Interlanguage pragmatics Ed. by Gabriele Kasper and Shoshana Blum-Kulka (review)

BOOK NOTICES 607 PC is reserved for two types of infinitival constructions : subject gap purpose constructions (Mary brought John, along e, to talk to her) and object gap purpose constructions (Man· brought John, along to talk to e,). Both PCs and IOCs are characterized as adjuncts, but PCs are shown to differ from IOCs in some important respects. In functional terms one could say that PCs display a higher degree of clause integration than IOCs. This is expressed more rigidly in GB terms by analyzing PCs as 'mere' VPs. That is, in contrast to IOCs, and in contrast to the standard GB analysis of PCs, they contain neither Infl nor Comp. This analysis, confirmed in several tests in Ch. 3 (79- 140), constitutes the core message of this book (along with the generalization that the controller of gaps in PCs is invariably the Theme of the matrix clause). The following chapters are devoted to the closely related 'fii.vv-clauses' and a refutation of the toughmovement analysis (Ch. 4, 141-71), to the demonstration that quantification is not a necessary ingredient in control (Ch. 5, 172-200), and—the most interesting and innovative part—to a semantic clarification of the notions of control and ?-role (Ch. 6, 201-37), going far beyond the scope of purpose clauses. From the viewpoint ofthe stubborn 'flat-earth functionalist', it is interesting to observe the gradual implementation of functional considerations in the GB-internal discussion, the (re-)discovery of intermediate categories, and the cautious admission of gradients and prototypical category structures. But the book's merits are mainly theory-internal. There is little news fornonbelievers about purpose clauses; perhaps their high degree of clause integration, their control regularities, and their affinity to ecisyclauses are worth noting. But the divisions demanded by the GB framework do not always fit the data available from corpus work. And the distribution of question marks and asterisks in the examples, on which a lot of the argumentation depends, is sometimes highly questionable. One wonders how much counter-checking of the judgments has taken place. Further drawbacks of the book are several confusing misprints , even in references to examples, and the lack of a list of abbreviations. [Paul Georg Meyer, Freie Universität Berlin.] Interlanguage pragmatics. Ed. by Gabriele Kasper and Shoshana Blum-Kulka. New York & Oxford : Oxford University Press, 1993. Pp. iv, 253. Cloth $45.00. This volume is welcome because it broadens the scope of intercultural pragmatics to include issues beyond attempts of nonnative speakers to perform various speech acts. The eleven papers are grouped into three sections: 'Cognitive approaches to interlanguage pragmatic development ', 'Speech act realization', and 'Discourse perspectives'. In Part 1, Richard Schmidt ('Consciousness, learning and interlanguage pragmatics', 21-42) contrasts implicit and explicit learning and considers which plays a more necessary role in acquiring pragmatic competence in the L2. Arguing that a connectionist framework is a suitable representation for noncategorical knowledge such as pragmatic knowledge, Schmidt concludes that conscious attention, i.e. explicit learning, is necessary to establish connections , and that simple exposure to pragmatically significant experience is not sufficient for learning. The second section presents analyses of L2 learners' attempts to perform various speech acts, following the framework of the Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project. Five speech acts or strategies are explored—thanking , apologizing, complaining, hinting, and correcting . The articles illustrate the complexity of investigating intercultural pragmatics: researchers are at pains to disentangle differences that seem to be artifacts of the investigative instrument (such as the tendency of nonnative speakers to produce relatively verbose utterances on discourse completion questionnaires but not in role-plays) from differences that arise because of cultural differences (in correcting lower-status addressees, Americans feel the need to preface corrections with praise, whereas Japanese speakers do not). Miriam Eisenstein & Jean Bodman ('Expressing gratitude in American English', 64-81) used ethnographic studies and role-plays in addition to discourse completion questionnaires to discover that even advanced learners of English have trouble with thanking, because of crosscultural variation in whom one thanks, what merits thanks, and the intensity or frequency with which one thanks. The act of correcting another speaker is explored by Tomoko Takahashi & Leslie M. Beebe ('Crosslinguistic influence in the...