Discourse-pragmatic variation and change: Theory, innovations, contact ed. by Elizabeth Peterson, Turo Hiltunen and Joseph Kern (review)

Reviewed by: Discourse-pragmatic variation and change: Theory, innovations, contact ed. by Elizabeth Peterson, Turo Hiltunen and Joseph Kern Elizabeth Closs Traugott Discourse-pragmatic variation and change: Theory, innovations, contact. Ed. by Elizabeth Peterson, Turo Hiltunen, and Joseph Kern. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022. Pp. xxviii, 332. ISBN 9781108836203. 125 (Hb). This edited volume showcases contemporary research on pragmatic variables above the level of the phoneme. The book begins with a foreword by Jan-Ola Östman that situates the papers in a tradition of interactional sociolinguistics that emerged in the mid-1970s and has flourished in the Discourse-Pragmatic Variation and Change (DiPVaC) research network. This is followed by an Introduction by the editors, who outline the focus of the volume, discuss intertwining links among the papers, and emphasize the importance of the interdisciplinary perspective taken. The volume is in three parts. Part I, 'Innovations in theory and method', encompasses four chapters. In Ch. 1, 'Reflexes of abruptness in the development of pragmatic markers', Derek Denis argues that change of pragmatic markers is abrupt, while frequency shifts are gradual. Data on I think, I guess, I suppose are drawn from corpora of interviews with English speakers born from 1890 to 1990 in Southern Ontario. In Ch. 2, 'Evaluation of pragmatic markers: The case of you know', Erik Schleef and Bradley Mackay use matched-guise tests to investigate how respondents rate use or nonuse of you know among speakers from the Greater Manchester area of the UK. Ch. 3, 'Quotative variation and change in French with additional insights from Brazilian Portuguese and Italian', by Stephen Levey, Laura Kastronic, Salvio Digesto, and Mélissa Chiasson, explores apparent-time comparative evidence. A range of quotative expressions in Acadian, Quebec, and European French is investigated, with focus on what has changed, and indeed if there has been change, in the system between 2005 and 2019, using sociolinguistic interviews. Ch. 4, 'Cross-linguistic variation in spoken discourse markers: Distribution, functions, and domains', by Liesbeth Degand, Zoé Broisson, Ludivine Crible, and Karolina Grzech, updates earlier proposals for annotating procedural cues at a metadiscursive level that 'constrain the interpretation of the host unit in a co-built representation of ongoing discourse' (85), illustrating this with French, Spanish, and Polish data sets of spontaneous interaction. The authors suggest that this annotation is more suitable for large-scale categorical studies than for detailed case studies (85). Part II is devoted to four case studies of innovative variables in English that take up several of the issues in Part I. Ch. 5, by Daniela Kolbe-Hanna and Laurel J. Brinton, discusses 'An emergent pragmatic marker: Sentence-final is all'. Is all was incipient in the seventeenth century, and became the fixed pragmatic expression that is/was/'s all in the eighteenth. It appears in reduced form chiefly in mid-twentieth-century fictional representation of spoken English. It invites the hearer 'not to infer more than what has been said and/or … to close the topic' (125). In Ch. 6, '"That is totally not my type of film": Innovations in the intensifier system of UK English', Karin Aijmer provides a comparison of the use of totally in the 2014 Spoken British National Corpus with that in the 1994 British National Corpus. This complements her earlier study of totally in North American English (Aijmer 2011). Focus is on the dependency of interpretations on collocations with particular adjectives and verbs, on distinguishing emphasizer and intensifier uses, and on identifying association with negative semantic prosody verbs (e. g. freak out, fall apart) (139). In Ch. 7 Tim Gadanidis and Derek Denis ask the all-important question 'Uh, what should we count? ', using as their data um and uh variability in oral histories of farm work and life in Ontario, Canada, collected in 1984, the period just before um became dominant. They argue for approaching discourse-pragmatic variation and change 'from multiple angles' (172). Ch. 8, 'Modeling listener responses' by Mirjam Elisabeth Eiswirth, seeks. . .