{"id":1919,"date":"2012-01-03T10:00:04","date_gmt":"2012-01-03T08:00:04","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elanguage.net\/blogs\/booknotices\/?p=1919"},"modified":"2012-01-03T09:58:43","modified_gmt":"2012-01-03T07:58:43","slug":"foundations-of-pragmatics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/?p=1919","title":{"rendered":"Foundations of pragmatics"},"content":{"rendered":"
Foundations of pragmatics.<\/strong> Ed. by Wolfram Bublitz <\/strong>and Neal R. Norrick<\/strong>. (Handbooks of pragmatics 1.) Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011. Pp. xiv, 710. ISBN 9783110214253<\/a>. $299 (Hb).<\/div>\n

Reviewed by Eric A. Anchimbe<\/a><\/strong>, University of Bayreuth<\/em><\/p>\n

After the resounding success of the Handbooks of applied linguistics<\/em> series, De Gruyter Mouton is publishing a new nine-volume series, Handbooks of pragmatics<\/em>, which like the earlier series is a solid mix of traditional and innovative approaches to, and investigations of, both old and contemporary topics in pragmatics. With most of the nine volumes already published, these self-contained collections promise to supplement and add new directions to existing handbooks of pragmatics in the market and to a field of linguistics that is exceptionally heterogeneous, constantly expanding, and progressively multilingual.<\/p>\n

The volume under review here is the first in the series and as the editors write, it \u2018provides a comprehensive overview of the foundations of pragmatics…the roots and evolution of those central theories and approaches as well as key concepts and topics that are characteristic of twenty-first century pragmatics as an approach to the means and ways of using language in authentic social contexts\u2019 (1). In addition to covering twenty-first century pragmatics, the contributions in this volume also focus on topics that emerged earlier, for example, the \u2018Semiotic foundations of pragmatics\u2019 (Winfried N\u00f6th<\/strong>), \u2018Pragmatics in Habermas\u2019 critical social theory\u2019 (Maeve Cooke<\/strong>), and \u2018Foundations: Ethnomethodolgy and Erving Goffman\u2019 (Christine Domke<\/strong> and Werner Holly<\/strong>), among others.<\/p>\n

This handbook consists of twenty-three articles divided into five thematic parts:\u00a0 conceptual foundations, theoretical foundations, key topics in pragmatic description, the place of pragmatics in the description of discourse, and methods and tools. The articles are written by experts not only in pragmatics but also in adjacent fields and sub-disciplines that lend themselves to pragmatic interpretations, such as semiotics, sociolinguistics, philosophy of language, functional linguistics, critical social theory, and literature. The handbook traces the long journey of the evolution of the field of pragmatics from its early beginnings (see \u2018Pragmatics as a linguistic concept\u2019 by Anita Fetzer<\/strong> and \u2018The rise of pragmatics: A historiographic overview\u2019 by Wataru Koyama<\/strong>) through its struggles to establish itself as an independent field (see \u2018Pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics\u2019 by Sophia Marmaridou<\/strong>).<\/p>\n

This journey continues with the theoretical frameworks that shaped pragmatics (e.g. \u2018Pragmatics in modern philosophy of language\u2019 by Nikola Kompa<\/strong> and George Meggle<\/strong> and \u2018Foundations of pragmatics in functional linguistics\u2019 by Saskia Daalder<\/strong> and Andreas Musolff<\/strong>), as well as traditional key topics in pragmatics (e.g. \u2018Deixis and indexicality\u2019 by William F. Hanks<\/strong> and \u2018Speech acts\u2019 by Elena Collavin<\/strong>). A rather recent phase in this evolution is the pragmatic focus on discourse (see \u2018Pragmatics and literature\u2019 by Jacob L. Mey<\/strong> and \u2018Pragmatics and prosody: Prosody as social action\u2019 by Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen<\/strong>). An even more recent phase is the application of corpus-based and experimental tools to pragmatic analysis (see \u2018Experimental pragmatics\u2019 by Richard Brehney<\/strong>and \u2018Corpus-based pragmatics: Quantitative studies II\u2019 by Christoph R\u00fchlemann<\/strong>).<\/p>\n

What makes this handbook different from many others is the expanse of the topics covered, especially the inclusion of a whole section on methods and tools. We are presented innovative and scientific methods and tools designed to facilitate data collection and processing, for instance, experiment-based tools as well as qualitative and quantitative corpus-based methods. With these methods, our study of pragmatics as intentional social interactional behavior in context across time and cultures will benefit from optimal and reliable findings that reflect authentic human behavior. This volume is, therefore, relevant to pragmaticians from both the traditional theoretical background and the modern, machine-mediated, corpus-based inclination.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Foundations of pragmatics. Ed. by Wolfram Bublitz and Neal R. Norrick. (Handbooks of pragmatics 1.) Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2011. Pp. xiv, 710. ISBN 9783110214253. $299 (Hb). Reviewed by Eric A. Anchimbe, University of Bayreuth After the resounding success of the Handbooks of applied linguistics series, De Gruyter Mouton is publishing a new nine-volume series, […]<\/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\/1919"}],"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=1919"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1919\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1920,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1919\/revisions\/1920"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1919"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1919"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1919"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}