Papers form the fifth regional meeting of the Chicago linguistic society

Lingua 26 (1971) 199-224, North-Holland Publishing Company REVIEWS - COMPTES-RENDUS R. I. BINNICK, ALICE DAVIDSON, GEORGIAM. GREEN and J. L. MORGAN(eds), Papers/orm the Filth Regional Meeting o] the Chicago Linguistic Society. April 18-19, 1969. Dept. of Linguistics, University of Chicago. Chicago IMnoi:, 196.0. iv, 462 pp. Within very recent years we have experienced a bumper crop of neologisms defining the escalating activities within and about linguistics: psycholinguistics, sociohngt:istics, stylostatistics - and the list will grow so long as new permutations of related fields cont:nue to be explored. It was initially assumed that such 'crosstalk' was simply the inevitable consequence of activity in a field as new as linguistics. The science had emerged and was booming, grants were awarded, and papers were published. The simple arithmetic of manpower in the academic and research world made it clear that psychologists:, sociologists, literary analysts, computer scientists, and dozens of other types of personnel would be co-opted to provide contour for the young science. That contour, dynamic as it is, has been at least roughly defined, and with that definition has come a whole new establishment, complete with Ph. D. programs, textbooks, and library call numbers. Therefore the 'cross-talk' we are experiencing today is no longer motivated by the novelty of the discipline. Rattier, the establishment has been served notice that the invention of structures or theories which ignore the language user as a ~erson are no longer acceptable. Whether linguistics as a science has the theoretical muscle necessary for this new dialog remains to be seen. A n d whether we ,Hew the 'interdisciplinat~studies' trend as a welcome harvest of linguistic endeavor or whether we see such a development as a sign of academic flabbiness, the age of the what is definitely giving way to the age of the how. Victor H. Yngve, in a superb 'trend-of-the-art' paper, notes the new theme which dominates not only this conference but the entire field: 199 200 REVIEWS -- COMPTES-RENDUS As a matter of fact, this has probably actually always been the real goal of linguistics, anyway, that is, how people use language to communicate. But the inhibitions of the older generation have caused them to neglect the study of people as language users. They have tended in public to ave~t their gaze as if ashamed. But the younger generation has begun to realize that people are beautiful and that there it~really nothing wrong in looking at them. They have the suspicion that their elders have always had a secret fascination for the whole subject. But we have somehow got hung up on this language structure business (458). The editors of the proceedings have reserved Yngve's paper for the end rather than the preface of the book, a decision which urges the reader to interpret rather than simply to observe. On the whole, one gains a clear impression that the earlier period of game-playing in linguistics is over. The main classification of the papers is ' S y n t a x and semantics' and occupies over sixty percent of the book. The hundreds of examples cited in the papers indicate that the theories and refinements of theories are indeed attempting courageously to account for 'any and all' utterances of language. Since these real-language examples are so comprehensive, it is frequently as demanding to follow them as it is to read the text of the papers themselves. The Chicago forum began a decade ago as a local meeting and has grown to national proportions; this inclusiveness is reflected in the tenor of the papers. When authors take issue with weU-established theories, the tone is conciliatory and constructive. F o r example Gregory Lee of Ohio State University offers a ver¢ thorough reformulation of Chomsky and Halle's 'main stress rule' from Sound patterns o] English. Lee offers a list of syllable-stripping rules which provide a plausible mechanism for automatically ignoring post-tonic syllables. His reformulation achie¢es economy by eliminating the specification, within the stress rule itself, of the syllables to be ignored. Another feature of the conference which provided a welcome appearance of cohesiveness was that even those studies of a rather esoteric nature contributed notab)y to the major problems of linguistic theory. Alice Daviso:a's 'Reflexivization and m o v e m e n t rules in relation to a class of ~.'~:indipsychological predicates' raises the intriguing question for languages with case-markings: at what point between semantic repre~entation and surface structure does REVIEWS -- C O M P T E S - R E N D U S 201 case-marking become syntacticaily more significant than word order ? In an exceptionally lucid and convincing presentation, George Lakoff examines the problem of rule-ordering in 'On derivational constraints.' He notes that elementary transformations 'define constraints on successive phrase-markers'. He mentions such already-formulated constraints as those of Ross on movement rules the theory of exceptions (Lakoff and Lakoff), Postal's crossover principle, and output conditions for pronominalization (Lakoff). The present paper is a suggestion 'that there is a wider variety [of constraints] than had previously been envisioned'. He argues for a level of 'derived structure', preceding surface structure, at which derivational constraints operate to relate semantic corn.handrelationships to precede- and command-relationships. The specific constraints in this paper affect quantifiers such as many and/ew, as in the following examples. (1) Many men read few books. (2) Few books are read by many men. Underlying structures of these sentences are examined to account for the semantic differences between them. The two constraints which are formulated relate the delicate interaction of 'semantic command' (many commands Jew in [1]; Jew commands many in [2?) with 'precedence' (left-to-right order). Fortunately, Lakoff accounts for the possible role of exceptionally heavy word stress as a determinant in deep structure. In a note referring to this phenomenon, which he implies as occurring only very infrequently, he offers the following hierarchy of relationships, operative 'in such dialects': (I) Commands (but is not commanded by) (2) Has much heavier st:ess than (3) Precedes i t would seem more palatable to recognize that such stress is likely to occur in any sentence for purpose of contrast. With a heavy stress on few in the first example above, the underlying structure would be 'The books that many men read are few, not many'. Lakoff finds that 'the appropri~.~e level of 'derived structure' must (a) precede surface structure, (b) follow the passive transformation, and (c) precede the insertion of lexical items such as dissuode, ~ohibit, prevelct, keep, etc.'. Thus he concludes that it is impossible to maintain the concept that (a) deep structure is the output 202 REVIEWS -- COMPTES-RENDUS of the last lexical insertiion rule and that (b) deep structure precedes all upwards-toward-the.surface cyclic rules. As a volume of proceedings, this book is quite acceptable, although it suffers frora the customary shortcomings of papers as opposed to polished monographs. Since the primary criteria for its compilation were speed and economy, the editors wisely chose photoreproduction of the originals for the layout of the work, and while there is an understandable number of typing errors, the book is not seriously hampered in its readibility. The editors are especially to be commended for tlteir sequencing of the papers, which provides an exceptionally high degree of continuity from one article to the next. Whitworth College, Dept. o/Modern Lang,J:ages, Spokane, Wash. 992~8. U.S.A. RONALD C. TURNER Francisco R. ADRADOS, Estudios de ling~istica general. Editorial Planeta, Barcelona, 1969, 3,25 pages. L'autem" "dent de publier deux gros volumes intitul6s Lingai:tica estructurai (I~adrid 1969, 1008 p.), v~ritable manuel de synth~se, actually6, et tr~s riche de documentation. Le volume ici recer~s~ r6unit une dizaine d'articles des dix dernitres ann,~es. Estruaura del vocab~lario y estructura de la teng~m. L'auteur precise dans une note irtitiale que cet article, 6crit en 1964, n'a pu tenir compte de nombteux travaux r~cents de s~mantique. I1 essaie de mettre en parall~le des types de raisormements utilis6s en phonologic et en analyse s~mantique. On regrettera clue des schemes ne viennent synth&iser la pens~e, fond~e en g6n~ral sur des relations logiques (comme le sont en fait ceUes 5e la phonologic). M.R.A. &udie, ~t partir de plusieurs exemples, i'organisation de pefits inventaires de mots (ex. hombre II v,~r~n/rnuim), qui se caract6risent par des traits d6jk eonnus clans le domaine grammatical (s~mes g~n6riques). L'auteur emploie beaucoup le terme de neutralisation, avec des sens qui semblent varies: e11tre autres celui de 'disparition de s~mes', dans le cas de hoja qui perd ses traits de 'eouleur' et