Geoffrey N. Leech (1936–2014)

Given the anodyne title I had no idea till I read it that this is (among other things) a foundational text in politeness theory, where Leech fleshes out what politeness phenomena like tact, generosity, approbation, modesty, agreement, sympathy, and irony mean pragmalinguistically alongside Grice's communication maxims.

That alone makes this a crucial read for anyone interested in the interpersonal aspect of language. Some of the rest is descriptive schematization of the type that is uninteresting to me, but Leech also does. a magnificent job critiquing Searle's idea of illocutionary acts (that sort of reduce language to "statements that do things" like "I hereby christen this boat/declare you married/leave this party" and treat huge swaths of normal speech problematically as exceptions or questionably as forced examples; he does so partly with a kind of corpus angle before its time, reminding us just how important proper corpora were for counteracting scholasticism like the generative semantics, still somewhat influential at the time, in which every indicative statement, like "It's Saturday," must be preceded with an implicit declaration, like "I declare that it's Saturday," for abstruse theoretical reasons. Bad rubbish well disposed of.

He gets us a lot closer to understanding the social aspect of language as a kind of damp emotional process that happens between nerve bundles as opposed to a volitional effort to express a change and thereby affect it (which, weirdly, leaves illocution as a kind of magic, a vow or incantation) or formal exchange of propositions among (hereby-)proposing machines. (I was working on a sex analogy but maybe nobody needs that.)… (mehr)