The Linguist

@Linguist_CIOL APRIL/MAY The Linguist 25 SECTION HEADER REVIEWS Top picks Our regular reviewer, Ross Smith, selects his favourite podcasts on language, literature, philosophy and culture To be worth listening to, a podcast series has to be both authoritative and entertaining, and ideally the episodes should not last more than around 40 minutes. These requirements are amply met by History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps (historyofphilosophy.net), written and presented by Peter Adamson, a Professor of Philosophy at King's College London. It follows the development of Western philosophy from the pre-Socratics onwards, and after 366 episodes it has just reached the Renaissance. Episodes are structured sequentially but each is a self-contained unit dealing with a specific topic, school or figure, and hence can be listened to separately. So if you want to peruse Neo-Platonism or dip into Diogenes, this is the cast for you. Equally authoritative and well delivered is Shakespeare Unlimited (folger.edu/shakespeare-unlimited), run by the prestigious Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington. Leading scholars and authors are interviewed by the lively and incisive Barbara Bogaev on matters ranging from the publication of the First Folio in 1623 to the Bard's influence on Game of Thrones. It's essential listening for Shakespeare geeks and for lovers of literature and the theatre in general. Literature is discussed more widely in The Book Club podcast (spectator.co.uk/podcasts/book-club), run by The Spectator magazine and presented by its literary editor, Sam Leith, with weekly episodes covering a broad array of subjects. Writers discuss their latest works, giving us the chance both to find out what the books are about and to hear the authors' own insights. Illustrious interviewees to date include Salman Rushdie, Donna Leon and Steven Pinker, as well as the latest Booker Prize winner, Douglas Stuart. Among more language-oriented podcasts, I can recommend the BBC's Word of Mouth (bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qtnz; pictured), which is also a long-standing radio series. It is presented by the veteran broadcaster and writer Michael Rosen, who is happy to talk – or argue – with his guests on practically any subject concerning the spoken or written word, providing he thinks his listeners will find it interesting. A particular favourite of mine is an episode called 'How Shakespeare Spoke' in which David Crystal Hon FCIL and his son Ben mimic English accents from the Elizabethan period, which they have reconstructed based on detailed phonetic analyses of plays, poems and other historical documents – the results are surprising! cÉwvtáàá Pragmatics: A slim guide Betty J Birner OUP 2021, 192 pp; ISBN 978-0198828594 Paperback, £14.99 The content of pragmatics is rather like a kitchen drawer full of bits and bobs: discourse, ellipsis, implicature, cultural reference, disambiguation… A hybrid subject drawing on syntax, semantics and stylistics, it has more than a whiff of logic from the philosophy of language. In the space between intention and reception, the author seeks to map "the relationship between what is said and what is meant, and between what is meant and what is understood". Codified by Paul Grice, the maxims that govern effective, spoken communication are of Quantity, Quality, Relation, Manner. In short, conversation is informative, truthful, relevant and orderly when the maxims are observed and fulfilled. When this 'contract' is broken, by design or by mistake, a listener may require a greater cognitive effort to understand, or the information transmission may fail altogether. Examples might be: damning someone with faint praise, using irony, introducing a non sequitur, and talking at great length. Pragmatics can expose the games people play, for example, in holding back key information. Writers and joke tellers do this routinely, of course, for artistic and comic effect. By convention, we mostly resolve the conundrums that we hear and read in relation to reference, sarcasm, vagueness, white lies and so on. Betty Birner's coverage of conversational maxims and performatives (see JL Austin and John Searle) is clear, with good examples. Most of the rest of the book is a close examination of anaphora, cataphora, definiteness and presupposition. Written discourse and spoken exchanges cohere through the use of explicit features, such as adverbials, articles and pronouns, as well as the reader/listener's implicit shared understanding. Changes to normal sentence structure can give rise to a marked meaning, change of emphasis or tone, as can changes to canonical word order (e.g. 'Good soup that was'). The author, Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at Northern Illinois University, gets the basics across well. Much more esoteric is the lengthy analysis of short statements containing a hall- of-mirrors profusion of purported meanings. Similarly, too much space is devoted to a reading of Bertrand Russell's the 'King of France is bald' statement. Neither true nor false, it presupposes a non-existent person, as is immediately apparent. Slim though it is, this book would benefit from Occam's Razor. Graham Elliott MCIL

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