Book review: Hansun Zhang Waring, Theorizing Pedagogical Interaction: Insights from Conversation Analysis

stage and audience. In a discussion of whether pictures can present narrativity, Schöttler (Chapter 7) argues that pictorial narrative as well as verbal narrative can present events of a story as a whole only when an observer is observing a picture and a reader is reading a text because it is the recipient that makes the entire narrative complete. Among the seven valuable contributions in this collection, two chapters are worth particular mention here – Chapters 3 and 7, which apply novel approaches to narrativity: a neurolinguistic approach and a pictorial approach. The investigation of narrativity from a neurolinguistic viewpoint shows that perspectivization is essential in keeping narratives coherent. Though not as common as linguistic medium, pictorial medium plays an important role in communication. Presenting, reinterpreting and defending the possibility of pictorial narrativity is worth exploring further. The literature on perspectivization is primarily about focalization models of physical and psychological stances of narrator and character, while this volume holds that perspectival complexity constitutes the narrative structure itself. The contributors to this volume argue that the features of narrativity lie within its perspectival structure and narrativity is characterized as a perspectival constellation, a recursive property and a dynamic configuration. This insightful and inspiring collection will be of interest to people in cognitive linguistics, cognitive poetics, stylistics, narrative, narratology and media, since it uncovers the basic mechanisms of perspectivization which are pervasive on different levels of linguistic structure, literary novels and narrative pictures. The collection also offers new empirical investigations on perspectival principles with a variety of approaches to modelling narrativity against the background of perspectivization, and it contributes to the theoretical debate on how to define narrativity. The book as a whole maintains its coherence and unity by focusing on how to deal with the perspectival character of narrativity in all its component chapters. It also succeeds in achieving its goal of extending the present status of narratological research by expanding the scope of narrative perspective in discourse studies in literary and non-literary contexts. A strong point of this collection lies in its involvement in various research fields (cognitive linguistics, discourse pragmatics, neurolinguistics, literature – novel, poetry, drama – and trans-media), where the aim of extending the status of narratological research has been, to a large extent, achieved. However, this diversity also weakens the focus of modelling narrativity against the background of perspectivization. With contributions from distinct approaches and theoretical backgrounds, it seems that no guiding theoretical thread can be seen to link the discussions to a coherent line of reasoning. That might be achieved better if scholars with the same theoretical tradition were invited to contribute their perspectives on the topic of narrativity and perspectivization. As is acknowledged by the editors, further investigations are very much needed to make clear the structure of perspectives so that we can understand more about perspectives on narrativity.