Article and noun in english

Lingua 33, 367-400. © North-Holland Publishing Company 1974

REVIEWS John Hewson, Article and noun in English. Janua Linguarum, Ser. Practica, 104. 137 pp. Mouton, The Hague/Paris, 1972. Dfl. 30.00. Reviewed by A.H. Sommerstein, King's Coll., C~mbridge, England.

The subject-matter of this book is twofold. On the one hand it is a st~dy in the semantic analysis of a.,~pects of the English article s y s t e m ; o n the other, an enthusiastic exposition of the linguistic theories of the late Gustave Guillaumc. It turns out that these two functions interfere with one another. Time and again the author's loyalty to Guillaume and his wish to demonstrate the relevance of the master's views on new ground lead his discussion of the article system into confusion, or away from valid insights that he was on the point of achieving; an~ the aim of explaining as much as possible of article usage in the small compass of this book (made even less by the necessity of explaining the fundamentals of the theory before the main discussion begins) results in many important phenomeaa being treated only scrappily or in passing. En revtznche, this first full-length attempt (other than Guillaume's own works) to apply Guillaumean theory in linguistic analysis serves only to demonstrate how very little the theory has to contribute to real linguistic investigation. I shall not here attempt to summarize Guillaume's theory of language. Hewson, who, as he tells us in his foreword, has had the advantage of being able to consult Guillaume's unpublished work and draw upon the 'oral tradition among his immediate disciples', has done this far better than I could, although he disclaims any pretence to exhaustiveness; the interested student will read Hewson's second chapter and then, fortified by an acquaintance with many of the basic concepts of the theory, will no doubt wish to proceed to such works as Valin (1953) and Guillaume (1964). A vital question that has to be answered about Guillaumean theory, and which Hewson dodges, is whether the apl:aratus of 'basic intuitional mechanisms', 'notional and structural ideations, 'dematerialization', and the like, constitutes an empirically testable hypothesis. When we read (43) that (after half a century!) 'many of the implications of G~lillaume's theories have not yet been worked out', the prospects of establishing the empirical nature of those theories do not seem bright; though we must notl,~ the implied claim that some of the implications of the theories have been w:-~rked out, and ask in that case, as we would with any other scientific hypothesis, what these implications are and what conceivable data would be inconsistent with them. On these points we are not enlightened by Hewson; perhaps, however, on at least some topics, we can try for ourselves.

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One ~turprising feature of the 'basic intuitional mechanism' which is the foundation of most Guillaumean linguistic analysis is that it is said to be relevant only or at least primarily for Indo-European languages. This claim is made explicit in the following passage (99f.): Those peoples who speak the languages of the Indo-European family have a remarkable facility, not found to the same degree in other language communities and seemingly absent in some (e.g., Chinese), of generalizing from a particular instance. It has often been remarked that Aristotelian logic is a purely Indo-European affair. Aristotle spoke of Induction, the main business of which is to lead on from the particular to the general, so that we see by a leap of intuition (Greek vo~¢) the laws of nature as exemplified in a particular instance. The physical sciences also aim at finding laws, and the theoretical and experimental methodology of these disciplines reflect Aristotelian induction: the proposal of an axiom from a particular instance and the testing under experimental conditions to see whether this general statement may be considered true. [... I But the important thing for us here is that this faculty is reflected in the usage of the general article. Before we can generalize inductively, we must present, or be presented with, the particular instance from which the further generalization is to be made. In the article system this task is done by the indefinite article. Once this has been performed we may, from the instance in mind, proceed to our generalization. This is the function of the definite article within the article system, hence its anaphoric value. I will not quarrel with the fact that what Hewson calls 'Aristotelian induction' includes an important deductive component, the 'testing under experimental conditions'; nor with his use of 'axiom' to mean 'hypothesis'; nor with his habit of citing an established cliche" (whether about the 'Westernness' of Aristotelian logic, the poverty of abstract expression in Latin, or what Heraclitus said about flux) without a reference and without apparent awareness that the clich6 is open to dispute. But are we really meant to take it as a consequence of Guillaume's theory that the faculty of induction, present (though inexplicitly) in the very rat that desists from pressing a bar after a few electric shocks, is absent in the Chinese (unless one of them is so fortunate as to learn an Indo-European language)? Hewson's evidence for his assertion about Chinese consists in the word 'seemingly'. Hewson never makes it clear whether he believes that any part of the 'psychomechanics' of language is common to all human languages: but it is hard to see what could be universal if the faculty of generalizing, admitted by the most radical behaviourists to be a universal human endowment, is regarded as specific to certain language families. The theory will thus have some difficulty in explaining the established fact that any prelinguistic infant is in principle capable of acquiring any natural language. Another field in which test implications of Guillaumean theory can fairly easily be deduced is the theory of the evolution of language. Language (at least IndoEuropean language) is seen as having an inherent tendency towards 'dematerialization' of the signifie" of the noun and verb, whereby the noun moves away from the 'support" of a particular concrete referent and the verb from the particularization

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implied by person, tense and aspect marking,. I'he development of an auxiliary system for the verb and an article system for the noun is seen as a corollary of this evolutive movement. It would thus be strong confirmation of tile theory if it could be shown that in those IE languages which have not developed a.a article system (and in these languages only), the noun remains close to a material, particular sense. This is not 3hown anywhere in the book; we have only some vague remarks about Latin. Is it the case that the noun is more 'dematerialized' in Bulgarian, which has an article system, than in Russian, which does not? We are not told. The claim is made, indeed (66), that 'those languages that have kept alive a vigorous case system are precisely the ones that have developed no artic/e'; but this statement is vacuous until 'vigorous' is defined. And since to make the statement true t~ae case system of Classical Greek (five cases, with numerous prepositions able to govern three cases with different meanings) must be classified as non-vigorous, it seems unlikely that a useful definition of 'vigorous' could be devised. A ubiquitous feature of Hewson's book is the diagram shown below, which throughout, with varying labels, symbolizes the 'basic intuitional mechanism' of indo-European language: the binary contrast between the particular and the universal, and the movement of thought from one pole of this contrast to the other. In the version of the diagram here given (taken from p. 39 of Hewson's book) P and G stand for 'particular' and 'general' respectively.

1 .... GI

-

/

P1 P2

J G2

Hewson meiotically describes as 'rather startling at first sight' the view that this schema is fundamental to everything in language, but assures us that it is 'borne out by a variety of supporting evidence'. It soon becomes clear, however, that by 'evidence' Hewson means anything suggesting the relevance of any binary contrast whatever in human language or thought. The remark of Contreras (1966) on Valin's attempt to show that Guillaumean psychomechanics was essentially the same as traditional comparative linguistics is equally apposite to the present case: 'The similarities shown are trivial - so trivial that they belong to the class of broad similarities which can be shown for almost any two objects'. Not one of the items of 'evidence' bears in any way at all on the claim that the 'basic intuitional mechanism' of language has to do with the two-way movement depicted above. 1 can find in this book nothing to suggest that Guillaumean linguistics, considered as a theory of language, has anything to be said for it. Nevertheless, notions suci~ as generalization and particularization, to which the theory gives prominence, can help to give interesting insights into language; and it is in the application of these and other Guillaumean notions to the article system of English that the main interest of the book under review lies. The first chapter is on the history of the article system. Hewson begins by demolishing the suggestion that the article systems of European languages all derive

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from that of Greek, an easy task indeed; the rest of the chapter is devoted to the development of article systems in Germanic and specifically in English, viewed within the Guillaumean paradigm (cf. above, p. 368). On p. 20, seeking to give a principled account of the use or non-use of the definite article with proper names, Hewson suggests that the criterion is the degree to which the object in question has 'clearly defined outlines', or more fully (110), 'proper names representing a single entity of clearly defined outline resist the use of the article much more, and, from the historical point of view, much longer, than names that represent entities lacking clear, definite outlines'. This hypothesis is related to the function of the definite article in Guillaumean theory, which is to 'lend form to what would otherwise be a formless representation'; the point is that a unique 'single entity of clearly defined outline' has all the 'form' it can cope with and doesn't need to t~orrow any. It seems unlikely, though, that this attractive generalization can be upheld. When he seeks to apply it to compound geographical names (the X Canal, Y Island and so forth) Hewson is forced to use a good deal of special pleading. For instance, he notes that street and all its variants (road, avenue, etc.) take no article;and he says that these objects 'are felt to have defined, restricted boundaries that may be drawn on a map'. Yet, just before, he has argued that this is not true of rivers: 'It is impossible to say where the St. Lawrence River ends and the Gulf of St. Lawrence begins'. Maybe. But most rivers are not like the St. Lawrence. Either they retain the designation 'river' right up to the point at which they reach the sea, or else they merge with another river just as two streets may converge. And, on the other hand, some roads are like the St. Lawrence in the relevant respect. The road from Cambridge to Milton begins as Milton Road and ends as Cambridge Road, and it is impossible to say where one ends and the other begins. Again (to take an example not considered by Hewson), why is the definite article normal with channel and strait but not with sound? (Note the Bristol Channel and the Tiran Strait(s), but Long Island Sound.) And do bridges named after the rivers they span (the Forth B,'idge, the Severn Bridge) have less clearly defined outlines than those named after the places they serve (London Bridge, Brooklyn Bridge)? After the second chapter (which might have stood first) on the fom,,dations and methodological j;ustification of Guillaumean linguistics, Hewson turn:, to 'the theory of the noun'. He begins (46) with a notional definition of the noun ('a sign used to refer to entities ... as if they had dimension within the s p a c e - t i m e continuum') which is better than most such definitions, neatly capturing the fact that a nominal abstraction can be reified (and personified) while a verbal abstraction, for instance, cannot: it is very hard to accept !'to procrastinate is the thief o f time, and *procrastinate is the thief of time is quite impossible. The noun is distinguished from the adj,ctive by having 'its own internal support', i.e. (very roughly) a referent, whereas the adjective does not; as a result, when an adjective is used without a noun, it has to 'search' for a support, which it finds (why?) in 'the total of the substantial [substantival??l elements to which it is normally attached'. The support of the beautiful is thus the totality of those entities which are properly described as beautiful.

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Hewson now (56) attempts to use i m p o r t - s u p p o r t theory to explain two observations about the substantivized adjective, (1) that it is always of more restricted meaning than the true adjective and (2) that it is always (in English) definite. The first observation is explained on the ground that the true adjective 'is not limited by a support'; that is, the true adjective can modify virtually any noun, while the substantivized adjective can only be understood as modifying those nouns 'to which it is normally attached'. Although Hewson does not succeed in making his meaning completely clear, this explanation may well be on the right lines. Less satisfactory is the account given of the obligatory definiteness of the substantivized adjective: 'the import of the [true] adjective is brought to bear directly upon the support of the noun it modifies; the attachment is not considered permanent and the import of the adjective is in fact removable or transferable. In the case of the substantivized adjectiw.~ the import of the adjective is brought to bear first of all upon its own substantial element, which is then identified with the noun, and the notion is thus felt to be totally attached to the noun'. I find this a complete non-sequitur. Why should an import brought directly to bear on the support of the head noun not be considered permanently attached to it? Why not the other way round? What, in any case, is the force of the metaphor 'brought to bear'? In some extremely interesting exemplification, Hewson shows that the contrast of temporary versus permanent _~ttachment of the content of the adjective to the referent of the noun has some exr, lanatory value; he does not show that the psychomechanical account of how this content is 'brought to bear' is in any way relevant. The development of an article system (69) takes place wheN, in the course of linguistic evolution, it becomes possible to view the import-supl~ort relation in the noun in two different ways: as movement from the general to tile particular, from import to support, and as movement towards the general, from :;upport to import. The former is expressed in English by the indefinite article, the latter by the definite. Thus, whereas the function of a is to isolate an individual, the assumes that the individual has been isolated. Hewson contrasts the sentences A table is a useful article o f furniture and The table is a useful article o f furniture. Both, it nlight be thought, are generic statements; but he points out that it is the first, not the second, that evokes an individual table. This statement is plausible enough, but one would prefer such a fine judgement to be backed up by some empirical evidence. A litt!e such evidence too little - is provided on p. 101. From here on the positive contributions of Hewson owe little to Guillaumean theory; often, indeed, ~t gets in the way. One of the most interesting things in the book is his account of the English demonstratives ( 8 2 - 3 ) . He sb,ows, what n o b o d y to my knowledge has pointed out before, that there are important parallelisms between this and the indefinite article; both, in particular, can have the function of introduction (Well, I was walking along the street and I m e t a]this man and he said ...), whereas that, like the, is anaphoric. Hewson analyses the contrast between the two demonstratives in a completely general fashion as one of approach versus withdrawal, rather than of nearness versus distance. (He does indeed illustrate this analysis by two Guillaumean diagrams; but the isomorphism between the analysis of

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the demonstratives and the 'basic intuitional mechanism' is at so gross a level that not even the basic particularizing vs generalizing contrast is preserved.) It must be said that there are certain difficulties with this analysis. For example, when I last used this, it was anaphoric - and it could not have been replaced by that. Also, I still do not think that this and that can be fruitfully studied apart from the adverbs here and there (cf. Sommerstein 1972, 205ff.) And it is at first sight difficult to analyse here and there in terms of approach and withdrawal. Perhaps, though, in a future paper Hewson will show us how this can be done and account for the other difficulty too. Like much else in the present book, the matter deserves more space than it gets. Also n o t e w o r t h y is the discussion ( 9 1 - 6 ) of the use of the indefinite article with what Hewson calls 'attributes' and others have called predicate nominals. Hewson b~;gins by excluding from consideration many predicate attributes which are clearly to be taken as adjectival (e.g. Church o f England in She liked her servants to be Church o f England; Hewson notes that these attributes are modified by adverbs, n,~ by oni,,.,~ .... ~ Genuine ,,,,~a;,,~, . . . . ~.,o~.. ,at, n., ~...~.~F~..:,~ ..,-..I present the notion 'a specimen of a category', but no article when they name a category that can in principle have only one specimen (like the nominal in Nixon became president). The distinction is like that between c o m m o n and proper nouns: the inherent meaning ('potential significate' in Hewson's terms) of the latter is already maximally specific and cannot be further particularized by an article. On p. 93 Hewson rightly affirms, against his favourite whipping-boys the pedagogical grammarians of English, that the use or non-use of a(n) with predicate nominals is not a matter of surface syntax, or as he puts i t , " n o t dependent on 'rules .... thus He was elected president is not to be accounted for by a rule proscribing the article in predicates which are part of the object of an active vex'b or the subject of a passive verb. Instead, however, of continuing with the distinction mentioned i n t h e last paragraph, he introduces a new one: the indefinit*, article is used when the reference is to 'an instance, a person' and omitted when the reference is to 'a status, position or office'. This leads him to finer and finer hairsplitting, and eventually (95) to seeing the difference between (i) and (ii) in terms of 'role or status' versus 'instance of profession' (i.e. species of the genus 'p:rofession'): (i) As coach he was a great success. (ii) As a coach he was a great success• The true distinction to be drawn here is that drawn on p. 92. in (i) the person referred to is filling the position of coach (sc. to a particular team), which can only be filled by one person; in (ii) there is no such implication - the sentence could perfectly well be used of a long career spent coaching many different teams. The importance oi the requirement that the position be one that can only be fil~ed by one person, if the article is to be omRted, is seen in the marked acceptability difference between (iii) and (iv): (iii) As ceach he was a great success but as goalkeeper he was a flop. (iv) ? ' A s coach he was a great success but as player he was a flop. Seme of Hewson's examples, it is true, seem not to support this distinction. In They took me prisoner, for instance, prisonership is certainly not a position that

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only one person can hold. But it must be doubted whether prisoner in this usage is a noun at all: it does not, for instancc, pluralize (They took us prisoner/*prisoners). Note also that in this idiomatic expression neither take nor prisoner may be varied in any way; if the omission of the article is really due to the fact that prisoner refers to a status, why can we not say *They took me prisoner o f war, and why is the article normally present in The), made me a Prisoner when ?They took me a prisoner is of dubious acceptability? In short, this idiom can't support any theory of articles. Another example, lie's been captain for several years now, is for me possible only when captain has its 'unique-status' sense of 'person commanding (ship, team, etc.)', not (pace Hewson) in the sense 'officer of a certain rank'. What is disturbing about this section, though, is that Hewson never seems quite sure which side of the fence he is on. In the middle of exemplifying the s t a t u s instance distinction he speaks as if he was exemplifying the quite different uniquestatus/nonunique-status distinction (~No article is necessary since no one else could have held the office lheadmaster of Rugbyl during the period that he [Arnoldl held it', 9 5 ). An important topic that regrettably gets only half a page ( i 0 i) is the distinction between the generic uses of the and a, illustrated by the following paradigm: (v) The/a motor car is a practical means of conveyance. (vi) The/*a motor car has become very popular. Hewson's explanation is a little confused, but his main point seems to be that the indefinite article is never completely free of particular reference, and so cannot be used generically unless it could also have been used, sah,a veritate, in a particularizing sense. 'A single car is a practical means of conw~yance, but a single car is not necessarily popu,ar.' These two sentence pairs exemplify far better than the 'table' sentences (73) the distinction Hewson wishes to draw between the two generic articles, and there is other evidence pointing the same way: (vii) The/a beaver builds dams. (viii) The/*a honey-bee has a complex social system. But probing a little further, we find problems: (ix) The/a second car has become a popular status symbol are equally acceptable, although an individual car, though it may be a status symbol, can hardly be a popular one. As in the case of the demonstratives, difficulties of this kind may well not be insuperable: ! mention them only to show that usage is more complex than one might infer from Hewson's treatment. The failure of the generic definite article to turn up with plural nouns is very r'eatly explained (105). In the singular, the generic definite article (the oak), in contrast with zero (oak, the wood), indicate~,; that we are dealing with a noun which is (either inherently or for the nonce) countable ('numerical'). But plurals are countable by definition; hence this particular contrast is neutralized, and the definite article is specialized to indicate non-genericness. Substantivized adjectives, on the other hand, even when semantically and concordially plural, are never themselves marked for number and so cannot do without the article. So we get cripples (generic) without an article, but the lame wi~:h one. Hewson does not consider the case of those nouns which have no overt marker of plurality (e.g. deer); but this account requires us to suppose that these nouns, in the plural, do take a plural

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morpheme, though one that has no phonetic realization. This of course is a conclusion that many have reached on other grounds. l will discuss one further matter in some detail: Hewson's account of the use or no,-use of the with modified proper names such as young Shakespeare. His explication of the contrast is that the use of the article implies a 'quantitative, exterior view' as distinct from a 'qualitative, interior view' of the signifid. These terms, however, are very vague. The clearest contrast between a phrase like young Shakespeare and the y o u n g Shakespeare is not so much in the 'view of the proper noun significate' as in the function of the modifier. In the former sentence it is descriptive; in the latter, as Hewson rightly says, it is contrastive. To be more precise it is first necessary to distinguish, as Hewson does not, between prenominal and postnominal modifiers. A post-modified proper noun takes an article only if the modifier plays the role of a restrictive relative clause: we can have the Engelbert Humperdinck who was a composer i but not the A d o l f Hitler who was a dictator (unless Adolf had a namesake). This is essentially the same distinction we have seen above for 'status' nouns; if the status (whether of presidency, goalkeeperhood or Hitlerhood) is unique, there is no article. With most premodified proper nouns things are different. Using the phrase the Shakespeare who was bald presupposes the existence of another Shakespeare who was not bald; but this is not so with the bald Shakespeare: (x) Lice were a great nuisance to the long-haired Elizabethans, but the bald Shakespeare did not have to bother about them so much. The modifier is still contrastive, but the contrast now is not between two Shakespeares or two aspects of Shakespeare, but between baldness and non-baldness. But now try the same kind of sentence with a different adjective: (xi) The older generation thought iLt presumptuous for a non-graduate to write plays, but young Shakespeare ignored such prejudice. If in (xi) we used the y o a n g Shakespeare, this would imply a contrast, not (as in the actual sentence) with other older men, but with the older Shakespeare. What is going on? Young, with a very few other adjectives (1 can think of only oM and little), behaves prenominally more or less exactly like post-nominal modifiers: it takes an article when and only when it is restrictive. The majority of prenominal modifiers, when used with proper names of persons, require the article in any case when they express any contrast at all. When they express no contrast they can be used without article, though this imparts a journalistic flavour to the style: (xii) ??Handsome Shakespeare was very popular with the women. (xiii) Handsome, debonair Linus van Pelt acknowledged the cheers of the crowd as he accepted the Man of the Year award. It is hard to tell whether this data pattern would be predicted by Hewson's theory, or, what is more important, whether it is even consistent with the theory. Once again thir,.gs are less simple than Hewson makes them seem. 1 For p o s t c r i t y ' s sake it should be m e n t i o n e d t h a t besides the c o m p o s e r there was a pc-~mlar singer o f the early 1970's w h o p e r f o r m e d u n d e r the n a m e Engelbert H u m p e r d i n c k . Up t , the time o f writing no singer to m y knowledge has t a k e n the n a m e A d o i f Hitler.

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The book contains a disturbiIlg number of errors, linguistic and otherwise, which must be debited to the author. I note a few. (p. 5) it is about time linguists stopped i:lforming us that "we are taught that O table! is the vocative case'. The source for this appears to be a story of the early struggles of Winston Churchill, nem'y ninety years ago, with Latin (n.b. not English) grammar. In what school is English grammar still taught as it was taught to Alice ('a mouse - of a mouse - to a mouse - O mouse!')? (p. 22) The formal substitute for L o r d D u r k a m is not the Lord D u r h a m but the Earl o f Durham (the Lord Tweedsmt, ir, though, is correct) (p. 29) Note t) presumably refers to l+waddell's definition of the phoneme, which he put forward precisely because prewous definitions (whether by 'behaviorists' or others) had not 'treated the phoneme as an imaginary linguistic abstractior~'. (p. 35) The statement that 'a code necessarily has a one-to-one relationship with the codified text' may mean that there must be symbol-to-symbol correspondence or merely that a coded message must be unambiguous: in neither sense is it correct. Incidentady, "codify" does not mean 'ettcode'. (p. 36) Heraclitus is dated about a century too early. (p. 66) French has not quite succeeded in eliminating from the noun system 'the expression of linguistic number': note the productive - a l . ' - a u x class. (p. 77, para. 2, line I) After 'names of people" add 'and towns'. (p. 88) In its generic use, a Mr J o n e s does not necessarily mean 'a man like Mr. Jones': note N o Democratic ticket is c o m p l e t e w i t h o u t a K e n n e d y , or indeed N o ICelsh rugby team is c o m p l e t e w i t h o u t a Jones, where the requirement is not similarity to a specific person, but in one case membership of a 'clan' and in the other possession of a particular name. (p. 104) In February the fifth, the [ifth is not in apposition to February in any normal sense. (p. 108) The Crystal Palace never had a chance to lose its article: it was burnt down first. (The name is now used without an article, but not to refer to the original building.) (p. 112, last line) For 'and their pets' read 'and ~nimals'. (p. 115, note I 1) For 'as quam is to tam in L+~tin (tam ... q u a m ) ' read 'as tanto is to quanto in Latin (quanto ... tanto)'. This is a disappointingly scrappy book. It scratches the surface of a great number of interesting phenomena, many of which have been little investigated in recent years; but again and again the author is content if the phenomena can be described, at least approximately, in Guillaumean terms. Few things about the articles in English are simple; but a theory of the article system must be more than 'a system which the reader himself can utilize, if it makes sense, to explain or classify usage that he may encounter' (132). As was said above, it must be a testable hypothesis. At some points we have seen Hewson propound testable hypotheses; but Guillaumean theory remains so vague that we get no idea what the relationship is between the hypotheses and the theory, and at the end of the book we still do not know whether the theory makes any empirical claims about language. Meanwhile there is room for deeper study of particular aspects of the usage of the articles, and continuing attempts to interrelate these aspects. It is to be hoped that Hewson will be among those who will one day give us the fruits of these attempts.

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References Contreras, H:, 1966. Review of R. Valin: La m~thode comparative en tinguistique historiq'~e et en psychom~canique du langage. Language 4 2 , 1 0 6 - 8 . Guillaume, G., 1964. Langage et science du langage. Quebec and Paris. S o m m e r s t e i n , A.H., 1972. On the so-called definite article in E~xglish. Linguist. Inq. 3, 197-209. Twaddeli, W.F., 1935. On defining the phoneme. Language Monogra!~h No. 16. Reprinted in: M. Joos (ed.), Readings in linguistics I. Chicago: University of ChicJgo Press (4th ed., 1966), 55-80. Valin, R., 1953. Petite introduction ~ la psychom~canique du langage. Quebec: Presses Universitaires Laval.

Bertil Malmberg, Phon&ique g6n6rale et romane: 6tudes en allemand, anglais, espagnol et franqais. Janua Linguarum, Series Maior, 42. Mouton & Co., The Hague, 1971. 478 pp. Dfl. 115.000 Reviewed by E. Pulgram, Romance Languages, Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor, U.S.A. The forty-five essays assembled in this volume were written between 1941 and 1967, a quarter-century that covers most of Malmberg's activity to date. Twentyseven papers deal with general, and eighteen with Romance linguistics, ranging in length from three to forty-two pages. Malmberg belongs entirely to the S a u s s u r e - T r u b e t z k o y - S a p i r - B l o o m f i e l d Jakobson-Martinet school of linguistics, that is, to classical structural linguistics, both synchronic and diachronic; but it must be remarked (and I shall have occasion to return to this point) that he is European more than American in that he avoids the strong behavioristic and positivistic leanings of the post-Bloomfieldiaas, though this does not, as indeed it did not need to, detract from the scientific integrity of his work. Post-structural (generative, transformational) directions are completely left out of account, to the point of scarcely being criticized even negatively; there is in this book but one single explicit reference to "les chomskyens - derni6re branche sur l'arbre de la linguistique..." (296), in an article of 1966. To be sure, contributi~. as dealing with phonological matters offer less occasion for taking a stand on a theory of syntactic transformations; but if Malmberg appears not to take cognizance of generative phonology either, one cannot but infer a belief on his part that one need not discard or replace structural phonology - a belief amply borne out by the 478 pages of this book, to say nothing of the thousands of pages of writings by many authors. All the more is the pity that all this work is neglected by an entire generation of linguists, too lazy or too indoctrinated to care. The term phon~tique in this book refers to both phonetics and phonemics, to what is often called phonology, the study of the sounds of languages; phonologie on the other hand, mostly means phonemics. The view that phonetics (in the narrower sense of the term) is not part of linguistics, is laid to a deserved rest in the earliest of the papers, of 1941, and of course pervades all subsequent contributions. That phonetics occupies itself with the analysis of the physical properties does not change the fact that it Jinvestigates:. not just any odd noise, but noises that serve as