Pragmatics (review)

This book is a jewel. Peccei has managed to write a pedagogically well designed introduction to pragmatics. His work is not only a student delight and most welcome outline of the basics but also an extremely useful tool for designing an overview course, of great interest even for the general public.

The volume is organized in ten brief chapters, each of which presents a set of empirical problems through vivid examples. By means of exercises, the student inquires into them and is presented with their basic theoretical underpinnings.

The first chapter addresses the basic distinction between grammatically related and use related aspects of meaning, thus serving as a presentation of the field. The second chapter is on the notion of entailment and includes a brief overview of foregrounding. From there, we come to a basic account of presuppositional phenomena and go on to digging into the basics of Gricean effects and maxims in Ch. 4. Ch. 5 dissects generalized and particular conversational implicatures, raising the subject of speech act theory covered in the next two chapters. Ch. 8 includes a discussion of politeness, and Ch. 9 serves as a final overview of context sensitiveness.

The last chapter perfectly represents the spirit of the book. It includes a series of projects in which students explore further the topics previously presented. The projects range from studying presupposition and implicature in advertising, political discourse, or humor to inquiring into children’s perception of politeness. It is a useful section that will challenge students to directly face the complexities of linguistic interaction.

All in all, it is worth remarking on the extreme care taken to make every single section accessible to people with no background in linguistics. The material is presented progressively through dynamic exercises that force readers to grasp the gist of the problems. The problems are all followed by a comment that, despite presenting possible solutions, moves the discussion further. Every single topic is illustrated by means of lively examples collected from assorted sources. Even typographical means are exploited for pedagogical purposes: the margins underline the basic ideas of the main text, text boxes alert the reader to the author’s purpose, and different self-explaining icons bring to one’s notice the overall role of the sections. All chapters are followed by a concise summary of the most important aspects of the topic under consideration and by supplementary exercises. Finally, a brief bibliography points the reader to excerpts from other accessible sources.

A succinct and accessible introduction to pragmatics, the book can be used for tailoring different types of courses and will be profitable for self-study. It is one of those rare examples of perfect marriage between clarity and depth.