Naomi Truan

Anna Ewa Wieczorek. (2013) Clusivity: A New Approach to Association and Dissociation in Political Discourse. Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. ISBN 978-1443844031 (hb), 250 pp., £44.99. Reviewed by Naomi Truan (Université Paris-Sorbonne (Paris IV) / Freie Universität Berlin) After the collective book Clusivity: Typology and Case Studies of the InclusiveExclusive Distinction edited by Elena Filimonova in 2005, Anna Wieczorek’s monograph Clusivity: A New Approach to Association and Dissociation in Political Discourse (2013) provides a new insight into a still very new field in pragmatic Linguistics: clusivity. As Wieczorek recalls, “clusivity” is “a newly-coined term used to describe different aspects of inclusion and exclusion encoded in language” (p. 24). It can occasionally be treated “as a separate grammatical category and enumerated along with other such categories, e.g. aspect, case, definiteness, modality, mood, voice, etc. (ibid). In her approach, “clusivity markers are treated [] as units that encode the relationship between the speaker and other discourse participants in relation to the context in which the speaker’s utterances are delivered” (p. 212). Although this definition seems quite general, the book actually focuses on “the relationship with the addressees” (p. 1). The specificity of Wieczorek’s work is to understand clusivity as a pragmatic phenomenon in American political discourse in a cognitively grounded model, therefore providing a comprehensive overview of a linguistic phenomenon which cannot be grasped only through the lens of grammar, whereas many previous studies put emphasis on the cross-linguistic distribution of clusivity markers (person marking, pronouns, deixis). The study is based on a small corpus of pre-electoral speeches held by Barack Obama between and February 2007 and November 2008 (p. 122). The first chapter is devoted to a dynamic state of the art in which Wieczorek brings together remarks on clusivity from a social, psychological and linguistic point of view, showing how fruitful interdisciplinary foundations can be for the analysis of political discourse.