La pragmatique linguistique: théories, débats et exemples par Adriana Costǎchescu (review)

Reviews 237 learners, an interlanguage that is dubbed franbreu. The authors generate fascinating empirical data using a variety of elicitation techniques, including interviews,conversations , narrations, and retelling of stories based on pictorial prompts. As this small sampling of contents indicates, the book has much to recommend it. Yet the smaller and greater flaws mar the book’s presentation. The beyond-tolerable instances of grammar/style errors constitute a distraction: spellings, lack of subject-verb agreement , inconsistent capitalization and use of italics, neologisms, and confusion of tenses. Moreover, further infelicities were introduced in the process of synthesizing previous research. Nearly identical language appears in the description of the linguistic landscape of Netanya on pages 87 and 124. Data tables often lack dates; were they picked up telles quelles from previous publications? For it should be remembered that much of this material has already appeared in print. I am frankly pained to point out the flaws in this work, given the pioneering and authoritative research program of this team. Indeed, my final remark is a strong recommendation of this book to both specialists and a more generalized readership for whom plurilingualism represents an ideal rather than a threat. Cabrillo College/Graduate Theological Union H. Jay Siskin Costăchescu, Adriana. La pragmatique linguistique: théories, débats et exemples. Munich: Lincom, 2013. ISBN 978-3-86288-430-8. Pp. 381. $236.70. Pragmatics—the study of the relation between the structure of a semiotic system (notably language) and its usage in context—forms, along with semantics, part of the general theory of meaning. It has also become an area of interdisciplinary concern, with fundamental contributions from linguistics, psychology, and the philosophy and sociology of language. The first chapter of this volume orients the reader to the field of inquiry by defining the discipline and situating it within the domain of linguistics. Costăchescu focuses on the inference versus code distinction, adopting this criterion to distinguish between semantic and pragmatic aspects of meanings. The notions of reference, deixis, and anaphors are then examined with respect to person, space, and time. The author delves into the analysis of two major classes of meaning: implicatures and presuppositions. The former, referring to what is suggested in an utterance although not explicitly encoded, is the centerpiece of Grice’s work and its subsequent developments. Costăchescu further discusses the specific properties that differentiate three major types of implicatures: conventional, conversational, and scalar. In the next chapter, she discusses major models of presuppositions from the last fifty years, which are separated into two classes: pragmatic models versus Frege-Strawson derived semantic models. Finally, the book turns to speech act theories that explain how speakers use language to accomplish intended actions and how hearers infer intended meaning. After reviewing the seminal work of two philosophers,Austin and Searle, Costăchescu considers the more recent Relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1995) and the role played by cognitive pragmatics. The most attractive feature of this volume is the rich number of examples and the systematic insertion of explanatory notes. Most of the examples are taken from literary sources, and the notes either meticulously explain how the example relates to the pragmatic notion discussed or provide more contextual detail about the phenomenon. The theoretical orientation of the book, containing meticulously-honed definitions, is both an advantage and a potential weakness. Indeed, over the past forty years, the field has dramatically evolved with respect to its data sources and methodologies.A discussion concerning the most current state of the field, concentrating on the types of empirical designs that have been applied to test theoretical claims and how their findings have shed light on several issues, would have been a welcome addition. For example, chapter seven could have benefited from insights into how implicatures behave empirically, notably focusing on the current debate as to whether implicature processing is fast and automatic or slow and effortful (Boo and Noveck, 2004; Degen and Tanenhaus, 2011). This minor criticism aside, the volume constitutes an important contribution to the field of French linguistics. Particularly useful is chapter six’s thorough description of the complex French tense system. The volume will also be a valuable reference for scholars interested in...