=?utf-8?Q?27.3299, _Review:_Pragmatics:_Verschueren, _=C3=96stman_(2015)?=

The LINGUIST List via LINGUIST linguist at listserv.linguistlist.org
Wed Aug 17 14:33:04 UTC 2016


LINGUIST List: Vol-27-3299. Wed Aug 17 2016. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 27.3299, Review: Pragmatics: Verschueren, Östman (2015)

Moderators: linguist at linguistlist.org (Damir Cavar, Malgorzata E. Cavar)
Reviews: reviews at linguistlist.org (Anthony Aristar, Helen Aristar-Dry,
                                   Robert Coté, Michael Czerniakowski)
Homepage: http://linguistlist.org

*****************    LINGUIST List Support    *****************
                       Fund Drive 2016
                   25 years of LINGUIST List!
Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
           http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

Editor for this issue: Michael Czerniakowski <mike at linguistlist.org>
================================================================


Date: Wed, 17 Aug 2016 10:30:39
From: Lelia Glass [lelia at stanford.edu]
Subject: Handbook of Pragmatics

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36157397


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/26/26-5415.html

EDITOR: Jan-Ola  Östman
EDITOR: Jef  Verschueren
TITLE: Handbook of Pragmatics
SUBTITLE: 2015 Installment
SERIES TITLE: Handbook of Pragmatics 19
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2015

REVIEWER: Lelia Glass, Stanford University

Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

The 2015 installment of the Handbook of Pragmatics is a collection of ten
papers added to the Handbook in that year.  

The Handbook of Pragmatics is published by John Benjamins and edited by Jef
Verschueren, Jan-Ola Östman and Jan Blommaert.  It is prepared by the
International Pragmatics Association, whose current president is Jan-Ola
Östman (University of Helsinki).  It is updated every year with around a dozen
new papers.  The full Handbook, consisting of a Manual introducing basic
pragmatics concepts followed by twenty years of supplemental articles on
various topics, is available online.  Ten thematically organized collections
of ''highlights'' have been published as stand-alone collections.

The 2015 installment is printed on loose-leaf paper; by using binder rings,
one could bind it with papers from other yearly installments.  It consists of
ten papers on a wide range of topics, from interpreter-mediated dialog to the
legacy of the French social theorist Pierre Bourdieu.  Each paper is
approximately twenty pages, with fairly wide line spacing.  The papers are
non-technical review articles that can be easily digested in one sitting.

In the first chapter, ''Argumentation in discourse and grammar,'' by Roberta
Piazza (Sussex) and Melanie J Green (Sussex), Piazza and Green attempt to
integrate the ''macro'' level of argument analysis (the structure of entire
extended discourses) with the ''micro'' level (the structure of individual
sentences and phrases).  They review both foundational and current literature
on argumentation, including recent debates about whether the primary goal of
argumentation is to persuade or whether persuasion is just one of many
functions of argumentation, and recent work suggesting that formal logic is
insufficiently flexible for capturing the non-airtight reasoning deployed in
many naturally occurring arguments, so that ''informal'' logic should be used
instead.  As an example of an argument in attested speech, they illustrate an
extended passage from a television news segment about terrorist attacks in
Chechnya and distill the logic underlying the discussion.

Next, Piazza and Green turn to the ''micro'' level of argument analysis, at
the level of individual sentences.  They cite work showing that speakers
prefer to package old information before new information, and suggest that
word order is a strategy not only for managing the Common Ground, but for
guiding reasoning and structuring arguments.  They encourage researchers to
better integrate this sentence-level analysis into the study of argumentation.

In the second chapter, ''Pierre Bourdieu -- Perspectives on language in
society,'' by Jan Blommaert (Tilburg), Blommaert distills the contributions of
the French social scientist Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002).  Blommaert
synthesizes Bourdieu's legacy into three themes: (1) his understanding of the
ethnographer as a subjective participant/observer; (2) his methodology of
supplementing ethnography with statistical analysis and survey data; and (3)
his goal of developing ''nexus concepts'' (habitus, social capital, symbolic
violence) where the ''macro'' landscape of social stratification is reproduced
in ''micro'' interactions.

Blommaert emphasizes that for Bourdieu, the ethnographer cannot and should not
attempt to be a truly objective chronicler of another society, but should
recognize that he or she comes to the ethnography as a social being deeply
influenced by his or her historically situated, cultural background. 
Blommaert then explores Bourdieu's convictions about proper social science
methodology: that ethnography is the starting point, but that survey data
helps one to generalize one's ethnographic findings to a broader group of
people.  Finally, Blommaert identifies and contextualizes Bourdieu's
influential concepts of habitus, symbolic power, and the ''market'' of
symbolic capital -- detailing the way these concepts manifest in speech and
verbal interaction.

The third chapter is called ''Collocation and colligation,'' by Tomas Lehecka
(Max Planck).  As Lehecka summarizes, collocation refers to an above-chance
co-occurrence between two or more lexical items: for example ‘read’ collocates
with ‘book’.   Colligation indicates above-chance co-occurrence between two or
more grammatical categories (determiners colligate with nouns, as in ‘the
cat’), or a word and a grammatical category (‘budge’ colligates with negation,
as ‘I won't budge’).  Lehecka describes the history of these concepts and lays
out several ways that collocation and colligation can be calculated in
corpora.  He then explains how collocation and colligation have been used in
the literature: in the construction of FrameNet; in machine translation; by
lexicographers; and in lexical-semantic corpus studies of differences between
near-synonyms such as ‘little’ and ‘small’.  More recently, the concept of
''mutual attraction'' between words has found new life with the advent of
vector semantics: attempts to represent the meaning of a word by the other
words it tends to co-occur with.

Lehecka then turns to the theoretical significance of collocation and
colligation, suggesting that these concepts are not just textual statistics
but are also represented mentally, underlying psychological phenomena such as
lexical priming and the mental representation of the lexicon.   In that sense,
he suggests that knowing how words collocate and colligate is part of what it
means to know a language.

In the fourth chapter, ''Emotion display,'' by Tom Koole (Groningen), Koole
emphasizes that the display of emotion is not simply the external
manifestation of a person's feelings, but a socially regulated, culturally
specific set of interactional behaviors.  Emotions are displayed as much for
one's audience as for oneself; and emotion displays follow rules of
turn-taking like other communicative acts.  Koole overviews discourse-analytic
work on laughter and expressions of pain, emphasizing that the sharing and
managing of emotions is fundamental to interpersonal relationships and a
primary function of language.  Koole gives particular attention to the
discourse functions of laughter (also discussed in the chapter by Glenn and
Holt), as a way of closing topics, ending one's turn, and lightening heavy
topics. 

In the fifth chapter, ''Interpreter-mediated interaction,'' by Cecilia
Wadensjö (Stockholm University),  Wadensjö discusses interpreter-mediated
interaction: conversations involving a person who translates between parties
speaking different languages.  After defining key terms for various levels of
simultaneity between the original-language speaker's talk and the
interpreter's translation, she emphasizes that the interpreter plays an active
role in managing the flow of a discourse.  She gives examples of two naturally
occurring interpreter-mediated dialogs, one involving an inexperienced
interpreter and one with a highly effective interpreter, showing that the
qualified interpreter is able to facilitate a much more effective interaction.

In the sixth chapter, ''Laughter,'' by Phillip Glenn (Emerson College) and
Elizabeth Holt (University of Huddersfield), Glenn and Holt explore recent
work on laughter in interaction.  Echoing the chapter on emotion display by
Tom Koole, they point out that laughter is a communicative act that follows
rules of turn-taking.  Engaging with earlier literature, they argue that
laughter is not always related to humor, but that it is always indexical to
some sort of referent.  Although laughter has no obvious meaning, Glenn and
Holt argue that laughter is best understood in terms of what it accomplishes
in discourse.  For example, they cite literature showing that laughter can be
used to mitigate face-threats or lighten the mood surrounding sad topics, to
signal the end of a topic or a turn, and to perform the identity work of
affiliating or disaffiliating from one's interlocutor.  As transcripts and
recordings of interactions become more technologically advanced, the authors
point out that it is now possible to study different types of laughter in more
phonetic detail.

The seventh chapter is called ''Geoffrey Leech, 1936-2014 -- The Pragmatics
legacy,'' by Jonathan Culpeper (Lancaster).  Jonathan Culpeper eulogizes his
Lancaster University colleague, Geoffrey Leech, who published over 30 books
and 130 articles, amassed over 32,000 Google Scholar citations, and made
contributions to a variety of subfields in linguistics including corpus
construction, pragmatics, modality, and politeness theory.  Unifying these
diverse projects, Culpeper argues, was a deep interest in language as it is
used in a social context, and a conviction that it is better to say ''a lot
about a little'' than the reverse.  One of Leech's most significant
contributions was to lead the Lancaster University team that created the
100,000,000-word British National Corpus, which has grounded several decades
of work by researchers around the world.  Culpeper also discusses Leech's
maxim-based work on politeness, defending it from critics who sometimes
misunderstand or oversimplify it.  Culpeper concludes by noting that Leech not
only worked on politeness in an academic context, but also embodied politeness
in his life as a generous, kind, and unassuming colleague.

In the eighth chapter, ''Omolúàbí,'' by Akin Odebunmi (University of Ibadan
and University of Freiburg) introduces the Yoruba concept of omolúàbí,
referring both to the Yoruba cultural values of good character, proper
etiquette, integrity, chivalry, hospitality, and kindness, and to people who
embody these values.  He details the complex system of greetings to be used
for people of different professions and social statuses and at different times
of day: for example, there is a specific greeting for the rainy season
(''Greeting you for the rains''), for hunters (wishing them a good catch), for
the early morning, the late morning, and so on.  Omolúàbí is a composite
concept involving both etiquette and character, so in addition to overviewing
Yoruba etiquette, Odemunmi also discusses the cultural values that an omolúàbí
person is supposed to display: honesty, kindness, chivalry, respect for
elders, and so on.  He gives several examples from the Nigerian news of people
who were considered to display or flout omolúàbí, and explores how omolúàbí is
changing as Nigerian culture becomes increasingly globalized.

In the ninth chapter, ''Silence,'' by Dennis Kurzon (University of Haifa),
Kurzon explores the many meanings of silence in an extremely broad range of
literatures.  Focusing on silence in turn-taking, he distinguishes between
lapses between turns (when no next speaker is selected), and the extremely
face-threatening and awkward case when someone is selected as the next speaker
but does not reply (''What do you think?'' followed by silence).  He also
examines silence in other contexts: silence after a teacher asks a question;
silence in libraries and places of worship.  In some contexts, he argues,
silence can be assigned an ''illocutionary force'' in the sense of Austin. 
Kurzon goes on to discuss silence in the legal context (''the right to remain
silent''), silence in the context of language learners who do not yet know how
to speak, as well as silence in the more metaphorical sense of ''silencing'' a
marginalized group or being ''silent'' on a particular topic.  He mentions
that ellipsis and passives can be considered ''silence'' as well, in that some
information is not realized linguistically.

In the tenth chapter, ''Sound symbolism,'' by Kimi Akita  (Nagoya University),
Akita synthesizes the long history of work on sound symbolism and iconicity,
places where the relation between sound and meaning, contrary to Saussure's
thesis, actually seems not to be arbitrary.  She points out that the
literature is ambiguous about exactly what level of ''meaning'' is involved in
sound/meaning correspondences, and exactly what level of sound is involved in
sound symbolism.  In addition to this critical summary of the literature,
Akita provides helpful tables detailing previous experiments on sound
symbolism, the languages involved, and the findings.  Akita then asks why
sound symbolism arises, and whether it is universal.  She reviews literature
suggesting that some instances of sound symbolism (e.g. the tendency for
diminutive morphemes to contain high vowels) are widespread, whereas others
(e.g. the meanings of Japanese ideophones) are not recoverable to people who
do not speak the language.

EVALUATION

The 2015 installment of the Handbook of Pragmatics is not meant to be
cohesive.  These ten papers are meant to form part of a repository of papers;
and any given researcher will only read the handful of papers in this
repository relevant to their work.  Therefore, it is not surprising that this
collection of papers is a bit of a grab-bag with few unifying themes.

Although these ten papers do not cohere, they all serve as quick, up-to-date,
fairly comprehensive overviews of their subject matter.  The papers by
Blommaert, Lehecka, and Akita stand out for critically synthesizing the
literature in a particularly insightful manner.  

More broadly, the Handbook of Pragmatics seems to be a valuable archive of
review papers on an impressively wide range of topics related to pragmatics,
based on a very broad and interdisciplinary understanding of the field.  It is
unfortunate that this impressive resource is so expensive (200 euros for a
yearly online subscription without the bibliography).  Since the Handbook
contains so many papers, this may be a reasonable cost per paper; but since
any given researcher is likely to only read a handful of papers contained in
the repository, the cost per paper that one reads is very high indeed.

This edition of the Handbook will be useful to researchers who are interested
in a quick, up-to-date overview of any of the ten topics covered within. 
Since the papers are not technical, they could be assigned to undergraduates,
although they are also detailed enough to be useful to experienced
researchers.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Lelia Glass is a Ph.D. candidate in linguistics at Stanford, focusing on
semantics and pragmatics. She has worked on belief verbs, modality,
compounding, and adjective meaning.





------------------------------------------------------------------------------

*****************    LINGUIST List Support    *****************
                       Fund Drive 2016
Please support the LL editors and operation with a donation at:
            http://funddrive.linguistlist.org/donate/

        Thank you very much for your support of LINGUIST!
 


----------------------------------------------------------
LINGUIST List: Vol-27-3299	
----------------------------------------------------------







More information about the LINGUIST mailing list