28.2242, Review: Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics: Remillard, Williams (2016)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-28-2242. Wed May 17 2017. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 28.2242, Review: Pragmatics; Sociolinguistics: Remillard, Williams (2016)

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Date: Wed, 17 May 2017 15:49:06
From: Peyman G.P. Sabet [P.Ghassemipoursabet at curtin.edu.au]
Subject: Human Communication across Cultures

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/27/27-3383.html

AUTHOR: Vincent  Remillard
AUTHOR: Karen  Williams
TITLE: Human Communication across Cultures
SUBTITLE: A Cross-cultural Introduction to Pragmatics and Sociolinguistics
PUBLISHER: Equinox Publishing Ltd
YEAR: 2016

REVIEWER: Peyman G.P. Sabet, Curtin University

Reviews Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry 

SUMMARY

‘Human communication across cultures’ is an introductory textbook aimed at
providing undergraduate students with a basic understanding of how language is
used for communication and how it reflects cultural values. Consisting of 13
chapters, it mainly focuses on three broad areas: what is language, how is
language used in different situations (pragmatics) and how is language used
for social interaction (sociolinguistics). Each concisely written and
well-presented chapter begins with a one-sentence summary, followed by a quote
relevant to the theme of the chapter. The main text of each chapter begins
with a brief introduction, including thought-provoking and tangible examples
from real life situations, and continues with a discussion of the main topic
followed by examples from other languages or cultures. The authors conclude
the main text in each chapter by presenting a concisely written conclusion.
What follows the conclusion is a set of tasks, ‘Additional Activities’,
adaptable for homework or classwork, that contribute to the consolidation of
the new knowledge. Remillard and Williams end each chapter with website
resources and a list of readings for further study. 

The authors commence the book with an overview of how language, communication
and culture are interrelated. To provide a better understanding of the
principles underlying each, Remillard and Williams use a questionnaire to
arouse the readers’ curiosity and also use their current views of language as
the point of departure. They, next, continue their exploration of language,
communication and culture by using four quotes leading to four principles: 1.
“Human language is a creative force” (p.7) that underlies every aspect of our
life. 2. Human language, as part of an innate gift is far more complex than
any other system. 3. Human language, consisting of communicative functions and
also associated with their identity, is used as a tool in their interpersonal
relationships. 4. Human language reflects their social and cultural values.   
 

I will summarise Chapters 2 to 13 around the four themes roughly outlined at
the end of Chapter 1: structural features of language, pragmatic view,
sociolinguistic view, and bilingualism. 

Chapter 2 focuses on forms of language independent of context. Providing a
brief history of linguistics at the beginning, Remillard and Williams offer an
introduction to language forms, sounds, grammar, and meaning as language
constituents. To begin with, they briefly describe what is involved in the
study of phonetics. Their description of sounds in language expands into a
scope larger than how sounds in human language are produced and develops into
how they are “structured and patterned within a given language” (p. 19). The
authors continue this chapter with an introduction to morphology and some
examples from French, English and Spanish.   To introduce the next linguistic
form, Remillard and Williams focus on syntax and explain how words are
combined to produce phrases and sentences. To elaborate on the role of syntax,
they make reference to the possible SVO combinations in different languages
and present an interesting percentage ranking of different SVO combinations in
all languages. The last language form they deal with in this chapter is
semantics; the discussion initially centres on word definitions, but gradually
develops into word relationships such as synonyms, antonyms, homonyms, and
metonyms.  

Chapters 3 to 8 provide an account of pragmatics and examine different
pragmatic forms and functions in English and different cultures. Following a
quick look in Chapter 3 at what the study of pragmatics involves , Remillard
and Williams address two areas associated with it, entailments and
presuppositions, despite still treating them as literal meaning rather than
speaker meaning derived from the context. To move on to the study of speaker
meaning, they choose ‘context’ (Hymes, 1974) as the point of departure and
elaborate on contextual components. In Chapter 4, the authors try to pave the
way for a more detailed discussion of pragmatics by introducing ‘speech acts
theory’ (Austin, 1962) and the framework it consists of: Locutionary Acts,
Illocutionary Acts, and Perlocutionary Acts. What they refer to next is the
flaw in Austin’s taxonomy of illocutions followed by a more detailed and
accurate classification proposed by Searle (1979) and refined by others.
Following a few notes on performative illocutionary acts, Remillard and
Williams introduce direct and indirect speech acts and three conditions
distinguishing between them, called felicity conditions. Their discussion of
cross-cultural speech acts includes examples from different cultures which
favoring Rosaldo’s (1982) findings indicate that Searle’s taxonomy is not
applicable to all languages. To further develop their discussion on
pragmatics, Remillard and Williams in the next chapter introduce routine
verbal formulas and their roles in interpersonal conversation. They give
examples of where routines occur–opening and closing conversations, expressing
thanks, apologizing and complementing–and also how they are used differently
across different cultures. To provide a more detailed account of the 
cross-cultural functions, they examine different terms of address such as
kinship forms, pronominal forms, honorifics and phatics. Chapter 6 of the book
is allocated to the study of Grice’s (1975) cooperative principle and
implicature. As required by any study of the cooperative principle, the
authors look at the four maxims introduced by Grice. The next concept
introduced in this chapter is implicature, which is followed by cross-cultural
examples of cooperative principle and implicature. To conclude the chapter,
the authors give examples of why maxims are violated in everyday life. In the
next chapter, Remillard and Williams examine the functions of politeness
strategies in social relationships. They begin the chapter by referring to the
term ‘face’ initially used by Brown and Levinson (1987) and continue with a
discussion of face wants which involves negative and positive face wants. In
addition, they investigate different politeness strategies and then, through
real-life examples, discuss how these strategies are used differently, due to
different linguistic and cultural competence. In Chapter 8, the last chapter
associated with pragmatics, the authors examine the structure of conversation
underlying speaker meaning. The first structural property is turn-taking under
which ‘transition relevance place’ (TRP) is raised. To point out where in
conversations TRP occurs, adjacency pairs and prosodic signals are discussed
with some examples. In the next discussion section, Remillard and Williams
examine the roles of overlapping and interruptions in verbal interactions. The
second property examined in this chapter is ‘cohesive communicative devices,’
which the authors introduce as repairs, backchannel cues and repetition. They
examine stylistic devices consisting of puns and alliterations as the last
devices prior to moving on to cross-cultural organizational devices. This
chapter ends with examples of how differences in using such devices, due to
cultural diversity, can lead to challenges and misunderstanding or
misjudgments.                 

Chapters 9 to12 look at how communication occurs from a sociolinguistic
standpoint. To achieve this goal, in Chapter 9, the authors examine how
various social factors such as gender, ethnicity, age, social class and
geographical locations shape the way language is used. Introducing the concept
of idiolect at the beginning, the authors continue this chapter by looking at
the relationship between language and society. To provide a clearer picture,
they examine the internal variation of language: variations within speakers
and variations between speakers. For instance, in the former case, how one
changes their language in terms of formality level or uses varying levels of
slang depending on the context, and in the latter case how language
variations, arising from different social factors such as gender differences,
geographical or historical backgrounds, occur among different people. The
authors continue the chapter by examining how language changes over time by
giving some examples of grammatical and vocabulary changes. Remillard and
Williams conclude Chapter 9 by describing how word choice can function as the
speaker’s identity marker. Chapter 10 is allocated to the study of how
dialects can be the integral part of the speakers’ identity. The authors
introduce the concept of ‘standard language’ in their discussion of language
varieties initially and point out that ‘standard variety’ is no nonexistent.
Terms such as Standard American English commonly encouraged by sociolinguists,
therefore, are merely concepts than realities. To clearly discuss what
dialects are, the authors contrast them against accents, highlighting the fact
that a dialect, arising from lexical, morpho-syntactic, semantic and pragmatic
differences, is associated with the way a group of people speak, whereas an
accent is an individual feature referring to one’s pronunciation. Giving some
real world examples, they conclude that there is no such thing as a strong or
heavy accent and “it is all a matter of relativity” (p. 114). In
differentiating between language and dialect, they set mutual intelligibility
as the first distinctive criterion; if the speakers of two varieties
understand each other, they speak varieties of a language; otherwise the
varieties are labelled as two different languages. However, the authors
present examples which prove the illegitimacy of such a claim and pave the way
for labeling each variety as a dialect and each separate language as a
‘prestige dialect’. The rest of the chapter examines divisions of English
dialects in the United States, mainly focusing on phonetic variants, lexical
variants and morpho-syntactic variants, followed by studying the same areas in
other languages. In Chapter 11, Remillard and Williams try to explore how
another social variable, ethnicity, can influence speech patterns. Addressing
differences in terms of ethnicity and race initially, the authors primarily
focus on African American English as a language variety and set it as an
example of a language that originated as a pidgin and developed into a creole
language. The chapter continues with some general characteristics of African
American English: phonetic characteristics, morpho-syntactic, and lexical
characteristics. The closing section of this chapter views African American
English from the public and political perspectives and concludes that this
language is preferred in less formal contexts. Chapter 12 investigates the
relationships between language and gender. To be more precise, the authors
focus on grammatical gender, gender-biased language and the use of language by
men and women in American and other cultures. To begin with, the authors
highlight the differences between grammatical gender, physical gender and
socialised gender role and continue with 11 conclusions Lakoff (1975) reached
in her studies on gender and language in American culture. Next, each
conclusion is revisited and examined against recent findings that reveal some
discrepancies over time. The authors begin the discussion on gender-biased
language with an exercise that aims to present a clearer picture of what it is
and move on to some recent movements to neutralise gender bias in language
use. To address language and gender roles in other cultures, they focus on
grammatical gender, a phenomenon non-existent in English. In so doing, they
give examples of nouns and their modifiers that have been assigned gender
roles in Romance languages, and also different classifications such as
inanimate vs. animate, human beings and non-human beings, rational and
non-rational things, to name just a few. For further elaboration, they also
refer to exclusive gender differences in other languages, for example,
systematic differences in Crib men’s vocabulary, gender-determined morphemes
or pronunciation. This chapter is ended by looking into Japanese as a language
with more salient gender-based differences in linguistic and pragmatic
features. 

The concluding chapter is Remillard and William’s views of bilingualism at
individual and social levels. They claim individual bilingualism can emerge in
various ways; these include being born into a bilingual family and picking up
the language from an early age or starting a second language at school.  What
follows next is two classifications of bilingual individuals in terms of
fluency; balanced bilinguals and receptive bilinguals.  To offer a more
thorough account of individual bilingualism, they also refer to Grosjean’s
(1984) study in which overall satisfaction with being a bilingual is reported
by bilinguals from different geographical and social groups. Likewise, the
authors associate bilingualism with some benefits such as being more
intelligent and better at multitasking. As far as the age of turning bilingual
is concerned, no definitive answer is provided, but the authors attach
advantages to learning a second language before and after the critical period.
In terms of code-switching, they state that bilinguals switch codes almost
subconsciously with no pauses or any changes in rhythm and tempo and no gap in
communication. The last factor at the individual level discussed in this
chapter is associated with the linguistic factors categorised as semantic
factors and grammatical factors. The authors start bilingualism at societal
level with the fact that the match between language use and current
geographical boundaries are not always consistent. In terms of language and
politics, they bring up the diversity in how countries describe their
linguistic realities by giving various examples. Bilingualism in the United
States is, next, dealt with in which reference is made to multiplicity of
languages used in this country. To add more dimensions to societal
bilingualism, Remillard and Williams introduce the term ‘diglossia’ and
provide some tangible examples.  They continue their discussion by referring
to the effect languages can have on each other and then focus on situations in
which pidgins are created and developed into creoles. The chapter is continued
by a brief look at types of bilingual educational programs, categorised mainly
as transitional and maintenance. What follows next is the effectiveness of
bilingualism in the United States and the public opinion which keeps switching
from positive to negative and vice versa due to “[t]he lack of a universal
agreement on the definitions and details of bilingual education (p.179). The
authors end the chapter and also the book by assigning a translation exercise
that reveals challenges in translation due to morphological or syntactic
differences between languages.        
              
EVLUATION

Remillard and William seem to have successfully achieved the goals set for the
publication of this book. In terms of content, it can offer fundamental
knowledge to the beginners in the field   As an introductory textbook, the
book uses language which is easy to understand for even non-native speakers at
different proficiency levels and also those who lack backgrounds in
linguistics, pragmatics or sociolinguistics. The authors seem successful in
designing interactive exercises which can facilitate understanding and enhance
learning.  The thought-provoking end-of-chapter exercises, along with the real
life examples, make the features under study more salient to students.
Remillard and William offer the readers the opportunity to give their
understanding of each chapter the desired amount of depth  by referring to
diverse relevant sources at the end of each chapter; ‘Web Resources’ and
‘Further Reading’.   
The book supports the authors’ claim pertaining to the adaptability and
flexibility of the text . It can be used as a course book or a self-study
resource for a variety of courses and in different countries. Though the
chapters are strongly linked together  and progress from the analysis of what
language is to what constitutes communication and finally how communication
occurs in different cultures, each chapter can be studied discreetly or with a
varying degree of focus since it gives the teacher the flexibility to assign
the end-of-chapter exercises and tasks as homework or classwork.  
The other factor that makes the book outstanding is the very well-structured
chapters, each of which, avoiding unnecessary sentences, begins with a
one-sentence overview of the chapter. Following each overview is an appealing
direct quote relevant to the theme of the chapter. Each chapter contains
several thought-provoking examples and engaging tasks that can contribute to a
more profound understanding of the topic. The bullet point summary at the end
of each chapter contributes to the consolidation of the new knowledge and
prepares the reader for the move to the next chapter. 
Overall, this is a commendable work by Remillard and William. I highly
recommend this valuable book as both a textbook and a self-study resource for
undergraduate level pragmatics and sociolinguistics courses. 

REFERENCES

Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press.

Brown, P. & Levinson, S. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language
usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 

Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In D. Davidson & G. Harman
(Eds.), The logic of grammar (pp. 64-75). Encino and Belmont: Dickenson
Publishing Company. 

Grosjean, F. (1984). Life with two languages: An introduction to bilingualism.
Cambridge: Harvard University Press.

Hymes, D. (1974). Foundations to sociolinguistics. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.

Lakoff, R. (1975). Language and women’s place: Text and communication. New
York: Oxford University Press. 

Rosaldo, M. (1982). The things we do with words: Ilongot speech acts and
speech act theory. Language and Society, 11, 203-23.

Searle, J. (1979). Expression and meaning. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Peyman G.P. Sabet received his Ph.D. in Language and Intercultural Education
from Curtin University in Australia where he is already working as an ESL
teaching academic. His research interests include vague language, pragmatics,
cross-cultural communication and teacher education. He is currently working on
vague language use by language learners.





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