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Black, Elizabeth. Pragmatic Stylistics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press (Edinburgh Textbooks in Applied Linguistics), 2006. x + 166 pp. £55 (hardback)/£18.99 (paperback). ISBN 978–0–7486–2040–1/2041–8, Forum for Modern Language Studies, Volume 43, Issue 1, JANUARY 2007, Pages 94–95, https://doi.org/10.1093/fmls/cql124
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Extract
This textbook in applied linguistics studies the language of literary texts, and indeed is presented as the first pragmatically-oriented study of the language of fictional texts. A range of pragmatic theories and of approaches to texts are outlined, the whole complemented by examples taken mainly from twentieth-century texts rather than invented. Reference is to Grice's “co-operative principle” and to, in particular, the insights into irony and varieties of indirect discourse offered by Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory, itself related to Bakhtin and Labov, thus bringing sociolinguistics, too, into consideration. We have a short list of acronyms and a very brief glossary (pp. viii and ix), followed by a brief Introduction and eleven chapters, including a Conclusion; the chapters cover pragmatics and stylistics, pragmatic theories, signposts, narrative voices, direct and indirect discourse, politeness and literary discourse, relevance and echoic discourse, tropes and parody, symbolism, and psychonarration. The whole is concluded by a Bibliography (pp. 158–62, including a list of works taken to provide examples), a General Index (pp. 163–4), and an Index to Literary Authors and Works Cited (pp. 165–6). This is an extremely objective and wide-ranging first exposition of a fascinating area of study.
