Abstract
This book brings together a wide range of studies by distinguished scholars in the field, who present in-depth discussions of various core issues and approaches of variation and change from a pragmatic perspective. Setting the scene for all other chapters, Mirjam Fried’s introduction presents the status quo of this promising field. The 17 remaining alphabetically organized chapters can be regrouped into two major themes.
The first group of contributions concentrates on the diachronic dimension of variationist research – language change. Raymond Hickey’s chapter provides a panorama of wide-ranging recurrent topics in language change, including the levels undergoing change and the factors involved, methodologies, recent sociolinguistic studies, pathways of change and explanatory models. It covers much of the relevant ground and could serve as the intellectual springboard for the rest of the book. Several chapters present approaches and methods to variation and change. Louis Goossens’ chapter surveys the evolution of historical linguistics, advocating placing its traditional issues in a broader context and recognizing the heterogeneity and dynamicity involved in revealing its motivations. Derek Nurse’s chapter offers a going-backward method, that is the comparative method, to discover the genetic relations among languages and reconstruct an earlier unattested stage of a given language or proto-language. Andreas H Jucker discusses the pragmatic aspects in language change. He mentions the origin, development, data analysis and central topics of historical pragmatics. Wolfgang Wildgen’s contribution shifts our attention to the evolution of human language faculty, which is the major concern of evolution pragmatics. Based on the assumption that human linguistic competence is closely related to animal communication and cognition, the author surveys various forces that shape human language. Kate Kearns’ chapter specifically addresses the role of pragmatic implicature in semantic change, making a fine distinction between generalized conversational implicature and metaphor/metonymy, two other cognitive inferential mechanisms accounting for semantic change.
The second group addresses language variation. Chapters in this group can be divided into two subgroups, one dealing with variation within an individual language and the other tackling cross-language variation. Within the first subgroup, Ronald Macaulay’s chapter clarifies the definition of ‘dialect’ and surveys some representative studies and recent developments in the USA. The scientific inquiry of dialects is called dialectology, a topic taken up by Georges De Schutter, who discusses the historical development, research aims and different perspectives of the field. The intersection of dialectology and pragmatics, known as variational pragmatics, is the focus of Klaus P Schneider’s contribution. He presents a comprehensive introduction to the various theoretical and methodological issues in this area, reviews its development and points out its future perspectives. Notably, he advocates integrating concepts from other traditions, such as activity type, community of practice and register (p. 261). One such concept, register, is dwelt upon by Norbert Dittmar. Register is speech variation connected to situation types and has been studied in functional linguistics, intercultural communication, linguistic pragmatics, etc. Finally, Luisa Martín Rojo examines a particular language variation – jargon. She demonstrates that, although great achievements have been made, there is still deep-rooted prejudice (such as the imposed dichotomies) in current studies of jargon, and urges a bias-free treatment of jargon and similar linguistic varieties. The second subgroup contains six entries dealing with multilingual variations. Yaron Matras’ chapter addresses language contact. Besides mentioning its societal and individual effects and its dependence on situation and topics, the author also discusses its significance for language and typology. Due to the increasing involvement of extralinguistic factors, the study of language contact needs to combine ‘sociolinguistic methodology with historical and descriptive linguistic theory’ (p. 212). Those approaches stressing socio-cultural and pragmatic factors of language contact are reviewed in Michael Meeuwis and Jan-Ola Östman’s chapter entitled ‘Contact linguistics’. Also considering the pragmatic dimension is Jeanine Treffers-Daller’s chapter on borrowing – an area expanding beyond lexical borrowing toward other types of borrowing and toward a more systematic pursuit of general principles or constraints in the borrowing process. Another field related to the pragmatics of language transfer in specific situations is interlanguage pragmatics, addressed by Gabriele Kasper. Salikoko Mufwene’s chapter introduces one of the results of language contact: Creolization, that is ‘the genesis of a new vernacular in a particular kind of contact situation and under particular socio-pragmatic conditions’ (p. 13). Finally, Bernard Comrie outlines the field of typology, whose recent aim is to offer cognitive and pragmatic generalizations concerning both the permitting rules and constraining principles of variations cross-languages.
With contributions by leading scholars in the area, this book is a timely and much welcomed addition to the growing field of variation and change, which is moving beyond ‘cataloguing instances of variation and toward developing theoretically informed accounts that aim at explaining variation and change’ (p. 14). Although the above summary divides the chapters into thematic groups, this does not mean that there is a clear demarcation between the various topics. On the contrary, one distinctive feature of the contributions lies in their demonstration of the complementarity and mutual enrichment between diachronic variation, synchronic variation and typology. For example, as Goossens indicates, some synchronic linguistic phenomena can be better understood if we examine their diachronic grammaticalization or lexicalization processes. Another characteristic of the researchers in the book is that they all stress the pragmatic/functional/socio-cognitive potential in offering promising methods or theoretical models for explaining variation and change. For instance, besides several chapters specially dedicated to pragmatics, Kearns’ chapter shows that all of the major types of semantic change can be attributed to a broadly construed implicature; and Jucker explicitly mentions that historical pragmatics ‘has made important discoveries by extending pragmatic research methods to the history of various languages’ (p. 118). Finally, there are issues which could be looked at in more depth and thus constitute new research possibilities, such as the relation between the computer and corpora (see the chapters by Nurse, Macaulay and Hickey), and the extension beyond English or a few European languages to other languages (see the chapters by Nurse and Jucker).
Overall, presenting a plethora of core topics, theoretical perspectives and methods on the basis of a variety of linguistic data from numerous languages, this book is essential reading for both students and scholars in the areas of pragmatics, historical linguistics, sociolinguistics, cognitive linguistics, linguistic typology, and so on, with an interest in language variation and change.