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Pragmatics: Critical concepts
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Journal of Pragmatics 32 (2000) 363-366
Book review Asa Kasher, ed., Pragmatics: Critical concepts. London: Routledge, 1998. Communication, interaction and discourse, vol. 5. $905.00 (6 vols.). Reviewed by Salvatore Attardo, English Department, Youngstown State University, Youngstown, OH 44555, USA.* Kasher's work is a multi-volume critical anthology of pragmatics. The fifth volume under review here comprises Parts Nine through Eleven. Part Nine is called 'Communication' and focuses on the age-old debate of whether the communicative aspect of language is essential to it: Searle's and Chomsky's well know arguments are anthologized, as well as an interesting article by a group of psychologists (Blank, Gessner and Esposito) who present a case study of a child who shows a distinct separation of linguistic competence and its use for communicative purposes. This child, while showing linguistic ability comparable to his peers, did not engage in any 'communicative' uses of language (for example, he refused to talk to anyone except his parents, frequently provided inadequate responses, did not point or understand pointing, etc.). These data support Chomsky's view that communication is not the sole/ prime function of language. Dummett's piece returns to Chomsky's question about the possibility of non-communicative uses of language. He broadens the issue to include truth-functional treatments of meaning, as well as Grice-style 'meaningNN' accounts of meaning, and concludes that language must necessarily involve both communicative as well as private uses, but that the private ones are primitive ("the primary notion must be that of an idiolect", p. 136). A short (1980) article by Akmajian, Demers and Hamish argues for the inadequacy of the basic Shannon-Weaver style 'code' of communication, an argument quite familiar to the readers of the authors' excellent textbook of the same period. A similar critique of the code model is presented in Relevance Theory. Sperber and Wilson's (1987) summary of their argument for RT is also a classic, and represents this influential branch of pragmatics in this collection. Verschueren's piece, dating from 1991, argues for the concept of adaptability, showing how language is dynamically adapted to its uses, contexts, and purposes to serve its speakers. Parikh's article, also published in 1991, is a long, complex, but rewarding game-theoretic account of how speaker and hearer come to choose the same interpretation of an utterance. Situation theory is then brought in to solve some *
E-maih [email protected]
0378-2166/00/$ - see front matter © 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: S0378-2166(99)00013-2
364
Book review / Journal of'Pragmatics 32 (2000) 363-366
of the problems that arise with the meaningNN aspect of Grice's theory. Unfortunately, there are a couple of misnumbered figures and a typo in the notation which is potentially confusing (a t for a q~). Parikh's piece is virtually unknown (a search on a citation index returned only one hit), and Kasher's inclusion in this collection is a brilliant idea. Part Ten is titled 'Talk in interaction' and contains two classics of the field: Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson's 'A simplest systematics for the organization of turn taking for conversation' and the same authors' (in different order) 'The preference for self-correction in the organization of repair in conversation', both of which appeared originally in Language (in 1974 and 1977, respectively). A (1978) piece by Goffman, 'Response cries', is perhaps less known, but is highly entertaining as well as informative: it deals with self-talk and with such interjections as Oops. ~, and shows how these are not at all uncontrolled impulsive reactions, but are in fact conventional. Lerner's article ('Collectivities in action: Establishing the relevance of conjoined participation in conversation') is a recent (1993) work addressing the fact that speakers may perform certain acts as groups (i.e., not individually). Part Eleven ('Discourse') also begins with a classic, an excerpt from van Dijk's Text and context (1977), one of the pioneering texts of text-linguistics, which focuses on transphrastic connectives, an area of research which would become popular later as 'pragmatic connectives'. In a lengthy postscript, van Dijk comments on the changes both in his thinking and on the field of pragmatics. Both have drifted, as is well known, towards the incorporation of ever broader concerns than the bare propositional/presuppositional skeleton, which, in the late seventies/early eighties, was the scope of text-linguistics, and which van Dijk himself was already augmenting with goals, intentions, etc. Nowadays, witness socio-pragmatics and critical linguistics, there seems to have emerged a broad consensus that social and ideological issues need to be incorporated in the analysis of discourse. Van Dijk's own work, which has gone on the study the discourse of racism, is a good example of this evolution. Fillmore's piece 'Pragmatics and the description of discourse' (1976) is hardly known but an interesting study of how semantic features of texts interact with pragmatic ones to determine literary genres, with a focus on 'free indirect discourse'. Fillmore argues that the study of literary language may help the study of face-to-face communication, which remains the primary mode of existence of language. Kuno's (1978) article presents a functional sentence perspective (FSP) analysis of syntactic phenomena, which he terms 'functional syntax' (later the title of his 1987 book). This comes as a good remedy to Levinson's (1983) dismissal of FSP. In this same trend, Prince's contribution to Newmeyer's (1988) four volume survey of linguistics for Cambridge University Press presents a discussion of 'discourse competence' along similar lines. We return to connectives with a 1984 piece on pragmatic connectives and their functions in argumentative structure, conversation, and monological text, by one of the key figure in the field, Eddy Roulet. Finally, a 1988 piece by Giora on the requirement of informativeness in texts (i.e., the idea that the most informative element of the text should come last) closes the volume. This last piece has a useful
Book review / Journal c~fPragmatics 32 (2000) 363-366
365
postscript which presents recent developments of this theory with some interesting applications to irony, for example. Overall, the editor should be congratulated for collecting a number of undisputed classics and adding a few stimulating, little known pearls to spice things up, as it were. This volume, and the others, will serve students and professionals alike, who will no longer need to track down the disiecta m e m b r a of the discussion on these topics, but will find them conveniently collected in these volumes. At the staggering price of $905.00 for the six volumes which make up this mastodonic collection, it is safe to assume that this work is aimed at the library market. However, there are some puzzling aspects to this book. Clearly, it is not meant for students, since it is too expensive even for professionals. But if it is meant as a reference text for professionals, it seems a bit redundant to reproduce Chomsky's or Sperber and Wilson's or Sacks and associates' pieces, which are surely part of any self-respecting pragmatician's library. Perhaps the idea was to serve both the student and the professional. What is really problematic is the minimalism (no pun intended) of Kasher's introductions, which are often limited to a few sentences and not very informative at that, since they often fail to provide significant background or even warn readers of developments in the research. For example, Roulet's work is presented without any mention of Ducrot's influence, which strikes me as fundamental to the understanding of the Geneva-style discourse analysis approach (see Moeschler and Reboul, 1994: ch. 18 for an overview). In other cases the lack of an explicit discussion needlessly complicates the reader's task; for example, not counting the two postscripts, only two articles from the nineties have been included. Is this a subtle point the editor is driving home, or just a coincidence? Conversely, at times the introductions seem redundant: does anybody need to be told that Chomsky teaches at MIT? And if we assume that a student naive enough to be unaware of this fact is part of the intended audience of the book, then will half of a .page's description of C h o m s k y ' s work be enough of a context for the poor soul to understand the discussion in 'Reflections on language'? In other words, I feel that the editor, who has been a significant player in the development of the discipline, should have been more open about his preferences and interests and should have, at least, hinted at his 'critical assessment of the area' which he mentions as his primary goal for in the foreword (vol. 1, xiv). I, for one, would have liked to know what Kasher thinks of conversation analysis, or what he feels are the reasons why text-theory, which seemed to be off to a great start in the seventies, faltered (and I assume that is why there is no trace of it in the survey, beyond van Dijk). Regardless of this criticism, which is, after all, somewhat unfair, as I am wishing the editor would have embarked on a much more complex project than he already had, this is an extremely valuable contribution to the field and one that any serious research library would do well to acquire. References Kuno, Susumu, 1987. Functional syntax. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.
366
Book review / Journal of Pragmatics 32 (2000) 363-366
Levinson, Stephen C., 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moeschler, Jacques and Anne Reboul, 1994. Dictionnaire encyclop6dique de pragmatique. Paris: Seuil. Newmeyer, Frederick, J., 1988. Linguistics: The Cambridge survey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Salvatore Attardo is Associate Professor of Linguistics at Youngstown State University (USA). His
first book (Linguistic Theories of Humor; De Gruyter) appeared in 1994. He has published on various topics of semantics and pragmatics in the Journal of Pragmatics, Pragmatics and Cognition, BLS, Machine Translation, and HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research. He is currently working on a monograph tentatively entitled Theoretical Pragmatics and on a study of humor in longer texts.
Journal of Pragmatics 32 (2000) 363-366
Book review Asa Kasher, ed., Pragmatics: Critical concepts. London: Routledge, 1998. Communication, interaction and discourse, vol. 5. $905.00 (6 vols.). Reviewed by Salvatore Attardo, English Department, Youngstown State University, Youngstown, OH 44555, USA.* Kasher's work is a multi-volume critical anthology of pragmatics. The fifth volume under review here comprises Parts Nine through Eleven. Part Nine is called 'Communication' and focuses on the age-old debate of whether the communicative aspect of language is essential to it: Searle's and Chomsky's well know arguments are anthologized, as well as an interesting article by a group of psychologists (Blank, Gessner and Esposito) who present a case study of a child who shows a distinct separation of linguistic competence and its use for communicative purposes. This child, while showing linguistic ability comparable to his peers, did not engage in any 'communicative' uses of language (for example, he refused to talk to anyone except his parents, frequently provided inadequate responses, did not point or understand pointing, etc.). These data support Chomsky's view that communication is not the sole/ prime function of language. Dummett's piece returns to Chomsky's question about the possibility of non-communicative uses of language. He broadens the issue to include truth-functional treatments of meaning, as well as Grice-style 'meaningNN' accounts of meaning, and concludes that language must necessarily involve both communicative as well as private uses, but that the private ones are primitive ("the primary notion must be that of an idiolect", p. 136). A short (1980) article by Akmajian, Demers and Hamish argues for the inadequacy of the basic Shannon-Weaver style 'code' of communication, an argument quite familiar to the readers of the authors' excellent textbook of the same period. A similar critique of the code model is presented in Relevance Theory. Sperber and Wilson's (1987) summary of their argument for RT is also a classic, and represents this influential branch of pragmatics in this collection. Verschueren's piece, dating from 1991, argues for the concept of adaptability, showing how language is dynamically adapted to its uses, contexts, and purposes to serve its speakers. Parikh's article, also published in 1991, is a long, complex, but rewarding game-theoretic account of how speaker and hearer come to choose the same interpretation of an utterance. Situation theory is then brought in to solve some *
E-maih [email protected]
0378-2166/00/$ - see front matter © 2000 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. PII: S0378-2166(99)00013-2
364
Book review / Journal of'Pragmatics 32 (2000) 363-366
of the problems that arise with the meaningNN aspect of Grice's theory. Unfortunately, there are a couple of misnumbered figures and a typo in the notation which is potentially confusing (a t for a q~). Parikh's piece is virtually unknown (a search on a citation index returned only one hit), and Kasher's inclusion in this collection is a brilliant idea. Part Ten is titled 'Talk in interaction' and contains two classics of the field: Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson's 'A simplest systematics for the organization of turn taking for conversation' and the same authors' (in different order) 'The preference for self-correction in the organization of repair in conversation', both of which appeared originally in Language (in 1974 and 1977, respectively). A (1978) piece by Goffman, 'Response cries', is perhaps less known, but is highly entertaining as well as informative: it deals with self-talk and with such interjections as Oops. ~, and shows how these are not at all uncontrolled impulsive reactions, but are in fact conventional. Lerner's article ('Collectivities in action: Establishing the relevance of conjoined participation in conversation') is a recent (1993) work addressing the fact that speakers may perform certain acts as groups (i.e., not individually). Part Eleven ('Discourse') also begins with a classic, an excerpt from van Dijk's Text and context (1977), one of the pioneering texts of text-linguistics, which focuses on transphrastic connectives, an area of research which would become popular later as 'pragmatic connectives'. In a lengthy postscript, van Dijk comments on the changes both in his thinking and on the field of pragmatics. Both have drifted, as is well known, towards the incorporation of ever broader concerns than the bare propositional/presuppositional skeleton, which, in the late seventies/early eighties, was the scope of text-linguistics, and which van Dijk himself was already augmenting with goals, intentions, etc. Nowadays, witness socio-pragmatics and critical linguistics, there seems to have emerged a broad consensus that social and ideological issues need to be incorporated in the analysis of discourse. Van Dijk's own work, which has gone on the study the discourse of racism, is a good example of this evolution. Fillmore's piece 'Pragmatics and the description of discourse' (1976) is hardly known but an interesting study of how semantic features of texts interact with pragmatic ones to determine literary genres, with a focus on 'free indirect discourse'. Fillmore argues that the study of literary language may help the study of face-to-face communication, which remains the primary mode of existence of language. Kuno's (1978) article presents a functional sentence perspective (FSP) analysis of syntactic phenomena, which he terms 'functional syntax' (later the title of his 1987 book). This comes as a good remedy to Levinson's (1983) dismissal of FSP. In this same trend, Prince's contribution to Newmeyer's (1988) four volume survey of linguistics for Cambridge University Press presents a discussion of 'discourse competence' along similar lines. We return to connectives with a 1984 piece on pragmatic connectives and their functions in argumentative structure, conversation, and monological text, by one of the key figure in the field, Eddy Roulet. Finally, a 1988 piece by Giora on the requirement of informativeness in texts (i.e., the idea that the most informative element of the text should come last) closes the volume. This last piece has a useful
Book review / Journal c~fPragmatics 32 (2000) 363-366
365
postscript which presents recent developments of this theory with some interesting applications to irony, for example. Overall, the editor should be congratulated for collecting a number of undisputed classics and adding a few stimulating, little known pearls to spice things up, as it were. This volume, and the others, will serve students and professionals alike, who will no longer need to track down the disiecta m e m b r a of the discussion on these topics, but will find them conveniently collected in these volumes. At the staggering price of $905.00 for the six volumes which make up this mastodonic collection, it is safe to assume that this work is aimed at the library market. However, there are some puzzling aspects to this book. Clearly, it is not meant for students, since it is too expensive even for professionals. But if it is meant as a reference text for professionals, it seems a bit redundant to reproduce Chomsky's or Sperber and Wilson's or Sacks and associates' pieces, which are surely part of any self-respecting pragmatician's library. Perhaps the idea was to serve both the student and the professional. What is really problematic is the minimalism (no pun intended) of Kasher's introductions, which are often limited to a few sentences and not very informative at that, since they often fail to provide significant background or even warn readers of developments in the research. For example, Roulet's work is presented without any mention of Ducrot's influence, which strikes me as fundamental to the understanding of the Geneva-style discourse analysis approach (see Moeschler and Reboul, 1994: ch. 18 for an overview). In other cases the lack of an explicit discussion needlessly complicates the reader's task; for example, not counting the two postscripts, only two articles from the nineties have been included. Is this a subtle point the editor is driving home, or just a coincidence? Conversely, at times the introductions seem redundant: does anybody need to be told that Chomsky teaches at MIT? And if we assume that a student naive enough to be unaware of this fact is part of the intended audience of the book, then will half of a .page's description of C h o m s k y ' s work be enough of a context for the poor soul to understand the discussion in 'Reflections on language'? In other words, I feel that the editor, who has been a significant player in the development of the discipline, should have been more open about his preferences and interests and should have, at least, hinted at his 'critical assessment of the area' which he mentions as his primary goal for in the foreword (vol. 1, xiv). I, for one, would have liked to know what Kasher thinks of conversation analysis, or what he feels are the reasons why text-theory, which seemed to be off to a great start in the seventies, faltered (and I assume that is why there is no trace of it in the survey, beyond van Dijk). Regardless of this criticism, which is, after all, somewhat unfair, as I am wishing the editor would have embarked on a much more complex project than he already had, this is an extremely valuable contribution to the field and one that any serious research library would do well to acquire. References Kuno, Susumu, 1987. Functional syntax. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.
366
Book review / Journal of Pragmatics 32 (2000) 363-366
Levinson, Stephen C., 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moeschler, Jacques and Anne Reboul, 1994. Dictionnaire encyclop6dique de pragmatique. Paris: Seuil. Newmeyer, Frederick, J., 1988. Linguistics: The Cambridge survey. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Salvatore Attardo is Associate Professor of Linguistics at Youngstown State University (USA). His
first book (Linguistic Theories of Humor; De Gruyter) appeared in 1994. He has published on various topics of semantics and pragmatics in the Journal of Pragmatics, Pragmatics and Cognition, BLS, Machine Translation, and HUMOR: International Journal of Humor Research. He is currently working on a monograph tentatively entitled Theoretical Pragmatics and on a study of humor in longer texts.