Journal of Pragmatics 43 (2011) 2474–2476
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of Pragmatics
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/pragma
Book review
Key Notions for Pragmatics
Jef Verschueren, Jan-Ola Ostman (Eds.), John Benjamins, Amsterdam/Philadelphia, 2009, 253 pp., $59.00 (paperback),
ISBN: 9789027207784
This is Volume 1 in the Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights series edited by Verschueren and Ostman. As the series approaches
pragmatics as a highly interdisciplinary field of inquiry, the volume seeks to ‘‘provide a practical and theoretical tool for
achieving coherence in the discipline’’ (p. xi). It demonstrates the ways in which the basic notions in the field of pragmatics are
relevant to the interdisciplinary study of human interaction in the cognitive, social, cultural, and linguistic dimensions.
The volume consists of 13 chapters which can be grouped into three thematically related parts. The first part, the opening
chapter, provides an overview of the historical development of pragmatics in terms of its cross-disciplinary nature. The
second part (chapters 2–8, 10, 12–13) consists of topics frequently discussed in pragmatics such as adaptability, channel,
communication, context and contextualization, conversational logic, deixis, implicitness, presupposition, semiotics, and
speech act theory. The third part (chapters 9 and 11) deals with non-verbal communication and primate communication,
topics rarely touched upon in the field of pragmatics.
The introduction to the volume, written by Verschueren, discusses the interdisciplinary roots of pragmatics.
Verschueren contends that pragmatics originated from the unification of semiotics with different disciplines. He argues
that pragmatics first took as its subject those topics which could not be suitably explored within syntax and semantics and
later interacted in various ways with a number of disciplines. In accordance with this historical overview of pragmatics,
Verschueren proposes to pursue a functional perspective on language – paying special attention to language use. That is,
to make ‘making choices’ in communication as the core concept of current work. He notes that the interpretation of
‘making choices’ involves three hierarchically related notions: variability, negotiability, and adaptability, which are
considered to be ‘the interrelated properties of the overall investigation for linguistic pragmatics, the functionality of
language’ (p. 20). Verschueren’s introduction provides detailed guidance to the principles underpinning this volume, and
also implies that pragmatics is undergoing change as contributions from different disciplines deepen our understanding of
the field.
Each chapter of the second group of topics in this volume addresses the most salient issues in pragmatics, showing how the
researchers’ different backgrounds and interests have given rise to various interpretations of common notions in pragmatics.
Adaptability is one of three key notions in Verschueren’s model of pragmatics (1999/2000). In his model, Verschueren
stresses the importance of adaptability by placing it at the core of language use. His discussion of adaptability focuses
primarily on its contributions to pragmatic descriptions and explanations, including identification of context, the process of
making choices in communication, and the importance of cognition in language use. But in this current article (chapter 2)
‘Adaptability’, Verschueren and Brisard shift their attention to the association between adaptability and evolutionary theory.
They argue that language is by nature adaptive, and reflect on two different senses of adaption. In its biological sense,
language emerges and develops adaptively to circumstances, while in its social-interactive sense, language functions
adaptively to the process of communication. These two uses are not discrete as both are inseparable from human cognition.
The authors not only emphasize the theoretical importance of an adaptability theory of pragmatics in the study of language
use, but also exemplify some of the applications of adaptability to human–computer interaction, political rhetoric, language
acquisition, accommodation theory, and language disorders.
In chapter 3, ‘Channel’ by Slembrouck, the basic assumption of the author is that the conventional distinction of channel
between spoken and written language in linguistic studies is ‘crude and narrow’ (p. 48), as channels of communication have a
greater variation in language use. According to Slembrouck, the crudity can be exposed through a comparison between print
and handwriting or between spoken television news and casual conversation. By probing into the complexities of written
and spoken language, Slembrouck suggests that changes in channels of communication have an impact on the nature of
institutionalized forms of language-use, and pragmatic research should stay abreast of what is happening in practice. He
extends the sense of channel by taking into consideration non-verbal signs involved in representation and communication,
including images and digital hypertext. Along with his focus on re-examining channels of communication, Slembrouck
highlights some topics of current interest in pragmatics’ research, such as multimodality. Some readers may find this section
0378-2166/$ – see front matter ß 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.pragma.2011.02.014
Book review
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of the article most significant, especially since ‘multimodality’ has also gained prominence within other disciplines such as
semiotics, linguistics and the cognitive sciences.
In chapter 4, ‘Communication,’ Harder addresses communicative activity ‘with a rounded perspective’ (p. 74). Although
his review of previous discussions on communication fails to deliver an encompassing theory of communication, several key
features of the review are worth noting. Among them, the notion of the ‘communicator’ is the most salient. According to
Harder, communicators have features of consciousness and intentionality; they are constantly playing an active role in
online communicative activity; and their ‘backgrounds’ frame the communicative activity. The term ‘background’ is used to
refer to factors functioning invisibly and implicitly in communication, which include habits shaped by historical and
superindividual forces, as well as codes and interactive patterns used in communication. Harder illustrates the pragmatic
nature of these factors from the perspective of critical discourse analysis. He shows that habits, codes, and their patterns are
displayed unintentionally but clearly reflect the users’ ideology, power, identity, and status. Harder believes that
‘background’ is helpful in understanding what is said and done in communication; thus ‘background’ is seen as a central
notion in explaining difficulties in intercultural communication, business communication, and mass communication.
In ‘Context and Contextualization’, Auer argues that a proper explanation of ‘context’ is contingent on seeing it against the
‘ground’ in which it is embedded. Because the widely accepted triple-representational theories of language (i.e. indexed
features, indexical, indexed/indexical-relationship) are too narrow to go beyond the concept of ‘dexis’, Auer proposes a fivedimensional context framework, which includes linguistic context, non-linguistic sense-data in the surroundings of the
linguistic activity, features of the social situation, features of participants’ common background knowledge, and the channel
of communication. Auer’s framework takes on a broader conception of context as it implies that everything may become a
‘ground’ for others. However, Auer identifies some problems which arise in actualizing this change, such as creativity of
contextualization, vagueness of contextualization, and the negotiability of context.
With the aim of enriching Grice’s theory, R.T. Lakoff poses some questions about conversational logic (CL) in her chapter.
The theory of CL had been developed by Grice as a three-part system: maxims of conversation, rules of conversational
implicature, and the principles stating when the latter are to be evoked. Although Grice applies this system to explain the
‘illogical’ utterances in daily life, it has proved inadequate to deal with some conversational aspects, such as non-fully
maxim-observant utterances. Lakoff argues for a re-examination of CL, in particular regarding its claims to universality, the
relation between CP and discourse genres, and the relation between politeness and informativeness.
‘Deixis’ by Sidnell begins with definitional and theoretical issues. The author focuses on spatial deictics and identifies the
possible dimensions of contrast within spatial deictic expressions. He proceeds to discuss a cross-linguistic typology of deixis
in terms of the semantic parameters encoded. He argues that spatial deictics in different languages show a great deal of
variation in their morphosyntactic expression. Finally, Sidnell explores the roles played by spatial deictics in interaction.
Sidnell uses case studies to illustrate how the interpretation of deictic terms is based on the context in which they occur, and
how deictic terms help to reorganize and orientate the co-participants in such interactions.
In the chapter titled ‘Implicitness’, Papi addresses implicitness from the vantage point of linguistics. Papi argues that no
matter which term is used for implicit phenomena in semantics and pragmatics, implicit meaning cannot be arrived at
without an inferential computation. This requires further work on the part of the addressee, and yet implicitness is still
pervasive in natural human languages. Thus, Papi is mainly concerned with the cognitive side of implicitness. The solution
provided by Papi is that there is an economy principle governing different modes of knowledge stored in the mind and
different modes of processing.
‘Presupposition,’ the chapter authored by Delogu, presents a particularly clear and useful overview of the progress being
made in dealing with the projection problem for presuppositions. Delogu argues that the failure of both semantics and
pragmatics to explain presupposition projection was overcome by Stalnaker with his use of the notion of ‘context’. Stalnaker
(1974) proposes that presupposition, once asserted, becomes part of the context and will change with the context. So context
in this sense is a set of propositional elements factually constrained and relevant to the goals of the ongoing interaction. As
Stalnaker’s theory defines the meaning of a sentence in terms of context change, Delogu places her theory within dynamic
semantics and names it the ‘cognitive approach’. She also compares it with the ‘anaphoric approach’ put forward by Van der
Snadt (1992), for whom presuppositions are anaphora, i.e. they are bound to a linguistic antecedent previously mentioned in
the discourse.
With her chapter ‘Semiotics’, Andersen suggests that semiotics is a field of study deserving our attention. Her reasons are as
follows: first, semiotics is specific in that it can be both an object-discipline and a meta-discipline; second, as an objectdiscipline, semiotics can be explored through different approaches, each focusing on different components in sign processing;
third, as a meta-discourse, it has become an important approach in investigating different objects in many scientific disciplines.
In her chapter, ‘Speech Act Theory’, Sbisa’s argument rests on the claim that ‘it is a task of speech act theory to explain in
which senses and under which conditions uttering something can be doing something, thus providing a conceptual
framework for describing and understanding the various kinds of linguistic action’ (p. 231). After providing an account of
early influential studies, Sbisa points out that these put the spotlight primarily on actions performed by words and neglect
the factor of intentionality. In addition, she points out, there are further problems to resolve concerning illocutionary forceindicating devices, the classification of illocutionary acts, modes of understanding, the relationship between speech acts and
truth, and the contrast between universality and the linguistic and cultural relativity of speech acts. Sbisa concludes the
chapter by generalizing the trends of development in speech act theory: to the cognitive inferential activities and to the
speaker’s intention in performing the speech act. It is in this part that the insights offered by Sbisa are most engaging.
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Book review
The two chapters, ‘Non-verbal Communication’ and ‘Primate Communication’ examine two topics rarely mentioned in
the literature on pragmatics. In the first of these chapters, Payrato offers a comprehensive review of non-verbal
communication (NVC) research, demonstrating that interest in the research on NVC has grown tremendously across
disciplines over the past decades. But just as Lyons (1972) proposed the term paralinguistic be used for all non-verbal
mechanisms supporting language communication, most of the research applying this concept has mostly paid attention to
its functions in verbal communication. Payrato argues that NVC is even more expressive than verbal language, and that
resources in the NVC system reveal the conceptualization of context by interlocutors. He then proposes that the study of NVC
should ‘‘embrace other wider paradigms (communication, pragmatics, social interaction, cognitive psychology . . .) and their
subtopics (gesture, facial recognition, haptics, communication pathologics . . .)’’ (p. 184); that communication should be
approached holistically, rather than treating verbal elements exclusively. In addition, although his discussion is mostly
confined to gestures, which are the generally accepted and most fundamental part of NVC, it can be argued that the
implications are equally applicable to other NVC means.
Tomasello takes a roundabout course in his chapter, ‘Prime Communication.’ Readers may not perceive his point of view
until they finish reading the article. On the surface, the author appears to be attempting to discern in animal communication
a kind of pragmatics in terms of the choice-making principle in communication (Verschueren, 2000). Using flexibility and
referentiality as the criteria for identification, Tomasello compares primate and human communication and arrives at the
conclusion that ‘‘the pragmatics of primate communication seems to be rather meager’’ (p. 214) and that ‘‘there is no sign of
referentiality or symbolicity’’ (p. 214). With his article, Tomasello aims to demonstrate that human communication is
unique, and that this uniqueness can be attributed to human social cognition and pragmatics, which primate communication
lacks.
A major strength of the book is the way in which the editors have managed to bring the wide scope of mainstream
pragmatics disciplines together in a brief volume. Rather than introducing new theories or new fields, the editors present
new perspectives on established concepts. Although the topics have been under discussion for years, the contributors prove
that fresh arguments remain possible. The editors succeed in presenting a compelling dialogue between differing
approaches, and the contributors successfully expand the boundaries of pragmatics to sociology, psychology, evolution, and
cognition. Both the editors and contributors share an interest in how to rethink pragmatic notions and this provides
coherence to the volume. Another feature of the work is that most chapters end with stimulating questions for the readers.
This is an important extension for discussion of the theories involved. It not only broadens our understanding of the field as a
whole, but also provides us with a clearer picture as to how to proceed. In this way, the volume constitutes an advancement
over purely theoretical works on pragmatics. It is, as the editors suggest, ‘‘designed to provide easy access for scholars with
widely divergent backgrounds’’ (p. xi), and is thus accessible to a wide audience. The writing styles are scholarly but not
overly academic.
In their preface, the editors specify the target audiences for this volume as ‘‘students and researchers’’ (p. xii). However,
the volume will be better appreciated by the latter than the former. Although the ideas under discussion are mostly
fundamental ones, they incorporate such a wide range of linguistic theories that a student lacking substantial theoretical
background could easily become lost. This is the sole shortfall of the book.
In sum, this volume is better than a mere review of pragmatic studies in recent years. It fulfils the editors’ aim of
‘‘achieving cross-disciplinary intelligibility’’ (p. xi) built around a clear and concise presentation of the research operating
from different perspectives. It is a good reference book for those who are interested in pragmatics. It offers its readers an
opportunity to reexamine their understanding of common notions from an interdisciplinary perspective. At the same time,
the volume suggests interesting research paths, allowing its readers to find their own points of departure for further studies.
References
Lyons, John, 1972. Human language. In: Hinde, R. (Ed.), Non-verbal Communication. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 49–85.
Stalnaker, Robert, 1974. Pragmatic presupposition. In: Munitz, M., Unger, P. (Eds.), Semantics and Philosophy. New York University Press, New York,
pp. 197–214.
Van der Snadt, Rob A., 1992. Presupposition projection as anaphora resolution. Journal of Semantics 9, 333–377.
Verschueren, Jef, 1999/2000. Understanding Pragmatics. Edward Arnold Publishers Limited, London/Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, Beijing.
Qinghuan Deng (b. 1966) is a Ph.D. Candidate in Linguistics at Xiamen University, Xiamen, Fujian Province, PRC. She is also an Associate Professor at Gannan
Teachers College. She is presently working on a paper on rhetorical varieties in educational discourse.
Qinghuan Denga,b,*
Xiamen University, Fujian, China
b
Gannan Teachers College, Jiangxi, China
a
*Correspondence address: Xiamen University, Fujian, China
E-mail address: dqh.2006@yahoo.com.cn
Available online 5 April 2011