Book Reviews 
Pragmalinguistics: Theory and Practice 
Jacob L. Mey, Editor 
Mouton Publishers, The Hague, 1979, 
444 pp., DM 76, ISBN 90-279-7757-7. 
(Dist: Walter de Gruyter & Co., New York) 
"Pragmalinguistics" or the occupation with prag- 
matic aspects of language can be important where 
computational linguists or artificial intelligence re- 
searchers are concerned with natural language inter- 
faces to computers, with modelling dialogue behavior, 
or the like. What speakers intend with their utteranc- 
es, how hearers react to what they hear, and what they 
take the words to mean will all play a role of increas- 
ing importance when natural language systems have 
matured enough to cope readily with syntax and se- 
mantics. Asking a sensible question to a user or giving 
him a reasonable response often enough depends not 
only on the "pure" meaning of some previous utter- 
ances but also on attitudes, expectations, and inten- 
tions that the user may have. These are partly con- 
veyed in the user's utterances and have to be taken 
into account, if a system is to do more than just give 
factual answers to factual requests. 
Thus someone who wants to construct a natural 
language system might look at Mey's book Pragmalin- 
guistics with some expectations as to what he should 
consider or what guidelines he should follow, or maybe 
just to find out what the current state of the art in 
pragmatics is. However, he will find little of that in 
this book. Pragmalinguistics is a collection of articles 
dealing with many different things--some of the arti- 
cles could instead of being called pragmatic or prag- 
malinguistic be labelled sociolinguistic. Most authors 
that have contributed to this volume are located in 
Scandinavia, and thus maybe it gives a good impres- 
sion of the concerns of North European linguists. 
The article by Bang and Door gives a critique of 
the linguistic theories of Lyons, Habermas, Bernstein, 
and Ehlich and Rehbein from a Marxist point of view. 
The article by Qvortrup criticizes Transformational 
Grammar--and in particular the Language Acquisition 
Devicemagain from a Marxist point of view and with 
a breath-taking ignorance of what TG is all about. 
Lindberg's article on units of speech is trivial and 
Utaker's on semantics is outdated. 
Blakar writes on language as a means of social 
power. His paper is anecdotal; he draws conclusions 
without stating from what premises; and he is on the 
whole not very explicit. Gregersen postulates in his 
article on the relationships between social class and 
language usage that an economic analysis of "objective 
class positions" has to precede sociolinguistic studies 
proper, but fails to show how the results of such an 
analysis will influence sociolinguistics. 
Haeberlin writes on class-specific vocabulary as a 
communication problem. His ideas have been pub- 
lished before and in more detail. But he at least 
makes substantial and concrete claims, and he has a 
reasonable framework for his research, even though he 
admits that the results he has obtained in his statistical 
studies are only preliminary in nature. He found, for 
instance, that members of the middle class have a 
higher ability to gather the meanings of new words in 
conversations than members of the lower class do. 
Jacobsen writes on language and emotions much from 
the point of view of a psychotherapist. The emphasis 
of his article is more on explaining emotions than on 
explaining the relationship between language and emo- 
tions. 
Olsen's paper is on psychopathology, interaction 
and pragmatic linguistics. Sondergaard's topic is the 
neurolinguistic concept of the ontogenesis and disinte- 
gration of smooth articulation. 
Andersen is concerned with the syntax of texts and 
the syntax of actions. He has been influenced by 
work done at SRI International, and his analysis of 
actions resembles the SRI action graphs. It may be 
worthwhile to look at the differences in detail. Bjerg 
wites on public speech acts, and Gloy states some 
postulates for a theory of linguistic manipulation. 
Schank's article--the only one in the book that 
carries the term computational in its title--gives a sum- 
mary of Conceptual Dependency Theory because he 
feels that is the (only?) prerequisite for computational 
pragmatics. 
In his closing paper on critical language theory Mey 
points out a number of phenomena having to do with 
the pragmatics of natural language that should be dealt 
with by an integrated linguistic theory. 
Pragmalinguistics is a book with an unfortunate 
history, which delayed its publication for a long time 
--maybe for too long. It is not very useful for some- 
one who expects concrete results applicable to the 
construction of a natural language system. But it may 
be of interest anyway, as it gives a different (often 
Marxist) perspective on linguistic phenomena that 
some may not have considered to be linguistic phe- 
nomena at all. 
Hubert Lehmann, IBM Heidelberg 
