Kasher, Asa, ed. (1998) Pragmatics: Critical Concepts, Vol. VI:
Pragmatics, Grammar, Psychology, Sociology. Routledge, hardback,
vi+559pp.
Reviewed by Zouhair Maalej, Department of English, University of
Manouba-Tunis, Tunisia
[This is the second of a projected set of five reviews of the six
volume set Pragmatics: Critical Concepts, edited by Asa Kasher.
The first review, by Aldo Sevi, of volume IV appeared as
<http://linguistlist.org/issues/12/12-2154.html> --Eds.]
Book's purpose and contents
The book is the last of a six-volume set to celebrate pragmatic
concepts. It includes three parts reflecting linearly the items
in the subtitle. Each part is preceded by a short introduction.
All in all, twenty contributions from eminent pragmatists and
less known ones spread unevenly over the three parts, with part
twelve and fourteen each receiving four contributions and the
bulk of papers going to the part on Pragmatics and Psychology.
The critical section will reflect this division by offering three
subsections in the critical section.
Part Twelve: Pragmatics and Grammar
93. Some Interactions of Syntax and Pragmatics, J. L. Morgan
In this already published paper in Cole & Morgan (1975), Morgan,
drawing on Ross's islandhood, shows strong interest in the fact
that "grammar needn't be pragmatically transparent," (p. 17)
which concern is continued later in Green & Morgan (1981).
94. Pragmatic Constraints on Linguistic Production, G. Gazdar
Gazdar brings pragmatic constraints to bear on grammar. Some of
the constraints include choice of expression, movement rules,
deletion, morphology, and phonology.
95. Pragmatics and Grammatical Theory, Norbert Horstein
Horstein's major argument is that the pair semantics-pragmatics
contributes very little to Chomsky's competence since it does not
enlighten us as to "what it is that people know about their
native languages, how it is acquired and how it is put to use"
(p. 54).
96. Applying Accessibility Theory, Mira Ariel
Ariel argues that definite NPs are pragmatic candidates, and
proposes to treat their contextual effects via Accessibility
Theory (AT), which is termed as "a geographic view of context"
and argued to supersede the notion of Givenness. Ariel isolates
three types of context: General or Encylopedic Knowledge,
Physical Environment of the speech event, and Linguistic Context,
arguing that "natural languages code the degree of Accessibility
of an antecedent, not its initial geographic source" (p. 63).
This geographic view is soon abandoned in favour of the Parallel
Distributed Processing (borrowed from McClelland & Rumelhart,
1986), which is a modular view of memory not in need of any
geographic borderlines. The degree of Accessibility is a function
of activation in memory, where the most accessible knowledge is
that which is subject to higher activation and stored in short-
term memory, with the least accessible having a lower level of
activation and being retrievable from long-term memory. Some of
the factors affecting accessibility include distance in discourse
between an anaphor and its antecedent, competition between
anaphors, saliency of an antecedent as a referent, and unity or
change of frame. On the interaction between grammar and
accessibility, Ariel claims that: (i) "Accessibility theory
constrains possible grammaticalization processes involving
pronominal forms," and (ii) AT "governs whatever optimal
decisions are left by the grammar concerning sentential anaphora"
(p. 77).
Part Thirteen: Pragmatics and Psychology
97. Responding to Indirect Speech Acts, Herbert H. Clark
Clark brings to bear a psychological model on how listeners
understand and respond to Indirect Speech Acts (ISAs). Properties
of ISAs are multiplicity of meaning (as when a literal and
conveyed meaning arise), logical priority of meaning (with
primacy going to the conveyed meaning), rationality,
conventionality (ISAs go by indirectly and idiomatically
questioning someone about their ability), politeness (ISAs are
motivated by politeness matters), purposefulness. Clark (p. 103)
proposes three possible responses to isolate ISAs: expected
responses, co-operative but unexpected responses, and
uncooperative responses. Under expected responses are subsumed
six properties (Clark promises 7 but gives 6 only): (i)
multiplicity of moves (as deriving from multiplicity of meaning),
(ii) functions of moves (preliminary, expected, and added moves),
(iii) order of moves, (iv) selection of moves (as deriving from
the logical priority of meaning), (v) politeness (where two- move
responses are judged to be more polite), (vi) ellipsis (with an
ISA and its response forming an adjacency pair). The response
model offered consists in: answer alone, answer-plus-
information, and information alone, and was checked in five
experiments. Transparency was tested in relation to
conventionality and idiomaticity. Clark postulates two kinds of
information in understanding ISAs: (i) linguistic (relating to
conventionality of means, conventionality of form, special
markers of politeness, and transparency of indirect meaning) and
(ii) functional (relating to the implausibility of the literal
meaning and the speaker's imputed plans and goals).
98. Your Wish is My Command: Convention and Context in
Interpreting Indirect Requests, Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr
In a first experiment, Gibbs argues that conventionality enhances
the interpretation of Indirect Requests (IRs), which have been
elicited from subjects through real-world scenarios, by
economising on processing time, but that conventional forms do
not seem to be contextually interchangeable. In a second
experiment, Gibbs asks subjects to rate the elicited IRs
according to their appropriateness in the contexts in which they
occur, and concludes that although "the notions of ^�convention
of means' and ^�convention of form' are useful for discussing
general patterns of conventionality in language, the
conventionality of a particular utterance can only be measured
given some specific social context" (p. 157). In a third
experiment, time ratings for IRs in conventional contexts were
found to be lower than those for non- conventional contexts.
99. Missing the Point. The Role of the Right Hemisphere in the
Processing of Complex Linguistic Materials, Howard Gardner, Hiram
H. Brownell, Wendy Wapner and Diane Michelow
Gardner et al study right hemisphere patients (RHPs), who "appear
to have difficulties in processing abstract sentences, in
reasoning logically, and in maintaining a coherent stream of
thought" (p. 172). To do so, they subject patients to narratives
that they are expected to understand, recall, and retell. Story
recall is scored on overall output, confusions, main events,
confabulations, sequencing errors, and moral abstraction. The
results of their study revolve around linguistic processing,
narrative ability, and humour appreciation. In terms of
linguistic processing, RHPs have been found to show qualitative
difference recall, lack of ability to repeat segments in a
condensed or abstract form, and flat delivery of narratives and
answers to questions. With regard to narrative ability, results
show that although RHPs perform well with spatial elements, they
score low on emotional and non-canonical elements. Thus,
incorrect emotional items are inappropriately embellished, but
reasonably explained, which points to the fact that RHPs "can
activate appropriate routines for inference, but tend to invoke
them inappropriately" (p. 178). Reaction to non-canonical items
is characterised by acceptance and even justification on the part
of RHPs. Regarding humour appreciation, RHPs, like normals,
reacted in the same way to humour, but find unfunny things
funnier than the normals consider them. Attempting an explanation
for these findings, Gardner et al explain that these defects
hinge on "ideational or conceptual factors" rather than purely
linguistic ones.
100. Appreciation of Pragmatic Interpretations of Indirect
Commands: Comparison of Right and Left Hemisphere Brain-damaged
Patients, Nancy S. Foldi
While Clark and Gibbs studied indirect requests in normal people,
Foldi studies indirect commands (ICs) in right and left
hemisphere brain-damaged patients (RHBDPs and LHBDPs), with a
control group from normal subjects. The reason for focusing on
brain-damaged patients, explains Foldi, has to do with: (i) the
fact that the polarization of language to the left hemisphere and
of non-language functions to the right one has been under
revision, (ii) the contradictory claims made about whether RHBDPs
show deficits on pragmatic aspects of communication, and (iii)
whether developmental literature shows dissociation between
linguistic and pragmatic information. Indirect commands are
matched to their direct counterparts, and show two individuals in
a social setting appropriate for the content of ICs. Results for
ICs reveal that while RHBDPs show preference for literal
responses, LHBDPs and normals waver between the appropriate (more
often) and literal ones, with the pragmatic responses receiving
more prominence. Responses to direct commands, however, separated
the brain- damaged patients (who are not consistent with their
judgements) from the normals, who almost always choose the
pragmatic not the literal responses. Foldi documents her results
as being consistent with results arrived at by other workers with
RHBDPs on narration and discourse abilities, in particular the
appreciation of humour, idiomatic expressions, metaphor, indirect
requests, and implicit attitudes. Foldi ends his paper by
postulating three hypotheses to explain the performance of
RHBDPs: (i) RHBDPs fail to appreciate the social relation between
participants in a given exchange and the intonational contour
that realises it, (ii) although this hypothesis was not borne out
and as research in indirect acts in general demonstrates, RHBDPs
seem, like children, to attend to non-salient dimensions of
communication (i.e. "valued the physically verifiable aspects of
a similar two-person exchange, even though those aspects had
nothing to do with the intent or content of the communication"
(p. 210), and (iii) RHBDPs fail "to integrate the necessary
components of information in order to arrive at a felicitous
indirect interpretation" (p. 210).
101. Pragmatics and Aphasia, Ruth Lesser and Lesley Milroy
Lesser & Milroy point to some of the problems posed by the Boston
Diagnostic Aphasia Examination used by many researchers on
aphasia such as confusing linguistic processing abilities (such
as calculating sense relations between lexical items or sense
properties of sentences) and inferencing abilities (such as the
capacity to infer implicatures), which amounts to the distinction
between "linguistic meaning" and "speaker meaning." The bulk of
the paper is devoted to repair strategies used by aphasics in and
out of clinical contexts.
102. Pragmatics and the Modularity of Mind, Asa Kasher
In this article reprinted from Davis (1991), Kasher seeks to
justify modular pragmatics. Kasher hypothesises that the modular
approach to the study of the mind includes (i) faculties having
various degrees of independence and access to propositional
content in a certain domain, (ii) mental mechanisms, with memory
as one example, (iii) cognitive modules (in Fodor's sense), which
are domain-specific, primary, computationally autonomous, and
innately specified, and (iv) central cognitive systems which are
"neither domain-specific nor informationally encapsulated, but
related to "general mental capacities of belief formation and
problem solving." Deixis presupposes the existence of a
perceptual module and a linguistic module, with resolution as
pertaining to the central cognitive systems. Lexical pragmatic
presuppositions are "beyond the power of cognitive modules" (p.
241). With regard to ISAs, Kasher invokes the presumption of
literalness as facilitated by the linguistic modules (syntactic
and semantic properties of lexical items), thus turning attention
away from the hemispheres of the brain to the modularity of the
mind. Implicatures, on the other hand, are monitored by a
principle of rationality, claiming that even Sperber & Wilson's
relevance theory is built on rational principles. Kasher
concludes by positing three parts to core pragmatics: (1) "a
pragmatic, purely linguistic competence, embodying ... knowledge
of certain speech act verbs," (2) "a pragmatic, non-linguistic
competence, governing aspects of intentional action in general,
including linguistic activity, which is intentional in nature,"
and (3) "a class of various interface features
103. The Ontogenesis of Speech Acts, Jerome S. Bruner
In this 1975 essay, Bruner imputes the distortion in language
acquisition (LA) research to a preoccupation with syntax at the
expense of language use. Bruner, however, suggests that not only
is structure not unimportant for LA but, most importantly, not
"totally arbitrary" (p. 255-6) in that the structure of language
tends to correlate with the psychological events that it encodes.
To illustrate, he invokes the subject-predicate as correlating
with topic-comment and case grammar as correlating with "the
structure of human action in infancy" (p. 258). Some of the
processes that facilitate the learning of communicative devices
that encode the concepts of agent, action, recipient include: (i)
learning segments from interaction with the mother, (ii)
elaborate construction of inter- subjective routines, (iii) the
routine attend to ? act upon, and (iv) prosodic patterns.
However, Bruner insists that play is a determinative factor that
leads the child to elaborate communication rules.
104. The Acquisition of Performatives Prior to Speech, Elizabeth
Bates, Luigia Camaioni and Virginia Volterra
In this 1975 essay, Bates et al are interested in the cognitive
and social developments of communication in children, arguing
that the acquisition of performative structures at the
prelinguistic level originates in gesture, eye contact, and
prelinguistic vocalizations. Bates et al explain the use of
prelinguistic imperative as a way of using the adult "as a means
to a desired object" (p. 278), whereas prelinguistic declarative
is the use of an object as a way of attracting the adult's
attention through pointing, showing, or giving. Adducing evidence
from case studies with Italian infants, Bates et al suggest that
children prelinguistically engage in communication with adults in
three phases: (i) the perlocutionary phase, (ii) the
illocutionary phase, and (iii) the locutionary phase.
105. The Meaning of Children's First Words: Evidence from the
Input, Anat Ninio, Postscript (1995)
Ninio suggests that children map one- word utterances onto "any
other piece of human behavior they observe" (p. 299), suggesting
that children attribute intentional communicative dimensions to
one-word utterances. In a case study of mother-child interaction,
Ninio concludes that "one-word utterances are lexical
realizations of complex communicative acts" (310). In a
Postscript, Ninio mentions a follow up study undertaken in 1992,
where past findings arrived at have been corroborated.
106. The Pragmatics of Formulas in L2 Learner Speech: Use and
Development, Jens Bahs, Harmut Burmeister and Thomas Vogel
Bahs et al study formulaic speech among L2 Learners as enhancing
pragmatic abilities. After expressing their dissatisfaction with
current classifications of formulaic expressions, Bahs et al
distinguish: expressive, directive, game or play, polyfunctional,
question, and phatic formulas.
107. Disturbance of Pragmatic Functioning, Benita Rae Smith and
Esva Leinonen
Smith & Leinonen offer a review of the literature on children
suffering from pragmatic impediments to comprehension and
expression, known as semantic-pragmatic disorders.
108. Pragmatics and Cognition in Treatment of Language Disorders
(Revised), G. Albyn Davis
The paper by Davis is one of the few that is updated and includes
recent references. Davis studies the role of pragmatics in cases
of aphasia. Davis isolates three types of context in connection
with aphasia: linguistic, paralinguistic, and extralinguistic.
Davis envisages a treatment hierarchy, including knowledge (of
the world), props (real objects instead of pictures, although
real objects did not make much difference), interaction (natural
conversation with turn-taking structure), purpose/situation
(role- playing activities), people (family members and friends
participating in clinical activities), and settings (simulated
world in clinics and hospitals).
Part Fourteen: Pragmatics and Sociology
109. Felicity's Condition, Erving Goffman
Goffman proposes to study what he calls "social presuppositions
in language use" (p. 396). This is a broader view of
presupposition than the ones known in the pragmatics literature.
Social presuppositions range from "everything that gets said
early in a conversation can be presupposed in some way by later
utterances in it" (p. 407), which amounts to anaphora, to "what
each speaker presupposes his listeners knew about the world and
its working before the conversational forgathering itself
occurred" (p. 410), which amounts to social experience with
knowledge .
110. Political Determinants of Pragmatic and Sociolinguistic
Choices (Revised), Hartmut Haberland and Tove Skutnabb-Kangas
Haberland & Skutnabb-Kangas address the more political problem of
how political contexts in a given society impact how scientific
knowledge is interpreted and applied. In a Postscript (1995), the
authors mention that their original paper has been shortened by
almost one half.
111. The Tact Maxim, Geoffrey N. Leech
Leech correlates Searle's illocutionary categories of directives
and commissives to Competitive (discourteous negative politeness)
and Convivial (courteous positive politeness) functions. The Tact
Maxim (TM) tends to be inversely proportional to the degree of
linguistic directness, i.e. the more an illocution is indirect,
the more polite it is. Indirect illocutions tend to be more
polite as they (i) increase the degree of optionality for not
doing something, and (ii) diminish force. The TM has two
dimensions to it: (a) negative: Minimise the cost to h, and (b)
positive: Maximise the benefit to h (e.g. making an offer to h).
Leech isolates three pragmatic scales: (a) cost-benefit scale,
(b) optionality scale, and (c) indirectness scale.
112. Politeness, Introduction to the Reissue: A Review of Recent
Work, Penelope Brown and Stephen C. Levinson
Brown & Levinson argue that a great part of the mismatch between
the pragmatic dichotomy of the said and implicated phenomena owes
its existence to politeness phenomena. Critical of Leech's
Politeness principle as a parallel to Grice's Co-operative
Principle, they hold that politeness depends on face (individuals
self- esteem), isolating three main strategies: (a) positive
politeness (the desire to be approved), (b) negative politeness
(the desire to be unimpeded in one's actions), and (c) off-record
politeness (avoidance of equivocal impositions). Owing to
counterexamples from non-European cultures (Samoans and
Ilongots), Brown & Levinson express reservations vis-�-vis
Grice's theory of intentional communication (for conceptual,
psychological, and cultural reasons) and speech act theory (for
its sentential bias). Three sociological factors determine the
level of politeness: (a) power, (b) distance, and (c) ranking. A
recurrent concept on which face depends is culture, which seems
to challenge any claim for universal models of politeness.
Appendix: Papers and Books
This small section includes further references to the topics
dealt with in the book, most of which are new ones.
Critical evaluation
As part of a six-volume set, the current volume looks more like a
reader in pragmatics as it includes some well known already
published papers and book chapters in the pragmatics literature.
Although very little in the way of new insight is on offer (in
all volumes judging by their table of contents), this compilation
is essential background reading for students of pragmatics and
new researchers in the pragmatics of language. Particular to this
volume under review, bringing together papers that directly and
indirectly relate to the pragmatics of language is, to say the
least, a laudable enterprise for which Kasher is to be commended.
1. The papers of Part Twelve (Pragmatics and Grammar) owe their
value not so much to any new/original claims they make, but to
the issues they raise such as the autonomy of syntax and the
modularity of mind, which are classic bones of contention between
formal and functional/cognitive schools of linguistics. In
claiming that "grammar needn't be pragmatically transparent,"
Morgan seems to be acting on the assumption that the linguistic
sign is necessarily arbitrary, and, by extension, grammar is not
symbolic. In the cognitive quarter, Langacker (1987: 12), arguing
against the hegemony of Saussure's l'arbitraire du signe, claims
that the cognitive conception of language as symbolic should be
extended "beyond lexicon to grammar." In contradistinction to
Morgan, Gazdar's defence of pragmatic constraints on grammar is
more commonsensical. This was addressed as the pragmatics of
grammar by Hindelang (1981). Horstein's assumption that native
speakers can make well-formedness judgements (performance) about
sentence structures (competence) in UG terminology amounts to
confusing the linguist with the native. His argument that
pragmatics does not contribute much to Chomsky's approach to
language amounts to asking whether Chomsky's competence/
performance distinction explains how language is acquired and
used, which we know formal linguists are not primarily concerned
with. Pragmatics is not "about" language, but studies language in
use. "How it is acquired" is partly taken care of by the sub-
discipline of psycholinguistics, and "how it is put to use" is in
part the concern of cognitive psychology (Bower & Cirilo, 1985:
71). Clearly, by asking of pragmatics more than its theoretical
programme can accommodate, Horstein wants it to be a jack of all
trades. Broadening the scope of pragmatics to dealing with NPs,
Ariel seems to suggest that an important portion of grammar,
namely, indexicals (including pronouns and spatio-temporal
deictic expressions) and NPs (including definite descriptions,
proper names, demonstrative expressions, etc.) is the epitome of
a pragmatically transparent grammar. Judging, then, from this
small set of papers, the interaction between grammar and
pragmatics is supported by all, with Morgan showing more
reservation and caution.
2. The papers of Part Thirteen (Pragmatics and Psychology) are
more original. Clark and Gibbs papers overlap in that both deal
with the role of conventionality in the interpretation of ISAs.
Although Clark's recorded ISAs may be argued to commend more
genuinely reliable results than Gibbs's elicited IRs (which is
generally the very criticism addressed to the lab practices of
cognitive psychologists), Gibbs does not see the resolution of
IRs with the same eye as Clark. While Clark's discussion of ISAs
raises the age-old dichotomy of literal (as a property of
sentences, i.e. semantics) vs. non- literal meaning (as a
property of utterances or speaker's conveyed meaning), Gibbs
argues that IRs "lie on a continuum between highly conventional
and non-conventional utterances" but not on "whether the
utterance is literal or metaphoric" (p. 163), which Kasher (this
volume) strongly contests as not realistic in the case of
neuropsychological research. In the same line of thought, Kasher
(1991: 395) rightly argues that "there is no reason to assume
that in understanding metaphorical expressions we employ the same
principles that identify for us the ^�higher' intended end of an
^�indirect speech act'." Kasher (this volume) resolves the issue
of ISAs "in terms of presumed, literal forces, as determined by a
linguistic module on grounds of strictly linguistic information,
and of eventual forces, as determined by some central device on
grounds of the presumed, literal forces as well as additional
non-linguistic information" (p. 244), which not only throws us
back into the literal vs. non-literal dichotomy, but also counts
as an implicit acknowledgement of two different mental
"locations" for purely linguistic (cognitive module) and
pragmatic information (central cognitive system).
Gardner et al and Foldi's papers are a rehabilitation of the
right hemisphere in language processing. Evidence from
neuropsychology corroborates this. For instance, Corina (1999),
for instance, argues that right hemisphere disorders, which were
thought to occasion no damage to language skills, have been shown
to be responsible for the disruption of the meta-control of
language and discourse abilities in both speakers and signers
(Maalej, forthcoming 2001). One may safely infer from Gardner et
al's paper that pragmatic knowledge is right hemisphere-dependent
as RHPs have difficulty recounting coherent stories told to them
and appreciating to their just value non-canonical items. Foldi
offers evidence to the effect that RHBDPs fail to bring pragmatic
appreciation to bear on linguistic material. It is now common
knowledge that such deficiencies observed in RHPs attest to two
separate linguistic and pragmatic modules in the left and right
hemispheres, respectively. Further evidence may be adduced.
Studying dementia in Alzheimer patients, Keller & Rech (1998:
315) pointed out that these patients show one largely preserved
cognitive capacity for phonological, morphological and syntactic
items but disturbed discourse-processing and semantic abilities,
and argued for the same conclusion on the provision for separate
modules for linguistic and pragmatic competencies. Further,
Campbell (1999: 63) argues that the capacity for speechreading is
impaired after left-hemisphere lesion (affecting supramarginal
speech processing), and rates higher in the perception of faces
and visual movements, showing that "audiovisual speech and silent
speechreading do not seem to lateralize to the left hemisphere as
cleanly as does heard speech." In contrast to all this evidence,
Kasher (1991a) argues for a "Modular Pragmatics in the Left
Hemisphere Hypothesis." The findings of Gardner et al definitely
battle against Kasher's hypothesis (although it is acknowledged
that "parts of central pragmatics are in the right hemisphere,"
p. 396): If it were true that linguistic and pragmatic items were
monitored in the same hemisphere, RHPs would have no such
impairment that Gardner et al and Foldi find them suffering from.
In essays 103-105, the psycholinguistics of acquisition
(prelinguistic, linguistic, and pragmatic) is addressed. Bruner
and Bates et al address the prelinguistic predisposition to
communicate in children. While Bruner situates it mostly in
mother-child interaction in play, Bates et al fit it into
performative structures. In contradistinction, Ninio's paper
addresses the pragmatics of first word acquisition as a form of
lexicalisation of communicative acts, arguing that children
attribute intentional communicative meanings to one-word
utterances, which implies that illocutions are present at this
phase of language development. Rae Smith & Leinonen offer to
study pragmatic impediments to comprehension and expression, but
end up giving a review of the literature on the topic without a
real contribution to the subject. The essay by Davis presents
aphasic people as suffering from pragmatic deficiencies, knowing
that aphasia is a left-hemisphere impairment and pragmatics is
right-hemisphere dependent.
3. The papers of Part Fourteen (Pragmatics and Sociology) If
Goffman's paper on presupposition suffers from displacement by
being transported into the social area (he calls his theme
"social presupposition"), that of Haberland & Skutnabb-Kangas has
very little to do with pragmatics altogether as they themselves
rightly asked the question: "One might ask what this paper has to
do with pragmatics." The truncated version massacred the import
of the original I happen to have read before.
To conclude this review, a few general remarks about editing are
in good order:
(i) If not for the dates of the references in the essays, not
acknowledging for all essays that they have already been
published elsewhere is misleading for non-specialists in the
field (e.g. students). [Sevi also made this point in his review
of Vol. 4 --Eds]
(ii) Some of the papers having been actually book chapters
elsewhere, the volume suffers from formatting errors and
pragmatic displacement of deixis. For instance, in Ariel's
chapter there is a subsection 0.2.1. but not 0.2.2., then 0.4.2.,
without 0.4.1. "This book" (p. 76) refers to her book, Accessing
Noun-phrase Antecedents, from which the chapter has been taken.
"In previous chapters" sows the same confusion (p. 77). In
Leech's chapter (p. 462), the first paragraph includes reference
to "this and the next chapter," where "this" refers to the
chapter in Kasher's book, but "next" to Leech's Principles of
Pragmatics from which the chapter has been taken. Another
occurrence of "this" in "this book" (p. 472) introduces the same
confusion between Leech's and Kasher's respective books.
Cognitively and pragmatically, such imperfections have slowed
down the pace of my reading of the book while reviewing it, and
proved to be costly in terms of the resolution of deixis and
ambiguity. The same thing occurs in Lesser & Milroy, whose first
sentence reads: "We have devoted some space to this selective
review of Grice's ideas ..." (p. 217), where "this" may shock the
reader as having read no review. It is only a few lines later
that the reader realises that this chapter is taken from a full-
length book by the authors (Linguistics and Aphasia). In the same
paper, reference is made to the utterances in (38) and (39) (p.
220), which do not figure in the paper. In Brown & Levinson's
essay, "this" (p. 488) in "this work" and "this" (p. 492) in
"this book" both refer to Politeness. Some Universals in Language
Use, but not to Kasher's book.
(iii) The running title in the header of the page includes the
chapter heading and not the essay title, which does not help
browsing through the volume for the different essays.
(iv) The inclusion of papers under a heading in which they do not
logically fit is quite common in these volumes. For instance,
indirect speech acts figure in two different volumes: four essays
on ISAs (71-74) in Volume IV devoted to presupposition, and four
essays on ISAs (97-100) in Volume VI under review. It would have
been better to include the ones in Volume IV in volume VI, as
there is a rationale for including them there with the other
essays on ISAs. This is not an isolated anomaly. Browsing through
the table of contents of Volume I and volume III, I noticed that
Bar-Hillel's "Indexical Expressions" features in Volume I but not
in Volume III, whose title is Indexicals and Reference. Goffman's
paper, which treats "social presupposition," is in the company of
two papers on politeness (by Leech and Brown & Levinson) instead
of being in Volume IV, devoted to presupposition.
References
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Campbell, Ruth (1999). "Language from Faces: Uses of the Face in
Speech and in Sign." In: Lynn Messing & Ruth Campbell (eds.), 57-
73.
Corina, David P. (1999). "Neural Disorders of Language and
Movements: Evidence from American Sign Language." In: Lynn
Messing & Ruth Campbell (eds.), 27-43.
Green, Georgia M. & J. L. Morgan (1981). "Pragmatics, Grammar,
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About the reviewer The reviewer is an assistant professor of
linguistics. His interests include cognitive linguistics,
metaphor, pragmatics, cognition-culture interface, critical
discourse analysis, sign language and gesture, etc.
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