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La interpretación y la imagen de masas
ELSEVIER
Journal of Pragmatics 32 (2000) 499-504 www.elsevier.nl/locate/pragma
Book review Francisco Yus Ramos, La interpretaci6n y la imagen de masas. Alicante: Instituto de Cultura 'Juan Gil-Albert', 1997. 404 pp. ISBN 84-7784-280-9.2.400 pesetas. Reviewed by Jos6 Mateo Martfnez, Departamento de Filologia Inglesa, Universidad de Alicante. Ap. Correos, 99, E-03080 Alicante, Spain.
La inte~pretaci6n y la imagen de masas (Interpretation and media) offers a new and original vision of media communication from a relevance-theoretic perspective. The book comprises two clear-cut parts in three sections plus a very useful appendix on related topics one can find in Internet. Section I embraces the first short part where Yus outlines the theoretical framework that sustains his research. Its forty pages highlight some basic points in pragmatics (especially Relevance Theory), of which he will make intensive use later to explain and justify his media communication model. Consequently, although some general pragmatics landmarks such as context and its varieties are given brief but special emphasis in this section, this is a book which is heavily indebted to Sperber and Wilson's (1995 [1986]) Theory of Relevance (henceforth RT). One of its main objectives is "[t]o apply Sperber and Wilson's ideas ... to the verbal-iconic discourse of British comics" (p. 13). This is then a relevance-theoretic work, although the word relevance does not appear in the title. The book culminates a sort of evolutionary process which originated in a previous book (Yus, 1995), where Yus started his research on comic discourse from a Gricean perspective. Yus soon discovered that Grice's model was insufficient and had to look somewhere else. Subsequently, Yus manages to apply Sperber and Wilson's ideas and assumptions to his approach to media (particularly comic) discourse with ease and efficiency. He devises a media communicative model of his own which he labels modelo escripto-ic6nico de la comunicaci6n (verbal-visual model of communication). This model emphasizes both the power of words and images to convey meaning and the various ways and levels in which active communicative mechanisms operate in human interaction. Before commenting on this model, which is explained and applied in the long second part of the book (sections II and III), I must say this is a successful attempt to apply RT to other contexts apart from face to face interaction, moving to media communication and social interaction via the discourse of comics and, as he promises, with future extensions to other types of mass discourse (cinema, television, the press, etc.). 0378-2166/00/$ - see front matter © 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: S0378-2166(99)00019-3
500
Book review / Journal of Pragmatics 32 (2000) 499-504
Section II opens with an interesting discussion, in which Yus tries to reconcile RT cognitive processes in typical conversational interaction (involving inference, implied meanings, contextual effects, explicatures, and so on) with plural (author/reader, author/spectator, character/character) communication conveyed by written and media texts. Although this is one of the most controversial issues within RT, it is also an indispensable development (beyond face to face communication and into media communication) of this theory which aspires to offer a comprehensive account of the different cognitive and social processes involved in human interpretation. Yus reaches the conclusion that meanings in media communication do not come only from what authors presumably intend to communicate. Since most media texts are typically received in situations lacking a physical co-presence between addresser (author) and addressee (reader/spectator) in which the former is able to make sure that the intended interpretation is chosen by the latter, in media communication there is spatial and temporal gap opening up the possibility that authors and addressees may well provide different hypotheses on what the meaning of the media text is supposed to be. Therefore, a contextual divergence is detected here: the author may have produced her/his text months or years before readers actually access it. Time changes the perception of things and original meanings can change to new meanings, because there are two conflicting contextual situations, that of the authors' when they wrote the text and that of the readers' or spectators' when they read/watch it some time later (Nystrand, 1986). Sometimes the text itself accumulates new meanings without the author's mediation due to time and social change. Yus tries to find an explanation for the existence of two layers of communication in media discourse (similar to other types of literary discourse): author~reader (in discourses such as comics, author/spectator in other media) and character~character, which he names dialogic communication (using Bakhtin's, 1981, concept) and diegetic communication (following Genette, 1980), respectively. These two different channels of interaction in comic discourse are the foundations of a more ample model of media communication which includes three other variables (verbal/non-verbal, intentional/unintentional, and maximal/minimal interpretive effort). The four dichotomies are organized in a taxonomic way which accounts, according to Yus, for all the (16) existing possibilities of dialogic and diegetic communication. This model - the Verbal-Visual Model of Communication (VV-Model, see also Yus, 1998) - is convincingly explained in the subsequent pages with abundant examples. The model is a taxonomy (see Table 1). Obviously one could argue that this apparently complex type of communication (which involves indeterminacy of meaning, mediation of intentionality or addressee's inferential hypotheses) cannot be explicitly taxonomized in just sixteen cases (four variables which combine 4 x 4 = 16). That might look like a somehow naive procedure. But Yus' intention is to provide a convincing and pedagogic explanation of the different communicative possibilities that can be found in media communication. Knowing that the outcome of human interpretation is inevitably medi-
Book review / Journal r?fPragmatics 31 (1999) 32 (2000) 499-504
501
Table 1 The VV-Model and its sixteen interpretive categories Category
Exchange
Message
Intentionality
Efficiency
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Spectator-oriented Spectator-oriented Spectator-oriented Spectator-oriented Spectator-oriented Spectator-oriented Spectator-oriented Spectator-oriented Character-oriented Character-oriented Character-oriented Character-oriented Character-oriented Character-oriented Character-oriented Character-oriented
Verbal Verbal Verbal Verbal Nonverbal Nonverbal Nonverbal Nonverbal Verbal Verbal Verbal Verbal Nonverbal Nonverbal Nonverbal Nonverbal
Intentional Intentional Unintentional Unintentional Intentional Intentional Unintentional Unintentional Intentional Intentional Unintentional Unintentional Intentional Intentional Unintentional Unintentional
Maximal Minimal Maximal Minimal Maximal Minimal Maximal Minimal Maximal Minimal Maximal Minimal Maximal Minimal Maximal Minimal
10
11 12 13 14
15 16
ated by many factors (non-demonstrative inferential processes, multiple layers of intentionality, various combinations of verbal and nonverbal input, and an indeterminate number of contextual assumptions), communication of (and in) media discourse is bound to result in a scale of interpretative efficiency ranging from the maximal to the minimal. With the assistance of the explicative tools of RT and its powerful descriptive apparatus, this sixteen-category model proves to be valid in explaining the communication processes involved in the interpretation o f (as readers/spectators) and in (as characters) media discourses. Section Ill is entirely devoted to the application of the VV-Model to British comics. This variety of media discourse is first contextualized in a general introductory chapter entitled 'The semiotics of comics' where Yus draws different parallelisms between comics and cinema, painting, photography, video and television, drama, and other media communication channels. The author believes that comic discourse deserves a better place than it has at present among the more prestigious communicative and cultural means. Technically, the verbal-pictorial format of comic discourse may resemble that of the cinema, television, and other arts, and even surpass some of their limitations: "with just a pencil and a rubber I can pay thirty thousand actors and make sets worth forty thousand million" (Druillet, 1976: 20, as cited in Yus, p. 148). Besides, if we consider the fact that cinema takes are first drawn in a comic format (storyboards), we might wonder why its popularity and cultural appreciation is significantly smaller than any of the above-mentioned arts. Yus defends the iconographic complexity of comics, their subtle and highly elaborated texts, and their technical proficiency in showing on a silent and blank page the movement, linguistic and nonverbal communication, expression of feelings, etc., of real life.
502
Book review / Journal of Pragmatics 32 (2000) 499-504
A good half of the book is dedicated to the application of these sixteen cases. In his analysis, Yus uses different alternative British comics (Viz, Smut, Exit, and others), from which he selects text and picture-related samples; he skillfully manages to fit in most of those cases. His examples are so clear-cut and coherent that one gets the impression that there is hardly any place for discussion or discrepancy. Nevertheless some cases are longer and better explained and exemplified than others. The reason for this lies in the fact that the textual structure of comic discourse is insufficient and therefore restricts the application of a model that aspires to give a full account of verbal and visual communication. For example, case 3 of his model, which includes dialogic communication, verbal, unintentional, and maximal interpretative efficiency becomes impossible to apply to comic discourse, because, as Yus himself admits, there cannot be reader-oriented verbal messages written on a page which the cartoonist had not intention to write, or these would not exist in the first place (p. 202). This problem applies to cases 3, 4, 7, and 8 (see Table l). However, he tries to find a solution to this apparent paradox by digging into what he describes as the subintentional level, where he differentiates between direct and indirect intention (explicativa and implicativa in the Spanish text). By 'direct intention' he means the author's (or character's, in diegetic communication) intention to communicate only the plain propositional content of his/her text (or utterance) without any added contextual meanings apart from minimal contextualization processes such as referent assignment or disambiguation (Sperber and Wilson's explicature). By 'indirect intention' Yus means implicit meanings that addressees have to infer beyond the propositional content of the text/utterance with the aid of contextual information. For example, if someone utters 'the cat is on the mat' in order to inform the hearer of its physical location, the speaker's utterance would be a result of his/her direct intention. If, on the other hand, the cat always sits on the mat when it is hungry and the speaker utters 'the cat is on the mat' in order to inform the hearer of its hunger, some extra contextual assumptions have to be supplied by the hearer, since the intended meaning is now implicit and, consequently, the utterance would be a result of the speaker's 'indirect intention'. Therefore, case 3 could be interpreted as an instance of dialogic communication where the cartoonist has no other intention but to explicitly convey the (minimally contextualized) explicature of the text and the reader infers this meaning accordingly, whereas in case 4 the reader would draw unintended implicit meanings from what was supposed to be only a literal, explicit message. This explanation seems a bit forced and hinders the easiness and comprehensive structure of his model, obliging Yus to look for hypothetical solutions which, although plausible, make his model look as though he were desperately trying to make it suitable for all kinds and outcomes of communication in the discourse of comics (and media discourse, in general). Fortunately, there is no real need to be exhaustive. The VV-Model works very well within media discourse but it does not need to have a 100% efficiency in this or any other specific communicative setting. Some cases may work better than others depending on which discourse we apply them to. If there was always a full and exact correlation between the VV-
Book review / Journal of Pragmatics 31 (1999) 32 (2000) 499-504
503
Model and all kinds of communication in media discourses, we might perhaps have reasons to feel worried, because that would mean that the human mind (and the outcome of its interpretative processes) is less flexible and creative than we thought. Leaving these considerations aside, the VV-Model is an effective tool for understanding the different settings in which communicative processes are established in media discourses, and not only between the author of the discourse and the reader(s)/spectator(s), but also between characters or even between fictional characters and the reader(s)/spectator(s). This model, which I am sure will be improved (see Yus, 1998) and applied to other communicative contexts, becomes an interesting case of how to amplify the scope of relevance-theoretic research to other communicative fields with a more social and less individual focus. This is currently the case of literary criticism based on RT notions, and in the application of RT to the discourse of advertising, translation, medical discourse, arid others. There is room for what we could define as 'applied relevance-theoretic studies', and in many of them, Yus' VV-Model may prove a fruitful tool of analysis. This idea is summarized in the book's concluding remarks where the author states what he thinks are the three requirements which any pragmatic account of communication should fulfill: integration (the biggest explanation with the smallest theoretical apparatus), interdisciplinarity (be ready to gather views and theories from related disciplines which may be useful to provide a better insight of the analysis), and applicability (to the kind of discourse on which hypotheses are laid). The book closes with a very useful appendix for those who currently use Internet to update and complement more traditional scholarly resources. The appendix offers a long list of a hundred web pages covering areas such as pragmatics, media communication, and the different interests covered by the VV-Model (media semiotics, RT, verbal/nonverbal communication, humor, irony, body language, etc.). Although the book is written in Spanish, its author, Francisco Yus, is an English language scholar who does most of his research in and about English. I mention this because it is a fact that in Spain the bulk of research carried out in the most innovative fields of linguistics, pragmatics, and communication stems from Departments of English Studies rather than from Departments of Spanish. The reason for this may be the Spanish linguists' poor command of English. A majority of scholars in most Spanish Departments are either unable to speak or read English, or their knowledge of this language is so limited that they have serious difficulties in understanding the depths and subtleties of many recent papers and books published on these matters which, as we know, are in English. By the time they are (if they are) translated into Spanish, some time has elapsed and their content is either dated or new developments have been published in between. Therefore, there is a traditional 'delay' in some areas like pragmatics or syntax, especially when it comes to adapt new findings to Spanish. It is mainly in the different works published by Spanish Departments of English Studies where we can trace an up to date line of research in pragmatics. Unfortunately, most of this research is only applied to English, with English examples extracted from English-speaking cultural settings. The paradox in Spain is that the
504
Book review / Journal of Pragmatics 32 (2000) 499-504
most interesting books and papers on pragmatics are published in English about English topics by researchers, who, in spite of being Spanish, have specialized in English Studies while a similar and original research in Spanish about the Spanish language is scarce and scientifically placed a step behind. Formally, La interpretaci6n y la imagen de masas breaks this seemingly c o m m o n rule but only in one respect: it is written in Spanish. But the examples studied have been derived from English comics and comic strips (reflecting not only the English language peculiarities but also the Anglo Saxon cultural world), although they have been thoroughly translated into Spanish. I think it is important that these highly innovative and interesting works take advantage of the bilingual condition of their authors and b e c o m e cross-cultural so that they can prove that the theoretic apparatus designed by English researchers really works when it is applied to other languages and cultural settings, both from a linguistic and a pragmatic perspective. In this respect, this volume could be seen as a first step in the direction o f using the local language and applying pragmatic findings to it. Hopefully, it will at least stimulate others to begin doing so.
References Bakhtin, Mihail, 1981. The dialogic imagination: Four essays. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Druillet, P., 1976. D6bat: De la bande dessin6e au cinema. Cinematographe 21. Genette, G6rard, 1980. Narrative discourse. New York: Cornell University Press. Nystrand, Martin, 1986. The structure of written communication. London: Academic Press. Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson, 1995 [1986]. Relevance: Communication and cognition. Oxford: Blackwell. Yus, Francisco, 1995. Conversational cooperation in alternative comics. Alicante: Universidad de Alicante, Departamento de Filologfa Inglesa (Working Papers 4). Yus, Francisco, 1998. Relevance theory and media discourse: A verbal-visual model of communication. Poetics 25: 293-309.
Jose Mateo is a Lecturer in Linguistics and Translation at the University of Alicante (Spain). His main researching interests include relevance theory applied to translation, the pragmatics of drama, and technical translation. He has published articles on those fields both in Spanish and international journals.
Journal of Pragmatics 32 (2000) 499-504 www.elsevier.nl/locate/pragma
Book review Francisco Yus Ramos, La interpretaci6n y la imagen de masas. Alicante: Instituto de Cultura 'Juan Gil-Albert', 1997. 404 pp. ISBN 84-7784-280-9.2.400 pesetas. Reviewed by Jos6 Mateo Martfnez, Departamento de Filologia Inglesa, Universidad de Alicante. Ap. Correos, 99, E-03080 Alicante, Spain.
La inte~pretaci6n y la imagen de masas (Interpretation and media) offers a new and original vision of media communication from a relevance-theoretic perspective. The book comprises two clear-cut parts in three sections plus a very useful appendix on related topics one can find in Internet. Section I embraces the first short part where Yus outlines the theoretical framework that sustains his research. Its forty pages highlight some basic points in pragmatics (especially Relevance Theory), of which he will make intensive use later to explain and justify his media communication model. Consequently, although some general pragmatics landmarks such as context and its varieties are given brief but special emphasis in this section, this is a book which is heavily indebted to Sperber and Wilson's (1995 [1986]) Theory of Relevance (henceforth RT). One of its main objectives is "[t]o apply Sperber and Wilson's ideas ... to the verbal-iconic discourse of British comics" (p. 13). This is then a relevance-theoretic work, although the word relevance does not appear in the title. The book culminates a sort of evolutionary process which originated in a previous book (Yus, 1995), where Yus started his research on comic discourse from a Gricean perspective. Yus soon discovered that Grice's model was insufficient and had to look somewhere else. Subsequently, Yus manages to apply Sperber and Wilson's ideas and assumptions to his approach to media (particularly comic) discourse with ease and efficiency. He devises a media communicative model of his own which he labels modelo escripto-ic6nico de la comunicaci6n (verbal-visual model of communication). This model emphasizes both the power of words and images to convey meaning and the various ways and levels in which active communicative mechanisms operate in human interaction. Before commenting on this model, which is explained and applied in the long second part of the book (sections II and III), I must say this is a successful attempt to apply RT to other contexts apart from face to face interaction, moving to media communication and social interaction via the discourse of comics and, as he promises, with future extensions to other types of mass discourse (cinema, television, the press, etc.). 0378-2166/00/$ - see front matter © 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: S0378-2166(99)00019-3
500
Book review / Journal of Pragmatics 32 (2000) 499-504
Section II opens with an interesting discussion, in which Yus tries to reconcile RT cognitive processes in typical conversational interaction (involving inference, implied meanings, contextual effects, explicatures, and so on) with plural (author/reader, author/spectator, character/character) communication conveyed by written and media texts. Although this is one of the most controversial issues within RT, it is also an indispensable development (beyond face to face communication and into media communication) of this theory which aspires to offer a comprehensive account of the different cognitive and social processes involved in human interpretation. Yus reaches the conclusion that meanings in media communication do not come only from what authors presumably intend to communicate. Since most media texts are typically received in situations lacking a physical co-presence between addresser (author) and addressee (reader/spectator) in which the former is able to make sure that the intended interpretation is chosen by the latter, in media communication there is spatial and temporal gap opening up the possibility that authors and addressees may well provide different hypotheses on what the meaning of the media text is supposed to be. Therefore, a contextual divergence is detected here: the author may have produced her/his text months or years before readers actually access it. Time changes the perception of things and original meanings can change to new meanings, because there are two conflicting contextual situations, that of the authors' when they wrote the text and that of the readers' or spectators' when they read/watch it some time later (Nystrand, 1986). Sometimes the text itself accumulates new meanings without the author's mediation due to time and social change. Yus tries to find an explanation for the existence of two layers of communication in media discourse (similar to other types of literary discourse): author~reader (in discourses such as comics, author/spectator in other media) and character~character, which he names dialogic communication (using Bakhtin's, 1981, concept) and diegetic communication (following Genette, 1980), respectively. These two different channels of interaction in comic discourse are the foundations of a more ample model of media communication which includes three other variables (verbal/non-verbal, intentional/unintentional, and maximal/minimal interpretive effort). The four dichotomies are organized in a taxonomic way which accounts, according to Yus, for all the (16) existing possibilities of dialogic and diegetic communication. This model - the Verbal-Visual Model of Communication (VV-Model, see also Yus, 1998) - is convincingly explained in the subsequent pages with abundant examples. The model is a taxonomy (see Table 1). Obviously one could argue that this apparently complex type of communication (which involves indeterminacy of meaning, mediation of intentionality or addressee's inferential hypotheses) cannot be explicitly taxonomized in just sixteen cases (four variables which combine 4 x 4 = 16). That might look like a somehow naive procedure. But Yus' intention is to provide a convincing and pedagogic explanation of the different communicative possibilities that can be found in media communication. Knowing that the outcome of human interpretation is inevitably medi-
Book review / Journal r?fPragmatics 31 (1999) 32 (2000) 499-504
501
Table 1 The VV-Model and its sixteen interpretive categories Category
Exchange
Message
Intentionality
Efficiency
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9
Spectator-oriented Spectator-oriented Spectator-oriented Spectator-oriented Spectator-oriented Spectator-oriented Spectator-oriented Spectator-oriented Character-oriented Character-oriented Character-oriented Character-oriented Character-oriented Character-oriented Character-oriented Character-oriented
Verbal Verbal Verbal Verbal Nonverbal Nonverbal Nonverbal Nonverbal Verbal Verbal Verbal Verbal Nonverbal Nonverbal Nonverbal Nonverbal
Intentional Intentional Unintentional Unintentional Intentional Intentional Unintentional Unintentional Intentional Intentional Unintentional Unintentional Intentional Intentional Unintentional Unintentional
Maximal Minimal Maximal Minimal Maximal Minimal Maximal Minimal Maximal Minimal Maximal Minimal Maximal Minimal Maximal Minimal
10
11 12 13 14
15 16
ated by many factors (non-demonstrative inferential processes, multiple layers of intentionality, various combinations of verbal and nonverbal input, and an indeterminate number of contextual assumptions), communication of (and in) media discourse is bound to result in a scale of interpretative efficiency ranging from the maximal to the minimal. With the assistance of the explicative tools of RT and its powerful descriptive apparatus, this sixteen-category model proves to be valid in explaining the communication processes involved in the interpretation o f (as readers/spectators) and in (as characters) media discourses. Section Ill is entirely devoted to the application of the VV-Model to British comics. This variety of media discourse is first contextualized in a general introductory chapter entitled 'The semiotics of comics' where Yus draws different parallelisms between comics and cinema, painting, photography, video and television, drama, and other media communication channels. The author believes that comic discourse deserves a better place than it has at present among the more prestigious communicative and cultural means. Technically, the verbal-pictorial format of comic discourse may resemble that of the cinema, television, and other arts, and even surpass some of their limitations: "with just a pencil and a rubber I can pay thirty thousand actors and make sets worth forty thousand million" (Druillet, 1976: 20, as cited in Yus, p. 148). Besides, if we consider the fact that cinema takes are first drawn in a comic format (storyboards), we might wonder why its popularity and cultural appreciation is significantly smaller than any of the above-mentioned arts. Yus defends the iconographic complexity of comics, their subtle and highly elaborated texts, and their technical proficiency in showing on a silent and blank page the movement, linguistic and nonverbal communication, expression of feelings, etc., of real life.
502
Book review / Journal of Pragmatics 32 (2000) 499-504
A good half of the book is dedicated to the application of these sixteen cases. In his analysis, Yus uses different alternative British comics (Viz, Smut, Exit, and others), from which he selects text and picture-related samples; he skillfully manages to fit in most of those cases. His examples are so clear-cut and coherent that one gets the impression that there is hardly any place for discussion or discrepancy. Nevertheless some cases are longer and better explained and exemplified than others. The reason for this lies in the fact that the textual structure of comic discourse is insufficient and therefore restricts the application of a model that aspires to give a full account of verbal and visual communication. For example, case 3 of his model, which includes dialogic communication, verbal, unintentional, and maximal interpretative efficiency becomes impossible to apply to comic discourse, because, as Yus himself admits, there cannot be reader-oriented verbal messages written on a page which the cartoonist had not intention to write, or these would not exist in the first place (p. 202). This problem applies to cases 3, 4, 7, and 8 (see Table l). However, he tries to find a solution to this apparent paradox by digging into what he describes as the subintentional level, where he differentiates between direct and indirect intention (explicativa and implicativa in the Spanish text). By 'direct intention' he means the author's (or character's, in diegetic communication) intention to communicate only the plain propositional content of his/her text (or utterance) without any added contextual meanings apart from minimal contextualization processes such as referent assignment or disambiguation (Sperber and Wilson's explicature). By 'indirect intention' Yus means implicit meanings that addressees have to infer beyond the propositional content of the text/utterance with the aid of contextual information. For example, if someone utters 'the cat is on the mat' in order to inform the hearer of its physical location, the speaker's utterance would be a result of his/her direct intention. If, on the other hand, the cat always sits on the mat when it is hungry and the speaker utters 'the cat is on the mat' in order to inform the hearer of its hunger, some extra contextual assumptions have to be supplied by the hearer, since the intended meaning is now implicit and, consequently, the utterance would be a result of the speaker's 'indirect intention'. Therefore, case 3 could be interpreted as an instance of dialogic communication where the cartoonist has no other intention but to explicitly convey the (minimally contextualized) explicature of the text and the reader infers this meaning accordingly, whereas in case 4 the reader would draw unintended implicit meanings from what was supposed to be only a literal, explicit message. This explanation seems a bit forced and hinders the easiness and comprehensive structure of his model, obliging Yus to look for hypothetical solutions which, although plausible, make his model look as though he were desperately trying to make it suitable for all kinds and outcomes of communication in the discourse of comics (and media discourse, in general). Fortunately, there is no real need to be exhaustive. The VV-Model works very well within media discourse but it does not need to have a 100% efficiency in this or any other specific communicative setting. Some cases may work better than others depending on which discourse we apply them to. If there was always a full and exact correlation between the VV-
Book review / Journal of Pragmatics 31 (1999) 32 (2000) 499-504
503
Model and all kinds of communication in media discourses, we might perhaps have reasons to feel worried, because that would mean that the human mind (and the outcome of its interpretative processes) is less flexible and creative than we thought. Leaving these considerations aside, the VV-Model is an effective tool for understanding the different settings in which communicative processes are established in media discourses, and not only between the author of the discourse and the reader(s)/spectator(s), but also between characters or even between fictional characters and the reader(s)/spectator(s). This model, which I am sure will be improved (see Yus, 1998) and applied to other communicative contexts, becomes an interesting case of how to amplify the scope of relevance-theoretic research to other communicative fields with a more social and less individual focus. This is currently the case of literary criticism based on RT notions, and in the application of RT to the discourse of advertising, translation, medical discourse, arid others. There is room for what we could define as 'applied relevance-theoretic studies', and in many of them, Yus' VV-Model may prove a fruitful tool of analysis. This idea is summarized in the book's concluding remarks where the author states what he thinks are the three requirements which any pragmatic account of communication should fulfill: integration (the biggest explanation with the smallest theoretical apparatus), interdisciplinarity (be ready to gather views and theories from related disciplines which may be useful to provide a better insight of the analysis), and applicability (to the kind of discourse on which hypotheses are laid). The book closes with a very useful appendix for those who currently use Internet to update and complement more traditional scholarly resources. The appendix offers a long list of a hundred web pages covering areas such as pragmatics, media communication, and the different interests covered by the VV-Model (media semiotics, RT, verbal/nonverbal communication, humor, irony, body language, etc.). Although the book is written in Spanish, its author, Francisco Yus, is an English language scholar who does most of his research in and about English. I mention this because it is a fact that in Spain the bulk of research carried out in the most innovative fields of linguistics, pragmatics, and communication stems from Departments of English Studies rather than from Departments of Spanish. The reason for this may be the Spanish linguists' poor command of English. A majority of scholars in most Spanish Departments are either unable to speak or read English, or their knowledge of this language is so limited that they have serious difficulties in understanding the depths and subtleties of many recent papers and books published on these matters which, as we know, are in English. By the time they are (if they are) translated into Spanish, some time has elapsed and their content is either dated or new developments have been published in between. Therefore, there is a traditional 'delay' in some areas like pragmatics or syntax, especially when it comes to adapt new findings to Spanish. It is mainly in the different works published by Spanish Departments of English Studies where we can trace an up to date line of research in pragmatics. Unfortunately, most of this research is only applied to English, with English examples extracted from English-speaking cultural settings. The paradox in Spain is that the
504
Book review / Journal of Pragmatics 32 (2000) 499-504
most interesting books and papers on pragmatics are published in English about English topics by researchers, who, in spite of being Spanish, have specialized in English Studies while a similar and original research in Spanish about the Spanish language is scarce and scientifically placed a step behind. Formally, La interpretaci6n y la imagen de masas breaks this seemingly c o m m o n rule but only in one respect: it is written in Spanish. But the examples studied have been derived from English comics and comic strips (reflecting not only the English language peculiarities but also the Anglo Saxon cultural world), although they have been thoroughly translated into Spanish. I think it is important that these highly innovative and interesting works take advantage of the bilingual condition of their authors and b e c o m e cross-cultural so that they can prove that the theoretic apparatus designed by English researchers really works when it is applied to other languages and cultural settings, both from a linguistic and a pragmatic perspective. In this respect, this volume could be seen as a first step in the direction o f using the local language and applying pragmatic findings to it. Hopefully, it will at least stimulate others to begin doing so.
References Bakhtin, Mihail, 1981. The dialogic imagination: Four essays. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Druillet, P., 1976. D6bat: De la bande dessin6e au cinema. Cinematographe 21. Genette, G6rard, 1980. Narrative discourse. New York: Cornell University Press. Nystrand, Martin, 1986. The structure of written communication. London: Academic Press. Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson, 1995 [1986]. Relevance: Communication and cognition. Oxford: Blackwell. Yus, Francisco, 1995. Conversational cooperation in alternative comics. Alicante: Universidad de Alicante, Departamento de Filologfa Inglesa (Working Papers 4). Yus, Francisco, 1998. Relevance theory and media discourse: A verbal-visual model of communication. Poetics 25: 293-309.
Jose Mateo is a Lecturer in Linguistics and Translation at the University of Alicante (Spain). His main researching interests include relevance theory applied to translation, the pragmatics of drama, and technical translation. He has published articles on those fields both in Spanish and international journals.