- Email: [email protected]
Readings in stratificational linguistics
398
Reviews
fur ein bestimmtes Eurocacup-Spiel zu beschreiben. Textreduktion ist ein indbesondere aus der automatischen Sprachverarbeitung bekanntes Verfahren, doch scheint es fraglich zu sein, ob dieses Verfahren, jedenfalls in linguistischer Hinsicht, reversibe1 ist. Ein gegebenes Thema kommt nicht notwendigerweise nur einem einzigen Text zu. Insofern konstituieren Themen Klassen von Texten. Zwar ist die Zerlegung einer Menge von Texten in them?tisch definierte Klaswn von Texten ein sinnvolles Verfahren, doch sollte unter dem Namen generative Textgrtzmmatik nur die Erzeugung einer Menge von Texten, das heisst die AufzHhlung dieser Texte mit Hilfe von Regeln, behandelt werden. Diese kritischen Anmerkungen sollten jedoch dem allgemeinen Urteil keinen Abbruch tun, dass Dresslers Einfiihrung ihre Au.fgabe, einen Einblick in eine erst entstehende Disziplin der Sprachwissenschaft zu geben, vollauf erfiillt.
Adam Makkai and David G. Lockwood (eds.), Readings in stratificational linguistics. Univ. of Alabama Press, 1973. vi, 33 1 pp. $9.00. Reviewed by J. Omstein, Dept. of Modern Languages and Linguistics, Univ. of Texas at El Paso, Texas, U.S.A.
During the twentieth century there have been two, and only two, leading ‘schools’ of American linguistics. For whatever it is worth, European colleagues often tend to comment on the American tendency to follow some charismatic leader in our field, referring, of course, both to Bloomfield and Chomsky respectively. (Alas, Sapir, an admirable ‘giant’ never enjoyed such status!) Nevertheless, other schools do exist, but as Newman once remarked about tagmemics, “these ‘other’ currents made their debNuts at times *hen they were literally swamped or eclipsed by either structural or TG models” (Newman 1368: 189-90). One therefore welcomes, to facilitate the on-going symbiotic processes in our field, the advent of a reader on stratificational grammar, a ‘model’ fully in fourth position in America, in terms of number of adherents following, in the order, TG and Neo-TG trends, structuralism and Neo-structuralism, tagmemics. Once more, European and other foreign colleagues often complain that Americans act as if they had invented linguistics, failing to recognize predecessors abroad, and the like. They should, then, be pleased that this volume renders tribute passim to the contributions of Hjelmslev, father of glossematics, whose largely speculative notions were utilized by Lamb in creating stratificationalism. Here is a fairly useful vademecum to the subject, complete with representative writings from all five stages of the development of stratificational grammar (henceforth SG). If one could but add the papers presented at the 1 lth International Congress of Linguists itr Bologna (Sept. 1972), an unusually good view of the Logic would emer8e. At that Congress, it might be noted, nine papers were presented (including the reviewer’s presentation), while only one paper was offered in glossematics, although Hjelmslev’s ideas were quite frequently mentioned.
Proceeding now to the book itself, the reviewer will somewhat impressionistically comment on each essay. In section 1, there are mostly general discussions, while 2 concerns itself more with specialized and technical topics. In ‘Stratificational Grammar’ (ch. l), John Algeo orients the reader with a concise and clear review of the basic principles of the approach. This is followed by Lamb’s ‘The Crooked Path of Progress in Cognitive Linguistics’ (ch. 2). In its ideal state, he argues, all linguistics is or should be cognitive, and, not unsurprisingly, Lamb finds SC best prepared to deal with the subject thus conceived. With all due respect to the scholar in question as a luminary of our field, this appears to be going too far, since a good case can be made out at least for the usefulness of taxonomic approaches which help provide the data upon which much theorizing is based, as well as psychological analyses of events in the speech act, in terms of Sender, Receiver and Setting. Of particular interest to applied linguistics is Lamb’s chapter 3, entitled ‘SG as a Basis for Mechanical Translation’. Let it be recalled that Lamb developed the main points of the model in connection with his own work on various Russian-English mechanical translation teams so that SG, despite the elusiveness of certain concepts and the flow-type interlocking diagrams, may rightfully boast of an extremely symbiotic relationship with the applied side of our field. This, in view of some colleagues, contrasts with the speculative nature of much of TG and other models, and the oft-repeated statements by Chomsky himself that he is not personally attreacted to field research.In fact, the paper in question was first presented at the U.S. Dept. of Defense Seminar on MT in Tokyo in 1964, with appropriate revisions. One of Lamb’s interesting conclusions in the above paper is that for geneticallyrelated languages (even English and Russian as Indo-European), it seems most efficient to set up a single compromise semotactics, in which the results ot semological decoding will be immediately ready for encoding. For unrelated language pairs, however, such as English and Chinese, separate semotactic systems are more desirable, necessitating a conversion stage from one to another before the encoding stage. The same scholar’s fourth chapter, entitled ‘Linguistic and Cogmtive Networks’, deals wivh the essential SC constructs of strata1 levels. One is reminded here of ‘size levels’ in Halliday’s ‘systemic grammar’ (formerly called ‘scale-and-category’ grammar) as well as the somewhat closely related notion in tagmemics, where the point of reference is basically upon the construct or level immediately one degree higher up. It should be noted that, in this essay as well as some others, the terms clause and sentence are employed without any precise definition. Most tdgmemicists and systemic linguists view the sentence as a level or rank above the clause; i.e., a layer of clause combinations. This has been disputed by Blansitt (1970: 112-2 1) an& apparently quite independently, by Trail (1973: 3-34). The argument advanced has been critical of the practice of considering a coordination of clause a compourd sentence, as well as failure to recognize numerous cases of functional equivalent of phrases and embedded clauses. The first part concludes with two studies by Peter A. Reich, pre-eminently psycholinguistic in chara.:ter. ‘Competence, Performance and Relational Networks’ (ch. 5) programmaticallq~ presents a ‘relational network approach’ as a formal system in which a few neurological restrictions can be incorporated, but which
400
Reviews
must stand or fall entirely on its ability to handle linguistic and psycholinguistic (or psychological) data alike. In cbhapter 6, entitled ‘Symbols, Relations, and Structural Complexity’, he argues that a relational element should be considered a larger, behaviorally-defined element, rather than a neurologically-defined one, and which can, at the same time, also be rigorously and mathematically stated, In general, Reich feels that working will neurons has severe limitations, since they are by their very nature extremely complex. He admits that much more work is necessary for substantiation - a refreshing statement unfortunately all too uncommon with psycholinguists, who, after all, work in the most tenuous and elusive sector of our field. In chapter 6, entitled ‘Symbols, Relations, and Structural Complexity’, Reich returns to his relational network, which he has revised from Lamb’s original formulation. He introduces the notion of hill-climbing or equivalence spaces defmed by the fq>rmal properties and the complexity count as a model of the sim$ification aspect of language acquisition. To put it a bit more simply, he tries to show that the process of simplification of a grammar in disjunctive form is non-uphill all :Ihe way. Admitting that he has thus far had reference oniy to context-free phrase structure grammar, he invites our attention to other writings where he deals with networks capable of handling those features of language not manageable by context-free ph.rase structure grammars. In his opinion, the network approach is a simpler overall system than that offered by TG or other models, while SG should msist us greatly in developing a more detailed and explicit model of the language acquisition process. IP goes without saying that active workers in psycholinguistics need to put Reich’s ideas through the crucible of empirical research - to the extent that ttis is possible m their field. The second section, entit‘.ed ‘Specific Studies in Stratificational Phonology, Grammar and Semology’ has l.he benefit of an overall introduction. A statement by the editors as to the fundamental orientation is worth repeating here: “It cannot be overemphasized enough that the major difference between the modem version of the stratificational theory and the transformational view is not that stratificational linguistics uses unordered rules while the transformationalists use ordered ones. Rather it is the case that stratificational theory does not use any rules at all, but views linguistic structure as consisting entirely of relationships, so that the notion of a ‘ruie’does not have any meaning within it” (p, 118).
As La.mb appears three times in this section, his essays here will be discussed together. In chapter 7, ‘Prolegomena to a Theory of Phonology’, he attempts, as W.F. Twaddell did three decades ago, to redefine the phoneme. Suffice it to say hi;le that be concludes by suggesting that much more needs to be known when one undertakes to specify what a phonemic or morphemic sign consists of. This should embrace not only those properties assignable to human speech in general, but also those of the given language, dialect or geographic area. The remaining articulatory properties of speech produced in the system and not accounted for in these ways should be considered manifestations of the hypophonemic signs, which are then
Reviews
401
capable of distinguishing meaning and having communicative significance. He then speculates that here we might indeed be in the presence of a completely new stratum. In ‘The Sememic Approach to Structural fiemantics’, Lamb addresses himself to a sector of our field, which with generative phonology can almost be said jointly to occupy the present center of interest. He traces his own changes in thinking since 1954, when he considered it sufficient to view the phonemic system at the bottom of the strata, and the sememic one
402
Reviews
to be the most interesting of all contrastive problems, because they analyze the differences in the way connected discourse, is organized and the precise ways in which this is signalled to both hearer or reader. Here again SG practitioners show themselves to be abreast of current interests in units above the sentence as well as the analysis of the speech event, as reflected in narrative analysis. In a different frame of reference, the approaches taken by social scientists to ‘ethnomethodology’ are also part and parcel of this current. In chapter 8, ‘ “Replacives” Without Process’, David G. Lockwood addresses himself to the question of how a relational approach such as SG can handle ablaut-type phenomena like sing-sang-sung. To oversimplify, he suggests that this ought to be possible within an item-and-arrangement framework, since in such relationships there is a one-to-one correspondence between ‘elements’ of different strata, making it unnecessary to devise superfluous ‘rules’ to realize one ‘object’ always as another. In practice, nevertheless, he feels neither item-and-process nor item-and-arrangement really satisfactory. In SG the treatment is much less complicated than in -most models, with relationships between cognate ‘elements’ of the strata so clearly marked that it is unnecessary to devise superfluous rules. The line for the ‘unc?ianged’ element will need to encounter no nodes other than the tactics of each successive stratum. Again in chapter 10, ‘The Problem of Inflectional Morphemes’, the same linguist argues basically for the structuralist treatment of these affixes. According to him, the use of strata1 levels eliminates the cumbersomeness resulting when one resorts always to suppletion. With the two strata of morphology and lexology, grammatically conditioned alternation can be handled in terms of alternate morphemic realization of lexons (1exemes:l and regular morphophonemic allomorphy can be accounted for in the phonology as a function of the realization of morphons, i.e., in effect, morphophonemic entities or constructs. Most of the corpus of the examples is from Latin. Valerie Becker Makkai writes ‘On the Correlation of Morphemes and Lexemes in the Rcmance Languages’ (ch. 9), grappling much of the time with the perennial struggle to delimit the conc:ept of the morpheme. In such French words as prbenir, she is concerned with whether we are in the presence of two lexemes pre’ and venir, or merely one, a question also arising in the case of English regular or irregular compound verbs, of the type understand. Resorting to SG diagrammatic treatment Makkai concludes that greater simplicity and economy emerge when one does indeed strive for a maximum separation of the minimally meaningful units. A highly useful appendix of compound verbs in Italian, Spanish and French is added in her appendix. The reviewer would like to see, in future treatments, some addition of examples from Rumanian, bec,use of its grammatical borrowing from Slavic in addition to the basic Romance stock. Three papers must finally come in for brief discussion. David G. Bennett (ch. ‘.4), in ‘English Prepositions’, attempts both to review previous work in synonymy and to suggest that, instead of two, four or even five levels are needed here. His main conclusion, using the English prepositions as a corpus, is that, as soon as one regards the strata above the lexemic one, he is forced
Reviews
403
to examine relations in general, rather than prepositions in particular. Bennett acknowledges the insights of Goodenough and Lounsbury’s componential analysis of meaning, important for its recourse to extra-linguistic experience, but feels the need to go beyond them. In ‘A Stratificational View of Polysemy’ (ch. 15), the same author endeavors to cope with ambiguity, a phenomenon that surely is conditioned by several, if not all, components of language, as well as extra-linguistic variables. He offers numerous examples from English and tries to resolve the problem through ‘disambig,ation’ (principally consisting of the substitution of one lexeme for another), which he admits does not necessarily prove that the original one was pob;semous. The reviewer suggests that, cer’ainly, Bennett is pursuing a fruitful vein, but feels that much more remains to be done on the constraints and conditions a’hich lead to ambig;lity, beyond denotation and connotation itself. Such features as utterance length, tactic patterns dnd tactic rearrangements for effect, and the like, need further exploration. Finally, in chapter !h, Adam Makkai writes on ‘The Transformation of a Turkish Pasha into a Big Fat Dummy’, a title at once suggestive both of its entertaining and instructive nature. In this he deals with the adequacy, or lack of it, of conternporary theoretical models in coping with translation problems. For his corpus he takes a didactic-performative nursery rhyme in Hungarian (in which he is a published poet). Like Lamb, then, he is also interested in such applied problems as translation, and he concludes that SG provides by far the most reliable scientific hypothesis of the nature of the process of rendering one language into another. Its main advantage, according to him, is that the theory manages to incorporate into its hypersememic system the cultural taxonomy of Pike’s behavioremes. Here, then, in this final essay we find added evidence of the symbiotic relationship between these two ‘other’ schools - SG and tagmemic. I LSfor Pike, his monumental Language in Its Relation to a Unified Theory of Human Behavior (19<7),
is one of the least
appreciated (and probably least read) works in our field, a fact that is everyone’s loss, no matter about his adherence to one school or another. At any rate, throughout its pages, with remarkable insight for a non-social scientist, Pike attempts to relate the linguistic and social dimensions of speech acts, with analyses of the latter centered on the basic concept of the ‘behavioreme’. At any rate, Makkai attempts to show r;p the r.mbiguity between competence and performance (of course not originally TG concepts) and finds a double standard. Although the transformationalist would, in fact, have to say that translation belonged to performance, it is contradictory, he asserts, to suppose that a person can outperform his own competence. Thus, from the semantic component of language A, we must go to that of language B, then to its deep structure, its surface structure and down to its phonological component, at which point TG grammar has really been abandoned. Knowledge stored in the hypersemology conditions the translator to adjusting the semological and iexological strata in both the source and target language, arriving at his goal with maximum economy His chart on page 3 12 simplifies his exposition. At the top is Cognition (Hypersemology) with identical layers of strata for languages A and B respectively for the
404
Reviews
following strata: Semology, Lexology, Morphology, and Phonology at the bottom. The translator, in hi cognition, must gain the awareness that the source text is a traditional nursery rhyme of a didactioperformative nature, and that Turkish pashas are nat meaningful for most English-speaking children. This knowledge, then, causes him to adjust correspondingly the semiology and the lexology of the text’in the target language. In tagmemic terms, he correctly notes, such a nursery rhyme would be a behavioreme in the source culture, with its feature and manifestation modes, The reviewer believes that, here again, one would need to field test theories like this, applying principles from various models to identical texts both in the human and machine translation mode. All in all this book makes a very favorable impression, reflecting the obvious care with which it was readied. Few if any typographical errors appear to be prosesi. The graphics were prepared by Earl M. Herrick, and are both abundant and largely effective. Type is reasonably large, the format is generally attractive. En conclusion, the reviewer feels that the overall effectiveness of the contents would be further aided by somewhat less insistence here and there of the superior merits of SG. Let the evidence speak for this. Moreover, some readers may feel that the large number of contributions by Lamb, albeit his status as the ranking stratificationalist, may reflect either a lack of balance or of other potential contributors. Perhaps essays could have been solicited from Herrick himself, or from William Sullivan or other scholars. All in all, it is nevertheless a worthwhile effort, and one enriching our professional literature.
References BIansitt, E., 1970. Sentence and clause in universal grammar. In: Anthropological Linguistics 12,112-21, and More on sentence and clause in universalgrammar, (forthcoming). Newman, S., 1961:. Review of Law Obligatory constructions in isthmus Nahuat grammar. Language44,189-91. Pike, K.L., 1967. Language in its relation to a unified theory of human behavior. The Hague: Mouton. Trail, R.L., 1973. Semantic relations between whole prepositions in English. In: Patterns in Clause, Sentence and Discourse in Selected Languagesof India r!ndNepal, part 1. (Kathmandu Triihuvan University Press, Summer Instituae of Linguistics).
Reviews
fur ein bestimmtes Eurocacup-Spiel zu beschreiben. Textreduktion ist ein indbesondere aus der automatischen Sprachverarbeitung bekanntes Verfahren, doch scheint es fraglich zu sein, ob dieses Verfahren, jedenfalls in linguistischer Hinsicht, reversibe1 ist. Ein gegebenes Thema kommt nicht notwendigerweise nur einem einzigen Text zu. Insofern konstituieren Themen Klassen von Texten. Zwar ist die Zerlegung einer Menge von Texten in them?tisch definierte Klaswn von Texten ein sinnvolles Verfahren, doch sollte unter dem Namen generative Textgrtzmmatik nur die Erzeugung einer Menge von Texten, das heisst die AufzHhlung dieser Texte mit Hilfe von Regeln, behandelt werden. Diese kritischen Anmerkungen sollten jedoch dem allgemeinen Urteil keinen Abbruch tun, dass Dresslers Einfiihrung ihre Au.fgabe, einen Einblick in eine erst entstehende Disziplin der Sprachwissenschaft zu geben, vollauf erfiillt.
Adam Makkai and David G. Lockwood (eds.), Readings in stratificational linguistics. Univ. of Alabama Press, 1973. vi, 33 1 pp. $9.00. Reviewed by J. Omstein, Dept. of Modern Languages and Linguistics, Univ. of Texas at El Paso, Texas, U.S.A.
During the twentieth century there have been two, and only two, leading ‘schools’ of American linguistics. For whatever it is worth, European colleagues often tend to comment on the American tendency to follow some charismatic leader in our field, referring, of course, both to Bloomfield and Chomsky respectively. (Alas, Sapir, an admirable ‘giant’ never enjoyed such status!) Nevertheless, other schools do exist, but as Newman once remarked about tagmemics, “these ‘other’ currents made their debNuts at times *hen they were literally swamped or eclipsed by either structural or TG models” (Newman 1368: 189-90). One therefore welcomes, to facilitate the on-going symbiotic processes in our field, the advent of a reader on stratificational grammar, a ‘model’ fully in fourth position in America, in terms of number of adherents following, in the order, TG and Neo-TG trends, structuralism and Neo-structuralism, tagmemics. Once more, European and other foreign colleagues often complain that Americans act as if they had invented linguistics, failing to recognize predecessors abroad, and the like. They should, then, be pleased that this volume renders tribute passim to the contributions of Hjelmslev, father of glossematics, whose largely speculative notions were utilized by Lamb in creating stratificationalism. Here is a fairly useful vademecum to the subject, complete with representative writings from all five stages of the development of stratificational grammar (henceforth SG). If one could but add the papers presented at the 1 lth International Congress of Linguists itr Bologna (Sept. 1972), an unusually good view of the Logic would emer8e. At that Congress, it might be noted, nine papers were presented (including the reviewer’s presentation), while only one paper was offered in glossematics, although Hjelmslev’s ideas were quite frequently mentioned.
Proceeding now to the book itself, the reviewer will somewhat impressionistically comment on each essay. In section 1, there are mostly general discussions, while 2 concerns itself more with specialized and technical topics. In ‘Stratificational Grammar’ (ch. l), John Algeo orients the reader with a concise and clear review of the basic principles of the approach. This is followed by Lamb’s ‘The Crooked Path of Progress in Cognitive Linguistics’ (ch. 2). In its ideal state, he argues, all linguistics is or should be cognitive, and, not unsurprisingly, Lamb finds SC best prepared to deal with the subject thus conceived. With all due respect to the scholar in question as a luminary of our field, this appears to be going too far, since a good case can be made out at least for the usefulness of taxonomic approaches which help provide the data upon which much theorizing is based, as well as psychological analyses of events in the speech act, in terms of Sender, Receiver and Setting. Of particular interest to applied linguistics is Lamb’s chapter 3, entitled ‘SG as a Basis for Mechanical Translation’. Let it be recalled that Lamb developed the main points of the model in connection with his own work on various Russian-English mechanical translation teams so that SG, despite the elusiveness of certain concepts and the flow-type interlocking diagrams, may rightfully boast of an extremely symbiotic relationship with the applied side of our field. This, in view of some colleagues, contrasts with the speculative nature of much of TG and other models, and the oft-repeated statements by Chomsky himself that he is not personally attreacted to field research.In fact, the paper in question was first presented at the U.S. Dept. of Defense Seminar on MT in Tokyo in 1964, with appropriate revisions. One of Lamb’s interesting conclusions in the above paper is that for geneticallyrelated languages (even English and Russian as Indo-European), it seems most efficient to set up a single compromise semotactics, in which the results ot semological decoding will be immediately ready for encoding. For unrelated language pairs, however, such as English and Chinese, separate semotactic systems are more desirable, necessitating a conversion stage from one to another before the encoding stage. The same scholar’s fourth chapter, entitled ‘Linguistic and Cogmtive Networks’, deals wivh the essential SC constructs of strata1 levels. One is reminded here of ‘size levels’ in Halliday’s ‘systemic grammar’ (formerly called ‘scale-and-category’ grammar) as well as the somewhat closely related notion in tagmemics, where the point of reference is basically upon the construct or level immediately one degree higher up. It should be noted that, in this essay as well as some others, the terms clause and sentence are employed without any precise definition. Most tdgmemicists and systemic linguists view the sentence as a level or rank above the clause; i.e., a layer of clause combinations. This has been disputed by Blansitt (1970: 112-2 1) an& apparently quite independently, by Trail (1973: 3-34). The argument advanced has been critical of the practice of considering a coordination of clause a compourd sentence, as well as failure to recognize numerous cases of functional equivalent of phrases and embedded clauses. The first part concludes with two studies by Peter A. Reich, pre-eminently psycholinguistic in chara.:ter. ‘Competence, Performance and Relational Networks’ (ch. 5) programmaticallq~ presents a ‘relational network approach’ as a formal system in which a few neurological restrictions can be incorporated, but which
400
Reviews
must stand or fall entirely on its ability to handle linguistic and psycholinguistic (or psychological) data alike. In cbhapter 6, entitled ‘Symbols, Relations, and Structural Complexity’, he argues that a relational element should be considered a larger, behaviorally-defined element, rather than a neurologically-defined one, and which can, at the same time, also be rigorously and mathematically stated, In general, Reich feels that working will neurons has severe limitations, since they are by their very nature extremely complex. He admits that much more work is necessary for substantiation - a refreshing statement unfortunately all too uncommon with psycholinguists, who, after all, work in the most tenuous and elusive sector of our field. In chapter 6, entitled ‘Symbols, Relations, and Structural Complexity’, Reich returns to his relational network, which he has revised from Lamb’s original formulation. He introduces the notion of hill-climbing or equivalence spaces defmed by the fq>rmal properties and the complexity count as a model of the sim$ification aspect of language acquisition. To put it a bit more simply, he tries to show that the process of simplification of a grammar in disjunctive form is non-uphill all :Ihe way. Admitting that he has thus far had reference oniy to context-free phrase structure grammar, he invites our attention to other writings where he deals with networks capable of handling those features of language not manageable by context-free ph.rase structure grammars. In his opinion, the network approach is a simpler overall system than that offered by TG or other models, while SG should msist us greatly in developing a more detailed and explicit model of the language acquisition process. IP goes without saying that active workers in psycholinguistics need to put Reich’s ideas through the crucible of empirical research - to the extent that ttis is possible m their field. The second section, entit‘.ed ‘Specific Studies in Stratificational Phonology, Grammar and Semology’ has l.he benefit of an overall introduction. A statement by the editors as to the fundamental orientation is worth repeating here: “It cannot be overemphasized enough that the major difference between the modem version of the stratificational theory and the transformational view is not that stratificational linguistics uses unordered rules while the transformationalists use ordered ones. Rather it is the case that stratificational theory does not use any rules at all, but views linguistic structure as consisting entirely of relationships, so that the notion of a ‘ruie’does not have any meaning within it” (p, 118).
As La.mb appears three times in this section, his essays here will be discussed together. In chapter 7, ‘Prolegomena to a Theory of Phonology’, he attempts, as W.F. Twaddell did three decades ago, to redefine the phoneme. Suffice it to say hi;le that be concludes by suggesting that much more needs to be known when one undertakes to specify what a phonemic or morphemic sign consists of. This should embrace not only those properties assignable to human speech in general, but also those of the given language, dialect or geographic area. The remaining articulatory properties of speech produced in the system and not accounted for in these ways should be considered manifestations of the hypophonemic signs, which are then
Reviews
401
capable of distinguishing meaning and having communicative significance. He then speculates that here we might indeed be in the presence of a completely new stratum. In ‘The Sememic Approach to Structural fiemantics’, Lamb addresses himself to a sector of our field, which with generative phonology can almost be said jointly to occupy the present center of interest. He traces his own changes in thinking since 1954, when he considered it sufficient to view the phonemic system at the bottom of the strata, and the sememic one
402
Reviews
to be the most interesting of all contrastive problems, because they analyze the differences in the way connected discourse, is organized and the precise ways in which this is signalled to both hearer or reader. Here again SG practitioners show themselves to be abreast of current interests in units above the sentence as well as the analysis of the speech event, as reflected in narrative analysis. In a different frame of reference, the approaches taken by social scientists to ‘ethnomethodology’ are also part and parcel of this current. In chapter 8, ‘ “Replacives” Without Process’, David G. Lockwood addresses himself to the question of how a relational approach such as SG can handle ablaut-type phenomena like sing-sang-sung. To oversimplify, he suggests that this ought to be possible within an item-and-arrangement framework, since in such relationships there is a one-to-one correspondence between ‘elements’ of different strata, making it unnecessary to devise superfluous ‘rules’ to realize one ‘object’ always as another. In practice, nevertheless, he feels neither item-and-process nor item-and-arrangement really satisfactory. In SG the treatment is much less complicated than in -most models, with relationships between cognate ‘elements’ of the strata so clearly marked that it is unnecessary to devise superfluous rules. The line for the ‘unc?ianged’ element will need to encounter no nodes other than the tactics of each successive stratum. Again in chapter 10, ‘The Problem of Inflectional Morphemes’, the same linguist argues basically for the structuralist treatment of these affixes. According to him, the use of strata1 levels eliminates the cumbersomeness resulting when one resorts always to suppletion. With the two strata of morphology and lexology, grammatically conditioned alternation can be handled in terms of alternate morphemic realization of lexons (1exemes:l and regular morphophonemic allomorphy can be accounted for in the phonology as a function of the realization of morphons, i.e., in effect, morphophonemic entities or constructs. Most of the corpus of the examples is from Latin. Valerie Becker Makkai writes ‘On the Correlation of Morphemes and Lexemes in the Rcmance Languages’ (ch. 9), grappling much of the time with the perennial struggle to delimit the conc:ept of the morpheme. In such French words as prbenir, she is concerned with whether we are in the presence of two lexemes pre’ and venir, or merely one, a question also arising in the case of English regular or irregular compound verbs, of the type understand. Resorting to SG diagrammatic treatment Makkai concludes that greater simplicity and economy emerge when one does indeed strive for a maximum separation of the minimally meaningful units. A highly useful appendix of compound verbs in Italian, Spanish and French is added in her appendix. The reviewer would like to see, in future treatments, some addition of examples from Rumanian, bec,use of its grammatical borrowing from Slavic in addition to the basic Romance stock. Three papers must finally come in for brief discussion. David G. Bennett (ch. ‘.4), in ‘English Prepositions’, attempts both to review previous work in synonymy and to suggest that, instead of two, four or even five levels are needed here. His main conclusion, using the English prepositions as a corpus, is that, as soon as one regards the strata above the lexemic one, he is forced
Reviews
403
to examine relations in general, rather than prepositions in particular. Bennett acknowledges the insights of Goodenough and Lounsbury’s componential analysis of meaning, important for its recourse to extra-linguistic experience, but feels the need to go beyond them. In ‘A Stratificational View of Polysemy’ (ch. 15), the same author endeavors to cope with ambiguity, a phenomenon that surely is conditioned by several, if not all, components of language, as well as extra-linguistic variables. He offers numerous examples from English and tries to resolve the problem through ‘disambig,ation’ (principally consisting of the substitution of one lexeme for another), which he admits does not necessarily prove that the original one was pob;semous. The reviewer suggests that, cer’ainly, Bennett is pursuing a fruitful vein, but feels that much more remains to be done on the constraints and conditions a’hich lead to ambig;lity, beyond denotation and connotation itself. Such features as utterance length, tactic patterns dnd tactic rearrangements for effect, and the like, need further exploration. Finally, in chapter !h, Adam Makkai writes on ‘The Transformation of a Turkish Pasha into a Big Fat Dummy’, a title at once suggestive both of its entertaining and instructive nature. In this he deals with the adequacy, or lack of it, of conternporary theoretical models in coping with translation problems. For his corpus he takes a didactic-performative nursery rhyme in Hungarian (in which he is a published poet). Like Lamb, then, he is also interested in such applied problems as translation, and he concludes that SG provides by far the most reliable scientific hypothesis of the nature of the process of rendering one language into another. Its main advantage, according to him, is that the theory manages to incorporate into its hypersememic system the cultural taxonomy of Pike’s behavioremes. Here, then, in this final essay we find added evidence of the symbiotic relationship between these two ‘other’ schools - SG and tagmemic. I LSfor Pike, his monumental Language in Its Relation to a Unified Theory of Human Behavior (19<7),
is one of the least
appreciated (and probably least read) works in our field, a fact that is everyone’s loss, no matter about his adherence to one school or another. At any rate, throughout its pages, with remarkable insight for a non-social scientist, Pike attempts to relate the linguistic and social dimensions of speech acts, with analyses of the latter centered on the basic concept of the ‘behavioreme’. At any rate, Makkai attempts to show r;p the r.mbiguity between competence and performance (of course not originally TG concepts) and finds a double standard. Although the transformationalist would, in fact, have to say that translation belonged to performance, it is contradictory, he asserts, to suppose that a person can outperform his own competence. Thus, from the semantic component of language A, we must go to that of language B, then to its deep structure, its surface structure and down to its phonological component, at which point TG grammar has really been abandoned. Knowledge stored in the hypersemology conditions the translator to adjusting the semological and iexological strata in both the source and target language, arriving at his goal with maximum economy His chart on page 3 12 simplifies his exposition. At the top is Cognition (Hypersemology) with identical layers of strata for languages A and B respectively for the
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Reviews
following strata: Semology, Lexology, Morphology, and Phonology at the bottom. The translator, in hi cognition, must gain the awareness that the source text is a traditional nursery rhyme of a didactioperformative nature, and that Turkish pashas are nat meaningful for most English-speaking children. This knowledge, then, causes him to adjust correspondingly the semiology and the lexology of the text’in the target language. In tagmemic terms, he correctly notes, such a nursery rhyme would be a behavioreme in the source culture, with its feature and manifestation modes, The reviewer believes that, here again, one would need to field test theories like this, applying principles from various models to identical texts both in the human and machine translation mode. All in all this book makes a very favorable impression, reflecting the obvious care with which it was readied. Few if any typographical errors appear to be prosesi. The graphics were prepared by Earl M. Herrick, and are both abundant and largely effective. Type is reasonably large, the format is generally attractive. En conclusion, the reviewer feels that the overall effectiveness of the contents would be further aided by somewhat less insistence here and there of the superior merits of SG. Let the evidence speak for this. Moreover, some readers may feel that the large number of contributions by Lamb, albeit his status as the ranking stratificationalist, may reflect either a lack of balance or of other potential contributors. Perhaps essays could have been solicited from Herrick himself, or from William Sullivan or other scholars. All in all, it is nevertheless a worthwhile effort, and one enriching our professional literature.
References BIansitt, E., 1970. Sentence and clause in universal grammar. In: Anthropological Linguistics 12,112-21, and More on sentence and clause in universalgrammar, (forthcoming). Newman, S., 1961:. Review of Law Obligatory constructions in isthmus Nahuat grammar. Language44,189-91. Pike, K.L., 1967. Language in its relation to a unified theory of human behavior. The Hague: Mouton. Trail, R.L., 1973. Semantic relations between whole prepositions in English. In: Patterns in Clause, Sentence and Discourse in Selected Languagesof India r!ndNepal, part 1. (Kathmandu Triihuvan University Press, Summer Instituae of Linguistics).