To celebrate Jef Verschueren's sixtieth birthday, editors Michael Meeuwis & Jan-Ola Östman invited a diverse body of scholars to offer insights about language function and use and the field of pragmatics. The title of the volume, Pragmaticizing understanding, is a play on Verschueren's influential book entitled Understanding pragmatics. The editors provide a brief biographical and professional sketch of Verschueren in the introduction. This is followed by eleven chapters, which are comprised of both theoretical works and empirical studies. The authors present a wide range of topics, but the common thread is pragmatics. With its variety of topics, this volume will be of particular interest to readers who desire a broader perspective on work being conducted within the field of pragmatics.
In Ch. 1 Michael Silverstein critiques linguistic theory's “autonomy of syntax” thesis by reviewing several influential pragmatic and sociopragmatic works to demonstrate how metapragmatic knowledge is necessarily invoked during interaction. Taking a philosophy of language approach, Marina Sbisà (Ch. 2) shares her personal, scholarly journey related to classifying illocutionary acts and how the philosophical notions of fact-value and theory-praxis shaped her understanding. In Ch. 3, Peter Auer explores the language-space relationship, focusing on the often separate traditions of spatial deixis and areal linguistics. In the chapter he argues that these two traditions can be reconciled when space is made relevant through interaction and suggests the term spatial indexicality to bridge the theoretical divide. Ch. 4 by Susan Ervin-Tripp reviews research related to child syntax development and the role pragmatics has played in this area. In Ch. 5 Charles Antaki demonstrates how conversation analysis can offer an alternative approach to the study of pragmatics by focusing on the turn-taking contributions interlocutors make in conversation. In Ch. 6 Yorick Wilks takes an artificial intelligence approach and explores how computational modeling of dialogue can advance the field. Sachiko Ide, in Ch. 7, provides an introduction to Japanese linguistic politeness, characterized by wakimae, and uses empirical evidence to demonstrate how Japanese use different linguistic forms to index their sense of self. Robin Lakoff explores the notions of intertextuality and appropriation in Ch. 8. Through several examples from public discourse, Lakoff considers the social and political functions of intertextual references to illustrate how sociopolitical cohesion may or may not be formed through such references. In Ch. 9 Teun van Dijk takes a critical discourse approach and use a UK House of Commons debate to examine how different discourse features may be utilized to abuse power for political reasons. Jenny Cook-Gumperz & John Gumperz (Ch. 10) examine the debates surrounding the contemporary reform of the German spelling system to highlight the importance of symbols and writing systems in the construction of national identity and the ideological firestorm debates over them can cause. Jacob Mey completes the volume in Ch. 11 with a personal note about the thirty-five-year friendship he has had with Verschueren. Mey recounts Verschueren's professional accomplishments and provides personal anecdotes to pay respect to his friend.
