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Book Review: Pragmatics and discourse: A resource book for students

Article · January 2002

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 LINGUIST List 14.1015
Fri Apr 4 2003
Review: Pragmatics/Discourse Analysis: Cutting (2002)

Cutting, Joan. (2002). Pragmatics and Discourse: A Resource Book for

Students.. Routledge, Routledge (English Language Introductions).

Zouhair Maalej, Department of Linguistics, University of New Mexico

Purpose and contents

Truthful to the nature of the series it is published in, the book is meant by its
author to be an introductory resource book, covering the areas of pragmatics and
discourse. The book includes four chapters of unequal length and importance
that cannot be read in isolation because they are interdependent in theory and
practice. Theoretically, the first chapter introduces the conceptions of pragmatics
and discourse that the following chapters build on. In practice, although chapters
two, three, and four deal with the same headings developed in the introduction,
each chapter has a different practical purpose that makes its individuality as will
be shown in the contents of the book.

Introduction: Concepts in pragmatics and discourse (pp. 1- 54)

In this introductory chapter, Cutting presents tools such as context, co-text,

speech acts, co- operative principle, politeness, conversation analysis, which are
instrumental to forthcoming chapters.

Development: Studies in pragmatics and discourse (pp. 55-76)

The author analyzes through various types of text (conversation, lecture, and
literature) the various concepts and tools proposed in the Introduction. The
author almost offers model corrections for the students.

Exploration: Data for investigation (pp. 77-107)

The author extends the analysis of text to other types of text (sports, medical,
cookery, literature, journalism, tourism, conversation, emails, etc.), associating
potential users with activities in the form of questions.

Extension: Readings (pp. 108-180)

This chapter is the longest in the book, consisting of extensive readings from
authorities in the two disciplines under investigation, sending the readers to
explore concepts for themselves and widen their horizons. Readings include the
way conversation works (by Wardhaugh), lexical cohesion (by Hoey), discourse
disorders (by Wodak), language and power (by Fairclough), and discourse
strategies (by Gumperz). But the lengthiest part of this chapter relates to issues
raised by relevance theory, namely, cognitive environment, mutual manifestness,
ostensive- inferential communication, informative and communicative intentions,
etc. The activities and questions that follow these readings get more complex
and focused, including theoretical questions that incite students to think about
their own stance on various issues in the pragmatics and discourse literature.

CRITICAL EVALUATION

The book is a resourceful document, including mainly a variety of texts and

activities. It also is written in accessible English to undergraduate students of
linguistics. There are many instances of oversimplification that can be
understood as contributing to making pragmatics and discourse accessible to
students. The progression in the degree of difficulty implemented throughout
takes the student by the hand with every chapter into more depth, difficulty, and
active participation. The book is, thus, a valuable one, text variety- and
pedagogy-wise.

However, from a purist perspective, the book includes the following problems.

Although she shows more relevance- theoretic knowledge of pragmatics, Cutting

(p. 3) seems to mesh Grice's Co-operative Principle with Sperber and Wilson's
Relevance Principle. It is important to keep these two theories distinct in the
minds of students as Sperber and Wilson altogether undermine the Co- operative
Principle by superseding it with the Relevance Principle. Many of the criticisms
that Cutting herself addressed to Grice's theory make it psychologically
justifiable to do so owing to the many instances of lack of co-operation that we
witness in everyday life situations.

Presenting deixis as three types (person, place and time) (p. 7) is difficult to
defend as a simplification as it leaves out the very important social deixis, which
has been demonstrated to play a big role in the construction of social reality (see
Levinson, 1983; Marmaridou, 2000).

There seems to be a misinterpretation of exophora, which is presented as first

mention (p. 7). According to Halliday and Hasan (1976: 31), reference is
exophoric when it is retrievable from the context of situation. Reference,
however, is endophoric when it can be retrieved from the surrounding text (32-
33). So, exophora is not necessarily first mention. Presenting endophora as
synonymous with intertexuality is not accurate. This confusion can be resolved
 by De Beaugrande and Dressler's (1981: 183) definition of the latter as ''the ways
in which the production and reception of a given text depends upon the
participants' knowledge of other texts.''

The theory of discourse has been presented in its various trends, including
conversation analysis, the exchange structure theory, and interactional
sociolinguistics. However, the pragmatic side suffers huge simplification, in that
not only is pragmatics reduced to speech acts and conversational maxims, but
also very little has been said about presupposition and implicature as important
features of this ostensive-inferential communication about which Cutting exhorted
potential readers to extend their knowledge.

REFERENCES

Beaugrande, R. de & W. Dressler (1981). Introduction to Text Linguistics.

London/New York: Longman.
Halliday, M. A. K. and R. Hasan (1976). Cohesion in English. London:
Longman Group Ltd.
Levinson, S. C. (1983). Pragmatics. London: CUP.
Marmaridou, Sophia S. A. (2000). Pragmatic Meaning and Cognition.
Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Sperber, Dan and Deirdre Wilson (1995). Relevance: Communication and
Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell (Second edition).

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

The reviewer is an assistant professor of linguistics. His interests include

cognitive linguistics, metaphor, cognitive pragmatics, psycholinguistics, critical
discourse analysis, etc. He has been awarded a senior Fulbright research
scholarship that he is currently spending at the Department of Linguistics,
University of New Mexico, Albuquerque (20022003) to write a book on cognitive
metaphor, with special reference to Tunisian Arabic.

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