28.4297, Review: Morphology; Pragmatics; Psycholinguistics; Semantics; Syntax: Huang (2017)

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Subject: 28.4297, Review: Morphology; Pragmatics; Psycholinguistics; Semantics; Syntax: Huang (2017)

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Date: Thu, 19 Oct 2017 14:25:14
From: Sherry Yong Chen [sychen at mit.edu]
Subject: The Oxford Handbook of Pragmatics

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/28/28-1898.html

EDITOR: Yan  Huang
TITLE: The Oxford Handbook of Pragmatics
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2017

REVIEWER: Sherry Yong Chen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

REVIEWS EDITOR: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

This edited volume contains 30 chapters on various aspects of the study of
pragmatics, written by a total of 32 contributors. The volume is edited by
Yang Huang, Professor of Linguistics at the University of Auckland. Huang is a
renowned scholar in the field of pragmatics and has published extensively on
various topics; he is best known for his work on anaphora and related
phenomena at the syntax-pragmatics interface.

The majority of the contributors are pioneers in the respective
sub-discipline, and many have devoted years of research to the contributed
topic. In fact, some contributors play a central role in the development of a
pragmatic theory, e.g. Deirdre Wilson on Relevance Theory, Penelope Brown on
the face-saving model of politeness, and Laurence R. Horn on the neo-Gricean
lexical pragmatic theory, to just name a few. The expertise of the
contributors certainly sets high expectations and speaks quite in favour of
the overall quality of this edited volume.

The introduction chapter provides an overview of pragmatics as a subfield of
linguistics, with a particular emphasis on its interplay with many kinds of
disciplinary influences. It begins by laying out two major schools of thoughts
– which are further spelt out in the subsequent chapters in Part 1 – and
demonstrating the strengths of each school and how their contributions are in
a somewhat complementary relationship, motivating the need to bring together
their research outcomes by compiling this edited volume. The editor then moves
onto an introduction of macro-pragmatics, dividing the current central topics
into three groups: those that are cognitive oriented, those that are socially
and/or culturally oriented, and those that are at the interface of various
aspects of language. This section therefore essentially foreshadows Part 2 –
Part 5, and it is quite successfully achieved by fleshing out the high-level
questions – many remaining largely unanswered – that can be used to guide the
readers through the remainder of the volume. 

The 29 chapters other than the editorial introduction are grouped into 5
parts:
1: Schools of Thought, Foundations, and Theories
2: Central Topics
3: Macro-Pragmatics and Cognition
4: Macro-Pragmatics and Society/Culture
5: Interfaces

Part 1 introduces the mainstream schools and theories of pragmatics, laying
down the philosophical foundation of the study of pragmatics. The two major
schools of thought, namely the Anglo-American school and the European
Continental school, take a component view and a functional perspective on
pragmatics respectively, in relation to other areas of linguistics. Guided by
this distinction in the broad sense, six chapters are devoted to bringing
together views from both sides in order to appreciate the different ways of
approaching pragmatic questions, as well as to provide a solid theoretical and
philosophical foundation for further discussion. Against this setup, Anne
Bezuidenhout opens up Chapter 2 with a discussion of several debates between
contextualism and semantic minimalism, which includes the division of
cognitive resources between semantics and pragmatics in human language
faculty, a recurring topic in this edited volume (and indeed, in pragmatics
research over the last few decades). Having identified the key debates,
Bezuidenhout ultimately offers five strategies to “break the deadlock” between
the two camps, but concludes that there is no “knockdown argument” against
either, leaving the debate fundamentally unsettled for future work. Chapter 3,
written by the editor himself, revisits the classical and neo-Gricean
enterprises by assessing their roles in linguistic theory. Specifically, it
presents a concise outline and evaluation of neo-Gricean pragmatic theory
(particularly the Hornian (1984, 2012) and Levinsonian (1987, 2000) models) in
the present day context. In a similar spirit, Relevance Theory is examined in
Chapter 4, contributed by Deirdre Wilson who is herself a co-founder of the
theory. The chapter proceeds with the relation between relevance and cognition
as well as communication, and ends with some new directions that are borne out
of recent research conducted by relevance theorists. Next comes Chapter 5,
written by Reinhard Blutner who dedicates the chapter to a critical discussion
of three formal frameworks, namely optimality-theoretical pragmatics,
game-theoretical pragmatics, and decision-theoretical pragmatics, all of which
are rooted in the exploitation of formal mathematical instruments. Chapter 6
by Jef Verschueren turns to contextualizing the European Continental
perspective view of pragmatics by first questioning the conventionally held
dichotomy between the Anglo-American school and the European Continental
school, and it later considers the contrast between Western and Non-Western
based conceptualization of language use, returning to the philosophical
foundation of pragmatics research. Lastly, Chapter 7 by Jacob L. Mey examines
the sociological foundation of pragmatics by taking an anecdotal and highly
self-reflexive approach, all while offering a comprehensive survey of common
practices in the study of language meaning in social context. Taken together,
Part 1 thus comprises  seven independent chapters about most major theories in
the field of pragmatics, with an adequate coverage of  both philosophical and
methodological foundations of study. 

Part 2 contains several long-standing central topics in the field of
pragmatics, with a very well-established theme in each chapter. Chapter 8 by
Yan Huang looks at both conversational and conventional implicature, covering
both existing accounts and latest developments in the study of implicature.
Presupposition is then discussed in Chapter 9, where Bart Geurts explores what
constitutes given information in a context, and whether presuppositions are
always contextually given. Chapter 10 by Stephen C. Levinson calls for a
renaissance of interest in speech acts – which the author claims has been left
off the research agenda since a few decades ago – by emphasizing their
fundamental role in language science and inviting new light to be shed on some
long-standing questions. The last three chapters of Part 2 share a broad
interest in the notion of referentiality and contextual dependency. First
comes an examination of deixis in Chapter 11, contributed by Jack Sidnell and
N. J. Enfield who start with an investigation of communicative acts in social
interaction and demonstrative systems in human language, and ultimately build
up to the argument that deixis is a “low-cost” and “highly efficient” form of
referencing. Chapter 12 then continues with the theme of reference, in which
Barbara Abbott investigates the various ways that speakers use to accomplish
reference; in particular, she takes up the novel position that verbs and
adjectives, in addition to nominals, can also be analyzed as effective tools
of referring. Finally, Chapter 13 by Anita Fetzer takes an interdisciplinary
approach to examine the notion of context as a major field of study, marking
the traditional distinction between semantics and pragmatics, and ultimately
suggests possible bridging points for the diverging perspectives in the most
prominent approaches presented here. 

Part 3 and Part 4 engage with interdisciplinary approaches to central issues
in the pragmatics literature, ranging from clinical, computational, and
experimental studies to sociological perspectives. Part 3 takes the theme of
cognitively oriented topics, with each chapter providing an overview of the
subfield under discussion. In general, chapters in this part all concern the
mental processes of human communication, but I was fascinated by how each
chapter takes an almost completely different approach to the introduction of
the respective subfield of study: Chapter 14 by Bruno G. Bara begins with
three fundamental concepts, i.e. the motivation to cooperate, a shared
structure of knowledge, and the intention to communicate, as the analytical
tools of study, before presenting an outline of the Cognitive Pragmatics
Theory and critically examining the empirical evidence for or against it. In a
rather different fashion, Pamela R. Rollins devotes Chapter 15 to explaining
how each stage of pragmatic development comes about over the course of our
early life within the social interactionalist framework, particularly the
development of social routines from nonverbal to verbal interactions. Rollins
thoughtfully concludes with a remark on the importance of cultural
differences, noting that pragmatics research must bear in mind these mediating
factors especially when making cross-cultural generalizations. Taking once
again a different approach, Raymond W. Gibbs in Chapter 16 introduces the
utility of various experimental techniques that contribute to our
understanding of several traditional concerns in pragmatics theories. The last
three chapters of Part 3 (Chapter 17 on computational pragmatics by Harry
Bunt, Chapter 18 on clinical pragmatics by Louise Cummings, and Chapter 19 on
neuropragmatics by Brigitte Stemmer) demonstrate how the analysis of annotated
corpora, clinical assessments and treatments, as well as investigations into
the neural network can help  present-day pragmaticists tackle questions that
relate to the broad notion of “macro-pragmatics”; although these are areas
that I am not particularly familiar with, each of the contributors carefully
sets up their discussions in such a way that I find it fairly easy to follow
the main ideas. 

Meanwhile, Part 4 zooms in onto some socially and/or culturally oriented
questions. Although my current research no longer focuses on this particular
area, my undergraduate background in sociolinguistics allows me to revisit the
topics in these chapters with a rekindled interest.  In Chapter 20, Penelope
Brown presents some approaches that pursue a universalist view of
(im)politeness before critically examining these proposals, and eventually
surveys some recent empirical research that investigates politeness in
different cultural settings. With this increasing awareness of cultural
factors in pragmatics research, a closer look at cross- and intercultural
pragmatics is naturally followed in Chapter 21, where Istvan Kecskes guides us
through the burgeoning literature that highlights differences as well as
parallels in communicative styles across cultures. Chapter 22 by J. César
Félix-Brasdefer continues with the theme of cross-cultural pragmatics, but
with a shift of focus to the acquisition of pragmatic norms in L2, i.e. the
idea of “interlanguage”. Finally, Emanuel A. Schegloff closes this Part with
Chapter 23 on conversation analysis (CA), where he offers a concise overview
of the commonly pursued inquiries and some “practiced solutions”. 

I would like to additionally highlight that the chapters in Part 3 and Part 4
not only function to introduce the key research topics in macro-pragmatics,
but they also identify and exemplify many different methodologies that can be
employed to addressing empirical questions, with insights from
state-of-the-art development in an interdisciplinary approach to pragmatics.
While many of these chapters are on relatively new disciplines, they are an
accurate reflection of the most recent development in the field and certainly
invite many old questions to be re-visited with new care. Against this
background, the endeavor to include these topics in the edited volume will
hopefully serve to open up new research agendas.

Finally, Part 5 aims to engage with topics and questions that lie at the
interface between pragmatics and other areas of linguistics. Robyn Carston
opens up Chapter 24 with an attempt to defy the prevalent idea that pragmatics
is secondary to semantics (i.e. pragmatics as the “wastebasket” of
linguistics), emphasizing on the priority of pragmatics from communicative,
evolutionary, and developmental perspectives. Mira Ariel then offers a very
sophisticated yet accessible discussion about the division of labor between
pragmatics and grammar in Chapter 25, where she considers these two “cognitive
competencies” as differing only in terms of the “code versus inference”
distinction, arguing against the feasibility of any over-complicated models.
Under the same theme, Chapter 26 by Wolfgang U. Dressler and Lavinia
Merlini-Barbaresi is dedicated to fleshing out some of the pragmatic uses of
morphological marking, an area of study dubbed as “morphopragmatics” which
assumes a direct interplay between morphology and pragmatics with no mediation
via semantics. In Chapter 27, Laurence R. Horn introduces various lexical
phenomena that are driven by pragmatic principles, specifically examining the
role of conversational implicatures in word formation, and word choice, as
well as meaning change. Turning to the sound aspect of linguistic systems,
Julia Hirschberg in Chapter 28 discusses how pragmatics influences the
variation of prosody in discourse and vice versa, highlighting the influence
of prosodic prominence to different parts of an utterance on the resolution of
sentence ambiguity and the interpretation of various semantic/pragmatic
phenomena, e.g. focus and contrast. Chapter 29 arrives with yet another change
of domain, where Andreas H. Jucker examines language change from a pragmatic
(but also sociological) perspective, modifying a model that sees the origin of
language change in discourse innovations by adopting the notion of community
of practice. This Part, and in fact the entire edited volume, ends with
Chapter 30, in which Gregory Ward, Betty J. Birner, and Elsi Kaiser talk about
theories of information structure – particularly those related to
non-canonical constructions and inferred information – and link these
discussions to various psycholinguistic investigations.

Overall, I find the handbook very successful in promoting recent novel ideas,
particularly those that arise from an interdisciplinary approach to central
issues in pragmatics. 

EVALUATION

The goal of the handbook, as the editor states in the preface, is to provide
“a collection of authoritative, comprehensive, thorough, insightful, and yet
accessible state-of-the-art critical surveys of current original research in
pragmatics”. Bearing this in mind, I read the handbook with the expectation of
seeing a wide range of topics, and my evaluation will be focusing on the
comprehensiveness, accessibility, and originality of this handbook from the
perspective of a graduate student.

Generally speaking, each choice of topic is fairly well justified by the
respective contributor(s). The range of topics is undoubtedly impressive, with
the background assumptions valid and of much relevance in respect to the
recent development of the field. For example, one important virtue of Part 1
is that each chapter can be read on its own to get a quick yet fairly
comprehensive overview of the pragmatic theory under question, which makes it
suitable as a complementary reading for a graduate course in pragmatics. I
would also like to highlight that the chapters in Part 2 provide a decent
combination of reviewing existing theories and rethinking some important
notions with new care; Chapter 10 by Stephen C. Levinson on speech act
theories and Chapter 13 by Anita Fetzer on context stand out as two excellent
examples, both of which offer a historical development of the research while
commenting on some novel insights from recent studies. The thoroughness and
comprehensiveness of these chapters is highly appreciated.

The handbook aims to target a wide range of readership, including “scholars,
researchers, and graduate and advanced undergraduate students specializing in
linguistics”, particularly those in the subfield of pragmatics (and
semantics). Indeed, the breadth of coverage of this edited volume makes it
suitable for researchers from many disciplines that are related to language
science. Having said that, speaking from the perspective of a graduate
student, it seems a pity to me that perhaps not all chapters are written to be
at the same level of accessibility to a less expert readership. For example,
Part 3 has a particular focus on experimental studies of various kinds which,
although particularly to my liking, may require some background knowledge for
advanced undergraduates to thoroughly comprehend. Relating to this point, I
would like to suggest that chapters in both Part 3 and Part 4 could
potentially use more linguistic data (explicitly) to illustrate the arguments,
as it would make it easier for less advanced readers to follow these
experimental results; an outstanding example would be Chapter 23 by Schegloff,
where the contributor has clearly made a commendable attempt to provide
detailed illustrations in order to demonstrate how Conversation Analysis is
done.

The handbook is fitting for the existing literature and the recent trends in
pragmatics research, and its strengths lie mainly in the combination of
theoretical progress with the latest experimental findings. Against the
background of a growing body of experimental work in pragmatics, the selected
chapters’ coverage of topics is extensive and reasonably classified in terms
of the topic’s relation to either cognition or society/culture. While the wide
range of experimental work in Part 3 and Part 4 deserves appreciation for
enriching the content and coverage of recent development in pragmatics, the
majority of these chapters may benefit from making more effort to engage with
the central topics of pragmatics discussed in Part 2, or how empirical
evidence informs us of the theoretical foundations introduced in Part 1. This
is, of course, a balance that is difficult to strike. While I do recognize
that perhaps not all contributors share the same goal, it seems to me that
Chapter 16 by Gibbs and Chapter 17 by Bunt would make two excellent examples
of how experimental findings relate to the traditional Gricean school of
pragmatic research. I particularly appreciate their effort in motivating the
need to study these questions experimentally, although the experimental work
in Chapter 16 can potentially be spelt out with slightly more details (I
understand the author’s intention to focus on answering the theoretical
questions by the use of experimental methods, but I also wonder if it may help
the readers to follow the conclusions if we could have more information about
the experimental studies per se).

Coherence cross chapters is best exemplified in Part 4, where all four
chapters fall under the broad theme of cross- and intercultural pragmatics,
each making an adequate effort to relate to the upcoming chapter without
losing concentration on the current flow of presentation.
One chapter that may stand out is Chapter 29 on Historical Pragmatics, which
is devoted to the broad phenomenon of language change from a pragmatic
perspective, whereas the remaining chapters in Part 5 relates specifically to
another area of linguistics (or rather, another aspect of language).

In addition to the virtue mentioned above, I am intrigued to see that this
edited volume also offers new insights into several long-standing puzzles, and
opens up some potential future research agendas that deserves following up.
This is especially well achieved in the concluding remarks of Chapter 4, where
Deirdre Wilson identifies several theoretically motivated and empirically
significant directions as well as challenges faced by relevance theorists.
With special reference to recent work by Sperber et al (2010) and Wilson
(2011), the contributor suggests the exploration of how “mindreading,
communicative, and epistemic vigilance” capacities may interact during the
comprehension of irony utterances, and more specifically, how procedural
expressions may be linked to epistemic vigilance mechanisms such as modality
and evidentiality. Chapter 19 also concludes with a rather self-contained
proposal on the outlook and future directions of neuropragmatics research,
outlining many questions that await further investigation. These endeavors to
highlight new directions certainly deserve special recognition and
appreciation.

REFERENCES

Horn, L. (1984). Toward a new taxonomy for pragmatic inference: Q-based and
R-based implicature. In D. Schiffrin (Ed.), Meaning, form, and use in context:
Linguistic applications (pp. 11-42). Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University
Press 

Horn, L. (2012). Implicature. In D. Fara, & G. Russell (Eds.), The Routledge
companion to philosophy of language (pp. 53-66). New York/London: Routledge.

Huang, Y. (Ed.). (2017). The Oxford handbook of pragmatics. Oxford University
Press.

Levinson, S. C. (1987). Pragmatics and the grammar of anaphora: A partial
pragmatic reduction of binding and control phenomena. Journal of Linguistics,
23(02), 379-434.

Levinson, S. C. (2000). Presumptive meanings: The theory of generalized
conversational implicature. Cambridge, MA: MIT press.

Sperber, D., Clément, F., Heintz, C., Mascaro, O., Mercier, H., Origgi, G., &
Wilson, D. (2010). Epistemic vigilance. Mind & Language, 25(4), 359-393.

Wilson, D. (2011). The conceptual-procedural distinction: Past, present and
future. In V. Escandell-Vidal, M. Leonetti, & A. Ahern (Eds.), Procedural
meaning: Problems and perspectives (pp. 3-31). Bingley: Emerald.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Sherry Yong Chen is a PhD student at the Department of Linguistics &
Philosophy, MIT. Her research focuses on theoretical and experimental
syntax/semantics/pragmatics, particularly issues related to the notion of
anaphoricity in natural language.





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