Jun 12
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhbook review
AUTHOR: Jef Verschueren
TITLE: Ideology in Language Use
SUBTITLE: Pragmatic Guidelines for Empirical Research
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2013
REVIEWER: Lorena Hernandez Ramirez, CUNY Graduate Center
Review’s Editors: Malgorzata Cavar and Sara Couture
SUMMARY
“Ideology in Language Use. Pragmatic Guidelines for Empirical Research” by Jef
Verschueren is a refreshing contribution to the study of ideology and language
by means of a pragmatics-based approach to historical data. Grounded in the
field of linguistic pragmatics, or as the author defines it, “the
interdisciplinary science of language use” (p. xii), it offers a valuable
guide for scholars and students in different fields of inquiry for whom the
“societal construction of frames of reference […] as mediated through
discourse” (p. xii) is relevant.
Both in the preface and in the introduction, the main purpose of the book is
clearly stated: to serve as a research tool, providing a methodological frame
for the study of ideology in discourse. Among others, political scientists,
historians, sociologists, and anthropologists may benefit from this work. The
main data source for the practical section of the book consists of historical
texts, and the author uses them extensively through the chapters to illustrate
his proposed methodology. More specifically, the corpus is comprised of a
compilation of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century discourses on the
colonial world and colonization in some British and French history textbooks.
The first source used dates back to 1902 (Lavisse), and then the topic is
narrowed down to episodes of the 1857 ‘Indian Mutiny’.
After the introduction, the author devotes Chapter 1, “Language use and
ideology”, to define ideologies as sociocultural-cognitive phenomena,
combining both description and prescription, embedded in social relations in
the public sphere, and in contrast with other traditions such as the false
consciousness of Marxism. This definition, therefore, seems to fall somewhere
along the range between what Woolard (1998) considers the biggest divide in
studies of ideology: the negative conception, and the neutral one. According
to the negative notion, ideology results from an interest in a particular
social position, and is presented as a universal truth. In the neutral
conception, ideology is seen as a set of ideas aimed at acquiring or
maintaining power (p. 27). Also, the notion of ideology behind Verschueren’s
tenets is most closely connected to that presented by Eagleton (1990), who
emphasizes the intertwining of power, politics, and discourse. Throughout this
chapter, Verschueren offers four theses (with subtheses, in turn, for the
first two) in order to describe the basic features of his definition of
ideology. Given the scope of the book, theses one and three seem particularly
relevant: “Thesis 1: We can define as ideological any basic pattern of meaning
or frame or interpretation bearing on or involved in (an) aspect(s) of social
‘reality’ (in particular in the realm of social relations in the public
sphere), felt to be commonsensical, and often functioning in a normative way”
(p. 10); “Thesis 3: (One of) the most visible manifestation(s) of ideology is
language use or discourse, which may reflect, construct, and/or maintain
ideological patterns” (p. 17).
The thesis presented in the first chapter leads to the content of chapter 2,
“Pragmatic rules of engagement”, where the author lays out a series of
pragmatic-based rules for engaging with language use and ideology, in order to
support the design of research questions and the collection of data. The
importance of combining both horizontal and vertical variation is emphasized.
The former refers to variation in genres, while the latter refers to variation
in structural levels of analysis, as strategies drawn from discourse analysis.
The last part of this chapter is devoted to justifying the selection of
materials, which are compared in terms of language, temporal and geographical
perspective, size and degree of detail, coverage, and intended audience.
Chapter 3,“Pragmatic guidelines and procedures”, is considerably more
extensive than the previous two, and it can be considered the core of the book
from the methodological point of view. It offers a series of practical
guidelines and procedures to be used in the actual exercise of research. A
number of caveats are also interspersed here, in order to warn the researcher
and guide them further in their inquiries. Given the extensive list of
guidelines, procedures, and caveats, only a few are summarized here for
illustrative purposes:
“Guideline 1: Get to know your data thoroughly […]
Guideline 2: Get to know the context of your data […]
Caveat 2.1: Context is not a stable ‘outside’ reality, nor is it finite in any
sense. Hence it cannot be described exhaustively […]
Procedure 2.1: Investigate the wider (social, political, historical,
geographical, etc.) context, to the extent that is accessible. In particular:
2.1.1: How does the context of the investigation relate to the context of the
investigated discourse?
2.1.2: How does the context of the investigated discourse relate to the
social, cultural, political, historical context which the discourse is
(presenting itself as being) ‘about’?
2.1.3: How does the investigated discourse carve out lines of vision in the
‘world’ it refers to?” (p. 201-202)
In the conclusion, Verschueren points at the fact that writing about ideology
is not a an ideology-free process. He also highlights what could probably be
the most important theoretical contribution of his work, that is, “providing
theoretically justified tools for analysis” (p. 199), by creating a
parallelism with the origins of structuralism in the humanities and social
sciences. According to Mauss and Lévi-Strauss, referring to Saussurean
structuralism, linguistics was “the most scientifically advanced field in the
social sciences” (p. 199), and it was a model extensively followed by other
fields. According to Verschueren, in a similar way linguistic pragmatics can
provide the theoretical framework, and the tools, as developed in this book,
to further contribute to the social sciences.
At the end of the book, two appendices are included. Appendix 1 gathers all
theses, subtheses, rules, guidelines, procedures, and caveats in a list form.
This provides a quick summary of the content. Finally, Appendix 2 includes all
the original sources that the author has used, which may serve as material for
other researchers to carry further studies.
EVALUATION
“Ideology in Language Use. Pragmatic Guidelines for Empirical Research” is
undoubtedly a solid step towards building a methodology for the study of
language and ideology. Grounded in a theory of pragmatic linguistics, the book
constitutes a practical tool for producing empirical research in a field that
up to date lacks of consistent guidelines for this purpose. The reader can
literally follow the guidelines presented by the author step by step, and it
will result in an empirical study of ideology and discourse in historical
data. Also, the sources for further analysis are provided in Appendix 2, and
thus, anyone who would like to engage in the topic and carry out further
analysis can use it as a corpus. The author states his goals clearly and meets
them throughout the book.
In the introduction, the following statement is worth analyzing: “Though the
concept started its career that way, ‘ideology’ is no longer seen as the
systematic analysis of sensations and ideas which should provide the basis for
all scientific knowledge. Ideology is no longer an academic discipline, but
rather an ‘object of investigation’” (p. 7). I believe that precisely one of
the main strengths of this book is that it offers the opportunity to develop
ideology, and in particular language ideologies, as both an object of study
and as a discipline. The author seems to avoid the phrase “language
ideologies”, perhaps because of his interest in discourse analysis and the
pragmatic grounding of his work. However, I think this book could benefit from
making a clear distinction, if considered necessary, between “ideology in
language use” and “language ideologies”. There exists an effort to consolidate
the latter as an academic discipline, especially in certain circles in England
and in the United States (see, among others, Joseph and Taylor 1990, Taylor
1997, Schieffelin, Woolard, and Kroskrity 1998, Kroskrity 2000). Verschueren
actually uses some of these traditions to frame his definition of ideology,
even though he does not establish further connections between “ideology in
language use” and “language ideologies”.
This book emphasizes the necessity for a solid methodology which will yield
consistent empirical research regarding ideology and language, and therefore
encourages researchers in a variety of fields to follow his proposed
guidelines and use them in their own research.
REFERENCES
Eagleton, Terry. 1991. Ideology: An Introduction. London: Verso.
Joseph, John E. and Talbot J. Taylor (eds.). 1990. Ideologies of language.
London/New York: Routledge.
Kroskrity, Paul V. (ed.) 2000. Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and
Identities. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.
Lévi-Strauss, Claude. 1958. Anthropologie structurale. Paris: Librarie Plon.
Schieffelin, Bambi, Kathryn A. Woolard, and Paul V. Kroskrity. 1998. Language
ideologies: practice and theory. New York: Oxford University Press.
Taylor, Talbot. 1997. Theorizing language: analysis, normativity, rhetoric,
history. Amsterdam/New York: Pergamon.
Woolard, Kathryn A. 1998. Introduction: Language Ideology as a Field of
Inquiry. In Language
ideologies: practice and theory, edited by Schieffelin, B., K. Woolard and P.
Kroskrity. NewYork: Oxford University Press, 3-47.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Lorena Hernandez Ramirez is a PhD candidate in the Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian
Literatures & Languages program at the Graduate Center of the City University
of New York. Her research interests revolve around language ideologies, with a
particular focus on Spanish in the US.
May 20
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhbook review
EDITOR: Arianna Maiorani
EDITOR: Christine Christie
TITLE: Multimodal Epistemologies
SUBTITLE: Towards an Integrated Framework
SERIES TITLE: Routledge Studies in Multimodality
PUBLISHER: Routledge (Taylor and Francis)
YEAR: 2014
REVIEWER: Kunkun Zhang, Macquarie University
Review’s Editors: Malgorzata Cavar and Sara Couture
SUMMARY
“Multimodal Epistemologies”, edited by Arianna Maiorani and Christine
Christie, is a new volume in the “Routledge Studies in Multimodality” series
edited by Kay L. O’Halloran. The book aims to create “a new, comprehensive,
more flexible and adaptable epistemology” (p. 1) for discourse analysts and
scholars in communication studies to respond to fresh challenges of new media
and technologies. This volume explores diverse frontier issues and presents
new analytical frameworks and methods in the study of multimodal discourse,
that is, discourse that combines more than one semiotic mode (including but
not limited to written language, speech, gesture, image, colour, music, sound,
and typography) to make meaning. It is divided into three sections (16
chapters) apart from an introduction and a conclusion. The three main sections
are based on “three ways of interpreting multimodality as an approach to
knowledge: (1) multimodality as a semiotic perspective; (2) multimodality as a
tool for cultural research; and (3) multimodality as a way to analyse
contemporary narrative processes” (pp. 1-2).
Section 1, “Multimodality as a Semiotic Perspective,” presents the first six
chapters, in which different approaches and methods are drawn upon to
investigate multimodal semiotic discourse. In Chapter 1, “An Eye-Tracking
Account of Reference Points, Cognitive Affordance and Multimodal Metaphors,”
Luna Bergh and Tanya Beelders measure 21 participants’ movement of eye and
duration of fixation when they view 30 print advertisements to test their
perception of reference points in multimodal texts, illustrating the
importance of conceptual archetypes, reference points, mental spaces, and
blending in viewers’ understanding of multimodal metaphors. Chapter 2,
“Demotivators as Deprecating and Phatic Multimodal Communicative Acts” by
Krzysztof Ozga integrates multimodal, semantic and pragmatic analyses to
explore demotivators. A demotivator is a combination of a picture or photo
with a caption that tends to ironically comment on the picture or photo. The
author analyses the socio-communicative functions of demotivators and the
visual-verbal relations in demotivators. In Chapter 3, “Legitimation in
Multimodal Material Ensembles,” Giulio Pagani combines the multimodal and
material analysis framework with the critical discourse analysis of
legitimation (Van Leeuwen, 2007) to see how Norwich Bus Station is represented
and legitimized, considering the social functions of the Station. The analysis
covers the material items and forms of the building itself as well as the
documentary texts recording the process of its construction. The congruity
theory, which approaches the meaning of a text in terms of its pragmatic
functions, is adapted in Chapter 4, “A Pragma-Semiotic Analysis of
Advertisements as Multimodal Texts: A Case Study” by Sabrina Mazzali-Lurati
and Chiara Pollaroli, to do a multimodal analysis of a Nike Air print
advertisement. The paper investigates the rhetorical strategies this
advertisement uses to persuade consumers and analyses the language, images and
layout of the advertisement. Chapter 5, “Analysing Pictures: A
Systemic-Functional Semiotic Model for Drawing” by Howard Riley, takes
Halliday’s systemic functional approach and analyses how different resources
for making meaning are chosen in drawing and fine arts to represent things,
communicate with viewers and organize compositional elements. In Chapter 6
“Multimodal Advertisement as a Genre within a Historical Context,” Sonja Starc
merges the text pattern theory (Hoey, 2001), social semiotic visual grammar
(Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2006) and systemic functional Appraisal Theory (Martin
and White, 2005) to probe into the advertisements in the early 20th century
Slovene newspapers. The focus is on the interpersonal function of the
advertisements, and their text structures as culturally shaped patterns.
Section 2, “Multimodality as a Tool for Cultural Research”, features five
articles that discuss various cultural issues. In Chapter 7, “A Multimodal
Analysis of the Metonymic Indexing of Power Relations in Novel and Film,”
Christine Christie draws upon the Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1995)
and pragmatic theorisation of indexicality to do a multimodal analysis of
power relations between characters in Kazuo Ishiguro’s fiction ‘The Remains of
the Day’ and the film adapted from it. The author particularly illustrates the
role of “banter,” a phenomenon of mock impoliteness that involves using acts
of impoliteness to index intimacy and equality in communication. Chapter 8,
“Re-Bombing in Memento: Traumata of Coventry, Belgrade and Dresden in
Multimodal Collective Memory” by Jan Krasni, looks into the public memories of
the bombing of three cities in different countries during the Second World War
through multimodal analysis of websites in memory of these bombing events,
combining the frameworks of Key Visuals (Kramer and Ludes, 2010) and
Multimodal Discourse Analysis (Kress and Van Leeuwen, 2006). According to this
article, collective remembrance serves as a common ground for identity
construction in a given community. Chapter 9, “Argumentation, Persuasion and
Manipulation on Revisionist Websites: A Multimodal Rhetorical Analysis” by
Michael Rinn, takes a rhetorical approach to explore the multimodal
revisionist websites that try to deny the Holocaust and restore the Nazi
ideology. These websites use such strategies as argumentative manipulation,
polyphonic communication (using pseudo-diversity of opinions to stir up
controversy), and effective infotainment to deny the Holocaust and change the
audience’s worldviews. Chapter 10, “A Corpus Approach to Semantic
Transformations in Multisemiotic Texts” by Aleksandar Trklja, investigates the
semantic changes of 500 modified versions of the American recruitment poster
“I want you for U.S. Army” in terms of experiential, interpersonal and textual
meanings. The author tries to provide a new approach for analyzing meaning
transformations in multimodal texts. Chapter 11, “Multimodality and
Illustrations: A Comparative Study of the English and Italian Illustrated
First Editions of The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling” is written by Monica
Turci. Using Kress and Van Leeuwen’s (2006) model of multimodal analysis, the
author identifies the similarities and differences between two illustrations
separately from the “Multimodal Source Text” (the English illustrated edition)
and the “Multimodal Target Text” (the Italian illustrated edition) in the
aspects of image composition, ideational meaning, and visual-verbal
relationship. Then she connects the domestication of illustrations in the
target text to historical and political contexts in Italy of the time when the
translated text was published.
The final five chapters in Section 3, “Multimodality as a Way to Analyse
Contemporary Narrative Processes,” study the narrative processes as well as
textual cohesion and coherence in multimodal discourse. Using English-Italian
parallel filmic dialogues as a corpus, Maria Freddi and Chiara Malagori in
Chapter 12, “Discourse Markers in Audiovisual Translation,” investigate how
pragmatic markers, including “well”, “so”, “now”, “you know/see”,
“look/listen” and “I mean”, in English films are translated into Italian and
what roles these pragmatic markers play. The contribution finds that
translation by omission is a regular pattern in dealing with pragmatic markers
in film dubbing. In Chapter 13, “Filmic Narrative Sequences as Multimodal
Environments: A New Perspective on the Effects of Dubbing,” Arianna Maiorani
takes systemic functional and Multimodal Discourse Analysis approaches to make
a corpus-based comparative study of English filmic dialogues and their Italian
dubbed versions, focusing on the space in film as a semiotic dimension.
Transitivity patterns and perspective shifts are analysed and compared in the
source text and target text to see whether the Italian audience is in fact
watching a different sequence. In Chapter 14, “Multimodal Analysis of the
Textual Function in Children’s Face-to-Face Classroom Interaction,” Roberta
Taylor investigates the pupil-to-pupil conversations in a Year Five class in a
British primary school. The pupils make use of different modes such as speech,
gesture, and noise to make cohesive and coherent meaning through the
strategies of repetition, omission, reference, intertextuality and so on.
Chapter 15, “The Contribution of Language to Multimodal Storytelling in
Commercials” by Sabine Wahl, is a multimodal investigation of a “mini-drama”
television commercial, in which the product (a Mercedes-Benz engine) is
promoted through a story. It first presents how the story is told without
written language or speech but using the modes such as image, music, and sound
effects. Then the author analyses the role played by the on-screen language.
The language does not contribute to the storytelling but is indispensable for
the advertisement, as it identifies the product by its name, for example.
Finally taking a filmic extract as example, Janina Wildfeuer in Chapter 16,
“Coherence in Film: Analysing the Logical Form of Multimodal Discourse,”
analyses the process of filmic comprehension and interpretation based on
textual qualities and structure on the one hand and knowledge of the world and
film conventions on the other hand. The interpretation process is illustrated
combining the formal, logical analytical framework (Asher and Lascarides,
2003) and multimodal film analysis approach (e.g. Bateman and Schmidt, 2011).
EVALUATION
This volume enriches the approaches and analytical methods in the study of
multimodality and multimodal communication by presenting studies with both
practical analysis and theoretical considerations. These chapters draw upon a
variety of theoretical approaches (semiotics, discourse analysis, semantics,
pragmatics, rhetoric, corpus linguistics, systemic functional linguistics,
cognitive linguistics, film studies, and so on) to explore multimodal
discourse in different areas (advertisements, websites, social media, films,
architecture, drawing, literature, translation, face-to-face interaction, and
so forth). Although the book is divided into three parts, the titles of the
sections do not cover all the theoretical aspects of these chapters. For
instance, Chapter 1 is included in the section on “Multimodality as a
Semiotic Perspective”, yet the experiment and analysis in the chapter adopt a
cognitive rather than semiotic perspective.
Indeed the book covers a wide range of fields of research. On the one hand, it
enriches the studies of multimodality from the perspective of social
semiotics, which is one significant theoretical foundation for multimodal
analysis (Van Leeuwen, 2005; Jewitt, 2009; Kress, 2010). On the other hand,
the book promotes the application of multimodal analysis in several new
fields. Firstly, it continues the tradition of the multimodal approach to
literature and narrative, which could be traced back to Page (2010). Secondly,
it features the multimodal analysis of translation, including both traditional
literary translation (Chapter 11), and audiovisual translation and film
dubbing (Chapter 12 and Chapter 13). As audiovisual discourse involves
multiple semiotic modes such as written language, speech, image, colour,
sound, and music, it can be said that the translation of audiovisual “texts”
provides a ready-made sample for cross-cultural multimodal discourse analysis.
This volume is innovative not only in terms of the research fields that it
covers, but also in terms of integrated theoretical frameworks. The
combination of multimodal analysis with critical discourse or cultural studies
is displayed in Chapter 3, Chapter 6, and Section 2 “Multimodality as a Tool
for Cultural Research” of this book. This theoretical integration responds to
Van Leeuwen’s (2013) call for the “critical analysis of multimodal discourse”
and Djonov and Zhao’s (2014) critical first step in establishing “critical
multimodal discourse analysis” as a distinctive branch of discourse analysis.
Particularly Chapter 3, “Legitimation in Multimodal Material Ensembles”, meets
the trend of a multimodal legitimation (e.g. Van Leeuwen, 2014).
Another theoretical innovation of this volume lies in the editors’ effort in
combining multimodality and pragmatics. This tendency is obviously
demonstrated in Chapter 2, Chapter 4, Chapter 7 and Chapter 12. Christie
(Chapter 7) remarks that the chapter also aims to “initiate a debate about
what pragmatic approaches in general can bring to the analysis of multimodal
texts” (p. 111). It seems, however, that this goal of combining pragmatics in
general and multimodality has not been reached so far. Nevertheless, the
debate promoted in this volume could prove beneficial to the combination of
the two approaches.
In conclusion, with theoretical and methodological innovations, this edited
volume offers its reader a range of recent studies in multimodal discourses of
diverse kinds. These studies renew our knowledge, or in the editors’ term,
“epistemologies” in multimodality and the rules played by multimodality in
contemporary communication.
REFERENCES
Asher, N. and Lascarides, A. (2003). Logics of conversation. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Bateman, J. A. and Schmidt, K-H. (2011). Multimodal film analysis: How films
mean. London and New York: Routledge.
Djonov, E., and Zhao, S. (Eds.). (2014). Critical multimodal studies of
popular discourse. New York: Routledge.
Hoey, M. (2001). Textual interaction: An introduction to written discourse.
London and New York: Routledge.
Jewitt, C. (Ed.). (2009). The Routledge handbook of multimodal analysis.
London and New York: Routledge.
Martin, J. R. and White, P. R. R. (2005). The language of evaluation:
Appraisal in English. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave MacMillan.
Kramer, S. and Ludes, P. (2010). Networks of culture: The world language of
key visuals. Berlin: Li.
Kress, G. (2010). Multimodality: A social semiotic approach to contemporary
communication. London: Routledge.
Kress, G. and Van Leeuwen, T. (2006[1996]). Reading images: The grammar of
visual design. London and New York: Routledge.
Page, R. (Ed.). (2010). New perspectives on narrative and multimodality. New
York: Routledge.
Sperber, D. and Wilson, D. (1995[1986]). Relevance: Communication and
cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.
Van Leeuwen, T. (2005). Introducing social semiotics. New York: Routledge.
Van Leeuwen, T. (2007). Legitimation in discourse and communication. Discourse
and Communication 1(1): 91-112.
Van Leeuwen, T. (2013). Critical analysis of multimodal discourse. In C.
Chapelle (Ed.), Encyclopedia of applied linguistics (pp. 1-5). Oxford:
Wiley-Blackwell.
Van Leeuwen, T. (2014). Multimodality and legitimation. Plenary speech
delivered at the 2014 Australian Systemic Functional Linguistics Association
Conference, University of New South Wales, Sydney.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Kunkun Zhang is a PhD candidate at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.
His research interests include multimodality, (multimodal) discourse analysis,
(social) semiotics, literary stylistics, and systemic functional linguistics.
Currently he has been engaged in exploring children’s literature across media,
particularly the relations between narrative, media, multimodality, and
literacies.
Dec 16
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhbook review
EDITOR: David Machin
TITLE: Visual Communication
SERIES TITLE: Handbooks of Communication Science [HoCS]
PUBLISHER: De Gruyter Mouton
YEAR: 2014
REVIEWER: Andrea E Lypka, University of South Florida
SUMMARY
Visual Communication, a collection of studies edited by David Machin enriches
the growing body of visual communication studies through an interdisciplinary
approach. The handbook’s 34 chapters, theoretical and analytical essays and
research studies, examine semiotic modes, such as talk, text, moving and still
images, music, and other forms of communication. Contributions are made by
international scholars and practitioners in the fields of semiotics,
psychology, anthropology, linguistics, typography, theatre, mass
communication, photography, tourism studies, advertisement, education,
political communication, and history. In the overview of the communication
discipline, Peter J. Schulz and Paul Cobley, editors of the series Handbooks
of Communication Science, articulate the interdisciplinary nature of
communication studies and acknowledge that communication spans hard and social
sciences, semiotic and linguistic approaches. This collection conceptualizes
quantitative and qualitative orientations to the study of human visual
communication and offers a broad survey of different theoretical,
methodological, and analytical perspectives.
The 756-pages long book is divided in three sections. In part one, Machin
introduces major academic journals and handbooks, such as Visual Communication
and Visual Studies, Rose’s (2012) Visual Methodologies, and Spencer’s (2010)
Visual Research Methods in Social Sciences. He then examines the evolving
nature of the field, cautioning against over-specialization, the tendency to
privilege theory-building as opposed to conducting research, and the
over-reliance on popular theories, models, and concepts. Machin argues that
such trends limit the approach to the exploration of certain concepts and
ultimately have epistemic limits to knowledge creation.
Machin fuses the perspectives of communication and semiotics to define visual
communication as the act of creating and communicating meaning through visual
resources and understanding the creator-meaning relationship in wider
contexts. In this perspective, visual communication is connected to identity
and positioning self within cultural discourses. Building on Kress and
Leeuwen’s (2001) discussion of the fluid visual-language-genre connection,
Machin visual communication as a social phenomena.
Parts two and three are a collection of 17 chapters that investigate visual
communication extensively from an interdisciplinary perspective, followed by
the authors’ biographical sketch. Studies in part two of the volume focus on
different methodological and theoretical approaches to visual communication,
including textual analysis, relevance theory, multimodality, critical theory,
psychoanalysis, content analysis, film narrative analysis, eye tracking,
biographical analysis, and visual analysis in various fields, such as
semiotics, discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, cognitive science, design
studies, anthropology, media studies, arts, education, and cultural studies.
Studies in part three investigate visual communication in different media or
forms of art.
The First Chapter by Göran Sonesson differentiates semiotics from the fields
of art history and psychology, positing that semiotics studies conventions of
visual artefacts. Informed by cognitive semiotics and James Gibson’s work, the
textual analysis of Mark Rothko’s set of abstract pictures, “Untitled” reveals
the complexity of rules, models (such as iconicity and plastic language) and
concepts (such as prototypes, oppositions, identities and indexicalities) that
might influence understanding of the artwork.
In the Second Chapter, Charles Forceville applies Sperber and Willson’s
Relevance Theory (RT) (1995) as a framework in his analysis of visual images.
Through the analyses of a Tintin panel cartoon and a political cartoon on
Barack Obama and the Dutch queen, Beatrix, Forceville illustrates the
difference between mass communication and prototypical verbal communication,
suggesting that RT allows for a rigorous analysis of different modes and
media.
In the Third Chapter, through the concept of resemiotization (Iedema, 2001),
Ian Roderick investigates the semiotics of military artifacts in two
television series, Future Weapons and Ultimate Weapons, by combining the
simondonian theory of socio-technical relations and Actor-Network Theory.
Findings suggest that the series present weapons as technical objects and
resemiotize the relationship between artifact and audience to publicize
military policy and recruit military personnel.
The aim of the Fourth Chapter by Christina Konstantinidou and Martha
Michailidou is to demonstrate how generic photojournalistic photographs and
archival images in a corpus of Greek newspapers reproduce institutional
discourses on immigration. Findings reveal that the press problematizes
immigration either as a national threat or humanitarian crisis within
discourses on European identity and securitization; both visual and textual
discourses normalize immigration, perpetuate visual stereotypes, and portray
immigrants as the “Other.”
Linguistic fetishisation or the use of languages for symbolic value as opposed
to instrumental value in advertising is the focus of the study by Helen
Kelly-Holmes. Using linguistic landscape analysis, she examines foreign words
in an online advertisement and on commercial websites to emphasize that
linguistic fetish is grounded in power relations.
In Chapter Six, Paul Bowman explores gender, sexuality, identity, and
ethnicity as performance, and the male gaze in contemporary popular culture,
to argue that media shape discursive individual and collective identity
formation. By linking Critical Theory and Laura Mulvey’s visual pleasures with
Rey Chow’s coercive mimeticism as analytical frameworks, Bowman demonstrates
how the popular music videos perpetuate patriarchal and sexist discourse on
gender.
In Chapter Seven, Inna Semetsky’s study on visual semiotics in Tarot cards
fuses Jung’s work and Charles Sanders Peirce’s logic as semiotics model that
consists of sign, object, and interpretant. The author suggests that
interpreting the polysemous meanings of Tarot cards in light of current events
enriches the consciousness.
In the Eighth Chapter,“Color language hierarchy,” Dennis Puhalla theorizes
color as language. By analyzing a weather map that might be difficult to
interpret without reference to a color legend and the London underground
transportation map that successfully integrates color, the author argues that
similar to language, color carries meaning and message and its three
characteristics, hue, value, chroma act as organizational and hierarchical
rules, comparable to syntax and semantics in language.
To understand the complex process of reading and the analysis of typefaces,
Mary C. Dyson carries out computer-based experimental research in chapter
nine. Specifically, the author examines differences between typographer and
user perception of these visual forms, particular characteristics of letters
and typefaces, drawing on two models of reading, McClelland and Rumelhart’s
Interactive Activation Model (1981), and Sanocki’s “font tuning” concept
(1991). Even though such methods are less used in typography research, they
can inform pedagogy and typography practice.
Toys as mass cultural artefacts and representations of simplified and often
distorted reality are the center of Gilles Brougère’s study in Chapter 10.
Using a socio-anthropological lens and rhetorical analysis, the author
connects the notion of toy to the action of play and game, to the goal of
entertainment and/or education, arguing that this image of toy is constantly
altered through media.
In Chapter 11, Martin Conboy’s provides a thorough historical overview of the
evolution of the journalism industry in Britain, including the influence of
American journalism and New Journalism, characterized by bold headlines and
simple, short language to attract attention. Conboy expands his analysis to
image, textual display, layout, and format, arguing that the evolving tabloid
journalism genre needs to be contextualized within contemporary journalism,
politics, economy, culture, and technological advances.
In Chapter 12, Gwen Bouvier analyzes how news photographs in the UK framed the
2011 uprising and 2012 NATO involvement/strikes in Libya, employing visual
content analysis and Halliday’s (1978) classification of verb types. Findings
reveal that the photographs represent a simplified, generic, decontextualized,
sanitized, and ethnocentric worldview, utilize government perspective, and
lack details about socio-political context.
Audiovisual artefacts, in particular narrative films, are the focus of the
study by John A. Bateman in Chapter 13, inspired by the Hallidayan systemic
functional theory. Bateman employs functional discourse analysis to interpret
three filmic discourse relations, such as time, contrast, and space, filmic
discourse structure, such as spatiotemporal relations, and filmic cohesion,
including audio elements and settings in an extract of the movie Father and
Daughter.
In Chapter 14, Jana Holsanova calls for more empirical research on
multimodality from the user perspective within an interdisciplinary framework.
Using heatmaps and examples from previous eye tracking studies, Holsanova
discusses informant narratives on their inspection of an image, following the
gaze allocation saliency model.
Within the broader aspects of the role of arts and artist in society, H.
Camilla Smith examines artistic creativity of German artist, Jeanne Mammen
(1890-1976), pointing to the artist’s and arts’ role as social construct in
Chapter 15. The analysis of magazine illustrations is contextualized in a
detailed discussion of Mammen’s letters, objects, and photographs in her
studio to reveal that such multilayered analysis can enrich or challenge
previous evaluations of Mammen’s work.
Carey Jewitt connects the discussion on multiple literacies and multimodality
in education to the Foucauldian notion of power in Chapter 16. Using a case
study of a multimodal hands-on lesson on blood circulation and a learning
space similar to a teenage room in a secondary school, the author demonstrates
how multimodal practices and materials facilitate learning and reconstruct the
student-education relationship,
In Chapter 17, Ross P. Garner adopts social-constructionist theories to expand
Paul Grainge’s (2000) model of nostalgia “moods” and “modes” to his analysis
of nostalgia discourses in the crime drama series, Ashes to Ashes. Garner
dissects changes in discourses of nostalgia, using various narrative
strategies. The author combines textual analysis with socio-semiotic
methodology to reveal the interconnection between nostalgic discourse
constructions and BBC public service discourses in TV series.
A 19th century UK cartoon figure with an oversized head and pot belly, Ally
Sloper, is the focus of Roger Sabin’s essay in Chapter 18. Following an
overview of comics studies, including the comic Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday,
the author draws on textual analysis and historiography to provide possible
interpretations of the evolution, relevance and meaning of this popular figure
in the Victorian context.
In Chapter 19, Marvin Carlson calls for the reconceptualization of visuality
in theatre. He discusses examples and technological affordances to attest the
dominance of visuality in the theatre, starting from the Greek theatre and
Filippo Brunelleschi’s giant flying machines, theatrical shows of panoramas,
evolving into the melodrama and silent movies, and culminating in live video
installations that blur the lines between public and private.
Vincent Campbell’s article in Chapter 20 provides an overview of Computer
Generated Imagery (CGI) in documentary entertainment, such as extinct animal
shows as well as series on extreme weather, natural disasters, and crime. The
author draws on models of computer animation in documentary films to analyze
the use of CGI scenes in Planet Dinosaur, a series about extinct animals.
From a poststructuralist paradigm, Sarah Edge approaches historical
photographs taken in prisons as visual discursive constructs that can help
historical photographers interpret complex historical events, identity, and
popular culture at a particular point in time. The author’s critical
interpretation of photographs of Fenians is contextualized in the mid -19th
century sociopolitical environment.
Diane Carr’s study in Chapter 22 is an analysis of a section of a survival
horror digital game. The author employs textual, structural, and inter-textual
analysis to reveal differences between game textuality and game structure,
arguing that the combined theoretical and methodological approaches afford a
multiple-level analysis.
Visual thinking and graphic representation play a key role in children’s
sense-making process and communication. In Chapter 23, Susan Wright discusses
a telling-drawing study that investigated how children from two primary
Catholic schools in Australia interacted with multimodal texts, using an
analytical framework inspired by Vygotsky, Bruner, and Peirce. Wright’s
analysis reveals that children combined fantasy, imagery, and personal
experiences to represent and describe complex ideas in their drawings.
Gendered meanings of fashion toys perpetuated in advertisements and connected
to culture are the focus of the study by Danielle Almeida in Chapter 24. The
author adopts a social semiotic lens to compare the performative nature of
gendered discourses on fashion dolls. The analysis reveals that fashion toys
present an idealized and simplified version of reality: they mirror evolving
discourses on gender but are unable to capture the complexity of human lives
beyond the commercial level.
In the exploratory study in Chapter 25, Kay I. O’Halloran, Alvin Chua, and
Alexey Podlasov combine linguistic and visual analysis to investigate visual
communication on social media networks in Singapore. Specifically, the
interconnection between personal and professional life is analyzed in
multimodal user generated content on Twitter and Instagram, using the free
face detection software, OpenCV.
Nathaniel Dafydd Beard’s essay examines the symbiotic relationship between the
contemporary fashion industry, visual communication, and technology in Chapter
26. The examples in the essay reveal that through evolving technological
developments, fashion photography blends characteristics of commercial
photography and art photography, materialism, artistic creativity with
multimodal forms to appeal to a global audience.
In Chapter 27, Nurit Peled-Elhanan adopts a social-semiotic approach to
examine meta discourses of power in Israeli textbooks. Her analysis suggests
that the ideological choices employed in the textbooks portray Palestinians as
subhumans or as invisible and legitimize Israeli discourses on authority by
presenting Israel as a democratic state that protects human rights.
Through a semiotic perspective, William Cannon Hunter’s case study
investigates discourses of tourism in advertising materials published by the
government and tourism developers to reveal how the tourism destination image
of Seoul is mediatized. Frequent depictions of tourism landscapes represented
Seoul as a progressive, global city and landscapes portrayed Han River as an
evolving tourist destination for recreation.
In Chapter 29, Randall Teal dissects the relationship between object and
visual representation in architecture from a visual communication lens. The
author borrows the analytique drawing approach developed by Marco Frascari to
argue that through this technique the designer reintroduces the elements of
ambiguity, incompleteness, and specificity in design.
The article on animal visual communication in Chapter 30 by Karely Kleisner
and Timo Maran proposes the Portmannian- Uexküllian adopts biosemiotic
approach as alternative to traditional theories on evolution. Through a
discussion of the development of semantic organs, the authors demonstrate that
the subject-oriented nature of biosemiotic approach allows the
reinterpretation of the dynamic interactions between certain elements in
complex and organic systems.
Murals as a medium to publicize political messages and propaganda, recruitment
tools for political movements, and representations of political events and
cultural symbols in Northern Ireland are at the center of Chapter 31 by
Maximilian Rapp and Markus Rhomberg. From a historiographical lens, the
authors investigate how murals in Belfast and (London-) Derry depicted a
republican agenda during the 1968 civil war.
From a visual anthropology paradigm and Taussig’s notion of mimesis (1993),
Rupert Cox’s essay raises questions about the relationship between art-agency,
original-copy, and viewer-object by analyzing a collection of reproductions of
Western artwork at a Japanese art museum in Chapter 32. Findings reveal that
this act of copying photographs of authentic artwork blurs the lines between
original and copy and challenges norms of cultural knowledge display,
copyright, and ethics.
Reader emotional engagement in fictional narratives is explored by Maria
Nikolajeva in Chapter 33. The author adapts the theory of mind from cognitive
psychology and the term emotion ekphrasis to reflect on joy, fear, love, and
guilt, in relation to multimodal narratives in children’s picture books.
Nikolajeva suggests that the complexity of iconography on the levels of
visual, verbal narrative, and word-image interaction differs in various
picture books.
In Chapter 34, from a practitioner standpoint, Paul Brighton argues that
effective data visualization and newsgathering can enhance a story’s news
value and the news outlet’s authority. Using autobiographical accounts from
reporters, he dissects how visual representation influences story treatment
and editorial decisions of selection of stories for television news from the
perspective authenticity, transparency, and audience expectations and within
the constraints of journalistic norms, citizen journalism, and economy.
EVALUATION
Visual Communication’s critical, interdisciplinary approach provides a fresh
perspective on the relationship between text and image with specific attention
to the symbiosis of popular media and the culture at large. Each chapter
offers an overview of visual communication in everyday mass-mediated culture
and examines a specific facet of popular culture: music videos, the toy
culture, tabloid newspapers from various fields of study, such as psychology,
media studies, linguistics, communication science, typography, anthropology,
theatre, and tourism studies, and lesser-known fields, such as cartoon
studies, biosemiotics, and game studies. As a result, the epistemologies and
theoretical frameworks underpinning these studies expand current pedagogy and
research.
However, this edited volume is more than a collection of visual communication
studies written by international scholars. The studies are valuable for
students and researchers in diverse fields interested in interdisciplinary
approaches to visual communication. There are many studies that will greatly
benefit novice researchers because of their in-depth description of theory,
methodology, and implications for practice, as well as the visual
enhancements– photographs, news articles, works of art, diagrams, heat maps,
and statistical tables–that accompany these studies. For example, Garner’s
clear argumentation for the relevance of the social constructionist
perspective to the topic of his study, nostalgia, as well as the combination
of textual analysis with socio-semiotic methodology in Chapter 17 are great
resources for novice researchers. However, some studies do not convey theory
and method in a way that is easily accessible to the novice researcher.
Besides the broader connection to visual communication, sometimes it is
unclear the relationship between the chapters and the three sections of the
book. The editor could have linked their theoretical, methodological
implications and broader concepts to other chapters in the book. For example,
the concept of creativity, explored in Chapter 15 as “artistic creativity”
could have been more thoroughly explored in Chapter 16 that deals with
multimodal forms of expression in education and Chapter 23 on affective
interactions with multimodal texts. Machin cautions against over-reliance on
popular theories, and the book itself does not rely on popular theories.
Instead authors use a fusion of theories from various disciplines and critical
approaches, such as the Foucauldian perspective on power.
REFERENCES
Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). In M. Holquist (Ed.), The dialogic imagination: Four
essays. Austin: University of Texas Press
Barthes, R. (1974). S/z, trans. R. Miller. Oxford: Blackwell.
Brougère, G. (2014). Toys or the rhetoric of children’s goods. In: D. Machin
(Ed.), Visual Communication (pp. 243-259). Berlin/Boston: Mouton de Gruyter.
Grainge, P. (2000). Nostalgia and style in retro America: Moods, modes, and
media recycling. Journal of American and Comparative Cultures, 23(1), 27-34.
Halliday, M. (1978). Language as social semiotic: The social interpretation of
language and meaning. London: Edward Arnold.
Hight, C. (2008). Primetime digital documentary animation: The photographic
and graphic within play. Studies in Documentary Film, 2(1), 9-31.
Honess Roe, A. (2011). Absence, excess and epistemological expansion: towards
a framework for the study of animated documentary. Animation, 6(3), 215-230.
Iedema, R. (2003). Multimodality, resemiotization: Extending the analysis of
discourse as multisemiotic practice. Visual Communication, 2(1), 29–57.
Forceville, C. (2014). Relevance Theory as model for analyzing visual and
multimodal communication. In: D. Machin (Ed.), Visual Communication (pp.
51-70). Berlin/Boston: Mouton de Gruyter.
Itti, L., and Koch, C. (2000). A saliency-based search mechanism for overt and
covert shifts of visual attention. Vision Research, 40(10-12), 1489-1506.
Johansson, R., Holsanova, J., Dewhurst, R., and Holmqvist, K. (2012). Eye
movements during scene recollection have a functional role, but they are not
reinstatements of those produced during encoding. Journal of Experimental
Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 38(5), 1289-1314.
Konstantinidou, C. and Michailidou, M. (2014). Foucauldian discourse analysis:
Photography and the social construction of immigration in the Greek national
press. In: D. Machin (Ed.), Visual Communication (pp. 92-133). Berlin/Boston:
Mouton de Gruyter.
Kress, G. and Van Leeuwen, T. (2001). Multimodal discourse: The modes and
media of contemporary communication. London: Arnold.
Machin, D. (2014) (Ed.). Visual communication. Berlin/Boston: Mouton de
Gruyter.
McClelland, J.L. and Rumelhart, D.E. (1981) An interactive activation model of
context effects in letter perception, part I: An account of basic findings.
Psychological Review. 88, 375–407.
Puhalla, D. (2014). Colour language hierarchy. In: D. Machin (Ed.), Visual
Communication (pp. 196-123). Berlin/Boston: Mouton de Gruyter.
Puhalla, D. (2005). Colour as cognitive artifact: A means of communication,
language and message. Dissertation, North Carolina University.
Salen, K. and Zimmerman, E. (2004). Rules of play: Game design fundamentals.
Cambridge: MIT press.
Sanocki, T. (1991b). Intrapattern and interpattern relations in letter
recognition. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and
Performance, 17, 924-941.
Sanocki, T. (1991c). Looking for a structural network: Effects of changing
size and style on letter recognition. Perception, 20, 529-541.
Sperber, D. and Wilson, D. (1995). Relevance theory: Communication and
cognition (2nd ed.). Oxford: Blackwell.
Stahl, R. (2010). Militainment, inc.: War, media, and popular culture. New
York, NY: Routledge.
Vygotsky, L. S.(1978) Mind in Society. The development of higher psychological
processes. ole, M., John-Steiner, V., Scribner, S., and Souberman, E. (Ed).
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Taussig, M. (1993). Mimesis and Alterity. New York and London: Routledge.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Andrea Lypka is a third year PhD student in the Second Language Acquisition
and Instructional Technology (SLA/IT) program at the University of South
Florida (USF). Her research interests include motivation, identity, digital
storytelling, and photovoice.
Dec 12
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhbook review
AUTHOR: Carmen Pérez-Llantada
TITLE: Scientific Discourse and the Rhetoric of Globalization
SUBTITLE: The Impact of Culture and Language
PUBLISHER: Bloomsbury Publishing (formerly The Continuum International Publishing Group)
YEAR: 2013
REVIEWER: Damian J. Rivers, Future University Hakodate
Review’s Editors: Malgorzata Cavar and Sara Couture
SUMMARY
This book attempts to sketch the position of scientific discourse within the
complexities of globalization with a theoretical slant aimed toward
genre-analysis and contrastive rhetoric in addition to the more expansive
domain of sociolinguistics. The author describes the volume as being heavily
influenced by the genre work of Miller (1984) and Swales (1990, 2004) and
these references are revisited throughout the volume.
Chapter 1, “The role of science rhetoric in the global village,” outlines the
thematic orientation of the volume as one with concern for the processes and
practices of globalization, language, culture and science in relation to
discourse and its multifarious ideological constructions. The author captures
the interest of the reader by mapping an array of decisive questions such as
“how is the experience of living in a globalizing world affecting contemporary
scholarly life?” and “to what extent do knowledge-based economies determine
research activities and assess research output?” (p.1). Factors concerning the
use of the English by “non-native English speaking scholars” (p.3),
particularly when discussed within a sociocultural paradigm, foreground the
questions raised and are discussed within this initial chapter at various
points. The chapter highlights “the linguistic burden” (p.3) of scholarly
participation and communication for scientists and researchers who do not
claim English as an L1. Other issues raised include the commodification of
scientific knowledge and the forms in which such knowledge is represented and
thus assigned value. The overall aim of the volume is cast as aiming to “offer
an in-depth examination of today’s scientific rhetoric and discursive
practices” through enquiring “into the socio-cultural reasons for the adoption
and hybridization processes of the standardized scientific discourse norms”
(p.7).
Chapter 2, “Scientific English in the postmodern age,” begins with a
description of the interdisciplinary and sophisticated intricacies of
contemporary scientific knowledge as a form of cultural and intellectual
expression, and perhaps most importantly, scientific knowledge is denoted as a
highly valuable economic, political and social commodity. The thrust of this
chapter aims to identify the forces reshaping contemporary scientific
discourse within what the author describes as a “complex research policy
matrix” (p.19). As an example of such, the author points toward “growing
institutional pressure to publish in impact-factor (English-language)
journals” (p.19) and provides insightful discussion concerning
knowledge-intensive economies, bibliometrics, and sources of university
research funding in addition to various other domains. More broadly, much of
this chapter draws from the work of Fairclough (1993) as it attempts to
demonstrate the expansive scope of the “marketization of contemporary
scientific discourse” across various fields and contexts (p.19).
Chapter 3, “Problematizing the rhetoric of contemporary science,” neatly
follows on from the previous chapter and takes the reader further into
phraseological, organizational and rhetorical mechanisms propelling the
commoditization and dissemination of scientific knowledge. More specifically,
the emphasis is placed upon the ways in which “the use of English for science
dissemination reflects rhetorical variation when we compare genres produced by
scholars from an Anglophone and a non-Anglophone context” (p.47). The author
departs with reference to Kuhn’s (1962) work on persuasion and the “textual
acrobatics” (p.47) of sales rhetoric, before revisiting Fairclough’s (1992)
work on commodification. The chapter proceeds to offer a contextually-bound
taxonomy for framing scientific discourse before discussing the cognitive
domain of scientific rhetoric and discourse genre. With reference to the
accepted format for the textual dissemination of scientific knowledge, the
author highlights how a lack of “adherence to the established ways of
arranging information [e.g. the situation-problem-solution-evaluation pattern
of presenting scientific discourse in academic publications] might be taken as
a pitfall” (p.57).
Chapter 4, “A contrastive rhetoric approach to science dissemination,” draws
from work conducted at the University of Zaragoza on the compilation of the
Spanish English Research Article Corpus (2008). The author draws upon corpus
linguistics and various ethnographic forms of exploration in order to identify
the similarities and differences between “scholars in Anglophone and
non-Anglophone contexts regarding the linguistic resources, rhetorical
traditions and community practices and procedures for interaction in their
local research sites” (p.71). The rationale for this chapter is stated as
having concern with the “view of cultural models as guiding our language and
interactions with others” (p. 72). Empirical data concerning standardized
lexicogrammar in scientific dissemination is presented (from English L1,
English L2 and Spanish L1 scholars) and thoroughly discussed from a variety of
interdisciplinary perspectives. The author notes how “the Spanish scholars
retain part of their culture-specific intellectual style when they write in
English as an additional language” while also being more sensitive to
“criticism and opt for less viable intersubjective stances” than their English
L1 counterparts (p.104).
Chapter 5, “Disciplinary practices and procedures within research sites,”
complements the previous chapter through a focus on “written discourse
produced by scholars from a North-American-based research site and from a
non-English-speaking research site” (p.105). This focus is foregrounded by the
author’s assertion that “scientific discourse is a socially situated activity”
(p.105). The chapter reports on interview-based protocols within a
“representative group” (p. 105) of Spanish academics and academics located
within a North-American context which aimed, among various other objectives,
to reveal attitudes toward contemporary research production in relation to the
role of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) in the dissemination of scientific
knowledge. The discussion of over 50-hours of interview data is extensive and
covers a broad range of related topics including deviations from Anglophone
norms in addition to the role of perceptions and attitudes in the role of
gate-keeping scientific knowledge.
Chapter 6, “Triangulating procedures, practices and texts in scientific
discourse,” is a particularly well-presented chapter focused upon the
rhetorical paradigm of science dissemination and the need for a more complex
understanding of how “academic tribes and research territories” construct,
present and disseminate “new knowledge” (p. 136). The author examines how
scientific knowledge production to date has been both uniform, in terms of
lexicogrammatical patterns and phraseological unit, and fragmented, in terms
of wider interdisciplinary collaboration and an increasing number of
co-authored research publications. The chapter examines a wide range of
related positions including, the exigencies of globalizing processes, the
interplay between science and culture with attention given to the role of
English and “language gate-keeping” (p.151), and situated learning within
specific scientific communities of practice.
Chapter 7, “ELF and a more complex sociolinguistic landscape,” is focused upon
the use of ELF and the processes of “linguistic and cultural blending” (p.164)
observable within contemporary scientific knowledge. The author suggests that
scientific English, as a functional variety, should be considered as a
language of communication rather than as a language of identification, thus
allowing “social groupings across academic and research sites [to] surpass
nationalisms and cultural identities” (p.165). The chapter explores such
possibilities through discussions of plurilingualism, diversification in ELF,
language planning, and the creation of alternative geolinguistic spaces. The
chapter concludes with a proposed tailor-made course for scientists with
limited proficiency in English or with little experience with scientific
discourse.
Chapter 8, “Re-defining the rhetoric of science,” outlines numerable global
challenges facing contemporary science and scientific discourse dissemination.
The author notes how English will retain its “geopolitical and geolinguistic
status…at least in the near future” due to the need for a common language for
mutual understanding underpinned by the visions and pressures of
internationalization within scientific communities of practice (p. 191). The
first half of the chapter addresses concepts such as meaning-making
configurations, text-internal and text-external features of scientific
discourse, notions of genre, genre mixing and genre metaphor. The second half
of the chapter looks forward and draws attention to new forms of world
scientific interrelatedness, which are mainly realized as calls for an
increase in linguistic and cultural sensitivity, and the challenges
surrounding increased opportunities for intercultural communication,
especially through scientific discourse and discussion within increasingly
diverse sites of interaction.
EVALUATION
After reading this book, and as testament to its influence, I am compelled to
ask myself the following question: according to which (and by whose)
pre-determined criteria for legitimate scientific knowledge review should I
structure my evaluation? Indeed, as a result of reading this book, the reader
is invited to give greater consideration to the mechanics and values
discreetly underpinning scientific discourse when produced within certain
communities of practice. Overall, this book has various strengths. It is
eloquently written and well supported by the research literature. Moreover,
each chapter is insightfully detailed and the contents will certainly appeal
to researchers and scientific practitioners from a broad list of professional
domains.
In contrast to these outstanding aspects, there are a small number of
potential areas for future improvements. An immediate question one might ask
from reading this book is whether science actually requires a global language?
Is there an argument to be heard that resists the pressures for convergence
toward a unified global community of scientists? What challenges do
researchers face by disseminating scientific knowledge in languages other than
English? How could these researchers still acquire the kind of international
status and prestige that comes from publishing and presenting in certain
places? With consideration to these questions, readers might also find it
worthwhile to read, “Does science need a global language?” (Montgomery, 2013).
A further aspect of the book which should have demanded greater attention and
scrutiny is the fundamental legitimacy of the “native speaker” / “non-native
speaker” bifurcation. Throughout the book, the author warmly accommodates this
division without critical reflection or rigorous interrogation despite the
warnings of Musha-Doerr (2009) who describes how “certain notions prevail
despite their theoretical shortcomings…‘native speaker’ is such a notion…it is
based on the idea that there is a bounded, homogeneous, and fixed language
with a homogeneous speech community, which is linked to a nation-state” (p.1).
Although the author outlines the need for “social groupings across academic
and research sites [to] surpass nationalisms and cultural identities” (p.
165), her failure to deconstruct the “native speaker” / “non-native speaker”
bifurcation actually works to bind the language competencies of individuals to
the nation. One could argue that the identification of individual scientists
as “non-native speakers of English” is ultimately an act of false
categorization. Finally, the background literature concerning ELF is largely
underdeveloped and a great deal of the critical literature in relation to ELF
has been omitted (see O’Regan, 2014 for an especially insightful critique).
Despite these shortcomings, reading this book was a thoroughly rewarding
experience and provided food-for-thought in relation to a number of issues
connected to the way in which scientific knowledge is constructed, valued and
disseminated with the contemporary global community.
REFERENCES
Montgomery, Scott, L. 2013. Does Science Need a Global Language?: English and
the Future of Research. Chicago. University of Chicago Press.
Musha-Doerr, Neriko. 2009. The native speaker concept. Berlin: Mouton De
Gruyter.
O’Regan, John, P. 2014. English as a Lingua Franca: An Immanent Critique.
Applied Linguistics, advanced access doi: 10.1093/applin/amt045.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Dr. Damian J. Rivers is an Associate Professor at Future University Hakodate,
Hokkaido, Japan. His research interests include oppression in educational
contexts, language policy rhetoric and the ‘native-speaker’ criterion. He is
editor of Resistance to the Known: Counter-Conduct in Language Education
(2014) and co-editor of Native-Speakerism in Japan: Intergroup Dynamics in
Foreign Language Education (2013) and Social Identities and Multiple Selves in
Foreign Language Education (2013).
Dec 12
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhbook review, journal
Journal Title: Functions of Language
Volume Number: 21
Issue Number: 3
Issue Date: 2014
Book reviews
Clare Painter, James R. Martin and Len Unsworth. Reading Visual Narratives.
Image Analysis of Children’s Picture Books
Reviewed by Eva Maagerø
333 – 341
Monika Bednarek & Helen Caple. News Discourse
Reviewed by Peipei Jia and Jingyuan Zhang
342 – 349
Bowcher, Wendy L. (ed.). Multimodal Texts from Around the World. Cultural and
Linguistic Insights
Reviewed by Anthony Baldry
374 – 379
Dec 09
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhbook review
AUTHOR: John H McWhorter
TITLE: The Language Hoax
SUBTITLE: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language
PUBLISHER: Oxford University Press
YEAR: 2014
REVIEWER: Peter Backhaus, Waseda University
SUMMARY
In the author’s own words, this book is a “manifesto” (ix) against the common
idea that language influences thought in any meaningful way. The main
arguments are briefly sketched in the introductory section, which describes
how this idea, best-known by the name of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or, as
the author prefers, Whorfianism, has seen a revival in recent years. This
renewed interest in possible ways that our language might shape the way we
think has been triggered by a number of widely reported experimental studies
of so-called Neo-Whorfian researchers as well as popular science books on the
topic, most notably Deutscher’s Through the Language Glass (2010), to which
the present book’s subtitle alludes. While McWhorter in his introduction
expresses a largely favorable stance towards both the research itself and the
secondary literature on it, he criticizes their somewhat self-enlarging effect
in public discussion, to the extent that grammar can easily be conceived of as
a pair of glasses that produces a certain “‘wordview’” (xviii). To show that
this is a mistake is the main aim of this book.
Chapter 1, “Studies have shown,” reviews some of the recent research within
the Neo-Whorfian paradigm, including the frequently quoted Russian color
experiment (Winawer et al. 2007) that showed different reaction times in
recognizing shades of blue depending on the participants’ first language; a
controversially discussed study on Piraha numbers (Gordon 2004), which, as may
be added here, also became a topic on LINGUIST List (e.g. Everett 2004); and
Levinson’s (1996) well-known turning-the-tables research on language and
space, among others. McWhorter one by one refutes the purported implications
of these studies, on accounts which can be summarized as follows: “I’m unaware
of a Neo-Whorfian study in which neither of these things are true: (1) it’s
hard to say what it has to do with what it is to be human, or (2) the whole
claim is like saying a tribe’s lack of a word for _calf_ is why they don’t
raise cattle” (21).
Chapter 2 is called “Having It Both Ways”, and explains just why having it
both ways is a problem. McWhorter argues against the assumption of a
complementary relationship, in which cultural patterns influence linguistic
structures, which — once in place — will have repercussions on how speakers
of that language think. At this point, McWhorter introduces his “bubbles
theory,” which holds that certain linguistic structures “pop up” at a certain
point in time not because of cultural necessity but rather by mere chance. He
exemplifies this with a discussion of the occurrence of evidential markers
across the world’s languages, as well as the lack thereof, which he considers
at least as important. McWhorter demonstrates that it is extremely difficult
to find any regularities that could be attributed to the cultural environments
in which evidential markers tend to be found. In this respect, as the author
emphasizes, languages essentially differ from cultural things such as works of
art or architecture, which are deeply imprinted by culture. Unlike these,
however, and “that’s just it — languages are not things” (55).
Chapter 3 is a brief “Interregnum On Culture,” inserted by the author to make
clear that he does consider culture an important factor in the study of
language. The best point to bring this home is the grammatical complexity of a
given language, for which a statistically robust inverse correlation has been
found with the size of a society using that language (e.g., Sinnemäki 2009).
The whole point here, however, is that culture shapes language, not vice
versa. McWhorter also takes this chapter as an opportunity to distance himself
from the generative paradigm, whose continued predominance in linguistics he
sees as one likely reason for the “spontaneous affection for Whorfianism among
so many linguists and fellow travelers” (71).
In Chapter 4, called “Dissing the Chinese,” McWhorter introduces a somewhat
uglier face of Whorfianism. The chapter centers on Bloom’s (1981) monograph on
Chinese vs. English and how, in a wider sense, the two languages and their
differing degrees of grammatical complexity can very easily be read as
differences in cognitive patterns. The one difference between Bloom’s study
and most other studies in the Whorfian paradigm, is that in the case of
Chinese and the “telegraphic nature” of its grammar, it is the ‘other’
language that seems to be somewhat deficient, thus turning the benevolent
nature of the Whorfian mission on its head. In the author’s words: “If
languages that are bubbling over with fine-grained distinctions about
materials and the definiteness or actuality of things are windows into the
minds of their speakers, then what are we to suppose Chinese’s grammar tells
us about the minds of _its_ speakers?” (77, emphasis original). As McWhorter
points out, this Mr. Hyde edition of Whorf has not commonly been pursued by
researchers, and when it was, as in the case of Bloom, it met with severe
criticism.
In Chapter 5, McWhorter intentionally puts on a Whorfian hat to explore
“What’s The Worldview From English.” He provides a detailed analysis of the
sentence “Dey try to cook it too fast, I’m-a be eatin’ some pink meat!” (106)
and the underlying thought patterns one might excavate here — if only one
wanted to. No matter how hard we try, however, and McWhorter tries fairly
hard, he concludes that there is nothing about this sentence, or any other
sentence for that matter, to be reasonably identified as indicative of a
worldview shared by the speakers of English around the globe. At the same
time, he wonders whether such a worldview wouldn’t have been attestable much
more easily if the same sentence “had been uttered by a farmer in the hills of
Vietnam” (132).
Chapter 6 is the concluding chapter, and it is called “Respect for Humanity.”
Starting with the summarizing verdict that “the visceral appeal of Whorfianism
is not scientific” (136), it recaptures the main points of the argument from
the previous chapters and formulates three major problems of Whorfianism: (1)
the question of how to deal with less favorable features in the grammar or
vocabulary of a language, (2) a frequent exotification of other cultures
and/or their languages, and (3) the way (neo-)Whorfian ideas feed into public
discourse. Particularly with regard to this last point, the book, which
clearly addresses a non-scientific audience too, concludes with an appeal to
marvel at the universals that all languages share, rather than their
differences.
EVALUATION
_The Language Hoax_ is a well-written and stimulating book that asks
uncomfortable questions and turns common arguments on their head. The author
uses examples from an impressive number of languages across the globe to
provide counter-examples to claims that may easily be made (and occasionally
have been made) about the influence of language on thought. The discussion of
evidential markers in Chapter 2 is but one example of this. In addition, and
largely thanks to Chapter 3, McWhorter manages the difficult task of properly
positioning himself within the vast territory between the two extremes of
linguistic determinism and biolinguistics. His demonstration of what may
happen when we get real about Whorf — the inconvenient conclusions that would
need to be drawn with respect to grammatically less complex languages such as
Chinese (Chapter 4) and the all too shiny pearls of wisdom one could easily
come up with when searching for the worldview of _the_ English speaker
(Chapter 5) — is at once entertaining and enlightening.
A point of criticism is the book’s tendency to take issue with the idea of
“Whorfianism” as a whole, when there are actually rather distinct camps to be
considered: Whorf and his immediate research legacy, the Neo-Whorfians with
their more sound and sober approach to the topic, popular science books such
as Deutscher’s (2010), which the author keeps referring to throughout his
argument, and a general public (rightly) perceived to be all too easily
excited over linguistic differences and their possible impacts on culture and
thought. Of course McWhorter is well aware of these camps and sure to
disentangle them on various occasions (most notably in the introduction (xix)
and the conclusion (167)). However, frequent catch-all references to
“Whorfianism”, “the Whorfian”, or “Whorfian thought” at times leave it unclear
what exactly is the respective target of his criticism.
A second issue is McWhorter’s take on the empirical findings of Neo-Whorfian
research, particularly differences in reaction time for solving certain
experimental tasks and how these are pinned down to differing first languages
of the participants. While acknowledging the empirical validity of the
differences themselves, the author disregards these “nano-peep[s]” (87) as
“weensy bias that has nothing to do with anything any psychologist,
anthropologist, or political scientist could show us about how the people in
question manage existence” (28). Given the significance of mental chronometry
in so many scientific fields, including psychology, I’m not sure if his
somewhat ridiculed “_one tenth of a second_” (9, emphasis original) should be
done away with that easily.
Finally, and perhaps related to the second point, I was a little confused by
the following statement towards the end of the book: “the media as well as
academia continue to promulgate the idea that the question as to whether each
language is a special pair of lenses is an open one” (135). To the best of my
knowledge, this question is indeed an open one and, though I’m almost
uncannily in line with the author’s views on the topic, for the time being
should remain that way. That’s how science works.
As can be seen from the above, McWhorter’s thought-provoking manifesto
provides much stuff to think about and keep the discussion on language,
culture and thought going. It is suitable for both undergraduate and graduate
classes (I just did it in one of mine, in combination with Deutscher’s book),
to provide answers to the – yes, open – question of whether the world looks
different in other languages, or just the same in any language.
REFERENCES
Bloom, Alfred H. 1981. The Linguistic Shaping of Thought: A Study in the
Impact of Language on Thinking in China and the West. Hillsdale: Lawrence
Erlbaum.
Deutscher, Guy. 2010. Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks
Different in Other Languages. London: Random House.
Everett, Daniel. 2004. Re: Mundurucu, Piraha Counting. LINGUIST List 15.3121.
https://linguistlist.org/issues/15/15-3121.html
Gordon, Peter. 2004. Numerical cognition without words: Evidence from
Amazonia. Science 306. 496-499.
Levinson, Steven C. 1996. Relativity in spatial conception and description. In
J.J. Gumperz & S.C. Levinson (eds.), Rethinking Linguistic Relativity (pp.
177-202). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sinnemäki, Kaius. 2009. Complexity in core argument marking and population
size. In G. Sampson, D. Gil & P. Trudgill (eds.), Language Complexity As an
Evolving Variable (pp. 126-140). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Winawer J., Witthoft N., Frank M.C., Wu L., Wade A.R., Boroditsky L. 2007.
Russian blues reveal effects of language on color discrimination. Proceedings
of the National Academy of Sciences 104(19). 7780-7785.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Peter Backhaus is Associate Professor at Waseda University, Tokyo. His main
research interests are in sociolinguistics, pragmatics, and written language.
Dec 09
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhbook review
AUTHOR: Kristin Börjesson
TITLE: The Semantics-Pragmatics Controversy
SERIES TITLE: Language, Context and Cognition 14
PUBLISHER: De Gruyter Mouton
YEAR: 2014
REVIEWER: Zhen-qiang Fan, Zhejiang Gongshang University
SUMMARY
“The Semantics-Pragmatics Controversy” is a timely and comprehensive addition
to the growing literature on the subject of the semantics-pragmatics
interface. It offers a critical comparison and evaluation of numerous
theoretical and empirical approaches concerning the distinction between
semantics and pragmatics. The book aims to answer three questions (p. 7):
1) What is it that makes the standard notions of ‘literal meaning’ and
‘non-literal meaning’ inadequate and thus in need of revision?
2) What exactly are the properties that characterize and differentiate
‘literal meaning’ and ‘non-literal meaning’ and how are these particular types
of meaning related to other types of meaning identified in the
semantics/pragmatics literature (e.g., conversational implicature, implicit
meaning aspects)?
3) By which criteria should semantics and pragmatics be characterized and
differentiated, if not by the dichotomies traditionally used and under the
assumption that the two systems are involved in the determination of (at
least) three distinct meaning levels in interpretation?
The book contains five chapters. The first chapter is an introduction in which
the author illustrates some key pairs of notions for distinguishing semantics
and pragmatics, such as literal meaning vs. non-literal meaning, conventional
meaning vs. non-conventional meaning, and context-independent meaning vs.
context-dependent meaning. This chapter also presents the aims and the
organization of the book.
Chapter 2 argues against the traditional distinction of semantics and
pragmatics which is based on the dichotomy between literal and non-literal
meaning. More specifically, the author demonstrates the inadequacies of
viewing literal meaning as context-independent and conventional, and
non-literal meaning as context-dependent and non-conventional. It is pointed
out that (i) it is utterances (sentences used in context) rather than
sentences per se that may be used literally or non-literally; and (ii)
conventionality is not an ‘all-or-nothing’ concept but gradual, so neither
context-dependency nor conventionality are sufficiently precise for
distinguishing literal and non-literal meaning. Then the author discusses the
implications of these assumptions for the nature of lexical meaning by
reviewing a number of approaches to meaning in the lexicon, arguing for the
‘underspecification’ of lexical meaning. To support the assumption, empirical
evidence is reviewed. In the final section of this chapter, the author,
drawing on the notion of ‘stereotype’, explains why the traditional
distinction was assumed in the first place.
Having pointed out the context-dependency of literal meaning, Chapter 3 first
examines two approaches (namely those proposed by Grice and Bierwisch) which
distinguish two context-sensitive levels of meaning: the first level is ‘what
is said’ (Grice) or ‘utterance meaning’ (Bierwisch); the second level is ‘what
is meant’ (Grice) or ‘communicative sense’ (Bierwisch). Chapter 3 focuses on
the first level, while Chapter 4 of the book concentrates on the second level.
The main part of Chapter 3 discusses alternative approaches to the
characterization of ‘what is said’ or ‘utterance meaning’, offering a detailed
analysis of the processes involved in the interpretation of utterances as well
as the contexts used. Especially, this chapter explicates the controversy of
whether the processes contributing to what is said (utterance meaning) are
linguistically mandated and whether they should be taken to be independent of
speaker intentions. Besides theoretical discussion of the various views
concerning the nature of semantics and pragmatics components and their
interactions in utterance interpretation, the final part of this chapter also
present some empirical studies.
The first part of Chapter 4 concentrates on a series of phenomena (i.e.
metaphor, irony, conversational implicature, indirect speech act)
traditionally viewed as belonging to ‘what is meant’/ ‘communicative sense’,
aiming to find out which of these phenomena actually need a fully
propositional utterance meaning as their basis and what kind of contextual
information is required in the process of their interpretation. The author
argues that metaphor, along with metonymy, is related to sub-sentential parts
and belongs to utterance meaning, independent of the speaker’s intentions. In
contrast, the interpretation of irony needs an utterance level meaning as
basis. It also argues that similar to irony and different from metaphor,
conversational implicatures are based on some full utterance meaning and are
speaker intended. Moreover, the author argues against treating indirect speech
acts as conversational implicatures because they do ‘not seem to necessarily
involve a prior determination of a potential but non-fitting direct speech
act’ (p. 243). The second part of this chapter presents some debates on the
issue of whether it is necessary, possible or useful to differentiate between
the two pragmatically determined levels of meaning, i.e. ‘what is said’ vs.
‘what is meant’. The author argues that ‘such a differentiation is useful and
necessary’ (p. 9), although he admits that it is difficult to find the
criteria to be used in the differentiation.
After discussing in Chapters 3 and 4 a range of meaning aspects which do not
fit into the traditional literal/non-literal dichotomy, the fifth chapter
turns back to the basic question that Chapter 2 ends with, i.e. how literal
meaning and non-literal meaning should be best characterized if we want to
capture the various uses the two terms are put to. In this chapter, the author
gives a critical assessment of the alternative characterizations of literal
meaning and non-literal meaning before he presents his own proposal. It is
indicated that previous characterizations (Recanati and Ariel’s) of
literal/non-literal meaning trying to capture the various problematic
phenomena covered in Chapters 3 and 4 are inadequate in that they assume that
lexical meanings have full-fledged readings, somehow ignoring the
context-dependency of literal meaning. The chapter also discusses the nature
of contextual information in utterance interpretation and evaluates the
usefulness of contextual-dependence in distinguishing semantics from
pragmatics. Specifically, it is argued that the dichotomy of
context-dependence and context-independence can only be used to differentiate
‘linguistic semantics’ from ‘pragmatics’. The process of semantic
interpretation actually only applies to meaning representations that have
already been pragmatically enriched since the output of the
context-independent linguistic semantics component is only sub-propositional.
So what really distinguishes pragmatics and real semantics is the nature of
the processes constituting them: monotonic reasoning with non-defeasible
output in the case of real semantics, while non-monotonic reasoning with
defeasible output in the case of pragmatics (p.306). Finally, the author
claims that although both ‘what is said’/ ‘utterance meaning’ and ‘what is
meant’/ ‘communicative sense’ are context-dependent levels of meaning, they
should be differentiated from each other in that the latter take into
consideration assumptions concerning the speaker’s intentions in making the
particular utterance.
Finally, the last chapter summarizes the main general conclusions drawn from
each of the chapters of the book.
EVALUATION
Researchers interested in the semantics-pragmatics interface will undoubtedly
find this book to be a useful resource. This monograph stands out among the
numerous books or collections on the semantics-pragmatics distinction in that
it offers a comprehensive comparison and critical assessment of a wide range
of major approaches to this topic.
In terms of theory, the book not only argues against the role of some
traditional notions such as the literal/non-literal in distinguishing
semantics from pragmatics, but also critically evaluates various crucial
topics in the fields of both semantics and pragmatics, e.g. ‘what is said’ vs.
‘what is meant’, minimalism vs. contextualism, unarticulated constituents, ad
hoc concept, and free enrichment. Most importantly, the author explains how
these notions fit into the whole picture of the semantics/pragmatics
controversy. Apart from reviewing existing approaches, the author also makes
his own theoretical contribution to the issue at hand. For example, in the
final part of Chapter 5 he presents his own characterization of the semantics
vs. pragmatics distinction, which does not refer to (non-)literal meaning or
context-(in)dependence.
Moreover, besides covering some traditional pragmatic phenomena (speech act,
conversational implicatures, generalized implicatures, etc.), the issues of
metaphor and metonymy are also addressed. As is known, metaphor and metonymy
are the common research concern of both pragmatics and cognitive linguistics.
It is argued elsewhere that relevance theory and cognitive linguistics are
complementary in explaining the mechanisms of metaphor and metonymy (Tendahl
and Gibbs 2008; Tendahl 2009; Ruiz de Mendoza Ibanez and Hernandez 2003). This
book goes beyond relevance theory and once again shows the cross-fertilization
between pragmatics and cognitive linguistics by giving a broader picture of
the semantic or pragmatic relevance of metaphor and metonymy.
Another strength of the book is that, in addition to theoretical speculations
and linguistic or discursive methods, the book also considers empirical data
in disciplines such as psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics. For instance,
in Chapter 2, a whole section is dedicated to empirical studies to prove that
lexical meaning should be characterized by underspecification and that
‘semantic processes of meaning construction should be differentiated from
pragmatically based plausibility checks’ (p. 8). And chapter 3 draws on some
experimental research in discussing ‘minimal proposition’ vs. ‘propositional
proposition’ (pp.147-154). In the future we would like to see more empirical
studies concerning his own proposals.
Overall, this book is a valuable resource and highly recommended to
researchers and novices in the areas of semantics, pragmatics, discourse
analysis, cognitive linguistics, and philosophy of language.
REFERENCES
Ruiz de Mendoza Ibanez, F. J. and Hernandez, L. P. (2003). Cognitive
Operations and Pragmatic Implication. In K. Panther and L. Thornburg (Eds.)
“Metonymy and Pragmatic Inferencing” (23-49). Amsterdam: John Benjamins
Publishing Company.
Tendahl, M. (2009). “A Hybrid Theory of Metaphor: Relevance Theory and
Cognitive Linguistics”. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Tendahl, M. & Gibbs, R. W. (2008). Complementary perspectives on metaphor:
Cognitive linguistics and relevance theory. “Journal of Pragmatics” 40(11),
1823-1864.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Fan Zhen-qiang is a lecturer in linguistics at Zhejiang Gongshang University
in Hangzhou, China. He obtained his doctoral degree in the Center for the
Study of Language and Cognition, Zhejiang University, China. In 2008, he was a
visiting PhD at the Utrecht Institute of Linguistics (Uil-Ots), Utrecht
University, the Netherlands. His research interests lie in the areas of
cognitive linguistics and pragmatics.
Nov 26
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhbook review
This volume is a collection of 14 interviews with Professor M.A.K. Halliday, the founder of Systemic Functional Linguistics (hereafter SFL). In these interviews, recorded over four decades, Halliday recounts and discusses his own experience as a student of language and linguistics in Britain and China and his career as a linguist, and explores key notions and concepts of SFL, the evolution of the theory around the world, its place in the field of general linguistics, as well as its many sites of application. The subtitle of the collection, as the editor explains, adapts a well-known saying of Firth’s, which characterises linguistics as language turned back on itself, and very fittingly describes the general spirit of this volume.
The interviews are presented chronologically, in the sequence in which they were originally conducted. Interview 1, conducted by Herman Parret in 1972, was originally published in 1974 inDiscussing Language – a collection of interviews with leading influential linguists of that time (Chafe, Chomsky, Greimas, Hartmann, Lakoff, Lamb, Martinet, McCawley, Saumjan). This interview explores in particular the theoretical context and the social semiotic orientation of Halliday’s linguistic theory, its European heritage and North American connections, as well as some key concepts in the theory.
Interview 2, conducted by Noboru Yamaguchi and Shun’ichi Segawa in 1977 at the University of Sydney, reveals some of Halliday’s views about Chomskyan linguistics and its place in the history of the study of language. It also clarifies some concepts in SFL and compares the theory with the various perspectives deriving from the Chomskyan paradigm. The strength and courage of Halliday’s convictions (at a time when SFL was still marginalized) are very much in evidence here. The interview also discusses Halliday’s work on child language development.
Interviews 3 and 4 both have a focus on the language in education themes. In Interview 3, published in The English Magazine in 1981, Halliday maintains that language is rooted in social meaning and that learning a language is learning the significant social meanings of a society. The positioning of his work in relation to educational concerns further illuminates the orientation of his theory. In Interview 4, conducted by Dr M. L. Tickoo in 1985 at the Regional Language Centre in Singapore, also focuses on the exploration of language in education, particularly his unifying notion of language across the curriculum – that of learning language, learning through language and learning about language.
Both Interviews 5 and 6 are in-depth interviews conducted by well-established fellow systemic functional linguists. Interview 5 (by Paul Thibault in 1985) was originally published as a chapter in the two-volume festschrift, Language Topics, prepared for Halliday upon his retirement from University of Sydney. This interview thematises the systemic, the functional and the social semiotic bases of Halliday’s work and explores the epistemological and theoretical criteria on which these are based. It clarifies the position of Halliday’s thinking in relation to other contemporary theoretical positions in linguistics and semiotics.
Interview 6, conducted by Ruqaiya Hasan, Gunther Kress and Jim Martin at the University of Sydney in 1986, is another in-depth interview. It opens with a section (Semogenesis) covering biographical details relevant to the development of Halliday’s career, the influence of his teachers such as Luo Changpei, Wang Li and Firth, and then picks up on and further develops several of the themes introduced in previous interviews (grammatical theory, language in education, language and context, etc.). Of particular interest is the discussion of Halliday’s interest in the development of a Marxist linguistics, and the need of the “backing-off movement”, and how these have impacted on his career path as a linguist.
Interview 7, conducted by Michael O’Toole at Murdoch University in Perth at the ‘3D: Discipline – Dialogue – Difference’ conference in 1989, also includes Gunther Kress, who was also a participant at this conference. Apart from issues under the general heading of language in education, this interview adds the theme of multimodality to the discussions, reflecting the emerging concern of the interviewers with the grammar of other semiotic systems. Halliday discusses the potential of exploring other semiotic codes, pointing out that as linguists, “we can then feed back into our understanding of the grammar precisely what we learn by applying these to other forms of semiotic” (p141).
Interview 8 was conducted by Caroline Coffin in 1998 in support of a masters-level course in Applied Linguistics. In this interview, Halliday explains how his theory came to be called systemic functional linguistics, and discussed the notion of context with reference to the work of Malinowski and Firth, and comments on the development of work on context in SFL.
Both Interviews 9 and 10 were conducted during the 25th International Systemic Functional Congress at Cardiff University in 1998. Interview 9 (conducted by Manuel Hernández) returns to and develops a number of themes introduced in Interviews 1, 5 and 6. Halliday’s discussion of the influence of his teachers in China and the UK (Wang Li and Firth in particular) and of colleagues (Bernstein, Hasan, etc.) is of particular interest. Interview 10, conducted by Geoff Thompson and Heloisa Collins, focuses on the development of the theory, SFL and other schools of linguistics, critical linguistics, linguistics and cognition, register, practical analysis issues and computer-aided analysis.
Interview 11 was conducted by Anne Burns in 2006. It explores Halliday’s position in the field of Applied Linguistics, language in education in particular. In this interview, Halliday articulates his view of SFL as an appliable linguistics, involving a dialectic of theory in practice, as well as his concern that this dialectic should evolve in an expanding range of applied contexts. Concerning studies on multimodality, Halliday emphasizes the importance of maintaining language itself “at the centre of attention, as being in some way the key” (p187).
Interview 12 was conducted by Hu Zhuanglin and Zhu Yongsheng in a plenary session at the 36th International Systemic Functional Congress at Tsinghua University in 2009. In this interview, Halliday discusses issues concerning the developments of SFL, the concept of appliable linguistics, SFL studies in China, grammatical metaphor, language generation and machine translation.
Interview 13, conducted by Bilal Ibne Rasheedin in Pakistan in 2010, explores a range of issues, including the relationship between Halliday’s politics and SFL (its consequences for his career path, both institutional and theoretical), the relationship between language and literature, Halliday’s views on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and his criticism of Chomsky’s Transformational Generative Grammar.
The final interview, conducted by Jim Martin and Paul Thibault at Halliday’s home in Sydney in 2011, serves as “a capstone chapter” for this volume. It explores, again from an ‘insider’ perspective, a range of contemporary theoretical and descriptive concerns in SFL. The interview also fills in bibliographical details missing from previous interviews.
Overall, this volume is an extremely valuable resource for those working in SFL, and complements Halliday’s Collected Works and other SFL publications. Although many of the interviews have been published elsewhere, some may not be so easily accessible. For me, what is most important is that it provides a delightfully rich reading experience – a useful surrogate for readers who have not had the privilege of discussing language and linguistics face-to-face with Halliday. For students and novice linguists of the field, it is learning by dialogue at its best. The dialogic mode enacted in the interviews allows Halliday to touch on details of his personal history and intellectual challenges that have not been addressed in other publications.
The interviews in this collection, from different angles, also help us understand more deeply the contexts and commitments that have long guided Halliday’s appliable linguistics and the humane qualities that make it so appealing as a theory of language and its relevance to the many areas of application. Moreover, as the editor rightly comments in the Introduction, these interviews reflect “Halliday’s enduring spirit of generosity as far as alternative points of view are concerned, a generosity not always afforded him by others with respect to either his political beliefs or his evolving model of language and social context” (xiv).
Nov 04
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhbook review
AUTHOR: James Paul Gee
TITLE: An Introduction to Discourse Analysis
SUBTITLE: Theory and Method, 4th Edition
PUBLISHER: Routledge (Taylor and Francis)
YEAR: 2014
REVIEWER: Michael Schwartz, St. Cloud State University
Review’s Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry
SUMMARY
James Gee’s fourth edition of “An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory
and Method” (2014) was much anticipated for those who are familiar with his
earlier editions. Intended as a textbook for upper undergraduate, graduate
students, and scholars across a wide variety of disciplines, including
linguistics, sociology, communication, education, and anthropology who are
interested in learning about discourse analysis and how it can inform and
enrich their disciplines, Gee attempts to condense, simplify, and make
accessible and applicable a large and often abstract body of work from
multiple fields of inquiry that claim discourse analysis. Furthermore, Gee,
as in the previous three editions, argues throughout for essentially a bottom
up approach to the analysis of language-in-use, “situated meaning” rather than
the traditional top-down conception of language, which embodies a belief that
humans are merely players in an a priori system of language as promulgated by
the proponents of Chomsky (1965). For this, Gee is to be commended. His
clear and simple examples of how the words “coffee” or “burrito” can mean
quite different things when situated in context demonstrate how much meaning,
by both producer and receiver of language, depends on the everyday situations
and experiences of humans. Furthermore, that Gee includes in the theory and
method of discourse analysis not just orthographic or spoken forms of language
but also multimodal forms, such as pictures, art, architecture, music, and
historical documents, is an important contribution to doing and understanding
discourse analysis and how it can empower humans with knowledge about
communication and interactions.
The book is largely a reprint of the third edition with only two entirely new
chapters, “What is Discourse Analysis” — Chapter 2 and “Conclusion- Proactive
Design”- Chapter 14. The book is divided into 4 sections, plus a Glossary and
Index: 1) Introduction and Defining Discourse Analysis, 2) Theory and
Definitions, 3) Application, and 4) Conclusion.
Section 1 includes the Introduction and Chapter 2: “What is Discourse
Analysis” in which Gee defines his interpretation of discourse analysis (DA)
and lays the groundwork for the rest of the book, providing the historical
context for and the various applications for DA across disciplines.
Chapters 3 through 8, mostly untouched from the 3rd edition, define and
describe the various tools and methods that researchers can and do draw on
when conducting research through a DA lens. Chapter 3: “Building Tasks”
presents Gee’s vision of the things that we use language for in order to
accomplish day-to-day activities. “We use language to build things in the
world, to engage in world building, and to keep the social world going” (p.
31). Chapter 4: “Tools of Inquiry and Discourses“ extends Gee’s 7 building
tasks by defining and describing the necessary linguistic tools needed to
dismantle the complex building tasks inherent in any text (spoken or written)
into manageable and analyzable parts, which can then be reassembled in a way
that provides a richer, more contextualized and more nuanced interpretation of
any given stretch of language.
Chapter 5: “Social Languages, Conversations, and Intertextuality” and Chapter
6: “Form-Function Correlations, Situated Meanings, and Figured Worlds”
continue with a sharpened focus on the tools of inquiry. I particularly find
his description of the different aspects of grammar “the traditional set of
units” and the “conventions” that are used to “create patterns” (p. 67) in
Chapter 5 to be useful, clear, and empowering, adding, as do his other tasks
and tools, to his argument that communication and meaning are co-constructed
via people and the social context in which any specific interaction occurs.
Likewise, in chapter 6, Gee’s explanation of “figured worlds” is particularly
insightful as this concept, to me, is a central goal of DA work: trying to
understand how a particular person or a group of people filter the words,
phrases, sentences, and/or images they encounter in any given text to construe
their unique meaning of that text or interaction. Seemingly, Gee agrees as he
devotes an entire chapter, Chapter 7, to the concept of Figured Worlds.
Figured worlds are historically grounded and layered according to a person’s
individual experiences as well as the experiences of the local and larger
communities in which the person participates. “A figured world is a picture of
a simplified world that captures what is taken to be typical or normal. What
is taken to be typical or normal, of course, varies by context and by people’s
social and cultural group” (p. 89).
Chapters 9: “Discourse Analysis” and 10: “Processing and Organizing Language”
begin pulling the previous seven chapters together with more robust, yet
scaffolded, analyses of DA at work. Gee does an excellent job of
demonstrating the analytical power of the tools of inquiry. Throughout these
chapters, Gee frequently reminds readers of these various tools as he takes
readers step-by-step through a text to demonstrate how the building blocks and
tools of inquiry work together to unpack a text within a larger Big “D”
Discourse. As is true for any empirical work, validity is a major concern
that researchers and scholars must address. It is perhaps of greater
importance to qualitative researchers because of the overall disposition of
those grounded in quantitative methods to assume DA simply means interpreting
another’s words, or “…that they are just the analyst’s opinion” (p. 141).
This is where Gee takes readers back to the tools of inquiry and suggests that
the more tools that a DA researcher uses to “triangulate” the analysis, the
greater the validity of the analysis. In other words, the tools of inquiry
can be employed for doing DA analysis work, as well as to verify the
interpretation. While Gee’s treatment of validity is good, it is also
somewhat disappointing. Given the importance of validity, it is a wonder why
there are only a total of two pages or 11 paragraphs devoted to this important
topic. The fact that the discussion comes at the end of chapter 10, before
the three Sample DA chapters, suggests that the need to address validity is
almost an afterthought, doing little to highlight its significance.
In chapters 11, 12, and 13, the Sample Discourse Analyses chapters, Gee
attempts to apply how his theory of DA, using his building tasks and tools of
inquiry, can be used to extrapolate an interpretation of a particular stretch
of text. These chapters are provided with good intentions, yet in the
previous two editions, I found these chapters to be too abstract to be of use.
This continues to be the case in the 4th edition.It might be better to pair
each sample with a particular set of tasks and tools at the ends of the
chapters 4, 5, and 6. At times, Gee does refer readers to the sample chapters
at the end of the book, but I think these references would be more effective
with specific page numbers and targeted questions to help the reader begin to
do discourse analysis with the tools of inquiry. However, I think there’s a
larger issue at play here: one that speaks to the overall dilemma DA
perpetually struggles with. Regardless of how much context and how many
“figured world” layers are added, more can always be provided and that “more”
always seems needed to finally provide the epiphany that is sought. Thus the
three sample chapters do help and Gee is to be commended for attempting the
difficult task of demonstrating the applicability of his tasks and tools in
such a limited space.
Chapter 14 is a welcome addition, and probably the best chapter in the book.
In summarizing the overarching argument of the book, Gee introduces his
alternative to the traditional view of how meaning is constructed through
words and images. Rather than mentally storing images, words and their
meanings in our brains for recall in interaction, meaning is co-constructed
and situated in what Gee calls “a proactive design theory.” Gee defines a
proactive design theory as “… any use of semiotic resources (whether words
or any other sorts of signs) is … always and everywhere situated. By this
[it] is meant that the meaning of any word or phrase (or other sort of sign)
is not a general or generic meaning or concept, but is actively ‘assembled on
the spot’ on the ground of practice” (p. 214). In other words, proactive
design recognizes the creative nature of any and all interactions; and words
and images, while sometimes used in predictable ways, may also be used in
novel, unique, and unexpected ways, stretching the boundaries of their
associated exemplars, or more common iterations.
The fourth edition also has a companion website (www.routledge.com/cw/gee),
which promises to be a welcome supplement to the text. At the time this
review was written, it contained four tabs: Questions, Glossary, Journal
Articles, and Feedback. Currently the Questions tab provides brief
descriptions of frequently asked questions, such as, “What is syntax, what is
discourse analysis, and what is the relationship of discourse analysis to
ethnography?” Linked to question 3, “what is ‘basic’ or ‘literal’ meaning”
is a useful PDF of exercises that take students step-by-step through the
process of analyzing text in context, giving students practice with the
concept of situated meaning in increasingly more complex texts, both written
and oral. Hopefully, additional PDFs and links will be provided to supplement
the remaining ten FAQs. The glossary tab is also quite useful and user
friendly. A list of the terms Gee uses in the text is provided, and simply
clicking on a term reveals a brief definition/description of the term. The
journal tab currently only lists three of Gee’s many journal articles, which
are dated at this point: 1999, 2003, and 2009.
EVALUATION
There are a few things about the text that deserve to be called into question,
some of which are the responsibility of the author, though others are more the
responsibility of the editor and publisher. At times I find Gee’s writing
style to be annoying. He attempts to set a conversational tone with the
reader, as if we were sitting around the fireplace in his personal study,
contemplating the situated meaning of humanity’s great questions. Yet, the
parenthetical, extended nominalizations, and intrasentential sidebars, though
well intended, are distracting at times. Chapter 14 is my favorite chapter in
this edition. In addition to introducing the concept of “proactive design
theory,” the chapter flows with lucidness and clarity. I attribute this to
Gee’s straightforward language and the reduction of his conversational style
sidebars.
I must also take issue with Gee’s conflation of discourse analysis and
conversation analysis. This is perhaps the biggest fault with Gee’s approach
to DA. Like Gee, I tend to think of DA, rooted in sociology and anthropology,
as the umbrella framework that supports and informs a host of sub-genres
including but not limited to narrative analysis, critical discourse analysis
(CDA), speech act theory, corpus linguistics, and conversational analysis
(CA). Gee states, “Discourse is the sequence of sentences. It is the ways in
which sentences connect and related to each other across time in speech or
writing. As we speak or write we choose what words and phrases we will put
into or ‘package into’ sentences” (p. 18). To me, this is the work of CA
researchers, who specifically and adamantly claim that they are interested in
understanding the internal architecture of conversation (Grice, 1975; Lerner,
2004; Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974; Schegloff, Koshik, Jacoby, &
Olsher, 2002; Seedhouse, 2004); whereas DA, which may rely on the work of CA,
is driven by understanding how “why that now” is understood and acted upon in
socially situated contexts. Gee gets away with conflating these two related
but very distinct methods of inquiry through his disclaimer in the
introduction, “No set of research tools and no theory belong to a single
person, no matter how much academic styles and our own egos sometimes tempt us
to write that way. I have freely begged, borrowed, and patched together. If
there is any quality to my work it is primarily in the ‘taste’ with which I
have raided others’ stores and in the way I have adapted and mixed together
the ingredients and, thereby, made the soup” (p. 11). Yet, I would like for
him to at least acknowledge CA as a legitimate and historically grounded
research method that is driven by specific questions quite distinct from those
that DA analysts ask.
The fourth edition, like the third, is often promoted with Gee’s companion
text, “How To Do Discourse Analysis: A Tool Kit.” It would be nice if the
links to the two texts were made more intentional, such as references to
particular chapters or sections from the “How To” text to the Introduction
text. Providing a Discussion and Problems section at the end of each chapter
in the Introduction to DA text and linking these directly to sections in the
How To do DA text would make the companion texts truly companions.
Finally, I have some notes to the editor. Throughout the book, there are
numerous and frequent typographical errors, missing, additional, or
incorrectly used words, making it not only annoying but also difficult at
times to maintain cohesiveness. More careful proofreading and copy editing
would be a much-appreciated improvement, particularly for a text that is
intended to be an introduction for beginning researchers. Careless editing
sends a message that attention to detail is unimportant, a direct
contradiction to the message that Gee himself iterates when doing any kind of
research, DA or not.
REFERENCES
Chomsky, N. (1965). “Aspects of the theory of syntax”. Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press.
Gee, J. P. (2014). “An introduction to discourse analysis: Theory and method
(4th ed.)”. New York, USA: Routledge, Taylor, and Francis Group.
Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. “Syntax and semantics”, 3, 41-58.
Lerner, G. H. (Ed.). (2004). “Conversation analysis: Studies from the first
generation”. Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing Company.
Sacks, H., Schegloff, A., & Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematics for
the organization of turn taking for conversation. “Language”, 50(4), 696-735.
Schegloff, E., Koshik, I., Jacoby, S., & Olsher, D. (2002). Conversation
analysis and applied linguistics. Annual review of applied linguistics, 22,
3-31.
Seedhouse, P. (2004). Conversational analysis methodology. In P. Seedhouse
(Ed.), The interactional architecture of the language classroom: A
conversational analysis perspective (pp. 1-54). Malden, MA: Blackwell
Publishing.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Michael Schwartz is currently an Assistant Professor in the MA-TESL program at
St. Cloud State University in St. Cloud Minnesota, USA and the Director of the
Intensive English Center. He teaches courses in Discourse Analysis and World
Englishes. His interests include second language acquisition, second language
writing, and international education. He earned his Ph. D. in Educational
Linguistics from the University of New Mexico.
Oct 27
ChRIS CLÉiRIGhbook review
EDITOR: Virve-Anneli Vihman
EDITOR: Kristiina Praakli
TITLE: Negotiating Linguistic Identity
SUBTITLE: Language and Belonging in Europe
SERIES TITLE: Nationalisms across the Globe
PUBLISHER: Peter Lang AG
YEAR: 2013
REVIEWER: Elizabeth Olushola Adeolu, University of Edinburgh
SUMMARY
‘Negotiating Linguistic Identity: Language and Belonging in Europe’ is a
collection of papers mostly presented at a conference on language and identity
held at the University of Tartu in Estonia in 2011 in collaboration with the
Coimbra Group, which is made up of established, European research-focused
universities. The importance of the Coimbra Group with respect to the issue of
negotiating linguistic identity is revealed in a discussion about their
seemingly contradictory aims of shaping and promoting national identity while
at the same time promulgating international networking and relevance.
The volume is divided into three sections namely ‘Multilingualism’,
‘Self-Representation and Belonging’, and ‘Language and Policy’. The first and
second sections consist of four articles each, while the last is made up of
three articles.
Preceding the sections is an introduction by Virve-Anneli Vihman and Juegen
Barkhoff titled ‘Introduction: The Shaping of Linguistic Identity in Europe’.
Here, Vihman and Barkhoff state the aims of the Coimbra Group and note the
salient role of member universities as advocates of these aims. They also give
a brief history of language and identity, as well as that of linguistic
diversity and multilingualism in Europe, highlighting such issues as the
dichotomy between language policies promoting multilingualism, which evoke
images of equal language representation, and the reality of hegemony of
majority languages.
The first section, ‘Multilingualism’, opens with an article by Johanna Laakso
titled ‘Who Needs Karelian, Kven or Austrian Hungarian – and Why?’ Here,
Laakso looks at the issue of multilingualism from the point of view of
researches carried out by the European language Diversity for All (ELDIA)
research project. She outlines the challenges faced by the project, including
negativity attached to such terms as minority languages, variability in
fluency and use of target varieties, international mobility, and issues of
language planning and teaching. She advises that the best way to research
multilingualism would be to combine the views of language as a resource, which
speaks to the instrumental function of language, and language as a burden,
which is mostly associated with heritage languages, or so called minority
varieties.
The second article, ‘Estonian-Russian Code-Copying in Russian-Language Blogs:
Language Change and a New Kind of Linguistic Awareness’ is written by Anna
Verschik. In this article, Verschik examined how Computer Mediated
Communication (CMC), such as emails, blogs, and text messages that take place
using two or more electronic devices, could benefit the field of contact
linguistics and multilingualism. She analysed the data from five Russian
Language blogs written by ethnic Russians living in Estonia within the
code-copying framework developed by Johanson (1993, 2002) and found that not
only were each of them consciously choosing to use Estonian expressions in
their blogs, a phenomenon that could be explained as contact-induced, but also
code-copying across the board followed the same pattern. As a result, she also
highlights the importance of focus on individuals in multilingualism studies.
The third article in this section, written by Martin Ehala and titled
‘Russian-Speakers in the Baltic Countries’, follows the history of the
relationship between language and identity of the ethnic Russian-speakers
living in the Baltic countries – Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania – from the
Soviet times till the present day. Ehala concludes by saying that the more
the use of the state language (the majority language used in the country of
residence), the more dynamic and flexible identity is.
The final article in the section is ‘Interaction among European Languages and
German Vocabulary’, written by Bettina Bock and Rosemarie Lühr. Using German
as a case study, the chapter focuses on loan processes in European languages
and what this means for the idea of a common European identity. Bock and Lühr
consider the use of Germanisms, loan words that have been borrowed from the
German language and used in a similar sense by at least three European
languages, and Europeanisms, which represent the converse (Bergmann 1995),
positing that this sharing of words can be exploited in forming a common
European identity.
‘Self-Representation and Belonging’, the second section in this volume, starts
with an article by John E. Joseph. The article, ‘Indexing and Interpreting
Language, Identities and Face’, centers on the complicated nature of indexing
identities and face – a role which language plays. By means of a sample
conversation analysis, Joseph underlines this difficulty of distinguishing in
linguistic analysis between face (the contact-based image an individual
projects) and identity (a more enduring sense of belonging that may encompass
what an individual or group projects and the interpretation this is given by
others). He posits that both identity and face are symbiotic concepts which
can also be seen as different outlooks on the same reality.
The second article, ‘Languages and Identities in Catalonia’ by Emili
Boix-Fuster, tackles the connection between language and identity in Catalonia
since the recovery of democracy in 1975. He maintains that the Catalan
language and identity still enjoy prestige and the language is used in major
domains in Catalonia, in spite of the changing linguistic landscape with the
major influx of immigrants whose first language is usually Spanish, the
growing bilingualism with Spanish, and the elitism of the political leaders.
Boix-Fuster cautions though that the use of Spanish should be managed so that
Catalan does not get assimilated.
The third article, ‘Gaelic and Sorbian as Multiple Boundary Markers:
Implications of Minority Language Activism in Scotland and Lusatia’ by
Konstanze McLeod, addresses the issue of the Gaelic language and
Gaelic-related identities in Scotland; and the Sorbian language and
Sorbian-related identities in Eastern Germany. Both languages (and
identities) erstwhile restricted to the heartland regions where they originate
and are predominantly spoken are now of more interest to and spoken, albeit
with varying degrees of proficiency, by ‘outsiders’. This spike in interest in
the Gaelic and Sorbian languages and identities is thought to have been
prompted by the respective parent countries’ explicit promotional schemes.
McLeod concludes that this diversity in speakers and people identifying with
the language and culture is overridden by the more pressing matter of activism
for these languages in the present age.
The last article in this section, ‘The Role of Language in Estonian Identity’
by Aune Valk, gives a theoretical review using data from mostly quantitative
studies to examine the relationship between language and identity among ethnic
Russians living in Estonia, Estonians living in Estonia, and Estonians living
abroad (the last group are further subdivided into Old DiEst, those who
escaped Estonia in and around 1944 following the German occupation and their
descendants; and New DiEst, those who have left Estonia since 1991). From the
review of the related studies, Valk finds that while proficiency in Estonian
was the major indicator of Estonian identity for the Estonians abroad,
probably because of the desire to hold on to their heritage language and
identity; unlike their counterparts in diaspora, Estonians living in Estonia
(and ethnic Russians living in Estonia who speak the language and identify
with the Estonian community) did not see language proficiency as a major
marker of Estonian identity, but cited the desire to integrate into the
Estonian community.
The third section, Language and Policy, opens with Patrick Sériot’s ‘Language
and Nation: Two Models’. In this article, Sériot delves into a historical
definition of the relationship between language and nation by two defining
approaches. The first approach, the German romantic approach, is defined as
‘naturalistic’ (p. 259) and holds the view that a nation is defined by the
language it speaks, and thus language is static and absolute. The second
approach, the French Jacobin, which Sériot describes as ‘contractualist’ (p.
259), favours the view that language does not define a nation, and language is
dynamic. Sériot sides with the latter approach with a discussion of the issues
that the approaches generate in dealing with the non-isomorphic concepts of
nation and language.
The second article by Tomasz Kamusella, titled ‘Scripts and Politics in Modern
Central Europe’, explores the issue of multiscripturalism in Central Europe.
Multiscripturalism itself refers to “the use of two or more scripts when
writing in a polity or territory” p. 273. Kamusella charts the history of
scripting in Europe to the present day when the majority of Europe is
monoscriptural and multiscripturalism is the preserve of Central Europe where
Latin, Cyrillic and Greek are used. He ends by stressing the importance of
multiscripturalism in providing access to more information and being a tool
that can be employed in politics in Europe, for better or worse.
The last article in this section is by John Walsh. The article, ‘Pushing an
Open Door? Aspects of Language Policy at an Irish University’, dwells on the
Irish language policy at the National University of Ireland (NUI), Galway,
within the framework of the Official Language Act (OLA). Walsh examines the
implementation of the NUI’s language policy which supports the OLA’s
obligations, one of which Walsh focused his research on. This obligation was
the bilingual presentation of signage and stationery in a particular manner.
He looked at the implementation of this obligation at the NUI and also
students’ attitudes to that and other aspects of NUI language policy. His
findings point to the importance of universities’ support of the OLA through
their language policy, especially as the results he found were favourable in
every regard.
EVALUATION
This volume is useful for anyone interested in historical linguistics,
multilingualism, language and identity, and language policy and planning. In
spite of the fact that the volume is Europe-focused, the issues it tackles are
generalisable.
The volume is also valuable in the sense of incorporating diverse approaches
to the examination of the issues discussed. Not only were there empirical and
theoretical approaches, but it was also refreshing to see multilingualism and
identity discussed from the non-traditional point of view of Computer Mediated
Communication, as in Verschik’s ‘Estonian-Russian Code-Copying in Russian
Language Blogs: Language Change and a New Kind of Linguistic Awareness’.
As a whole, the articles were cohesive, as they all touched on the central
theme of negotiating linguistic identity in Europe. But, the sections
‘Multilingualism’ and ‘Self-Representation and Belonging’ had less coherence
than the section on ‘Language and Policy’. The majority of articles in the
former sections could easily fit either section; this defeats the purpose of
the division into sections in the first place. Indeed, it seemed that the
first two sections were named after the major issue in the first articles of
each of the sections.
Another issue that was disappointing but understandable (given publishing
deadlines and the undesirability of rushing research analysis) was the issue
of incomplete research results presented in two of the articles – Laakso’s
‘Who Needs Karelian, Kven or Austrian Hungarian – and Why?’ (p. 52); and
Ehala’s ‘Russian-Speakers in the Baltic Countries’ (p. 94). It would have
been interesting and probably more meaningful to have the full results in the
volume, but such an omission is not unusual.
Potential for future research was indicated by some of the articles in the
volume. One of such articles is Verschik’s ‘Estonian-Russian Code-Copying in
Russian Language Blogs: Language Change and a New Kind of Linguistic
Awareness’ which indicates the need for more research into CMC. Likewise,
Kamusella’s theoretical take on the issue of multiscripturalism and its effect
on politics in ‘Scripts and Politics in Modern Central Europe’ seems to be a
good foundation for further empirical studies.
Overall, the volume is a good reference book that makes for an interesting
and multi-dimensional study on familiar linguistic topics.
REFERENCES
Bergman, Rolf. 1995. ‘Europsmus’ and ‘Internationalismus’. Zur Lexikologischen
Terminologie [‘Europeanism’ and ‘internationalism’. On Lexicological
Terminology]. Sprachwissenschaft 20. 239-277.
Johanson, Lars. 1993. Code-Copying in Immigrant Turkish. In Guus Extra and
Ludo Verhoeven (eds). Immigrant Languages in Europe. 197 — 221.
Clevedon/Philadelphia/Adelaide: Multilingual Matters.
Johanson, Lars. 2002. Structural Factors in Turkic Language Contacts. London:
Curzon.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Elizabeth Olushola Adeolu is a Ph.D. candidate of Linguistics and English
Language at the University of Edinburgh, U.K. Her research interests include
such sociolinguistic and socio-phonetic areas as Dialect features, World
Englishes, Identity, Language Endangerment, language Attitudes and
Perceptions, Pidgins and Creoles. Her current research work is on attitudes
and perceptions of exonormative varieties by ESL speakers.
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