30.2211, Review: Pragmatics: Ilie, Norrick (2018)

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Subject: 30.2211, Review: Pragmatics: Ilie, Norrick (2018)

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Date: Tue, 28 May 2019 15:41:25
From: Juan Bueno Holle [jotajotabueno at gmail.com]
Subject: Pragmatics and its Interfaces

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/29/29-3793.html

EDITOR: Cornelia  Ilie
EDITOR: Neal R.  Norrick
TITLE: Pragmatics and its Interfaces
SERIES TITLE: Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 294
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2018

REVIEWER: Juan José Bueno Holle, Independent Researcher

SUMMARY

The book “Pragmatics and its interfaces”, provides a useful and illustrative
array of studies by scholars working at the cross-disciplinary edges of the
field of pragmatics. Edited by Cornelia Ilie and Neal Norrick, the collection
of 12 articles is especially helpful as a resource for linguistic scholars at
all levels for exploring and evaluating the vast breadth and depth of
pragmatics research. The contributors to the volume each discusses the role
and impact of pragmatics in relation to a discipline that it interfaces with,
focusing on the overlapping and complementary insights that pragmatics has
contributed to each as well as the insights that each has contributed to
pragmatics. A strength of the book is the focused and thorough discussion that
each chapter provides through close attention to methodological concerns and
to specific, illustrative examples.

The introductory chapter, written by the editors, frames the conceptual,
theoretical, and methodological considerations that motivate the collection
and establishes the aims of the book. The authors show that, unlike earlier
studies which tend to take a unidirectional approach to the interfaces of
pragmatics, this volume takes a bidirectional approach that emphasizes the
interpenetration of pragmatics with other, related disciplines, not
restricting itself to either the impact of pragmatics on other disciplines or
the impact of other disciplines on pragmatics. Instead, it focuses on the
range of differences, overlaps and complementarities between pragmatics and
neighboring disciplines, including: sociolinguistics, discourse analysis,
conversation analysis, rhetoric, narrative studies, translation studies,
gesture studies, anthropology, politeness theory, corpus linguistics,
internet-mediated communication, and humor theory. Together, the contributions
cover the major areas of overlap between pragmatics and related fields,
working from the most obvious/general crossover areas to the lesser ones. 

The authors are all specialists in their own field as well as scholars with a
strong interest in pragmatics phenomena and pragmatics theory. Their
contributions highlight the following challenges and questions:

● They present cutting-edge research on problems and issues at the interface
between pragmatics and other disciplines and seek to show where pragmatic
perspectives enter in and how far they can go.

● They identify the potential research value in exploring the relation between
qualitative and quantitative research in pragmatics and adjacent fields.

● They challenge the idea that pragmatics takes an exclusively bottom-up view
by contrast with a top-down view.

● They point out similarities and differences in the theory and practice of
particular pragmatics interfaces.

Together, the collection of articles provides fruitful discussion to
reconsider the boundaries and mutually-nourishing connections between
pragmatics and its neighboring disciplines. 

In her chapter, “Sociolinguistics vs. pragmatics: Where does the boundary
lie?”, Janet Holmes uses data from her own research on the “Language in the
Workplace Project” in New Zealand to explore the constraints of egalitarianism
and gender in New Zealand society. Through a close analysis of five excerpts
from face-to-face interaction, Holmes demonstrates how two macro-level
socio-cultural values, egalitarian ethic and avoidance of self-promotion, are
evident in the ways that individuals in New Zealand workplaces negotiate
complex social identities in everyday interaction. In doing so, she
illustrates the advantage of drawing on both disciplines, pragmatics and
sociolinguistics, showing how macro-level societal norms act as sociopragmatic
constraints --or as a focus for contestation in interaction-- at the
micro-level of interaction in different workplace contexts.

Anita Fetzer, in her chapter “Discourse pragmatics: Communicative action meets
discourse analysis”, explores the relevant connections between pragmatics and
discourse analysis. She investigates bridging points between speech act theory
and Gricean logic and conversation, on one hand, and the discourse analytic
framework on the others, focusing specifically on 1) the differentiation
between ordinary speech acts and higher-level speech acts, and 2) the
structuring of discourse and questions of granularity with respect to content
and force. Fetzer argues that the patterned linearization of discourse is
constrained by 1) the semantics and pragmatics of the constitutive discourse
units, 2) the semantics and pragmatics of the joints, metaphorically-speaking,
and 3) the semantics and pragmatics of discourse as a whole, demonstrating
that the whole is always more than the sum of its constitutive parts. In this,
Fetzer supports this argumentation with a discourse-analytic and pragmatic
analysis of British political discourse.

In the chapter “Pragmatics and conversation analysis”, Paul Drew demonstrates
how conversation analysis (CA) complements the study of pragmatics, especially
in three areas: implicature, speech acts, and presupposition and
well-formedness. Through the empirical analysis of short samples taken from
real conversation, Drew demonstrates how participants orient to each of these
three areas in real time in order to design their talk as well as to make
sense of the other’s conduct. The key, Drew argues, is that CA adds to the
pragmatic notion of context that of the sequential context, because sequential
analysis --an analysis that focuses on action, rather than meaning-- enables
us to see what actions participants infer in and attribute to one another’s
turns at talk.

In the chapter “Pragmatics vs rhetoric: Political discourse at the
pragmatics-rhetoric interface”, Cornelia Ilie presents an integrative
analytical approach taking tools from both pragmatics and rhetoric to the
study of political discourse. This approach, which she calls a
pragma-rhetorical approach, challenges the misconception that pragmatics takes
an exclusively bottom-up perspective through a close inspection of two
political discourse genres: (a) contextualization strategies through meaning
negotiation and re-negotiation in political interviews with Hillary Clinton
and Barack Obama during the 2008 US presidential campaign, and (b)
metadiscourse framing strategies in question-answer sequencing in
parliamentary debates in the UK parliament featuring an adversarial encounter
between Prime Minister Gordon Brown and the leader of the Opposition David
Cameron. The analysis presented by Ilie shows how each of these micro-level
interactions are embedded within a wider macro-level societal context.  

Neal Norrick, in his chapter “Narrative studies versus pragmatics (of
narrative)”, provides a pragmatic perspective on narrative that addresses the
functions of narrative within a variety of contexts. In this, Norrick first
provides a bottom-up discussion of the contribution of pragmatics to the study
of narrative, including an analysis of discourse markers such as “and” and
“oh”, as well as formulaicity, repetition, and tense shift. He then moves on
to a top-down characterization of what stories can accomplish in interaction,
paying specific attention to the characteristic slots that stories fill and to
their function in various recurrent cultural contexts or speech events as
direct and/or indirect illocutionary acts. The author finds that telling
stories generally realizes directly the force of representative acts (such as
confessing or making excuses) and indirectly performs expressive acts (such as
apologizing) and directive acts (such as warning). No evidence is found of
narratives realizing the indirect force of commissives and declarations, but,
the author concludes, more work is needed in this area. 

Juliane House, in her chapter “Translation studies and pragmatics”, focuses on
the role of context in the interface between translation studies and
pragmatics. Because translated texts are doubly contextually bound --to their
originals as well as to the new recipients’ contextual conditions--
translation involves re-contextualization. This re-contextualization can be
done in two qualitatively different ways: through “overt” translation and
“covert” translation. Whereas overt translations are more straightforward and
involve the originals being taken over unfiltered and transposed from the
source to the target cultural context in the medium of the new language, the
function of a covert translation is to reproduce in the target text the same
function as the original by taking account of the new addressees’
context-derived communicative norms. As such, covert translations require the
application of what the author refers to as a “cultural filter”. House
concludes by considering the notion of “cultural filter” within a global
context characterized by the scientific and cultural dominance of English as a
lingua franca and a drift towards Anglo-American norms. In this context, House
predicts, it is likely that less cultural filtering in re-contextualization
processes will occur in the future, and many more “culturally universal” or
“contextually homogeneized” translation texts will be routinely created as
carriers of Anglophone and West-European/North-Atlantic linguistic cultural
norms.

In the chapter “Pragmatics and gesture studies”, Geraldine M. Pereira
re-examines classic topics in pragmatics such as cohesion, reference, and
repetition to contribute novel findings that point to a need to undertake
further research based on the inclusion of gesture and gaze. Based on
audiovisual recordings of communicative partners completing a Map Task,
Pereira shows that verbal repetition and gesture recurrence create connections
across larger discourse chunks. Gesture and gaze express stance and signal
agreement, disagreement, and understanding. Eye gaze communicates levels of
attention and involvement in a task. It is only through the combined analysis
of linguistic pragmatics and gesture, Pereira argues, that one can begin to
see the complex dynamics of human communication and interaction. 

In “Pragmatics and anthropology”, Gunter Senft presents a brief survey of the
ways of speaking of the Trobriand Islanders to show the functions that the
situational-intentional varieties of Kilivila fulfill with respect to the
Trobriand Islanders social construction of reality. Based on his own fieldwork
covering over 30 years in the region, Senft discusses three specific
observations about the Tobrianders’ attitudes to their language and their use
of language in social interactions: greeting behaviors, controlling emotions,
and discussing taboos. More generally, Senft argues, any research into the
role of language, culture, and cognition in social interaction requires a deep
understanding of how the researched society constructs its reality, as
researchers must be on “common ground” with the researched community. 

In their chapter, “Integrative pragmatics and (im)politeness theory” Michael
Haugh and Jonathan Culpeper respond to the discursive critique that challenges
the pragmatic focus of the study of (im)politeness by outlining an integrative
approach. They argue that an integrated approach both highlights the
fundamentally pragmatic basis of (im)politeness and also draws attention to
the need for a nuanced and complex theory of (im)politeness that integrates
multiple perspectives and methods of analysis, including
interpretive/interactional methods as well as quantitative, corpus-based
methods. The authors focus on a case study of an infamous incident on UK Big
Brother involving the ostensibly jocular use of a racial slur which caused
serious offense and the removal of a contestant. Interaction is treated as the
primary locus of analysis, but this analysis goes beyond analyzing the
locally-situated understandings of users to embrace the understandings of
observers as well, so that a theory of (im)politeness must address not only
for whom a particular instance of talk or conduct is considered (im)polite but
on what grounds that talk or conduct can legitimately be evaluated as
(im)polite. 

Christoph Rühlemann and Brian Clancy, in their chapter “Corpus linguistics and
pragmatics”, aim to show how the field of corpus pragmatics, integrating the
qualitative methodology typical of pragmatics with the quantitative
methodology predominant in corpus linguistics, can be fruitfully applied. They
illustrate this claim by examining the choice between indicative ‘was’ and
subjunctive ‘were’ in as-if clauses in the Corpus of Contemporary American
English (COCA). The combined methodology successfully incorporates the
horizontal reading typical of pragmatics with the vertical reading of corpus
linguistics. 

In “The interface between pragmatics and internet-mediated communication:
applications, extensions, and adjustments”, Francisco Yus applies pragmatics
to an analysis of internet-mediated communication and argues that this
application entails a reconceptualization of the hypotheses, methodologies,
and conclusions used in analyses of off-line communication. Specifically, Yus
proposes the terms ‘non-intended non-propositional effects’ and ‘contextual
constraints’ to consider why certain kinds of internet-mediated communication
are fruitful despite being apparently limited, or even useless or irrelevant,
when analyzed from a proposition-centric perspective. The remainder of the
chapter considers six specific examples to address how these two notions shed
light on why messages exchanged in internet-mediated communication achieve
relevance beyond discourse interpretation.  

Nancy Bell, in her chapter “Pragmatics, humor studies, and the study of
interaction”, outlines the contributions that pragmatics, and specifically
theories of politeness, has made to our understanding of what humor is and how
it functions in everyday interaction. Bell then stands this analysis on its
head to examine how humor scholarship can inform our understanding of
pragmatics and our understanding of language use. This part of her analysis
draws on specific examples that focus on contextualization processes,
identity, and the negotiation of social relations and that, together, frame
the study of humor not merely as a way that people try to entertain each
other, but as a highly critical and flexible communication resource.

EVALUATION

Overall, this collection of articles represents a comprehensive volume of
pragmatics studies that should be of interest to scholars within and across a
range of disciplines. At its core, this volume demonstrates the
interdisciplinary nature of the study of pragmatics through focused studies
and a wealth of concrete examples taken from spontaneous speech. As such, the
introduction and the 12 articles form an extremely valuable collection that
simultaneously offers a look at the immense breadth that is possible in the
field as well as at the great depth.

One specific strength of the volume is that the articles, while each focusing
on distinct areas related to pragmatics, make frequent and explicit
connections to other articles within the volume. Classic pragmatics topics
such as speech acts, presupposition, implicature, context, reference,
discourse markers, (im)politeness, and contextualization cues are addressed at
multiple points by multiple authors and from multiple perspectives. Rather
than appear heterogenous, which can often be a danger in edited collections,
these explicit connections that are drawn between the articles help to present
a coherent view of the panorama of the field, which is robust. In addition, a
related strength uniting the articles is that each makes an explicit intention
to address the importance not only of a bottom-up analytical approach but of
top-down approaches as well, which can often be missing from pragmatics
studies. Furthermore, several articles in the volume incorporate the
perspective offered by rapidly growing fields such as corpus linguistics and
internet-mediated communication.

Despite the evident breadth of interfaces that the collection addresses, it is
also evident that several related fields are not represented. The volume is
missing articles that address the interface of pragmatics with the rich fields
of gender studies (which the editors note in their introduction),
intercultural and cross-cultural communication, and language documentation.
More generally, all of the examples in the book address issues as viewed from
a monolingual frame of reference, addressing pragmatic phenomena in
monolingual interactions between monolingual speakers in monolingual contexts.
In this way, the book contributes an unmentioned but underlying assumption
that monolingual interactions represent a kind of default interaction type. 

That said, “Pragmatics and its interfaces” effectively and vibrantly
illustrates the relevance of pragmatics to a vast array of interrelated
fields. Because of the wealth and range of data that it draws upon as well as
its strong theoretical orientation, the book would serve well as a core
reading in an advanced undergraduate or graduate course as the volume has the
potential to inspire interdisciplinary studies that help to both ground and
enrich the study of pragmatics and to connect pragmatics with a range of
related fields.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Juan José Bueno Holle holds an MA in Applied Linguistics from the National
Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) and a PhD in Linguistics from the
University of Chicago. His research interests include language documentation,
Mesoamerican languages, and discourse pragmatics. His work has received
support from the Endangered Languages Development Programme (ELDP), the
National Science Foundation's Documenting Endangered Languages program
(NSF-DEL), and the Smithsonian Institution.





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