Contrastive pragmatics Edited by Wieslaw Oleksy. (review)

BOOK NOTICES 415 The second section comprises the largest part of the book, with one chapter devoted to each of the applications addressed: natural-language interfaces, machine translation, text processing/ understanding, text generation, speech processing , and writing aids. For each application there is a brief sketch of the task involved, the approaches used to develop systems, and the types of products currently available. In addition , a brief history of the application and a discussion of trends for the future provide a general picture of the particular area. A list of suggested background reading and useful industry contact addresses completes each chapter . The final section of the book examines the prospects for NLP technology in the future. Here the author's extensive experience with NL technology, which includes academic study (in linguistics), research, and commercial product development, provides the basis for his analysis of the field. The current barriers—linguistic, technological, and human—to development of NLP software are explained through a historical overview of development in this dynamic field, and some ways in which these problems can be addressed by businessmen and academics are suggested. O's discussion in these chapters clearly shows both his optimism for the field's ultimate success and his realism, derived from long experience in both NLP research and the NLP industry. For those who are intrigued by the prospects for applying linguistic theory to computer software development or simply curious about NLP. this book would be a good starting point. [Laura Proctor. CiVv Polytechnic of Hong Kong.} Contrastive pragmatics. Ed. by Wieslaw Oleksy. (Pragmatics and beyond, new series, 3.) Amsterdam & Philadelphia: Benjamins, 1989. Pp. xiii, 282. 'Pragmatics is not a wastebasket ...', said Michael Silverstein in 1977 (in Linguistics and anthropology , ed. by M. Saville-Troike), but this volume indicates that, as a category, it is still a miscellany. The book is composed of eleven papers divided into two parts: 'Pragmatics in cross-language studies' and 'Pragmatics in interlanguage and second language acquisition studies'. Some of the contributions seem dated, due mainly to the fact that the papers were submitted in 1984, only to encounter delay in publication . In a nicely-argued paper, Robert Herbert provides data on 'The ethnography of English compliments and compliment responses: A contrastive sketch' (3-36), collected from American and South African college students. The strength of this paper is Herbert's functional perspective and the attempt (following Wolfson) to relate speech behavior to contrasting cultural values. Roman Kalisz (37-54) reargues Searle's taxonomy of illocutionary acts, attempting to construct a Roschian 'prototype' analysis by contrasting English and Polish assertives . Tomasz Krzeszowski's programmatic essay 'Towards a typology of contrastive studies ' (55-72) examines terminological issues and tries to systematize equivalents. Barbara Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, in 'Praising and complimenting' (73-100), contrasts British and American English examples with Polish examples and effectively distinguishes the social function, illocutionary structure , linguistic structure, and discourse consequences of praising and complimenting. Marie-Louise Liebe-Harkort ('Interactive ethnolinguistics', 101-12) examines Gncean 'maxims' and Brown & Levinson's 'politeness' in crosscultural miscommunication, specifically in American English speakers' interaction with Western Apache speakers; she argues for differential cultural understanding of 'maxims'. Susan Shephard considers 'The impact of the child's world on pairing form and function in Antiguan Creole and English' (113-27). Children in the two cultures are said to share a world view concerning authority, revealed in the expression of modality; Shephard shows that the relationship of creóle to 'standard' language must not only focus on formal issues, but must also respond to pragmatic dimensions, in this case the parallel 'worlds' of children as language learners. Part 2 opens with Hans Dechart & Paul Lennon's 'Collocational blends of advanced language learners: A preliminary analysis' (13168 ). University students, the authors claim, create both 'intraclausal' and 'supraclausal' blends (e.g. in Stocks tumble to a new time low) in written expression. Blends signal either inadequate cognitive coherence or deficiencies in discourse aspects oflanguage instruction. Werner Hüllen & Wolfgang Lorscher, in 'On describing and analyzing foreign language class- 416 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 67, NUMBER 2 (1991) room discourse' (169-88), consider West German pupils of English and their classroom discourse, following the transcript-analytic model of John Sinclair & Malcolm...