Aproximaciones pragmalingüísticas al español (Diálogos hispánicos, 12

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Book reviews /Journal of Pragmatics 25 (1996) 281-302

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References Brandt, Per Aage, 1992. La Charpente modale du sens. Pour une sEmiolinguistique morphogrnEtique et dynamique. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press and Amsterdam: Benjamins. Brandt, Per Aage, 1994. Dynamiques du sens. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, Brandt, Per Aage, 1995. Morphologies of meaning. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. Greimas, A.-J., 1983. Pour une thEorie des modalitEs. In: Du sens II, 57-102. Paris: Editions du Seuil. Lakoff, George, 1987. Women, fire, and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Lewis, David, 1975. Causation. In: E. Sosa, ed., 1975, 180-191. Petitot, Jean, 1985. Morphogen~se du sens. Pour un schEmatisme de la structure. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Petitot, Jean, 1989a. ElEments de dynamique modale. Poetica et Analytica 6: 44-79. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. Petitot, Jean, 1989b. ModUles morphodynamiques pour la grammaire cognitive et la sEmiotique modale. Recherches sEmiotiques/Semiotic Inquiry 9(1-3): 17-51. Montreal: Canadian Semiotic Association. Sosa, E., ed., 1975. Causation and conditionals. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sweetser, Eve E., 1982. Root and epistemic modals: Causality in two worlds. In: M. Macauley and O. Gensler, eds., Proceedings of the eighth annual meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 484-507. Berkeley, CA: Berkeley Linguistics Society. Talmy, Leonard, 1981. Force dynamics. Paper presented at the conference on Language and Mental Imagery, May 1981, University of Calitomia at Berkeley. Talmy, Leonard, 1988. Force dynamics in language and cognition. Cognitive Science 2: 49-100. von Wright, Georg H., 1975. On the logic and epistemology of the causal relation. In: E. Sosa, ed., 1975, 95-113.

H e n k Haverkate, Kees Hengeveid and Gijs M u l d e r , eds., Aproximaciones pragmalingtifsticas al espafiol (Difilogos hispfinicos, 12). A m s t e r d a m and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1993. 219 pp. Reviewed by Victoria Escandell-Vidal, Departamento de L e n g u a Espafiola, Universidad Nacional de Educaci6n a Distancia, Senda del Rey s/n, E-28040 Madrid. In N o v e m b e r 1992, the Department o f Spanish Studies of the University of Amsterdam organized a round table under the heading 'Pragmalinguistic Approaches to Spanish'. Five of the six contributions now collected were presented at this meeting, which was followed by a general debate, also partially transcribed at the end of the book. With the analysis of Spanish p h e n o m e n a as the c o m m o n denominator, the papers included in this volume explore a wide range o f topics: discourse operators and connectives (Garrido), uses of echoic questions (Dumitrescu), the contrast between pronominal and empty subject in a pro-drop language (Martin Rojo and Meeuwis), pragmatic uses of non-standard conditionals (Montolfo), expressive and commissive speech acts (Haverkate), and the notion of indirectness (Mulder). The volume starts with Joaqufn Garrido's paper, 'Operadores epistrmicos y conectores textuales' ('Epistemic operators and textual connectives'). The author focuses on the forms incluso ( ' e v e n ' ) , todavfa (,'still', 'yet'), and ya ('already').

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After a critical discussion of some previous accounts, he argues for a treatment of incluso roughly in the spirit of Blakemore (1987), i.e., as a unit which restricts the context of interpretation. In this way, incluso can be seen as encoding an instruction for introducing a particular piece of information in the context of interpretation and, at the same time, for rejecting this information. An explanation for todavfa and ya, and their German and Dutch counterparts, is suggested along the same lines. Perhaps the label textual connectives used by Garrido to refer to these items is somewhat misleading, in the sense that it can (wrongly) suggest that two actual pieces of explicit information are connected; however, this is not Garrido's claim: for him, it is not necessary that the information used in the interpretation has been made explicit before, but only that it can be retrieved or constructed at the moment of the interpretation. There is no need either for postulating any kind of preexisting argumentative or pragmatic scales, as Ducrot (1972) and Fauconnier (1975) have suggested. Lexical units are only assumed to have simple, constant meanings. Because the contribution of such items is constant and non-inferential, the analysis of them becomes a matter of semantics, not of pragmatics. An account d la B l a k e m o r e is thus preferred to other kinds of pragmatic explanations, and even to a classical Gricean account as a conventional implicature. In fact, the whole proposal has a clear relevance-theoretic flavor, and could be easily restated in terms of Wilson and Sperber's (1993) distinction between conceptual and procedural information: items encoding procedural meaning do not refer to concepts, but transmit instructions on the management of information. The idea that these connectives induce the recovering or the introduction of an assumption which is subsequently rejected, could also be consistently captured under Sperber and Wilson's (1986) notion of echoic utterance, and it could explain why the utterances containing these connectives always reflect a dissociated attitude to an assumption. The article by Domnita Dumitrescu, 'Funci6n pragma-discursiva de la interrogaci6n ecoica usada como respuesta en espafiol' ('Pragmalinguistic functions of echoic interrogatives used as replies in Spanish'), is the only contribution in the volume that was not presented at the round table. For the author, the class of echoic interrogatives includes all syntactically interrogative sentences that repeat some segment of an interlocutor's previous interrogation, totally or in part (notice that Bolinger's (1957) 'ditto' questions would not fall under this category). Echoic interrogatives are therefore always used as replies to a preceding discourse, and can serve as dialogue controllers or as attitudinal expressions. Dumitrescu establishes a complex taxonomy of uses (not always easy to follow) according to syntactic and prosodic properties of sentences, and tries to establish a direct relationship between linguistic form and pragmatic function; in this sense, her analysis is related to the search for illocutionary markers. Differences in intonational patterns are, in fact, crucial to the right interpretation of utterances, and have usually been unattended in mainstream pragmatic research, which has given priority to the logical properties of propositional forms, neglecting the role of suprasegmental features in interpretation. At least in the case of interrogatives, the same would be necessary for the role of negation, or of (positive and negative) polarity items. Another interesting aspect in the functioning of echoic inter-

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rogatives is the fact that they are, to a large extent, attitudinal utterances: for instance, echoic rhetorical questions are used to reject some assumption 'hidden' in the partner's previous discourse; so this kind of utterance could be said to be echoic also in Sperber and Wilson's sense (i.e., as the interpretation of someone's thoughts). In fact, Blakemore's (1994) approach to echo questions from a relevance-theoretic perspective is built on the idea that these are always representations of other utterances which question either the words actually used, or the thoughts communicated. Again, the assumptions attributed to the other reveal themselves as a determining factor in the dynamics of interaction. The contribution by Luisa Martin Rojo and Michael Meeuwis, 'Referentes del sujeto pronominales y t~icitos en la conversaci6n en espafiol: un enfoque pragm~itico' ('Pronominal and null subject referents in Spanish conversation: A pragmatic approach'), tries to offer a pragmatic explanation for a typically syntactic phenomenon. As it is well known, Spanish is a so-called pro-drop language, i.e., a language that allows the existence of subjects without overt phonological realization; such a possibility is usually related to a rich verbal agreement morphology. The subject can be thus realized as an overt noun phrase, as a pronoun, or as an empty category. These three possibilites are not, of course, fully equivalent, and the differences between them must be explained. After a theoretical introduction, Martin Rojo and Meeuwis claim that the full range of differences between the explicit and the null pronoun can be adequately accounted for from a pragmatic perspective. Using a corpus of spoken conversation as a source for their data, they offer a proposal in which notions such as topic/comment distinction, face management, turn taking, and politeness play an important role. The analysis of the examples is descriptively correct; however, the approach suggested can raise some controversial issues. A large number of linguists would maintain that topic and comment are, in fact, at the interface between syntax and pragmatics, and that most of their formal manifestations (including word order, obligatory stress, use of certain units, etc . . . . ) are indeed a matter of grammar. In other words, there are many cases in which syntax does not allow any choice between a structure with or without the overt pronoun, but where only one of the two possibilities is available. These cases require a strictly syntactic explanation, as Fernandez Soriano (1990) has argued also on Spanish data. In addition, it seems that the constraints on the presence of the pronoun in the subject position also govern clitic doubling in the object position, so in these cases a common explanation is called for. Perhaps it would have been better to draw a clearer distinction between syntactic restrictions and real pragmatic strategies. Estrella Montolio's paper ' " S i me lo permiten ...". Gram~itica y pragm~itica: sobre algunas estructuras condicionales regulativas en espafiol' (' " I f I'm allowed ..." Grammar and pragmatics: On some regulative conditionals in Spanish') studies conditionals that do not obey the logical laws for (material implication. The author analyzes examples of so-called indirect conditionals, such as Si quiere que le diga la verdad ... ('[If you want me] To tell you the truth . . . . ), Si no te importa . . . . ('If you don't mind . . . . '), and Si no me equivoco . . . . ('If I'm right . . . . '), whose main function in discourse is characterized as regulative (in the sense of Caron, 1983); they

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can serve as repairs and also as contextualization cues. A different explanation in relevance-theoretic terms is also suggested, according to which the conditional clause provides the speaker with a piece of information that is necessary to adequately process the other clause, i.e., it both indicates which aspect is related to the situation or to the previous discourse, and reduces the processing effort. The central meaning of the non-standard if-clause is "suppose p, for q to be processed with a guarantee of success". Although she claims that she ultimately wants to account for conditionals from the perspective of relevance theory, the author constantly invokes notions from different approaches, such as face-saving strategies, or discourse control mechanisms. The generalization suggested to explain the meaning of regulative conditionals seems to require a less vague formulation. Perhaps if a more restricted framework had been used, a more precise explanation would have been reached. For example, according to recent developments in relevance theory (Wilson and Sperber, 1993), non-standard conditionals can be seen as contributing to the interpretation of the utterance not by affecting or modifying its truth-value, but by imposing further restrictions on the construction of higher-level explicatures. The paper by Henk Haverkate, 'Acerca de los actos de habla expresivos y comisivos en espafiol' ('On expressive and commissive speech acts in Spanish'), offers a characterization of two types of speech acts (according to Searle's classification), one of which, commissives, has been rather neglected in current pragmatics: research has especially focused upon directives, and only to a lesser extent upon assertives. Expressives transmit a psychological state which can be relevant to the hearer, and include greetings, compliments, apologies, and acknowledgements. Commissives are represented by promises and invitations, and convey the intention of doing an action for the bearer's benefit. From a communicative point of view, expressive speech-acts are supposed to have very limited cognitive value, since their content only reflects a manifest change; however, its role in communication is not to be related to the transmission of factual information, but to the strengthening of social relationships, by reacting to a manifest change. Expressives are, thus, linked to politeness. However, they contribute to a 'polite' behavior in a special way: their role seems to be that of fulfilling social expectations about interactional verbal behaviour. Only failing to produce an expressive when required by the external situation gives rise to politeness-related implicatures, namely of communicative incompetence or of rudeness. If so, a deeper understanding of politeness phenomena and a more sophisticated theory of stereotyped socio-cultural expectations will be needed in order to properly account both for the role of expressives in a particular culture and for inter-cultural differences. Commissives appear as a much less homogeneous class. Although they imply social relations, their degree of institutionalization is different for each sub-class. Promises have as a central, nuclear part the speaker's commitment to a future action, while invitations only convey an intention; in other words, commitment is the constitutive factor for a promise, but it is rather a sincerity condition for an invitation (as it would also be in directive speech-acts). This explains, for example, why for many cultures an insincere invitation can be socially acceptable, while an insincere or bro-

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ken promise is not. Moreover, it is clear that invitations play an important role in interpersonal relations, but the same cannot be said about promises. The role of commissives in interactional strategies is therefore an aspect that deserves further investigation. Gijs Mulder's contribution ' ~ Por qu~ no coges el tel~fono ?: acerca de los actos de habla indirectos' ('Why don't you answer the phone?: On indirect speech acts') is more theoretically-oriented; it addresses the general problem of indirectness. After discussing some previous accounts, he analyses a number of examples of 'classical' indirect speech-acts, metaphors, and irony, and concludes that they share a family resemblance (in Wittgenstein's sense), although there is no specific set of properties that could wholly characterize all the members. As Mulder says, also the notion of directness needs some clarification. He suggests that an utterance is direct if it does a single speech-act, and it is indirect if it simultaneously does more than one. The adequate definition of indirectness, or even the discussion about whether we actually need the concept of indirectness at all, is indeed a controversial issue and has deep theoretical consequences for speech-act theory in particular, and for pragmatics in general. Indirectness has been at least a useful departing point, which has permitted the identification of a number of properties of utterances; however, the strict correlation between sentence types and illocutionary forces can no longer be maintained, and intercultural diversity seems to lead to a more relativistic position: cultural ethos and conventions play a crucial role in the understanding of 'indirect' utterances. The question, however, is still open and, as the papers that recently appeared in Tsohatzidis (1994) show, an agreement is far from being reached. To sum up, the articles collected in this volume clearly show that the authors have contributed to the general topic from different perspectives and from different theoretical backgrounds: Haverkate, Mulder and, only in part, Dumitrescu can be roughly included in speech-act theory; Garrido and Montolio present their proposals from a cognitive perspective related to Sperber and Wilson's relevance theory; and Martin Rojo and Meeuwis make use of Verschueren's distinctions. These differences both in the issues addressed and in the frameworks selected can serve as a good sample of the diversity in current Spanish research on pragmatics.

References Blakemore, Diane, 1987. Semantic constraints on relevance. Oxford: Blackwell. Blakemore, Diane, 1994. Echo questions: A pragmatic account. Lingua 94:197-211. Bolinger, Dwight, 1957. Interrogative structures of American English. Alabama: University of Alabama Press. Caron, Jean, 1983. Les r6gulations du di~scours. Psycholinguistique et pragmatique du langage. Paris: PUF. Ducrot, Oswald, 1972. Dire et ne pas dire. Paris: Hermann. Fauconnier, Gilles, 1975. Pragmatic scales and logical structure. Linguistic Inquiry 6: 353-376. Fermindez Soriano, Olga, 1990. Strong pronouns in null subject languages and the 'avoid pronoun' principle. MIT Working Papers in Linguistics 11: 228-240. Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson, 1986. Relevance. Communication and cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Tsohatzidis, Savas L. (ed.), 1994. Foundations of speech act theory. Philosophical and linguistic perspectives. London: Routledge. Wilson, Deirdre and Dan Sperber, 1993. Linguistic form and relevance. Lingua 90: 1-25.

Julio Calvo P6rez, Introducci6n a la pragm~itica del espafiol. Madrid: Ediciones C~itedra, 1994. 286 pp. Reviewed by Henk Haverkate, Department of Spanish, University of Amsterdam, S puistraat 134, 1012 VB Amsterdam, The Netherlands. It is a striking fact that in the past few years a relatively large number of introductions to linguistic pragmatics have been written in Spanish. Thus, the book of Calvo P6rez (henceforth C.P.) can be considered the most recent one of a set which, in chronological order, includes the following titles: Eduardo Bustos (1986) Pragm6tica del espahol: Negaci6n, cuantificaci6n y modo, Graciela Reyes (1990) La pragm6tica lingiiistica, and M. Victoria Escandell Vidal (1993) lntroducci6n a la pragm6tica. As suggested by the subtitle of the first book, the introductions referred to above show differences with respect to their focuses of interest. The obvious explanation for this is that mainstream pragmatic research is conducted within the framework of a set of basically autonomous theories, the principal ones of which are conversation analysis, speech act theory, the theory of Gricean maxims, politeness theory, and relevance theory. For this reason, it is customary for authors writing an introduction to pragmatics to provide a justification for the perspective from which they approach their subject matter. One of the central problems involved here is that of defining the scope of pragmatics. This point is extensively discussed in Levinson's well-known Pragmatics (1983). In the introductory chapter of this book, the author points out that the wide variety of objects of research to which pragmaticists devote their attention makes it impossible to adequately demarcate the boundaries of the field. Nevertheless, there seems to be a general consensus concerning the fact that the notion of context should play a keynote role in pragmatic theory. As for the scope of context, Levinson quotes the following characterization by Ochs (1979:5): "The scope of context is not easy to define ... one must consider the social and psychological world in which the language user operates at any given time" (p. 1) ... "it includes minimally, language users' beliefs and assumptions about temporal, spatial, and social settings; prior, ongoing, and future actions (verbal, non-verbal), and the state of knowledge and attentiveness of those participating in the social interaction in hand". Turning next to Introducci6n a la pragm6tica del espafTol, we find that C.P. also assigns a crucial role to the concept of context, which he subcategorizes in the following way: 'natural context', 'social context', and 'individual context'. The two latter terms are self-explanatory. The subcategory of 'natural context' is characterized in global terms only: "... el mundo como globalidad en que vivimos, donde creamos y nos recreamos" (p. 28) ('... the world as a global entity in which we live, in which we create and recreate ourselves'). The same lack of explicitness is inher-

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