Reviewed by Kanavillil Rajagopalan, State University at Campinas, Brazil

This is the sixth in the nine-volume series, Handbooks of pragmatics. In their series introduction, Wolfram Bublitz, Andreas H. Jucker, and Klaus P. Schneider note that the volume is unified by an interactional perspective on pragmatics common to the contributors. Although the term pragmatics was put into circulation by semioticians like C. S. Peirce and C. Morris, it was only by the late 1960s and early 1970s that linguists ‘took note of the term and began referring to performance phenomena and, subsequently, to ideas developed and advanced by Wittgenstein, Ryle, Austin and other ordinary language philosophers’ (v).

In their introduction Locher and Graham highlight divergent interests within pragmatics and some uncertainty in its core concerns. They follow Jef Verschueren, for whom pragmatics has to do with ‘[a] general functional perspective on (any aspect of) language, i.e. as an approach to language which takes into account the full complexity of its cognitive, social, and cultural (i.e. meaningful) functioning in the lives of human beings’ (1).

The body of the volume is made up of seventeen chapters divided into three parts: ‘Theoretical approaches to interpersonal pragmatics’, ‘Linguistic strategies for interpersonal effects’, and ‘Interpersonal issues in different contexts’. Part 1 in turn presents its chapters under the headings ‘Approaches to politeness and impoliteness’ (4), ‘Approaches to interpersonal interpretation drawn from communication studies and social cognitive linguistics’ (2), and ‘Identity and gender’ (2). Parts 2 and 3 comprise four and five chapters each.

Politeness is a central concern of this volume. Maria Sifianou, Richard Watts, and Deek Bousfield look at the broader questions of the foundations of the theory of politeness, definitional issues, and future directions of research in their separate contributions, while Shigeko Okamoto zeroes in on aspects of politeness in East Asia. Robert Arundale’s chapter ‘Relating’ and Andreas Langlotz’s ‘Social cognition’ make up the second section, and Anna De Fina’s ‘The negotiation of identities’ and Louise Mullany’s ‘Gender and interpersonal pragmatics’ constitute the third.

The four chapters of Part 2 are ‘Mitigation’, ‘Respect and deference’, ‘Swearing’, and ‘Humour’. Finally, Part 3 is comprised of five chapters dealing with interpersonal issues in the workplace, courts of law, medical settings, political discourse, and dating advertisements.

The volume offers the reader a broad spectrum of work by scholars currently working in interpersonal pragmatics. But the authors also provide an in-depth treatment of the topics sure to stimulate further research.