{"id":1096,"date":"2010-11-22T10:00:28","date_gmt":"2010-11-22T08:00:28","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elanguage.net\/blogs\/booknotices\/?p=1096"},"modified":"2010-08-31T11:50:16","modified_gmt":"2010-08-31T09:50:16","slug":"accentuation-and-interpretation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/?p=1096","title":{"rendered":"Accentuation and interpretation"},"content":{"rendered":"
Accentuation and interpretation.<\/strong> <\/em>By Hans-Christian Schmitz<\/strong>. (Palgrave studies in pragmatics, language, and cognition.) New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Pp. 260. ISBN 9780230002531<\/a>. $90 (Hb).<\/div>\n

Reviewed by Daniel Gutzmann<\/strong><\/a>, University of Frankfurt<\/em><\/p>\n

Hans-Christian Schmitz develops a theory of accentuation and its effects on utterance interpretation. The core idea of this book is the hypothesis of optimal accentuation <\/strong>(HOA) according to which a cooperative speaker accentuates only the i-critical<\/strong> words, i.e. the words that are sufficient for the recipient to understand the entire meaning of the utterance in the discourse context. For instance, given the question Which student talked to Jane?<\/em>, the i-critical word in the answer Jane talked to the French student<\/em> is French. <\/em>According to the HOA, the speaker accentuates French<\/em> and nothing else.<\/p>\n

After introducing semantic and pragmatic effects of accentuation, S develops and defends the HOA in Ch. 2, \u2018Optimal accentuation\u2019. In order to increase the probability of being properly understood, a cooperative speaker accentuates all the i-critical words that are sufficient given the discourse context to enable the recipient to reconstruct the intended message in case it is recognized incompletely.<\/p>\n

Chs. 3 and 4 contain a formal model for reconstructing and interpreting incompletely recognized utterances in discourse. Ch. 3, \u2018Cooperative information exchange\u2019, \u00a0provides formal definitions for a model of cooperative information exchange (limited to complete sentences) as well as adequacy criteria for evaluating non-equivalent reconstructions that are defined on the basis of Gricean conversational maxims using a dynamic update system.<\/p>\n

In Ch. 4, \u2018Reconstruction of messages,\u2019 S extends the model to natural language and the interpretation of incomplete utterances. The model hearer extends an incompletely recognized utterance into a full proposition or question by first translating the recognized expression into an expression of the logical language, and then applying formally defined operations of semantic enrichment to reconstruct the utterance. If there is more than one possible reconstruction, the adequacy criteria and the discourse context can guide the recipient to exclude non-adequate reconstructions and derive the intended message. If there are no adequate reconstructions, the hearer can accommodate her representation of the common ground to render the message adequate. The function of accentuation is thus claimed to consist solely in making the i-critical words of an utterance more likely to be recognized correctly, and its semantic and pragmatic effects are a side effect arising from the hearer’s attempt to relate the i-critical (and therefore accentuated) words to an utterance context and the question under discussion.<\/p>\n

In Ch. 5, \u2018Optimal accentuation vs. focus accentuation\u2019, S compares his approach with two dominant approaches to focus interpretation: alternative semantics for focus and the structured meaning approach. Theoretically, there is no need for the term focus <\/em>as used in focus theories. Empirically, his approach makes different predictions about stress patterns, particularly as to which elements of a constituent are to be stressed. He presents experiments to support this approach.<\/p>\n

The book should be of interest not only to linguists working on focus phenomena and accentuation, but also to scholars with an interest in the formal implementation of pragmatic reasoning in discourse context. Many summaries, clear and explicit argumentation, and the critical evaluation of possible objections make the book very accessible to a broad readership despite its high degree of formalization.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Accentuation and interpretation. By Hans-Christian Schmitz. (Palgrave studies in pragmatics, language, and cognition.) New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008. Pp. 260. ISBN 9780230002531. $90 (Hb). Reviewed by Daniel Gutzmann, University of Frankfurt Hans-Christian Schmitz develops a theory of accentuation and its effects on utterance interpretation. The core idea of this book is the hypothesis of optimal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1096"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1096"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1096\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1097,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1096\/revisions\/1097"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1096"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1096"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1096"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}