A Review of From Grammar To Science

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american speech 76.1 (2001)198 REVIEWS

UPDATING A CLASSIC

American Pronunciation

By John Samuel Kenyon. 12th edition, expanded

Edited by Donald M. Lance and Stewart A. Kingsbury

Ann Arbor, Mich.: George Wahr, 1994. Pp. xxx + 410

Reviewed by

erik r. thomas, North Carolina State University

John Samuel Kenyon’s American Pronunciation is a classic in Americanlinguistics. In large part it consists of a detailed description of his own

dialect (that of northeastern Ohio), but it also includes a great deal about

the history of English and about processes such as spelling-pronunciation

that lead to change. Kenyon designed it, as he said in the preface of the first

edition in 1924, as “a textbook on pronunciation” for teachers, both

college-level and secondary-level (v). From then until 1950 it appeared in

ten different editions. However, with Kenyon’s death in 1959, the periodic

revision of this work came to an end. At the prompting of the George Wahr

Publishing Company, Donald M. Lance and the late Stewart A. Kingsbury,

with assistance from Stephen M. Howie, took on the perhaps unenviable

task of producing an updated version. This edition, officially the 12th,

appeared in 1994.

The 12th edition is made up of several parts. First are a new preface by

Lance and Kingsbury and an introduction by Lance. Next is Kenyon’s text

from the tenth edition, including the index, all reprinted without alter-

ation. After that is a chapter on the acoustic characteristics of English

sounds by Lance and Howie, followed by a chapter on geographic and

social variation in American English by Lance that largely draws on the

findings of dialectologists and sociolinguists since 1950. After Lance’s

essay, an important paper that Kenyon wrote, “Cultural Levels and Func-

tional Varieties of English,” is reprinted from the journal College English .

Finally, a list of references, a bibliography of Kenyon’s publications, and a

new index are provided.I will begin with Kenyon’s own text. In his introduction, he lays out two

goals for the book. First, he states that the focus of the work is the

description of phonetics. Second, he makes it clear that he is writing about

American Speech , Vol. 76, No. 2, Summer 2001

Copyright © 2001 by the American Dialect Society

198



Reviews 199

how phonetics can be applied to education. He argues that the purpose of

applying phonetics to education is both to combat ignorance in what is

taught about pronunciation and to improve elocution. With regard toignorance in teaching, he notes that people who hear differing pronuncia-

tions, such as [nju] or [nIu] or [nu] for new , often ask, “Which is correct?”

and that an answer to such a question should be based on historical

knowledge instead of chauvinistic defense of one’s own pronunciation (6).

This theme appears repeatedly in the rest of the book. Kenyon adds that

the importance of phonetics for education is based not on its practicality

but on “its value as a branch of knowledge” (6). However, he is clearly

interested in applications as well. The numerous references to the peda-

gogical value of phonetics show that his intended audience is teachers, not

just of linguistics but of English and speech, too.

Kenyon’s text is organized into sections. In places, he provides chapter

headings, though he does not always do so. He follows his introduction with

a chapter entitled “Historical Suggestions.” Here he briefly reviews the

history of English from common Germanic, with emphasis on the influence

of the Norman French. This history leads to a discussion of how pronuncia-

tion changes. His description of the difference between phonetic change

and analogical change is not only still current (though knowledge of the

mechanisms of phonetic change has increased significantly), but also writ-

ten in a clear and understandable way. He follows that with discussions of

his notions about how American English originated and about stylistic

variation in speech. Here his ideas appear rather dated. For example, he

states that it has been established that American English is derived from

seventeenth-century standard British English, not from vernacular Britishdialects. However, Trudgill’s (1986) and Kerswill’s (1995) research on the

leveling that occurs with dialect mixture—as happened in the settlement of

the American colonies—and Fischer’s (1989) study of how regional British

cultural and linguistic traits are preserved in the United States call Kenyon’s

statement into question. His classification of speaking styles into familiar

colloquial, formal colloquial, public-speaking style, and public-reading

style has been supplanted by a series of more complicated schemes (e.g.,

Labov 1966; Bell 1984) as well as by the notion of register, as Lance notes

(367–68). Nevertheless, Kenyon, writing over 50 years ago, lacked the

benefit of more sophisticated classifications of style. In addition, the fact

that he admonishes his audience that colloquial English is not “bad”

English (17) points out his main concern on this topic, that of fightingpopular misconceptions.

Subsequent sections cover the IPA symbols that Kenyon used, the

articulation of the sounds of English, the definition of phoneme , syllable



american speech 76.1 (2001)200

division, assimilation, and stress. In his discussion of articulation, he occa-

sionally mentions acoustic correlates; writing before spectrographs had

become widely available to linguists, he was limited by the knowledge of histime. As a result, as Lance and Howie note in their chapter on the acoustics

of English sounds, Kenyon was right on some points and wrong on others.

Acoustics were not the focus of these sections, though, and as a whole they

are still instructive and worthwhile for students to read.

Sections 104–41 (81–114) discuss in detail stress and its effects on

vowels. He first discusses levels of stress. Then he delves into differences

between American and British pronunciation of words like imaginary and

territory in which American usage preserves a secondary stress that British

English has lost. He even provides historical evidence from poetry that

British English once had the secondary stress. After some discussion of

what he calls sense-stress, which contemporary students of intonation

might call nucleus placement, he engages in a lengthy discussion of how

stress levels are related to reduction of vowels to schwa. Although some of

the terminology has changed, these sections on stress are still useful

reading for linguists, English and ESL teachers, and speech instructors.

The fact that they do not include modern phonological theories does not

detract from their value; Kenyon bases his description on the examples that

he provides, and such evidence is timeless even as phonological theories

come and go.

After that, Kenyon discusses spelling-pronunciation. These sections

express some of the exasperation Kenyon felt about people, especially

teachers, who proclaim that the “proper” pronunciation of a word is the

one most like its spelling. He states that such an attitude is “fundamentally in error about the nature, origin, and growth of all language” (117) and

lists numerous examples that demonstrate that traditional pronunciations

of many English words do not conform to their spelling. For some of these

words, the spelling-pronunciation had already triumphed in Kenyon’s

time, and it undoubtedly has for more since then. However, English teach-

ers are often the chief conveyors of the notion that pronunciation should

conform to spelling, and they would benefit from Kenyon’s discussion. It is

no less instructive today than when he wrote it.

The largest and final part of Kenyon’s text, sections 151–376 (121–

234), covers the individual consonants, vowels, and diphthongs of English.

For each sound, Kenyon provides exercises for students on learning its

articulatory description. He also discusses each sound’s historical sourcesat length. In many of the sections, he includes remarks on spelling-pronun-

ciations that affect particular sounds or dialectal differences, particularly

differences between British and American pronunciation. His notes about



Reviews 201

dialectal variants within American English are based on data that predate

linguistic atlas investigations—let alone sociolinguistic studies—and are

thus limited. Although the pervasive phonetic symbols may discouragesome nonlinguists from reading these sections (as they might for earlier

sections), as a whole they are quite clearly written and useful to the wide

audience at which Kenyon was aiming.

Kenyon’s essay “Cultural Levels and Functional Varieties of English” is

a valuable addition to this edition. It fits largely because it is intended for

the same broad audience, especially English teachers. In it, Kenyon distin-

guishes between “cultural varieties,” which today are called sociolects or

similar names, and “functional varieties,” which today fall under the head-

ings of style and register. While different cultural varieties might typify

the usage of different groups of people, any individual uses various func-

tional varieties. Kenyon acknowledges that he had formerly failed to make

this distinction himself. Other terms that he employs have passed from

linguistic use, notably semiliterate . However, this article is important from a

historical perspective because the distinction that he defines had previ-

ously been widely ignored.

Lance and Kingsbury hint in their preface and introduction that it was

difficult to decide what else to add or change. They resolved to leave

Kenyon’s text alone. They also decided to add the introduction to place

“the content of the book in its historical context” and to add two chapters

after Kenyon’s text “to bring the book as a whole more in line with current

knowledge about American pronunciation” (xiii). They explain that they

added the chapter on acoustic characteristics of English sounds because

“Kenyon focuses on articulation in his description of English phonemes”(xiii). The purpose of Lance’s chapter on variation in American English is

to address complaints about Kenyon’s use of General American for what

dialectologists divide into the “North Midland” and “Inland Northern”

dialects (see xviii) and also to add recent findings about American dialects

and social and stylistic variation.

The chapter by Lance and Howie, “Spectrographic Analysis of English

Phonemes and Allophones,” covers some basic phonetic terminology, with

references to and corrections of statements by Kenyon, and then describes

the acoustic characteristics of each sound in American English. The discus-

sion is thorough. It covers formant structure, aperiodic components of

speech sounds, pitch differences, differences between male and female

voices, and numerous other aspects of speech. Special sections on /l / and /r/ are included. It is full of spectrograms demonstrating each point, often

with tables of numerical data supplementing the spectrograms. The spec-

trograms are a great aid to readers in understanding the text; in phonetics,




one picture really can be worth a thousand words. One of the best features

of this chapter is the extensive referencing to published papers from

acoustic phonetics. I would certainly recommend it to students in phonet-ics classes.

However, the problem with this chapter is that it is not useful to the

same audiences as Kenyon’s text. Any reader can see that the content

differs starkly from that of Kenyon’s text, but that in itself is not a drawback.

The difficulty is that while Kenyon was targeting speech and English

teachers as well as linguists, Lance and Howie’s chapter is of use only to

linguistics students—in fact, primarily to those involved intensively in

phonetics. It seems likely to me that most English instructors would find

the acoustics baffling, even with the clear explanation that Lance and

Howie provide, and would find no application for it in classroom instruc-

tion. Bird field guides provide an analogy. Guidebooks traditionally de-

scribed bird vocalizations with verbal descriptions or representations.

Robbins, Bruun, and Zim (1966) introduced spectrograms to their field

guide. Though the book sold well for other reasons, most birders found the

spectrograms completely useless, and other guides published subsequently

have reverted to verbal descriptions. Spectrograms, while invaluable to

acoustic specialists and for many kinds of research, are of limited value

outside those contexts.

Similarly, Lance’s chapter, “Variation in American English,” seems to

target a narrower audience than Kenyon’s text does. In general, this

chapter provides a good overview of the most important findings of dialec-

tology and sociolinguistics. It does not cover every issue, but it should not

aim to do so. If it had, it would have been far too long. Lance attempts torelate the findings to Kenyon’s text, especially with regard to Kenyon’s use

of General American (noted above) and how Kenyon’s understanding of

social and stylistic variation relates to the extensive research conducted on

those topics since 1950. He adds some discussion of ethnic variation, which

Kenyon had not addressed. This chapter succeeds in filling out Kenyon’s

descriptions, constrained as they were by the limits of knowledge when he

was writing. It also serves admirably as a concise summary of the findings of

scholars who study language variation.

There are a few minor points about which one could quibble. For

example, Lance writes in section 471 (356) that Labov (1991) finds

fronting of /U/ , as in took , to be associated with the Northern Cities Shift, but

actually it is fronting of /u/ , as in two . In section 477 (358), Lance says that tensing and raising of /I/ before /S/ , as in fish , does not occur in the North or

North Midland for generations younger than Kenyon’s, but it certainly

does occur in the North Midland for speakers born as late as the 1920s.



Reviews 203

The cross-generational comparison of recordings of seven speakers from

northeastern Ohio that Lance provides in sections 474–78 (357–59), the

oldest of whom is Kenyon himself, is a nice touch. However, consideringthe extensive reference to acoustics in the preceding chapter and the fact

that Lance is referring to Labov’s acoustic research here, one wonders why

Lance did not include formant plots of the vowels of these speakers. Of

course, such an analysis would have interested only linguists, which brings

up the major question about this chapter: how relevant is it to nonlinguists?

Parts of it would certainly be of interest to the nonlinguists among Kenyon’s

original audience. The discussions of court rulings and educational policy

regarding ethnic dialects are of great importance to educators. The discus-

sions of dictionary labels, inclusive language, high-school social divisions,

and popular knowledge of dialects would also be useful. On the other

hand, many nonlinguists would find opaque the discussion of the vowel

shifting patterns that Labov formulated, and the detailed discussion of

dialect boundaries delineated by dialectologists could also be of limited

value. As with the previous chapter, it seems as if this chapter was written

primarily for linguists.

This edition has numerous merits. I agree with the editors that it was

appropriate to leave Kenyon’s own text unaltered. Even though some of its

terminology has become outdated, the detailed historical derivations, the

treatment of popular misconceptions, and the copious examples certainly

have not. Kenyon’s essay on cultural levels and functional varieties is a

welcome addition. The new chapters are—by themselves—well written,

too. Lance’s new introduction effectively places Kenyon’s text in its histori-

cal context. Lance and Howie’s excellent chapter on acoustic phoneticscould serve as a supplementary text in any phonetics course. Lance’s

chapter, “Variation in American English,” adequately summarizes the

findings on dialectal and stylistic variation that have accumulated since

Kenyon’s last revision. Except for the essay on cultural levels and functional

varieties, however, the additions fundamentally change the focus of this

edition. The new chapters lack Kenyon’s preoccupations with historical

derivation and with popular misconceptions of language. More impor-

tantly, however, they are not designed for the same audiences. Kenyon’s

focus, a pedagogical one, was English teachers and elocutionists as well as

linguists. The new chapters are much less relevant for nonlinguists and are

also less pedagogical than Kenyon’s text had been. American Pronunciation

will continue to be a valuable resource for linguists. Nevertheless, it seemsclear that the constituency for whom the 12th edition is useful is narrower

than Kenyon had intended.




REFERENCES

Bell, Allan. 1984. “Language Style as Audience Design.” Language in Society 13:145–204.

Fischer, David Hackett. 1989. Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America . Oxford:

Oxford Univ. Press.

Kerswill, Paul. 1995. “Children, Adolescents and Language Change.” Working

Papers in Linguistics 2: 201–22.

Labov, William. 1966. The Social Stratification of English in New York City . Washington,

D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics.

———. 1991. “The Three Dialects of English.” In New Ways of Analyzing Sound

Change , ed. Penelope Eckert, 1–44. Orlando, Fla.: Academic Press.

Robbins, Chandler S., Bertel Bruun, and Herbert S. Zim. 1966. A Guide to Bird

Identification: Birds of North America . New York: Golden.

Trudgill, Peter. 1986. Dialects in Contact . Language in Society 10. Oxford: Blackwell.

IS LINGUISTICS A SCIENCE?

From Grammar to Science

By Victor H. Yngve

Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1996. Pp. xii + 350

Reviewed by

douglas w. coleman, University of Toledo

Not too long ago, I went looking for reviews of Yngve’s From Grammar to

Science and found that, although it has been out for about five years, it had

been reviewed only once, and then only electronically on the Linguist List

(Hacken 1997). Considering the book’s potentially enormous impact on

the field of linguistics, I was surprised, to say the least. Further, when I read

Hacken’s review, I was quite taken aback. It has several major errors of fact

with regard to the book’s contents—but more about that below.

From Grammar to Science is aimed primarily at practicing linguists. At

many points, the author speaks to them directly, often using the metaphor

of moving from the “old country” of a linguistics based primarily on

philosophical approaches to a “new country” in which linguistics enters the

domain of hard science (see especially chap. 9, “Plans for Emigrating to theNew World”).



Reviews 205

The book’s intent is ambitious. First of all, Yngve points out problems

at the very foundation of contemporary linguistics that undermine its

attempts to be “scientific.” At the risk of oversimplifying, I can summarizeby stating that Yngve says these problems arise essentially out of what he

calls “domain confusions” between objects of the sort studied by philoso-

phy and objects of the sort studied by science. As Yngve (like others) argues

convincingly, the objects of language are more like those studied by phi-

losophy than those studied by science. (My own corpus-based research

comparing references to the research process in texts from “theoretical”

and “applied” linguistics seems to confirm this [Coleman 1999].) Note

Saussure’s often-quoted remark on the “objects of language”: “Far from it

being the object that antedates the viewpoint, it is the viewpoint [of the

observer] that creates the object” (1959, 8). As I have often explained it to

my own students, people, the noises they make, the marks they make on

paper, and so on are observable in the “real world”—what Yngve calls the

“physical domain.” But language (i.e., “grammar”) is something linguists

have offered by way of explanation for what they observe. Itkonen (1978)

has shown beyond doubt the dangers to linguistics of conflating the former

sense of “observation” (recording sense data from the real world) with the

one in which we speak of “making observations” about hypothetical enti-

ties. People, Yngve argues, are objects in the physical domain; language is

not. “We cannot found a science on an assumption that creates its own

objects of study,” that is, “objects of language” (33). The linguistics he

proposes is, rather, “a human linguistics, a linguistics focused on people

rather than on language” (121). He takes most of chapters 1–9 to fully

develop his arguments along these lines. Yngve outlines his conceptual framework in chapters 10–18. He shows

how a system of attaching properties to individuals and interactional groups

in which they participate can be developed into a complex apparatus for

describing human communication. It is disappointing but perhaps under-

standable that he provides only short examples of various communicative

situations and does not develop any of his examples in great depth. The

nature of his framework—which includes properties of individuals partici-

pating in a communicative event, properties of the interaction, and de-

scriptions of conditional changes of state in these properties—would re-

quire a few chapters to develop an in-depth example, and would require

prior understanding of the conceptual framework he has developed.

In chapters 19 and 20, the author presents a notational system that heargues will allow linguistics to be truly scientific. To this end, he does not




create a new notation out of thin air, but adopts standard diagramming

conventions from Boolean logic.

Now, here are some of the blatant misrepresentations made by Hacken(1997). “In Yngve’s view scientific knowledge is permanent and represents

truth,” a position Hacken describes as “so naive no philosopher would get

away with it.” But note what Yngve himself says: “Our theories are always

held to be tentative” (98). Hacken also complains that “Yngve [puts] the

starting point of modern science in the 17th century.” In fact, I cannot find

what statement of Yngve’s Hacken is referring to. Yngve acknowledges the

key contributions of Bacon, Descartes, and Galileo (21–22) in the forma-

tion of modern science—as does, for example, Stephen Hawking (1988,

179)—but at no point does he offer any kind of discrete “starting point” for

science. Hacken chides Yngve for believing that “the real world is given”

and explains himself by stating, “Observations of the world are determined

in part by our theories and metatheories.” Now, Yngve warns that the

natural sciences “do not confuse . . . the real physical world out there” with

“our observations of the world” (97). But, in fact, Hacken is guilty of this

when he conflates the givenness of the “real world” (which Yngve asserts)

and the “givenness” or literalness, if you will, of our observations of the

world (which Yngve warns cannot be taken for granted).

Hacken faults Yngve’s references for lack of coverage of current lin-

guistics. For example, he cites Yngve’s failure to address the formulation of

mentalism by Jackendoff (1993) and the outline of Chomskyan meta-

theory presented in Botha (1989) as reasons that his claims are “not

acceptable.” Recall Yngve’s claim: the problem is that current linguistics is

a linguistics of language (which is not in any meaningful sense “observablein the real world”) rather than a linguistics of people (who are). Botha has

dealt with this issue, as has Itkonen (1978, 1981). I am not aware of anyone

on the side of “mentalism” who has mounted a viable defense of language

(“grammar”) as something that exists in the real world rather than as

an explanation of something in the real world. Yet the “data” of current

linguistics is language. It is true that many would find Yngve’s arguments

more persuasive if he had cited a great deal of metatheoretical literature

from the field. But why? It would better establish his authority, but that is a

not a matter of the substance of his core argument: science studies real-

world objects, and language is not a real-world object.

I may be overly pessimistic about the possibility of Yngve’s linguistics of

people replacing the current linguistics of language in the immediatefuture, but I do not see this as a likely outcome of the appearance of his

book. After all, Itkonen (1978, 1981) presented clear and compelling



Reviews 207

arguments 20 years ago to the effect that intuitional “data” does not

constitute “observation” in any scientific sense. (I was a graduate student

when Itkonen’s works appeared and was forced to “discover” them on my own only a few years ago; they are unknown to the vast majority of my

colleagues.) Itkonen’s point has been belabored by others for decades, yet

it is essentially ignored by self-styled “mainstream linguistics.” I am hopeful

that From Grammar to Science will finally spur some colleagues to embark on

a serious attempt to recast linguistic theories within a framework of observ-

able real-world entities and will show them how to make their theories truly

scientifically testable. If so, then the book will at least have served as one of

the first reliable maps to the “new country” for linguistics—one that does

not display the realm of hard science as a largely blank area labeled merely

“heere be monsteres.”

REFERENCES

Botha, Rudolf P. 1989. Challenging Chomsky: The Generative Garden Game . Oxford:

Blackwell.

Coleman, Douglas W. 1999. “Assumptions, Hypotheses, and Theories in ‘Applied’

and ‘Theoretical’ Linguistics.” In LACUS Forum XXV , ed. Shin Ja J. Hwang and

Arle R. Lommel, 461–72. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Linguistic Association of Canada

and the United States.

Hacken, Pius ten. 1997. “Review: Yngve: From Grammar to Science .” Linguist List (on-

line serial): 8 (1277). http://linguistlist.org/issues/8/8-1277.html.

Hawking, Stephen. 1988. A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes . New

York: Bantam.

Itkonen, Esa. 1978. Grammatical Theory and Metascience: A Critical Investigation into

the Methodological and Philosophical Foundations of “Autonomous” Linguistics .

Amsterdam: Benjamins.

———. 1981. “The Concept of Linguistic Intuition.” In A Festschrift for Native

Speaker , ed. Florian Coulmas, 127–40. The Hague: Mouton.

Jackendoff, Ray. 1993. Patterns in the Mind: Language and Human Nature . New York:

Harvester/Wheatleaf.

Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1959. Course in General Linguistics . Trans. Wade Baskin.

New York: Philosophical Library.




A RHE TOR ICAL BIO GR APHY OF AN UN LIKELY RHE TOR

From Plymouth to Parliament: A Rhetorical History of Nancy Astor’s 1919 Campaign By Karen J. Musolf

New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999. Pp. xi + 244

Reviewed by

michael erard, University of Texas at Austin

From Plymouth to Parliament is a “rhetorical history,” a definition of which

author Karen J. Musolf dispatches in a short preface: it is “interdiscipli-

nary,” “carefully researched,” and “limited in scope,” and it “aims for

authenticity.” “An emerging genre,” the rhetorical history is “a blended

form that joins historical description with rhetorical description” (xi). Thismatters to readers of American Speech because such a title promises attention

to language, speech, and discourse.

Yet this modest volume—which mostly delivers on those promises—is

perhaps more appropriately dubbed a “rhetorical biography,” since it tells

about the rhetorical skills the American-born Lady Astor brought to her

1919 bid for the House of Commons and how she deployed those skills to

defeat two male opponents after a heated campaign. No theoretical bodice-

ripper, the book remains invested in the self-evidence of particulars. Thus,

for those readers who lack the requisite cross-disciplinary social, historical,

and political knowledge to situate the subject and its themes in larger terms

and for those readers who believe that particulars are most interesting,

productive, and compelling when they are framed in those larger terms,

Musolf’s book raises more questions than it answers.

The introduction is a biography of Lady Astor and her husband,

Waldorf Astor, whom Nancy met on a transatlantic ship in 1905 and

married in 1906. Lady Astor was a study in contrasts: a well-bred Virginian

(Nancy Langhorne was her given name), she loathed her snobbish class-

mates in finishing school in New York City; a hard-riding, hard-talking

horsewoman, she shunned alcohol and became a Christian Scientist. As

chapter 1 explains, Lady Astor’s candidacy became possible shortly after a

series of laws (the Representation of the People Act of 1918 and the

Qualification of Women Bill) enfranchised women and made wives equal

to their husbands, opening the way for her to vie for her husband’s seat in

the House of Commons after he fulfilled his destiny by filling his deceased

father’s seat in the House of Lords. When her husband called her to

become a candidate, Lady Astor sought to intensify a life of public service.

She was not actually the first woman elected to Parliament—that honor



Reviews 209

went to an Irish woman, Constance Markievicz—but she was the first

elected woman to claim her seat. In chapters 2 and 3, Musolf presents Lady

Astor as an unlikely rhetor in an unlikely campaign. Chapter 4 describesthe last few meetings of the campaign, and a conclusion discusses some

challenges facing Astor in her parliamentary career until 1945—for in-

stance, she was branded a Nazi sympathizer for her association with Neville

Chamberlain and his policy of appeasement of Hitler’s Germany.

For the most part, Musolf’s method is to analyze various texts of the

1919 campaign, including Astor’s speeches, newspaper reports, and let-

ters, comparing Astor’s word choices, figurative language, rhetorical strate-

gies, and verbal interactions with interlocutors in order to examine how

Lady Astor conducted her public appearances, managed her public per-

sona, handled her opponents, newspaper reporters, and hecklers. Musolf

compares Astor’s strategies to those of her opponents and shows how the

candidate altered her message to different audiences. She also uses com-

ments from audiences, reporters, and her campaign opponents to judge

reactions to Lady Astor’s rhetorical behavior and her rhetorical effective-

ness. Musolf concludes that Astor’s political success (in 1919 and six

successive elections) was due to her rhetorical skills. In sketching Lady

Astor’s “rhetorical gifts,” Musolf presents a woman probably more able

than most to withstand the pressures of public life, and certainly more

outspoken and well-versed in issues of the day than the 35-year-old carica-

ture of the “blatant and bloomered” creature the cartoonist Linley

Sambourne had imagined would be the first woman M.P. Because one gets

a vivid picture of Astor as a speaker and rhetor, From Plymouth to Parliament

is better termed a “rhetorical biography,” a nascent genre for which Musolf’sbook is a model, though not always a positive one.

Yet this rhetorical biography’s narrow focus on Astor is as much a

weakness as a strength. On one hand, Musolf has deftly mustered anec-

dotes from primary sources about Lady Astor’s verbal jousting, both public

and private. Working as a nurse in a Red Cross hospital, she confronted a

dying soldier with the following:

Yes, Saunders, you’re going to die. You’re going to die because you have no guts. If

you were a Cockney, or a Scot, or a Yank, you’d live. But you’re just a Canadian, so

you’ll lie down and die! I’ll have them send you up a good supper for your last meal

and I bet you this wrist watch you’ll be dead this time tomorrow. You can keep it ’till

then. I’ll get it back when you’re gone. [14]

The man finished the dinner and kept the watch for the rest of his life. Such

anecdotes complete a fine-grained portrait of Lady Astor as a tough, quick-

witted, intelligent speaker, someone who could be humorous, self-depre-




cating, but also confrontational. Musolf uses written materials to advantage

in her portrayal of Lady Astor’s campaign as well. As becomes clear, Lady

Astor depended on a certain resistance from other candidates and thehecklers her opponents sent into her crowds. “Heckling did not put any

clamps on Astor’s campaign talk,” Musolf writes. “Instead, it provided her

with the opportunity for a virtuoso performance—a tour de force of

rhetorical invention” (92). In this sense, unlike so many linguistic studies,

Musolf’s gives us real words produced by a real speaker and a description of

the settings and situations in which she produced them. On the other

hand, the meticulous attention to Lady Astor’s language, one virtue of the

biography, also means that Musolf disregards the social and linguistic

context within which Lady Astor’s language was considered distinctive.

Linguists will immediately notice that as a speaker, orator, or rhetor Lady

Astor is not situated within any description of the public discourse of the

day; in a book-length work, this must be considered a liability. Unfortu-

nately, this is exacerbated by the fact that the only comparisons are to

modern campaign practices, mostly American. This juxtaposition neither

illuminates the subject nor respects the complexity of modern campaigns.

There are several notions one could use to formulate “context”; one is

Pierre Bourdieu’s “linguistic marketplace.” As he writes, “linguistic utter-

ances or expressions are always produced in particular contexts or markets,

and the properties of these markets endow linguistic products with a

certain ‘value’” (Bourdieu 1991, 18). If rhetoric can be defined as a

symbolic activity that produces symbolic products of various use-values and

exchange-values within such a linguistic marketplace in order to produce

social formations of identification and persuasion, then a “rhetorical his-tory” should properly describe not only an individual rhetor’s utterances

but the marketplace which values or devalues them.

In the case of Lady Astor, consider heckling, which Musolf notes “has

been part of the British political tradition for a long time” (198). Here a

simple (if riskily unpositivist) historical description is more necessary than

a theoretical discussion about the metaphysics of a heckling hegemony:

how were parliamentar y elections so shaped by heckling that antiheckling

rhetorical strategies were available to the candidates in the first place? This

would help the reader understand not only the source of Lady Astor’s

rhetorical skills but the contemporary conventions of political discourse

which she manipulated, exploited, and occasionally abandoned. Elsewhere

Musolf points out that the repartee between candidates and hecklers wasseriously judged (199). For Lady Astor’s campaign to succeed rhetorically,

what exactly were the conventions governing a campaigner’s response to

hecklers, and by what criteria were her responses judged? Musolf also

claims that heckling was Astor’s Labor opponent William Gay’s “rhetorical



Reviews 211

tactic,” but in order to accept this claim, the reader must understand how

Gay’s arsenal was constructed and managed in terms of accepted political

practices of the day.Musolf also claims that “Astor’s informal style and humor helped her

cross some of the class and cultural barriers that stood between her and the

women in her audience” (42). Here the question concerns definitions of

“formal” and “informal” and how well the contemporary reader knows how

they worked in early-twentieth-century England. As it stands, Musolf’s

claim seems credible enough, but here she misses an opportunity to

produce a thicker description of the linguistic marketplace. As examples of

such “thicker descriptions,” one thinks of Richard Bauman’s Let Your Words

Be Few: Symbolism of Speaking and Silence among Seventeenth-Century Quakers

(1983) and Jane Kamensky’s Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in

Early New England (1997), both of which rely on historical documents to

meet Dell Hymes’s 1962 call for research in “The Ethnography of Speak-

ing” which, as Bauman and Joel Sherzer (1974, 6) put it, is “directed

toward the formulation of descriptive theories of speaking as a cultural

system or as part of a cultural system.”

The thinness of Musolf’s description is most salient where the book

might contribute the most, exactly on the issue of gender, public discourse,

and the early history of women’s enfranchisement. She depends on an

evaluation of Lady Astor’s first speech by an Evening Standard reporter, “one

of the most remarkable political speeches ever delivered by a woman” (32).

What types of speeches were these listeners used to hearing from women?

Musolf mentions that Astor’s presence in the election influenced her

opponents’ rhetoric by suddenly illuminating it as highly gendered. Forinstance, William Foot’s favorite election metaphor was about boxing, and

he used to like to say, “Let the best man win,” and, “Slug it out man to man,”

expressions which he could not use in 1919. Musolf also notes that the

“interactive format” Astor preferred was unusual for women’s meetings,

which “gave both Astor and the members of her audience the opportunity

to enact women’s participation in the political process” (39). Musolf also

points out that Astor’s candidacy affected campaign coverage, which was in

turn the center of political news, “the primary function of the British

press—its raison d’être ” (104). Still, Musolf provides more information

about written public discourse than about spoken discourse, which is

ironic, considering that her appreciation of Astor’s “rhetoric” is mostly

about her speaking. A final comment about the “rhetorical history” of the book’s subtitle:

First, it announces that a “rhetorical approach” has directed the scholar to

describe and evaluate a person’s linguistic behavior on the reasonable

assumption that linguistic behavior, whether fully conscious or not, reveals




a significant amount about individuals, their intentions, and their times.

Thus, a “rhetorical history” is distinct from an intellectual history (what

someone thought, in terms of what was available to them to think) or amaterial culture perspective (what someone owned or built, in terms of

what was available to own or build). It also shares the reasonable assump-

tion that public linguistic action influences how people think, act, and

know. But why is a rhetorical history any better than any other kind of

history? Musolf does not say.

Second, “rhetorical history” announces what is as often a drawback as a

strength in projects identified as “rhetorical,” which is that they are not

bound to any disciplinary conventions of method, presentation, or conclu-

sions. That Musolf uses terminology from the contemporary study of

political campaigns indicates that her study is rooted in part in the study of

“rhetoric” itself, but rhetorical terms are deployed haphazardly and not

always defined. In the end, she leaves unjustified the interdisciplinary

nature of her project, and as a result the “rhetorical approach,” with its

autonomy from other disciplines, becomes a liability because it does not

provide reasons for that autonomy. For Musolf, a “rhetorical approach”

seems to be warranted in Lady Astor’s case simply because she was an

unlikely rhetor in an unlikely campaign—not, however, because the “rhe-

torical approach” builds a more complete framework for understanding

this campaign, this rhetor, or the impact of this rhetor on British politics.

For the most part, From Plymouth to Parliament ’s claims to interdisciplin-

arity are not earned, a conclusion which I realize is far from Lady Astor’s

campaign but worth making. The point of interdisciplinary work is to

achieve conclusions. Sometimes one can generate an interesting intellec-tual friction that is productive for the project if it is an energy directed

towards the impossibility (or possibility) of certain types of conclusions, but

we are not yet at the point where the ethos of interdisciplinarity is en-

hanced when not belonging to a recognizable set of disciplinary behaviors

is undertaken simply for the frisson of not belonging.

REFERENCES

Bauman, Richard. 1983. Let Your Words Be Few: Symbolism of Speaking and Silence

among Seventeenth-Century Quakers. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.

Bauman, Richard, and Joel Sherzer, eds. 1974. Explorations in the Ethnography of

Speaking . Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power . Trans. Gino Raymond and

Matthew Adamson. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press.



Reviews 213

Hymes, Dell. 1962. “The Ethnography of Speaking.” In Anthropology and Human

Behavior , ed. T. Gladwin and W. C. Sturtevant, 13–53. Washington, D.C.:

Anthropological Society of Washington.Kamensky, Jane. 1997. Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New

England. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

HOW THE MIND TURNS LANGUAGE INTO MEANING

The Ascent of Babel: An Exploration of Language, Mind, and Understanding

By Gerry T. M. Altmann

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. xiii + 257

Reviewed by

mark canada, University of North Carolina at Pembroke

In his preface to The Ascent of Babel , Altmann explains, “I wanted to write

this book so that it would be readable by non-specialists. I wanted to convey

to them the excitement and challenge of psycholinguistics —the study of how

the mind turns language into meaning, and back again” (vi). Altmann

succeeds on both counts, making his subject both accessible and interest-

ing. Indeed, The Ascent of Babel has all the ingredients of a successful lay

introduction to a complex subject, as well as an approach that makes it an

ideal textbook for a college linguistics course.

In this brief but expansive overview, Altmann explores the processes by which the human brain acquires language, interprets spoken words and

sentences, produces speech, and absorbs language through reading, as well

as the various ways that these processes can break down. As the preface

promises, the focus is on meaning. For example, while some discussions of

language acquisition emphasize the stages by which infants learn to talk,

Altmann examines the possible ways that infants come to make sense of the

language they hear. Comparing the prosody of speech to the music behind

song lyrics, he suggests that the prosodic clues that infants hear in voices

may help them to distinguish syllables—an important first step in under-

standing language. Meaning is also the focus of a chapter called “Words,

and How We (Eventually) Find Them,” which examines the complex

mental processes involved when a person hears and interprets a sentence. Altmann shows how aural input initially activates various words with differ-

ent meanings—captain and captive , for example—in the brain and how the

brain then eliminates inappropriate meanings until it arrives at the correct





Reviews 215

tics—like any other academic field—as something mysterious and unfold-

ing rather than a fixed body of knowledge. Indeed, particularly because of

its juxtaposition of generally accepted concepts and speculation, The Ascent of Babel implicitly invites students to participate in the search for knowl-

edge. This invitation, along with the lesson it teaches about academic

inquiry, is the book’s most appealing and important feature.

STATUS, PREEMINENCE, AND PROMISCUITY

A Bawdy Language: How a Second-Rate Language Slept Its Way to the Top

By Howard Richler

Toronto: Stoddart, 1999. Pp. xiii + 208

Reviewed by

peter m. carriere, Georgia College & State University

This book is a compilation and reorganization of articles from Richler’s

column in the Gazette newspaper of Montreal, Quebec, though some new

material appears in parts 1 and 2. Styled for the reading public, the book

excludes standard scholarly aids like indexes and bibliographies. Neverthe-

less, Richler relies heavily on research from myriad sources. This approach

may be an emerging trend. Nichols (1999), in her review of Wolfram and

Schilling-Estes (1997), observes that Hoi Toide is a “book on linguistics for

the public” and then asks, “About how many of the books in our libraries

can we say this?” Of course, research into bawdiness has a certain compel-

ling quality, and Richler’s entertaining and witty style may be enjoyed by

anyone. His mock-serious revelation at the end of chapter 3 is typical: “The

[lexical] progeny of a pheasant and a duck would be . . . a deasant , of

course” (18).

Richler’s general thesis is that the prominence of English as the world’s

lingua franca is a result not only of the overwhelming global presence of

Britain and the United States over the last few centuries but also of the

English language’s willingness to absorb words and phrases from a multi-

plicity of sources without worrying about retaining its purity. In adopting a

skeptical posture toward attempts to keep language pure, journalist Richler

is working in the tradition of linguists like Mencken, who, in The American

Language (1979), devoted a whole chapter to condemning English atti-

tudes toward American linguistic “barbarisms.” Observed Mencken, “In




language an Americanism is generally regarded as obnoxious ipso facto and

when a pungent new one begins to force its way into English usage the

guardians of the national linguistic chastity belabor it” (31). While Richler’sbook provides ample evidence that the success of English is partly because

it was a language that “slept its way to the top,” the last two sections, parts 5

and 6, move away from that general theme. Part 6 reviews some of the word

games that have occurred in English throughout its history and ends by

providing the reader with challenging language puzzles, riddles, and fill-in-

the-blank exercises of the type available in airport bookstores.

In short chapters (two to four pages long) the other parts of the book

discuss the “impure” conditions of English that have contributed to its rise.

Each chapter culls the most bizarre and entertaining oddities pertaining to

its topic rather than providing exhaustive scholarly discussions. The num-

ber of chapters in each part varies from five in part 5 to nine in part 4.

These sections and chapters may be read in any order without sacrificing

understanding, an organizational feature that may appeal to the reading

public and enhance the book’s general popularity.

Part 1 is devoted to a discussion of “the strength of English,” by which

Richler means its flexibility in adopting slang, portmanteau blends, color-

ful jargon, and words created out of new endeavors and occupations. An

example is the phrase exit bag , which Richler traces to 1997 when it arose in

connection with assisted suicide. Exit bag was an American Dialect Society

word of the year, and Richler features some of the more unusual ones to

emerge in the 1990s, like the self-explanatory starter marriage from 1995

and urban camping , a euphemism for homelessness, from 1996. Having

ingratiated himself with the reader by appealing to contemporary linguis-tic innovations, Richler then freely explores more historical portmanteau

words like Shakespeare’s glaze , a blend of glare and gaze , and Herman

Melville’s snivelization , coined in 1849 from snivel and civilization (17).

Illogical combinations like alcoholic are covered in chapter 2: “An alcoholic

is not addicted to ‘alco’ but to ‘alcohol’” (15). The contributions of slang

form the topic of chapter 4, and part 1 ends with a brief discussion of the

illogical and hypocritical nature of linguistic “purity” and those who seek it.

Richler’s point throughout is that the value and popularity of English have

something to do with its willingness to mate with disreputable characters

that other cultures and languages would eschew, to which, Richler says,

“Thank God for disreputable characters” (19).

Part 2 focuses on the beneficial adulteration of English by the additionof words of foreign origin and the delightful oddities that occur when

people speaking the same language are geographically separated. For

example, chapter 8 covers some of the differences between British and

American usage. Some of the entries are fairly well known, like the words



Reviews 217

diaper and nappy , but others are not, like the British phrase keeping your pecker

up , equivalent to the American keeping your courage up . Chapter 9 features a

discussion of the African legacy in English and the idea of Ebonics as anenduring English language variant, and chapter 10 features the influence

of Yiddish and certain words like klutz , schmuck , and nudnik —words that

Richler believes have endured “not because they introduce a new concept

but because they’re fun to say” (51). The next chapter discusses the

influence of English used in former colonies, and the following three

chapters are devoted to Canadianisms, where we learn that “in the United

States a shit disturber is more likely to be referred to as a shit-stirrer ” (62).

Richler defines neither term, but shit-stirrer appears in Spears (1982) as a

synonym for sodomite (378).

The chapters of part 3 are loosely grouped around an ironic theme:

“Genealogy: The Pedigree of a Mongrel Language” (67). Chapter 15

contains a lengthy discussion of the “f-word,” referred to by Richler as “our

[lexical] Sovereign,” and chapter 16 strips the mask of gentility off words

like avocado , which descended from the Aztec word for ‘testicle’ (74), and

vermicelli , which literally means ‘little worms’ (75). Chapter 17, aptly titled

“What’s in a Nym,” discusses acronyms, eponyms, and retronyms, a word

coined by Robert F. Kennedy’s aide Frank Mankiewicz to “describe the

union of adjectives to previously solitary nouns” (80), as in acoustic guitar , a

two-word noun made suddenly necessary by the appearance of the electric

guitar. The next chapter focuses on the origins of such geographic names

as America and Canada , and chapter 19 is concerned with words that find

sudden fame (or infamy), such as paparazzi , which, according to Richler,

was born in 1961, the same year as Princess Diana. The next chapterconsists of a discussion of the full Monty , a protean phrase that can mean ‘the

whole thing’ (91) or ‘total nudity’: “When performing the full monty,”

writes Richler, “clothes can be donned as well as doffed” (93). Chapter 21

concludes part 3 with a brief but informative discussion of the origins of the

Oxford English Dictionary , followed by a return to the theme that to insist on

purity in language is to stifle its natural and engaging development: “It is

never the true linguists, such as Noam Chomsky, Dwight Bolinger, and

Robin Lakoff,” insists Richler, “who are issuing the language fiats” (98).

The first word puzzle occurs in chapter 22, in part 4. Generally devoted

to a discussion of English as an easy language to acquire in its basic form

(850 words gets the job done) but difficult to really master, the puzzle

illustrates the problem of meaning: Does sanction mean ‘forbid’ or ‘per-mit’? Many of the heteronyms and heterophones Richler discusses have

been the subject of small talk for years, as in the difference between bear

‘animal’ or ‘tolerate’ and bare ‘undress’ or ‘be naked’. Never willing to stray

too far from the bawdiness theme, Richler in chapter 23 covers the impor-




tance of language in the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal; in chapter 24, the

linguistic focus of political correctness; and in chapter 25, the difficulty of

telling euphemisms from dysphemisms ‘euphemisms with offensive con-notations’, as in ball and chain ‘wife’. Chapter 26 covers acronyms, ending

in an entertaining list of satirical ones, as in DOS ‘Defective Operating

System’ or WW W ‘World Wide Wait’ (124). The rest of part 4 covers other

lexical anomalies like the appearance of the euphemistic donkey to replace

biblical ass , the seven deadly sins as neither deadly nor sins today, preju-

dices associated with the word left , and odd names: “People with surnames

such as Piddle, Shitler, and Daft still live in the villages of Ugly, Nasty, Foul

Hole, and Swineshead” (139).

The divergence of the last two parts of Richler’s book from his bawdi-

ness-is-beneficial theme is not total. While some chapters are devoted to

such things as how proverbs change from one language to another, or how

Irish is a dying language while Hebrew has been resuscitated through

mouth-to-mouth reiteration, others return to English, as in those chapters

in part 6 devoted to English word games like Scrabble, no longer the sole

possession of the English language, or the fun of anagrams, lipograms,

pangrams, palindromes, and split-definitives, ‘words defined by their

constituent parts’. Thus Hebrew becomes he-brew ‘beer with balls’ (197).

In his introduction, Richler claims that his “aim” in writing A Bawdy

Language “is to demonstrate why the English language is in such good

shape and to explain to the reader what he or she should know to fully

enjoy the world’s global language” (5). This rather broad topic is made

necessary by the chapters that diverge somewhat from the strict scrutiny of

English and its promiscuous origins. Or perhaps Richler considers wordgames a manifestation of linguistic promiscuity. Whatever the case, the

short chapters make for quick reading, and A Bawdy Language would make

an entertaining and informative addition to any library.

REFERENCES

Mencken, H. L. 1979. The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of

English in the United States. 4th ed., abr. with annotations and new material by

Raven I McDavid, Jr. New York: Knopf.

Nichols, Patricia. 1999. Review of Wolfram and Schilling-Estes (1997). American

Speech 74: 95–99.

Spears, Richard A. 1982. Slang and Euphemism: A Dictionary of Oaths, Curses, Insults,Sexual Slang and Metaphor, Racial Slurs, Drug Talk, Homosexual Lingo, and Related

Matters . Abr. ed. New York: Signet.

Wolfram, Walt, and Natalie Schilling-Estes. 1997. Hoi Toide on the Outer Banks: The

Story of the Ocracoke Brogue . Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press.

Documents

A Review of From Grammar To Science