816 Book reviews

lustrate the ‘ heuristic indication’ dialogue type in human-machine-communica- tion. The authors first offer a linguistic-psychological clarification of the nature of the dialogue type ‘information extraction’ and the characteristic feature ‘heuristic indication’ (viz. of a possible problem solving strategy utilized by the partner) which is based on that feature. The advantages of this procedure in human-machine-communication are then illustrated in an enlightening manner, taking the PLIDIS-system as an example.

Gunther G&z (Erlangen) (‘Inferenzen in einem natiirlichsprachlichen Di- alogsystem’) describes the design of the Erlangen language processing system (using a train schedule information scenario). The system is supposed to utilize several analysis expert modules in order to conduct a frame-driven dialogue with the user. The first attempts at implementation in FRL are discussed. This contribution might be convincing, if representative parts of the system were made operational.

Maria Nowakowska (Warsaw) (‘Further extensions of the formal theory of dialogues’) reports in her logic-oriented paper on new concepts of a theory of dialogues with respect to ‘convictions’ and ‘constraints’ imposed by the struc-

ture of the topic. Both the large number of fields represented and the broad spectrum covered

by the individual contributions make this volume extremely stimulating. In

addition, a representative bibliography is provided for those who may not be familiar with the literature in neighboring fields.

Walther v. Hahn Germanisches Seminar

University of Hamburg Hamburg, F.R.G.

Walther von Hahn (b. 1942) studied German Literature and Linguistics, Classical Philology, and Philosophy in Marburg. He is currently Professor of Linguistics (German) and of Computational

Linguistics at the University of Hamburg. He is also Director of the Research Unit for Informa-

tion Science and Artificial Intelligence. His main research areas are: Artificial Intelligence (natural

language processing) and LSP (languages for special purposes). Important publications are:

Fachsprachen. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft (1981); Fachkommunikation. Berlin:

de Gruyter (1983).

P. Bange et al., Logique, argumentation, conversation: Actes du Colloque de Pragmatique, Fribourg 1981. Berne, Frankfurt: Lang (Sciences pour la Com- munication), 1983. 223 pp. Sfr. 39.50.

Logique, argumentation, conversation (LAC) is a collection of the texts of different presentations given at a colloquium held at Fribourg (Switzerland) in 1981. It is divided into two parts (‘Analyses’ and ‘Theories et modeles’) in

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which the texts are arranged by authors in alphabetical order. As the theoret- ical positions expressed in these articles make little reference to each other, I will present the contributions separately, in their original order of appearance.

Abderrazak Bannour (‘Pour une semantique linguistique, un argument supplementaire: etude de certains aspects du comportement des modaux deuoir et pouuoir’, pp. 29-59) seeks to argue in favor of a ‘linguistic semantics as the theoretical model for linguistic analysis’ (p. 9) rather than ‘the dispersal of meaning and the sanctification of the context of enunciation’ (ibid.), a position which he (falsely) attributes to Ducrot (1980). Bannour examines the different uses, deontic and epistemic, of the modals devoir and pouvoir, by applying the distinctions established by Karttunen (1971; 1972) between factive, implica- tive, if verbs, and only-if verbs (see also Mordrup (1975)), arriving at the conclusion (formulated as a postulate) that ‘the respective fundamental mean- ings of devoir and pouvoir are deontic’ and that ‘the deontic meanings have served as the model for the epistemic meanings’ (p. 10). Bannour’s (tortuous) argumentation would nonetheless require a specification: From what point of view (diachronical? logical?) has the deontic meaning ‘served as a model’? One also regrets his failure to take into account any modification of meaning linked

to the nature (animate/inanimate) of the agents, or of the type of clause (declarative, interrogative) of the sentence in which the modal occurs.

In ‘Aspects des discours explicatifs’ (pp. 61-77) Joelle Kohler-Chesny shows that explanation in daily, colloquial discourse ‘cannot be bi-univocally defined on the basis of formal criteria’ (p. 61), but that it may be characterized (in opposition, for example, to justification) according to parameters arising from (1) the interlocutory situation; (2) its enunciation, and (3) the objects of explanatory discourse. From the point of view of the interlocutory situation, an explanatory discourse supposes a legitimation (for example, that a request for explanation has been made), and may be described in terms of ‘face threaten- ing’ (cf. Brown and Levinson (1978); Roulet (1981)), whereas a justification places the positive and negative faces of the speaker in more danger than an explanation. From the point of view of enunciation, explanatory discourse presents itself as arising from knowledge (vs. opinion) and possessing ‘in its

very foundations something that would make it a neutral mode of treatment of its object’ (p. 66). Explanatory discourse is thus characterized as ‘directing the attention to the objects of discourse and their interrelation’ (p. 68), unlike the justificative, which ‘directs the attention to the speaker’ (ibid.). From the third point of view, the explanatory relationship posits that the existence of the object to be explained (i.e. the ‘problematical’ object, presented ‘as though it clashed with the known facts’, p.71) is governed by the explanatory object. In terms of discourse, the expIained is topic; the explanatory, comment. This hierarchical relationship can nonetheless be flattened when two statements are linked by the metadiscursive operators: which is to say (c’est-h-dire); in other words (autrement dit), etc. This phenomenon of ‘discursive redundancy’ is dealt

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with more thoroughly in research carried out by the Centre de Recherches Semiologiques at the University of Neuchatel on discursive reasoning (cf.

Revue Europeenne des Sciences Sociales (1981)). Oswald Ducrot, in ‘La valeur argumentative de la phrase interrogative’ (pp.

79-ill), demonstrates that the sentence-type destined to convey yes/no questions has an ‘intrinsic argumentative orientation, and that this orientation is negative’ (p. 81) - in other words, that such sentences are marked so that their utterances reach, from an argumentative standpoint, the same conclusions as the utterances of the corresponding negative sentences. In order to demon- strate that this quality is inherent to the meaning of the sentence-type, Ducrot resorts (cf. Ducrot et al. (1980)) to the notion of polyphony (which posits that an enunciation may be constituted of several simultaneous ‘elementary acts’ [l] uttered by ‘enunciators’ distinct from the speaker, and whose position the speaker may or may not support). He further shows that the sentence-meaning of the interrogative sentence-type specifies ‘the types of elementary acts that must appear in such utterances’ (p. 89). ‘Polyphonic’ analysis shows that the interrogative sentence-type is marked to accomplish three elementary acts: a ‘previous assertion’ of the content p on which the question bears; it is to this assertion that the anaphora in non-argumentative sequences refers (Will Paul

come? I hope so), where so refers to p, which designates Paul’s coming. The second elementary act is ‘the expression of an uncertainty’ (p. 94); the speaker supports the position of the enunciator of this act and thus manifests his uncertainty about p. Now, it is generally acknowledged that the expression or assertion of uncertainty is negatively oriented: from I don’t know whether Paul will come one cannot discursively conclude so we had better set a place for him,

but rather, so there’s no reason to set a place for him. For Ducrot, therefore, it is this second elementary act that is responsible for the negative argumentative orientation of the question. As for the third elementary act, it consists of ‘creating an obligation to answer’ (either p or non-p, p. 99). The enunciator of this third elementary act is also (generally) supported by the speaker. This description has the advantage of applying to ordinary questions as well as to the well-known ‘test’ variety and to indirect requests using an interrogative form. It is further developed in Anscombre and Ducrot (1983).

The final text of the ‘Analyses’ section is the work of Georges Ludi: ‘Tu

parles! Etude de semantique pragmatique’ (pp. 113-140). The author here examines, from a lexicological point of view, the properties of the French expression Tuparles! (whose meanings vary from Don’t I know it! to Bullshit!), relative to the general usage of the French verb parler. His analysis, which relies on the notion of usage categories (classes d’emploi), determined by the semic structures of lexical units, aims to characterize the contours of the usage

[l] The notion of act (used here in a different sense than that used by Austin or Searle) is not very

clearly defined; this problem nonetheless in no way affects the interest of ‘polyphonic’ description.

Book reuiews 819

category of Tu parles! - a category whose existence is distinguished by its syntactic properties (structure: Tu parles ! + subordinating element + proposition; whilst ‘the general usage of parler specifically excludes a proposi- tion as a complement’, p. 119). Above all, in spoken usage (Tuparles! being ‘a fundamentally oral expression’, p. 129) the expression is distinguished by intonation, significant at one level in that it allows one to distinguish in Tu parles d’un idiot between the idiomatic Tu parles si c’est un idiot and the standard usage TM me parles d’un idiot. For Ludi, Tu parles is used to supply modality (in the sense of the speaker’s attitude) to a propositional content previously asserted, called into question, or simply presumed. This modality is thus ‘reactive’ and may be either assertive or ‘negative’, and may also take on tones of irony, admiration, or contempt: this nuance being determined by the intonation (at a second level). This renders Tu parles a ‘reactive marker of empty modality’ whose value is specified by the rhetorical component. Al- though Tu parles may be ‘memorized independently of standard lexical meanings of parler ’ (p. 133), the expression remains transparent, Ludi con- cludes, as is attested by the cases of ambiguity between standard usage (‘metacommunicative’) and the modalizing usage of TM parles.

The first of the five works in the section entitled ‘Theories et Modeles’ - Pierre Bange, ‘Pragmatique et Litterature’ (pp. 145-165) - is devoted to the relationship between literary theory and pragmatics, and notably how the latter gives a stable object to the former by conceiving of this object as ‘text in a communicative situation’ (p. 148) - even if this ‘communicative situation’

seems to belie the conditions of colloquial communication. Bange posits as central the problem of fictionality, which he characterizes, following Ham- burger (1968), by ‘the disappearance of the real I-origin, for which are substituted fictive I-origins, in other words, set in place by the text’ (p. 153). The decisive question is thus no longer ‘Is what is said real?’ but ‘Does the speaker have an extra-textual existence?’ (p. 154). In this manner, Bange displaces the problem posed by (among others) Searle (1975) - whom he does not mention - in terms of the suspension of the rules of words/world fit, nonetheless arriving at the idea that literary discourse ‘takes place in condi- tions of relativization or suspension of social norms’ (p. 156). This allows him to see literary communication as play (cf. Lotman (1973)) and by analogy with ludic modeling, to characterize literature as a kind of general method of ‘trial and error’. For Bange, the major advantage of this approach to literary theory is that it allows a break with a normative conception of a work, and gives literary science (eternally programmatic) a certain social relevance by taking back into account the dimensions of the work’s production and reception.

Christian Perelman (‘Logique formelle et argumentation’, pp. 167-175) deals with certain differences between the properties of logical reasoning within formal systems using artificial languages and those of natural language reasoning. For Perelman, the central point is the place required for the

820 Book reviews

audience: the properties attributed to expressions in a formal system (true/false, necessary/probable) being independent of what this or that individual may think, believe, etc., while a statement in natural language requires an interpre- tation that depends on the interpreter. Seen in this light, the difference between a demonstration (in a formal system) and an argumentation (as a rhetorical activity and not, as according to Ducrot, as a fundamental semantic activity) resides in the fact that the former, in artificial language, transfers from the premise toward the conclusion an ‘objective property such as truth’ (p. 173) while the latter, in natural language, must carry toward the conclusion the adhesion accorded to the premise - adhesion which is necessarily dependent on the audience. The ‘quality of an argumentation’ cannot, however, be judged only by its effectiveness, precisely because it also depends on the quality of the audience. However, Perelman concludes, one can nonetheless judge the quality of an argumentation by testing its effectiveness when confronted by a pos- tulated ‘universal audience’ - the most exacting imaginable, and which, ‘in the history of philosophy, incarnates Reason’ (p. 174).

In ‘Pragmatique et acquisition’ (pp. 177-189) Bernard Py examines the specific problems related to the acquisition of another organization of place deixis that arise during the learning of a second language. His analysis is based on a collection of the meta-linguistic judgments made by two French-speaking groups of students confronted by the difficulties they were given respectively by the German verbs kommen and gehen, and the particles hin and her; and the Spanish verbs ir and venir, llevar and traer. Finding that these difficulties may not be resolved by practice of ‘structural exercises’ (substitution, permuta- tion, etc.), and that they require a readjustment of ‘natural processes’, Py arrives at a description of the different strategies employed by the learners to resolve their specific difficulties. He classifies these strategies according to their degree of appropriateness (power of problem resolution). This classification goes from a ‘naive’ strategy (‘looking in one language for a form freely transferrable from the other’, p. 187), to a strategy that includes pragmatic data on the level of the sign (‘looking for correlations between the form to be interpreted and certain general situational characteristics . . . ’ ibid.), and finally to one that includes the reorganization of the deictic ‘microsystem’ (‘once the relevance of the orientation of the displacement is accepted, trying to identify the reference mark in function of which it is described’, p. 188). Although this classification does not represent a ‘sequence of steps on the road to acquisi- tion’ (ibid.), it nonetheless allows the author to show, and this seems to be the important thing from a pedagogical viewpoint, that one of the problems of learning a second language involves generalizing ‘a pragmatic strategy that functions on the level of signs’ (p. 186) to apply it to ‘microsystems’.

Eddy Roulet’s article (‘Actes de langage, interaction en face-a-face et structure de la conversation’, pp. 191-207) seeks to show how the processes of face-work (cf. Goffman (1974)) that are set in motion by the protagonists of an

Book reviews 821

interaction must be taken into account in the description of speech acts in context. Through the presentation of a hierarchical model on three levels of conversation - exchange, move (interuention), and speech act - Roulet posits that the ordinary structure of an exchange (‘remedial interchange’, cf. Goff- man (1973)) is constituted of three moves that assume the illocutionary function generally attributed to speech acts, which may be identified by the paraphrase using a performative verb. He distinguishes between the initiative illocutionary functions (request, for example), which have a directing role in the exchange; the reactive-initiative ones (for example, acceptance or refusal); and the reactive (evaluation) illocutionary functions. What’s more, he shows that moves are constituted of several acts, subordinated to a directing act (which conveys the illocutionary point of the move). Now, if one may char- acterize these acts from an illocutionary point of view (as assertions, for example), it becomes necessary to describe them in terms of the interactive function they assume in relation to the directing act: the function of prepara- tion, justification, etc. The interactive characterization (Aston (1977)) of the subordinate constituents in a move is justified by the impossibility of using a performative verb to paraphrase them, and further allows one to construct a pertinent description of the complex structures of exchange embedded in a move. Roulet’s analysis is completed by an examination of the various traces of face-work, on the level of speech acts, in an authentic conversation. One finds in Roulet (1981) a more detailed presentation of the hierarchical model and of the relationship between problems linked to face-to-face interaction and the structure of the move.

Like Perelman’s article, the ‘Note sur la deduction naturelle et le connecteur done’ (pp. 209-221) by Alain Berrendonner stresses the differences between natural language reasoning and logical deduction. For Berrendonner, the model of logical deduction, when used to simulate everyday natural language reasoning processes, lends properties to the image of discourse which it does not normally possess. He mentions two: a logical deduction requires the formulation of all the premises that infer a proposition, and of all inferrable conclusions. Now, ‘this completeness is, in the case of natural language reasoning, an extremely rare exception’ (p. 212). However, it is examination of the second property that provides the ideas for analysis: Berrendonner demon- strates that in the logical expression ‘4 is deduced from p’, three relationships coincide, which natural language does not exploit simultaneously. These are: Rl ( p implies q -‘i.e. if p is true, then q is true), consequence; R2 (q follows p), consecution; and R3 (q is the objective of p - i.e. p serves only to enunciate q). For him, ‘saying done 4 . . . is to posit q . . . and at the same time to characterize this enunciation metadiscursively by presenting it as evinced by a previous act’ (p. 218). He thus establishes two types of relationships in order to describe natural language reasoning: the first, of an argumentative nature, to evince - ‘a fact, event x, cannot take place without giving one the right to

822 Book reviews

say q’ (p. 217); and the second, of a topographical nature, to precede - x precedes, or is preceded by, the enunciation of q. These two types of relation- ships allow Berrendonner to file certain pragmatic connectives according to whether the enunciation of q is marked by the connective as evinced, evincing,

preceded by, or preceding. The essential interest of this system of classification, which does not exhaust semantic description of these connectives, is for Berrendonner to ‘show that these two types of relationships (to evince and to precede) are largely independent of each other’ (p. 219).

If several of the contributions in this collection are of a certain interest to the study of pragmatics, one can only deplore the many errors left by poor editing of the texts, as well as the fact that the acts of a colloquium held in early 1981 had to await publication until 1983. Hypotheses become outdated quickly, and several articles had already been made obsolete by the publication of other works by the same authors when this collection finally appeared (Kohler-Chesny, Ducrot, and Roulet). Such delays can sometimes be justified by the time taken up by a careful editorial process; this is unfortunately not the case for LAC: two texts lack bibliographies (Bange and Py); in some cases the references are fanciful (p. 9, ‘Berrendonner, Elements de Linguistique, 1980’ instead of ‘Elements de Pragmatique linguistique, 1981’) - which is perhaps why they are not cited at the end of the text. One author’s name is written in two different ways (‘C. Kohler-Chesny’ on the cover, ‘Joelle Chesny-Kohler’ in the table of contents), neither of which is correct (cf. above). The latter is but one example of the systematic occurrence of misspellings in the text, which, in conclusion, can be no better demonstrated than by: ‘ _ . . the persistance of faults . . .’ (p. 179) and ‘. . . persistant faults . . .’ (p. 180) . . . . This is, alas, the only occasion on which the editor’s lack of care has some redeeming value.

Antoine Auchlin Universite de Geneve Geneva, Switzerland

References

Anscombre, J.-C., 0. Ducrot, 1983. L’argumentation dans la langue. Bruxelles: Mardaga. Aston, G., 1973. Comprehending value: Aspects of the structure of argumentative discourse. Studi

Italiani di Linguistica Teoretica ed Applicata 6: 465-509.

Brown, P., S. Levinson, 1978. ‘Universals in language usage: politeness phenomena’. In: E. Goody

ed., Questions and politeness: Strategies in social interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-

sity Press. pp. 56-310.

Ducrot, 0. et al., 1980. Les mots du discours. Paris: Minuit.

Goffman, E., 1973. La mise en scene de la vie quotidienne. Paris: Minuit. Goffman, E, 1974. Les rites d’interaction. Paris: Minuit.

Book reviews 823

Hamburger, K., 1968. Die Logik der Dichtung. Stuttgart: Klett.

Karttunen, L., 1971. Some observations on factivity. Papers in Linguistics 4(l): 55-69.

Karttunen, L., 1972. ‘Possible and must’. In: J. Kimball ed., Syntax and semantics 1. New York:

Seminar Press. pp. l-20.

Lotman, I., 1973. La structure du texte artistique. Paris: Gallimard.

Msrdrup, O., 1975. Presuppositions, implications, et verbes francais. Revue Romane 10: 125-157.

Revue Europeenne des Sciences Sociales. 1981. Vol. 19; 56.

Roulet, E., 1981. Echanges, interventions et actes de langage dans la structure de la conversation.

Etudes de Linguistique Appliqued 44: 7-39.

Searle, J.R., 1975. The logical status of fictional discourse. New Literary History 6: 319-332.

Anfoine Auchlin (born 1954) studied general linguistics in Lausanne and Geneva. 1979-81:

research assistant at the University of Geneva (speech acts and conversation analysis). 1981-83:

studied Chinese in Beijing and Tianjin. Since 1983, French Linguistics Assistant at the University

of Geneva, main research topic and subject of doctoral thesis: comparative pragmatics from

Chinese and French conversational data.

Wolfgang Motsch and Dieter Viehweger, eds., Richtungen der modernen Semantikforschung. * Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1983. 425 pp. DM 28.00.

Modern research in semantics is no easy area to survey: linguistics, logic, philosophy of language, cognitive psychology have each developed partially independent approaches to meaning, thus making it hard to formulate - let alone to answer - such ontologically absolute questions as ‘What is meaning’?

Growing awareness of methodological as well as theoretical issues underly- ing the scientific investigations of meaning leads, then, to an alternative: either the central question within a long-standing tradition of linguistic semantics is reformulated with reference to the single disciplines interested in the different sides of meaning, or a new, more complex view of meaning must be developed as a synthesis of suggestions deriving from the different branches of study.

The papers included in the book under review aim at demonstrating the necessity for modern semantics to pursue this latter direction - that is, to work out an ‘integrative’ view of meaning which alone can guarantee positive results in view of a scientifically based study of human meaningful activities in general, language being but one of them. In Bierwisch’s and Lang’s opinion, semantics should be organized in such a way as to systematically deal with meaning from the viewpoints of its linguistic organization, of its psychological

* Richrungen der modernen Semanrikforschung consists of five long papers, each of them deserving

attention beyond what will be briefly mentioned in what follows: M. Bierwisch, ‘Psychologische Aspekte der Semantik natlirlicher Sprachen’, (pp. 15-65); E. Lang, ‘Die logische Form eines

Satzes als Gegenstand der linguistischen Semantik’ (pp. 65-145); D. Viehweger, ‘Semantik und Sprechakttheorie’ (pp. 145-245); R. Pasch and I. Zimmermann, ‘Die Rolle der Semantik in der

generativen Grammatik’ (pp. 246-363), and A. Ufimceva, ‘ Wortschatzbeschreibung mittels Sys- temmethode in der sovietischen Sprachwissenschaft’ (pp. 363-425).