AUTHOR: Ariel, Mira

TITLE: Pragmatics and Grammar

SERIES: Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics
PUBLISHER: Cambridge University Press
YEAR: 2008

Dinha T. Gorgis, Jadara University, Irbid, Jordan

SUMMARY
Pragmatics and Grammar is a book that attempts to resolve a number of intriguing
problems related to the complex relationship between grammar and pragmatics. While
maintaining the mainstream conviction about the grammar/pragmatics division of
labor, the author seems to be more willing to announce a happy marriage between the
two, though admitted (explicitly and/or implicitly) to be at times uneasy bedfellows,
than keep them single. If they are kept absolutely distinct from each other, as
suggested by standard analyses, Ariel argues that accounts for grammaticization and
semanticization will not be possible (cf. pp. xiii; 257). The book opens with a preface
followed by an introductory chapter and six more chapters distributed over three
parts, each of which addressing questions intended to be answered on the basis of her
mostly natural linguistic/discoursal examples collected from various sources, mainly
representative of Hebrew and English. Original examples and their glosses can
be found at:
www.cambridge.org/0780521559942
A cursory look at the rich list of references, followed by two indexes, is indicative of
the tremendous efforts she has exerted on preparing the book.

Chapter 1: Grammar, pragmatics, and what's between them (pp. 1-24) draws our
attention to the fact that although we need to draw a distinction between grammar, as
correlated with a set of codes, and pragmatics, as correlated with different types of
inferences, to which part I is devoted, we equally need to account for how inferences
cross over and become codes. In addition to being content with "the now well
accepted assumption that we always communicate by combining codes (grammar)
with inferences (pragmatics)" (p.3), which means that inferences constitute an integral
part of grammar by definition, the author is committed to the issue of cross-over
which is believed to have serious implications for grammaticization and/or
semanticization and hence the on-going development of current grammars. Ariel
appeals to Grice's pragmatic theory; for since it is assumed "that every act of
communication is actually inferential" (p. 4), i.e. involving additional or
complementary interpretation, it follows that all pragmatic theories are essentially
Gricean. As such, the author's position in this book "is contra the assumption made by
other linguists, that there must be a purely grammatical literal meaning which
corresponds to the complete utterance (usually assumed to be a single complete
proposition) ….[for it] may well be a combined grammatical/pragmatic representation
in most cases" (p. 24).

Chapter 2: Distinguishing the grammatical and the extragrammatical: referential

expressions (pp. 27-67) focuses on some referential expressions, mostly definite
expressions and pronouns. In order to provide arguments for drawing the division of
labor between interpretations and language use conditions whose
grammatical/pragmatic identity is opaque, presuppositions are given a special
treatment because the available literature about their assignment is divided. The
heated argument, based on case studies and "contentious" examples, shows that some
aspects of the use of presuppositions are semantic, others, pragmatic. Certain other
referring expressions seem to require explanations by making appeal to extralinguistic
principles but, as evidence shows, a grammatical convention is also involved.
Preferred Argument Structure constraints as well as register-specific referring
expressions are claimed to fall in between, i.e. neither encoded nor inferred. In Ariel's
words, the conclusion is that "one aspect of the use of definite descriptions is
grammatically encoded, the other, pragmatically inferred" (p. 44).

In part I (pp. 25-109), we are told that "some interpretations are implicated, some are
explicated, and yet others are only potential truth compatible inferred interpretations"
(p. 25), which chapter 3 (pp.68-109) handles in conjunction with codes. For the
purpose of assignment, Ariel selects a number of issues, e.g. conjoined clauses with
'and' and some scalar expressions such as 'most' and 'all'. While Gricean pragmatists
variously rely "on the criterion of truth conditionality for distinguishing grammatical
and extragrammatical interpretations, taking truth-conditional meanings as semantic
and nontruth-conditional meanings as pragmatic" (p. 69), Ariel's position is consonant
with Relevance theoreticians "who apply the code/inference distinction strictly" (p.
69). For them, Grice's conventional implicatures, which are the domain of pragmatics,
constitute coded meanings and hence semantic in essence. Towards the end of the
chapter, however, Ariel admits that it is "a delicate matter to distinguish the truth-
compatible from the encoded" (p. 108).

In part II: Crossing the extralinguistic/linguistic divide (pp. 111-256), the author takes
the reader to an arena where the grammar/pragmatics interface is likely to take place.
Central to this part is the argument that "pragmatics, together with other
extragrammatical triggers, provides the raw materials and impetus for grammar" (p.
111). Following such an argument, mainly based on the complex relationship between
diachronic and synchronic facts, the reader may at this junction draw two
assumptions: (1) the linguistic/extralinguistic divide is a prerequisite for the
grammar/pragmatic divide; and (2) our current and future grammars can equally
contribute to the building up of foreseeable grammars and hence witnessing an ever
running process of grammaticization (or grammaticalization, if you wish).

Chapter 4: Grammar, pragmatics, and arbitrariness (pp. 117-148) begins by

addressing the most crucial question, viz. whether grammar is extralinguistically
motivated or arbitrary. In introductory linguistic courses we often tell our students
that grammar is a self-contained system. If autonomous, then it must be arbitrary. We
do this for the sake of purely describing form-function correlations without seriously
embarking on possible motivations. Yet, if we, as researchers, are not prepared to
accept the simple fact that "grammar is a natural historical product" (p. 148), then it
follows that human history is "chaotic" and "arbitrary". In fact, one of the main
reasons why certain linguistic phenomena seem to us arbitrary is the lack of evidence.
Don't we often frown at innovations in language use, which are likely to end as
conventional codes by which others abide gradually?

Chapter 5: All paths lead to the salient discourse pattern (pp. 149-211) addresses a
number of questions intended to show how "grammar is constantly in the making" (p.
149). A number of factors, viz. (embodied) cognition, sociocultural norms and
inferential practices (pragmatic enrichments), not to mention grammar itself (cf. p.
150), may all conspire in the creation of new codes. It is undeniable that the world in
which we live, "the world filtered by the human cognitive make-up" (p. 151), can
have a considerable impact on the molding and re-molding of our grammars. In Ariel
words, all of these "constitute an integral part of communication, because the
linguistic code is forever under-determinate" (p. 166). It is to be noted that the
influence of extralinguistic factors on grammar is not direct. Rather, it is the
mediating salient discourse patterns, of which only a small set (as deemed necessary)
undergoes conventionalization (cf. p. 211).

Chapter 6: The rise (and potential fall) of reflexive pronouns demonstrates why and
which salient discourse patterns actually do turn grammatical. Current English
reflexive pronouns are used as an example to show that "earlier grammaticizations do
not preclude newer ones, and newer ones do not always cancel out old ones" (p. 213).
The English reflexive pronoun, "which we are used to thinking of as a type of
referring expression, is historically tied to two quite distinct grammatical categories. It
evolved out of an originally emphatic adjunct, which acquired argument status. As
such, it became a marked form, used for marked interpretations" (p. 253). But once it
is used intransitively, as is sometimes the case today, "the reflexive pronoun will lose
not only its interpretative markedness, but also its argument status (once again)" (p.
253) and hence the widespread of the nonreflexive form, i.e. regular pronouns, as
perhaps a more marked use in the future.

The few introductory pages in part III: Bringing grammar and pragmatics back
together (257-308) round off the whole argument run in parts I and II. While they
remind the reader of what has been achieved so far, on the one hand, they are meant
to enable us to link the previously discussed meanings, e.g. the so-called 'conveyed'
and 'bare' meanings, with an intervening (or intermediate) 'basic level' meaning,
captured by the fashionable, but highly controversial, 'what is said' concept, on the
other hand. This third level of meaning representation is the topic of chapter 7:
Grammar/pragmatics interfaces (pp. 261-308) which is mainly a critical review of
some important accounts of 'what is said' in the literature starting with Grice. The
chapter discusses "the possibility that 'what is said' is not only important for
grammar/pragmatics interfaces during interaction, but also in processes in which
pragmatics crosses over to become grammar" (p. 261). To conclude, a word of
caution is in place at this juncture. The author's position is that explicated inferences
(or conveyed meaning level), rather than implicated inferences, would serve as the
immediate impetus for, or potentially give rise to, most semanticizations and
grammaticizations (cf. pp. 306-307).

EVALUATION
With the exception of a few invented examples, Pragmatics and Grammar utilizes a
wealth of references, a comprehensive literature overview indeed, and naturally
occurring data which enabled the author to draw subtle pragmatic distinctions while
simultaneously offering a wide range of convergent/divergent perspectives, all being
undoubtedly indicative of her strong research background. The book has a clear
structure. It is equally error-free, but perhaps with the exception of the third
occurrence of the word "implicatures" (p. 81 fn. 13) which must be "explicatures"
instead.
At the outset, one might be curious to ask Mira Ariel why choosing to order
Pragmatics before Grammar as the title of the book in the first place at the time her
consistent use of their reversal is quite evident throughout the whole book, including
part and chapter titles. One may simply attribute concept order to prominence (or
focus, if you like) which captures the main argument of the feeding relationship, i.e.
the fact that pragmatics, including whatever extralinguistic facrors, is held responsible
for grammaticization/sematicization. If the initial ordering and its reversal are never
meant to invite inferences, should we say that a paradox in ordering is optional and
hence arbitrary or even meaningless? Suppose the following conversation is valid in a
possible world:
Teacher: Did you like Ariel's Pragmatics and Grammar?
Student: Yes, I did, but not in this order.
Teacher: How's that?
Student; Well, I'd rather place Grammar before Pragmatics.
Teacher: But why?
Student: Can you ever draw inferences without an existing code, including gestures?
(cf. p. 285 for a similar example).
I do not wish to push it any further and compare it with the chicken-egg puzzle, but I
still wonder. And if an answer is provided, I'm afraid (delayed) repair work should
have been given due attention as regard (written) communication.

The second remark I'd like to make is the author's consistent choice of "her" for
'speaker', 'person', 'participants' (A, B, …) and even 'dog' (cf. p. 307), perhaps with
two exceptions where in one she refers to the addressee as 'his' (p. 49, fn. 27) and in
the second both 'she' and the neutral 'they' (p. 291, fn. 29). Since she discusses
'reference' and 'anaphora', could her extensive use of 'she' (cf. her 'frequency'
throughout) be indicative of femininization and hence susceptible to foreseeable
grammaticization? One wonders if English will ever have two competing codes, viz. a
she-grammar vs. a he-grammar, in the future.

Documentation is impressive, yet often felt extravagant and annoying at times.The

frequently squeezed references and cross-references in a work which is intended as a
textbook may have side effects, particularly on the smooth flow of information. The
book is highly theoretical and argumentative in a number of places and hence
presupposing too much background knowledge on the part of the (average) reader.
Just as certain things are not clear to the author (cf. p. 152, fn. 4), we do not expect all
students to make their way through the condensed theoretical account about, e.g.
iconicity and world view (p. 152). Equally in the absence of examples, e.g. left
dislocations and their "three distinct discourse functions" (p. 120), the reader would
likely be unable to follow the argument. To substantiate this particular point, I gave
the following extract to some of my M.A. students:

one can measure the syntactic (in)dependence of combined

clauses by the (in)dependent choice of tenses, illocutionary
forces, participants, etc. Thus, causative and modal relations are
high on the cohesion hierarchy, representing one perceived
event, temporal adverbials and conditionals are intermediate, and
two unrelated events (propositions) end the cohesion hierarchy.
(p.152).
In a word, they were totally lost, simply because no one single example is provided.
While she is a supporter of Grice's maxims, I find it crystal clear that she is violating
those maxims, though unintentionally, in a few places.

Confusion may also arise with term-distinction. For example, it's only after reading 94
pages that Ariel asks us to see Sperber and Wilson (1987) "for arguments against
positing a distinction between generalized and particularized conversational
implicatures" (p.94, fn. 22). Much earlier (p. 22), she already seems to be for the idea
that "many cases analyzed as generalized conversational implicatures by neo-Griceans
are analyzed as explicated inferences by Relevance theoreticians ….[in which case]
the inferences are non-prototypical implicatures". What makes scalar implicatures
involving 'most', 'not all', 'more than half', for example, generalized conversational
implicatures? Is it because they easily lend themselves to guesses, or what? Are
particularized conversational implicatures "generated only in specific contexts" (p.
98)? If 'most' were compatible with 'all', as concluded by Horn (2006) and reported by
Ariel (p. 92), 'most' would have been synonymous with 'all', which is not the case.
The quantifier 'all' was most likely not intended by the speaker, Dana, whose 'most'
turned out to be 'all'. If you asked Dana after the event: "Did you expect 'all', without
exception, would prefer square plates?", she would most likely answer: "Well, not
really", or "I guess so", etc. If this were not the case, we could also say that "most
likely" is equally compatible with 'absolutely', 'certainly', 'positively', etc., which is
not intended. If it is a matter of focusing on "informativeness" only, then this would
be fine. Still, possibilities and probabilities of meaning dominate her overview of
arguments for/against implicature/explicature accounts of the upper bound of 'most'.

In fact, one would come up with the conclusion that the best part of the book is really
much less about grammar/pragmatics interface per se than semantic/pragmatic
overlap/interface. One would have liked to see, e.g. Quirk et al. (1985), a classic code,
to be used as a point of reference for grammatical points but, unfortunately, it is only
footnoted in one place (p. 252, fn. 61). Unlike Van Valin (2005), which looks at how
syntax, semantics and pragmatics interact in different ways across human languages,
Ariel's book, though focusing on the "grammaticization of pragmatics" (p. 159), is a
kind of grammar that sounds very much lexically biased. This is evident in, e.g. her
support of a no "one-to-one relationship between cognitive concepts and grammatical
categories" (pp. 167-169) as in the case of 'washing' and 'hiding', while maintaining
that "the grammar goes the discourse, rather than the cognition, way" (p. 169) and
hence much in agreement with Hopper and Thompson (1980; 1984; 1993) who are of
the view that semantic concepts are derivative of discourse functions, rather than the
other way round (p. 172). Except for the development of S-modifiers (p. 297) and
'since' (p. 307), the rest of the argument presented in Chapter 7 is devoted to solving
the controversial question of 'what is said' (see Levinson 2000 and Ariel's summary,
p. 292), which is obviously a pragmatic/semantic issue.

This is not to deny that she has not tackled grammatical, including a number of
phonological/morphological, issues. In one place (p. 192), she says that "some strings
are more useful to speakers than others". As such, we would expect users of Standard
Arabic to feel content with the construction /sa?aktubu/ 'I'll write' and thus ridding of
the categorical boundary in the equivalent expression /sawfa ?aktubu/. Such a
preference may be "privileged" on the basis of "frequency" (cf. p. 191), but since
negation is blocked in the construction, users normally negate the expression: /sawfa
lan ?aktuk/ 'I'll not write'., at which classical grammarians would frown, though. In
another place (p. 186; cf. also p. 191), she seems to agree with Hooper's (1976)
argument when she writes:

That a potential reductive sound change applied to the

original schwas in every, artillery, and memory according to
their respective frequencies. The fact that every has no schwa
preceding the /r/ now, but artillery does, is due to the fact
that the former is a highly frequent word, whereas the latter is
quite rare. In between in terms of frequency is memory,
which is also phonetically intermediate, with a syllabic /r/.

My position is that in every primary stress is retained, whereas stress would shift to
the pre-antepenultimate syllable if the schwa were reduced in artillery. Since the
majority of multisylllabic words in English receive their primary stress on the
antepenultimate syllable (my dictionary-based conclusion), due to its prominence, the
schwa must be maintained in the penultimate syllable as constrained by English
phonology elsewhere.

The "surprising facts" (p. 254) for which she posits seven stimulating questions are
not very much different from the ones called "ugly facts" (p. 195) in essence; for
there's no question about their pragmatic motivations, including whatsoever
extralinguistic forces. At this point, one may wonder if there is any well-defined
borderline between pragmatic and extralinguistic factors. Why not calling any
phenomenon that does not count as an integral part of the code, i.e. grammar, just
extra or non-linguistic? I agree with her on the rather minor role played by language
academies (p. 182, fn. 28), including prescriptive grammarians, on the process of
grammaticization/semanticization, particularly in the Arab world, but what about the
globalization of English (cf. Englishes), borrowing, translation, immigrants' use of
English as a second language, the media, the co-existence of bilingual and
multilingual communities, for example? Which of these can be categorized as
linguistic and/or extralinguistic or pragmatic?

The author, after all, is fully aware that the "road to grammar is still not obstacle-free"
(p. 209). That said, Ariel's use of "potential" so frequently that factors effecting
linguistic change will forever remain competitive and hence justifying the "paths" she
has chosen for the Catholic bride and groom, named grammar and pragmatics, will
undoubtedly pave the road for other researchers to follow up the numerous
challenging issues which await verification in light of fresh data secured from other
languages. Her reference to Haspelmath (2004), being written at the same time as her
chapter 6 "without either knowing about the other" (p. 213, fn. 4), is a sign of honesty
and credibility, which we are compelled to admire. Though found (sometimes) a bit
tiring at certain crossroads, I must say I enjoyed reading the book.

REFERENCES
Haspelmath, Martin. 2004. A frequentist explanation of some universals of reflexive
marking. Paper presented at the "Reciprocity and reflexivity – description,
typology and theory workshop". Free University of Berlin, October 2004.
Hooper, Joan B. 1976. Word frequency in lexical diffusion and the source of
morphophonological change. In W. Christie, ed. Current progress in historical
linguistics. Amsterdam: North-Holland, 96-105.
Hopper, Paul J. and Sandra A. Thompson. 1980. Transitivity in grammar and
discourse. Language 56: 251-299.
Hopper, Paul J. and Sandra Thompson. 1984. the discourse basis for lexical categories
in universal grammar. Language 60: 703-752.
Hopper, Paul J. and Sandra Thompson. 1993. Language universals, discourse
pragmatics, and semantics. Language Sciences 15: 357-376.
Horn, Laurence R. 2006. The Border Wars: a neo-Gricean perspective. In Ken Turner
and Klaus von Heusinger, eds., Where semantics meets pragmatics. London:
Elssevier, 21-48.
Levinson, Stephen C. 2000. Presumptive meanings: The theory of generalized
conversational implicature. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Quirk et al. 1985. A comprehensive grammar of the English language. London:
Longman.
Sperber, Dan and Deirde Wilson. 1987. Précis of Relevance: Communication and
cognition. Behavioral & Brain Sciences 10: 697-754.
Van Valin, Robert D. 2005. Exploring the syntax-semantics interface. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Dinha T. Gorgis has been teaching several linguistic modules, including English
grammar, discourse, pragmatics and translation, at a number of Arab universities
since 1975, and is currently professor of linguistics at Jadara University in Jordan. He
is chief editor of STJ, member on the editorial (advisory) boards of Linguistik and
TLJ online, IPrA and WATA member. His latest publications are: " English and
Arabic conceptual metaphors of anger: Implications for translation" (STJ, 2008) and "
The translation of Arabic collocations into English: Dictionary-based vs. dictionary-
free measured knowledge" (Linguistik, 2009, forthcoming).

Published on 24 June 2009, The LINGUIST List, Vol. 20.2280

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