustrates a range of examples and dwells in particular on the constructions as good as and as long as, for which he can trace first instances of grammaticalized uses in Old and Middle English texts. However, Trousdale’s analysis of these comparative constructions that acquired fixed adverbial meaning over time actually calls forth a possible alternative interpretation as an example of lexicalization rather than grammaticalization; an interesting issue worth exploring in more detail. In his conclusion, the author emphasizes the vital link between semantic-pragmatic and morphosyntactic changes evident in the process of grammaticalization. Nevertheless, the pragmatic side of this link remains largely unexplored in his chapter. Pragmatics also remains in the background in Terttu Nevalainen’s account on Sociopragmatics of language change. She offers a cogent discussion of major sociolinguistic theories of language change such as Accommodation Theory (Giles et al., 1991), Schneider’s (2007) five-stage model explaining the development of post-colonial Englishes, and other important notions in language change (e.g. dialect leveling, the gravity model, the role of indexing identity, and others). The discussion of these notions is accompanied by insightful examples of language and dialect change in Finland and, for the most part, in different English speaking areas, including original data on the use of double negation and third-person --s taken from her own research on Early Modern English letters. The final chapter of the handbook on The semantics of pragmatic expressions by Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen nicely illustrates the interwoven nature of semantics and pragmatics and their common grounding in cognition. The author’s opinion on the study of meaning as necessarily relying on both semantic and pragmatic components resonates well with
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previous contributions that stress the necessity to consider pragmatics as an indispensable element of meaning. In order to account for different meanings of adverbials and conjunctions, Hansen distinguishes between content-level use (i.e. propositional meaning) and context-level use (i.e. non-propositional meaning). After discussing different types of contextlevel use for various adverbials in English, French, and Danish, Hansen focuses on the question of how the polyfunctionality and, from the perspective of language change, polysemy of context-level expressions can be explained. The ensuing discussion of semantic change involves the notion of subjectivity and grammaticalization. However, in line with scholars working in the field of Romance linguistics, Hansen attributes a central role for changes in meaning to the process of metonymy, which she defines as a figure/ground shift. While cognitive linguists might not unanimously agree with this characterization of metonymy (cf. the discussion of metonymy as an instance of profiling in Langacker, 2008:69), Hansen’s focus on metonymy emphasizes the cognitive grounding of the process of semantic change. As the discussions of the individual chapters in the volume have shown, the handbook of Cognitive Pragmatics is an important contribution to a rapidly evolving field of linguistic research in pragmatics. All of the chapters provide wellgrounded and dense discussions, which, with the exception of a few contributions (as discussed above), are tuned to an audience of researchers and advanced graduate students, who would like to get an overview of research on the interface of cognition and pragmatics. In general, the volume places a strong emphasis on the interwoven nature of the linguistic disciplines of pragmatics, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and cognitive linguistics, all of which bear an outspoken concern with what happens in the mind of a speaker. Readers not subscribing to the basic tenets of a usage-based approach to language analysis might find it troublesome to witness the dissolution of disciplinary boundaries propagated throughout the volume. However, it is exactly this integrative approach to linguistic research that is the greatest strength and innovative aspect of many contributions in this handbook. Thus, the volume carries the essential message that profound insight into the nature of language use is dependent on holistic analysis grounded in social-cognition and sensitive to acts of situated discourse. References Attardo, Salvatore, Raskin, Victor, 1991. Script theory revis(it)ed: joke similarity and joke representational model. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 4 (3) 293--347. Barsalou, Lawrence, 1992. Frames, concepts and conceptual fields. In: Lehrer, A., Kittay, E. (Eds.), Frames, Fields and Contrasts. Erlbaum, Hillsdale/NJ, pp. 21--74. Clark, Herbert, Marshall Catherine, R., 1981. Definite reference and mutual knowledge. In: Joshi, A.K., Webber, B.L., Sag, I.A. (Eds.), Elements of Discourse Understanding. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 10--63. Evans, Vyvyan, 2006. Lexical concepts, cognitive models and meaning-construction. Cognitive Linguistics 17 (2) 491--534. Gibbs, Raymond W., 1980. Spilling the beans on understanding and memory for idioms in conversation. Memory and Cognition 8, 449--456. Gibbs, Raymond W., 1986. On the psycholinguistics of sarcasm. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 115, 3--15. Giles, Howard, Coupland, Nikolas, Justine, Coupland, 1991. Accommodation theory: communication, context and consequence. In: Giles, H., Coupland, J., Coupland, N. (Eds.), Contexts of Accommodation: Developments in Applied Sociolinguistics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 1--68. Giora, Rachel, 1991. On the cognitive aspects of the joke. Journal of Pragmatics 16 (5) 465--486. Giora, Rachel, 1997. Understanding figurative and literal language: the graded salience hypothesis. Cognitive Linguistics 7, 183--206. Giora, Rachel, 2003. On Our Mind: Salience, Context and Figurative Language. Oxford University Press, New York. Grice, H. Paul, 1975. Logic and conversation. In: Cole, Peter, Morgan, Jerry L. (Eds.), Syntax and Semantics 3. Speech Acts. Academic Press, New York, pp. 41--58. Harder, Peter, 2010. Meaning in Mind and Society: A Functional Contribution to the Social Turn in Cognitive Linguistics. De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin/New York. Horn, Laurence R., 1989. A Natural History of Negation. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Horn, Laurence R., 2004. Implicature. In: Horn, L.R., Ward, G. (Eds.), The Handbook of Pragmatics. Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 3--28. Horton, William S., Gerrig, Richard J., 2005. The impact of memory demands on audience design during language production. Cognition 96, 127--142. Langacker, Ronald W., 1991. Concept, Image, and Symbol: The Cognitive Basis of Grammar. De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin/New York. Langacker, Ronald W., 2008. Cognitive Grammar. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Levinson, Stephen C., 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Levinson, Stephen C., 2000. Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature. MIT Press, Cambridge/MA. Panther, Klaus-Uwe, Thornburg, Linda, 1998. A cognitive approach to inferencing in conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 30, 755--769. Pickering, Martin J., Garrod, Simon, 2004. Toward a mechanistic psychology of dialogue. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 27, 169--226. Raskin, Victor, 1985. Semantic Mechanisms of Humor. Reidel, Dordrecht/Boston/Lancaster. Ruiz de Mendoza-Ibáñez, Francisco-José, Baicchi, Annalisa, 2007. Illocutionary constructions: cognitive motivation and linguistic realization. In: Kecskes, I. (Ed.), Explorations in Pragmatics, Linguistic, Cognitive and Intercultural Aspects. De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin/New York, pp. 95--127. Schneider, Edgar W., 2007. Postcolonial English: Varieties Around the World. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Searle, John R., 1975. Indirect speech acts. In: Cole, P., Morgan, J.L. (Eds.), Syntax and Semantics 3. Speech Acts. Academic Press, New York, pp. 59--82. Sperber, Dan, Wilson, Deirdre, 1986/1995. Relevance: Communication and Cognition, second ed. (with postface 1995) Blackwell, Oxford.
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Alexander Onysko holds a doctorate in English linguistics and is currently senior researcher at European Academy Bolzano, Italy and lecturer in English linguistics at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria. Previously, he was visiting professor in English linguistics at the Universities of Hamburg, Bochum, and Innsbruck. His research interests combine the fields of language contact, bilingualism, cognitive linguistics, and World Englishes. His major publications are on English--German language contact (Anglicisms in German, De Gruyter, 2007) and on the application of cognitive linguistics to word formation (Cognitive Perspectives on Word Formation, De Gruyter, 2010). Having spent a year as visiting scholar at the School of Māori and Pacific Development, University of Waikato, New Zealand, he is currently working on two research projects involving Maori-English bilingual speakers: one on English noun--noun compounds, and the other one on cultural conceptualizations in the variety of Maori English. a
Alexander Onyskoa,b,* Department of English, University of Klagenfurt, Universitätsstraße 65-67, 9020 Klagenfurt, Austria b European Academy Bolzano (EURAC), Viale Druso 1, 39100 Bolzano/Bozen, Italy *Corresponding reviewer at: Department of English, University of Klagenfurt, Universitätsstraße 65-67, 9020 Klagenfurt, Austria. Tel.: +43 650 5557865. E-mail address: [email protected]
Journal of Pragmatics 51 (2013) 40--46 www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma
Book review Cognitive Pragmatics Hans-Jörg Schmid (Ed.), Handbooks of Pragmatics, vol. 4, De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin/New York, 2012, 648 pp., ISBN: 978-3-11-021420-8, EUR 199.00 (hardback) Cognitive Pragmatics is the fourth volume in the series Handbooks of Pragmatics edited by Wolfram Bublitz, Andreas H. Jucker, and Klaus P. Schneider. The series consists of nine volumes that provide an interdisciplinary coverage of the multifaceted discipline of pragmatics. In its comprehensive scope, the series maps the field of pragmatics from the perspectives of speech action, interpersonal relations, discourse, cognition, society, culture, history, and computer mediated communication. The current volume under review takes up the challenge to elucidate the interface of cognition and pragmatics dealing with ‘‘the cognitive aspects of the construal of meaning-in-context’’ (p. 3). In the introduction to the volume, the editor, Hans-Jörg Schmid, sets the scene for the pairing of cognition and pragmatics which, at first sight, emerges as a Janus-faced combination. On the one hand, Schmid observes that the term Cognitive Pragmatics is not well established in the linguistics community, thus stressing the need for filling this obvious gap with the present handbook. On the other hand, the editor notes that the concept of cognitive pragmatics comes close to being a tautology since fundamental work in the field has always considered cognitive aspects as essential to the analysis of linguistic behavior. This is exemplified in Grice’s description of implicatures (1975), in Searle’s (1975) elaboration on indirect speech acts, and in Sperber and Wilson’s (1986/1995) seminal work on relevance. In addition, Schmid highlights the fact that pragmatic theories which were originally not concerned with the cognitive side of construing meaning in context have nevertheless inspired a range of approaches in the domains of cognitive science and cognitive linguistics over the last three decades. The picture emerging from this discussion shows that even though cognition and pragmatics are intertwined, the discipline of pragmatics and linguistic approaches to cognition such as cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics, and neuroscience have developed as independent domains of research. In light of this, it is a particularly laudable aim of the present volume to couple insights of these disciplines in order to ‘‘identify the general cognitive-pragmatic principles and processes that underlie and determine the construal of meaning-in-context’’ (p. 4). Schmid himself sets out to address this aim in the introductory chapter, as he takes the example of a brief conversational exchange from the movie Last Chance Harvey as a point of departure to analyze the interaction in terms of cognitive prerequisites and abilities that the interlocutors must rely upon in order to co-construct their exchange and to understand nonliteral meanings and ironic implications. His analysis leads Schmid to postulate a general overview of cognitive prerequisites and abilities that a cognitive-pragmatic theory has to take into account, and he builds upon this overview to postulate four types of input factors and three major targets for the construal of meaning-in-context. Among the input factors, cognitive principles are on par with the actual utterance/text/discourse, the non-linguistic environment, and the linguistic system in the sense of a cognitively determined structure. All of these input factors play a role for the construal of underdetermined, nonexplicit, and non-literal meanings, which are primary concerns in pragmatics. By considering the effects of the different input factors on the major targets of construal, Schmid arrives at four broad domains where cognition and pragmatics interact, and these four domains form the structural backbone of the volume: (1) cognitive principles of pragmatic competence, (2) psychology of pragmatics, (3) the construal of non-explicit and non-literal meaning-in-context, and (4) the emergence of linguistic structure from the construal of meaning-in-context. After having convincingly motivated the structure of the volume interlacing cognition and pragmatics, Schmid concludes his introductory chapter with a brief outlook of each of the twenty chapters in the volume. These contributions have been gathered with the intention of unifying research in pragmatics with insights in psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics to create a holistic approach to language analysis. The first part of the volume is dedicated to basic pragmatic and semantic principles which offer an overview of some of the major concerns and theoretical notions in pragmatics and cognitive linguistics. In fact, the three contributions on semantic principles are strongly rooted in the discipline of cognitive semantics (see the discussion further below) while the three contributions on pragmatic principles deal with the fundamental notions of relevance, implicature and explicature, as well as inference and reasoning. In the opening contribution on Relevance and neo-Gricean pragmatic principles 0378-2166/$ -- see front matter http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2013.03.002
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(chapter 2), Yan Huang zooms in on the maxim of Relation as originally postulated by Grice (1975) and discusses its ramifications for Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory before contrasting the latter with Horn’s and Levinson’s neoGricean pragmatic models, which do not give any particular weight to the maxim of Relation. A central point in Yang’s comparison between Relevance Theory and neo-Gricean pragmatics is the notion of conversational implicatures, and it is their important role in neo-Gricean models which appeals to Yang as more convincing than the distinction between explicatures and implicatures as originally put forward in Relevance Theory. Yang’s conclusion supporting a neo-Gricean postulate of conversational implicatures stands in contrast to the following chapter on Implicature and explicature by Robyn Carston and Alison Hall. In their contribution, the authors advocate a differentiation between explicatures and implicatures as proposed in the framework of Relevance Theory. The authors explain explicatures as additional elements that are not linguistically encoded but are contextually triggered to complete an utterance. As such explicatures form part of the propositional content of an utterance. Thus, to take an example from Carston and Hall, the simple sentence of ‘‘There’s milk in the fridge’’ could have the following explicature: THERE’S MILK IN THE FRIDGE OF SUFFICIENT QUANTITY/QUALITY FOR ADDING TO COFFEE(p. 56). A possible implicature of that utterance, on the other hand, refers to the speaker performing an indirect request directed at her/his interlocutor. While, intuitively, the argument of Relevance Theory for a qualitative difference between explicature an implicature is appealing, the postulate of these two inferential processes hinges on the difficulty of differentiating between the two. Some tests, particularly the notion of scope, are discussed in the article but are not fully convincing as Yang has pointed out in the preceding contribution. Even if there is a qualitative difference in the inferential scope of implicature and explicature, they are, from a cognitive point of view, the product of the same general process of inferencing. The process of inferencing is the topic of the final chapter in the section on pragmatic principles. In Inference and reasoning in discourse comprehension, Murray Singer and R. Brooke Lea explore the fundamental cognitive process of drawing inferences for understanding discourse. The authors provide an open-ended discussion that highlights the role of reasoning and deduction in discourse comprehension as well as the major types of bridging inferences (i.e. inferences that allow the mental connection of discourse units) and elaborative inferences. The latter are based on world knowledge, which is an important notion in cognitive semantics as well, for instance in the construction of lexical frames (cf. Barsalou, 1992). Surprisingly, from the perspective of discourse comprehension, elaborative inferences that draw on the interlocutor’s world knowledge have much smaller effects on facilitating comprehension than bridging inferences (e.g. anaphora as well as semantic inferences on cause, space, and time). This is explained by the fact that elaborative inferencing is solely grounded in the context or situation of the ongoing discourse whereas bridging inferences are also encoded in the surface and propositional levels of discourse representation. The authors conclude their account by sketching some areas of current research on discourse inferences, including some that are of relevance to cognitive linguistics and cognitive science, such as the role of embodied cognition and cognitive constraints on discourse inferences. Małgorzata Fabiszak’s contribution on Conceptual principles and relations is the first one in the section on semantic principles in part 1 of the volume. Her account is rooted in the tradition of cognitive semantics, and she provides a brief discussion of the major theories in the field touching upon categorization and prototypes, idealized cognitive models (ICMs), image schemas, semantic frames, metaphor, conceptual blending, and metonymy. In contrast to the previous chapters on pragmatic principles, which remained more closely focused on concerns in their own field of research, Fabiszak’s contribution stands out for its attempt to show how insights from cognitive linguistics can add to understanding pragmatic aspects of anaphora, deixis, speech acts, modality, and the processes of presupposition and inferencing. The most convincing link between cognitive linguistics and pragmatics is drawn in her summary of Panther and Thornburg’s depiction of inference patterns as metonymies in speech act scenarios and in the notion of illocutionary metonymy (Panther and Thornburg, 1998:757--758), which means that one speech act can stand for another speech act. This insight is further elaborated in Ruiz de Mendoza-Ibáñez and Baicchi (2007), who discuss illocutionary acts by drawing on cognitive linguistic notions such as prototypicality and gestalt. While Fabiszak’s contribution provides an overview of the possible relations between key notions in cognitive semantics and in pragmatics, John Taylor’s article on Contextual salience, domains, and active zones highlights the interwoven nature of semantics and pragmatics and the inherent difficulty to draw a dividing line between these domains. Taylor builds his lucid account on two divergent interpretations of the sentence ‘‘I left the university a short time ago’’ where the meaning of the individual constituents of the sentence changes depending on an interpretation of the scene as an ego moving away from the building or as an ego that has severed its relation with the institution (e.g. by graduating, or quitting a job at the institution). Taylor’s clear description of the senses invoked in this scene leads into a discussion of polysemy that is contrasted with the cognitive semantic notions of active zones (Langacker, 1991:189--201) and metonymy, domain activation, and usage-based factors. In tying these notions together, including an excursus into phonology showing the parallelism between variation in phonological representations and semantic variation, Taylor draws the convincing conclusion that word meanings constitute areas in a conceptual network, and the usage context of a word activates some specific links in this network. Furthermore, memory of usage events also influences the type of activation in the network,
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which means that the representation of words can follow from an exemplar model of language use as evident in the existence of collocations. Finally, Taylor concludes with the important observation that the belief of words having certain fixed meanings fails to capture the reality of language use. Instead, ‘‘word meanings are the creations of context, where ‘context’ ranges over conceptual structure, the linguistic environment, and embodied cultural practices’’ (p. 168). In a similar, albeit more general, vein, Istvan Kecskes stresses the central role of cultural models for understanding human interactions. In Encyclopaedic knowledge and cultural models, he follows Evans (2006) in arguing that there is no principled distinction between semantics and pragmatics but that encyclopaedic knowledge is at the core of meaning and language use. Thus, words are mere points of access to vast repositories of encyclopaedic knowledge, which, in turn, provides the basis for the formation of cultural models. These emerge in practices and routines of communal interaction providing individuals with schemas that guide interpretation and behavior in different life situations. At the same time, cultural models are dynamic and subject to individual manipulation, long-term change, and situational contexts. Altogether the contributions on pragmatic and semantic principles in Part II of the volume provide a valid overview of some essential notions in both pragmatics and cognitive semantics. While the chapters on pragmatic principles remain more narrowly focused on traditional questions in the domain of pragmatics, the articles discussing a range of insights from a cognitive semantic point of view create a more solid link between cognition and pragmatics in line with the aim of the handbook. After these foundational contributions, Part III focuses on the connection between psycholinguistics and pragmatics. As in the previous part, the six chapters on The psychology of pragmatics are equally divided in two subsections: the first one on Processing and acquisition and the second one on Disorders. In The processing of pragmatic information in discourse, Ted Sanders and Anneloes Canestrelli focus on psycholinguistic, experimental approaches to coherence relations in discourse. They discuss two aspects of coherence in discourse, that is referential coherence, i.e. establishing relations to referents, and relational coherence which comprise logical relations between discourse segments (e.g. CAUSE--CONSEQUENCE relations). Discussing a wide range of studies, the authors bring psycholinguistic evidence to bear on the fact that referential coherence is enhanced if pronouns have only one possible referent, if they refer to proximal referents, and if they relate to topical concepts (i.e. frequently the subject in a sentence) rather than to less topical ones (e.g. reference to an object). On the other hand, referential coherence (as measured in processing effort) decreases when topic changes are unmarked in discourse and when temporal adverbials create chronological distance between the topics expressed in a discourse unit. These psycholinguistic findings thus confirm similar observations in other linguistic disciplines. When it comes to relational coherence, however, psycholinguistic studies show different results for measures of discourse processing, particularly in the area of objective vs. subjective connectives. The authors partly explain these differences in terms of possible methodological pitfalls, and they call for a closer cooperation of linguists, especially cognitive linguists, and psycholinguists for conducting further experimental research on relational coherence in discourse. Rachel Giora’s contribution Happy New War -- The role of salient meanings and salience-based interpretations in processing utterances is concerned with a very specific psycholinguistic debate, which makes her contribution very narrowly focused compared to the wider scopes of the contributions in the handbook so far. Her discussion revolves around the issue of whether The Graded Salience Hypothesis (Giora, 1997) or The Direct Access View (Gibbs, 1986) and Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1986/1995) can better account for the types of meanings that speakers activate when processing language. Throughout the chapter, the author repeats her main claim, which is that salient meanings are always activated when processing language, even in contexts where the salient meaning leads to an incompatible interpretation. She presents evidence from psycholinguistic studies and some corpus linguistic investigations on the interpretation of irony, metaphor, and visual negation, which, according to her, are incompatible with the Direct Access View and Relevance Theory. The latter two assume that our mind is able to swiftly concentrate on a single contextually appropriate meaning when processing language. Since Giora’s examples that give support to her theory are for the most part based on the processing of irony and metaphors, a brief comment is necessary at this point. First of all, it is not surprising that the processing of ironic language use and of (novel) metaphors has to draw on generally salient meaning components; by definition irony and metaphors exist due to an implicit comparison with a salient, i.e. non-metaphorical or non-ironical, meaning of an expression. It is precisely the novel or, in the case of irony, the counterfactual use of an expression that characterizes this type of language use. Proponents of the Direct Access View and Relevance Theory would not deny this. However, what the latter two approaches emphasize is the fact that a language user can easily focus on the relevant part of the meaning emerging from the particular usage context, blinding out other, irrelevant parts of meaning. So, it seems that these theories do not really stand as strongly in conflict with each other as discussed throughout the chapter; instead, they appear to focus on different aspects of the processing stage and, in part, on the processing of different language phenomena (cf. Gibbs, 1980 on the processing of idiomatic expressions). In contrast to Giora’s contribution, the chapter on Components of pragmatic ability and children’s pragmatic language development by Daniela O’Neill fits very well to the purpose of the handbook. O’Neill provides an overview of previous studies on the development of children’s pragmatic skills, which is supported by her own global framing of pragmatics as emerging from the interlacing domains of social knowledge, social-cognitive knowledge, and cognitive knowledge. Some
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of the evidence she discusses centers on the crucial ability of children to develop an understanding of mental states and their interlocutors’ minds. The author also touches upon evidence from developmental disorders (such as autism) where this type of understanding can be missing. This provides a fitting link to the next section which focuses on disorders. The three chapters on pragmatic disorders begin with an overview by Louise Cummings, who describes research in the relatively recent field of clinical pragmatics. She takes the pragmatic key notions of speech acts, implicatures, deixis, presuppositions, non-literal language, context, and non-verbal communication as a point of departure to summarize some of the key findings and to highlight the necessity for more research in some of these areas. Her contribution paves the way for the following two chapters, each of which focuses on a specific impairment that gives rise to research on the interface between cognition and pragmatics. In Autism from a cognitive-pragmatic perspective, Anne Reboul, Sabine Manificat, and Nadège Foudon provide a very lucid account of Autistic Spectrum Disorders (ASD) and their relation to social-pragmatic deficits in language acquisition. In general, autistic children are delayed in both onset of language (first word stage) and in the ensuing development of first word combinations and syntactic competence. According to the authors, this delayed development is due to difficulties in carrying out joint activity with adults, i.e. autistic children are not able to engage in shared attention. As a consequence, autistic children suffer from deficiencies in mapping other people’s intentions, or, in other words, they experience difficulties in establishing a theory of mind, which generally allows humans to predict and explain other people’s behavior. Such difficulties in ‘‘mind-reading’’ are at the base of pragmatic disorders of autistic people as they also limit the capacity to understand humorous and non-literal language use. Apart from autism, aphasia is another impairment that has significant effects on the pragmatic domain of language use. Suzanne Beeke offers a comprehensive and highly engaging overview on the pragmatics of everyday conversation between people suffering from aphasia and people close to them. After a concise review of research into aphasia and pragmatics, the cornerstone of her contribution lies in the application of Conversation Analysis (CA) to real life interactions including aphasic interlocutors. An impressive analysis of two excerpts of her own data allows the author to highlight the groundbreaking progress made by the application of CA. Part IV of the volume shifts the focus of the handbook back towards traditional topics in pragmatics on the one hand, and cognitive linguistics on the other. The four contributions in this part are separated into two sections, one on The construal of non-explicit meaning-in-context, and a complementary one on The construal of non-literal meaning-incontext. While the former contains two chapters that are more closely aligned with pragmatics, the contributions in the latter section are more strongly tied to cognitive linguistics. On the pragmatic side, William Horton discusses the crucial role that shared knowledge plays in conversation. He provides an insightful introduction to the importance of mutual knowledge, or common ground, and traces the history of research and theoretical approaches to understanding mutual knowledge. Early accounts of mutual knowledge as shared, direct representations of knowledge led into the so-called mutual knowledge paradox of infinite recursion. This problem was successfully addressed by Sperber and Wilson’s (1986/1995) postulate of mutual manifestness, which stresses that an interlocutor’s capability of representing information and of accepting the truth of such representations lies at the core of generating shared knowledge. Apart from this, the author discusses Clark and Marshall’s (1981) set of copresence heuristics which guide the formation of common ground based on physical and linguistic copresence as well as community membership. These conditions allow speakers to draw inferences on the knowledge of others. To this, Horton adds insights from his own research (Horton and Gerrig, 2005) on the relevance of memory search and retrieval in inferring shared knowledge, and he discusses this memory-based view in relation to Pickering and Garrod’s (2004) stance of interactive alignment, which highlights the automatic online generation of common ground. At the end of the chapter, the author draws the reasonable conclusion that speakers most likely rely on different ways of constructing common ground including overt knowledge of specific situations and more schematic representations of information. The chapter on Conversational and conventional implicatures by Jacques Moeschler completes the pragmatic section of Part IV. In fact, Moeschler’s contribution stands out as being most firmly rooted in traditional pragmatic theories. He provides an engaging reprise of Grice’s foundational work and the observations he put forward regarding implicatures. In addition, Moeschler shows how Grice’s account of implicatures inspired further significant work in pragmatics, particularly on scalar and informative implicatures (cf. Horn, 1989, 2004; Levinson, 1983, 2000), as well as on their relation to explicatures and weak implicatures as proposed in Relevance Theory. Due to its concern with fundamental notions in pragmatic theory, Moeschler’s contribution would have fit very well into the section on pragmatic principles in Part II of the volume. Similarly, the opening chapter of the next section on The construal of non-literal meaning-in-context by Alice Deignan resonates with the topic of semantic principles in Part II of the handbook. Thus, her chapter on Figurative language in discourse provides a concise but comprehensive overview of research that studies the use of metaphors in different types of discourse. Applying the Hallydayan framework, she provides evidence for the ideational, interpersonal, and textual functions of metaphors and also shows their relations to the register variables of field, tenor, and mode. Overall, Deignan’s chapter is nicely tuned to the demands of the handbook in that she gives an overview of research on figurative language in
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discourse. This makes her chapter very informative and coherent with the tenor of the introductory contributions on semantic principles in Part II of the volume. The chapter on Humour and irony in cognitive pragmatics by Geert Brône gives an overview of existing approaches of research on humour and irony, charting the field from the seminal work by Raskin on Semantic Script Theory of Humour (1985) and its later extension into the General Theory of Verbal Humour (Attardo and Raskin, 1991) to a range of cognitive linguistic and pragmatic explorations. Brône’s discussion is very dense and informative and provides a wealth of stimuli for the reader interested in humour research. The author states that he primarily focuses on the cognitive linguistic contribution to the field, and he does clear justice to that by describing the application of conceptual metaphor and metonymy, conceptual blending, and construction grammar to research on humour and irony. Furthermore, the author highlights the important contribution of the marked informativeness and optimal innovation hypotheses (Giora, 1991, 2003), and he also touches upon Sperber and Wilson’s approach to irony (1986/1995), which regards ironic speech acts as echoic mention of previous speech. In discussing the various theories, Brône lays special emphasis on showing the links between them and on highlighting the cognitive motivations for each of these. This makes his contribution a clear example of the intricate relation between cognition and pragmatics as outlined by the editor in the introduction. While the contributions in the first four parts of the handbook are concerned with discussing important processes and theoretical concepts in cognition and language use, the final part of the volume shifts the perspective onto the emergence of linguistic structures and, in four separate chapters, portrays how cognitive pragmatic processes can shape the constructions and forms of language. In the first chapter of Part V, Peter Harder discusses the evolution of the study of grammar in modern linguistics. He observes that approaches to grammar as a set of cognitive principles and parameters have been superseded by a general usage-based orientation of modeling grammar, which stresses the emergent nature of grammar. This is not to say that Harder conceives of grammar as purely emergent from language use and without inherent structure. Instead, he sees language as a system determined by sociocultural affordances (cf. also Harder, 2010). Thus, the actual expressions and constructions a speaker uses depend on the sociocultural conditions in which an utterance is made. At the end of his contribution, Harder raises the issue of empiricism vs. intuition in language analysis, and he puts forward an inspiring reframing of the dichotomy between the two: In order to avoid reductionism, usage-based linguistics must reject not only purely quantitative empiricism, but the whole idea of a cline from a more statistical to a more interpretive methodology. [. . .]; the usage-based agenda means that the time has come to break down the barrier between language as a mental fact and language as a social fact. The aim is therefore to include the quantitative and variational and the mental dimensions in one integrated field of inquiry, not to play down either intuitive understanding or attested events. (p. 525) Harder’s programmatic outlook on the future of usage-based grammar research is followed by Graeme Trousdale’s chapter on Grammaticalization, lexicalization and constructionalization from a cognitive-pragmatic perspective. As the title promises, Trousdale elaborates on the process of grammaticalization, which he ties to three Langackerian notions of cognitive construal: specificity, viewpoint, and subjectivity. Of these three, specificity seems particularly relevant as Trousdale notes that semantically more general expressions tend to undergo grammaticalization more easily. After discussing the differences between lexicalization (essentially a process of creating a new referential meaning for an existing expression) and grammaticalization (where a lexical form assumes procedural or indexical functions), the most engaging section of Trousdale’s chapter is on the notion of constructionalization. The author illustrates a range of examples and dwells in particular on the constructions as good as and as long as, for which he can trace first instances of grammaticalized uses in Old and Middle English texts. However, Trousdale’s analysis of these comparative constructions that acquired fixed adverbial meaning over time actually calls forth a possible alternative interpretation as an example of lexicalization rather than grammaticalization; an interesting issue worth exploring in more detail. In his conclusion, the author emphasizes the vital link between semantic-pragmatic and morphosyntactic changes evident in the process of grammaticalization. Nevertheless, the pragmatic side of this link remains largely unexplored in his chapter. Pragmatics also remains in the background in Terttu Nevalainen’s account on Sociopragmatics of language change. She offers a cogent discussion of major sociolinguistic theories of language change such as Accommodation Theory (Giles et al., 1991), Schneider’s (2007) five-stage model explaining the development of post-colonial Englishes, and other important notions in language change (e.g. dialect leveling, the gravity model, the role of indexing identity, and others). The discussion of these notions is accompanied by insightful examples of language and dialect change in Finland and, for the most part, in different English speaking areas, including original data on the use of double negation and third-person --s taken from her own research on Early Modern English letters. The final chapter of the handbook on The semantics of pragmatic expressions by Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen nicely illustrates the interwoven nature of semantics and pragmatics and their common grounding in cognition. The author’s opinion on the study of meaning as necessarily relying on both semantic and pragmatic components resonates well with
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previous contributions that stress the necessity to consider pragmatics as an indispensable element of meaning. In order to account for different meanings of adverbials and conjunctions, Hansen distinguishes between content-level use (i.e. propositional meaning) and context-level use (i.e. non-propositional meaning). After discussing different types of contextlevel use for various adverbials in English, French, and Danish, Hansen focuses on the question of how the polyfunctionality and, from the perspective of language change, polysemy of context-level expressions can be explained. The ensuing discussion of semantic change involves the notion of subjectivity and grammaticalization. However, in line with scholars working in the field of Romance linguistics, Hansen attributes a central role for changes in meaning to the process of metonymy, which she defines as a figure/ground shift. While cognitive linguists might not unanimously agree with this characterization of metonymy (cf. the discussion of metonymy as an instance of profiling in Langacker, 2008:69), Hansen’s focus on metonymy emphasizes the cognitive grounding of the process of semantic change. As the discussions of the individual chapters in the volume have shown, the handbook of Cognitive Pragmatics is an important contribution to a rapidly evolving field of linguistic research in pragmatics. All of the chapters provide wellgrounded and dense discussions, which, with the exception of a few contributions (as discussed above), are tuned to an audience of researchers and advanced graduate students, who would like to get an overview of research on the interface of cognition and pragmatics. In general, the volume places a strong emphasis on the interwoven nature of the linguistic disciplines of pragmatics, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and cognitive linguistics, all of which bear an outspoken concern with what happens in the mind of a speaker. Readers not subscribing to the basic tenets of a usage-based approach to language analysis might find it troublesome to witness the dissolution of disciplinary boundaries propagated throughout the volume. However, it is exactly this integrative approach to linguistic research that is the greatest strength and innovative aspect of many contributions in this handbook. Thus, the volume carries the essential message that profound insight into the nature of language use is dependent on holistic analysis grounded in social-cognition and sensitive to acts of situated discourse. References Attardo, Salvatore, Raskin, Victor, 1991. Script theory revis(it)ed: joke similarity and joke representational model. Humor: International Journal of Humor Research 4 (3) 293--347. Barsalou, Lawrence, 1992. Frames, concepts and conceptual fields. In: Lehrer, A., Kittay, E. (Eds.), Frames, Fields and Contrasts. Erlbaum, Hillsdale/NJ, pp. 21--74. Clark, Herbert, Marshall Catherine, R., 1981. Definite reference and mutual knowledge. In: Joshi, A.K., Webber, B.L., Sag, I.A. (Eds.), Elements of Discourse Understanding. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 10--63. Evans, Vyvyan, 2006. Lexical concepts, cognitive models and meaning-construction. Cognitive Linguistics 17 (2) 491--534. Gibbs, Raymond W., 1980. Spilling the beans on understanding and memory for idioms in conversation. Memory and Cognition 8, 449--456. Gibbs, Raymond W., 1986. On the psycholinguistics of sarcasm. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 115, 3--15. Giles, Howard, Coupland, Nikolas, Justine, Coupland, 1991. Accommodation theory: communication, context and consequence. In: Giles, H., Coupland, J., Coupland, N. (Eds.), Contexts of Accommodation: Developments in Applied Sociolinguistics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 1--68. Giora, Rachel, 1991. On the cognitive aspects of the joke. Journal of Pragmatics 16 (5) 465--486. Giora, Rachel, 1997. Understanding figurative and literal language: the graded salience hypothesis. Cognitive Linguistics 7, 183--206. Giora, Rachel, 2003. On Our Mind: Salience, Context and Figurative Language. Oxford University Press, New York. Grice, H. Paul, 1975. Logic and conversation. In: Cole, Peter, Morgan, Jerry L. (Eds.), Syntax and Semantics 3. Speech Acts. Academic Press, New York, pp. 41--58. Harder, Peter, 2010. Meaning in Mind and Society: A Functional Contribution to the Social Turn in Cognitive Linguistics. De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin/New York. Horn, Laurence R., 1989. A Natural History of Negation. University of Chicago Press, Chicago. Horn, Laurence R., 2004. Implicature. In: Horn, L.R., Ward, G. (Eds.), The Handbook of Pragmatics. Blackwell, Oxford, pp. 3--28. Horton, William S., Gerrig, Richard J., 2005. The impact of memory demands on audience design during language production. Cognition 96, 127--142. Langacker, Ronald W., 1991. Concept, Image, and Symbol: The Cognitive Basis of Grammar. De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin/New York. Langacker, Ronald W., 2008. Cognitive Grammar. Oxford University Press, Oxford. Levinson, Stephen C., 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Levinson, Stephen C., 2000. Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature. MIT Press, Cambridge/MA. Panther, Klaus-Uwe, Thornburg, Linda, 1998. A cognitive approach to inferencing in conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 30, 755--769. Pickering, Martin J., Garrod, Simon, 2004. Toward a mechanistic psychology of dialogue. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 27, 169--226. Raskin, Victor, 1985. Semantic Mechanisms of Humor. Reidel, Dordrecht/Boston/Lancaster. Ruiz de Mendoza-Ibáñez, Francisco-José, Baicchi, Annalisa, 2007. Illocutionary constructions: cognitive motivation and linguistic realization. In: Kecskes, I. (Ed.), Explorations in Pragmatics, Linguistic, Cognitive and Intercultural Aspects. De Gruyter Mouton, Berlin/New York, pp. 95--127. Schneider, Edgar W., 2007. Postcolonial English: Varieties Around the World. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. Searle, John R., 1975. Indirect speech acts. In: Cole, P., Morgan, J.L. (Eds.), Syntax and Semantics 3. Speech Acts. Academic Press, New York, pp. 59--82. Sperber, Dan, Wilson, Deirdre, 1986/1995. Relevance: Communication and Cognition, second ed. (with postface 1995) Blackwell, Oxford.
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Book review
Alexander Onysko holds a doctorate in English linguistics and is currently senior researcher at European Academy Bolzano, Italy and lecturer in English linguistics at the University of Klagenfurt, Austria. Previously, he was visiting professor in English linguistics at the Universities of Hamburg, Bochum, and Innsbruck. His research interests combine the fields of language contact, bilingualism, cognitive linguistics, and World Englishes. His major publications are on English--German language contact (Anglicisms in German, De Gruyter, 2007) and on the application of cognitive linguistics to word formation (Cognitive Perspectives on Word Formation, De Gruyter, 2010). Having spent a year as visiting scholar at the School of Māori and Pacific Development, University of Waikato, New Zealand, he is currently working on two research projects involving Maori-English bilingual speakers: one on English noun--noun compounds, and the other one on cultural conceptualizations in the variety of Maori English. a
Alexander Onyskoa,b,* Department of English, University of Klagenfurt, Universitätsstraße 65-67, 9020 Klagenfurt, Austria b European Academy Bolzano (EURAC), Viale Druso 1, 39100 Bolzano/Bozen, Italy *Corresponding reviewer at: Department of English, University of Klagenfurt, Universitätsstraße 65-67, 9020 Klagenfurt, Austria. Tel.: +43 650 5557865. E-mail address: [email protected]