Book review

Reviewing Linguistic Thought

Sophia Marmaridou, Kiki Nikiforidou & Eleni Antonopoulou (eds.): Reviewing Linguistic Thought: Converging Trends for the 21st Century. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter

Reviewed by Chaoqun Xie, Research Center for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics, Guangdong University of Foreign Studies; Foreign Languages Institute, Fujian Normal University

This volume brings together papers from a conference with the title 'Reviewing linguistic thought: Perspectives into the 21st century'. The editors provide a general introduction, in which they outline the theoretical background and introduce each of the five parts of the book. Beyond that, the editors also add a reader-friendly introduction at the beginning of each new part.

Part I, 'Relaxing level boundaries', addresses how and why the rigid dichotomy between semantics and pragmatics should be overcome in the study of meaning. Eve Sweetser, in 'Putting the 'same' meaning together from different pieces', focuses on the relationship between concessive conditional constructions and conditional then, pointing out that 'indirectly expressed meaning has an important effect on the licensing of a construction' (p. 45). In 'Motivation and convention in some speech act constructions: A cognitive linguistic approach', Klaus-Uwe Panther and Linda L. Thornburg analyze four speech act constructions, showing that cognitive linguistics and pragmatics offer complementary perspectives on pragmatic meaning. Part I ends with Bert Cornillie's 'Subjectivity in Spanish esperar-based constructions'.

Part II, 'Focusing on level interaction', contains three chapters. In 'Prolegomena to a default semantics', Katarzyna M. Jaszczolt reviews central issues of the semantics-pragmatics boundary debate before discussing implications and applications of 'default semantics'. She distinguishes between cognitive defaults and social defaults, arguing that default interpretations, rather than being a matter of pragmatics, lie in the domain of semantics. Jaszczolt's account of a 'default semantics' provokes the question what a 'default pragmatics' should look like. Eliza Kitis and Anastasios Tsangalidis address 'Expressivity as an option of tense-aspect in language: The case of the Modern Greek imperfective past', reaffirming that grammar, semantics and pragmatics all have a part to play in utterance interpretation. This view can also be found in Michalis Georgiafentis' chapter, which treats focus as a multi-leveled phenomenon, highlighting the interplay of syntax, phonology, semantics and pragmatics.

The first chapter of Part III, 'Drawing on different theories', is contributed by Michiel Leezenberg, who elaborates on impoliteness in Greek tragedy and argues for a practice-oriented approach to linguistics. He correctly shows that linguistic practices are not totally cooperative. Marina Terkourafi draws on Greek data to demonstrate, among other things, that frequency of use is conducive to the rise of 'minimal context' in making pragmatic inferences. By the way, some references do not appear at the end of this chapter, such as Terkourafi (2001), Terkourafi (2004), Thomas (2000), Thomason (1990), Traugott (2004), Zegarac (1998) and Zipf (1949). Chryssoula Lascaratou and Sophia Marmaridou examine metaphor in Greek pain-constructions from functional and cognitive perspectives, concluding that both linguistic experience and conceptual mechanisms play a decisive role in the formation of our thought and world view. This part closes with a 21st century perspective on research in contrastive linguistics contributed by Svetlana Kurteš.

Part IV explores how various research areas can interact with each other. While Anastasios Fivos Christidis presents a historical overview of the nature of language discussed in the 20th century, Nicholas J. Enfield discusses micro-and macro-dimensions in linguistic systems. Joel Walters uses the study of bilingualism as an example how a marriage of socio-pragmatics and psycho-linguistics can be brought about. Alexandra Kallia accounts for 'The social and psychological modalities of politeness', claiming, among other things, that politeness expresses 'the inner feelings of the individual' (p. 347). This claim, as I see it, however, needs to be further evidenced because in real-life social encounters, politeness is not necessarily an expression of 'the inner feelings of the individual' (see Xie forthcoming for discussion). Part V discusses 'Interdisciplinary perspectives on modularity'. Deridre Wilson, viewing pragmatics as a mind-reading cognitive facility, presents some new possible directions for research on pragmatics and modularity. Elly Ifantidou examines hearsay devices in Modern Greek particles in the context of linguistic metarepresentation. The book closes with name and subject indices.

All in all, this is an excellent collection in the sense that it brings together some current topics in linguistic theory and practice, and that it points to future directions in which research on language, cognition, and mind might possibly develop. The editors have to be credited with providing an important and thought-provoking volume that sheds new light on the intricacies of the linguistic system and the human mind. The book confirms once again that the view across rigid and arbitrary disciplinary boundaries yields a better understanding of language. It will be a valuable source for researchers interested in the question how different strands of linguistic theory might be combined for a better account of meaning, mind, and cognition.

Of course, a truly interdisciplinary perspective is not easy to accomplish. Discussions of linguistic theory are more often than not affected by the academic background, personal theoretical persuasions, research strategy, and argumentation stance of the discussants. What is often claimed to be interdisciplinary or cross-disciplinary may turn out be more or less discipline-bound. When arguing for 'default semantics', for instance, we seem to be arguing against 'default pragmatics', as is reflected in the very term 'default semantics'! This may partly explain why we sometimes call for breaking down rigid disciplinary boundaries only to find ourselves returning to old boundaries or setting up new ones.

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