Abstract
The eighth in the 10-volume Handbook of Pragmatics Highlights series, this collection brings together a wide scope of topics, approaches and theories under the term ‘discursive pragmatics’. Zienkowski’s introduction previews the topics presented in all other chapters and introduces some topics which are thematically relevant to, and thus should/could have been included in, the present collection. The remaining 15 alphabetically organized chapters can be regrouped according to the ways in which they contribute to the pragmatic study of discourse.
The first group of entries offers theoretical approaches to discourses and text. De Beaugrande traces the development of text linguistics from extending prevailing syntactic theories to text to its recent focus on revealing the social and cognitive processes involved in the generation and comprehension of texts. Adopting the term ‘text and discourse linguistics’ (TDL) to emphasize the merger of text linguistics and discourse analysis, Östman and Virtanen discuss several core fields of research in TDL from both theoretical and application perspectives. Throughout their discussion, these two chapters demonstrate the convergence of discourse studies and pragmatics.
The second group of papers concentrates on concepts which are perspectives on discourse phenomena. Such a perspective is provided in Wodak’s entry on her pragmatic-based integration of critical linguistics and critical discourse analysis (CDA) and her view of CDA as an approach ‘characterized by interdisciplinary and problem-oriented principles’ (p. 2). Johansson and Suomela-Salmi address French enunciative pragmatics with its communicative view of language and its focus on language in use and speaker. Polyphony, introduced by Roulet, is a pragmatic method used to describe how speakers organize and convey different voices in their discourse. In Slembrouck’s chapter, intertextuality is taken as a high-level pragmatic perspective on ‘how history is inscribed into situated practice’ (p. 174). White views appraisal as a pragmatic perspective on discourse, because there are many evaluations that go beyond what is marked in utterances and need the consideration of context. Taking narrative as a perspective involving subjectivity and context, Georgakopoulou elaborates on the referential, textual and contextual properties of narrative.
The third group of articles is concerned with more concrete discourse phenomena, the research on which displays an increasing pragmatic orientation. Solin discusses three representative approaches, issues and debates concerning genre research. Sarangi defines public discourse as ‘social processes of talk and text in the public domain which have institutionally ratified consequences’ (p. 248), whose mechanism can be better understood by resorting to social pragmatics. Bublitz offers a pragmatics-based investigation of the relationship between cohesion and coherence, claiming that ‘cohesion is normally a sufficient condition for coherence’ (p. 42) which is a mental notion and a dynamic process relying heavily on context and language user. Aijmer and Simon-Vandenbergen address various issues concerning pragmatic markers, including definition, theoretical models, classification and methodology. Kienpointner mentions several pragmatics models for figures of speech (FSP) and calls for an interdisciplinary approach. Chilton provides a pragmatic exploration of the conditions under which manipulation can be achieved. Finally, Attardo reviews several pragmatic-oriented explanatory models of humor.
The book isn’t meant to create a new field called ‘discursive pragmatics’, rather, it is intended to serve as ‘an instrument for establishing a platform for inter-disciplinary and inter-theoretical cross-fertilization’ (p. 1). The value of the book’s title lies in its ‘communicative potential for researchers who tend to view their activities as either pragmatic or discursive ways of approaching empirical language use’ (p. 1). The book brings new insights to some existing topics and the rethinking of this old issue provides coherence to the volume. Another strength of the work is that most chapters end with stimulating questions for future research, extending the overview of the topics involved.
The uniqueness of the book can shown by comparing it to a similarly titled book (Cutting, 2002) which holds ‘the proponent view’ of pragmatics and views pragmatics as containing topics such as speech acts, implicature and politeness. In contrast, the current book is influenced by ‘the perspective view’ of pragmatics, taking it as representing a functional (social, cognitive and cultural) perspective on every aspect of language use (Huang, 2009: 4). So the editor’s introduction attempts to treat all the notions in the collection as ‘perspective or points of view from which phenomenon related to language use can be approached’ and the topics differ in that they occur at different levels of abstraction. That said, it should be noticed that while some concepts typically constitute a pragmatic perspective to discourse (e.g. CDA), others are just concrete discourse phenomena that can be approached by various theoretical perspectives (e.g. humor). And there are still other notions that can be viewed either way. For example, metonymy (an FSP) can be regarded either as a phenomenon or as a theoretical perspective on cases of language use. The practice of treating all as perspectives runs the risk of obscuring the original notions and making them less distinctive from similar concepts. For instance, cognitive linguists advocate expanding metonymy to include metaphor, indirect speech acts, implicature, etc. However, if a notion can explain everything, it amounts to explaining nothing. Besides, it is likely to confuse novices. That is why I have re-presented the articles by regrouping them.
It should be noted that the editor and some contributors stress the importance of multimodal aspects of discourse (e.g. Zienkowski, Kienpointner and Georgakopoulou), but mention them only in passing. Important topics like this one deserve more space in discursive pragmatics. Nevertheless, this book is not only a valuable asset to pragmatics and discourse studies, but it will also be welcomed by those who work in areas such as cognitive linguistics, social linguistics, literature and applied linguistics.