Studies in Europragmatics: Some Theoretical Foundations and Practical Implications

While European languages have been quite frequently studied with respect to cultural-historical, sociopolitical and word-form-oriented issues, the study by Joachim Grzega is the first monograph that deals intensively with the search for commonalities of European languages with respect to the use of word-forms, i.e. pragmalinguistic aspects. The book addresses basic general definitory questions (e.g. what is "European", what is "Eurolinguistic"?), it discusses and creates methodological approaches of qualitative and quantitative research, it compares working with naturally gathered (spoken and written) language data (e.g. Wikipedia, EU minutes, Facebook) and working with language data artificially elicited by questionnaires, and it makes suggestions on how the results of analyses on speech-acts, address terms, word-connotations and other communicative patterns could be interpreted. Grzega's volume includes numerous case studies related to synchronic, historical and applied europragmatics, transferring results into numerous figures (among them the map of the flight of the Europragmatic bumblebee, showing the distribution of 36 Europragmatic features).