Pragmatics
YAN HUANG
(Oxford Textbooks in Linguistics)
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, xxx + 346 pp.
Reviewed by KEITH ALLAN, Monash University

‘The aim of this book is to provide an authoritative, up-to-date, and yet accessible
introduction to contemporary linguistic pragmatics’ (xi). Despite the criticisms made below, it
mostly succeeds, though I question how accessible the book would be to my second year
undergraduates. Evaluating it as the set text for them, I decided to relegate it for use as a
reference text; however it would be suitable for honours or postgraduate students.

The book consists of an introduction to basic notions in pragmatics (1–19) followed by two
Parts ‘Central topics in pragmatics’ (21–177) and ‘Pragmatics and its interfaces’ (179–277).
There is a list of symbols and abbreviations, a glossary, references, suggested solutions to the
exercises to be found at the end of every chapter (preceded by a list of key concepts), and
three indexes. Part I contains chapters on implicature (23–63), presupposition (64–92), speech
acts (93–131), and deixis (132–177). Part II discusses relevance theory (181–208), the
pragmatics-semantics interface (216–44), and anaphora (245–77). The coverage of the book is
certainly comprehensive; it also displays authoritativeness; but the style of presentation is not
so user friendly as that of Levinson 1983 (Pragmatics), Clark 1996 (Using Language), nor
Jaszczolt 2002 (Semantics and Pragmatics).

In the introduction, H (Huang) uncontroversially defines pragmatics as ‘the systematic
study of meaning by virtue of, or dependent on, the use of language’ (2). He identifies the link
to ordinary language philosophy but also to generative semantics, among whose adherents he
unexpectedly includes Jerry Katz, who would have repudiated the label. H gives due credit to
Horn, Gazdar and, a little surprisingly, Fillmore for developing pragmatics in the 1970s and to
Levinson 1983 as marking the coming to age of linguistic pragmatics. Rightly, H contrasts the
‘Anglo-American school’ of pragmatics to which H himself adheres, to the ‘Continental
school’ for whom pragmatics constitutes a functional perspective on all aspects of linguistic
behaviour (4f).

On p.5 H writes: ‘the linguistically encoded meaning of a sentence radically
underdetermines the proposition the speaker expresses’. It is not merely the proposition that is
underspecified but also the speaker’s message or illocutionary point. H defines a proposition
(283) as the content of a statement bearing a truth condition; this is far narrower than its usual
definition as the content of a clause that may or may not occur in a truth-bearing token.
Surprisingly, H assigns truth conditions to sentences rather than utterances (14ff), which for a
linguist is simply wrong, as the discussion of deixis (Chapter 5) surely reveals. Furthermore,
H confuses utterance meaning with speaker-meaning (11): the two are clearly distinguished in
Allan 2001 (which H refers to elsewhere, but does not appear to have read, although it
touches on some of the same points he does and often takes the same point of view). Given
the importance of context within pragmatics, H’s discussion of it is disappointingly cursory.
He largely ignores context when discussing the meanings of his examples and in Chapters 7
and 8 this vitiates some of his discussion.

Chapter 2 on implicature is one of the best in the book. H quotes (27n) the excellent
definition of conversational implicature in Horn 2004: 3: ‘a component of speaker meaning
that constitutes an aspect of what is meant in a speaker’s utterance without being part of what
is said.’ The Gricean notions of generalized and particularized conversational implicature and
importance of defeasibility are all demonstrated. Horn’s Q and R principles are described
along with the Horn-scale before H turns to the Levinson’s Q, I, and M-principles. These are
Keith Allan, Review of Pragmatics – p.1/4

---

respectively glossed by Levinson, but not by H, as “What isn’t said, isn’t.”, “What is
expressed simply is stereotypically exemplified”, “What’s said in an abnormal way isn’t
normal” (Levinson 2000: 35, 37, 38). Nowhere does H comment on how the Gricean maxims
of relation and quality are accommodated by Horn and Levinson by simple assumption.
Though Horn-scales are frequently referred to, H offers no discovery procedure for them, and
the use of a scale such as <boil, grill, stir-fry, …> (44) incorrectly suggests that all contraries
form scales. Certainly the choice of one item usually denies the applicability of any of its
contraries, e.g. The door is green entails The door isn’t red, but this is not a conversational
implicature deriving from a Horn-scale as a naïve student is led to believe.

H says that ‘the notion of conventional implicature does not seem to be a very coherent
one’ (57). This is perhaps because Grice wrote almost nothing about it and others have
(mis)interpreted him in different ways. There is good reason to claim that the conventional
implicature arising from a connective like therefore is simply its conventional meaning or
‘sense’ (cf. Lyons 1995: 276; Allan 2001: 189) and there is nothing in H’s book to counter
such a view.

Chapter 3 is on presuppositions, but the distinction between semantic and pragmatic
presupposition is not clearly drawn and the implausibility (if not downright absurdity) of
semantic presupposition is not made explicit. Otherwise, however, this is a competent chapter
that covers all the usual bases. On p.82 in example (3.54) (wrongly referred to as ‘(3.50)’ in a
rare misprint) H claims that John has discovered that Angola is in Asia does NOT presuppose
Angola is in Asia. Because presupposition is pragmatic, it is the speaker who wrongly
presupposes (or pretends to presuppose) that Angola is in Asia. The discussion of the matter
shows that (a) presupposition is a speaker based precondition on the utterance and (b) the
speaker is misled, ignorant, or intending to mislead.

Chapter 4 on speech acts is very traditional in distinguishing performatives from
constatives while denying (94), contrary to fact, that explicit performatives have truth values,
see Cohen 1964; Lewis 1970; Bach 1975; Allan 1986. H does not give any clear indication of
how illocutions arise from locutions: on this topic there is the work of Austin 1962; Vendler
1972; Ballmer and Brennenstuhl 1981 and from a very different point of view Allan 2006. H
recognizes the place of politeness (or rather face) in choosing among manners of speaking,
correctly stating that ‘while politeness itself is a universal phenomenon, politeness strategies
and individual speech acts may to some extent vary from one language/culture to another’
(119). H then launches into discussion of the cultural specificity of speech acts.

Chapter 5 on deixis offers a cross-linguistic descriptive analysis with very little theoretical
exposition but realized through an informative list of publications on deixis. As a resource for
research on deixis, the Chapter is valuable; as an introduction for undergraduate students it’s a
dog’s breakfast.

Chapter 6 is a neat summary of relevance theory from an unsympathetic critic, yet to me it
seems fair, perhaps because it was vetted by Deirdre Wilson and Robyn Carston (xiii). The
basic tenet of the theory is that ‘The degree of relevance of an input to an individual is a
balance struck between cognitive effects (i.e. reward) and processing effort (i.e. cost)’ (183).
Relevance theory postulates explicature ‘to account for the crucial role played by pragmatic
inference in explicit content’ (189). Explicature fleshes out the underspecified logical form of
the sentence uttered by disambiguating according to common ground, by filling out empty
slots in semantic frames and scripts – again according to common ground. These are referred
to by H as ‘reference resolution’, ‘saturation’ and ‘free enrichment’ – though I don’t see the
need (as distinct from the possibility) to recognize three types, I suspect many more could be
identified given existing work by Prince, Schank, Levinson, among others. Relevance theory
also identifies implicated premises, contextual assumptions intended by the speaker, e.g. X:
Keith Allan, Review of Pragmatics – p.2/4

---

Look at that cute chihuahua! Y: I hate little dogs +> chihuahuas are little dogs; and
implicated conclusions, Some of my students arevery smart +> not all of them are. There
seems to be nothing in relevance theory that is not adequately dealt with in neo-Gricean
theories such as Levinson 2000. H’s exposition does not demonstrate that relevance theory is
a viable alternative to neo-Gricean theories of pragmatics. H makes a direct comparison of the
two (201–5). Whereas (neo-)Gricean theory recognizes norms of social-interactive behaviour
directed toward communicative efficiency, relevance theory prefers a determinative inviolable
cognitive principle of relevance that cannot be falsified. The neo-Gricean view leads to
generalized default pragmatic inference on the hearer’s part being presumed by the speaker
(this leads to the default semantics of Jaszczolt 2005).

Chapter 7 ‘Pragmatics and semantics’ expends a lot of ink on the division of labour
between semantics and pragmatics without clarifying why such a division is more
consequential than the conflicting ideologies of Swift’s Big-enders and Little-enders. The
controversy, such as it is, is more terminological than substantive. Any boundary between
semantics and pragmatics is a matter of stipulation (242, citing Recanati). The fact is that
neither semantics nor pragmatics is autonomous, the two are inextricable when considering
language systems (as opposed to unrepresentative fragments of language data). H provides
useful surveys of pure Grice, relevance theory, Recanati on pragmatic enrichment, and Kent
Bach’s notion of ‘impliciture’; but H nicely comments that there is no experimental evidence
to prefer any of these to neo-Gricean implicature (227n). Neo-Griceans like Levinson allow
conversational implicatures to intrude on the assignment of truth conditions (239). Thus ‘one
should treat semantics and pragmatics as two overlapping and interrelated fields of study’
(240) – the position taken in Allan 1986; 2001.

Chapter 8 ‘Pragmatics and syntax’ concerns itself only with nominal anaphora. This is
partly because anaphora is intrinsically interesting; partly because Chomsky nominates it as
evidence for the innate language faculty; partly because anaphora is subject to syntactic,
semantic, and pragmatic constraints; and partly, though H does not admit to this, that Huang
2000 is a definitive study of anaphora. The failure of Chomsky’s binding theory is nicely
described, as in H’s earlier book. A pragmatically motivated pattern of anaphora is postulated:
‘Reduced, semantically general anaphoric expressions tend to favour locally coreferential
interpretations; full, semantically specific anaphoric expressions tend to favour locally nonco-
referential interpretations’ (259). The notion of markedness is brought in to account for
reflexives (262); presumably this would be conditioned by Levinson’s M-principle.

In conclusion I judge H’s Pragmatics to be competent and comprehensive, but marred by
the few flaws identified earlier in this review. It is up-to-date and teacher friendly, but not so
student friendly. It is indigestible compared with Huang 2000 or with many of its competitors.

To end, three minor quibbles about presentation. I found that footnotes extending over the
page were often difficult to distinguish from the main text; this is something that OUP should
rectify. Morph(eme)-by-morph(eme) translations are unconventional: e.g. Pashto ‘xwr-əm’ is
translated ‘eat-1-M-SG’ which would more conventionally be rendered “eat-1.M.SG” – this is
something the author should fix. On p. 241 there is an uncaptioned table that is very hard to
read because the black type is on an almost black background (I suspect the greyscale shading
may once have been in colour); readers would need to check H’s table against its source,
Table 3.1 on p.195 of Levinson 2000.
References
Allan, Keith. 1986. Linguistic Meaning. 2 vols. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. (Reprint
edn, Beijing: World Publishing Corporation. 1991.).
Allan, Keith. 2001. Natural Language Semantics. Oxford & Malden MA: Blackwell.
Keith Allan, Review of Pragmatics – p.3/4

---

Allan, Keith. 2006. Mood, clause-type and illocutionary force. In Encyclopedia of Languages
and Linguistics. 2nd edn, ed. by E. Keith Brown. 14 vols. Oxford: Elsevier. Pp. 8: 267-71.
Austin, John L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Bach, Kent. 1975. Performatives are statements too. Philosophical Studies 28: 229–36.
Reprinted, slightly amended, in Kent Bach and Robert M. Harnish Linguistic
Communication and Speech Acts. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 1979, pp. 203–08.
Ballmer, Thomas T. and Waltraud Brennenstuhl. 1981. Speech Act Classification: A Study in
the Lexical Analysis of English Speech Activity Verbs. Berlin: Springer-Verlag.
Clark, Herbert H. 1996. Using Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cohen, L. Jonathan. 1964. Do illocutionary forces exist? Philosophical Quarterly XIV (55):
118-37. Reprinted in Readings in the Philosophy of Language ed. by Jay Rosenberg and
Charles Travis. Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall Inc. 1971: 580-99.
Horn, Laurence R. 2004. Implicature. In The Handbook of Pragmatics, ed. by Laurence R
Horn and Gregory Ward. Oxford: Blackwell. Pp. 3-28.
Huang, Yan. 2000. Anaphora: a Cross-linguistic Study. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Jaszczolt, Katarzyna M. 2002. Semantics and Pragmatics: Meaning in Language and
Discourse. Harlow: Longman.
Jaszczolt, Katarzyna M. 2005. Default Semantics: Foundations of a Compositional Theory of
Acts of Communication. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Levinson, Stephen C. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Levinson, Stephen C. 2000. Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized
Conversational Implicature. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.
Lewis, David. 1970. General semantics. Synthese 22: 18–67. Reprinted in Semantics of
Natural Language ed. by Donald Davidson and Gilbert Harman. Dordrecht: Reidel. 1972:
169–218.
Lyons, John. 1995. Linguistic Semantics an Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Vendler, Zeno. 1972. Res Cogitans. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.


Keith Allan, Review of Pragmatics – p.4/4

---

Document Outline

---