Perspectives on Semantics, Pragmatics and Discourse: A Festschrift for Ferenc Kiefer (review)

It is not surprising that in this festschrift for Ferenc Kiefer, an eminent linguist, honorary member of the Linguistic Society of America, and an active scholar in the area of the pragmatics of language and modality, there appear many contributions by excellent scholars whose interests are related somewhat to those of the honoree. All of these contributions attain an excellent level of scholarship and display great originality. It is impossible to sum them all up, and I thus confine myself to those that immediately struck me, so as to be able to offer the reader a representative sample.

Wolfgang Dressler and Merlini Barbaresi offer a picture of morphology in which they contend that pragmatics is a superordinate of semantics. They ground their arguments in the careful investigation of diminutive and augmentative derivational affixes, proposing that, in addition to the semantic features ‘small’ and ‘big’, they contain the feature ‘fictive’. Kent Bach defends the view that pragmatics intrudes into full propositional forms by means of ‘implicatures’ but argues in favor of a classical picture of semantics and pragmatics in which what is said can broadly coincide with linguistic semantics. In other words, he resists the distinctions made by relevance theorists that explicatures contribute to what is said. This contribution is particularly important both for the data the author considers and for the solid theoretical considerations he arrives at, which minimally alter and update the Gricean picture. It might be claimed that this picture avoids the so-called Grice’s circle, a theory-internal definitional difficulty. Barbara Partee and Vladimir Borschev also deal with the semantics/pragmatics distinction in relation to genitive phrases, focusing on certain configurational semantic effects (they distinguish simple nouns from relational nouns). Johann van der Auwera and Bert Bultinck deepen the issue of Horn-scales in relation to modals, quantifiers, and conjunctions. Noel Burton-Roberts grapples with Grelling’s paradox. Robert M. Harnish deals with verbalmood in relation to some neglected aspects of Gottlob Frege’s philosophy of language. Anna Wierzbicka builds on Leibnizian linguistics (in which language is seen as a mirror of the human mind) and argues in favor of conceptual universal primitives. Bruce Fraser investigates innuendo as an effect that is not part of the speaker’s public intentions. Zoltan Gendler Szabó investigates the semantics of certain adjectives and the consequences of the principle of compositionality and formulates the ‘context thesis’: The content of an expression depends on context only insofar as the contents of its constituents do. Monika Doherty examines the translations of clefts between English and German. Clefts are sometimes a means to express focus, a device in discourse to highlight or contrast some expression in a sentence. Her analysis of clefts sheds light on the way highlighted elements stand in contrast to the preceding context.

This is a very fine book, one that really deserves to be placed in a linguist’s library. In a world in which good books, like good friends, are rare, this collection should accompany one for years.