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REVIEWS345 Pragmatics and natural language understanding. By Georgia M. Green. Hillsdale , NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1989. Pp. xii, 180. Cloth $24.95 paper $12.95. Reviewed by Gregory L. Ward, Northwestern University When Georgia Green's textbook Pragmatics and natural language understanding (hereafter P&NLU) first came out in 1989, I immediately ordered it for my undergraduate Pragmatics course. I had for some time felt the need for an alternative to Levinson's Pragmatics (1983), long the standard text in this area; in a nine-week quarter, undergraduates in an introductory course generally cannot assimilate Levinson's dense coverage of the field. I am pleased, but not surprised, to report that G's book provides an excellent solution to this 'Levinson problem'. In 180 pages, G manages to lay out in a very clear and concise manner the basic principles of modern pragmatics, including what are now generally taken to be six central topics of the field: reference, including anaphora, deixis, and (in)definiteness; implicature; presupposition; speech acts; conversational structure; and functions of syntax. In addition, G clears up several misconceptions and misunderstandings that have plagued the field for a number of years. I share G's impatience with linguists—especially those working in discourse —who continue to claim, for example, that Grice's maxims are nonuniversal and even culture-specific, or that NPs refer to other NPs, or that a given sentence implicates this or that. It is unfortunate that such views persist, but persist they do. By identifying some of the pitfalls into which many seem to stumble, P&NLU will help ensure that neophyte pragmaticians won't repeat these common mistakes. For instance, on the relationship between semantics and pragmatics, G observes that '[i]t is often assumed that the pragmatics is independent of the semantics, and takes the "output" of the semantics as "input", the semantics having provided a truth-conditional interpretation of a syntactically well-formed expression' (8). However, G notes, there are many cases in which a truth-conditional semantics cannot operate independently of pragmatics. Moreover, G goes on to argue that, without benefit of clairvoyance, even pragmatics (in conjunction with a truth-conditional semantics) could never specify the actually intended interpretation of an utterance—but only a range, at times ranked, of plausible candidates (10). G's approach throughout P&NLU is the admirable one of reinforcing the view that pragmatics is inherently interactive, that the central notions of the field—e.g. beliefs, intentions, plans, and actions—are properties of speakers and hearers, not of words or sentences. On reference, G observes (37) that many linguists write as if linguistic expressions themselves refer; instead, G emphasizes the central, well-established finding of ordinary language philosophy that referring is something that speakers do. G carries this view over into her discussions of particular referring expressions; for example, she points out that the interpretation of the definite article is entirely pragmatic, despite continuing claims to the contrary: 'The has the pragmatic function of aiding the addressee in inferring the speaker's intended referent, but no semantic function in fixing or delimiting truth conditions' (47). 346LANGUAGE, VOLUME 67, NUMBER 2 (1991) Another important admonition is directed towards cognitive psychologists working on semantic memory: '[I]t is important not to confuse the analysis of the name of a kind such as fish or water, with analysis of the kind itself, or with people's knowledge, beliefs, or understandings about that kind. The first is part of the study of language ...; the second belongs to biology, chemistry ... or whatever; and the last is part of cognitive psychology ...' (43). As G correctly observes, most of the vast psychological literature on 'semantic' memory is not really about words but about the kinds that words name. Inevitably, comparisons will be drawn between P&NLU and Levinson's Pragmatics. Although G's book is less than half the length of Levinson's, its coverage of the field is, as one would have hoped, more modern, reflecting current research directions. A separate chapter (Ch. 6) of 14 pages, 'Pragmatics and Syntax', reflects this topic's place as a central research area in pragmatics. The study of the correlation of syntactic form with discourse function offers clear evidence that at least...

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