Visual Communication

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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.

The Semiotics of Che Guevara: Affective Gateways

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Title: The Semiotics of Che Guevara
Subtitle: Affective Gateways
Series Title: Bloomsbury Advances in Semiotics

Publication Year: 2014
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing (formerly The Continuum International Publishing Group)
http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/

Book URL: bloomsbury.com/uk/the-semiotics-of-che-guevara-9781472505231/

Author: Maria-Carolina Cambre

Electronic: ISBN:  9781472505293 Pages: 256 Price: U.K. £ 74.99
Electronic: ISBN:  9781472512222 Pages: 256 Price: U.K. £ 74.99
Hardback: ISBN:  9781472505231 Pages: 240 Price: U.K. £ 75.00

Abstract:

Alberto Korda’s famous photograph of Che Guevara titled the “Guerrillero Heroico” has been reproduced, modified and remixed countless times since it was taken on March 5, 1960, in Havana, Cuba.

This book looks again at this well-known mass-produced image to explore how an image can take on cultural force in diverse parts of the globe and legitimate varying positions and mass action in unexpected global political contexts.

Analytically, the book develops a comparative analysis of how images become attached to a range of meanings that are absolutely inseparable from their contexts of use. Addressing the need for a fluid and responsive approach to the study of visual meaning-making, this book relies on multiple methodologies such as semiotics, research-creation, multimodal discourse analysis, ethnography and phenomenology and shows how each method has something to offer toward the understanding of the social and cultural work of images in our globally oriented cultures.

Scientific Discourse and the Rhetoric of Globalization: The Impact of Culture and Language

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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).

Functions of Language 21/3 (2014)

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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

The Language Hoax

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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.

The Semantics-Pragmatics Controversy

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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.

The Integration of Prosody and Gesture in Early Intentional Communication

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Institution: Universitat Pompeu Fabra
Program: Cognitive Science and Language
Dissertation Status: Completed
Degree Date: 2014

Author: Núria Esteve-Gibert

Dissertation Title: The Integration of Prosody and Gesture in Early Intentional
Communication

Dissertation URL:  http://prosodia.upf.edu/home/arxiu/tesis/doctorat/tesi_esteve_gibert.pdf

Linguistic Field(s): Language Acquisition
Phonology

Dissertation Director(s):
Pilar Prieto

Dissertation Abstract:

This dissertation comprises four experimental studies which investigate the
way infants integrate prosody and gesture for intentional communicative
purposes. The first study is a longitudinal analysis of how a group of infants
produce gesture and speech combinations in natural interactions, with results
that show that already at 12 and 15 months of age infants temporally align
prosodic and gesture prominences. The second study uses a habituation/test
procedure to test the infants’ early sensitivity to temporal gesture-prosodic
integration, showing that 9-month-old infants are sensitive to the alignment
between prosodic and gesture prominences. The third study analyzes the
longitudinal productions of four infants at the pre-lexical stage and provides
evidence that infants use prosodic cues such as pitch range and duration to
convey specific intentions like requests, statements, responses, and
expressions of satisfaction or discontent. Finally, the fourth study examines
how infants responded at 12 months of age to different types of
pointing-speech combinations and shows that infants use prosodic and gestural
cues to comprehend communicative intentions behind an attention-directing act.
Altogether, this dissertation shows that the temporal integration of gesture
and speech occurs at the early stages of language and cognitive development,
and that pragmatic uses of prosody and gesture develop before infants master
the use of lexical cues. I further claim that infants’ integration of prosody
and gesture at the temporal and pragmatic levels is a reflex of an early
emergence of language pragmatics.

The Language Instinct?

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https://www.princeton.edu/~adele/MTLngNotInstinct.pdf

http://aeon.co/magazine/culture/there-is-no-language-instinct/

Text Linguistics: The How and Why of Meaning

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Text Linguistics

The How and Why of Meaning

MAK Halliday and Jonathan J Webster

HB 9781904768470   £65

PB 9781904768487   £25

436pp

Sysfling members may order the book at a special discount of 25% off the retail price from the book page of the website. Please quote the code LINGUISTICS14when prompted (valid to the end of December 2014):

http://www.equinoxpub.com/home/text-linguistics-meaning-m-k-hallliday-jonathan-j-webster/

Description:

Whether prose or poetry, how does a text come to mean what it does? A functional-semantic approach to text analysis, such as is illustrated in this book, offers a revealing look at the resources of language at work in the creation of meaning, and a unique perspective on the text as object of study.

This collaborative work between M.A.K. Halliday, the founder of Systemic Functional Linguistics, and Jonathan Webster, the editor of Halliday’s eleven volume collected works, draws on a considerable body of Halliday’s previously unpublished work, including lectures on fundamental concepts in Systemic-Functional Theory, to present a foundational overview suitable to those who are new to the theory and methodology of Systemic Functional Grammar and Rhetorical Structure Theory. Building on this foundation, section two presents the findings from several case studies in text analysis, demonstrating how to conduct detailed functional-semantic analysis of the speeches of Billy Graham, Barack Obama, Richard Nixon, Steve Jobs and Susan Rice. This second section will benefit both beginners and those who have already had some background in the study of linguistics.

Contents:

Acknowledgement

Preface

Part One: a Functional Approach

1.         Functions and Components of Language

2.         Experiential systems

3.         Material and mental processes

4.         Verbal and relational processes

5.         Participants and circumstances

6.         Things and “meta-things”

7.         Modality in English: modals and “pseudo-modals”

Part Two: Text and Texture

8.         Textual meaning

9.         Rhetorical structure of texts

Part Three: Case Studies in Text Linguistics

10.       Stepping into meaning: a case study of Billy Graham’s address at the National Prayer and Memorial Service at the Episcopal National Cathedral on 14 September 2001

11.       Visualizing the architeXture of a text: analyzing Obama’s first inaugural address and Nixon’s second inaugural address

12.       Arriving at a theory of the text: a case study of the commencement addresses delivered by Steve Jobs and Susan Rice

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