Book review

Key Terms in Pragmatics

Nicholas Allott. 2010. Key Terms in Pragmatics. London: Continuum.

Reviewed by Iwo Iwanov, Department of English Literature and Linguistics, University of Heidelberg, Germany.

In this book, Nicholas Allot sets out to provide the undergraduate student with an introduction into the field of pragmatics. The first chapter (16 pp.) offers a short survey of key concepts and methods that are applied in pragmatics. Chapter two ("Key Terms", 183 pp.) constitutes the bulk of the volume. "Key Thinkers" (33 pp.) provides the reader with informative abstracts on some of the most important biographical dates and, of course, the major contributions of central figures in the respective areas. "Key Works" (10 pp.) and an index conclude the book.

Chapter 1: Introduction

Already the very first paragraph makes clear that pragmatics is a complex area of inquiry and that it is "not the same thing for all of its practitioners" (p. 1). Despite this superficial fragmentation of perspectives, there is agreement upon four fundamental cornerstones of pragmatic inquiry. The points are (cf. p. 1):
(1) Communication involves complex intentions.
(2) These communicative intentions have to be inferred.
(3) Communication is governed by principles/maxims.
(4) There is a fundamental distinction between explicit and implicit conveyance of information.
In roughly page-long portions of text, Allott works through the most important core concepts. While doing so, Allott never forgets to link the content to its historical origins. For instance, the notion of implicature is connected to Grice's famous 1967 lectures (Grice 1975). Speech acts, illocutionary force, presupposition and pragmatic principles are all equally well embedded in their respective histories. The survey is necessarily brief but highly useful. Clear examples support rapid understanding of the concepts and yield concrete anchoring to real-life situations. A very brief history of pragmatic thinking rounds up the introduction. Allott identifies three periods (cf. pp. 10-11):
(1) From antiquity to Grice (1957).
(2) From the 1940s to the 1960s, with Grice and Austin as main proponents.
(3) The modern period from 1967 (Grice 1975) to today.
Special importance is placed on Grice's Logic and Conversation lectures, which can be seen as a foundational work in the formation of pragmatics as a distinct field in the study of language. The modern diversity of the field is exemplified by Allott's mentioning Griceans, neo-Griceans, relevance theorists and proponents of formal pragmatics.

Chapter 2: Key Terms

The list of the entries ranges from "Abductive inference" to "What is said". Some of the entries cover only half a page, others are given three or so pages. The longest contribution, with six pages, can be found under the heading "Conversational maxims" (p. 45). Each article is tagged with one or more key terms that stand in some conceptual relation to the preceding contribution. The tags for "Processing effort" (p. 155), for example, are "accessibility", "relevance" and "relevance-theoretic comprehension procedure". "Cognitive linguistics" (p. 29) is tagged with "functionalism", "metaphor" and "metonymy". Given the brevity of the book, it should be clear that the key term contributions cannot be in-depth examinations, but Allott manages to capture the big picture. Fauconnier, Lakoff and Langacker are mentioned (p. 29); their central achievements are outlined. For example, Allott discusses the importance of metaphor and metonymy as a "window into the mind", or, more precisely, a "window into this backstage cognition of our minds" (Fauconnier 2004: 657): "Thus cognitive linguistics has an affinity with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, according to which the language we speak influences or determines the way we think, although a cognitive linguist might prefer to say that language evokes, depends on and reveals our mental resources" (p. 30).

Chapter 3: Key Thinkers

This chapter covers eight key thinkers, including John Langshaw Austin, Dan Sperber, and Deirdre Wilson. Each contribution includes some brief biographical notes. For instance, the reader learns that Paul Grice held regular meetings with other Oxford philosophers on Saturday mornings, calling them the "Playgroup". Allott provides the reader with all that is needed for a very first overview over the issues and core contributions of each of the eight thinkers. Thus, Austin is mentioned in connection to speech act theory, of which the essential concepts are introduced. On approximately four pages, Allott also manages to include critical positions that have been voiced as reactions to Austin's work. He contrasts Austin's emphasis on the societal background assumptions of utterances with Grice's intentional motivation for the analysis of utterances. Allott writes: "It is not surprising that this aspect of Austin's work on speech acts has appealed more to pragmatic theorists interested in broader questions of language use and society than Griceans" (p. 203). Still, concepts such as illocutionary force are also important to researchers working within the Gricean approach. As Paul Grice's contributions are mentioned, we learn that it "is hard to overstate Grice's influence on pragmatics" (p. 216), which is certainly a true proposition � perhaps even more so in the face of the fact that Allott himself largely works within a Gricean approach, (cf. his dissertation Pragmatics and Rationality). Informative further reading lists round up the sections. I believe they will be especially helpful to those whose course of linguistic study has just begun.

Chapter 4: Key Works

In this bibliography, texts central to pragmatics are marked with an asterisk and introductory texts are marked with a double asterisk. The introductory literature is not categorized into levels of accessibility, which can be found, for example, in Yule (1996). Levinson's classic (Levinson 1983) is marked by Allott as a central and as an introductory text. Yule marks it as "more advanced and consequently more technical" (Yule 1996: 118). This further classificatory device could have helped Allott in the creation of an even better "Key Works" section. Some entries do not represent the latest editions. For instance, Mey (2001) and Smith (2004) have seen second editions.

To summarize, the reviewed volume presents an accessible glossary-style introduction into the many faces of pragmatics. Newcomers to the field should find it very handy in many ways. Some minor shortcomings of the bibliographic section do not diminish the overall value of the book.

References

Allott, Nicholas. 2007. Pragmatics and Rationality. Ph.D. Thesis. University College London.
Fauconnier, Gilles. 2004. Pragmatics and Cognitive Linguistics. In Laurence Horn & Gregory Ward (eds.). The Handbook of Pragmatics, 657�674. Oxford: Blackwell.
Grice, Paul. 1957. Meaning. The Philosophical Review 66(3). 377�388.
Grice, Paul. 1975. Logic and Conversation. In Peter Cole & Jerry Morgan (eds.). Syntax and Semantics (3), 41�58. New York: Academic Press.
Levinson, Stephen C. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Mey, Jacob L. 2001. Pragmatics: An Introduction, 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell.
Smith, Neil. 2004. Chomsky: Ideas and Ideals, 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Yule, George. 1996. Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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