Whales, Candlelight and Stuff Like That: General Extenders in English Discourse (review)

Overstreet has provided a comprehensive overview and insightful analysis of general extenders in English. The book does a great job of summarizing and discussing the existing literature on this topic and offers an interesting solution to the problem of general extenders. The book is clearly written, and its convincing examples and helpful structure will quickly arouse the reader’s interest.

According to O, general extenders are ‘a class of expressions of the form conjunction plus noun phrase, which typically occur in clause-final position, are non-specific in reference and extend otherwise grammatically complete utterances’ (143–44). The book is divided into ten chapters. Ch. 1 discusses some preliminaries of this subject such as the most frequent general extenders in English and the context of their occurrence.

In Chs. 2–4, O discusses former, mainly ideational, approaches to the problem of general extenders, such as general extenders as ‘vague language’, the claim that speakers want to indicate that a list is ‘relevantly incomplete’, and the proposal that general extenders implicate a category in the speakers’ minds. O demonstrates that these views provide only a partial explanation.

In Chs. 5–9, O turns to a sociolinguistic perspective. She shows that general extenders are best viewed as multifunctional forms which do not serve a predominantly referential function but serve a more interpersonally defined role. General extenders ‘are used to indicate assumptions about shared knowledge and experience, or to mark an attitude toward the message expressed, or toward the hearer’ (11). She explores intersubjectivity in discourse and speakers’ orientation to politeness strategies and discusses general extenders in terms of an orientation to expectations associated with the Gricean maxims of quality and quantity.

In her final chapter, O gives a sense of how richly textured and multifunctional these forms can be within interactive discourse. She looks at the most frequently occurring forms and attempts to provide a synthesis of the potential functions associated with these forms.

This is a useful book. It makes available an excellent discussion of the literature on the diverse aspects of this subject and uses current sociolinguistic and discourse analytic theory to present a convincing solution to the problem of general extenders in English discourse. For those seeking a broad view of the concept of general extenders and for those who just want to spend a day reading an interesting book, this book will guarantee a pleasant reading experience and a solid discussion of issues in English discourse.