SBORNK PRAC FILOZOFICK FAKULTY BRNNSK UNIVERZITY

STUDIA MINORA FACULTATIS PHILOSOPHICAE UNIVERSITATIS

BRUNENSIS K 7 (1985) - BRNO STUDIES IN ENGLISH 16

Geoffrey N. Leech, Principles of Pragmatics, Longman, London and New York 1983,
xiv + 250 pp.
Geoffrey N. Leech is a scholar of great linguistic erudition, well-known to Czechoslovak
Anglicists and not only to Anglicists as a co-author A Grammar of Contemporary
English (R. Quirk et al., London and New York 1972) and the author of a very readable
Semantics (Penguin Books 1974), as well as from his personal visits to Czechoslovakia. He
has a special gift for following the modern trends in linguistics without losing sight of the
firm ground of its previous achievements. In addition to this, he is one of those who are
able to combine the need for scholarly precision with a popular way of writing. All these
qualities find their reflection in the thirtieth title of the Longman Linguistic Library,
Principles of Pragmatics.

The book consists often chapters, which are preceded by a Preface and A note on symbols,
and followed by References and Index (of names and linguistic terms).
Chapters 13 {Introduction, A set of postulates, Formalism and functionalism) constitute

the theoretical framework of the book. Leech's treatment of the formal and the functional
approach to language exemplifies his line of thinking and his personal approach to linguistic
facts (p. 46): '(a) Formalists (eg Chomsky) tend to regard language primarily as a mental
phenomenon. Functionalists (eg Halliday) tend to regard it primarily as a societal phenomenon, (b) Formalists tend to explain linguistic universals as deriving from a common
generic linguistic inheritance of the human species. Functionalists tend to explain them
as deriving from the universality of the uses to which language is put in human societies,
(c) Formalists are inclined to explain children's acquisition of language in terms of a built-in
human capacity to learn language. Functionalists are inclined to explain it in terms of the
development of the child's communicative needs and abilities in society, (d) Above all,
formalists study language as an autonomous system, whereas functionalists study it in relation
to its social function. On the face of it, the two approaches are completely opposed to one
another. In fact, however, each of them has a considerable amount of truth on its side.'
In the theoretical part of the book, Leech tries to show that grammar (i. e. phonology,
syntax, and semantics) is predominantly formal, while pragmatics is predominantly functional. This idea is further developed in detailed commentaries on the following postulates
(p. 5):
PI: The semantic representation (or logical form) of a sentence is distinct from its pragmatic interpretation.
P2: Semantics is rule-governed ( = grammatical); general pragmatics is principle-controlled
( = rhetorical).
P3: The rules of grammar are fundamentally conventional; the principles of general
pragmatics are fundamentally non-conventional, ie motivated in terms of conversational
goals.

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P4: General pragmatics relates the sense (or grammatical meaning) of an utterance to its
pragmatic (or illocutionary) force. This relationship may be relatively direct or indirect.
P5: Grammatical correspondences are defined by mappings; pragmatic correspondences
are denned by problems and their solutions.
P6: Grammatical explanations are primarily formal; pragmatic explanations are primarily
functional.
P7: Grammar is ideational; pragmatics is interpersonal and textual.
P8: In general, grammar is describable in terms of discrete and determinate categories;
pragmatics is describable in terms of continuous and indeterminate values.
According to Leech, formalism and functionalism are complementary approaches. Any
linguistic account that is faithful to the facts and is at the same time
as simple and
generalizable as possible must take both the approaches into consideration. This is not to
say, however, that the particular branches of linguistics may not find one approach more
appropriate than the other. Dealing as it does with language phenomena in the very act of
(interpersonal) communication, pragmatics is most suitably studied from the functionalist
point of view.
In Chapters 4 6 {The interpersonal role of the Cooperative Principle, The Tact Maxim,
A survey of the Interpersonal Rhetoric), Leech presents his rhetorical model of pragmatics,
making a distinction between the interpersonal and the textual rhetoric. Each of the two
rhetorics consists of a set of pragmatic
principles, which may be further specified by maxims
and sub-maxims. In this parf of the book, Leech skilfully shows how the Cooperative
Principle and the Politeness Principle actually perform their functions in everyday communication and what is still more important how these two principles interact. The
Cooperative Principle (of Grice) is mainly concerned with the 'informative' aspect of
communication between the speaker and the hearer (addressee), specifically with the extent
of information (Maxim of Quantity), its truth (Maxim of Quality), its relevance (Maxim of
Relation), and its clarity (Maxim of Manner). This pragmatic principle in itself cannot
explain '(i) why people are often so indirect in conveying what they mean; and (ii) what is
the relation between sense and force when non-declarative types of sentence are being
considered' (p. 80). The explanation can be found in the interplay of the Cooperative
Principle with other principles. Of these, the Politeness Principle appears to be the most
important from the viewpoint of everyday communication, and it is one of the main
achievements of the book that Leech elaborates the Politeness Principle in such a way that
it can be applied to and used in linguistics. Each of the six maxims of this principle
has two sub-maxims, of which the former tend to be more important than the latter (p. 132):
(I) TACT MAXIM
(a) Minimize cost to other
(b) Maximize benefit to other
(II) GENEROSITY MAXIM
(a) Minimize benefit to self
(b) Maximize cost to self
(III) APPROBATION MAXIM
(a) Minimize dispraise of other
(b) Maximize praise of other
(IV) MODESTY MAXIM
(a) Minimize praise of self
(b) Maximize dispraise of self
(V) AGREEMENT MAXIM
(a) Minimize disagreement between self and other
(b) Maximize agreement between self and other
(VI) SYMPATHY MAXIM
(a) Minimize antipathy between self and other
(b) Maximize sympathy between self and other
The operation and the interplay of pragmatic principles, their maxims and sub-maxims
may vary according to speech situations, language communities and cultural areas. At the
same time, different languages may vary in exploiting different formal means in order to
comply with the same pragmatic principles and their maxims. Hence general pragmatics
is closely related to both grammar (pragmalinguistics) and sociology (socio-pragmatics).
The common denominator of Chapters 79 {Communicative Grammar: an example;
Performatives; Speech-act verbs in English) is the application of Leech's theoretical views
to several sets of grammatical phenomena. The example of communicative grammar
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relates different negative and interrogative forms to their various pragmatic utilizations.
In Chapters 8 and 9, Leech argues that 'a rhetorical view of pragmatics requires us to take
a different view of performatives and of illocutionary acts from that which is familiar in the
"classical" speech-act formulations of Austin and Searle. The view is put forward that
Searle's taxonomy of illocutionary acts should be reinterpreted as a semantic taxonomy of
speech-act verbs.' (P. xi.) The only thing to add is that Leech more than succeeds in his
argument.
Chapter 10 (Retrospect and prospect) recapitulates the preceding discussion and draws
attention to some of the important issues that are frequently dealt with in pragmatics but
could not have been included in the book.
'If there is one idea of importance in this investigation, it is the notion that illocutionary
force can be translated into the problem-solving paradigm of means-ends analysis, and that
pragmatic interpretation can also be formulated as problem-solving within a different
paradigm that of hypothesis formation and testing. Within this same general framework
for studying communicative linguistic behaviour, "indirect speech acts" have appeared
as problem-solving strategies of the same kind as "direct speech acts", except that the
means-ends analysis is more complex and oblique.' (P. 229.) This is what Leech himself
says in his concluding remarks. Any reader of the book, however, will undoubtedly find not
only one but quite a number of ideas of paramount importance, not to speak of hundreds of
excellent examples and incisive linguistic descriptions. Leech's Principles of Pragmatics
shows convincingly what many linguists all over the world have felt when reading philosophically and logically oriented treatises and essays on language pragmatics: the ideas are
basically sound and inspiring, but they lack a true-to-facts linguistic background. The
hypotheses seem to work in general, but they gradually stop working when applied to the
complex phenomena of everyday language use. There has been a great need for a genuine
linguistic approach which would accommodate the thought-provoking non-linguistic stimuli
to the specific requirements of linguistics. And this is exactly what Leech's book has
done.
Ale Svoboda

Leiv Egil Breivik, Existential 'There', Studia Anglistica Norvegica 2, Bergen, 1983,
XIV + 458pp.
L. E. Breivik's book is a large-scale synchronic and diachronic study of English existential
clauses containing the non-locative morpheme there. It is based on the excerption of 4,031
pages of Old Middle and early Modern English texts and both spoken and written presentday English texts containing a total of 755, 000 words. Since all the previous treatments of
existential there, adhering strictly to a single linguistic theory, had failed to explain its use
satisfactorily, the present author adopted an eclectic method of investigation.
The book is devided into seven chapters. Chapter 1 offers a critical survey of earlier
studies of existential clauses (sentences). Chapter 2 refers to the semantic, syntactic and
phonological differences between existential there, denoted as there i, and locative there,
denoted as therei. Chapters 3 and 4 deal with the conditions of the use and non-use of there \
in present-day and earlier English. In chapter 5, therei is compared to functionally similar
devices used by other languages. Chapter 6 presents a tentative hypothesis about the origin
of therei. The conclusions arrived at in chapters 16 are summed up in chapter 7. These
are the most important points.
In present-day English, therei and therei have sharply distinc, syntactic and semantic
functions and different phonological realizations. Therei functions as a dummy
subject
and does not apear to have a referential meaning; it tends to be realized as /&(r)/ o r /^ e ( r )/
and never has a nuclear pitch movement. Therei functions as a locative adverb and usually
carries the meaning 'at the particular place'; its realization is /ee(r)/ and it is capable of
bearing a nucleus. The use and non-use of therei in present-day English is conditioned by its
pragmatic function. It serves as a presentative signal of a subject conveying new information
and appearing in post-verbal position; it co-occurs with intransitive verbs of 'appearance
on the scene' (most frequently with lexical be), which allow the subject to become the
communicative core. Therei and therei are already differentiated in Old English. Therei
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clauses, however, are far less frequent than today and, unlike at present, also co-occur with
transitive verbs in the active voice. The decay of this type of clause and the increase in the
use of therei with verbs of 'appearance on the scene' is due to the typological shift of the
Old-English verb-second language to verb-medial Modern English. Therei insertion in
pre-yerbal position represents a solution of the conflict between the topicalization principle
(topic comment sequence) and the fixed word order principle (SV sequence). Languages
do not universally possess media comparable to the English therei. Dummy subjects are
present in languages that either have or have had the verb-second constraint.
The subject-matter of L. E. Breivik's study is carefully organized. The author offers
clear definitions, a convincing number of examples, and thorough consideration of the
results achieved in the field of the existential clause (sentence) theory by other scholars.
He brings into relief a number of problems presented by the existential constructions that
have not been solved so far. He examins the constructions from the viewpoint of their
communicative function and observes them against the background of the whole system of
the language. He tries to find the relationship between the synchronic and the diachronic
and succeeds in presenting the language as a dynamic structure. L. E. Breivik's book is an
exceedingly important contribution to English grammar as well as to general linguistics.
Jana Chamonikolasovd

Delia Summers (ed.-in-chief), Longman Active Study Dictionary of English. Longman Group Limited, London 1983, 710 pp.
The Longman family of English dictionaries for foreign learners has been increased by
a new member: Longman Active Study Dictionary of English, prepared by an editorial
team headed by Delia Summers.
The LASDE is a monolingual dictionary suitable for use by intermediate students of
English. Like the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE), it employs
the Longman denning vocabulary of 2.000 common words and records both British and
American pronunciation. Its special features are exercises intended to increase the learner's
vocabulary, and study notes taking up such major language points as conjunctions, countability and uncountability, phrasal verbs and prepositions. A few full-page illustrations with
word labels attached to objects and persons depicted present the vocabulary linked with
recurring common scenes (e. g., at the airport, in the classroom, in the living room and in
the supermarket). Exercises accompany also the introductory explanations of how to use
the dictionary. Usage notes concern points of grammar and help to avoid common mistakes
in English.
Even a more advanced learner will find the new dictionary useful, especially when looking
for further illustrations of the use of a word. He may therefore be disappointed if the
examples given by the LASDE happen to be the same as those in the LDOCE (cf., e. g.,
'The minister approved the building plans': 'Come off it, tell the truth': 'The little boy cried
out with pain when he burnt his fingers'; 'The trapped woman cried out for help'), but
appreciate if they differ (cf., e. g., 'He enticed her away from her husband', 'Their beautiful
garden is the envy of all the neighbours' and 'You can't equate his poems and/with his
plays', adduced by LDOCE, and 'He enticed me away from my work', 'The boy's new toy
was the envy of his friends' and 'You can't equate passing examinations with being educated', adduced by LASDE).
The LASDE will undoubtedly establish its place among the learning dictionaries, for it
is a welcome book of reference that a learner can use with considerable profit before turning
to a more comprehensive dictionary of the LDCOE type.
Jan Firbas

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Delia Summers (ed.-in-chief), Longman New Pocket English Dictionary. Longman

Group Limited, London 1984, 320 pp.
Another new member a pocket English dictionary meant as a first monolingual
learning dictionary has recently increased the family of the Longman dictionaries. It
offers definitions for about 10.000 words and phrases and presents them in clear and simple
English, employing a limited vocabulary of 1600 common words. Numerous examples and
even illustrations assist the learner in grasping the meanings defined.
The dictionary is an attractive booklet and very handy because of its truly pocket size.
It may become a vade-mecum even for more advanced students, who could make use of it
for simple definition practice, i. e. in learning how to define in a simple way the meanings
of the most frequent English words, and for the exemplification of their employment.
Students will appreciate that the examples adduced by the dictionary are different from
those offered by the other Longman dictionaries.
The learner will use the dictionary preparatory to availing himself or herself of the
Longman Active Study Dictionary and eventually of the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary
English and other English dictionaries. In this way the new pocket dictionary fills a gap
within the range of available monolingual English dictionaries. It will be welcomed even
by those for whom it is not primarily intended.
Jan Firbas

Tibor Frank (ed.), The Origins and Originality of American Culture, Akadmiai
Kiad, Budapest, 1984, 801 pp.
In April 1980 one of the more important international conferences on American studies
held in Europe in recent years took place in Budapest. Over seventy literary scholars,
linguists and social historians from Eastern and Western Europe, the Soviet Union and the
United States presented papers on a wide variety of topics gathered loosely around the
theme of the meeting, "The Origins and Originality of American Culture". Now these
papers have been published and so made available to the general scholarly public.
The collection includes all the papers presented at the conference, arranged in fourteen
sections. In fact the use of the term "American Culture" is somewhat misleading. The bias
is heavily towards literature: twelve sections deal with literary topics (or view social and
cultural phenomena through literature).
The linguistic papers in the volume fall under two headings "Impacts and Influences"
and "Theories and Theorists". The most interesting paper in the first group is Sndor
Rot's discussion of lexical semantic fields (based on Trier's theory rid of its agnostic implications) in American neologisms from 1945 to 1975. Two other papers in the same group
can also be considered as linguistically relevant and interesting Veronika Kniezsa's
treatment of expressions for 'playing truant' and Lszl Pordany's analysis of borrowings
from American in British English, including the influence of German on American English
(one example, 'iron out', however, is recorded in the OED). The remaining three contributions in "Impacts and Influences" are not linguistic papers as such. Peter Medgyes argues
which of the two variants should be taught at schools and, with various qualifications,
favours Standard British English. John Odmark's discussion of relations between language
and culture operates with imprecise and subjective notions, such as the vitality and originality of the American language, and Julio-Csar Santoyo's survey of Spanish loan-words
is an emotional defence of Spanish-speaking settlers in the present USA based on arguments long since familiar from other authors.
In the second linguistic group, "Theories and Theorists", the most revealing, in the
reviewer's opinion, are Messmer's and Kenesei's papers. Andrs Messmer shows how
advanced Whitney's approach to language was and Istvn Kenesei's discussion of relative
clauses is well founded and well balanced. In another paper, Jzsef Andor traces Chomsky's
views back to early, especially European thinking. The remaining two papers by Lszl
Varga and Katalin E. Kiss deal with questions related to the theory of functional sentence
perspective. The relation between stress, syntax, and semantics, discussed by Varga, is
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after all one of the basic issues in the theory of FSP and the sensitivity to FSP has been
demonstrated by Firbas even for English, where the dominant word-order principle is the
grammatical principle. Kiss's category of topic-focus languages might indicate that there
are languages where FSP does not operate. (As for the pioneering work of Samuel Brassai,
there exists a still earlier book, written by Henri Weil and published in 1844.)
Since any detailed commentary on the more than sixty papers focused on literature would
be impossible here, I shall instead make some general observations on these papers as
a whole, referring in the course of the discussion to some that seem to me to be of particular
interest.
Two points should be made to begin with. The first is that, in terms of quality, the collection is very uneven. This is not so much a criticism as a comment on the democratic openness of the conference contributors ranged from recognized expersts in their fields to
graduate students at the first stages of their scholarly careers. Hence great differences in
quality and worth were inevitable though it should be emphasized that it is not always
the work of the young scholars that suffers in the comparison. None of them is responsible
for anything resembling Eric Mortram's tendentious and slightly hysterical account of
"Fears of Invasion in American Culture"; or Keith Keating's extraordinary grab bag of
famous names in "Elizabethan Influences on American Language, Painting, and Music";
or Todor T. Kirov's confused attempt to link the English Renaissance and the "American
style" (variously located in Whitman, Melville, Twain, London, Crane and Hemingway)
in "The Origin of the Originality of American Literature". When read alongside pieces of
this type, modest efforts of restricted scope take on a new value.
The second point worth noting is that the ostensible concern of the conference for "origins and originality" is only examined explicitly in a very few papers, and even here the
concept is sometimes asserted more confidently in the title than argued in the text. This is
perhaps understandable. The question of "origins" gets increasingly difficult to define
as American culture takes on a distinctive shape and borrows less from outside itself,
while "originality" is extremely hard to pin down much harder than its opposite (how
many millions of scholar-hours per year are devoted to sniffing out sources?). But in fact
some of the best papers in the collection can be found in this small group. Warren Staebler,
in "The Originality of Vision in the American Romantics", stresses the social awareness of
the American Romantic writers their intense consciousness of the principles on which
the nation had been founded and the ideals it was intended to fulfil, as well as their habit
of "nay-saying", their stance of high-minded social dissent, something marking them off
clearly from other Romantics. Darlene Unrue sees both Henry James and William Faulkner
as being driven by a need to explore the confrontations and contradictions between the past
and the present, the American and (ultimately) European past and the American present
in the case of James, the aristocratic Southern past and the defeated Southern present in
the case of Faulkner, with each struggling against a superstitious overvaluation of the past.
In an examination of Whitman's poetry, Clive Bush comes closest to unravelling the knotty
"origins and originality" problem when he defines the latter as a local and personal response
to a set of historical possibilities, in which the free process of choosing from these possibilities creates something new and distinctive. Discussing Whitman, he stresses his fascination with the English seventeenth century, his closeness to a certain tradition of "passionate, unstudied (religious) oratory", his love of Italian opera and the theatre, his
instinctive attraction to oriental mysticism, his respect for the exactness of science, and
his feeling for the language of the American street; his originality lay in finding ways of
using these to open up poetry to the surrounding world and so to subvert the melancholy
of the Romantic ego. Zoltn Szilassy has a useful decriptive summary of the European
origins of happenings and new performance theories in American theatre. And finally,
Peter Dvidhzi contributes a crisp study of the development of Ren Wellek's thought
and his critical theory and a perceptive evaluation of his contribution to American
criticism.
As I have said, most of the papers are not devoted specifically to origins and originality,
though in some of them these concerns are of peripheral importance and in others they are
introduced in a rather forced way. The great bulk of the papers deal straightforwardly
either with individual authors (usually their production as a whole rather than individual
works, and ranging from the seventeenth century to the present) or with subjects taking
in the whole history of American literature or culture (or, less commonly, some specific
period). Several of the papers devoted to individual authors or books are rather perfunctory,
and on a few occasions, where two or three authors are discussed in a paper, the links

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between them seem very tenuous. Daniel Hoffman, however, offers a revealing analysis of
"Poe's Obsessive Themes", pointing out Poe's obsession with the theme of some kind of
forbidden knowledge whose attainment brings with it destruction, and examining the
haunting fear of personal extinction pervading his tales. The relaxed ease of Istvn Geher's
"Reflections on Malcolm Cowley" corresponds perfectly with the humanistic and empirical
approach favoured by Cowley in his own criticism. Myron Simon's reassessment of the
modern myth of Thoreau as a democratic freedom-fighter in "Thoreau's Politics" (the
longest piece in the book) argues persuasively that Thoreau's perfectionism and extreme
individualism make it impossible for him to be tied down to any one particular stream of
political thought and render him unsuitable as a guide to political conduct. Wilson J. Moses
looks at the vision of America found in The Melting Pot, by Israel Zangwill (who actually
invented the familiar phrase) and compares it with that in the novels of Sutton Griggs,
shedding light on the "melting pot" theory of American cultural development and pointing
out the crucial distinction here between race and ethnicity.
Although a few of the papers dealing with broader subjects betray strong elements of
waffle, most manage to avoid the grand theorizing that is the endemic temptation in work
of this kind. David Skilton chooses a very specific goal: in "Some Victorian Readings of
American Fiction" he discusses very briefly what the Victorians saw as a new element in
American fiction its idealism, as opposed to what they felt to be the realism of Victorian
fiction and the difficulty they had in finding terms to describe the qualities in American
fiction that they desired so much, but rarely found, in their own fiction. Paul Levine also
limits his subject rigorously in "Recent Women's Fiction and the Theme of Personality";
seeing American literature as being about the marginal individual's search for self-realization, he contrasts the way that, in recent women's fiction, the question of leaving the
family (a male-dominated tyranny) becomes an end in itself, whereas in traditional male
fiction this is only a beginning: men escape not only from the family but also from the social
world (both often seen as feminine). Josef Jaab, too, concentrates on a specific issue with
wider implications in his "Black Aesthetic: A Cultural or Political Concept?", a balanced
and clear-eyed examination of the claims of the Black Aesthetic ideologues that pinpoints
both the strength and weaknesses of their arguments and suggests that current black literature has been both stimulated and hindered by the policies of Black Aesthetic.
Limitations of space having forced me to restrict my comments to only a dozen specific
papers, I should stress that these are not, of course, the only interesting contributions.
Far from it. Some, such as R. Anthony Arthur's "The Search for 'the Real' in American
Fiction", offer a useful survey of some particular topic (in this case fiction in the 60's and
70's); others give a good close analysis of a particular work (for example Richard P. Sugg's
paper on Crane's The Bridge); others again will perhaps reveal something new to the nonspecialized scholar (Astrid Schmitt-v. Miihlenfels's examination of the seventeenth and
eighteenth century New England elegy). And certainly no one will fail to be impressed by
the vitality of American studies shown by the collection as a whole.
Don SparlingJosef Hladk

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