Historical dialogue analysis. Pragmatics and beyond new series

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Book review Andreas H. Jucker, Gerd Fritz and Franz Lebsanft, eds., Historical dialogue analysis. Pragmatics and beyond new series, vol. 66. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1999. viii + 478 pp. US$95.00. Reviewed by Jacob L Mey, 1100 West 29th Street, Austin, TX 78703-1915, USA. Email: inmey@ mail.utexas.edu The volume under review consists of an introductory article by the editors, along with fifteen articles (of which two in are in German, the rest in English) by authors working in the field of what broadly can be characterized as the study of discourse and dialogue in an historical perspective. (What this perspective consists in, both in the way of inclusion and of exclusion, is not entirely clear from the beginning; I'll come back to this below.) The volume contains furthermore a preface (from which it appears that the papers originally were presented at a workshop at Rauischolzhausen, Hesse, Germany; no date is given); however, the editors have aspired at giving more than just a volume of proceedings. As they say, "all the papers have been carefully refereed and edited before they were included in this volume" (from the preface, p. vii); however, no mention is made of any screening and possible rejection of presented papers. In their introduction, entitled 'Historical dialogue analysis: Roots and traditions in the study of the Romance languages, German [sic] and English', the editors paint a broad picture, in an historical perspective, of the status of dialogue studies, which is said to be "still a very young discipline" (p. 1), without fixed traditions and methodologies. This may explain, say the editors, why "the authors use different methodologies and ask different research questions" (p. 2); their common interest is the "dialogic nature of language" (p. 2). As the reader will discover, this common interest (inasmuch as it represents a general characteristic of language in use) may be hard to pin down to any particular method or work sphere; hence, the contributions to the volume are rather different in outlook and approach. The introduction then goes on to describe the field of study for the various subdisciplines: Romance languages, German, and English. While the former two areas are characterized by an interest in spoken vs. written language (coupled, in the case of German, with a strong tradition of historical literary studies), the emphasis in the English development has been on modem methods of text analysis, mainly stimulated by the increasing use of the computer. 0378-2166/00/$ - see front matter © 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: S0378-2166(99)00113-7

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The synopses of the several research traditions offered by the editorial troika are well executed, and can be said to be highly relevant to readers who want to introduce themselves to these fields of studies, even though, owing to the fact that different authors have combined their efforts in producing the introductory article, the approaches are rather divergent, and a certain repetition could not be avoided (the individual articles are sometimes referred to in different sections of the introduction, not always by dint of necessity). Another quibble here might be the choice of the term 'German': I would have preferred to have a broader designation, in line with 'Romance' ('Germanic', or even 'Germanistic'); curiously enough, the very first article in this sub-field is not from the German historical literary tradition, but takes its material from Middle Dutch, which is a 'Germanic' language all right, but certainly rather different from what is usually called 'German'. If the editors had tried to establish some subdivision of the volume, for instance in the form of sub-sections, they would probably have become aware of this as well as of other inconsistencies, such as the sequence of the articles which, as it is now, seems rather arbitrary. Marcel Bax, in a well-written and well-documented contribution entitled 'Ritual levelling: The balance between the eristic and the contractual motive in hostile verbal encounters in mediaeval romance and early modern drama' analyzes the typical medieval format of challenge and combat between knights, on the one hand, and a combative use of language in an early Modern Dutch dramatic tradition of altercating 'devils' on stage (in the plays called sinnekens). The two genres are extremely different, and it remains to be seen if the common denominator 'eristic' does indeed warrant to treat the two genres as belonging to one superset. Still, the author's point that the dialogues in these two genres are to be considered as essentially cases of 'pretend' speech acts, makes sense, and the article offers a fascinating insight into the popular mores and uses of language of periods and areas that we usually consider as peripheral and preparatory to the 'real thing', emerging later and elsewhere. The question can be raised whether this study is merely 'historical' in the traditional sense, or whether it indeed conforms to the criteria laid down by the editors in their introduction; my feeling is that it doesn't quite make the grade as far as the latter are concerned. This study could have appeared in any collection on, or journal dedicated to, the history and development of literacy tradition; in addition, and perhaps as a consequence of this lack of superordinate focusing, the central concept of 'leveling' is never explicitly discussed and brought to bear on the two instances cited. As a result, the two parts of the study, however interesting individually, are not brought together into a homogeneous whole. Thomas Gloning, in 'The pragmatic form of religious controversies around 1600: A case study in the Osiander vs. Scherer and Rosenbusch controversy' deals with a cause c~l~bre in the history of post-reformatory ecclesiastical disputes: the notorious controversy between the two Jesuits Scherer and Rosenbusch and their adversary Thomas Osiander, a court preacher from Stuttgart, who had accused (as was usual in those days) the Jesuit 'venomous spiders' of all sorts of criminal malpractices and heinous crimes, in addition to being theologically weak in the head, their arguments "melting like butter in the sun" (p. 92).

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In addition to furnishing us with a fascinating peep into the mores and debates of the times, Gloning also contributes essentially to the history of the 'controversy' as a genre, which he sees as being a direct consequence of two factors: the Lutheran Reformation in 1517, and the invention of the art of printing some decades earlier. He documents the extent and structure of the controversy, which was mostly conducted in the written form of 'pamphlets' (printed works for immediate consumption, on the average 70 pages long), by which the protagonists entered into a dialogue with each other (the term 'polemic' would perhaps be better suited, given the level of verbal acrimony and coarse wording that these documents exhibit). The framework of description is an adaptation of classical speech act theory; however, the author points out (p. 105) that much work needs still to be done to place these various linguistic acts in a proper communicative framework. The next article, by Johannes Schwitalla, 'The use of dialogue in early German pamphlets: On the constitution of public involvement in the Reuchlin-Pfefferkorn controversy' also deals (as did Gloning's contribution) with the subject of controversies as a genre, expressed through the use of pamphlets. The controversy in question took place a few years before the real 'boom' in pamphleteering starting in 1517, following the Reformation (as shown in the graphic display in the chapter's Fig. 1), between the anti-Semite Pfefferkorn (himself a 'baptized Jew'), and the famous lawyer, humanist and hebraicist Johannes Reuchlin, whom Pfefferkorn accuses of being 'soft on Jews', having interceded with the Emperor to prevent him from adopting the punitive measures against the Jews that Pfefferkorn had suggested (among other things, one should deprive them of their Hebrew books and make them clean the shit-houses and public streets). As a documentation of how ingrained anti-Semitism was in Germany as early as the 16th century, the article provides interesting and indeed shocking reading. The controversy between the two adversaries, although it was conducted in print (as was also the case in the later disputes between the Jesuits and Osiander), still had a more restricted character; the printed words were thought of first and foremost as providing support for, or limiting the effects of, the public disputations (often ending with an autodaf~) that used to take place at such occasions as the semi-annual Frankfurt Masses. As such, the pamphlets were highly political in nature, and the authors fought teeth and claws, not just for their views and personal preferences, but in many cases for their very right to exist: many a controversy had ended with one of the opponents being declared a heretic, with all the consequences involved. (Among Reuchlin's opponents, whom Pfefferkorn had managed to enlist in his crusade, were precisely the Dominicans of Cologne, whose Order traditionally presided over the Inquisition, and who had already formulated charges of heresy against Reuchlin.) While the debate between Pfefferkorn and Reuchlin prefigures the later ones (such as those discussed by Gloning in the preceding chapter), the factor of public involvement in their dispute could perhaps have been more clearly outlined. Despite the title ('On the constitution of public involvement...'), the article gives only scant information about what this 'constitution' in reality means. As the amount of printed material that went around before 1517 was infinitesimal, compared to the barrage of pamphlets that started to inundate the German lands beginning that year, the

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presumption of a public involvement (not to speak of its 'constitution', whatever that may imply) needs to be shored up more effectively. Schwitalla's final section 7 (pp. 131-133), the only one that explicitly deals with 'public discussion', is very short (about one page) and only states laconically that "the pamphlets of the Reuchlin-Pfefferkorn conflict produced public discussion for the first time in Germany in which any literate person was invited to take a decision" (p. 131-132). What these 'decisions' were and how they were arrived at is unfortunately not documented, except by reference to the transition from hand-written to printed documents in general. Despite this shortcoming, the article contains a lot of interesting and useful information, and gives us a clear picture of a familiar, but always frightening phenomenon: the hate of anything foreign in the name of some higher principle. Manfred Beetz' contribution to the volume: 'The polite answer in pre-modern German conversation culture' addresses a cultural phenomenon, that of conversation, as it takes shape before our eyes through the documented manuals and behavioral guidelines that became so popular in cultured lay society during the Renaissance and the following periods, as contrasted with earlier 'Specula' and 'Regulae' that were usually directed at selected representatives of one particular category (such as Macchiavelli's I1 Principe) or at a general class of persons, mostly religious (cf. the Rule of St. Benedict, originally due to St. Augustine, or the complex rule system of the Jesuit Order, with its Regulae Modestiae, Regulae Novitiorum, Regulae Lectorum, Regulae Peregrinorum, Regulae Coadiutorum Temporalium, not to mention the (un)speakable list of subjects that were allowed in after-dinner conversation among the Order's members - known as the Catalogus P. Nadal quibus de rebus Nostri recreationis tempore colloqui possunt - and so on and so forth). One of the guiding factors in conversation and etiquette-ruled conduct is of course politeness. The author remarks that very little work has been done on the history of the concept and its practice through the ages; the present contribution is intended to plug that gap, at least to some extent, namely as far as the history of conversation in the 16th through 18th centuries is concerned. An interesting sidelight is thrown on a facet of cultural development that is usually not acknowledged as worthy of interest: How do people establish contact with each other through language, and how do the rules of this linguistic contact change over time? Beetz clarifies some of the principles guiding polite contact, and remarks that Brown and Levinson's model is far too 'absolute' in its demands and categorizations, and that the notions of polite conduct need to be described in frameworks that respect "behaviour which is specific to culture, class and gender as well as bound by time and situation" (p. 139). The various reply strategies are discussed, and it is remarkable, says Beetz, how the emphasis shifts within the course of merely one century: while the baroque art of complimenting relies on heavily convoluted syntactic structures, (re)executed in an incredibly high number of prescribed conversational turns (minimally on the order of 7 to ten; p. 150), under the influence of the (originally French) Enlightenment, demands for honesty and straightforwardness became more urgent, also in Germany, along with the realization that one's time is more precious than perhaps the favors of a potentate, if one has to spend half of one's life just trying to bring one's wishes to his or her attention.

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The paper is well written and carefully documented (just as were the two preceding papers) and also content-wise lives up to the intentions of the editors: to provide an avenue of approach to the historically relevant parameters in real dialogue (in addition to the polemic one, discussed in the two preceding chapters). Hannes Kastner writes (in German, with an abstract in English) on the curious fact that despite the prominence of the minnesang as genre in early Middle High German literature, there are no independent sources from which to infer what the essence of a 'polite conversation' between two partners in (potentially) amorous encounters (Minnegespriiche) could have been ('Die galante Konversation in der frtihen deutschen Lyrik'). Circumstantial evidence makes it likely that the 'Minnesingers' did indeed give expression to certain ideals, as these were in force in the courts and in the context in which courtly ideals were recognized, including the relationships between the sexes. Also this contribution, similarly to that by Bax, focuses exclusively on the synchronic state of affairs, and thus does not quite honor the other half of the 'historicity' that the editors must have had in mind when they composed the volume. However, in its own right, the article is interesting and makes an important contribution to our understanding of a genre that often is dismissed as overly mannerist or simply passe. The next paper, by Thomas Honegger, deals with a similar theme: the courtly farewell lyrics often referred to as 'dawn songs' (French aubades), i.e, poems expressing the lovers' discomfort at having to leave each other's embraces at the cock's crow. Honegger draws attention to the fact that, although the genre originated in (the South of) France, it became most popular in the German lands, while there is virtually no trace of them in Middle and Early Modem English literature. He discuses the only two extant instances, one from Chaucer and one from Shakespeare, and shows how tradition and innovation go hand in hand in both poets' dealing with the traditional material. He is able to identify a number of features characteristic of the 'dawn song', and shows how these are handled respectively in Troilys and Criseyde and Romeo and Juliet. As in the case of Bax, quoted earlier, there is no direct connection with 'history' in this discussion of lovers' dialogues; however, despite this fundamental shortcoming, the article is a worthwhile and very readable contribution to our knowledge of an intriguing genre in some of the earliest European literary productions. It is hoped that the author will find the time to extend the lines connecting the tradition of the 'dawn song' to our own times. Richard J. Watts deals with some of the earliest known variants of the literature that is flourishing even in our days: the 'phrase book' or Sprachfiihrer, of which Berlitz and Toussaint-Langenscheidt are egregious examples. An earlier approach, 'Methode Mertner', named for the Stuttgart forerunner and original model of the still extremely popular Toussaint-Langenscheidt series of phrase books, grammars and dictionaries (Mertner's copyrights were bought out by the latter in 1910), could be quoted as a prototypical specimen of modem techniques that aim at remaking the foreign speaker into the image of a native son or daughter, by having him or her interact 'naturally' in the foreign language. Another outstanding example is the Dane Arthur M. Jensen's successful 'natural method' of language instruction (Naturmetoden), which incorporated insights into the process of foreign language instruction

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that by now have become common property (not to say: commonplace) in the discourse of language learning. Watts' chapter is called, appropriately so (and using a quote from one of his sources): 'Refugiate in a strange countrey', with a subtitle that describes exactly what the article is about: 'Learning English through dialogues in the 16th century'. Watts analyzes two early efforts at introducing the foreign learner to the language to be learned, by placing him or her in a familiar setting where all the replies are given in the target language. Watts' example on the first two pages turns out to be an authentic 16th century original, but it could figure, more or less as it stands, in any contemporary phrase book of the kind referred to above. The question Watts raises is: How, and by whom, might the dialogues have been used? In the same connection, the problem of the teaching goals is raised as well (see the article's section 3). Besides trying to answer these obvious questions, the author also details solutions to more intricate problems, such as the degree of integration (language- and non-language-wise) of the foreign communities in late 16th century London, and the question of where these dialogues could have been used, for what audience, and so on. The article is especially interesting because it throws sidelights on a whole row of matters that normally are not within the purview of historical linguistic or pragmatic studies (mostly for want of material); thus, Watts tells us, with some degree of exactitude, how people went shopping in the markets of those days, and what kinds of goods they were able to buy and at what prices. One may take issue with some of the wider implications of Watts' research as interpreted by the author; thus, in section 4 he makes a plea for the dialogues having been conceived and "set very firmly within the framework of orthodox Calvinism". But surely, what we have learned earlier (p. 219) about the contents of the dialogue book studied, whose part 3 contains, among other things, 'the Lord's Prayer', 'the salutation of the angel', 'the articles of the faithe' and so on, would rather index the standard Roman Catholic catechism stuff (this is especially true for the combination of the two first items, always mentioned in the same breath: Pater Noster et Ave Maria, and as such belonging exclusively in a Catholic context). One could also question Watts' reasoning that the spelling indicates a date prior to 1554, since (as we are told in section 2) the book represents a version of a vocabulary printed in Louvain in 1551. But couldn't the author have been some elderly gentleman who clung to his archaic spelling, not unlike some of my acquaintances who, even unto this very day, in the Year of the Lord 1999, capitalize their Danish substantives, even though this spelling was officially abolished fifty years ago? Watts' article allows us an intriguing glance at some of the earliest known pragmatic practices in history: the practical use of a foreign idiom by speakers from outside the country, in particular by immigrants to the new country. It shows us that in these matters, not much new is under the sun, even though those early practitioners did not reflect on what they were doing and why, as is the custom among their modem counterparts. 'Dialogues in late Medieval and early Modern English medical writing' is the subject of the next contribution, due to Irma Taavitsainen. This excellent article takes on a theoretical problem: how to account for the differences between mono-

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logue and dialogue from a text-theoretical point of view and between the strictly scholastic and what could be called a 'mimetic' type of dialogue. But it also shows us an instance of a practical solution to the problem, as it is realized in medical scientific writing of the 15th through 18th centuries in England. The problem is complicated by the fact that during that same period (as Taavitsainen points out on p. 245), a European 'vemacularisation' of science was taking place, with the concomitant difficulty of how to preserve the knowledge that was available in Latin, while trying to disseminate it in the national languages such as English. For this, the dialogue format was usually the only one available, since it had been used for centuries and had proven itself to be useful and practical. The astonishing fact is that in the late medieval period, the incidence of dialogue is 'lean' (to use the author's expression; p. 247). By contrast, in the early modem period we see a recurring and growing abundance of manuals in question-answer form (the form that had been codified by the medieval philosophers, following the classical authors: compare the sic et non method of the Scholastics, and the question format used by religious authors, of which an early modem German instance is represented by Luther's catechism). As time progressed, more and more 'modem', mimetic, sometimes even fictional elements are introduced into the dialogues, which sometimes end up reading like travelogues or tourist phrase books, or remind us, as the author herself points out, of later centuries' pamphleteering literature (p. 261 ; see also Schwitalla's contribution to the volume, discussed above). Taavitsainen's article shows us an interesting aspect of the development of the pragmatics of dialogue over time, and it is to be hoped that her further studies will continue to shed light on this subject. Franz Lebsanft writes on 'A late medieval French bargain dialogue (Pathelin II), or: Further remarks on the history of dialogue forms'. Despite its somewhat cumbersome title, the chapter deals with a highly interesting question: how are speech acts, such as the ones employed in bargaining, reconstructed in an historical perspective? The author considers one of the staples of the medieval popular theater, the farce of 'Maistre Pathelin', named for its protagonist, a sharp and street-smart lawyer who specializes in defrauding people (especially merchants) by his clever use of language. The author compares the use of language in the farce with that of two other earlier Old and Middle French sources (so-called 'custumals', or manuals of language use and language instruction), in order to derive some conclusions about the development of oral discourse, seen in the perspective of the history of dialogue, and to explain the 'alterity', or historical bestrangement, that meets us when we study those older dialogues. The contribution that the dialogues make to our knowledge of speech acting in earlier times is in that they not only teach us how to use language according to the rules of proper use, but also how to violate those rules; in other words, how to use speech acts in contravention to what nowadays are called the (Gricean and other) 'principles' and 'maxims' of cooperation and the like. It turns out that despite the 'alterity' that is characteristic of older texts, the basic structures of such 'pragmatic acts' as selling and buying remain the same across the centuries; it is the secondary structures that are subject to change. One could perhaps say that speech acts and

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pragmatic acts retain their deep structures over time, but that they are subject to changes in their surface realization; Lebsanft's article is a valuable contribution to the study of these historic relationships and changes. In a ground-breaking study: 'Modifying pragmatic force: Hedges in a corpus of Early Modem English dialogues', Jonathan Culpeper and Merja Kyt6 explore the near-virgin ground of past conversations. What did people say in the days of old when they were chewing the fat? What were their preferred interjections, discourse markers, hedges and the like? In the absence of recordings of actual speech for the period prior to, say, 1870, we are looking at material that is entirely dependent on written reflections of one or the other kind. The authors have decided to build a corpus of Early Modem English dialogues, as a first step towards remedying this deficit. Given that all early sources are in written form only, some are evidently more written than others: plays and written dialogue are more oral than, say, court depositions, even though the latter perhaps are closer to what people really said. Of course, one never can be sure: the Italian writer Italo Calvino, in one of his collections of stories (Una pietra sopra; Calvino, 1980: 122), has a wonderful case of the police's 'faithful transcription' of an accused's deposition, where the legal rendering is several light-years away from its original, oral source (see Mey, 2000: 289-290). Although the authors repeatedly stress that this is a preliminary study, they have been able to find some interesting tendencies in the development of oral discourse, thus corroborating their initial expectation that English has become more 'oral' over time (p. 308), but that certain functions (such as that of the discourse marker why) have remained relatively stable. In this connection, a methodological quibble: as the authors remark, a hedge such as about can well have had a slightly different emphasis (in time or space) during the time span considered (roughly two and a half centuries). Thus, one wonders if, by simply counting occurrences of such a word and assuming it to have the same function over time, the authors may have induced a certain skewedness in their analysis of the data. The article is lucidly written and a pleasure to read, not least because of the many interesting sidelights it throws on Early Modem English life, as seen from the perspective of oral 'hedging'. One looks forward to more work on the subject from these authors. Anne Herlyn discusses so-called 'multiple dialogue introducers', in a study called 'So he says to her, he says, "Well", he says ...: Multiple dialogue introducers from a historical perspective'. This work examines the possible origin and development of a narrative structure that is common in spoken present day English, but has disappeared from the written language, where it is still frequently attested in Middle English. The repetition of a verb of saying (as in the title of the article) is said to be more than just an indication of direct discourse (like an extra 'punctuation mark'). Rather, by functioning as a 'spelled-out double quote', such a repetition creates cohesion in the text; in particular, it is claimed that the occurrence of this structure in Middle English can be explained from the still-present role of the oral narrator, a function whose importance has been gradually reduced over the centuries. The chapter is well-documented with copious examples from the Middle English literature, as well as by references to what modem authors have had to say on the

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subject. Herlyn's arguments (which represent an independent synthesis of the earlier approaches) are plausibly propounded; her original contribution consists in throwing an interesting sidelight on a feature that is often neglected in studies on earlier forms of a language, namely the amount of 'orality' that is reflected in the syntax of the written language. As such, she inscribes herself with merit in an emergent tradition of studies on 'natural narratology', past and present (cf. Fludernik, 1996). ' Q u e f a i s , Adam? - Questions and seduction in the Jeu d'Adam' is the title of a weighty and interesting contribution by Angela Schrott. The author asks herself in what way the occurrence of questions in the Old French play named in the title can be brought to bear on the issue of questions viewed as speech acts in their own rights. While inquiring into the pragmatic potential of interrogative acts, the author manages to clear a few familiar, well-trodden areas in speech act theory of encroaching rubble and illegal structures, and thus does the pragmatic community a service which far surpasses the modest aims of the article itself. I was particularly impressed by Schrott's pertinent (and very necessary) distinction between questions as parts of a conversational-analytic procedure ('adjacency' is the buzz word here) and questions as real interrogatives, being parts of 'dialogue acts' (pp. 334ff.). She distinguishes between two pragmatic levels of interrogation, the first, a basic one, where speech acts are classified as assertions, interrogatives, and so on, and a "secondary level of illocutions of second order depending on the given context of conversational interaction" (p. 337; this is the level that I have assigned to the 'pragmatic act'; see Mey, 2000: chapter 8). After giving us a clear and complete description of the various interrogative types found in the Jeu d'Adam, the author further discusses the Old French text from the point of view of historical dialogue analysis. She has some interesting thoughts on the possible development of the interrogative act itself over time; this again reflects on the way we see speech acts these days, not so much any longer as 'universals' in the Searlean tradition, but "in their historical dimension as verbal interaction" (p. 353). The chapter shows abundantly how a thorough study of the facts of language not only presupposes a pragmatic orientation on the part of the researcher but also, that such an orientation will produce new and unexpected (also theoretical) results. Schrott's article is well-written and -structured, apart from a certain wordiness and a long-winded way of presenting the arguments (which often repeat themselves). One could also question (sic!) the wisdom of including 63 footnotes and 10 pages of references in an article of only 25 pages; but that may be a matter of preference (either personal or cultural). Schrott's article is a 'must', not only for Romanists, but for all pragmaticists (including conversation analysts) with the slightest respect for themselves. Hans Ramge writes (in German, with an abstract in English) on 'Dialogues in the judiciary protocol: An inheritance quarrel in 1309 A.D. in Wetzlar and the emergence of a new text genre'. The article details the origins of a way of dealing with language in the court ambiance which later on became know as the 'court protocol', and he highlights several points that are of importance for a text of this kind: accuracy in speech acting, detailed declarations about rights and claims, and appeals to witnesses, magistrates, and higher courts. What is most interesting in this connection,

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and also that which justifies its inclusion in this volume, is that the texts contain what well might be the earliest occurrences of Middle High German dialogue, and as such throw an interesting sidelight on the development of dialogue from the Middle Ages to our own times, as well as on the representation of direct speech (as opposed to rendered, or 'represented' speech, one of the themes that modem literary pragmatics is much concerned about (see, e.g., Fludemik, 1993, 1996). The chapter is an interesting contribution also to the history of court procedures, as they evolve from oral to written, and thus helps us to critically assess the pragmatic value of the written text, placed in its proper context and within its own limitations. The contribution by Peter Koch, entitled 'Court records and cartoons: Reflections of spontaneous dialogue in early romance texts', looks at the development in oral dialogue as it is reflected in written records. As such, it naturally continues the line of research adumbrated in the previous contribution (although no cross-references are made; a problem that the entire volume exhibits, and which probably could have been taken care of by a more conscientious editing). A two-way distinction is suggested between, on the one hand, 'graphic' and 'phonic' (roughly, written vs. spoken), and on the other hand, 'communicative immediacy' vs. 'communicative distance'. A diagram is provided which I found very helpful in following the author through his occasionally rather arcane speculations. In particular, I was baffled by his continuous use of the word 'conception' (with the derived adjective 'conceptional' as a partner notion to 'medial', itself a rather unusual word and supposedly representing an adjective to accompany the substantive 'media'): cf. 'conceptionalmedial', 'conceptional contrast' etc., p. 400 et pass.). This lack of conceptual (sic !) clarity is all the more damaging because the author has a very special message to convey, and one that is exciting at that. In his studies of Old Romance texts and inscriptions, Koch discovered a fascinating regularity in the use of dialogue (in accordance with what he calls the 'immediacy' dimension, introduced above). His examples are a delight, and his interpretation very reasonable and insightful. In a parallel development of his research, the author then (in section 4) joins his findings with, and expands them into, the area of early visual communication, such as that represented by the frescos in churches and other places. When the inscriptions are lined up with the earlier analyses, Koch is able to identify ten parameters which he considers critical for the genre of oral dialogue in writing, when it comes to communicative immediacy; at least six of these are found both in the written texts and in what he calls the 'comics' of the Middle Ages. As is usual in works by German scholars, the author's documentation is extensive and his display of scholarship persuasive; Koch's chapter constitutes a great window through which to look at the development of pragmatics over the ages. The last contribution to this rich volume is called 'Dialogue and violence: The Inca Atahualpa meets Fray Vicente de Valverde (Cajamarca, Peru, 16th November 1532)'. Its author, Wulf Oesterreicher, re-analyzes and synthesizes the records of an historic meeting, the first head-on collision between the Spanish colonizers and the indigenous Peruvian rulers and their people, which culminated in the well-known disaster of the conquista and the wholesale robbery and slaughter through which the

Book review ! Journal of Pragmatics 32 (2000) 1539-1550

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Spanish organized their overseas American empire, and which formed the basis for their subsequent wealth and further expansions. The chilling story is told through the medium of contemporary eye witnesses and commentaries on the actual happening, and this is in itself fascinating reading, but Oesterreicher does much more. He is able to combine the different, often fragmentary or contradictory records into one by invoking the 'red thread' that runs through the various accounts: the not mentioned, but very really present document called the requerimiento. This is an official exposition and justification of the aims and goals of the Spanish presence in the colonies-to-be; it consists in a short resume of the world's history, leading up to an assertion of the divine rights of the Spanish emperors to conquer the lands. The document had to be read out aloud in the presence of the natives, who were given a choice of either subjugating themselves to the good cares of their new lords, or facing the most horrible of penances imposed in the name of the Church and Christian love. As Fray Bartolom6 de las Casas (quoted on p. 445) remarked, the hypocrisy of this document ("injusto, impfo, escandaloso, irracional y absurdo") is such that one doesn't know if one should weep or laugh. For the Indios, however, this was bloody earnest, in the strictest sense of the word: on that November day of 1532, more than 7,000 of them were brutally murdered in the market place of Cajamarca at the hands of Pizarro's hirelings, in a two hour long carnage. What Oesterrreicher manages to show in his rich and well-documented contribution is that none of the earlier researchers has paid attention to this cruel practice of 'conversation as aggression' (cf. p. 445): the Spanish declared in fact war on the Indians by reading aloud some principles, threats, and promises in a language that one, couldn't be understood by those whose mother tongue was another, and two, didn't make any deeper sense anyway, since the whole framework of Christian theology was alien to the listeners. Thus, the whole procedure became a perfidious comedy and a mere pretext for unlimited murder, rape, and theft: "a disgrace to the Faith and the Christian religion" (Las Casas, quoted on p. 445). What Fray Vicente read out from his book was not the word of God, but the threat of the human conquistador. Historically, the pretended dialogue was nothing but a declaration of war; given the concrete 'set-up' (Mey, 2000: chapter 8), the pragmatic act of threatening (couched in whatever speech acts) was the only available option, and it was necessarily followed by the effectual realization of the threats. To conclude, some general remarks about the editing of the book. One direly misses consistency in tying the individual chapters together, especially where they treat of the same or similar topics. Even authors who appear side by side in the volume don't bother to quote, or cross-refer to, each other's contributions; the editors should have been more alert to this obvious possibility of enhancing the value of an otherwise very worthwhile, indeed essential, volume on the history of the dialogue from a pragmatic point of view. Similarly, the index could suffer some improvement: there are some significant lacunae, both as regards persons (the famous Bartolom6 de las Casas is not found) and subject matter (important concepts such as 'speech act' or 'dialogue act' are entirely absent; by contrast, and with some good luck, one may be able to find, under the letter R, the surprising but not very helpful entry: 'repertoire of speech acts 96, 104').

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Book review / Journal of Pragmatics 32 (2000) 1539-1550

T h a t b e i n g said, the editors s h o u l d b e c o n g r a t u l a t e d o n p r o d u c i n g this t i m e l y coll e c t i o n o f e x c e l l e n t articles, a n d for e x p a n d i n g o u r p r a g m a t i c frontiers into the future o f o u r u n d e r s t a n d i n g , as w e l l as into the past o f o u r r e - a p p r e h e n s i o n .

References Calvino, ltalo, 1980. Una pietra sopra. Torino: Einaudi. Fludernik, Monika, 1993. The fictions of language and the languages of fiction: The linguistic representation of speech and consciousness. London: Routledge. Fludernik, Monika, 1996. Towards a 'natural' narratology. London: Routledge. Mey, Jacob L., 2000. Pragmatics: An introduction. (Second, entirely revised edition). Oxford: Blackwell.

Jacob L. Mey (born 1926) is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at Odense University, Institute of Language and Communication, Odense, Denmark. His most recent appointments were at Haifa University and Haifa Technion, Israel. Jacob Mey's research interests concern all areas of pragmatics, with an emphasis on the social aspects of language use, the pragmatic impact of computer technologies, and the pragmatic use of literary devices. In 1985, he published Whose language? A study in linguistic pragmatics (Amsterdam: Benjamins). His Pragmatics: An introduction (Oxford: Blackwell) was published in 1993 (5th revised printing 1997, second, entirely revised edition 2000). His newest book is called When voices clash: A study in literary pragmatics (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1999); his latest edited volume is the 1100-page Concise encyclopedia ofpragmatics (Elsevier Science, 1998). Jacob Mey is cofounder of the Cognitive Technology Society and edits the Journal of Cogntitive Technology (with Barbara Gorayska, from 2000). Together with Hartmut Haberland, he founded the Journal of Pragmatics (1977), of which he still is the Chief Editor. He is also the Editor of RASK: lnternationalt tidsskriftfor sprog og kommunikation (Odense University). Jacob Mey holds an honorary doctorate from Zaragoza University (1993). He is married to Inger Mey, has six children and loves cats,