33.2868, Review: Pragmatics: Birner (2021)

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Subject: 33.2868, Review: Pragmatics: Birner (2021)

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Date: Thu, 22 Sep 2022 21:13:50
From: Nicolas Ruytenbeek [nicolasruytenbeek at gmail.com]
Subject: Pragmatics

 
Discuss this message:
http://linguistlist.org/pubs/reviews/get-review.cfm?subid=36819157


Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/32/32-1006.html

AUTHOR: Betty J. Birner
TITLE: Pragmatics
SUBTITLE: A Slim Guide
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2021

REVIEWER: Nicolas Ruytenbeek, Ghent University

SUMMARY

In this monograph, Betty Birner (BB) offers an introduction to the field of
pragmatic research, with a focus on the English language. The book is about
150 pages long, and its target audience encompasses (post-)graduate students
in linguistics and philosophy programs.

Chapter 1, “Introduction”, describes in simple terms the difference between
saying and meaning, using a variety of request forms. The role of inference in
pragmatics, as well as the distinction between convention and intention, are
presented. Several notions from formal logic and semantics are briefly
introduced, i.e., possible worlds, propositions, truth conditions, discourse
models, logical operators, quantifiers, and entailment.

In Chapter 2, “Literal vs. non-literal meaning”, BB provides an account of
natural vs. non-natural meaning, conventional vs. intentional meaning, context
(in)dependent meaning, and (non)truth-conditional meaning.

In Chapter 3, “Implicature”, the author discusses Grice’s (1975) cooperative
principle and the related conversational maxims of Quantity, Quality,
Relation, and Manner. She explains, using naturally occurring examples, the
different ways for speakers/writers to depart from these maxims and convey
additional meanings. She also addresses the properties of conversational
implicatures that differentiate them from conventional implicatures, such as
calculability and defeasibility. Finally, she distinguishes between
particularized and generalized conversational implicatures. The major
neo-Gricean approaches to implicated meanings (Horn, Levinson, and relevance
theory) are also addressed.

“Speech acts” are the topic of Chapter 4. This chapter covers Austin’s
distinction between constatives and performatives, the felicity conditions for
the performance of speech acts, and the notion of indirect speech act
(indirect request and apology). The perlocutionary effects of speech acts are
also addressed, and a discussion of face-threat and politeness considerations
associated with hedged requests is offered.

Chapter 5, “Reference”, offers an answer to the question of how interlocutors
are able to successfully refer to entities in communication. Central notions
are discourse models and mutual knowledge. BB contrasts referentialist
approaches to reference with mentalist accounts, and she identifies several
types of deixis.

In Chapter 6, “Definiteness and anaphora”, BB addresses definite descriptions,
theories of definiteness in terms of uniqueness of the referent and
familiarity with the referent. A subsection is devoted to the phenomenon of
anaphora.

Chapter 7, “Presupposition”, starts with a definition of the notion in
question, followed by an illustration of how presupposition works with
different triggers. The central issue that is dealt with in this chapter is
how one determines what can(not) be accommodated in discourse, a question that
is relevant for the study of the semantics-pragmatics interface.

Chapter 8, “Information structure”, bears on the relationship between
(non)canonical word order and constructions and the distinction between given
and new information.

In Chapter 9, “New directions”, BB outlines future perspectives in terms of
research methods and theory for research in pragmatics. On the one hand, in
line with the development of corpus linguistics, she insists that pragmatic
acceptability should be based on actual speakers’ judgments. She also
acknowledges the emergence of experimental pragmatics as a field of research,
together with the increasing use of techniques originating from psychology and
neuroscience, such as eye-tracking and electroencephalography. On the other
hand, coming years will see a growing interest in lexical pragmatics and
dynamic approaches to meaning gain in popularity.

Chapter 10, “Conclusion”, reminds the reader of the most important notions and
approaches presented in the book, which includes a glossary and the references
for the naturally occurring examples provided in the chapters.

EVALUATION

In “Pragmatics: A slim guide”, BB convincingly achieves her objectives. She
offers an easy-to-read and wide-ranging overview of the major research topics
in the pragmatics of the English language.

Chapters 5 to 8, in particular, constitute a very coherent whole, which
corresponds to the author’s area of specialization. The transitions between
each chapter are fluent and easy to follow for non-expert readers. In
addition, many of the examples given by the author to illustrate pragmatic
notions are authentic tokens of language use.

I was positively surprised by the author’s discussion of the gender-neutral
singular third-person pronoun “they” in Chapter 6, pp. 103-5. This reflects
her awareness of the most recent empirical issues in pragmatics with a
societal impact. Another specific strength of the present monograph is, in
Chapter 7 on Presupposition, the excellent account of the tension between
presupposition and accommodation related to the question: How do we know what
can(not) be accommodated? Finally, despite the author’s reliance on her
metalinguistic knowledge as a native speaker of English and the absence of a
reference to the emerging discipline of corpus pragmatics, she rightly
acknowledges that, “just like other language users, linguists themselves are
not good judges of their own linguistic behavior, which makes so-called
armchair linguistics […] a terrible idea” (pp. 140-1).

In general, this monograph adopts an English-based approach to pragmatics,
with most examples immersed in an Anglo-Saxon cultural context. I therefore
expect its contents to be easier to grasp for a target audience with a similar
cultural background. That is not per se a problem, in the sense that the
volume can also be considered a good introduction to the pragmatics (and
cultural aspects) of the English language. In addition, this book pays special
attention to the semantics-pragmatics interface and thus serves as an
introduction to issues that are relevant to both subdisciplines of
linguistics.

In Chapter 2, devoted to literal and non-literal meaning, complex concepts
including conventional/intentional meaning and context (in)dependent meaning
are presented one after the other, with smooth transitions. However, it might
be difficult for students and other non-expert readers to assess the
differences between these related notions and the extent to which they
overlap; as a result, the take-home message of this chapter might be hard to
identify.

The major shortcoming I noticed has to do with indirectness. While Chapter 1
starts off with a few examples of indirect requests to highlight the role of
the context of utterance and speaker’s intentions, the phenomenon of indirect
communication, dealt with in Chapter 4, pages 59-64, and the different notions
of indirectness (Decock & Depraetere 2018) are not given sufficient attention.
To begin with, only the speech acts of requests and, to a minor extent,
apologies are addressed. Moreover, while the socio-demographic variables that
play a role in the production and interpretation of various types of indirect
speech acts are hinted at on page 61 (see also pp. 15-16), the relevant
literature is not properly acknowledged (see, e.g., Holtgraves 1994;
Ruytenbeek 2021, Chapter 5 for a review). Another recent approach, i.e.,
Pinker’s (2007) strategic speaker hypothesis, would have benefitted the
discussion of indirectness, politeness, and face-threat considerations. I also
missed a comparison of different accounts of indirectness in terms of, e.g.,
the “question under discussion”, conversational implicatures, relevance
theoretic explicatures/implicatures. Furthermore, the literal force
hypothesis, which is the starting point of research on indirect speech acts,
is not mentioned (but Austin’s since abandoned distinction between constatives
and performatives is).

Regarding the author’s treatment of “speech acts”, the reader who first
encounters the notions of implicature and (non-)literal meaning might wonder
why the concept of a “speech act” is needed at all. In addition, on some
occasions the explanation is difficult to follow, as on page. 60 where a
confusion between sentence-types and speech act types arises: “[f]rom the
point of view of semantics, a declarative simply makes a statement, an
interrogative simply asks a question, an imperative directly makes a request”.
Here, it is the semantic meaning, rather than the pragmatic force, of
sentence-types that is couched in the form of speech acts. While at the
semantic level different types of sentences express a proposition under a
particular mode of presentation, literal speech acts, just like speech acts in
general, belong to the realm of pragmatics. In a similar vein, I was not
convinced by the author’s presentation of the difference between locutionary
and illocutionary force and between literal and direct speech acts. I would
not be surprised if some readers face the same comprehension issues. Finally,
on pages 65-66 the author mistakenly claims that an indirect apology or
request can be the perlocutionary effect of an utterance. Perlocutionary
effects are the possible causal effects of an illocutionary act, they are not
illocutionary acts themselves.

Summing up, “Pragmatics: A slim guide” is a valuable tool for anyone
interested in the study of pragmatics. Despite some shortcuts and
approximations, it will be particularly useful to graduate and post-graduate
students working on such topics.

REFERENCES

Decock, Sofie & Ilse Depraetere. 2018. (In)directness and complaints: A
reassessment. Journal of Pragmatics 132: 33-46.

Grice, Henry P. 1975. Logic and conversation. In P. Cole & J. L. Morgan
(Eds.), Syntax and Semantics 3: Speech Acts (pp. 41-58). New York: Academic
Press.

Holtgraves, Thomas R. 1994. Communication in context: effects of the speaker
status on the comprehension of indirect requests. Journal of Experimental
Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition 20(5): 1205-1218.

Ruytenbeek, Nicolas. 2021. Indirect Speech Acts. Cambridge: CUP.

Sperber, Dan & Deirdre Wilson. 1995. Relevance: Communication and Cognition,
2nd edition. Oxford: Blackwell.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Nicolas Ruytenbeek (PhD 2017, Université libre de Bruxelles) is currently an
assistant professor in digital and multilingual communication at the KU
Leuven, campus Antwerp. His main research interests include the study of
speech acts, politeness and indirectness in digital contexts.





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