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Text and tagmeme
Book reviews
721
Kenneth L. Pike, Linguistic concepts (an introduction to tagmemics). Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. 146 pp. (paperback). Kenneth L. Pike and Evelyn G. Pike, Text and tagmeme. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1983. 129 pp. (bound). 1 Recalling my last review (1983) of Kenneth L. Pike (1981) in this journal, I would like to bring to attention two more recent publications on tagmemics, namely Linguistic concepts (An introduction to tagmemics) by Kenneth L. Pike, and Text and tagmeme by Kenneth L. Pike and Evelyn G. Pike (with a foreword by Robin P. Fawcett). These two books are different in character, the former providing, in a playful manner, an explanation of the basic notions of tagmemics, while the latter one, more of a scholarly character, shows the application of the tagmemic theory to the analysis of a prose text and a poem, and brings a further extension of the theory. 2 In Linguistic concepts, the author not only clearly expounds the basic tenets of tagmemics, but also convincingly argues for how a (linguistic) theory should look like. Not being satisfied with the abstractionism and reductionism inherent in scientific thinking and with the directionalism typical of scientific theories, he argues that theories should be conceived of as tools for better understanding the complex structure of reality of which man is a part (cf. ‘the choice of theory is pragmatic’), proposing tagmemics as a ‘theory of theories’, in that tagmemics has the capacity of incorporating into itself even its own background (including the viewpoints of the users of language and of the linguist-analyst, i.e., ‘how the observer universally affects the data and becomes part of the data’), being free from any dogma and capable of change. Tagmemics is not intended as a theory of linguistics in isolation but rather of linguistics in relation to a unified theory of human behaviour, i.e., it is not intended as a model which would be more simple than reality; on the contrary, it strives to reflect the complexity of verbal behaviour in close connection with nonverbal behaviour. From this it follows that by means of tagmemics it is possible to account also for nonstandard, surprising, ‘off-norm’ or metacommunicative instances of verbal behaviour which can be found in poems, jokes, and in other special types of verbal communication. The distinctions of tagmemics (such as tagmeme or hierarchy) are viewed as always related to the physical substance of text/speech in that the author does not consider any level of (abstract) grammar or semantics (in the form of rules or logical formulas). The book is divided into four parts: ‘The observer and the things’, ‘The unit’, ‘Hierarchy’, and ‘Context’; they are being accompanied by lovely
722
Book reoiew~s
paintings and poems. Let us survey in this place the basic tenets of the tagmemic theory as expounded in the four chapters. (I) In tagmemics, three different viewpoints (perspectives, contexts) are considered from which a single element of verbal behaviour may be observed: an element may be viewed as a particle (static view), as a wave (dynamic view), and as a field (relational view); this approach is very flexible, allowing e.g., a particle (an element with the intrinsic character of a particle) to be viewed as a wave, and the other way round. These viewpoints can be employed in each of the hierarchies simultaneously occurring in a stream of speech (namely, the phonological, the grammatical, and the referential hierarchies), and also with respect to the lexical substance (cf. the lexical wave, involving the basic and the peripheral (derived) meanings of a word). Out of them, especially wave deserves closer attention: consisting of an obligatory nucleus and optional margin(s) (borders, transitions), it resembles the prototypical mode1 of language phenomena used e.g., in the 20’s and 30’s by the linguists of the Prague Circle. (2) The units of verbal behaviour (ranging from a syllable through a discourse to the viewpoint of the speaker) are describable in terms of tagmemes _ units which differ from each other in contrastive-identificational features, but may describe elements of language occurring in different variants. The tagmeme consists of four cells which correspond to four kinds of information concerning the element under examination: the slot cell indicates the place of the element in a higher constituent, the class cell indicates its paradigmatic (substitution) relations, the role cell indicates its function (behavioural meaning or social impact), and the cohesion cell indicates what governs its occurrence. As was mentioned above, tagmemes are inseparable from the physical substance of text/speech. (3) Text (stream of speech) (henceforth: text) should be viewed as simultaneously involving three hierarchies (cf. (1) above),. sharing the physical substance of the text. Methodologically, the three hierarchies are viewed as separate, i.e., a text can be examined only in one of them. The hierarchies are informally correlated in that e.g., a referential event is expressible by means of different grammatical constructions (sentences). Every of the hierarchies consists of a number of recursively arranged levels (layers), which is important especially for didactic purposes; in this respect, the hierarchies may exhibit parallelisms. The higher levels of the hierarchies, reflecting the regularities of verbal behaviour, are not reducible to the lower levels, which reflect also the irregularities. (4) Tagmemics is characterized above all by contextualism (anti-abstractionism, anti-reductionism), which implies the freedom of the observer to consider things from different viewpoints, and at the same time a duty to respect in any case the context of verbal behaviour; it is precisely this respect to context which makes tagmemics so vivid, compact, flexible, and universal.
Book reviews
723
In conclusion to the first part of our review it can be stated that the book under review is an example of a brilliant exposition of a theory, free from bias of any sort, reflecting the holistic approach of the author and his endeavour to understand the world even in its unexpected manifestations; in other words, it represents the author as a philosopher of linguistics rather than as a pure linguist. 3 The second book under review, Text and tagmeme, consists of three parts. The first part, by Evelyn Pike, entitled ‘Grammatical and referential hierarchies in a prose text - Toward its systematic exegesis’, provides (an illustration of) a systematic and minute analysis of a portion of the article ‘The question of honour’ by Allan Sherman (published in 1971 in Reader’s Digest, concerning a remarkable event of World War II - a surprising rescue of allied troops, and referred to as ‘The Bathtub Navy’) by means of numerous displays in the form of tree diagrams and tagmemic formulas, which constitute the heart of the contribution; the analysis shows the parallelisms, differences as well as moot points concerning the two hierarchies in question. Each of the hierarchies consists of several levels; the higher levels are parallel (cf. the parallel levels concerning the participation of the speaker and the hearer in a discourse, namely the grammatical I-Thou-Here-Now Axis vs. the referential Macro-event), while the lower levels often do not have any counterparts in the other hierarchies (cf. the grammatical level of morpheme, or the referential level of vectors (a vector represents the actions of an actor of a text)). The two hierarchies in question differ also in their structuring with respect to time: the grammatical hierarchy of a text need not correspond to the chronological sequence of events, while the referential hierarchy is necessarily based on a chronological sequence of events, admitting also (unlike the grammatical hierarchy) simultaneity. From this it follows that referential elements (events) can be expressed, from different viewpoints of the speaker, by a number of grammatically different paraphrases. Most importantly, in the referential hierarchy, mainly in the tagmemic cells of role (and cohesion), many elements (concerning generally purpose or reason, and in particular such items of behavioural meaning or social impact as ‘to try to rescue trapped troops’ or ‘with success’) must be inferred (reconstructed) in order to understand the text. Such an inferencing (including the inferencing which the hearer is spontaneously making while processing a text) is based on the factual knowledge as well as on the beliefs, attitudes, etc. of the hearer (and of the linguist-analyst); in this sense, the result of the referential analysis transcends a thorough knowledge-representation scheme of a text. Another creative aspect of the referential analysis consists in the treatment of the
124
Book reviews
Performative Interaction level, where the intentions of the speaker (encoder) are reconstructed in considerable detail. In addition to the basic characteristics of this contribution, there are two more points to be discussed here, namely the author’s conception of topic and focus, and of meaning. The author works with the notions of topic and focus (prominence), if I understand her correctly, as having roughly the same meaning, paraphrasable as ‘what stands in the centre of attention/interest’, ‘what is spoken about’; in this, her conception of focus is close to that of Grosz (1977), but different from that of Chomsky (1971), which coincides with the conceptions in European linguistics (cf. below). In this sense, one may miss in the analysis a level (or perhaps kinds of role in the tagmeme?) where the elements of a sentence would be classified according to whether they belong to the old/given/presupposed information (topic, theme ~ what is spoken about) or to the new information (focus, comment, rheme - how the topic is modified), as established in the tradition of European functionalism (cf. Sgall et al. (1973)); we believe that the topic-focus articulation of a sentence (exhibiting recursive properties and being applicable also to other levels than that of sentence) could prove a useful tool also in the tagmemic theory. On the other hand, the author seems to use the term ‘meaning’ in two meanings, namely (a) as the behavioural meaning, which is generally used in tagmemics as involved in the role slot of the tagmeme, and (b) as the meaning of words, which is correlated to reference (cf. ‘the meaning (of an entry in the lexicon) represents the referential class’). In the first of the two usages of the term, meaning seems to be conceived as cutting across the whole linguistic system (which is in agreement with the functionalistic intuition), but the two usages of the term (the two conceptions of meaning) should be more explicitly delineated. On the whole, Evelyn Pike’s analysis has shown that the grammatical and the referential hierarchies are well-conceived parts of a framework in which the formally grammatical (morphological, syntactic) as well as the referential and pragmatic aspects of a text are intended to be exhaustively treated. The second part of the book, by Kenneth L. Pike, entitled ‘Phonological hierarchy in a four-cell tagmeme representation from poem to phoneme class’, based on an analysis of a poem by Langston Hughes (Who but the lord, originally published in 1945, now slightly adjusted), does not only present a detailed phonological analysis of a remarkable poem, but enables the reader to discover its poetic values, especially with respect to the behavioural meaning of its parts. In the analysis, the poem is divided into the following levels: poem, paragraph complex and the final pause group, phonological paragraphs, phonological subparagraphs, phonological sentences, phonological clauses, syllables and vowels, each of the units of these levels being specified, inter alia,
Book reviews
725
with respect to its role-behavioural meaning. The intuitive character of the approach and at the same time the accuracy with which the behavioural roles are assigned leads us to make a general comment on Kenneth Pike’s conception of form and meaning in comparison with the other linguistic conceptions thereof. In the present conception, form and (psychologically treated) behavioural meaning are not separated into different levels of analysis, but cut across all of the three hierarchies; consequently, there are certain general distinctions of meaning which are common to the three hierarchies, such as purpose, as opposed to more specific distinctions (such as ‘setting tension’, ‘afterthought’, or the even less general distinctions mentioned above). It should be remarked, however, that behavioural meaning, not being conceived as a separate domain of study, does not seem to be readily accessible to generalizations and to systematic (explicit) account. Thus, though the specific labels for the kinds of behavioural meaning as mentioned above are intuitively plausible and psychologically realistic, they do not seem to be explicitly motivated (systematically psychologically backgrounded) so that a reader may miss a deeper explanation for why it is just ‘setting tension’ or ‘afterthought’ which have been chosen as pivot notions of the analysis. To recall the conceptions of form and meaning in other linguistic theories, let us only note that the majority of the Western linguistic descriptions treat meaning under the heading of ‘semantics’ as accountable for by means of logical calculi (cf. the Chomskyan ‘logical form’) and as involving reference, often with respect to computational applications (referential-inferential approach). The other extreme point is represented by the conception of the Functional Generative Description (cf. Sgall 1980,1981), which includes a special level of meaning in the sense of strict, narrow, literal meaning as directly structured by the linguistic form and not paraphrasable by other linguistic constructions (in this sense, the level of meaning is akin to the level of deep syntax), the distinctions concerning what is called here behavioural meaning (including beliefs, intentions and attitudes) as well as reference being relegated to the (extralinguistic) domain of ‘cognitive content’, which is supposed not to be directly structured by the linguistic form. From this viewpoint, Kenneth Pike’s approach represents presumably the mediocre way, admitting in different ways both behavioural meaning and reference to his linguistic system, with a certain amount of formalism (tagmeme), allowing for an informal approach toward language. Such an approach should be praised, but we propose that the idea of behavioural meaning as embodied by (encapsulated in) the role ceil of the tagmeme should be perhaps spelled out more systematically. As the major merit of the contribution under review should be considered the author’s successful merging of the linguistic and the poetic, as well as the empirical and the creative, aspects of the analysis of a single hierarchy of a poem.
The third part of the book, likewise by Kenneth L. Pike, entitled ‘The tetrahedron as a model for the four-cell tagmeme in its multiple relations’, brings a substantial innovation into the tagmemic theory, making it more comprehensive and at the same time more transparent. According to the innovation in question, the (two-dimensional) four-cell tagmemic matrix is transposed into the (three-dimensional) structure of the tetrahedron, which makes explicit those relations which in the four-cell matrix had been implicit or hardly conceivable: this means that by means of the tetrahedron model there can be treated “very great interlocking empirical complexities of relationships across hierarchies and their levels”. The new approach is presented with respect to the development of tagmemic theory since the 50’s, with an emphasis on its functional basis and kinship to stratiticational types of description; the recursive character of the present shape of tagmemics (tagmemes being applicable to the units of any level of any of the three hierarchies) assures the continuity of its functional-stratiticational character, though methodologically the three hierarchies are conceived of as separate in that there are no explicitly proposed relations of relabelling or of asymmetric dualism between adjacent levels or hierarchies. In the ‘two-and-two’ tagmemic matrix (consisting of two columns and two rows), four relations (concerning pairs of cells) have been recognized as relevant only, namely slot-class, role-cohesion, slot-role, and slot-cohesion, while the other two relations, of diagonal nature, namely slot-cohesion and class-role, have been quite backgrounded. On the other hand, with the tetrahedron model (whose four faces represent the four cells of the tagmeme), all of the six relations are represented in an equally transparent manner by the six edges of the tetrahedron. Furthermore, every point of the tetrahedron represents, with respect to its opposite face (cell), a common feature shared by the other three faces (cells) which intersect in it, cf. cohesion (characterized as concerning the structure of the remote context), as opposed to the triple slotclass-role (characterized as concerning the structure of the immediate context). The tetrahedron model also makes it possible to perceive new relations which had been quite ‘invisible’ in the tagmeme, such as the relation of opposition concerning the opposite edges of the tetrahedron (i.e., those edges which do not intersect): every edge of the tetrahedron (representing a pair of cells) can be characterized by a feature, and these features are in turn arranged in pairs exhibiting opposite properties (cf. slotclass = overt data vs. rolecohesion = covert data; slot-role = syntagmatic vs. class-cohesion = paradigmatic, and classsrole = awareness easy vs. slot-cohesion = awareness difficult). In conclusion to the second part of our review, it can be argued that the book Text and Tugmeme provides a good piece of evidence in favour of the claim that tagmemics is a reliable tool for interpreting, in a straightforward and creative manner, any kind of text, and shows in a convincing way that
Book reviews
127
tagmemics is a flexible theory accessible to adjustments and capable of constant development._ I think that it will be adequate to remark in this place that in the present book I found with satisfaction a long reference to Professor Bohumil Trnka, an outstanding personality in Czechoslovak linguistics, who tragically died in 1984, still lecturing at the age of 89. On the whole, the two books under review have shown that tagmemics has proved to be an adequate theory for the understanding of the structure and the explicit and implicit meaning of text as inseparable from the participants of discourse, from the outer world and from rr,e specific conditions of its occurrence: in our opinion, it is quintessential ?I.; the tagmemic analysis that it is psychologically realistic, corresponding to the human processing of text, i.e., to the understanding (decoding) of the message intended by the encoder. We sincerely look forward to Professor Pike and his colleagues for further developments of their remarkable theory. Eva Koktova Germanisches Seminar Universitat Hamburg FRG References Chomsky, Noam, 1971. ‘Deep structure, surface structure and semantic interpretation’. In: D. Steinberg and L. Jakobovits, eds., Semantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. pp. 183-216. Grosz, Barbara, 1977. The representation and use of focus in dialogue understanding. Technical Note 151, Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, CA. Koktova, Eva, 1983. Review of: Kenneth L. Pike, Tagmemics, discourse, and verbal art. Journal of Pragmatics 7: 24&242. Pike, Kenneth L., 1981. Tagmemics, discourse, and verbal art. Ann Arbor, Ml: University of Michigan Press. Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics, 1984. (Editors), In Memoriam Professor Bohumil Trnka. Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics 43: 5-6. Sgall, Petr, 1980. ‘Towards a pragmatically based theory of meaning’. In: J.R. Searle et al., eds., Speech act theory and pragmatics. Dordrecht: Reidel. pp. 233-246. Sgall, Petr, 1981. The level of linguistic meaning. Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics 34: 340. Sgall, Petr, Eva HajiEova and Eva BeneSovi, 1973. Topic, focus, and generative semantics. Kronberg/Ts.: Scriptor.
Gertrud Greciano, Signification et denotation en allemand. La semantique des expressions idiomatiques. Paris: Klincksieck, 1983. (Recherches Linguistiques IX, publites par le Centre d’Analyse Syntaxique de 1’Universitt de Metz.) 469 pp. 160 FF. The last 15 years have witnessed a considerable progress in the study of phraseology, as a logical consequence of the increasing interest in lexical
721
Kenneth L. Pike, Linguistic concepts (an introduction to tagmemics). Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1982. 146 pp. (paperback). Kenneth L. Pike and Evelyn G. Pike, Text and tagmeme. Norwood, NJ: Ablex Publishing Corporation, 1983. 129 pp. (bound). 1 Recalling my last review (1983) of Kenneth L. Pike (1981) in this journal, I would like to bring to attention two more recent publications on tagmemics, namely Linguistic concepts (An introduction to tagmemics) by Kenneth L. Pike, and Text and tagmeme by Kenneth L. Pike and Evelyn G. Pike (with a foreword by Robin P. Fawcett). These two books are different in character, the former providing, in a playful manner, an explanation of the basic notions of tagmemics, while the latter one, more of a scholarly character, shows the application of the tagmemic theory to the analysis of a prose text and a poem, and brings a further extension of the theory. 2 In Linguistic concepts, the author not only clearly expounds the basic tenets of tagmemics, but also convincingly argues for how a (linguistic) theory should look like. Not being satisfied with the abstractionism and reductionism inherent in scientific thinking and with the directionalism typical of scientific theories, he argues that theories should be conceived of as tools for better understanding the complex structure of reality of which man is a part (cf. ‘the choice of theory is pragmatic’), proposing tagmemics as a ‘theory of theories’, in that tagmemics has the capacity of incorporating into itself even its own background (including the viewpoints of the users of language and of the linguist-analyst, i.e., ‘how the observer universally affects the data and becomes part of the data’), being free from any dogma and capable of change. Tagmemics is not intended as a theory of linguistics in isolation but rather of linguistics in relation to a unified theory of human behaviour, i.e., it is not intended as a model which would be more simple than reality; on the contrary, it strives to reflect the complexity of verbal behaviour in close connection with nonverbal behaviour. From this it follows that by means of tagmemics it is possible to account also for nonstandard, surprising, ‘off-norm’ or metacommunicative instances of verbal behaviour which can be found in poems, jokes, and in other special types of verbal communication. The distinctions of tagmemics (such as tagmeme or hierarchy) are viewed as always related to the physical substance of text/speech in that the author does not consider any level of (abstract) grammar or semantics (in the form of rules or logical formulas). The book is divided into four parts: ‘The observer and the things’, ‘The unit’, ‘Hierarchy’, and ‘Context’; they are being accompanied by lovely
722
Book reoiew~s
paintings and poems. Let us survey in this place the basic tenets of the tagmemic theory as expounded in the four chapters. (I) In tagmemics, three different viewpoints (perspectives, contexts) are considered from which a single element of verbal behaviour may be observed: an element may be viewed as a particle (static view), as a wave (dynamic view), and as a field (relational view); this approach is very flexible, allowing e.g., a particle (an element with the intrinsic character of a particle) to be viewed as a wave, and the other way round. These viewpoints can be employed in each of the hierarchies simultaneously occurring in a stream of speech (namely, the phonological, the grammatical, and the referential hierarchies), and also with respect to the lexical substance (cf. the lexical wave, involving the basic and the peripheral (derived) meanings of a word). Out of them, especially wave deserves closer attention: consisting of an obligatory nucleus and optional margin(s) (borders, transitions), it resembles the prototypical mode1 of language phenomena used e.g., in the 20’s and 30’s by the linguists of the Prague Circle. (2) The units of verbal behaviour (ranging from a syllable through a discourse to the viewpoint of the speaker) are describable in terms of tagmemes _ units which differ from each other in contrastive-identificational features, but may describe elements of language occurring in different variants. The tagmeme consists of four cells which correspond to four kinds of information concerning the element under examination: the slot cell indicates the place of the element in a higher constituent, the class cell indicates its paradigmatic (substitution) relations, the role cell indicates its function (behavioural meaning or social impact), and the cohesion cell indicates what governs its occurrence. As was mentioned above, tagmemes are inseparable from the physical substance of text/speech. (3) Text (stream of speech) (henceforth: text) should be viewed as simultaneously involving three hierarchies (cf. (1) above),. sharing the physical substance of the text. Methodologically, the three hierarchies are viewed as separate, i.e., a text can be examined only in one of them. The hierarchies are informally correlated in that e.g., a referential event is expressible by means of different grammatical constructions (sentences). Every of the hierarchies consists of a number of recursively arranged levels (layers), which is important especially for didactic purposes; in this respect, the hierarchies may exhibit parallelisms. The higher levels of the hierarchies, reflecting the regularities of verbal behaviour, are not reducible to the lower levels, which reflect also the irregularities. (4) Tagmemics is characterized above all by contextualism (anti-abstractionism, anti-reductionism), which implies the freedom of the observer to consider things from different viewpoints, and at the same time a duty to respect in any case the context of verbal behaviour; it is precisely this respect to context which makes tagmemics so vivid, compact, flexible, and universal.
Book reviews
723
In conclusion to the first part of our review it can be stated that the book under review is an example of a brilliant exposition of a theory, free from bias of any sort, reflecting the holistic approach of the author and his endeavour to understand the world even in its unexpected manifestations; in other words, it represents the author as a philosopher of linguistics rather than as a pure linguist. 3 The second book under review, Text and tagmeme, consists of three parts. The first part, by Evelyn Pike, entitled ‘Grammatical and referential hierarchies in a prose text - Toward its systematic exegesis’, provides (an illustration of) a systematic and minute analysis of a portion of the article ‘The question of honour’ by Allan Sherman (published in 1971 in Reader’s Digest, concerning a remarkable event of World War II - a surprising rescue of allied troops, and referred to as ‘The Bathtub Navy’) by means of numerous displays in the form of tree diagrams and tagmemic formulas, which constitute the heart of the contribution; the analysis shows the parallelisms, differences as well as moot points concerning the two hierarchies in question. Each of the hierarchies consists of several levels; the higher levels are parallel (cf. the parallel levels concerning the participation of the speaker and the hearer in a discourse, namely the grammatical I-Thou-Here-Now Axis vs. the referential Macro-event), while the lower levels often do not have any counterparts in the other hierarchies (cf. the grammatical level of morpheme, or the referential level of vectors (a vector represents the actions of an actor of a text)). The two hierarchies in question differ also in their structuring with respect to time: the grammatical hierarchy of a text need not correspond to the chronological sequence of events, while the referential hierarchy is necessarily based on a chronological sequence of events, admitting also (unlike the grammatical hierarchy) simultaneity. From this it follows that referential elements (events) can be expressed, from different viewpoints of the speaker, by a number of grammatically different paraphrases. Most importantly, in the referential hierarchy, mainly in the tagmemic cells of role (and cohesion), many elements (concerning generally purpose or reason, and in particular such items of behavioural meaning or social impact as ‘to try to rescue trapped troops’ or ‘with success’) must be inferred (reconstructed) in order to understand the text. Such an inferencing (including the inferencing which the hearer is spontaneously making while processing a text) is based on the factual knowledge as well as on the beliefs, attitudes, etc. of the hearer (and of the linguist-analyst); in this sense, the result of the referential analysis transcends a thorough knowledge-representation scheme of a text. Another creative aspect of the referential analysis consists in the treatment of the
124
Book reviews
Performative Interaction level, where the intentions of the speaker (encoder) are reconstructed in considerable detail. In addition to the basic characteristics of this contribution, there are two more points to be discussed here, namely the author’s conception of topic and focus, and of meaning. The author works with the notions of topic and focus (prominence), if I understand her correctly, as having roughly the same meaning, paraphrasable as ‘what stands in the centre of attention/interest’, ‘what is spoken about’; in this, her conception of focus is close to that of Grosz (1977), but different from that of Chomsky (1971), which coincides with the conceptions in European linguistics (cf. below). In this sense, one may miss in the analysis a level (or perhaps kinds of role in the tagmeme?) where the elements of a sentence would be classified according to whether they belong to the old/given/presupposed information (topic, theme ~ what is spoken about) or to the new information (focus, comment, rheme - how the topic is modified), as established in the tradition of European functionalism (cf. Sgall et al. (1973)); we believe that the topic-focus articulation of a sentence (exhibiting recursive properties and being applicable also to other levels than that of sentence) could prove a useful tool also in the tagmemic theory. On the other hand, the author seems to use the term ‘meaning’ in two meanings, namely (a) as the behavioural meaning, which is generally used in tagmemics as involved in the role slot of the tagmeme, and (b) as the meaning of words, which is correlated to reference (cf. ‘the meaning (of an entry in the lexicon) represents the referential class’). In the first of the two usages of the term, meaning seems to be conceived as cutting across the whole linguistic system (which is in agreement with the functionalistic intuition), but the two usages of the term (the two conceptions of meaning) should be more explicitly delineated. On the whole, Evelyn Pike’s analysis has shown that the grammatical and the referential hierarchies are well-conceived parts of a framework in which the formally grammatical (morphological, syntactic) as well as the referential and pragmatic aspects of a text are intended to be exhaustively treated. The second part of the book, by Kenneth L. Pike, entitled ‘Phonological hierarchy in a four-cell tagmeme representation from poem to phoneme class’, based on an analysis of a poem by Langston Hughes (Who but the lord, originally published in 1945, now slightly adjusted), does not only present a detailed phonological analysis of a remarkable poem, but enables the reader to discover its poetic values, especially with respect to the behavioural meaning of its parts. In the analysis, the poem is divided into the following levels: poem, paragraph complex and the final pause group, phonological paragraphs, phonological subparagraphs, phonological sentences, phonological clauses, syllables and vowels, each of the units of these levels being specified, inter alia,
Book reviews
725
with respect to its role-behavioural meaning. The intuitive character of the approach and at the same time the accuracy with which the behavioural roles are assigned leads us to make a general comment on Kenneth Pike’s conception of form and meaning in comparison with the other linguistic conceptions thereof. In the present conception, form and (psychologically treated) behavioural meaning are not separated into different levels of analysis, but cut across all of the three hierarchies; consequently, there are certain general distinctions of meaning which are common to the three hierarchies, such as purpose, as opposed to more specific distinctions (such as ‘setting tension’, ‘afterthought’, or the even less general distinctions mentioned above). It should be remarked, however, that behavioural meaning, not being conceived as a separate domain of study, does not seem to be readily accessible to generalizations and to systematic (explicit) account. Thus, though the specific labels for the kinds of behavioural meaning as mentioned above are intuitively plausible and psychologically realistic, they do not seem to be explicitly motivated (systematically psychologically backgrounded) so that a reader may miss a deeper explanation for why it is just ‘setting tension’ or ‘afterthought’ which have been chosen as pivot notions of the analysis. To recall the conceptions of form and meaning in other linguistic theories, let us only note that the majority of the Western linguistic descriptions treat meaning under the heading of ‘semantics’ as accountable for by means of logical calculi (cf. the Chomskyan ‘logical form’) and as involving reference, often with respect to computational applications (referential-inferential approach). The other extreme point is represented by the conception of the Functional Generative Description (cf. Sgall 1980,1981), which includes a special level of meaning in the sense of strict, narrow, literal meaning as directly structured by the linguistic form and not paraphrasable by other linguistic constructions (in this sense, the level of meaning is akin to the level of deep syntax), the distinctions concerning what is called here behavioural meaning (including beliefs, intentions and attitudes) as well as reference being relegated to the (extralinguistic) domain of ‘cognitive content’, which is supposed not to be directly structured by the linguistic form. From this viewpoint, Kenneth Pike’s approach represents presumably the mediocre way, admitting in different ways both behavioural meaning and reference to his linguistic system, with a certain amount of formalism (tagmeme), allowing for an informal approach toward language. Such an approach should be praised, but we propose that the idea of behavioural meaning as embodied by (encapsulated in) the role ceil of the tagmeme should be perhaps spelled out more systematically. As the major merit of the contribution under review should be considered the author’s successful merging of the linguistic and the poetic, as well as the empirical and the creative, aspects of the analysis of a single hierarchy of a poem.
The third part of the book, likewise by Kenneth L. Pike, entitled ‘The tetrahedron as a model for the four-cell tagmeme in its multiple relations’, brings a substantial innovation into the tagmemic theory, making it more comprehensive and at the same time more transparent. According to the innovation in question, the (two-dimensional) four-cell tagmemic matrix is transposed into the (three-dimensional) structure of the tetrahedron, which makes explicit those relations which in the four-cell matrix had been implicit or hardly conceivable: this means that by means of the tetrahedron model there can be treated “very great interlocking empirical complexities of relationships across hierarchies and their levels”. The new approach is presented with respect to the development of tagmemic theory since the 50’s, with an emphasis on its functional basis and kinship to stratiticational types of description; the recursive character of the present shape of tagmemics (tagmemes being applicable to the units of any level of any of the three hierarchies) assures the continuity of its functional-stratiticational character, though methodologically the three hierarchies are conceived of as separate in that there are no explicitly proposed relations of relabelling or of asymmetric dualism between adjacent levels or hierarchies. In the ‘two-and-two’ tagmemic matrix (consisting of two columns and two rows), four relations (concerning pairs of cells) have been recognized as relevant only, namely slot-class, role-cohesion, slot-role, and slot-cohesion, while the other two relations, of diagonal nature, namely slot-cohesion and class-role, have been quite backgrounded. On the other hand, with the tetrahedron model (whose four faces represent the four cells of the tagmeme), all of the six relations are represented in an equally transparent manner by the six edges of the tetrahedron. Furthermore, every point of the tetrahedron represents, with respect to its opposite face (cell), a common feature shared by the other three faces (cells) which intersect in it, cf. cohesion (characterized as concerning the structure of the remote context), as opposed to the triple slotclass-role (characterized as concerning the structure of the immediate context). The tetrahedron model also makes it possible to perceive new relations which had been quite ‘invisible’ in the tagmeme, such as the relation of opposition concerning the opposite edges of the tetrahedron (i.e., those edges which do not intersect): every edge of the tetrahedron (representing a pair of cells) can be characterized by a feature, and these features are in turn arranged in pairs exhibiting opposite properties (cf. slotclass = overt data vs. rolecohesion = covert data; slot-role = syntagmatic vs. class-cohesion = paradigmatic, and classsrole = awareness easy vs. slot-cohesion = awareness difficult). In conclusion to the second part of our review, it can be argued that the book Text and Tugmeme provides a good piece of evidence in favour of the claim that tagmemics is a reliable tool for interpreting, in a straightforward and creative manner, any kind of text, and shows in a convincing way that
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tagmemics is a flexible theory accessible to adjustments and capable of constant development._ I think that it will be adequate to remark in this place that in the present book I found with satisfaction a long reference to Professor Bohumil Trnka, an outstanding personality in Czechoslovak linguistics, who tragically died in 1984, still lecturing at the age of 89. On the whole, the two books under review have shown that tagmemics has proved to be an adequate theory for the understanding of the structure and the explicit and implicit meaning of text as inseparable from the participants of discourse, from the outer world and from rr,e specific conditions of its occurrence: in our opinion, it is quintessential ?I.; the tagmemic analysis that it is psychologically realistic, corresponding to the human processing of text, i.e., to the understanding (decoding) of the message intended by the encoder. We sincerely look forward to Professor Pike and his colleagues for further developments of their remarkable theory. Eva Koktova Germanisches Seminar Universitat Hamburg FRG References Chomsky, Noam, 1971. ‘Deep structure, surface structure and semantic interpretation’. In: D. Steinberg and L. Jakobovits, eds., Semantics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. pp. 183-216. Grosz, Barbara, 1977. The representation and use of focus in dialogue understanding. Technical Note 151, Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, CA. Koktova, Eva, 1983. Review of: Kenneth L. Pike, Tagmemics, discourse, and verbal art. Journal of Pragmatics 7: 24&242. Pike, Kenneth L., 1981. Tagmemics, discourse, and verbal art. Ann Arbor, Ml: University of Michigan Press. Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics, 1984. (Editors), In Memoriam Professor Bohumil Trnka. Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics 43: 5-6. Sgall, Petr, 1980. ‘Towards a pragmatically based theory of meaning’. In: J.R. Searle et al., eds., Speech act theory and pragmatics. Dordrecht: Reidel. pp. 233-246. Sgall, Petr, 1981. The level of linguistic meaning. Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics 34: 340. Sgall, Petr, Eva HajiEova and Eva BeneSovi, 1973. Topic, focus, and generative semantics. Kronberg/Ts.: Scriptor.
Gertrud Greciano, Signification et denotation en allemand. La semantique des expressions idiomatiques. Paris: Klincksieck, 1983. (Recherches Linguistiques IX, publites par le Centre d’Analyse Syntaxique de 1’Universitt de Metz.) 469 pp. 160 FF. The last 15 years have witnessed a considerable progress in the study of phraseology, as a logical consequence of the increasing interest in lexical