geoffrey n. leech, principles of pragmatics

8/18/2019 Geoffrey N. Leech, Principles of Pragmatics

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S B O R N Í K

PRACÍ F ILOZ OFIC KÉ FAKULTY BRNĚNSKÉ UN IVERZ ITY

S T U D I A

MIN ORA FACULTATIS P HI LOSOPH ICAE U N IVERSITATIS

B R U N E N S I S

K 7 (1985) BRNO STU D IE S IN E N G L I SH 16

Geoffrey N . Leech,

Principles of

Pragmatics, Longman, London and N ew York 1983,

xiv + 250 pp .

Geoffrey N . Leech is a scholar of great linguistic erudition, well known to Czechoslovak

Anglicists

— and not only to

Anglicists

— as a co author A Grammar of Contemporary

English

(R. Quirk et al., London and New York 1972) and the author of a

very

readable

Semantics (Penguin Books 1974), as

well

as from his personal visits to Czechoslovakia. He

has a special gift for

following

the modern trends in linguistics without losing

sight

of the

firm ground of its previous achievements. In addition to th is, he is one of those who are

able to combine the need for scholarly precision with a popular way of writing. All these

qualities find their reflection in the thirtieth title of the Longman Linguistic Library,

Principles of

Pragmatics.

T h e book consists often chapters, which are preceded by a Preface and A note on symbols,

an d

followed by

References

and

Index

(of names and linguistic terms).

Chapters

1—3

{Introduction, A set of postulates, Formalism and functionalism)

constitute

th e

theoretical framework of the book. Leech's treatment of the formal and the functional

approach to language exemplifies his line of thinking and his personal approach to linguistic

facts (p. 46): '(a) Formalists eg Chomsky) tend to regard language primarily as a mental

phenom enon .

Functionalists eg Halliday) tend to regard it primarily as a societal phenom

enon,

(b) Formalists tend to explain linguistic universals as deriving from a common

generic linguistic inheritance of the human species. Functionalists tend to explain them

as deriving from the universality of the uses to which language is put in human societies,

(c) Formalists are inclined to explain children's acquisition of language in terms of a built in

h u m a n

capacity to learn language. Functionalists are inclined to explain it in terms of the

development of the child's communicative needs and abilities in society, (d)

Above

all,

formalists study language as an autonomous system, whereas functionalists study it in relation

to

its social function. On the face of it, the two approaches are completely opposed to one

another .

In fact, however, each of them has a considerable amount of truth on its side.'

I n the theoretical part of the book, Leech tries to show that grammar (i. e. phonology,

syntax, and semantics) is predominantly formal, while pragmatics is predominantly functio

nal .

This idea is further developed in detailed commentaries on the

following

postulates

(p . 5):

P I :

The semantic representation (or logical form) of a sentence is distinct from its prag

matic

interpretation.

P 2: Semantics is rulegoverned ( = grammatical); general pragmatics is principle controlled

( =

rhetorical).

P 3 : The rules of grammar are fundamentally conventional; the principles of general

pragmatics are fundamentally

nonconventional, ie

motivated in terms of conversational

goals.

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P4: General pragmatics relates the sense (or grammatical meaning) of an utterance to its

pragmatic (or illocutionary) force. This relationship may be relatively direct or indirect.

P5:

Grammatical correspondences are defined by mappings; pragmatic correspondences

are denned by problems and their solutions.

P6: Grammatical explanations are primarily formal; pragmatic explanations are primarily

functional.

P7: Grammar is ideational; pragmatics is interpersonal and textual.

P8:

In general, grammar is describable in terms of discrete and determinate categories;

pragmatics is describable in terms of continuous and indeterminate values.

According to Leech, formalism and functionalism are complementary approaches. Any

linguistic account that is faithful to the facts and is — at the same time as simple and

generalizable as possible must take both the approaches into consideration. This is not to

say, however, that the particular branches of linguistics may not find one approach more

appropriate than the other. Dealing as it does with language phenomena in the very act of

(interpersonal) communication, pragmatics is most suitably studied from the functionalist

point of view.

In Chapters 4

6 {The

interpersonal

role of the

ooperative

P rinciple, The T act Ma xim,

A survey of the Interpersonal Rhetoric , Leech presents his rhetorical m odel of pragmatics,

making a distinction between the interpersonal and the textual rhetoric. Each of the two

rhetorics consists of a set of pragmatic princ iples, which may be further specified by maxims

and sub-maxims. In this par

f

of the book, Leech skilfully shows how the Cooperative

Principle and the Politeness Principle actually perform their functions in everyday commu-

nication and — what is still more im portant — how these two principles interact. T he

Cooperative Principle (of Grice) is mainly concerned with the 'informative' aspect of

comm unication between the speaker and the hearer (addressee), specifically with the extent

of information (Maxim of Qu antity ), its truth (M axim of Quality), its relevance (Maxim of

Relation), and its clarity (Maxim of Manner). This pragmatic principle in itself cannot

explain '(i) why people are often so indirect in conveying what they mean; and (ii) what is

the relation between sense and force when non-declarative types of sentence are being

considered' (p. 80). The explanation can be found in the interplay of the Cooperative

Principle with other principles. Of these, the Politeness Principle appears to be the most

important from the viewpoint of everyday communication, and it is one of the main

achievements of the book that Leech elaborates the Politeness Principle in such a way that

it can be applied to and used in linguistics. Each of the six maxims of this principle

has two sub -maxims, of which the former tend to be more im portant than the latter (p. 132):

( I ) TACT MAXIM

(a) Minimize cost to other

(b) Maximize benefit to other

( I I ) GENEROSITY MAXIM

(a) Minimize benefit to self

(b) Maximize cost to self

( I I I ) APPROBATION MAXIM

(a) Minimize dispraise of other

(b) Maximize praise of other

( IV) MODESTY MAXIM

(a) Minimize praise of

self

(b) Maximize dispraise of

self

(V) AGREEMENT MAXIM

(a) Minimize disagreement between self and other

(b) Maximize agreement between self and other

(VI) SYMPATHY MAXIM

(a) Minimize antipathy between self and other

(b) Maximize sympathy between

self

and

other

The operation and the interplay of pragmatic principles, their maxims and sub-maxims

may vary according to speech situation s, language com munities and cultural a reas. At the

same time, different languages may vary in exploiting different formal means in order to

comply with the same pragmatic principles and their maxims. Hence general pragmatics

is closely related to both grammar (pragmalinguistics) and sociology (socio-pragmatics).

The common denominator of Chapters 7—9

{ ommunicative

Gramm ar: an example;

Performatives; Speech-act verbs in English is the application of Leech's theoretical views

to several sets of grammatical phenomena. The example of communicative grammar

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relates different negative and interrogative forms to their various pragmatic utilizations.

I n

Chapters 8 and 9, Leech argues that 'a rhetorical view of pragmatics requires us to take

a

different view of performatives and of illocutionary acts from that which is familiar in the

classical speech act formulations of Austin and Searle. The view is put forward that

Searle's taxonomy of illocutionary acts should be reinterpreted as a semantic taxonomy of

speech act verbs.' (P. xi.) The only thing to add is that Leech more than succeeds in his

argument.

Chapter

10

Retrospect

and

prospect)

recapitulates the preceding discussion and draws

attention to some of the important

issues

that are frequently dealt with in pragmatics but

could not have been included in the book.

'If there is one idea of importance in this investigation, it is the notion that illocutionary

force can be translated into the problem solving paradigm of means ends analysis, and that

pragmatic interpretation can also be formulated as problem solving within a different

paradigm — that of hypothesis formation and testing. Within this same general framework

for studying communicative linguistic behaviour, indirect speech acts have appeared

as problem solving strategies of the same kind as direct speech acts , except that the

meansends analysis is more complex and oblique.' (P. 229.) This is what Leech himself

says

in his concluding remarks. Any reader of the book, however,

will

undoubtedly find not

only one but quite a number of ideas of paramount importance, not to speak of hundreds of

excellent examples and incisive linguistic descriptions. Leech's

Principles of Pragmatics

shows

convincingly what many linguists all over the world have

felt

when reading philo

sophically and

logically

oriented treatises and

essays

on language pragmatics: the ideas are

basically sound and inspiring, but they lack a true to facts linguistic background. The

hypotheses seem to work in general, but they gradually stop working when applied to the

complex phenomena of everyday language use. There has been a great need for a genuine

linguistic approach which would accommodate the thought provoking non linguistic stimuli

to

the specific requirements of linguistics. And this is exactly what Leech's book has

done.

Aleš Svoboda

Leiv

Egil

Breivik, Existential There ,

Studia Anglistica Norvegica 2, Bergen, 1983,

XIV + 458pp.

L. E.

Breivik's

book is a large scale synchronic and diachronic study of English existential

clauses containing the non locative morpheme there. It is based on the excerption of 4,031

pages of Old Middle and early Modern English texts and both spoken and written present

day English texts containing a total of 755, 000 words. Since all the previous treatments of

existential there, adhering strictly to a

single

linguistic theory, had failed to explain its use

satisfactorily, the present author adopted an eclectic method of investigation.

T h e

book is devided into seven chapters. Chapter 1

offers

a critical

survey

of earlier

studies of existential clauses (sentences). Chapter 2 refers to the semantic, syntactic andphonological differences between existential

there,

denoted as

there

i, and locative

there,

denoted as therei. Chapters 3 and 4 deal with the conditions of the use and non use of there

in

present day and earlier English. In chapter 5, therei is compared to functionally similar

devices used by other languages. Chapter 6 presents a tentative hypothesis about the origin

of therei. The conclusions arrived at in chapters 1—6 are summed up in chapter 7. These

are the most important points.

I n present day English, therei and therei have sharply distinc, syntactic and semantic

functions and different phonological realizations.

Therei

functions as a dummy subject

an d

does not apear to have a referential meaning; it tends to be realized as /&»(

r

)/

o r

/ ^

e

(

r

) /

an d

never has a nuclear pitch movement. Therei functions as a locative adverb and usually

carries the meaning 'at the particular place'; its realization is /ňee(r)/ and it is capable of

bearing a nucleus. The use and non use of therei in present day English is conditioned by its

pragmatic function. It

serves

as a presentative signal of a subject conveying new information

an d appearing in post verbal position; it cooccurs with intransitive

verbs

of 'appearance

on the scene' (most frequently with lexical be), which allow the subject to become the

communicative core.

Therei

and

therei

are already differentiated in Old English.

Therei

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clauses, however, are far less frequent than today and, unlike at present, also co-occur with

transitive verbs in the active voice. T he decay of this type of clause and th e increase in the

use of therei with verbs of 'appearance on the scene' is due to the typological shift of the

Old-English verb-second language to verb-medial Modern English. Therei insertion in

pre-yerbal position represents a solution of the conflict between the topicalization principle

(topic — comment sequence) and the fixed word order principle (SV sequence). Languages

do not universally possess media comparable to the English

therei.

Dum my subjects are

present in languages that either have or have had the verb-second constraint.

The subject-matter of L. E. Breivik's study is carefully organized. The author offers

clear definitions, a convincing number of examples, and thorough consideration of the

results achieved in the field of the existential clause (sentence) theory by other scholars.

He brings into relief a number of problems presented by the existential constructions that

have not been solved so far. He examins the constructions from the viewpoint of their

communicative function and observes them against the background of the whole system of

the language. He tries to find the relationship between the synchronic and the diachronic

and succeeds in presenting the language as a dynamic structure. L. E. Breivik's book is an

exceedingly important contribution to English grammar as well as to general linguistics.

Jana Chamonikolasovd

Delia Summers (ed.-in-chief),

Longman Active Study Dictionary of English.

Long-

man Group Limited, London 1983, 710 pp.

The Longman family of English dictionaries for foreign learners has been increased by

a new member: Longman Active Study Dictionary of English, prepared by an editorial

team headed by Delia Summers.

The LASDE is a monolingual dictionary suitable for use by intermediate students of

English. Like the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE), it employs

the Longman denning vocabulary of 2.000 common words and records both British and

American pronunciation. Its special features are exercises intended to increase the learner's

vocabulary, and study notes taking up such major language points as conjunctions, count-

ability and uncountability, phrasal verbs and prepositions. A few full-page illustrations with

word labels attached to objects and persons depicted present the vocabulary linked with

recurring common scenes (e. g., at the airport, in the classroom, in the living room and in

the supermarket). Exercises accompany also the introductory explanations of how to use

the dictionary. U sage notes concern points of grammar and help to avoid comm on mistakes

in English.

Even a more advanced learner will find the new dictionary useful, especially when looking

for further illustrations of the use of a word. He may therefore be disappointed if the

examples given by the LASDE happen to be the same as those in the LDOCE (cf., e. g.,

'T he minister approved the building plans': 'Come off it, tell the tr ut h' : 'T he little boy cried

out with pain when he burnt his fingers'; 'The trapped woman cried out for help'), but

appreciate if they differ (cf., e. g., 'He enticed her away from her h usband ', 'The ir beautiful

garden is the envy of all the neighbours' and 'You can't equate his poems and/with his

plays', adduced by LD O C E, and 'H e enticed me away from my work', 'T he boy's new toy

was the envy of his friends' and 'You can't equate passing examinations w ith being educa-

ted', adduced by LASDE).

The LASDE will undoubtedly establish its place among the learning dictionaries, for it

is a welcome book of reference that a learner can use with considerable profit before turning

to a more comprehensive dictionary of the LDCOE type.

Jan Firbas

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Delia Summers (ed.-in-chief),

Longman New Pocket English Dictionary.

Longman

Group Limited, London 1984, 320 pp.

Another new mem ber — a pocket English dictionary meant as a first monolingual

learning dictionary has recently increased the family of the Longman dictionaries. It

offers definitions for about 10.000 words and phrases and presen ts them in clear and simple

English, employing a limited vocabulary of 1600 common words. Nu merous examples and

even illustrations assist the learner in grasping the meanings defined.

The dictionary is an attractive booklet and very handy because of its truly pocket size.

It may become a vade-mecum even for more advanced students, who could make use of it

for simple definition prac tice, i. e. in learning how to define in a simple way the meanings

of the most frequent English words, and for the exemplification of their employment.

Studen ts will appreciate tha t the examples adduced by the dictionary are different from

those offered by the other Longman dictionaries.

The learner will use the dictionary preparatory to availing himself or herself of the

Longman Active Study Dictionary and eventually of the Longman Dictionary of ontemporary

English and other English dictionaries. In this way the new pocket dictionary fills a gap

within the range of available monolingual English dictionaries. It will be welcomed even

by those for whom it is not primarily intended.

Jan Firbas

Tibor Frank (ed.),

The Origins and Originality of American Culture

Akadémiai

Kiadó, Budapest, 1984, 801 pp.

In April 1980 one of the more important international conferences on American studies

held in Europe in recent years took place in Budapest. Over seventy literary scholars,

linguists and social historians from Eastern and W estern Euro pe, the Soviet Union and the

United States presented papers on a wide variety of topics gathered loosely around the

theme of the m eeting, T he Origins and Originality of American C ulture . Now these

papers have been published and so made available to the general scholarly public.

The collection includes all the papers presented at the conference, arranged in fourteen

sections. In fact the use of the term Am erican Cu ltur e is somewhat misleading. The bias

is heavily towards literature: twelve sections deal with literary topics (or view social and

cultural phenomena through literature).

T he linguistic papers in the volume fall under two headings — Im pac ts and Influences

and Theories and Th eor ists . The most interesting paper in the first group is Sándor

Rot's discussion of lexical semantic fields (based on Trier's theory rid of its agnostic impli-

cations) in Am erican neologisms from 1945 to 1975. Tw o other papers in the same group

can also be considered as linguistically relevant and interesting — Veronika K niezsa's

treatment of expressions for 'playing truant' and László Pordany's analysis of borrowings

from Am erican in B ritish English, including the influence of German on Am erican Eng lish

(one exam ple, 'iron ou t', however, is recorded in the OED . Th e remaining three co ntribu-

tions in Im pac ts and Influences are not linguistic papers as such. Peter Medgyes argues

which of the two variants should be taught at schools and, with various qualifications,

favours Standa rd B ritish English. John Od mark's discussion of relations between language

and culture operates with imprecise and subjective notions, such as the vitality and origi-

nality of the American language, and Julio-César Santoyo's survey of Spanish loan-words

is an emotional defence of Spanish-speaking settlers in the present USA based on argu-

ments long since familiar from other authors.

In the second linguistic group, Th eories and T heoris ts , the most revealing, in the

reviewer's opinion, are Messmer's and Kenesei's papers. András Messmer shows how

advanced Whitney's approach to language was and István Kenesei's discussion of relative

clauses is well founded and well balanced. In another paper, József Andor traces Chomsky's

views back to early, especially E uropean thinking. The remaining two papers by László

Varga and Katalin E. Kiss deal with questions related to the theory of functional sentence

perspective. The relation between stress, syntax, and semantics, discussed by Varga, is

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after all one of the basic issues in the theory of FSP and the sensitivity to FSP has been

demonstrated by Firbas even for English, where the dominant word-order principle is the

grammatical principle. Kiss's category of topic-focus languages might indicate that there

are languages where FS P does not opera te. (As for the pioneering work of Samuel Brassai,

there exists a still earlier book, written by Henri Weil and published in 1844.)

Since any detailed com mentary on the m ore than sixty papers focused on literature would

be impossible here , I shall instead make some general observations on these papers as

a w hole, referring in the course of the discussion to some that seem to me to be of particular

interest.

Tw o points should be m ade to begin with. Th e first is that, in terms of quality, the collec-

tion is very uneven. This is not so much a criticism as a comment on the democratic open-

ness of the conference — con tributors ranged from recognized expersts in the ir fields to

graduate students at the first stages of their scholarly careers. Hence great differences in

quality and w orth were inevitable — though it should be emphasized that it is not always

the work of the young scholars that suffers in the com parison. None of them is responsible

for anything resembling Eric Mortram's tendentious and slightly hysterical account of

Fea rs of Invasion in American C ul tur e ; or Ke ith K eating's extraordinary grab bag of

famous names in Elizabethan Influences on American Lang uage, Painting, and M usic ;

or Todor T . Kirov's confused attem pt to link the English Renaissance and the American

style (variously located in Whitman , Melville, Tw ain, Lon don , Crane and Hemingway)

in T he O rigin of the Originality of American Li teratu re . When read alongside pieces of

this type , modest efforts of restricted scope take on a new va lue.

The second point worth noting is that the ostensible concern of the conference for ori-

gins and originality is only examined explicitly in a very few pap ers, and even here the

concept is sometimes asserted m ore confidently in the title than a rgued in the text. Th is is

perhaps unde rstandab le. The question of orig ins gets increasingly difficult to define

as American culture takes on a distinctive shape and borrows less from outside itself

while origina lity is extremely hard to pin down — much hard er than its opposite (how

many millions of scholar-hours per year are devoted to sniffing out sources?). But in fact

some of the best papers in the collection can be found in this small grou p. W arren Staebler,

in The Originality of Vision in the A merican Ro mantics , stresses the social awareness of

the Am erican R omantic writers — their intense consciousness of the principles on which

the nation had been founded and the ideals it was intended to fulfil, as well as their habit

of nay-saying , their stance of high-minded social dissent, something marking them off

clearly from other Romantics. Darlene Unrue sees both Henry James and William Faulkner

as being driven by a need to explore the confrontations and con tradictions between the past

and the present, the American and (ultimately) European past and the American present

in the case of James, the aristocratic Southern past and the defeated Southern present in

the case of Faulkne r, with each struggling against a superstitious overvaluation of the past.

In an examination of W hitman's poe try, Clive Bush comes closest to unravelling the knotty

origins and o riginality problem when he defines the latter as a local and personal response

to a set of historical possibilities, in which the free process of choosing from these possibi-

lities creates something new and distinctive. Discussing Whitman, he stresses his fascin-

ation with the English seventeenth century , his closeness to a certain tradition of pas-

sionate, unstudied (religious) oratory , his love of Italian opera and the theatre, his

instinctive attraction to o riental mysticism, his respect for the exactness of science, and

his feeling for the language of the Am erican stree t; his originality lay in finding ways of

using these to open up poetry to the surrounding world and so to subvert the melancholy

of the Romantic ego. Zoltán Szilassy has a useful decriptive summary of the European

origins of happenings and new performance theories in American theatre . And finally,

Peter Dávidházi contributes a crisp study of the development of René Wellek's thought

and his critical theory and a perceptive evaluation of his contribution to American

criticism.

As I have said, most of the papers are not devoted specifically to origins and originality,

though in some of them these concerns are of peripheral importance and in others they are

introduced in a rather forced way. The great bulk of the papers deal straightforwardly

either with individual authors (usually their production as a whole rather than individual

works, and ranging from the seventeenth century to the present) or with subjects taking

in the whole history of American literature or culture (or, less commonly, some specific

period). Several of the papers devoted to individual authors or books are rather perfunctory,

and on a few occasions, where two or three autho rs are discussed in a paper, the links

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between them seem very tenuous. Daniel Hoffman, however, offers a revealing analysis of

Poe's

Obsessive

Themes , pointing out Poe's obsession with the theme of some kind of

forbidden knowledge whose attainment brings with it destruction, and examining the

haunting

fear of personal extinction pervading his tales. The relaxed ease of István Geher's

Reflections on Malcolm Cowley corresponds perfectly with the humanistic and empirical

approach

favoured by Cowley in his own criticism. Myron Simon's reassessment of the

moder n myth of Thoreau as a democratic freedom fighter in Thoreau's Politics (the

longest piece in the book) argues persuasively that Thoreau's perfectionism and extreme

individualism make it impossible for him to be tied down to any one particular stream of

political thought and render him unsuitable as a guide to political conduct. Wilson J. Moses

looks at the vision of America found in The Melting Pot, by Israel Zangwill (who actually

invented the familiar phrase) and compares it with that in the novels of Sutton Griggs,

shedding light on the melting pot theory of American cultural development and pointing

out the crucial distinction here between race and ethnicity.

Although a few of the papers dealing with broader subjects betray strong elements of

waffle,

most manage to avoid the grand theorizing that is the endemic temptation in work

of this kind. David Skilton chooses a very specific goal: in Some Victorian Readings of

American Fict ion he discusses very briefly what the Victorians saw as a new element in

American fiction — its idealism, as opposed to what they felt to be the realism of Victorian

fiction

and the difficulty they had in finding terms to describe the qualities in American

fiction

tha t

they desired so much, but rarely found, in their own fiction. Paul Levine also

limits his subject rigorously in Recent Women's Fiction and the Theme of Personality ;

seeing American literature as being about the marginal individual's search for self reali

zation,

he contrasts the way tha t , in recent women's fiction, the question of leaving the

family (a male dominated tyranny) becomes an end in

itself,

whereas in traditional male

fiction this is only a beginning: men escape not only from the family but also from the social

world (both often seen as feminine). Josef Jařab, too, concentrates on a specific issue with

wider implications in his Black Aesthetic: A Cultural or Political Concept? , a balanced

and

clear eyed examination of the claims of the Black Aesthetic ideologues that pinpoints

both

the strength and weaknesses of their arguments and

suggests

that current black lite

rature has been both stimulated and hindered by the policies of Black Aesthetic.

Limitations of space having forced me to restrict my comments to only a dozen specific

papers, I should stress that these are not, of course, the only interesting contributions.

F ar from it. Some, such as R. Anthony Arthur's The Search for 'the Real' in American

F ic t ion ,

offer a useful survey of some particular topic (in this case fiction in the 60's and

70's); others

give

a good close analysis of a particular work (for example Richard P. Sugg's

paper on Crane's The Bridge); others again will perhaps reveal something new to the non

specialized scholar (Astrid Schmitt v. Miihlenfels's examination of the seventeenth and

eighteenth century New England elegy). And certainly no one will fail to be impressed by

th e vitality of American studies shown by the collection as a whole.

Don

Sparling—Josef

Hladký

161

geoffrey n. leech, principles of pragmatics

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