AUTHORS: Bieswanger, Markus; Becker, Annette TITLE: Introduction to English Linguistics PUBLISHER: Narr YEAR: 2008 PAGES: 229 + ix ISBN: 978-3-7720-8254-4 REVIEWER: Dinha T. Gorgis, Jadara University, Irbid, Jordan The book, presented in a user-friendly English and intended for beginners in English linguistics, is a second edition which welcomes "comments and suggestions for future editions" (Preface ix). The review that follows, based on over a three-decade personal teaching experience, will accordingly observe what newcomers to a linguistics course need to know before they intend to major in linguistics. Although the authors believe that the textbook does not require any previous knowledge [of the field], it is my contention that some knowledge of basic English grammar is necessary, particularly where English is taught as a foreign/second language. SUMMARY Bieswanger and Becker divide their book into nine chapters, each of which ending with an annotated bibliography save the last, named "Appendix", which includes key answers to exercises suggested in chapters 2-8. Chapter 1 (pp. 1-9) is a brief introduction that starts with the definition of linguistics, its main branches, and some central concepts used in the field. Perhaps because Ferdinand de Saussure is often called the father of modern (structural) linguistics in many parts of the world, particularly Europe, the authors introduce his dichotomies to the exclusion of paradigmatic vs. syntagmatic relations, a distinction already illustrated (p. 112) without acknowledgement. However, a brief mention of 'functionalism' (as an extension of Saussurian structuralism) and 'formalism' (i.e. generativism) is made in a couple of paragraphs. Chapter 2 (pp. 11-38) is a brief history of English. In this overview, four periods are distinguished, viz. OE (c 450-c1150), ME (c1150-c1500), Early Modern English (c1500-c1700), and Modern English (c1700- present). At the outset of the chapter, the authors justify their inclusion of the language history in an introductory book on grounds that history "can provide explanation for many features and irregularities of contemporary English"(p. 12). Prior to talking about OE dialects and their origins, some mention is made about the Celts (aboriginals) and the Romans (invaders) of the British Isles. Latin, in particular, is said to have influenced "Germanic dialects before the Germanic tribes left the Continent for Britain" (p. 15). Obviously, this influence became more extensive with the arrival of Roman Christian missionaries since the end of the sixth c. A.D. English, a Germanic language and member of the Indo-European family, is attested to have had its first written form in Roman script almost a century later. So ME era may be said to have started with the Norman Conquest which had a great impact on the development of English. French influence is crystal clear because "most administrative and religious material was written in French or Latin" (p. 21). OE and ME are best associated with Beowulf, a heroic poem, and Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, a collection of 24 stories. What's important for a student of linguistics to know is that English had been gradually losing its inflections and becoming a more analytical language. Undoubtedly, Early Modern English is remarkable, simply because the introduction of printing to England facilitated the spread of the visible word; King James Bible and Shakespeare's monumental works are but two examples worth mentioning. The impact during the Renaissance had been enormous. English extended its vocabulary borrowing to a multitude of languages. Spelling became more regular

and grammar well established. The vowel system, however, had undergone considerable changes since the 14th c. This change is known to linguists as the Great Vowel Shift, where long vowels of ME were either raised or diphthongized and short vowels rounded and/or centralized (cf. pp. 27-28). Unlike ME or Early Modern English, Modern English is not associated with any historical landmark. "The year 1700 is usually set as the beginning of the Modern English period ….. [which] can be called the period of lost inflection" (pp. 28-29). Without going into further details, one may conclude that English, once developing within the territories of the British Isles and beyond, due to colonization and language contact, is today a global language which will very likely "permit different changes to happen" (p. 30) as long as it is used by over two billion speakers (cf. Crystal 2003). Chapter 3: Phonetics and Phonology (pp. 39-73) starts with a definition of phonetics, its three branches: articulatory, acoustic and auditory, and their relations to phonology. Like many introductory textbooks on English pronunciation, phonetics and phonology or language/linguistics, e.g. Roach (2000), Gimson (2001), O 'Connor (1980), Fromkin et al. (2006), among many others, Bieswanger and Becker focus on articulatory phonetics because of its practical applications to the teaching and learning of pronunciation. So for both descriptive and pedagogical purposes they utilize the traditional drawings (adapted from O'Grady et al. 2004) to show parts of the speech apparatus and their workings. Also following the tradition, the authors provide a description and classification of consonants in terms of voicing (also called fortis vs. lenis contrast), place and manner of articulation. Likewise, a three-part articulatory description is provided for the vowels, viz. height of the tongue, part of the tongue involved in the production, and shape of the lips, i.e. whether rounded or unrounded. Received Pronunciation (RP) and General American (GenAm) vowels are identified with reference to Daniel Jones's Cardinal vowel chart (p. 49) as well as IPA vowel chart (p.55). RP is accordingly shown to have 12 pure (simple) vowels whereas GenAm 11, understandably lacking a short, rounded and mid-low vowel as in 'pot'. Unfortunately, the corresponding GenAm vowel given in the chart (p. 56) is the same as the low RP vowel /a:/ (cf. pp. 55; 60), which is not the case as a matter of fact. However, eight diphthongs, divided into two groups, viz. closing (both fronting, backing) and centring, are suggested for RP (p.58). GenAm lacks the three centring diphthongs because it is described as rhotic, i.e. an r-pronouncing variety, which also differs in the pronunciation of [ou]. The domain of phonology, the study of sound patterns, is divided into segmental and suprasegmental. Segmental phonology is concerned with consonants, vowels and diphthongs as phonemes, which stand in opposition (or contrast) and signal a difference in meaning when occurring in minimal pairs. In contradistinction to phones, phonemes are abstract phonological units which are limited in number. The phoneme is a family of sounds, each of which is called an allophone. These allophones are said to be in complementary distribution. For example, where a dark [l] in RP occurs, a clear one does not. Nevertheless, variants (members) of the same phoneme may be in free variation, in which case meaning does not change as a result of substituting one allophone for another. This, however, could be variety or language-specific. Such variants (actual speech sounds) are the output of phonological rules which operate on phonemic forms (mental entities) as their input (cf. p. 63). The phonemes, already described by adopting a three-part articulatory method and established via the minimal pair technique, may also be described and differentiated from each other by utilizing distinctive features and hence the formation of a natural class of sounds. Suprasegmental phonology is taken by the authors to include not only prosody, viz. stress, rhythm, tone and intonation, but also syllable structure and phonotactics, including consonant clusters (cf. pp. 64-66). English, as a stress-timed language, differs from syllable-timed languages in that its sentence stress "depends to a large part on the rhythm, i.e. on the distribution of stressed syllables in a sentence or an utterance" (p. 67). This is best observed in connected speech where certain sounds get reduced and receive weak stress. In connected speech, certain sounds undergo assimilation, mainly of the regressive type in English, or elision.

Morphology, the topic of chapter 4, studies the internal structure of words which are said to be "stored in our mental lexicon as lexical entries, or lexemes" (p. 77) along with information about their grammatical properties. New content words are created by applying abstract rules which form part of the speakers' linguistic competence, i.e. the internalized linguistic knowledge, but linguists "differ in their views as to whether the rules [including stress] are stored together with individual lexemes or separately" (p. 78). Words, however, either belong to the open (lexical) class, and are often called content words, or to the closed (grammatical) class, and are often called function words. Like the phoneme in phonology, the morpheme is a unit of linguistic analysis in morphology. Whereas the phoneme is meaningless, but differentiates meaning, the morpheme is said to constitute the smallest meaningful unit, which may be either free, e.g. {book}, or bound, e.g. the plural {s} in books. Bound morphemes are termed affixes, most common of which are the prefixes and suffixes. English has both inflectional and derivational suffixed. While the former are quite limited in number in present-day English and do not change the grammatical category of words when attached to the base morpheme, as in {book}+{s}, the latter are numerous, highly productive, able to change the grammatical category each time one suffix is added to the base, e.g. {friend} (N) + {ly}= friendly (Adj), {quick} (Adj) + {ly} = quickly (Adv), {link} (V) + {age} = linkage (N), etc., and hence enriching the lexicon by time. Like the phoneme, the morpheme has members (variants) called allomorphs, most of which are phonologically conditioned. For example, the plural {s} is realized differently in different contexts and hence variability in pronunciation. Compounding is another major productive area of word formation in English, but other processes, e.g. blending, clipping, back formation, the extensive use of acronyms and the like, all add up rapidly and constantly to the language vocabulary stock.

Chapter 5 (pp. 99-135) is about syntax, "the branch of linguistics that seeks to describe the rules which enable us to recognize and generate an unlimited number of [well-formed phrases, clauses and sentences]… from a limited set of means" (p. 100). So right from the beginning, the authors introduce the beginner to Chomsky's 'competence' vs. 'performance' dichotomy, his principles-and-parameters framework and the minimalist program with casual reference to English, French and Italian. Before introducing X-bar theory and its application, an attempt is made to introduce syntactic (grammatical) categories and their distribution in terms of phrasal constituent tests and branching trees, including bracketing, and the unacknowledged (originally) Saussurian 'paradigmatic' vs. 'syntagmatic' relations. The major part of the chapter contains illustrative of the X-bar schema which accounts for phrases and their heads, including non-branching phrases. Noun phrases are expanded by attaching an adjective phrase as an adjunct phrase and hence the use of so-called left- and right-adjunction. The merge operation, involving combinations of constituents which have binary branches, "may be repeated over and over again to form phrases and sentences" (p. 119). This operation, called 'recursivity', 'recursiveness', or 'recursion' in the pertinent literature, "may also be applied to phrases created on the basis of the coordinated schema" (p. 122). The same operation is said to work for sentences once interpreted as phrases with heads. The head in this case is a functional category called 'inflection' ( I ). As such, the traditional binary branching of S into NP and VP is dispensed with. Apart from declarative structures, the so-called 'transformations' are obtained via 'the move operation' in accordance with the X-bar schema. This operation "transforms existing syntactic structures by moving elements into new positions" (p. 125). The chapter concludes with a section on thematic roles, e.g. agent, theme, experiencer, goal, etc. (See Saeed 2003, chapter 6, for a better identification). These roles specify the meaning relations between predicates and arguments, whose combination is called 'argument structure' (cf. p. 128). Predicates in English require at least one argument which may be overt (explicit) or covert (implicit/understood). The preposition within a prepositional phrase is claimed to assign a thematic role to the complement noun phrase (cf. p. 130) although falling outside the argument structure. Perhaps the authors do not wish the beginner to confuse between theta roles (which are syntactic structures reflecting positions in the argument structure) and semantic relations (which are semantic descriptions) and hence the syntactic-semantic interface.

Chapter 6 (pp. 137-160) is devoted to semantics, the study of linguistic meaning and meaning relations among expressions we call words, phrases and sentences. Because linguists do not know much about how "meaning is represented in the human mind …. many questions regarding meaning are still unanswered" (p. 146). The authors, however, attempt to introduce beginners to the complex issues of meaning within the domains of lexical and sentential semantics. The former covers an overview of common concepts such as synonymy, antonymy & some of its basic types, homophony & homography, polysemy and lexical ambiguity. Additionally, three pairs of terms, viz. connotation ~ denotation, sense ~ reference and intension ~ extension are seen to be of paramount importance in (structural) semantic analysis (cf. p. 146). The members of the first pair, it is to be noted, must be reversed so that 'denotation' comes first in order for the statement following to apply correctly and uniformly to the three pairs. Lexical semanticists have also been engaged in exploring lexical fields on the assumption that words can also form a network of semantic relations and hence their use of the terms 'hyponymy' and 'hypernomy' to establish vocabulary hierarchies. But since the 80's, cognitive semantics have been involved in accounting for meaning in terms of conceptualization and categorization on the assumption that language forms "part of our cognitive ability through which we organize and classify all aspects of our experience" (p. 149) and hence the use of 'prototype' as a working hypothesis. The second half of semantics displays meaning relations among sentences, the most important of which are paraphrase, entailment and contradiction.

Meaning is further explored in chapter 7 (pp. 161-180) from a pragmatic perspective. Pragmatics can simply be defined as the study of meaning in social context. Such a straightforward and simple definition sets apart this field of inquiry into the nature of meaning from semantics though they sometimes share similar interests and concerns. To approach meaning in interaction, the authors relate language to culture and focus on cross-cultural communication which requires pragmatic competence, interpreted as "the ability to use language appropriately within social contexts" (p. 163). Deixis is one of the central issues in pragmatics because misuse of deictic expressions may lead to meaning loss and hence communication breakdown. Five basic types of deixis, which speakers use in contexts of situation, may be accompanied by non-verbal signals, in which case the deictic centre is easily identified in face-to-face interactions. These types are commonly known as person, place, time, discourse and social deixis. But successful communication may be hindered without observing Grice's 'Cooperative Principle' which subsumes four maxims, viz. quantity, quality, relation (or relevance) and manner. However, if "one or more of these maxims are not being observed [i.e. violated] …. this gives rise to conversational implicatures" (p. 169). In this case, communicators go beyond what is being said and make use of their knowledge repertoire(s) in search for inferences. Also central to pragmatic research is the heated topic of 'speech acts'. Utterances are generally categorized into five speech act classes, viz. representatives, directives, commissives, expressives and declarations. In order for a speech act within any class to be performed successfully by a speaker, felicity conditions must be met. These are: preparatory, sincerity and essential conditions. Speech act theorists distinguish between direct speech acts, corresponding to the traditional sentence types, and indirect speech acts which deviate from the normal form-function sentence type. Towards the end of the chapter, appeal is made to Conversation Analysis in order to support the claims made by pragmaticists, including 'politeness' as an additional maxim. (See, e,g. Leech 1983).

Chapter 8 (pp. 181-205) extends the topic of language-use to sociolinguistics, a field of inquiry that relates language to society with focus on the study of "the effects of extralinguistic factors on the linguistic choices we make" (p. 182) and hence the description and explanation of linguistic variation. In order to avoid the problems associated with the delimitation of language and dialect, in particular, the term 'variety' is used neutrally. In so doing, four types of varieties are distinguished: standard, regional, social and functional varieties. The 'standard' is a superposed variety which is usually used in print, education and administration. Pronunciation varieties of the 'standard' are accents, viewed by linguists as neither superior nor inferior to each other. Functional varieties include styles and registers, terms between which clear boundaries cannot be drawn. Generally, however, styles may refer to degrees of formality in sending verbal messages. Official letters and documents, for example, are normally written in formal style, almost always characterized by a

careful choice of syntactic structures and vocabulary. Registers may also be formal, but after all they constitute 'jargons' because they exhibit specialized sets of vocabulary used only by particular groups in certain situations (cf. p. 188). Regional varieties, whose evolvement is largely determined by geographical considerations, have been the object of study by dialectologists since the middle of the 19th c. Their efforts have also extended to the examination of certain aspects of social variation. Sociolinguists have been working on differences in pronunciation, for example, drawing isoglosses on maps and eventually coming up with linguistic atlases, e.g. Labov 2006. Social varieties, also called 'sociolects', are identified on the basis of socio-economic status (or class), ethnicity, gender and age, among others. Gender is given special attention and space towards the close of the chapter. Fig. 8.7 (pp. 201-202) offers an interesting view of some of the most important guidelines on non-sexist usage in English. EVALUATION The observation I made at the outset of this review seems valid for a number of cases. For example, a "finite verb" (p. 123) in English cannot be understood without being juxtaposed to the non-finite, unless the authors take it for granted that their German students already know the distinction. Comparison with German, and some other three languages, is justified for the sake of clarification, but this strategy presupposes some basic knowledge of the grammars of those and other languages. Perhaps Latin or Semitic languages would be better examples to contrast with the highly inflected OE, though this all depends where the book is taught and by whom, in which case the instructor is indispensable. Some instructors may feel that the brief history of English, though useful, is altogether irrelevant and can be dispensed with for the following reasons: (1) very little is utilized in the subsequent chapters; the authors' justification for its utility is not well brought down to earth; (2) many universities offer a separate course, often at a more advanced stage. The drawbacks of this chapter are crystal clear; for how come that linguistic concepts, e.g. morphology, inflection, case, syntax, etc. be introduced to a beginner prior to their explanation in the following chapters? Does the beginner primarily know how to pronounce historical vowels, specify their values and locate them on a vowel chart so that an understanding of the Great Vowel Shift (p. 28) is in place? If a "phantom" letter is not introduced earlier, how come that the authors ask the beginner to give examples and figure out what 'ghoti' (p. 72) without referring them to historical facts? This, to my knowledge, is more of putting the cart before the horse. Just imagine a beginning student being presented with 23 sources in the bibliography to a brief history! Do we expect instructors to recommend further reading and ask their 'beginning' students to write projects and/or give seminars by consulting standard books, e.g. Baugh & Cable (2002) or Fennell's (2001) which relates history to 'sociolinguistics', a term only explained in the last chapter?! All in all, the authors' choice of references in every single bibliography is unfortunate for at least two reasons: (1) Many references, especially those introduced after the first few pages of the book, are too advanced for a beginning student, e.g. Chomsky (1957), also documented later (p. 134), though marking "the foundation of generative linguistics" (p. 9), or Harris's (2003) highly argumentative book on Saussure and his interpreters. Even in later chapters, a source book like Chomsky's (1995) should not be recommended; rather, one may suggest Radford (2004) or Carnie (2007) as interesting introductions to generative syntax. Alternatives are available. Therefore, I suggest comparable introductory textbooks, which are equally easily accessible and written in "friendly-user English", e.g. Aitchison (1995). Fromkin, et al. (2006), already documented in the bibliography to chapter one, is a reasonable suggestion, but not Fromkin (2003), which covers core areas of linguistics from a generative perspective. Labov's contribution to the field of sociolinguistics is acknowledged (cf. p. 193) but, unlike others, none of his works, e.g. Labov (1966; 1972; and especially 2006) are documented. Strangely, we find Cruse (2003) on meaning in semantics and pragmatics (introduced later), but not his 'Lexical Semantics' (19..) which is highly relevant to lexical relations presented in the chapter on 'semantics'.

For many linguists, 'phonetics' is a science on its own, with a long-standing history, not a branch of linguistics although Ladefoged (2001) has a chapter named "Linguistic Phonetics". Its introduction as part of the linguistic enterprise, often in conjunction with phonology, is more often than not pedagogically oriented. Perhaps we are still fascinated by Kenneth Pike's famous statement: "Phonetics provides raw material; phonology cooks it." Fair enough, but what is unfair in the book is the total negligence of American structural linguistics since Bloomfield, at least. Nor is the field of linguistics justified to be a science like other sciences (cf. Crystal 1971; Robins 1989, among others). Surprisingly enough, the authors never mention anything about the acquisition of English in relation to Universal Grammar at a time we feel they are advocates of the generative trend led by Chomsky. I suggest that a short chapter on psycholinguistics, comparable to their 'sociolinguistics', be included in a future edition. To my thinking, a number of specific points require explanation and/or reconsideration: 1. The term "sibilant" (p. 52), associated with "fricatives" and previously mentioned (cf. p.45), is left unexplained. 2. Since GenAm is frequently referred to and contrasted with RP (no longer used, but often replaced by Southern British English) in chapter 3, I suggest that Yavas (2006) be referred to and documented. 3. Consonants clusters are very briefly noted along with constraints imposed on them despite their importance in teaching English as a second/foreign language. I guess beginners would be glad to read about consonant distribution, clustering and constraints on their combination in Gimson (2001), fortunately mentioned in the bibliography but without referring to it in the text. And instead of mentioning Roach (2001), also not referred to therein, the authors could have listed Roach (2000) which has an interesting chapter on syllable and the role of consonant clusters in determining syllable boundary. 4. In the absence of supporting evidence and documentation, as is the case elsewhere, recent studies are said to suggest that vowels are reduced to [i] and [u] (cf. p. 68) without saying that these sounds are often called 'archiphonemes'. 5. Partial and total (or complete) types of assimilation (pp. 69-70) are contrasted without offering examples. 6. The authors admit that "circumfixes" (p. 84) do not exist in English. Although German examples are provided by displaying the three morphemes: prefix + base + suffix, glossed as pairs, viz. say ~ said, ask ~ asked, or as single words, viz. "given", a non-German beginner would not be able to figure out the meaning of each of the three morphemes. 7. I suggest that curly braces be used for enclosing morphemes and their allomorphs rather than square brackets (cf. p. 85) which are commonly used to enclose phonetic material in contradistinction to slashes used for phonemes. At the time 'zero-allomorph' is mentioned (p. 88), we find nothing about 'replacive' or 'alternating' allomorphs, though infixes are said to exist only in swear words (cf. p. 84, but see Palmer 1971). 8. The term "lexeme" is not made clear. One wonders whether it is an entry in our mental lexicon (p. 77), i.e. void of any affix, or is "formed by adding an affix to an existing word" (p. 88). Would Arabic (mental) lexicon, for instance, contain only consonantal skeletons as entries, or what? 9. If words are traditionally taken to be "combined into phrases" (p. 107), how would the authors be able to convince the beginner that "Anna" and "sang" (p. 110) are NP and VP, respectively? This, of course, extends to pronouns, AP, e.g. "big" (pp. 116f.) and ADVP, e.g. "soundly" (p. 126). Perhaps the authors take it for granted that it is the instructor's job to further explain this, among other things, in terms of non-branching phrases within X-bar theory. Last, but not least, the publisher is to be acknowledged with admiration for both the typesetting and error-free text although the index requires a second look. And whatever I have said above, though worth considering in future editions, does not necessarily apply to all settings. Beginners, after all, would find the book enjoyable. REFERENCES Aitchison, J. 1995. Linguistics: An introduction. 4th edn. London: Hodder and Stoughton.

Baugh, Albert C. & Thomas Cable. 2002. A history of the English language. 5th edn. London: Routledge. Carnie, Andrew. 2007. Syntax: A generative introduction. 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell. Chomsky, Noam. 1957. Syntactic structures. The Hague: Mouton. Chomsky, Noam. 1995. The minimalist program. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Cruse, Alan. 2004. Meaning in language: An introduction to semantics and pragmatics. Oxford: OUP. Cruse, Alan. 1986. Lexical semantics. Cambridge: CUP. Crystal, David. 2003. English as a global language. 2nd edn. London: Penguin. Crystal, David. 1971. Linguistics. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Gimson, Alfred C. 2001. Gimson's pronunciation of English. 6th edn. Revised by Alan Cruttenden. London: Arnold. Fennell, Barbara. 2001. A history of English: A sociolinguistic approach. Oxford: Blackwell. Fromkin, Victoria A. et al. 2006. An introduction to language. 8th edn. Boston: Heinle. Fromkin, Victoria A. (ed.). 2001. Linguistics: An introduction to linguistic theory. Maiden, MA: Blackwell. Harris, Roy. 2003. Saussure and his interpreters. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Labov, William; Sharon Ash; and Charles Boberg. 2006. Atlas of North American English: Phonetics, phonology and sound change. Berlin/New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Labov, William. 1972. Sociolinguistic patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Labov, William. 1966. The social stratification of English in New York city. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. Ladefoged, Peter. 2001. A course in phonetics. 4th edn. New York: Harcourt Brace, Jovanovich. Leech, Geoffrey N. 1983. Principles of pragmatics. London: Longman. O'Connor, J.D. 1980. Better English pronunciation. 2nd edn. Cambridge: CUP. O'Grady, William et al. (eds.). 2004. Contemporary linguistics: An introduction. 5th edn. Boston: St. Martin's. Palmer, Frank. 1971. Grammar. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Radford, Andrew. 2004. English syntax: An introduction. Cambridge: CUP. Roach, Peter. 2000. English phonetics and phonology: A practical course. 3rd edn. Cambridge: CUP. Roach, Peter. 2001. Phonetics. Oxford: OUP. Robins, R. H. 1989. General linguistics: An introductory survey. 4th edn. London: Longman. Saeed, John I. 2003. Semantics. Maldon, MA: Blackwell. Yavaş, Mehmet. 2006. Applied English phonology. Malden, MA: Blackwell. ABOUT THE REVIEWER Dinha T. Gorgis has been teaching linguistics at a number of Arab universities since 1975, and is currently professor of linguistics at Jadara University in Jordan. He is editor-in-chief of Sayyab Translation Journal, WATA Translation and Languages Journal (online), and co-editor for Linguistik and The Translation Journal (both online). He has reviewed a number of books for the LINGUIST List, written three book notices for eLanguage (forthcoming), and is now working on the translation of English anger metaphors into Arabic and Arabic collocations into English. Published on LINGUIST List (11 Sep. 2008), Vol.19-2772.