Book review: Jessica N Lester and Michelle O’Reilly, Applied Conversation Analysis: Social Interaction in Institutional Settings

Abstract

semantic and/or pragmatic distinctions. How to identify such formal differentials underpinning semantic and/or pragmatic distinctions and what consequences such research would have would be directions worthy of future investigation. Last but not the least, the book shows that properties, such as morphosyntactic marking, semantic specificity, illocutionary force potentials and distributional properties are crucial for analyses of English clauses, which leads to the proposal of a gradient model of clause types, that is, viewing clause types as a continuum. This is a valid alternative model, as opposed to the traditional dichotomy of ‘major’ and ‘minor’ clause types, for analysing clauses in English. Seeing clause types as forming a continuum, however, suggests that the properties mentioned above can be quantified in some way. How this can be done would, therefore, be another direction worth pursuing, as also pointed out by Siemund (p. 390). The above discussion would suffice to indicate that the book is a valuable contribution to research on speech acts and clause types in English, though to what extent it can be usefully used as a textbook for students of (English) linguistics is not clear. I am, therefore, happy to highly recommend the book to researchers of English and general linguistics, in particular to those interested in semantics, pragmatics and the interface between syntax, semantics and pragmatics.