Book review

Pragmatics

Huang, Yan. 2006. Pragmatics. New York: Oxford University Press.

Reviewed by Chaoqun Xie, Center for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies

The book under review is a comprehensive introduction to pragmatics that "focuses on topics emerging from the traditional concerns of analytical philosophy [and] delimits the scope of the discipline in a relatively coherent, systematic, and principled way" (p. 5). An Anglo-American view of pragmatics is adopted instead of the alternative perspective view of pragmatics (Verschueren 1999). As a result of this adoption, the first part of the book (Chapters 2 through 4) covers topics that are normally included in a pragmatics textbook (such as Levinson 1983), while the second part explores further issues.

Chapter 1 serves as an introduction. The author offers a definition of pragmatics, discusses why it should be included in an integrated linguistic theory, and lays out the notions that are basic to both semantics and pragmatics.

Chapter 2 focuses on implicature, a notion originated by Grice and also a source of heated discussions and notorious confusions. The author makes a distinction between conversational implicaturesO and conversational implicaturesF. While the former include those conversational implicatures that arise as a result of directly observing the maxims of conversation, the latter arise through violations of the maxims. The author also touches upon generalized conversational implicatures (GCI) versus particularized conversational implicatures (PCI). The author illustrates several properties of conversational implicature, such as defeasibility or cancellability, non-detachability, calculability, non-conventionality, reinforceability and universality. The latter part of chapter 2 is devoted to two neo-Gricean pragmatic theories of conversational implicature, namely, the Hornian system and the Levinsonian system. Huang offers a comparison and contrast of conventional implicature and conversational implicature within these systems.

Chapter 3 is concerned with presupposition. The focus of Chapter 4 is speech act theory. The first part of the book concludes with a discussion of deixis.

Part 2, which consists of three chapters, explores the interfaces of pragmatics with other linguistic disciplines. Chapter 6 discusses the interface between pragmatics and the study of cognition, with special reference to relevance theory. Huang focuses on the theory's cognitive and communicative principles of relevance, the notions of implicature, explicature, conceptual versus procedural meaning and, how it is distinct from classical/neo-Gricean theory.

Chapter 7 dwells on the semantics-pragmatics interface, introducing some of the following dichotomies: truth-conditional versus non-truth-conditional meaning, conventional versus non-conventional meaning and context independence versus context dependence. The highlight of this chapter is the author's elaboration of the classical Gricean notion of what is said, coontrasting the views of four influential approaches. These are relevance theorists' explicature, Recanati's view of the pragmatically enriched said, Bach's conversational impliciture written with an i, and Levinson's conversational implicature. The author's conclusion is that "Levinson's model is theoretically and methodologically preferable, because it postulates fewer representational levels in the interpretation of an utterance than its competitors" (p. 241).

In Chapter 8, the author looks at the pragmatics-syntax interface. After criticizing Chomsky's binding theory for not being able to properly account for cross-linguistic binding patterns, the author offers a revised neo-Gricean pragmatic theory of anaphor and examines its implications for current linguistic theorizing, one of which being that it invites us to reconsider the nature of grammatical rules and their interaction with pragmatic principles.

The last few years have witnessed an impressive boom in pragmatics research, as evidenced in, for instance, what has come out from such book series as Pragmatics & Beyond (John Benjamins), Studies in Pragmatics (Elsevier) and the Mouton Series in Pragmatics (Mouton de Gruyter), not to mention numerous articles published in Intercultural Pragmatics, Journal of Pragmatics, Pragmatics and Pragmatics & Cognition). As for textbooks in pragmatics, there have been some on the market (see e. g., Cummings 2005; Grundy 2000; Levinson 1983; Mey 2001; Verschueren 1999), but the present one under review stands out. The book gives a clear overview of current research in core areas of pragmatics and how it might be developed further. I am particularly impressed by Professor Yan Huang's detailed and insightful elucidation of several puzzling issues related to Grice's notion of implicature. The issues discussed are complicated, but the language used is accessible. The author employs many examples drawn not only from Chinese, English and Japanese, but also from Polish, Persian, French, Russian and many other languages. This indicates the author's commitment to validating pragmatic theories through cross-linguistic evidence. The book is particularly reader-friendly in that there are, at the end of each chapter, key concepts, exercises and essay questions, as well as suggestions for further reading. Solutions to exercises and a glossary are also provided. Students of pragmatics, philosophy of language in general, Gricean pragmatics, relevance theory and anaphora in particular will find this textbook useful and valuable. While all topics are introduced in terms accessible to both undergraduate and postgraduate students, this text, authoritative and up-to-date, can serve as a valuable resource for scholars from pragmatics and neighboring areas of inquiry who wish to keep abreast of advances in the discipline.

It goes without saying that this book does not solve all the complicated problems in pragmatics; indeed it is not possible to do so. As for the semantics-pragmatics interface, for instance, I think the view of cognitive linguistics should be taken more into consideration. For cognitive linguistics, "[t]here is no principled distinction between semantics and pragmatics" (Evans and Green 2006: 215). Another point that needs to be noted is that this book does not discuss the social aspects of pragmatics. In point of fact, Huang, largely influenced by his adoption of the component view of pragmatics, is quite selective in what he includes in his discussion, which may partly explain, among other things, why he does not devote a chapter to conversation analysis (cf. e.g., Levinson 1983), why recent developments in (im)politeness are barely mentioned (cf. e.g., Eelen 2001) and why he still seems to endorse the view that "the more indirect a speech act, the more polite" (p. 115) (cf. e.g., Sifianou 1992). The author's personal view of pragmatics may be said to be one of semantic pragmatics. Still, the book serves its purpose as a general introduction to pragmatics remarkably well.

References

Cummings, L. 2005. Pragmatics: A Multidisciplinary Perspective. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press

Eelen, G. 2001. A Critique of Politeness Theories. Manchester: St. Jerome Publishing.

Evans, V. and Green, M. 2006. Cognitive Linguistics: An Introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Grundy, P. 2000. Doing Pragmatics (2nd edition). London: Arnold.

Levinson, S. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mey, J. 2001. Pragmatics: An Introduction (2nd edition). Oxford: Blackwell.

Sifianou, M. 1992. Politeness Phenomena in England and Greece: A Cross-Cultural Perspective. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Verschueren, J. 1999. Understanding Pragmatics. London: Arnold.

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