Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning by Roman Jakobson; John MephamReview by: Ronald MacAulayAmerican Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 82, No. 3 (Sep., 1980), pp. 626-627Published by: Wiley on behalf of the American Anthropological AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/677488 .

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626 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [82, 1980]

the null hypothesis. Unless one can rule out the possibility that failure to obtain significant dif- ferences in such measures does not reflect inade- quacies in the experimental tasks, it is difficult to attribute statistical nonsignificance to a real lack of differential hemispheric involvement. This logical dilemma can be rectified by in- cluding appropriate control groups in order to demonstrate the sensitivity of the experimental procedures to asymmetries in hemispheric pro- cessing. However, most of the studies cited failed to use monolingual control groups so that in fact we cannot be sure of the validity of their tasks. At other times, particularly in the case of their own study (pp. 167-193), the authors have interpreted statistically nonsignificant dif- ferences to indicate greater right hemispheric involvement in bilingual language processing. Moreover, although the authors assert repeated- ly, and in fact conclude on page 253, that the pattern of cerebral lateralization in bilinguals "is influenced by many different factors, in- cluding age, manner, and modality of second language acquisition," they do not use these fac- tors in any precise or coherent fashion in their interpretation of statistically significant results.

Overall, one has the impression that in their enthusiasm to discover differences in brain organization for language in bilinguals and monolinguals, Albert and Obler were unrespon- sive to the implications of the statistical and em- pirical results before them. Consequently, their review of the literature does little to advance their original hypothesis, as outlined on page 2, nor for that matter the reader's understanding of the subtleties and complexities of this impor- tant issue.

Six Lectures on Sound and Meaning. Roman Jakobson. John Mepham, trans. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1978. xxvi + 116 pp. $13.95 (cloth).

Ronald Macaulay Pitzer College

On the face of it, this seems an improbable volume--a "new" work by Roman Jakobson, purportedly written (and delivered as lectures in French at l'Ecole libre des hautes etudes in New York) in 1942, now newly translated by John Mepham, with a preface by Levi-Strauss. It sounds suspiciously like one of Nabokov's jeux

d'esprit. What evidence is there to show that it is genuine? It must be admitted that the preface is not too convincing. It is clear, modest, and laudatory. True, there are references to incest and "mythic discourse" but it is only 16 pages long. Can even Nabokov nod? Perhaps he was only saving his energies for the text proper.

The first lecture begins appropriately with a reference to Poe's The Raven but (perhaps a subtle touch here) refrains from drawing atten- tion to the mirror image of "Never (-more)" which Jakobson mentions elsewhere. The lecture goes on to discuss motor and acoustic phonetics and their limited contribution to the study of language; without knowledge of the linguistic entities "the phonic substance becomes as dust" (p. 19). Key references in this lecture for cognoscenti are "une bouche sans langue qu'elle parle" and "la fille sans langue" (p. 12) which also appear in Jakobson and Waugh's The Sound Shape of Language (1979). The second lecture deals with the concept of phonology and gives due credit to Baudouin de Courtenay for concentrating on "the analysis of the relations between the motor-acoustic properties of sounds and their lexical and grammatical values" (p. 34) and to Saussure for "the idea of the phonological system" (p. 42, emphasis in original).

The third lecture examines the concept of the phoneme and Saussure's view of phonemes as "differential and negative entities" (p. 65) in preparation for the discussion of distinctive features in the next lecture. Nabokovians and others will be impressed here by the reference to the American two-cent stamp for local delivery and the three-cent stamp for intercity destina- tions. (When is Jakobson going to deal with linguistic change and the laws of irreversible in- flation?) Lecture four introduces the notion of distinctive features to account for the basic vowel system of Turkish, an example also to be found in The Sound Shape of Language. The fifth lecture illustrates the use of binary features to describe the consonant system of French and points out how the notion of distinctive features supports Saussure's contrast between the axis of simultaneity and the axis of succession.

The final lecture summarizes the earlier lec- tures, showing how phonology can progress now that it is freed from too great reliance on "a mechanistic and creeping empiricism" (p. 109). Here in eight short pages are references to Saussure, Whitney, Benveniste, Sapir, Mallarme, phonetic symbolism, the arbitrary nature of the sign, child language, and aphasia.

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LINGUISTICS 627

Surely not even Nabokov could have produced a texture of this richness; it must be Jakobson after all.

This volume deserves to become a classic but not in Mark Twain's sense of "something which everyone wants to have read but nobody wants to read." On the contrary, the book should be read for sheer pleasure as well as enlightenment because as Levi-Strauss remarks in the preface, the lectures "bring to life a great adventure of the mind" (p. xxvi). It is to be hoped that a paperback edition will be produced so that it will be easily accessible to all those who have not yet "been liberated from the boundless power of empiricism" (p. 97).

Adverbs, Vowels, and Other Objects of Wonder.James D. McCawley. Chicago: Univer- sity of Chicago Press, 1979. xi + 303 pp. $20.00 (cloth).

David Dwyer Michigan State University

Adverbs, Vowels, and Other Objects of Wonder, a collection of McCawley's papers published between 1965 and 1977, covers the entire gamut of linguistic concern: phonology, syntax and semantics, the lexicon, and general theory. These articles, as McCawley professes, have scarcely been modified from their original published versions, save for stylistic im- provements and occasional annotations (retrac- tions, emendations, and further insights).

Consequently, this book should not be taken to be a holistic statement of the author's view of language theory, that known as generative semantics. In fact at first blush, there appears to be no general unifying theme behind the book, other than what the author puts forth somewhat apologetically in the preface: "If there is a single theme that unites the essays in this book, it is that there is more diversity in language and in ways in looking at language than linguists have generally recognized. Yet, surely, if this is all McCawley had in mind, he could have made his point more directly than by having us reexamine a number of articles on various aspects of linguistics, some of which are now out of date. What then, is the purpose of this collection of previously published articles? An important clue comes from the fact that

they have been presented in chronological order according to topic.

This arrangement only makes sense of the context of an evolution of thinking. The world of transformational linguistics has changed con- siderably since the presentation of the standard theory in 1965 by Chomsky. Since that time generative semantics, pioneered by McCawley, Lakoff, and others, has diverged in one direc- tion while Chomsky, Jackendoff, and others have diverged in another. And in the heart of the fray has been the independent, challenging, and insightful writing of McCawley. The chron- ological presentation then provides one way of understanding the book, as a revelation of the evolution of the thinking of one of the field's leading scholars during the last decade. With this perspective, we see a number of these ar- ticles representing important criticisms of the extant view such as "The Role of Phonological Features .. ," "On the Role of Notation .. and the final article of the book "Some Ideas Not to Live By" in which four "pernicious" (a favorite word of McCawley's) ideas, quite cen- tral to the general linguistic thinking of 1965, are seriously questioned. From this collection then, we gain an overall view of the character of James McCawley that we could not easily gain from reading individual, isolated articles.

But in addition to what must have been Mc- Cawley's primary purpose, the book contains some timeless articles of more general interest. These include interpretations of Sapir's and Whitney's approaches to phonology, a pro- phetic parallel between Montague and trans- formational grammar, an insightful review of Lakoff's Language and Woman's Place, and an article entitled "On Interpreting the Theme of This Conference" in which an appeal is made against narrowing the domain of linguistic in- vestigation.

I am tempted to include his "Madison Avenue, Si, Pennsylvania Avenue, Nol" as another such article. It is, for the most part, an excellent presentation of McCawley's "anar- chistic philosophy" of how knowledge develops within a scientific community and makes the important point of separating the practice (science) from practitioners (scientists), and that what is often in the interest of one may not be in the interest of the other. But I am dis- turbed by the analogy between the operation of a scientific community and that of the American economy including such terms as "in- tellectual capital," "retooling costs," and the

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