Book review: Peter Siemund, Speech Acts and Clause Types: English in a Cross-Linguistic Context

Abstract

a multidimensional methodology circumscribing pragmatic variables in natural interactions by first situating them in the specific social communicative activities and tasks in order to ensure maximum variable control and a high degree of contrastivity and comparability, overcoming the hurdle that inhibits the effective use of natural interactional data in VP. Moreover, the methodology could be deliberately tailored to cater for distinctive features of diverse pragmatic variables, opening up new perspectives and providing an effective tool for a wider range of further studies. However, this publication has some imperfections. First, all the subcorpora in LARC are gender imbalanced, the author’s aim being to ‘keep things as natural as possible’ (p. 54). Given the illuminating review in Chapter 2 of previous inquiries into gender variation, one would expect that, if the gender parameter had been controlled, the findings of the present study would have been somewhat different. Second, the investigation is confined to a limited sample size owing to the necessity to delimit variables at multiple levels, making it difficult to implement fully the statistical testing, which is a powerful and indispensable tool in most quantitative analyses, and unfortunately undermining the validity and rigor of the argumentative claims. Finally, the lack of definitions for the symbols in some figures (e.g. Figures 6.4–6.6) hinders readability to a minor extent. Overall, this book makes a valuable contribution to the rather limited VP research on socioeconomic factors, while also addressing some fundamental methodological concerns regarding warranting comparability for pragmatic variation in naturally occurring data. It will provide theoretical, methodological and empirical inspirations for researchers in the fields of VP, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, discourse and related areas of linguistics.