Reviewed by Kanavillil Rajagopalan, State University at Campinas, Brazil

Produced loose-leaf in a 3-ring binder to accompany the familiar bound manual (originally compiled by Verschueren, Östman, Jan Blommaert, and Chris Bulcaen in 1995), this is the 2010 installment of the Handbook of pragmatics. This work has consistently been a major source of authoritative information on ongoing research in practically all areas concerning linguistic pragmatics. The present installment presents a total of sixteen new entries. Alongside such familiar topics as ‘code switching’, ‘intensional logic’, and ‘language change’ are general topics like ‘cognitive psychology’, ‘philosophy of mind’, and ‘psycholinguistics’. Additionally, there are also interesting (and perhaps overdue) novelties such as ‘deconstruction’, ‘agency and language’, and ‘contextualism’. Entries on J. R. Firth and Ludwig Wittgenstein perhaps fall under the category of yawning gaps in the earlier installments.

The sixteen entries also vary among themselves in size and in breadth and depth of treatment. While the entry on deconstruction runs to nine pages, the chapter on psycholinguistics takes up a whopping ninety-eight pages. (Naturally, the latter reads like a book-length treatment of the topic, while the former seems only a rushed, bare-bones crib.) The entry titled ‘Agency and language’ (twenty-five pages long) introduces this important theme, distinguishing this rather slippery concept from ‘free will’ on the one hand and ‘resistance’ on the other. It also provides important food for thought for more advanced researchers, especially those who see language as a form of social practice, by goading them into academic militancy.

The entry titled ‘Language ideologies – evolving perspectives’ (running into twenty-four pages) succinctly brings out some the intricacies of this overworked and often haphazardly handled concept and underscores the importance of being attentive to its workings in the very act of thinking about language. The entry on J. R. Firth does an enormous good by highlighting the important work of this great British linguist and his impact, not only on succeeding generations of scholars but on the very area of research called ‘Pragmatics’ that, the author reminds us, ‘developed as a reaction against Chomsky’s autonomous view of language’ (20–21). On the other hand, while the entry on Ludwig Wittgenstein details the Austrian thinker’s life, it does little to bring out his relevance to contemporary concerns apart from a rapid comparison to J. L. Austin’s work on speech acts, apparently solely to draw attention to the greater relevance of Wittgenstein’s thought to linguistic anthropology and ethnolinguistics.

On the whole, however, the 2010 installment is a useful addition to the Handbook and is destined to be a publishing success.