La Pragmatique linguistique: théories, débats, exemples by Adriana Costăchescu (review)

This volume offers a comprehensive and often extremely detailed exposition of the most important aspects of contemporary pragmatics, particularly in the Anglo-American tradition. The first chapter outlines the different ways of defining pragmatics and discusses code-based and inference-based models of meaning. The following five chapters examine reference, deixis, and anaphora. In Chapter 2 Adriana Costăchescu introduces the concepts and distinguishes philosophical and linguistic approaches to the study of these phenomena. The third chapter shows that personal pronouns can be used deictically and includes a surfeit of annotated examples to demonstrate this. Chapter 4 explores spatial deixis and Chapter 5 temporal deixis. The sixth chapter concludes the discussion of anaphora and deixis with an examination of these properties in verbs. While extremely detailed and well exemplified, Chapters 2–6 are very repetitive and, in terms of their style, will be testing for even the most interested of readers. Chapter 7 discusses a bedrock of linguistic pragmatics: conversational implicature. Costăchescu explains Grice’s Maxims, giving (at times, painstaking) explanations of how a particular implicature is derived, but she fails, unfortunately, to consider the difference between particularized and generalized conversational implicatures. It is also surprising that Stephen C. Levinson’s Presumptive Meanings (Cambridge: CUP, 2000) is missing entirely from her discussion of neo-Gricean developments. Chapter 8 outlines presupposition and synthesizes the debates arguing that presupposition is either a semantic or a pragmatic phenomenon; here the properties and triggers of presupposition are exemplified particularly thoroughly. The ninth chapter, on speech acts, gives a summary of the Austinian and Searlean approaches and taxonomies of speech acts. Chapter 10 focuses on cognitive pragmatics and provides an account of Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson’s Relevance Theory. As well as outlining its theoretical basis, Costăchescu details how their theory can be applied to fiction, irony, and metaphor. Disappointingly, however, she fails to subject their work to the kind of critical scrutiny seen, for example, in Chapters 7–9, and there is a lack of engagement with the criticism their theory has faced (see, particularly, Stephen C. Levinson, ‘A Review of Relevance’, Journal of Linguistics, 25 (1989), 455–72). Also absent from the book is a final chapter giving Costăchescu the opportunity to present her overall conclusions, mention various recent developments in the field such as the subdisciplines of historical and experimental pragmatics, and indicate possible future directions. A further issue concerns the presentation of the material itself: the typesetting is generally inelegant and the font far too small in places; typographical errors occur on nearly every page of the bibliography. These reservations aside, Costăchescu’s study provides a number of thorough explanations, with abundant clarifying examples, of the basic principles of pragmatics. Original English terms are given as well as French translations, allowing the reader to research the literature in English more easily. The level of detail is probably too great for an undergraduate French linguistics course, but the volume is certainly a useful resource for more advanced (doctoral) students and researchers.