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Baby talk and infant speech
394
l&views
Hackett deals quite directly with the problem of describing actual language performance, and the conclusion is quite important: any theory of competence that is inadequate as a basis for a theory of pe rmance is inadequate as a theory of competence. This conclusion, of course hinges on the assumption made above in the discussion of Chapter 9 that linguistics deals with language that real people actually use. This, I believe, accounts for great deal of Hackett’s aversion to transformational grammar, its insistence on black box competence that can have no relation to performance. Hackett, of course, was deali g with ‘ marble slab’ post-Bloomfieldian linguistics, but his conclusion applies equa y well to the transformationalists, as he
notes in the prefatory comments. If you liked Chapter 9, you will like Chapter 12. If you found Chapter 9 offensive, skip Chapter 12. Do not under any circumstances skip Chapter 13, ‘Jokes’. Hackett offers a categorization of jokes that makes a good deal of sense, and one can almost remember parts of it when one finishes the chapter. The jokes themselves provide a good deal of relief (they are the part one remembers) to the rest of the book, and the system of categorization justifies the inclusion of this chapter in a scholarly work (I guess). An equaily interesting categorization awaits the reader who examines footnote 4 and checks to see who provrded Hackett with which jokes. His daughter seems to be the source of some of the more interesting.
Chapter 14, ‘Information, entropy, and the episte_mology of history’, is a fitting conclusion to the book. It is dense, it provides an overdose of information theory, and it combines information theory with the Whorfian theses in interesting and perhaps important ways. For the historical linguist (or linguistic historian, as he should be called) the chapter is a must. For the general historian it should also be required reading. For the general ethnographer and general linguist it is valuable for its discussion of the categorization of perceptions of events as opposed to the categorization of the events themselves. I leave the reader to work out the implications for his own field. As one can, I hope, deduce from this review, Hackett’s book is terribly uneven, insights that make the low points easily forgettable. I have already found ing enhanced by some of Hackett’s comments, and I also detect some effect on my own research. I suspect that the attentive reader will also find himself stimulated and provoked by the book, which is really as much as anyone could ask, especially from the bad boy of American linguistics.
tlbaiburga von Raffler-Engel and Yvan Lebrun (eds.), Baby talk and infant speech. Ze er B.V., Amsterdam, 11976. ard T. Tervoort, Inst. of General Linguistics, University of bY Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. 2, an International Sym\posium on First Language Acquisition Italy. Due to difticulties with the publishing house of Mouton the publication of these Proceedings was delayed until 1974. As a consequence
value as “a survey of thereof, although this volume retains its histori research during the first years of the ninet n-seventies ” (p. I I ), has to be termed outdated in 1978. Some 62 authors, listed alpha Rule learning (like Abbot-Fe1 Schlesinger and Stewart), Feldman-Barton, by talk (Ervin-Tripp, Harkness,
of the book (p. 359). The difference in lengtlh of the contributions - between half a page and 28 pages reflects the difference in quality. It is quite evident that not much can be said in less than one page, yet eleven authors restrict themselves that way, and seventeen more just give a summary of about two pages. The others are somewhat more substantial but only 15 read like complete reports, namely : Blount (’ Babbling in Luo children “), Crystal (’ Developmental intonology ‘), Derwing (‘What kind of rules can children learn?‘), Ferguson (’ Remarks on theories of phonological development ‘), Hoffer (’ Mexican-American acquisition of syntax’), Jarvella (‘ Children’s short-term memory for discourse’), Lar (‘Movement behaviour and preverbalization of five infants in a cross-cultural setting’), Lock (‘Acts instead of sentences’), Pacesova (‘Some notes on developmental universals in Czech-speaking children’), Park (’ Imitation of grammatical and ungrammatical sentences by German speaki lg children ‘), Remick (’ Maternal speech to children during language acquisition’), Sachs an (‘ Language development in a hearing child of deaf parents’), Spilka (‘ guage’), Waterson (’ Perception and spontaneous speech production in a secon and Wells and Ferrier (‘A study of production in the acquisition of phonolo ly a few of these deal with either ’ child speech in its conversational context ‘). talk’ or ‘Infant speech’. It is hardly possible to evaluate each of these full contributions in particular; most of them are of good quality. But for the reader, this book is a failure since it lacks a uniform and explicit internal organization. The editors could at least have used the ten pages reserved for the Introduction for that purpose, instead of giving extensive information on the background of the conference and the publication, which is completely Irrelevant for most people.
Wolf Leslau, English-Amharic context dictionary. Otto Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden, 1973. 1503 pp. Reviewed by Jack Fellman, Bar-Ban University, Ramat-Gan, Israel, Amharic, the African Semitic language which is the national langua
l&views
Hackett deals quite directly with the problem of describing actual language performance, and the conclusion is quite important: any theory of competence that is inadequate as a basis for a theory of pe rmance is inadequate as a theory of competence. This conclusion, of course hinges on the assumption made above in the discussion of Chapter 9 that linguistics deals with language that real people actually use. This, I believe, accounts for great deal of Hackett’s aversion to transformational grammar, its insistence on black box competence that can have no relation to performance. Hackett, of course, was deali g with ‘ marble slab’ post-Bloomfieldian linguistics, but his conclusion applies equa y well to the transformationalists, as he
notes in the prefatory comments. If you liked Chapter 9, you will like Chapter 12. If you found Chapter 9 offensive, skip Chapter 12. Do not under any circumstances skip Chapter 13, ‘Jokes’. Hackett offers a categorization of jokes that makes a good deal of sense, and one can almost remember parts of it when one finishes the chapter. The jokes themselves provide a good deal of relief (they are the part one remembers) to the rest of the book, and the system of categorization justifies the inclusion of this chapter in a scholarly work (I guess). An equaily interesting categorization awaits the reader who examines footnote 4 and checks to see who provrded Hackett with which jokes. His daughter seems to be the source of some of the more interesting.
Chapter 14, ‘Information, entropy, and the episte_mology of history’, is a fitting conclusion to the book. It is dense, it provides an overdose of information theory, and it combines information theory with the Whorfian theses in interesting and perhaps important ways. For the historical linguist (or linguistic historian, as he should be called) the chapter is a must. For the general historian it should also be required reading. For the general ethnographer and general linguist it is valuable for its discussion of the categorization of perceptions of events as opposed to the categorization of the events themselves. I leave the reader to work out the implications for his own field. As one can, I hope, deduce from this review, Hackett’s book is terribly uneven, insights that make the low points easily forgettable. I have already found ing enhanced by some of Hackett’s comments, and I also detect some effect on my own research. I suspect that the attentive reader will also find himself stimulated and provoked by the book, which is really as much as anyone could ask, especially from the bad boy of American linguistics.
tlbaiburga von Raffler-Engel and Yvan Lebrun (eds.), Baby talk and infant speech. Ze er B.V., Amsterdam, 11976. ard T. Tervoort, Inst. of General Linguistics, University of bY Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. 2, an International Sym\posium on First Language Acquisition Italy. Due to difticulties with the publishing house of Mouton the publication of these Proceedings was delayed until 1974. As a consequence
value as “a survey of thereof, although this volume retains its histori research during the first years of the ninet n-seventies ” (p. I I ), has to be termed outdated in 1978. Some 62 authors, listed alpha Rule learning (like Abbot-Fe1 Schlesinger and Stewart), Feldman-Barton, by talk (Ervin-Tripp, Harkness,
of the book (p. 359). The difference in lengtlh of the contributions - between half a page and 28 pages reflects the difference in quality. It is quite evident that not much can be said in less than one page, yet eleven authors restrict themselves that way, and seventeen more just give a summary of about two pages. The others are somewhat more substantial but only 15 read like complete reports, namely : Blount (’ Babbling in Luo children “), Crystal (’ Developmental intonology ‘), Derwing (‘What kind of rules can children learn?‘), Ferguson (’ Remarks on theories of phonological development ‘), Hoffer (’ Mexican-American acquisition of syntax’), Jarvella (‘ Children’s short-term memory for discourse’), Lar (‘Movement behaviour and preverbalization of five infants in a cross-cultural setting’), Lock (‘Acts instead of sentences’), Pacesova (‘Some notes on developmental universals in Czech-speaking children’), Park (’ Imitation of grammatical and ungrammatical sentences by German speaki lg children ‘), Remick (’ Maternal speech to children during language acquisition’), Sachs an (‘ Language development in a hearing child of deaf parents’), Spilka (‘ guage’), Waterson (’ Perception and spontaneous speech production in a secon and Wells and Ferrier (‘A study of production in the acquisition of phonolo ly a few of these deal with either ’ child speech in its conversational context ‘). talk’ or ‘Infant speech’. It is hardly possible to evaluate each of these full contributions in particular; most of them are of good quality. But for the reader, this book is a failure since it lacks a uniform and explicit internal organization. The editors could at least have used the ten pages reserved for the Introduction for that purpose, instead of giving extensive information on the background of the conference and the publication, which is completely Irrelevant for most people.
Wolf Leslau, English-Amharic context dictionary. Otto Harrassowitz, Wiesbaden, 1973. 1503 pp. Reviewed by Jack Fellman, Bar-Ban University, Ramat-Gan, Israel, Amharic, the African Semitic language which is the national langua