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Book review

Understanding Pragmatic Markers: A Variational Pragmatic ApproachKarin Aijmer, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh, 2013, 162 pp., ISBN: 978-0-748-63550-4,Price: £22.99 (paperback)

www.elsevier.com/locate/pragmaJournal of Pragmatics 74 (2014) 30--32

Is there a need for, yet, another volume on pragmatic markers? This is, perhaps, what some linguists may havewondered upon the publication of this volume. In my opinion, the answer is: yes. Furthermore, I believe that here is anurgent need to understand the behaviour of pragmatic markers (henceforth PM’s) vis-à-vis the recent developments oflinguistics. The present volume Understanding Pragmatic Markers: A Variational Pragmatic Approach, authored by KarinAijmer, tries to update the classical studies on these particles with a comprehensive approach to communication based onthe theory of variational pragmatics. To attain this aim, Aijmer follows the well-established methodology of corpuslinguistics, to which the author contributed since its early stages (Aijmer and Altenberg, 1991).

The author departs with a quote by Sapir (p.1) underlining that the objective of her research is to describe how the samelinguistic form can have different receptive values depending on the types of relationships between speakers at differentlevels: family, group, society and nation. The application of this theoretical premise to the analysis of PM’s highlights theproto-typicality of these elements at various linguistic levels: grammatical, prosodic, functional (Romero-Trillo, 2012).However, the author’s intent in the volume is to demonstrate that their variational sociolinguistic role has not been properlystudied in depth, and that this is an essential factor in order to obtain a full picture of the nature and function of theseelements (Aijmer, 2002).

After a detailed and well-structured description of the history and the trends in the study of PM’s, the author shows herintention to analyze the social, cultural and regional factors in the study of PM’s according to the principles of variationalpragmatics expressed by Barron and Schneider (2009). To attain this aim, Aijmer introduces a very personal and inspiringdescription of PM’s as windows that shed light on language use through linguistic reflexivity and contextualization. Theauthor’s intention, therefore, is to present introspection in liaison with corpus linguistics in the analysis of the markers.

At this point of the volume, the reader assumes that the theoretical tenets are clearly context-oriented and understandsthat the author’s objective is to re-interpret the mainstream theories of PM’s in the light of context with a description ofintegrative theories, relevance theory, andmeaning potentials. To explain the relationship between context and the use ofthe markers, the author emphasizes the role of these elements via the metapragmatic awareness of the speakers in aspecific communicative and contextual situation with the aid of prosody, hesitation and pausing. According to Aijmer,these three elements are key indicators, as they have the capacity to project and uptake the conditions to change thecontext. This process is specifically achieved through contextualization cues that help the listener to understand the newdiscourse stage via transition signals. Here I must say that the role of context in Aijmer’s description of PM’s is understoodlato sensu without affiliating to any specific cognitive or situational theories of context as is done, for instance, with theanalysis of PM’s within the theory of adaptive management (Romero-Trillo, in press).

From page 20 onwards the volume concentrates on the specific description of the following PM’s from a variationalperspective: ‘well’, ‘in fact’ and ‘actually’, and ‘general extenders’. The structure of chapters 2--4 follows a consistentpattern that helps the reader to understand the development of the theory and the results portrayed. The three chaptersstart with a summary of the previous studies on each marker with thorough bibliographic references and insightfulcomments on their evolution, and with a reference to the various traditions supporting their description. The author thenpresents the corpora in which themarkers will be studied, mostly based on the International Corpus of English (henceforthICE). Specifically, the author uses the spoken British English section (ICE-GB) for ‘well’ and the spoken and writtensections of that corpus for ‘in fact’ and ‘actually’. The chapter on general extenders also uses the ICE-GB corpuscompared with other sections of the ICE, i.e. the Australian, New Zealander, Canadian, and Singapore components. Thesection on general extenders also uses the Santa Barbara Corpus for comparison.

The chapters proceed with the description of the markers according to their own structural and functional idiosyncrasy.For instance, the description of ‘well’ concentrates on the role of this element in interaction as a constructor of social

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rapport, with specific sections on coherence (word-search, repair, turn-taking), involvement (agreement, disagreementand feedback), politeness, private and public dialogue, and spontaneous commentaries. What is also interesting in thecase of ‘well’ is the different analyses of face-to-face and telephone private conversations. Another interesting contributionin this respect is the quantification of the use of full and weak vowels in the pronunciation of themarker ‘well’ depending onthe context.

The chapter on the PM’s ‘in fact’ and ‘actually’ compares the behaviour of both markers in speech and writing in a verydetailed way, with also an initial section on previous studies of the two elements. The section on ‘in fact’ concentrates onthe adversative, elaborative, hedging and softening functions, to then specify the appearance of this element in speechand writing. In the case of speech, Aijmer differentiates the results in public dialogue (legal cross-examinations andbroadcast discussions), and in monologues (demonstrations and unscripted speeches). As a corollary, the description of‘in fact’ introduces a taxonomy that shows its creative specificity in conversation, i.e., emphasizing reality, explicit andimplicit opposition, hedging and politeness, novelty and surprise, speaker’s position and elaboration. To finish theanalysis of this marker, Aijmer proceeds with the description in different very specific contexts: classroom lessons,business transactions andmonologues. The section endswith the use of ‘in fact’ in writing, followed by a summary with thecomparison of the two markers.

Chapter 4 describes the use of general extenders, ‘and all this stuff ’, ‘and things’, etc., in the various English corporamentioned above. The core introduction summarizes the essence of these elements, followed by a table with the structureof general extenders on p. 130, based on examples with ‘stuff ’, ‘things’, ‘all’ and others with ‘and’. The author’s descriptionof these elements has a formal orientation (p. 129--130), in contrast with other approaches that offer a more discursiveinterpretation and include a wider range of elements under this umbrella (Buysse, 2014). Nevertheless, the table providedby the author serves as the baseline for the subsequent corpus analysis and offers a clear stance on the understanding ofthese elements by the author. Specifically, the pragmatic functions identified in the analysis of general extenders are thefollowing: shared knowledge and positive politeness, intensification, hedging and negative politeness, with the last sectionon general extenders and fluency.

In my opinion, one of the main assets of Aijmer’s volume is that it offers a systematic presentation of examples in allsections, followed by tables with the results of each marker and by comparative tables that illustrate the function of aspecific marker in several variational contexts. In this respect, what I would suggest for a second edition of the book is thepresentation of the statistical tests used to validate the results in a more detailed way. The author describes the p level ofthe results for the differences between corpora or PM’s in passim, and in some cases even in the appendix. For example,the reference to the test used for comparison of the distribution of ‘in fact’ and ‘actually’ appears in a footnote on page 75,which then refers to page 125. In other cases, like in the description of ‘well’, the author’s argumentation is mainly basedupon the results in percentages.

By way of conclusion, the readers ofUnderstanding Pragmatic Markers: AVariational Pragmatic Approachwill not finda full treatise on these markers but a synthetic research-focused opus that follows the classical format of introduction,theoretical background, data analysis and conclusion, prefaced by an excellent table of contents. In this sense, somescholars may feel that the book lacks enough discussion on the nature of these elements but, in my opinion, this brevitycan be considered an advantage. In fact, the author delineates the main theoretical trends in the study of the markers andconcentrates on a well-designed analytical and descriptive piece of research, supplemented with a full-fledgedbibliographical apparatus. In sum, I think that this book is an indispensable tool for researchers interested in socio-pragmatics, conversation and discourse analysis, and language teaching. Also, this is an essential volume for thecommunity of scholars who have been working on PM’s from various theoretical perspectives in recent times, as they willdefinitely find inspiration for future work on these omnipresent, though ‘fragile’ (Mair, 2009: 10), elements of language.

References

Aijmer, Karin, 2002. English Discourse Particles: Evidence from a Corpus. John Benjamins, Amsterdam and Philadelphia.Aijmer, Karin, Altenberg, Bengt (Eds.), 1991. English Corpus Linguistics. Longman, London.Barron, Anne, Schneider, Klaus P., 2009. Variational pragmatics: studying the impact of social factors on language use in interaction. Intercult.

Pragmat. 6, 425--442.Buysse, Lieven, 2014. ‘We went to the restroom or something’. General extenders ‘‘and stuff’’ in the speech of Dutch learners of English. In:

Romero-Trillo, J. (Ed.), Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics 2: New Theoretical and Empirical Paradigms. Springer InternationalPublishing, Switzerland, pp. 213--237.

Mair, Christian, 2009. Corpus linguistics meets sociolinguistics: the role of corpus evidence in the study of sociolinguistic variation and change. In:Renouf, A., Kehoe, A. (Eds.), Corpus Linguistics: Refinements and Reassessments. Rodopi, Amsterdam and New York, pp. 7--32.

Romero-Trillo, Jesús, 2012. Pragmatic markers. In: Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics. Blackwell-Wiley, Oxford, pp. 4522--4528.Romero-Trillo, Jesús, in press. ‘It is a truth universally acknowledged’.. .you know? The role of adaptive management and prosody to start a turn in

conversation. Pragmatics and Society.

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Prof. Jesús Romero-Trillo lectures at the Department of English Philology, Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, Spain. His publicationsmainly verse on the study of pragmatic markers and on the interface between pragmatics and prosody in intercultural communication. He isthe Editor-in-Chief of the Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics (Springer) and the Review Editor of the journal Intercultural Pragmatics(Mouton de Gruyter).

Jesús Romero-Trillo*Departamento de Filología Inglesa, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras,

Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, 28049 Madrid, Spain

*Tel.: +34 914978540.E-mail address: jesus.romero@uam.es

URL: http://www.jesusromerotrillo.es