16.113, Review: Pragmatics/Discourse: Blackwell (2003)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-113. Sun Jan 16 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.113, Review: Pragmatics/Discourse: Blackwell (2003)

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1)
Date: 14-Jan-2005
From: Raúl Morales Carrasco < rmc at itpuebla.edu.mx >
Subject: Implicatures in Discourse: The Case of Spanish NP Anaphora 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Sun, 16 Jan 2005 01:38:32
From: Raúl Morales Carrasco < rmc at itpuebla.edu.mx >
Subject: Implicatures in Discourse: The Case of Spanish NP Anaphora 
 

AUTHOR: Blackwell, Sarah E.
TITLE: Implicatures in Discourse
SUBTITLE: The Case of Spanish NP Anaphora
SERIES: Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 105
PUBLISHER: John Benjamins
YEAR: 2003
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/14/14-812.html


Raúl Morales Carrasco, Systems and Computing Department, Puebla Institute 
of Technology (ITPue), Puebla, Pue., México

SYNOPSIS

The book under review is, one in the series of John Benjamins in 
Linguistics, written for advanced undergraduate or postgraduate students. 
Blackwell reports a highly relevant topic in today's research theory of 
anaphora as a general phenomenon into languages; her observations support 
a pragmatic theory of anaphora. She analyzes the use and interpretation of 
definite noun phrase (NP) anaphora in Spanish conversations and oral 
narratives within a neo-Gricean pragmatics framework of conversational 
implicature, based on the previous work of Levinson (2000), Huang (2000) 
and her own proposal.

SUMMARY

The book is organized into six chapters. Chapter 1 introduce us to the 
relation between definite NP anaphora and coreference. She explains 
why "the most obvious property anaphoric expressions share is that they 
derive their meaning in a given context from their association with other 
elements in that context". Then, she comments that the 'c-command' 
syntactic constraint "may be overridden by contextual and pragmatic 
conditions". Finally, she establishes the premises for data and 
methodology used. Data came from two genres of spoken Spanish discourse: 
spontaneous conversation and a series of narratives useful to test the neo-
Gricean pragmatic theory and to observe the effects of coreference 
constrains. She, analyzed data qualitatively using a combined discourse 
and conversation analytic approach. 

Chapter 2 gives us a panoramic view of neo-Gricean pragmatic approach to 
anaphora setting the framework of her work. She takes as a premise 
that "anaphora involves utterance interpretation, which is in turn an 
inferential process involving conversational implicatures". She then 
continues explaining Grice's theory of conversational implicature with 
Levinson's pending problems proposal, and Huang proposal including 
background knowledge, mutual knowledge, semantic constraint entailments, 
and antecedent saliency. Finally, She outlines "the neo-Gricean pragmatic 
framework of analysis used in the present study of anaphora in Spanish ... 
including a set of consistency constraints on implicatures ... to provide 
a fuller, more explanatory account of Spanish anaphora". This and next 
chapter are vital for understanding her standpoint.

Chapter 3 is on approaches to reference from social, functional and 
cognitive points of view. Here, the author analyzes how speaker's freedom 
to use NP expressions in the same context 'implicate' coreference with a 
given antecedent. She seeks: first, what kind of factors influence and 
constraints speaker's choice to use a lexical NP instead of a pronoun, or 
a pronoun instead of null subject; and second, to what extent these 
factors influence implicatures, according to her neo-Gricean approach and 
Huang's notion of consistency constraint. She shows "how the use of 
recipient-designed recognitionals and minimization with regard to both 
informativeness and surface linguistic form, influence a speaker's use of 
referring expressions" taking account of givenness in terms of 
predictability/recoverability, cognitive factors involved in anaphora 
including 'accessibility' in the mind of the recipient, and the assumed 
memory and attention state of the addressee when a certain NP type is used.

Chapter 4 is on NP anaphora in Spanish conversation. First, she addresses 
the nature of conversation and objectives associated with conversation 
analysis. Next, she describes the method to collect, select eight from 
twenty 90-minute tapes of Spanish conversation, how she transcribes them 
and finally the main characteristics of the participants. Then she 
illustrates how 'the basic pattern of anaphora' is instantiated by the 
interaction of the neo-Gricean principles I-(nformativeness) and M-
(anner), and the saliency of the antecedent. Finally, she examines the 
ways in which patterns of anaphoric reference and the speaker's tendency 
toward linguistic minimization are both influenced by the interlocutors 
mutual knowledge of personal experiences, concerns and interpersonal 
relations. 

Chapter 5 is on referring expressions in Spanish narrative discourse. Here 
she accounts for anaphora into this kind of discourse using her revised 
neo-Gricean framework. First, she describes the data collection and 
transcription phases of the study. Next, she examines: the role of the 
antecedent saliency as a consistency constrain on implicatures of 
coreference; the effects of background and mutual knowledge of narrator 
and addressee on anaphora production and interpretation; the role of 
agreement in implicatures of coreference and non-coreference; and the 
contrastive function of 'marked' NP expressions. Then, she analyzes 
backward anaphora, in sentences coordinated with 'but', observing both the 
similarity in the syntactic structure of the clauses in which the anaphors 
and antecedents occur, and also the fact that they appear to play a 
similar pragmatic role in discourse structure: they 'communicate 
uncertainty or negativity'. Finally, she concludes that regardless of the 
type of referring expression, interpretation of coreference depends upon 
inferences based on the 'state' of the interlocutors mutual knowledge; and 
this 'state' "cancel[s] predicted implicatures of coreference, when these 
are based solely on the saliency of the potential antecedents and the use 
of minimal forms". 

In Chapter 6, 'Conclusions', Blackwell presents a summary of findings 
reached from this study and some reflections upon neo-Gricean approach to 
anaphora. She comments how the evidence of Q(-uantity), I(-nformativeness) 
and M(-anner) principles are reinforced by data of both genres of spoken 
discourse analyzed. Finally, she concludes that any full explanation of 
discourse requires to consider the interaction of factors 
from 'syntactic', 'semantic', 'pragmatics' and 'cognitive' domains; so, 
we "need to seek a better explanation, furnished by an integrated theory, 
drawing on useful notions from the different domains cited above"; and 
invites us to continue the analysis about the nature of discourse anaphora.

EVALUATION

The book, with its Spanish conversation and narrative discourse examples 
so carefully described about anaphora, represents an invaluable gift 
because they are naturally occurring (Cornish,1999:37). It is an 
outstanding contribution to the study of anaphora, as a step forward, and 
shows clearly that many other factors play a role in the selection of the 
best anaphoric form in a given environment. Moreover, it is evident that 
there are still many puzzles to be solved. 

Generally speaking, the book also provides a good overview of previous 
approaches to anaphora. Based on her Ph.D. thesis, the book nicely 
presents research that is useful for graduate and postgraduate students as 
a companion text in any linguistic or computational linguistic course. The 
overall impression is that the book is well designed, well written and 
easy to read. There are some errors which, however, do not harm the 
pleasure of reading. Here are examples:

(1) On page 111 example (117) line 16, "... todas esas peripecias nos 
pasó" should be "... todas esas peripecias nos pasaron" due to Spanish 
number concordance.

(2) On page 122 example (122) line 5 Spanish, her transcription omits (I 
think) a 'se' third person reflexive pronoun according to her translation 
into English. The actual transcription literally means "the things don't 
forget me".

(3) On page 258 line 21, a duplicated 'that' in "... determiners signals 
not only definite reference, but also that that the hearer, ..." can be 
observed.

I suggest reviewing the original tape to check (1) and (2).

In conclusion, Blackwell's linguistic research is entirely professional 
and her book can be recommended to anyone interested in the subject. The 
book could be used both as a reference for its empirical results, and as a 
source of inspiration for further study.

REFERENCES 

Cornish, Francis. (1999). Anaphora, Discourse, and Understanding. Evidence 
from English and French. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Huang, Yan. (2000). Anaphora. A Cross-linguistic Approach. Oxford 
University Press

Levinson, Stephen C. (2000). Presumptive meanings. MIT Press. Cambridge, 
MA. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

The reviewer received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Center for 
Computing Research (CIC), at the National Polytechnic Institute (IPN), 
Mexico, with a thesis titled 'Automatic Resolution of Indirect Anaphora in 
Spanish'. Currently he is a full time professor at Puebla Institute of 
Technology (ITPue), México. His primary research interest is anaphora 
resolution for natural language processing (NLP) and information 
extraction systems along with a broader research area of computational 
linguistics.





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