1 Contents

3 Editorial

5 Obituary for Paul Salmon

8 Conference report (Anders Ahlqvist)

10 Abstracts of papers (ed. Andrew Linn)

26 Tony Crowley, Language in History: Theories and Texts (Mark Atherton)

31 Klaus D. Dutz & Stefano Gensini (eds.), Im Spiegel des Verstandes, Studien zu Leibniz (Jaap Maat)

36 Klaus Dutz & H.-J. Niederehe (eds.), Theorie und Rekonstruktion (Werner Hüllen)

39 Silvia B. Garciá, Zum Arbitraritätsbegriff bei F. de Saussure (Brigitta Nehrlich & David D. Clarke)

44 Penny Lee, The Whorf Theory Complex: A Critical Reconstruction (Anthony Parry-Jones)

46 Ian Michael, English as a Subject: Its Development over Four Centuries (John Walmesley)

48 Brigitte Nerlich & David D. Clarke, Language, Action and Context: The Early History of Pragmatics in England and America. (Frank Vonk)

53 Riccardo Rizza et al. (eds.) Colloquia, et dictionariolum octo linguarum (Werner Hüllen)

56 Books & pamphlets/ Journals / Articles (ed. Herman Bell)

64 The Renaissance Linguistics Archive (Christine Damis)

66 Workshop on the Historiography of Brazilian Linguistics (Cristina Altman)

67 Report on the SGdS Colloquium, Potsdam 1997 (Michael Isermann)

69 Henry Sweet Society Colloquium, Amsterdam 1998

70 11th International Colloquium of the SGdS, Leuven/Louvain 1998

70 International Colloquium on metalanguage & linguistic terminology, Grenoble 1998

71 Henry Sweet Society financial report (John Flood, Treasurer)

74 New members and changes of address (ed. Herman Bell)
 

T

HIS issue sees the emergence of the HENRY SWEET SOCIETY BULLETIN from the chrysalis of what was formerly the Society's Newsletter. In keeping with the nature of our discipline, this will manifest both continuity and change. In particular, the numbering of the BULLETIN will be continuous from previous issues-this 29th one seamlessly following the 28th.

Initially, the BULLETIN will be edited by David Cram and Andrew Linn. One of their first tasks is to thank the retiring editor, Jonathan Hope, for his services to the Society over the past years. Another is to pay tribute to an irreplaceable former editor, Paul Salmon, whose obituary follows. The new editors have taken on their task jointly, but have decided there should be only one co-ordinating editor at any one time. They will bat in alphabetical order, with a two-year innings to start with.

The BULLETIN will build on the various elements that have proved so successful in the Newsletter, in particular the two substantial sections ably edited by Herman Bell: the reviews of books, and the listing of publications received for the Society's library at Keble. Announcements concerning the Society, including John Flood's treasurer's reports and abstracts of papers from the annual colloquium, occupy other regular slots, together with notices from our sister societies. A section which we hope to see expanded, under the direction of Werner Hüllen, will be the one devoted to research in progress, with reports of larger research projects.

Guided by discussion at the Society's committee meetings, the editors would like to introduce other possible sections in addition to these staple items. One such possibility is to present small-scale biographies of figures in the history of linguistics who have been overlooked in recent biographical works such as Stammerjohann's Lexicon Grammaticorum (reviewed by Werner Hüllen in Issue No. 28); to avoid overlap, contributions and nominations for the salon des refusé(e)s should be channelled through David Cram. Also in mind is a series of brief articles dealing with particular terms and concepts in the history of linguistics, along the lines of Mark Atherton's item on Sweet's use of the term 'synthesis' and Chris Stray's article on 'notions' in Latin teaching in the nineteenth century (both in Issue No 26). Mark Atherton has undertaken to promote further contributions of this sort. A further idea, originating with Mike MacMahon, is to carry reviews not just of recently published books, but also of 'classic' works in the history of linguistics.

It is hoped that production of material for the BULLETIN will increasingly become a team effort, with sections looked after by separate individuals. The proposals outlined above are not to be seen as exclusive, and we hope that members will feel encouraged to come up with other suggestions. In the meantime, contributions for the BULLETIN are warmly welcomed. The copy-deadline for the Spring issue is March 31st 1998; the address for correspondence is listed, along with others, inside the back cover.

David Cram, Oxford Andrew Linn, Sheffield

W

ITH the deaths of Princess Diana, Mother Theresa and Sir Georg Solti so fresh in our memory, no one needs reminding that last week was a very sombre week, and for this Society especially so, for in Paul Salmon we lost one of our most committed supporters.

The earliest conversation I recall having with Paul was exactly thirty years ago when I congratulated him on his appointment as Reader in German at Birkbeck College, University of London. He joked that this move was just a further leg of what he called his Cook's Tour of the University of London. For having graduated from University College in 1947 he had been appointed Tutorial Student at King's College, then returned to University College as Assitant Lecturer before becoming Lecturer and Reader at Royal Holloway College, and then at Birkbeck College. Eventually in 1970 he left London to take up the second chair of German at Edinburgh. Beloved of his students (whose subsequent careers he followed with great interest), he was a committed and enthusiastic teacher - but a stern taskmaster too. From his father, who was a printer, he had learned the art of close reading: forwards, backwards and upside-down, which rather perturbed many a student who, expounding a medieval text, might try to fudge the issue: Paul, facing him from the other side of the desk and reading upside-down, could and would always pick him up on anything he tried to skip over. Having this background in printing, of course, Paul took to computing and word-processing like a duck to water; and as a proof-reader he was second to none: witness the care he lavished on the memorial volume for Leslie Seiffert which the Society published in 1993 and to which, incidentally he contributed a fine essay on the reception of Herder's Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache. (The debate over the origin of language was one which he found perennially fascinating: his last essay on this topic, on Max Müller, appeared in our volume Linguists and Their Diversions last year.)

Paul Salmon was one of the dwindling band of British Germanists who had two research degrees. The first was the old University of London M.A., involving both a range of stiff written papers and a full-length thesis which in his case was an edition of and commentary on the fifteenth-century German translation of Jacobus de Theramo's Consolatio Peccatorum. He then embarked on his doctorate (which he completed in 1957) on The Works of Hartmann von Aue in the Light of Medieval Poetics. It was a happy choice, for Paul and the late 12th-century poet Hartmann von Aue had something in common: Gottfried von Straßburg praised Hartmann for his kristalliniu wortelin, his 'crystalline words', and indeed Paul too wrote with crystalline clarity and precision, no matter whether he was discussing medieval courtly literature, heroic poetry, Germanic alliterative verse, the link between grammar and poetics in the Middle Ages, the language of German romanticism, or Herder and others who debated the origin of language. His book Literature in Medieval Germany, published in 1967, is a model of its kind. But there was one respect in which Paul and Hartmann von Aue differed greatly. Hartmann tells us that he only wrote swenne er sîne stunde nicht baz bewenden kunde, 'when he could not make better use of his time'. In Paul's case time never hung heavily on his hands. He was always interested in what was going on and, if he was not indulging his great love of music, he himself was always working. Whenever one saw Paul and Vivian they were always frantically busy, with many things on the go, devouring stacks of books in Bodley or at the British Library. In Paul's case at least for the last two or three years, in addition to publishing original work in his own fields (he completed an illuminating essay on the history of the term 'morphology' just before his death), he had been chiefly occupied first with editing the entries for English-speaking linguists for Harro Stammerjohann's Lexicon grammaticorum (published in 1996) and then above all with translating P. A. Verburg's monumental Taal en Functionaliteit (1952) into English, meticulously attempting to check out every obscure reference, a task he thankfully completed just before he died.

Everyone who knew Paul - and indeed Vivian too, for Paul and Vivian have always (for over 50 years in fact) been (as they say today) very much 'an item' - will have been impressed by his (and her) friendliness and helpfulness. Despite his work Paul always had time for colleagues and friends and particularly for younger scholars. He was always willing to place the prodigious breadth of his knowledge at the disposal of all who sought his help and advice. No one who approached him went empty away. If ever I asked him whether he would not mind digging out some obscure Latin quotation in a sixteenth-century book in Bodley he would happily drop everything to do it. And of course he was always a most staunch and loyal supporter of Vivian in her many projects and undertakings. Nor was his assistance confined solely to things academic: I am told that he was never happier than when he was called upon to mend a broken electric plug in the Department or offer some other 'hands-on' assistance. After the untimely death of Leslie Seiffert he took over as Treasurer of the Philological Society and, by all accounts, made a splendid job of it. But nowhere was his helpfulness more manifest than in the Henry Sweet Society: Once Vivian Salmon, following up an idea that had surfaced in a conversation with Konrad Koerner, had conceived the idea of founding the Society back in August 1983, Paul and Leslie were immediately recruited as the very first members. For several years Paul served on the Executive Committee; even more importantly, as Editor of the Newsletter for several issues he ensured its regular and punctual appearance, and furthermore he single-handedly compiled and keyboarded the first catalogue of the Society's library, issued to members a few years ago.

The Henry Sweet Society and the Philological Society were not the only learned societies to benefit from his membership. There was the London Medieval Society too, and for many years he was also an assiduous supporter of the Viking Society for Northern Research, for - like any Germanist worth his salt and treading in the footsteps of Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm - he was interested not only in things German but things from the wider Germanic area. His interest in things Dutch, medieval and modern, is well known, but he was also quite at home adducing parallels in Icelandic sagas to illuminate German nineteenth-century literature. His interests indeed went right back to early Germanic times - indeed I understand that the last opera he saw, at the Edinburgh Festival a fortnight ago, was Wagner's Die Walküre. (He was a passionate Wagnerian, but then nobody is perfect ...!) Given his enthusiasm for the Germanic past, it is perhaps appropriate if I conclude this tribute by recalling what are probably the most famous elegiac lines of all in ancient Germanic poetry, from the Norse Hávamál:

Deyr fé. deyja fraendr,

deyr sjálfr it sama;

ek veit einn at aldri deyr:

dómr of dauðan hvern

Possessions perish, kinsmen die, and likewise one dies onself:

I know of one thing that never perishes: the reputation of a man who has died.

Paul's reputation will long be cherished amongst us.

John L. Flood April 5, 1998

T

HIS year's colloquium took place at the University of Luton, from Wednesday evening 10 to Saturday morning 13 September. It was an outstanding success. Not only had the organiser, Dr Andrew Linn, managed to put together a singularly diverse and attractive programme, but he and his helpers, themselves mostly students of the history of linguistics, also saw to it that participants were singularly well looked after, in all of sorts of ways. The venue for the majority of lectures and meals was the attractive Conference Centre at Putteridge Bury, situated about four miles from the main campus and from the student accommodation used by most of us. Since this issue of the Newsletter contains full abstracts of papers given, this report will try to add an idea of how the programme impressed this particular member of the Colloquium audience.

The programme began at the Main Campus in Luton itself, on the Wednesday evening, with a paper by the President of the Society, Professor Werner Hüllen, who had chosen 'habent sua fata libelli' as the motto for his Leslie Seiffert Memorial Lecture. In it he had much of interest to tell us about the interconnection of 'books' and 'ideas' as 'facts' and 'arguments' in the historiography of linguistics.

On Thursday morning, we travelled to Putteridge Bury. The morning's work got to an excellent start with the account by Cram and Maat, of Dalge[sic]rno in Paris. Then followed a paper on the not very well known German Germanist, Hebraist and Comparativist, Martin Aedler; Fredericka van der Lubbe had come all the way from Sydney to deliver this fine paper.

Thereafter we heard a paper by Masataka Miyawaki, who had come equally far (from Yokohama), to give us a meticulous and obviously very well researched account of James Harris's revision of Hermes. Lieve Jooken presented an equally erudite view of James Beattie's foundation of grammatical categories, compared to Condillac's Grammaire. Gerda Haßler then finished off the morning's work with some rather thought-provoking and challenging remarks on Hervás y Panduro's position in the history of anthropological linguistics.

After lunch, we proceeded to hear Dirk Schenkeveld on some to my mind quite compelling reasons for the non-development of syntactical theory in the Hellenistic Period. This was followed by a surprisingly lively and most enjoyable (apart from simultaneously being very erudite) symposium on the history and nature of figures and tropes, in which James Murphy, Lynette Hunter, Peter Mack and (once more) Dirk Schenkeveld took part.

Following an obviously well deserved tea break, Hanne Lauridsen and Inge Kabell presented a splendidly lively account of the study of English in Denmark, during the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. They dealt, in turn, with separate periods, but the two papers meshed in together so well that it seems appropriate to take them together.

After dinner, we were treated to a welcome surprise: Andrew Linn turned out to be not only a wonderful conference organiser but also a highly accomplished organ player, as his concert of 'linguistic organ music' in Luton's delightful St. Mary's Church conclusively demonstrated.

Friday morning started with the perhaps best presented paper of the Colloquium; in it John Joseph sorted out Humboldt's fascinating views on the genius of the Chinese language. Ann Wehmeyer then also took us to the Far East, dealing as she did with Keichû and native Japanese linguistic tradition. Immediately following, Cristina Altman treated us to a lively account of South American missionaries and their description of the 'General Languages'.

Coffee was followed by Kibbee's extremely informative and (as always, in his case) well-researched case-study of the politics of Anglo-Norman language and dialect. Jon Mills then gave us a balanced and interesting view of Cornish lexicography from its very beginnings. The last paper before lunch was given by Adel Sidarus, who managed to pack a lot of useful information about early multilingual (Greek-Coptic-Arabic) glossaries into the twenty minutes at his disposal.

After lunch, Kjell-Åke Forsgren, from Skövde, presented us with his insights into German Valency Grammar in the 19th Century, in a very clear and excellently prepared paper. Else Elffers then took a good hard look at the division of labour between linguistics and psycholinguistics. Béatrice Godart-Wendling dealt with quantification from Adjukiewicz to Montage, in what obviously was a very deeply read talk, even if this auditor in places found it somewhat technical. Finally, he last paper was given by Pius ten Hakken, from Basle, who managed to 'show that Chomskyan linguistics is conceptually and historically a unity in a non-trivial sense', in a wide-ranging and helpfully organised paper.

The Annual General Meeting followed, and the formal part of the Colloquium concluded with a very convivial Conference Dinner, ably prepared and pleasantly served by the staff of Putteridge Bury. Everybody dispersed after breakfast on Saturday, by which stage it was more than obvious that we all felt that coming to Luton for the Colloquium had been well worth it. Finally, it remains to observe that meeting the Luton students of was one of the numerous very positive aspects of the Colloquium. It is clear that the history of linguistics plays a deservedly important role as part the Luton course of linguistics.

Anders Ahlqvist

School of Irish

National University of Ireland, Galway

Tony Crowley,

Language in History. Theories and Texts

London: Routledge, 1996. ISBN 0-415-07245-x (pbk)

I

N Language in History, Professor Tony Crowley combines the history of linguistic ideas with cultural history to present a forceful argument for the study of the role played by language and language attitudes in the making of social, cultural and national identity. Part of a new 'Politics of Language Series' published by Routledge, the book follows closely its programmatic sub-title Theories and Texts. Dealing first with his theoretical basis - a re-examination of the relevant writings of Ferdinand de Saussure and the Russian linguist and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin - Tony Crowley proposes a model of study where - in the words of Saussure - linguistics is 'not solely the business of a handful of specialists', because 'in the lives of individuals and societies, language is a factor of greater importance than any other'. Following the two theoretical chapters of part 1, the book then gives four case studies (the 'texts' of the book's sub-title) focussing on 'wars of words' in eighteenth-century Britain (ch. 3), linguistic nationalism in nineteenth-century Ireland (ch. 4), nineteenth-century English attitudes to the 'science of language' and the 'standard language' (ch. 5), and finally a study of language matters in present-day Ireland and Northern Ireland.

The proposed 'study of language in history' as defined here by Crowley would aim to investigate a number of related issues: (1) the institutional, political and ideological relations between language and history; (2) the ways in which language is used to divide and unify social groups; (3) the role of language in the making and unmaking of nations, forms of social identity, and patterns of beliefs.

One might be forgiven for thinking that this is in effect sociolinguistics, defined for instance by R.A. Hudson in a book of that name (1980:1) as 'the study of language in relation to society'. But Tony Crowley is adamant that a fully theorised study of 'language in history' is not what sociolinguistics offers, since it is 'extremely empirical in its bias and, again, relatively unsophisticated in terms of social theory' (p. 2). This view is shared at least in part by Hudson, who writes of the 'relatively little discussion' by socio-linguists of 'theoretical issues with less immediate practical consequences' (Hudson 1980:3). The empirical issue is one which may strike some readers of Language in History, and I will return to the question briefly below. In general, I think, the introduction (pp. 1-5) is to be avoided on a preliminary reading, except for those already acquainted with the approach taken. Rather odd turns of phrase such as 'why has this lack of theory occurred?' may be off-putting to the unsympathetic first-time reader. Moreover, the case for the usefulness of Bakhtin may - if the book is not read through with an open mind - seem to be overstated in the initial pages of the book. I am reminded of the work of Bernard Huppé in Anglo-Saxon studies, who discovered the usefulness - for the interpretation of Old English texts - of a theoretical framework based on the exegetical methodology of Augustine of Hippo. This theory was then applied too sweepingly to every aspect of his readings of the texts (see Howe 1997:82-5). While Crowley does not err too far in this respect, a note of caution should be sounded; at the same time, however, a potentially hostile reader may be persuaded to read on further, for Language in History has much of interest, and it raises a number of pertinent historiographical questions.

The kind of theory which Tony Crowley finds relevant is primarily based, as I have said, on a re-reading of Saussure, and specialists in the modern period of the history of linguistics may well find chapter 1 'For and against Saussure' of particular interest. Here Crowley outlines Saussure's crucial role in the definition of the 'formal, abstract forms of linguistic study which have dominated the twentieth century' (p. 28). Crowley criticises Saussure and his followers for their emphasis on 'scientificity' and for the reification of language, which denies 'its roots in praxis, in practical human labour' (p. 18). He cites a relevant passage from Lukács:

a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a 'phantom objectivity', an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal any trace of its real nature: the relation between people. (Lukács 1971:83)

Despite this, Crowley also finds much of value in Saussure's work, and he argues that while Saussure wished to relegate the diachronic viewpoint, he did not wholly reject the importance of history. Indeed, as Crowley shows (pp. 16, 19-21, 26-28), in the remarks on 'external linguistics' within the Course in General Linguistics and in the letter to Antoine Meillet of January 4th 1894, Saussure specifically gives pointers to how such an ethnographic and political approach might be made. It is these pointers which Crowley wishes to develop and take further, and he does this by historicising and politicising a number of key linked terms from the work of Bakhtin, namely the opposition between 'monologism' and 'dialogism', between 'centripetal' and 'centrifugal' social forces within a particular language community, and between 'monoglossia', 'polyglossia', and 'heteroglossia'. By politicising these terms, Crowley aims to make them more specific and less 'reductively formalist', and hence more useful as tools of analysis in specific contexts.

To assess how these terms are applied to the study of a particular historical period, I turn now to the third of Crowley's case studies, 'Science and silence: Language, class, and nation in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Britain', chapter 5 of Language in History. Here Crowley focuses on the 'Science' of linguistics and the 'silence' of the working classes as typical terms found frequently in the discourses on language throughout the nineteenth century. He argues against the views of Stalker (1985) and others that the nineteenth century study of language supposedly became more objective by dropping eighteenth-century linguistic prejudices and adopting a scientific and positivist methodology. Instead, Crowley argues, various biases can be identified which dominated the study of language in the period. These occur within discussions of national identity and the relationship between language and social identity; a particularly important issue for this author, and one on which he has written elsewhere (Crowley 1989) is that of the 'standard language', a term first used in 1858 and a focus of much linguistic and social debate.

Within the first two sections of the chapter - Crowley's discussion of the relationship between language and national identity, and in the discussion of Archbishop Trench's 'Theological etymology', which Crowley calls a 'monologic discourse of moral order' - the present reviewer finds that (though there is much of interest) there is not enough historical data. At the risk of appearing 'extremely empirical', I would like to be given more information about the individual linguists and writers who are cited so frequently, or at the very least references so that I could look this information up for myself (see, for instance Crowley 1989). In the case of Trench, for instance, we learn in Language in History very little about the man himself or about his linguistic attitudes other than those given in his major writings; nor do we learn what his political opinions were - he was, at least for a while, a liberal follower of Bentham and Mill (Aarsleff 1983:192). We do not know, from Crowley's account here, whether Trench had any opponents at the time, nor are we referred to any other recent (even if flawed) discussions of Trench which attempt to show him in a different light (e.g. Aarsleff 1983:230-47). We are told that 'what Trench's writings exemplify ... is that the study of language in the nineteenth century was not less rhetorical and socially motivated than that of the eighteenth, but perhaps even more so... the status bestowed upon the science of language is deployed on behalf of a specific social project' (p. 157). The question that arises here is this: where, in his writings, does Trench lay such great claim to scientific objectivity? Does Trench 'exemplify' the study of language in the period, or perhaps only one branch of it? Trench's views on etymology are surely worth comparing with those of Max Müller, for the latter scholar was far more expressly 'scientific' and objective in his methods (even if his findings on the origin of language are now discredited), and he was certainly far less 'monologic' in his linguistic beliefs and pronouncements. It should be added too that Müller is an equally viable exemplification of nineteenth-century attitudes, and in his day was probably more influential.

Similar objections could be made to other parts of this chapter, for instance the section on the standard language, where the pronouncements of writers with very different social backgrounds and very different linguistic views are treated almost as though they shared exactly the same monologic attitude to the spoken standard language. Such widely differing figures cited here include the self-educated Yorkshireman and Joseph Wright, who spoke with a Yorkshire accent and was clearly not an unqualified supporter of standard spoken English, and Henry Sweet, politically probably a Socialist supporter, who admittedly favoured what could be called a 'monologic' standard spoken language furthered by phonetics and spelling reform, but who nevertheless included Cockney-coloured diphthongs in the transcriptions of his own spoken English which he used in his language primers (Sweet 1885). Both these figures surely differ from the younger linguist H.C. Wyld, who had more reactionary views on standard speech and other matters. In a study stressing that 'in the lives of individuals and societies, language is a factor of greater importance than any other', such historical information on individuals is not to be ignored.

Despite this lack of differentiation, the author's analysis is also frequently very successful in its technique of juxtaposition of different sources: Crowley reads widely in the field and focusses on the 'key tropes' - typical aspects of the discourse of the linguistic debates, citing and juxtaposing passages by different writers to reveal similarities and divergences. One instance of this is his discussion of the term 'standard language' which first occurs in the Proposal for the Publication of a New English Dictionary:

As soon as a standard language has been formed, which in England was the case after the Reformation, the lexicographer is bound to deal with that alone. (1858:3)

Crowley interprets the coining of this term as a response to a methodological need by the OED lexicographers to establish a literary canon - a corpus on which they could draw for sample sentences for the dictionary entries. Such an interpretation fits well with Bakhtin's views on the process of 'centripetalisation' within a language:

Unitary language constitutes the theoretical expression of the historical processes of linguistic unification and centralization, an expression of the centripetal forces in a language. A unitary language is not something given (dan) but is always in essence posited (zadan) and at every moment of its life it is opposed to the realities of heteroglossia. (Bakhtin 1981:270)

Crowley regards 'the standard language' as a necessary theoretical invention, which then itself contributed to the processes of standardisation, and produced a form of monoglossia at the level of writing. Using his favourite technique of juxtaposition, Crowley compares the above cited passage from Bakhtin with a report on the effects of the Education Act of 1870:

The education Act has forced the knowledge of the three Rs upon the population, and thereby an acquaintance in all parts of the country with the same literary form of English, which it has been the aim and object of all elementary teachers to make their pupils consider to be the only correct one. The result is already becoming manifest... There is one written language understood by all, while the inhabitants of distant parts may be quite unintelligible to each other viva voce. (Elworthy 1876:xliii)

Here, as the author points out, the forces of centripetalisation produce a socially desirable effect, namely a mass literacy project, a form of monoglossia which Bakhtin characterises as follows:

it makes its real presence felt as a force for overcoming...heteroglossia, imposing specific limits to it, guaranteeing a certain maximum of mutual understanding and crystallizing into a real, though still relative unity. (Bakhtin 1981:270)

In his section on nineteenth-century discussions of accent and dialect, Crowley turns to another, more 'reactionary' use of the phrase 'standard English' in the nineteenth century, namely to refer to socially acceptable speech. He makes the valid point that the dialectologists (often philologists anxious to employ scientific methodology) frequently favoured recording the various rural dialects (which appeared to be dying out) rather than investigating the new speech varieties of the 'populous cities'. Evidently these dialect investigators were not wholly objective, since social or political attitudes also played a role in their selection of material. Taking this point further, Crowley then juxtaposes the preference by linguists for the study of rural dialects with actual descriptions of the language of urban workers as given by nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century novelists such as Gissing (1892) and by sociologists and educationalists such as C.F.G. Masterman, who writes that 'the first thing to note is our quantity, the second is our silence' (1902:18). The word 'silence' is used metaphorically here to indicate that urban workers were restricted by social attitudes (by centripetal forces of monoglossia, to use the Bakhtinian terms) so that they 'never attain a language which the world beyond can hear' (Masterman 1902:20). Here the Bakhtinian terminology is employed to give a related yet different reading of the significance of language in nineteenth-century social history.
 

REFERENCES

Bakhtin, M (1981) The Dialogic Imagination Austin: University of Texas Press.

Crowley, T. (1989) The Politics of Discourse; the Standard Language Question in British Cultural Debates. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

Elworthy, F.T. (1875-6) The Dialect of West Somerset, 2 vols. London.

Gissing, G. (1892) Demos: A Story of English Socialism, new edn. London: Smith, Elder.

Howe, N. (1997) 'Historicist Approaches', in Reading Old English Text, ed. K. O'Brien O'Keeffe. Cambridge: CUP.

Hudson, R.A. (1980) Sociolinguistics Cambridge: CUP.

Lukács, G. (1971) History and Class Consciousness: Studies in Marxist Dialectics, trans. R. Livingstone. Cambridge MA: MIT Press.

Masterman, C.F.G. (1902) From the Abyss: Of Its Inhabitants by One of Them. London: Johnson.

Proposal for the Publication of a New English Dictionary (1858) London: Philological Society.

Stalker, J. (1985) 'Attitudes towards Language in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries', in The English Language Today, ed. S. Greenbaum. Oxford: Pergamon.

Sweet, H. (1885) Elementarbuch des gesprochenen Englisch. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Mark Atherton, Oxford

Klaus D. Dutz, Stefano Gensini (eds.)

Im Spiegel des Verstandes, Studien zu Leibniz

Nodus Publikationen, Münster 1996.

T

HE volume contains a collection of nine papers, each of which deals with some aspect of Leibniz's ideas on language. Four of these papers are in German, four in English, and one in Italian. The editors intended to contribute to a survey of current research on Leibniz, and relate that they were surprised by the coherence of the ensuing volume. However, they do not explicate this any further, and they refrain from thematically arranging the various contributions, which are instead alphabetically ordered by author's name. The variety of issues addressed by the authors testifies to the impressive range of subjects related to language on which Leibniz had interesting things to say.

1. Allison P. Coudert, Leibniz, Knorr von Rosenroth, and the Kabbalah Denudata.

Coudert discusses the interests shared by Leibniz and Knorr von Rosenroth (1636-1689), a polyglot who translated a number of kabbalistic texts into Latin, and published them under the title 'Kabbalah Denudata'. Leibniz was greatly interested in these texts, and in 1689 he visited von Rosenroth. They read over the 'Kabbalah Denudata' together and Leibniz made notes of what he found the most memorable kabbalistic ideas. According to Coudert, these ideas were later modified and included by Leibniz in his own writings. In particular, the Leibnizian concept of monads was directly influenced by the Kabbalah. Moreover, kabbalistic ideas helped to shape Leibniz's argument for free will, and his theory of causation as volition.

Coudert states that modern historians unjustifiedly categorize seventeenth-century intellectuals as either progressive mechanists or reactionary occultists. In fact, the situation was more complex and interesting. Areas of knowledge considered scientific in the seventeenth century, such as alchemy, magic and the Kabbalah should not be eliminated. The optimism characteristic of the period developed in part from precisely these areas. It is time, Coudert concludes, "to acknowledge the Kabbalah as a factor in the emergence of our modern secular and scientifically oriented world."

Although a thorough assessment of Coudert's claims should take his 1995 book into account, the argument as presented in the present paper is unconvincing. It requires some strain of the imagination to view the kabbalistic ideas allegedly lying at the basis of Leibniz's concept of monads as even remotely resembling the latter. Further, it is ironic that Coudert provides quotes from Leibniz which confirm that kabbalistic writings were not well known to his contemporaries, and that if they were, they were habitually ridiculed. In my opinion, Coudert underestimates the extent to which the opposition between science and occultism, rather than being a distinction imposed by later historians, was a reality in seventeenth century intellectual life. That Leibniz tried to reconcile every conflict he met with, distilling, whenever possible, useful elements from each of the impressive number of doctrines he was familiar with, should not mislead us into thinking that he believed all these doctrines to be true nor that the conflicts did not exist.

2. Klaus D. Dutz, Leibniz und die Linguisten.

Dutz's paper is the longest, the most puzzling and the least convincing of the volume. His central claim seems to be that since the history of linguistics stands desperately in need of a 'meta-historiographical concept', we are unable to exclude the possibility that Johann Jakob Feinhals (1702-1769) was in fact the person who wrote or edited some or most of Leibniz's writings. Not that we don't know this was not the case, but we have no methodology ascertaining this. I find this claim little short of absurd, and I assume I am probably unable to grasp the full complexity of Dutz's argument. A somewhat unfortunate circumstance is that Dutz's paper contains a section in which he criticizes a paper by myself. Since this section is fairly self-contained, I shall use all the available space for a brief discussion of this section only.

In my paper, I examined Leibniz's position with respect to Dalgarno and Wilkins. I argued that Leibniz studied their work thoroughly, and that he used both Dalgarno's and Wilkins's lexicons as a starting point for his own lists of definitions. Further, I pointed out that Leibniz's aims differed widely from those of both Dalgarno and Wilkins. Nonetheless, if we focus on the actual work done to achieve these different objectives, we see that Leibniz continued the work of his English predecessors. The latter conclusion has apparently evoked Dutz's indignation. He goes into detail to argue that Leibniz's definitions represent a completely different philosophical view from that underlying those of Wilkins and he even takes pains to show that some of Wilkins's definitions are nonsensical. All that Wilkins and Leibniz have in common, he concludes, is that both thinkers were interested in the search for an ideal language, and that Leibniz used Wilkins's list of definitions. The rest is 'Rekonstruktion und Rezeption'. In a footnote, he adds that it may have become clear that "'mein' Leibniz nicht 'Maats' Leibniz ist". The funny thing is that this has not become clear to me at all, for I perfectly agree with Dutz's observation that Leibniz's philosophical position is far removed from Wilkins's, if a consistent position can be associated with the latter's definitions at all. Indeed, I assumed that these differences would be so apparent from the short comparative table I provided that this point did not deserve separate mention. Dutz's polemic, then, is quite pointless. Yet what has become clear is that 'Dutz's Maat' is not 'my Maat', and this must probably be ascribed to 'Rekonstruktion und Rezeption', though unfortunately, as I will explain on another occasion, not of an admirable sort.

3. Stefano Gensini, The Leibnitian Concept of 'Significatio'.

The main point made in the paper is the following: Leibniz did not, in a traditional manner, regard the meaning of linguistic expressions as residing in a material or mental extra-linguistic referent. Rather, like Frege and De Saussure, he distinguished an autonomous level of linguistic meaning. Gensini substantiates this claim by examining, first, two early essays by Leibniz, in the latter of which Leibniz introduced the notion of 'significatio' as 'a pure linguistic entity'. Next, Gensini examines fragments that are related to Leibniz's project of a characteristica universalis. It appears that 'blind thought', which is characterized by a vague 'sense' that is present in the mind, as opposed to the fully explicated 'significatio', is just as essential for ordinary language use as it is for the characteristica universalis. Thirdly, Gensini discusses the Nouveaux Essais, in which Leibniz clearly confirms 'the autonomy of the semantic side of languages'. In a final section, Gensini argues against recent attempts to depict Leibniz as an Adamicist and as a precursor of modern theories of a 'language of thought'.

Bringing together a wealth of relevant material, Gensini makes some interesting further points. For instance, he persuasively argues that Leibniz's views cannot be understood without taking into account the distinction between the historical order, to which our thoughts and our language use belong on the one hand, and the metaphysical order, the 'realm of ideas', fully grasped only by God on the other hand. Further, Gensini rightly points out that it would be a mistake to associate Leibniz's ideas on natural languages with a mystical view on language.

4. Ludger Kaczmarek, Organisation, Kommunikation, Formentstehung. Resonanzen eines begrifflichen Feldes bei Leibniz und in der Gegenwart.

Kaczmarek draws attention to aspects of Leibniz's solution to the mind-body problem which he says are of interest for linguistics and communication theory. Leibniz's metaphysical concept of psycho-physical relations is modelled on mutual interaction and communication. The world is a sensible structure, organised with respect to a goal. The laws of nature underlying matter are not questioned but subsumed under a metaphysical perspective. Kaczmarek observes that questions occupying Leibniz, such as whether life can be sufficiently explained by mechanical laws or whether it is necessary to assume goal-directed principles of organisation, still have not received a definitive answer. Further, there are non-trivial parallels between Leibniz's theory of pre-established harmony and recent theorizing on 'morphic fields' by Sheldrake. Leibniz's concept of harmony, which is central to his philosophy, is a precondition of, or even coincides with 'communication'. Kaczmarek also explores the relations between Bisterfeld's concept of 'immeatio', the theological concept of 'perichoresis', and Leibniz's central concept of relational, communicative harmony between everything that exists.

5. Maurizio Matteuzzi, Leibniz e i sincategoremi.

From the De Arte Combinatoria (1666) on, Leibniz was concerned to derive a truth condition for all propositions from an arrangement of terms. This posed the problem of what role is to be assigned to the syncategorematic part of language. Matteuzzi discusses various solutions Leibniz considered to cope with this problem. In the 1666 tract, Leibniz used the Greek article to represent relational terms, thus indicating that these terms belong to a metalinguistic level. In the Generales Inquisitiones (1686), Leibniz attempts reductions of partial terms, such as 'similar', to integral terms, that is terms which can be the subject or the predicate of a proposition. Thus, 'similar to A' is an integral term. As Mateuzzi shows, Leibniz then realizes that he cannot not do without certain particles, and that particles are to be divided into primitive ones and composed ones. At this point, a new problem arises. Whereas integral terms are combined in a single way following the single rule of juxtaposition, particles combine in diverse ways. Leibniz declares this problem unsolvable as long as a list of primitive terms and primitive particles has not been established. After providing a provisional list, Leibniz is diverted by more pressing thoughts. In later writings, he did not come back to the problem, which thus remained unsolved. By way of afterthought, Matteuzzi argues that Leibniz was correct in trying to make the structure of his language isomorphic with that of the world.

6. Francesco Piro, Are the 'Canals of Tropes' Navigable? Rhetoric Concepts in Leibniz' Philosophy of Language.

The rhetorical tradition recognised the function of figurative language not only to adorn speech but also to supplement the poverty of literal language. Leibniz transformed this insight into an explanation for semantic change: the semantic potential of a language evolves through the 'canales troporum'. In an illuminating article, Piro examines the various, sometimes implicit expressions of Leibniz's views on tropes through his early and mature writings. Tropes are important in the first place within the context of investigations into natural languages, but Leibniz also explores the etymology of prepositions within the context of his search for a philosophical language. Although the present meaning of a word ('usus') can sometimes be traced back to an earlier or the earliest meaning ('origo') through the channels of tropes, this often fails because there are no rules determining these meaning changes. Thus the opaqueness of ordinary language results from arbitrary transformations on originally 'natural' signs. These transformations are no instances of degeneration; on the contrary, they are means to enlarge the expressive power of languages and to allow a more rational use of signs. Leibniz's views on tropes, Piro concludes, are not only concerned with explaining meaning change in natural languages, but are directed to a deeper problem: "to connect language and time, language and contingence".

7. Olga Pombo, Leibnizian Strategies for the Semantic Foundation of Universal Language.

Central to Leibniz's project of a universal language, Pombo points out, is his cognitive conception of language, that is, the view that language is not merely instrumental in communicating, but also in constituting thought and further, that language has heuristic potentialities. In order to create a universal language having great heuristic power, Leibniz followed two strategies. The first one is to establish an exhaustive list of primitive ideas into which all our concepts can be resolved. Since this approach faces insurmountable difficulties, Leibniz tried a second strategy, which is connected with his views on the 'representativity of the sign'. Three seemingly contradictory projects are in fact part of a single effort, unified by Leibniz's concern with this representativity of the sign: the study of natural languages, the search for a rational grammar and the construction of a universal language. The second strategy consists in applying the discoveries concerning the motivated origin of natural languages and the deep structure underlying these languages to the new philosophical language. This result concerning the internal structure of Leibniz's views, Pombo claims, has interesting external implications in that it may help us to reconsider our ideological belief in the arbitrariness of language.

Pombo justifiedly distinguishes two Leibnizian approaches towards the construction of a philosophical language, which distinction was already made by Couturat (1901). However, both Pombo and Couturat fail to see that in terms of strategies, the first approach using primitive ideas was never really an option for Leibniz. Although the theoretical framework starts from primitive ideas and their combination, in practice the primitives function as the end towards which progressive steps in analysis are directed. From his earliest writings on, Leibniz makes clear that this analysis takes existing languages as a starting point. A more serious objection concerns Pombo's principal claim that Leibniz tried to construct, in a sophisticated manner, a language which was 'natural' in the seventeenth century sense of the term. This claim is based, among other things, upon the premiss that Leibniz tried "to avoid the complete formalism of a well made but empty language". This is to misrepresent Leibniz's primary concern, which was precisely to construct a completely formal language. In his view however, such a language is not 'empty', i.e., disconnected from reality, but structured in such a way that syntactic and semantic correctness coincide.

8. H. Walter Schmitz, Ungeheuer über Leibniz und die cognitio symbolica-Tradition.

Schmitz is not directly concerned with Leibniz, but with the views of Gerold Ungeheuer (1930-1982), as expounded in a series of studies edited by Schmitz (1990). Ungeheuer's studies deal with the Cognitio Symbolica tradition, which originated with Plato and extends into the present. Leibniz occupies a central position in this tradition. 'Cognitio Symbolica' involves knowledge with the help of symbols, but comprises in addition that of the 'entia rationis', 'things of thought', which is the ontological correlate of the human capacity of phantasy and imagination. In the tradition of Western thought, entia rationis are to a large degree dependent on language. According to Ungeheuer, Leibniz integrates both Suarez's and Ockham's ideas into his conception of 'cognitio symbolica', i.e. knowledge by means of signs. Since this type of knowledge, which forms the lion's share of what we know, is blind, the certainty of knowledge is constantly in danger. Hence Leibniz's effort to make knowledge more reliable by analyzing it into first elements. Ungeheuer traces the tradition further in later writers such as Nietzsche, Bühler and Wundt. Rather than viewing the history of ideas as a sequence of periods, Ungeheuer was convinced that behind these periods a more fundamental process takes place, in which the same basic stances keep reappearing.

9. Giovanna Varani, Leibniz' Rezeption der Aristotelischen Dialektik.

Aristotle's 'art of disputation', also known as dialectic or topics, constituted a special kind of rationality, distinct from deductive thinking: to be successful in a debate requires the use of artifices besides methodical processes. Varani examines Leibniz's reception of Aristotelian dialectic, a subject that, she claims, has hitherto been scantily studied. Presenting a broad sketch of Aristotelianism and Ramism in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Varani argues that Leibniz's general attitude towards Aristotle was both approving and critical. As for dialectic, he identified this with the art of invention in his early writings. In the Parisian years the art of invention gained prominence and was developed in a mathematical sense. In the Nouveax Essais Leibniz repeated his criticism of the abuse of dialectical artifices, but he maintained that the use of some types of dialectical argument is sometimes justified. In the Theodicee, finally, he judged positively of Aristotelian dialectic, and did not hesitate to use dialectical artifices for his discussion of theological matters.

Jaap Maat, Amsterdam

Klaus D. Dutz and Hans J. Niederehe (eds.)

Theorie und Rekonstruktion. Trierer Studien zur Geschichte der Linguistik.

Münster: Nodus Publikationen 1996, 216 pp. ISBN 3-89223-265-6. DM 56.00.

T

HE volume contains eleven papers read on the occasion of a conference organised by the Studienkreis Geschichte der Sprachwissenchaft, 21 ^- 22 September 1995 in Trier. As is the tradition of these conferences, there was no set theme. Consequently, this collective volume lacks thematic cohesion; it mirrors the colourful arbitrariness of topics as offered by their authors. Three papers are concerned with the history of linguistics pertaining to Spanish, one pertaining to Irish, four to German, one to English, and two pertaining to universal problems. The sequence is chronological with the exception of the hibernian topic, which, although chronologically first, was placed third. No reason is given for this arrangement.

Hans-J. Niederehe's plea for a history of linguistic historiography complements the importance of Occitan, whose excellency is grounded in the literature of the Troubadours, with works by Enrique de Villena (1433?), Antonio de Nebrija (1492) and Juan de Valdés (1535) in which early principles of historiography can be found. This pertains to the Ausbau of a language in its text-types, including literature, and the parallelisation of linguistic and political developments. The growth and decline of an empire entails the growth and decline of the language of its people. There then follow the early histori(ographi)es of Spanish by Andrés de Posa (1587) and Bernardo Aldrete (1606) whose turning towards the assumed pre-Roman origins of Spanish signals a growing distance from Latin. Gregorio Mayáns y Siscar's work on the history of the language, finally, incorporates a historiography of the science.

Ramón Sarmiento, in a paper written in Spanish, compares three models of traditional Spanish grammaticography, as to be found between 1771 and today, namely the philological, the normative, and the philosophical. The philological follows canonical texts, the normative follows oral performance, and the philosophical follows language use insofar as it depends on thinking.

Erich Poppe shows that the Irish treatise Auraicept na nÉces of the second half of the seventh century is part both of the hibernian and of the Roman-Christian traditions and thus presents itself as one link in the chain of early works on a vernacular (and written in it) which aims to improve the vernacular's status by describing it with the help of Latin categories. Thematic examples are case morphology and the comparison of adjectives, and also the terms 'genus' and 'species'.

Miguel Ángela Esparza Torres sketches the relevant works of four representatives of Spanish grammarians (Antonio de Nebrija, 1482-83; Andrés Gutiérrez de Cerezo, 1485; Petro Madariaga, 1582, and Juan Sánchez, 1586) in the so-called Golden Age (1492-1600) who use the vernacular for the description of Latin and in doing so occupy an important place in the grammaticography of their mother-tongue.

Andreas Gardt sketches plans for a dictionary of language theory in the Baroque and the Enlightenment, which will document metalinguistic statements from German works between 1600 and 1780 according to lemmata like 'language, thinking, reality', 'language origin', 'universal grammar', 'upgrading of German vs. Latin', etc. The dictionary is currently being compiled at the University of Heidelberg. Gardt's report is the first of a group of papers devoted to German, continued by Jörg Hardy with a complex discussion of the 'logic' of linguistic research in Wilhelm von Humboldt's works. By this is meant an integrating scientific concept by which linguistic theory is made part of a comprehensive anthropology in the perspective of cultural history. It works by comparison and looks for the unity of human actions expressed by individual, i.e. national, linguistic means. This leads to many gaps and contradictions in argumentation, because Humboldt never topicalised this metalevel of his research but 'simply' employed it as an inherent programme.

Maria Herrlich shows that Jacob Grimm's Geschichte der deutschen Sprache, evaluated as odd by experts, is a project sound in its theoretical planning project, notwithstanding its obviously false statements on the origin of German. The history of language is here embedded in the history of culture which is in turn embedded in the history of peoples. This prefigures later developments, e.g. the so-called Wörter-und-Sachen-research. Ulrike Haß-Zumkehr is concerned with the same period. She portrays the lexicographer Daniel Sanders, an enlightened mand and a liberal one (both in the general as well as the party-political sense), whose Jewish origins and the fact that he dared to criticize Grimm's dictionary thwarted his career and his recognition by contemporary linguists. Topics arising in the course of this portrait are Sanders' concept of the linguistic rule, of language as a system of signs, and of polysemy, all of which make him a successor of Adelung rather than a member of the romantic Germanistik.

Mark Atherton's paper, in English, follows Henry Sweet's pathway from an associationist concept of language learning in the wake of John Locke and John Stuart Mill, as explained in an early (unpublished) draft of his Practical Study of Languages, to a synthetic concept of longer linguistic units to be learned as 'masses of apperception' (Vorstellungsmassen) in the wake of Friedrich Herbart, as explained in the final version of the book. In particular, Hermann Paul and Wilhelm Viëtor, the representative of the so-called Reform, guided him in this direction.

The last two papers are devoted to general topics. Brigitte Bartschat compares Jakobson's and Hjelmlev's concept of 'case' according to aims and methods of analysis. The point of comparison is the endeavour to find a universal case system with semantic functions behind the various language-bound paradigms. Finally, Frank Vonk gives an overview of psycholinguistic schools, beginning with early scientific models, aiming to assign to linguistics, with its own questions and problems, a proper place within an interdisciplinary complex woven from psychology, sociology, cultural science and a science of human behaviour (Handlungswissenschaft). A critical role in this is played by the Hungarian psychologist Géza Révèsz, who emigrated to the Netherlands and subsequently worked there.

The status and the quality of these papers inevitably varies. The contributions by Herrlich and Haß-Zumkehr are concise versions of a dissertation and a Habilitationsschrift respectively. The contributions by Torres, Bartschat and Vonk are called 'preliminary' by their own authors. Andreas Gardt reports on a project in progress. This leaves five contributions (Niederehe, Sarmiento, Poppe, Hardy, Atherton) as topical analyses in their own right. A certain imbalance results from this state of affairs, although this need not diminish the interests for readers, many of whom will be expecting to find brief accounts both of forthcoming work and recently completed studies.

The book has a few editorial blemishes. The contribution by Miguel Ángel Esparza Torres has a Spanish title in the table of contents, but a German one in the text. It is in fact written in German. On page 9, the difference between 'der Verdienst' and 'das Verdienst' in German is overlooked. There are further misprints on pages 11 and 12. In the contribution on early Irish, a paper which is written in German, it is irritating that Irish texts are translated into German, while Latin texts, if translated at all, are given in English. Temporal deixis should not be obsolete when a book appears (p. 97). On page 109 an important quotation from Humboldt is wrong; on page 119 an unexplained and unusual abbreviation is introduced ('PSF' for Philosophie der symbolischen Formen by Ernst Cassirer). A reference on page 131 is not intelligible. There are some additional minor slips. Finally the title: The reviewer admits that he does not understand the pairing of Theorie and Rekonstruktion. 'Reconstruction' refers to a certain methodological point of view in historiography. But 'theory'? There is no clue in the papers how to understand this pair of terms.

What in a conference may provide a pleasing and colourful arbitrariness of topics cannot in a book wholly avoid leaving an impression of incoherence. Nevertheless, this collective volume is of value as a token of work in progress. Its merits lie in the mine of topical information where readers may find exactly what they seek and what they need. The value is furthermore derived from the broader context in which the book originated, i.e. the conference tradition and programme of the Studienkreis, whose meetings cut a tranche de la vie historiographique out of the vast enterprise of uncovering the often-hidden realities of the history of linguistics.

Werner Hüllen, Essen

Silvia B. Garciá

Zum Arbitraritätsbegriff bei F. de Saussure. Eine exegetisch-philologische Untersuchung.

Münster: Nodus Publikationen, 1997, pp. 202.

P

INKER claims that there are two 'engineering principles' underlying language. "The first principle, articulated by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, is 'the arbitrariness of the sign,' the wholly conventional pairing of a sound with a meaning. The word dog does not look like a dog, walk like a dog, or woof like a dog, but it means 'dog' just the same. It does so because every English speaker has undergone an identical act of rote learning in childhood that links the sound to the meaning. For the price of this standardised memorisation, the members of a language community receive an enormous benefit: the ability to convey a concept from mind to mind virtually instantaneously." (Pinker 1994: 83-84). On a more negative note Chris Sinha has pointed out in 1996 that: "Generativist theories recast the traditional structuralist notion of the 'arbitrariness of the sign' as 'the autonomy of syntax', neglecting the human dimension of meaning", pointing out that: "In cognitive linguistics, linguistic expression is regarded as motivated by meaning, and grammar and lexicon are viewed as being iconically based in psychological processes of image-schematisation." (Sinha 1996:1; cf. also Tomasello 1995) The matter of the arbitrariness and motivation of signs is therefore at the core of all modern debates about the nature of the science of language. Although this topicality of the topic is only alluded to, linguists will welcome Garciá's thorough study of the concept of arbitrariness as used by this pioneer in linguistic theory: Ferdinand de Saussure.

The book continues a tradition of Saussure-exegesis in which German and French authors, such as Godel, Amacker, Engler, Wunderli and myself engaged, a tradition less apparent in English speaking countries where authors normally limit their interpretative efforts to the Cours de Linguistique Générale as published by Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye (for an exception, cf. Thibault, cf. Nerlich 1997). All this might change as English translations of the first, second and third course of lectures on general linguistics that Saussure gave at Geneva are now available.

Although we cannot do justice to the (sometimes overwhelming) richness of detailed quotation and interpretation displayed in this book, we shall try to summarise it in its broad outline. Its aim is twofold: (1) to reconstruct the various meanings that the terms arbitrary and arbitrariness assumed in Saussure's work over time, that is in his early notes and in his three courses on general linguistics held at the University of Geneva between 1907 and 1910/11, with the last and third course being the most important record of Saussure's conception of the arbitrariness of the sign; (2) to analyse how the concept of arbitrariness was interpreted and, in some instances, distorted by later generations of linguists (who, one has to say in their defence, only had the Cours in the form published by Bally and Sechehaye at their disposition). So as to achieve the first task, the author had to interpret the concept of arbitrariness in the context of various narrower and wider semantic fields, that is its interconnection with other central concepts in Saussure's theory of language, such as lanue and parole and so on, and to contrast it with the complementary concept of motivation. The structure of the book follows neatly from its two goals.

After a short introduction the second chapter, entitled "Der sprachtheoretische Begriff der Arbitrarität", discusses Saussure's concept's of langage, faculté du langage, langue as nomenclature, and other conceptions of langue, parole and the interrelation between langue and parole. The most noteworthy part of this chapter is perhaps the lengthy discussion of the faculty of langage, which draws on a cornucopia of Saussurian notes, and the interpretation of this concept by later writers, such as Peter Wunderli. She writes: "Die 'faculté du langage' ist damit ein Komplex, der eine Reihe von 'untergeordneten' Fähigkeiten einschließt, d.h.. für die Konstituierung der 'langue' und für deren konkreten Vollzug auf der Ebene der 'parole'. Die 'faculté du langage' funktioniert sowohl bei der Rezeption als auch bei der Übertragung der sprachlichen Äußerungen, und trägt so zur Entstehung des Systems und zum sprachlichen Gebrauch bei." (p. 35).

The third chapter, entitled "Die Konzeption des sprachlichen Zeichens", deals with the concepts of image acoustique and concept, signifiant and signifié, their schematic representations, and their terminological history. After about 1894 Saussure had played with such terms as sème, symbole, mot, signe, aposème, forme, sôme, contre-sôme, anti-sôme, para-sôme, and parasème (cf. pp. 82-83). Garciá should have stressed more that this terminological tinkering actually brought about a real theoretical breakthrough in Saussure's thoughts, as the following quote (not fully given by Garciá:86) demonstrates: "Différence [ou a]vantage du terme de sème sur celui de signe . 1⁰ <Pas essentiel [b.].> Sig[ne p]eut être = geste direct, c'est-à-dire hors d'un système et d'une convention. - <Sème = signe faisant partie d'un système [b.]>. - Sème = 1⁰ signe conventionnel, - 2⁰ signe faisant partie d'un système <également conventionnel>" (N15, CLG/E, II: 36). And: "Mais du reste il serait faux de dire que nous faisons une question très capitale de sème au lieu de signe. - Vérité est que parasème et aposème sont des notions capitales" (ibid., 3310.13) The aposeme is the material envelope of the seme, but what is more important, the term paraseme indicates that signs can only be studied as part of a conventional (arbitrary) system of signs. What this note shows is that around 1894/97 Saussure arrived at the conclusion that to give linguistics a sound methodological and theoretical foundation one had to abandon wholeheartedly the view that there is a natural link between sign and object and replace it by the view that the linguistic sign can only function as a sign because it entertains systematic links with other signs in a (conventional) system of signs. The thesis about the arbitrariness of the sign followed naturally from this insight.

Chapter 3 goes on to deal with such difficult notions of unité linguistique, entité linguistique and identité linguistique and throws important light on their definitions. It closes with a discussion of concepts introduced by some of Saussure's followers, such as moneme, morpheme and syntagm. The scene is now set for dealing with the problem of arbitrariness in detail.

Chapter 4 treats the arbitrariness of the sign itself and the link between the two sides of the sign. Chapter 5 deals with possible counter-arguments such as onomatopoeia and interjections. As BN was reading Pinker in parallel with Garciá, we cannot resist quoting the following fact that Saussure, had he known about it, would certainly have used with delight to shut up some of his critics: "Because of that arbitrariness, there is no hope that mnemonic tricks might lighten the memorisation burden, at least for words that are not built out of other words [what Saussure called relative arbitrariness]. Babies should not, and apparently do not, expect cattle to mean something similar to battle, or singing to be like stinging, or coats to resemble goats. Onomatopoeia, where it is found, is of no help, because it is almost as conventional as any other word sound. In English, pigs go 'oink'; in Japanese, they go 'boo-boo'." (Pinker 1994: 152). To get back to our summary: Chapter 6 deals with a central claim of the book, that is arbitrariness as a semiological principle. Chapter 7 discusses arbitrariness in the context of the change and stability of linguistic signs. Chapter 8 studies the relation between arbitrariness and value; chapter 9 relative and absolute arbitrariness, chapter 10 arbitrariness and diachrony, and chapter 11 arbitrariness as irraison. Chapter 12 is devoted to the discussion of arbitrariness after Saussure, in the Geneva School, glossematics, Martinet, Benveniste and in the context of the physei-thesei debate.

The book closes with a summary, in which the author lists the various meanings of arbitrariness and warns the reader not to use these divers acceptations indiscriminately as it has so often been done in the past. Garciá distinguishes between the following levels at which Saussure situates and uses the concept of arbitrariness: first of all there is semiological arbitrariness, which characterises any semiological system of signs whatsoever, but in particular systems of linguistic signs; secondly there is linguistic arbitrariness, which characterises the link between the two constituents of the binary sign; however, depending on the context, arbitrariness might be attributed to the signifiant, the signifié, the sign as a whole or the system of la langue; thirdly there is relative arbitrariness, or the morphological motivation of signs in a language; and lastly there is the fact that, from a diachronic perspective (the point of view of phonetic change), changes in signifiants are never motivated.

We would have liked to have seen a more detailed discussion of the arbitrariness thesis in the context of langue not only as a semiological system, but also as a social fact, especially in relation to the notion of conventionality. The sign as a whole exists only as a social fact. It is therefore 'independent' of the objects it designates, as Saussure pointed out in his early notes. There is no intrinsic link, especially not a natural one, between the sign and the object (cf. the quotes given on pages 83 and 84). The link between sign and object is purely conventional, but not conventional in the sense of some nomenclaturists, that is to say as based on a social agreement of any sort. There is agreement in some sense, that is, we all agree in our uses of a certain sign for a certain object, although, Saussure stresses, we never in fact agreed on using just that sign for that object (as one could say in German Übereinstimmung is not the same as Übereinkunft). The term convention is here used in the sense of a social practice, a custom, a use. In his later writings Saussure moves away from stressing the arbitrary and purely conventional link between the sign and the object and focuses on the inner constitution of the sign, on the link between signifiant and signifié. He now tries to dispel another confusion, associated this time not with the term convention, but with the term arbitrary. He stresses that arbitrary does not mean capricious, dictatorial, dependent on the individual will, the intentionality of those who use a sign. The speakers of a language never really have a choice; they cannot, as Wittgenstein would say, establish a private language. Private and convention or private and rule do not go well together. A rule, a convention, a sign must be social to be able to function in a community, where we rely on the fact that we can convert meanings into sounds when we speak and sounds into meaning when we listen and all this according to a certain conventional code. As Bréal said already in his arguments against those who regarded signs as living organisms: "Nos pères de l'école de Condillac, ces idéologues qui ont servi de cible, pendant cinquante ans, à une certaine critique, étaient plus près de la vérité quand ils disaient, selon leur manière simple et honnête, que les mots sont des signes. [...] ils n'ont pas plus d'existence que les gestes du télégraphe aérien ou que les points et les traits (.-) du télégraphe Morse". (Bréal 1924 [1897]: 255)

In short, arbitrary means neither 'conventional' in the sense of social contract, nor 'intentional' in the sense of individual choice. The link between signifiant and signifié only exists because the sign is used in this way by a social mass, and it is conventional in this sense only. The link between the sign as a whole and the object designated, or more specifically between the signifié and the signifiant can therefore never be a motivated one. That does not mean however that semiological systems based on the principle of arbitrariness are static or immutable. In fact, the opposite is the case: As there is no inherent necessity in language other than its arbitrariness, languages can change, they are always 'mutable', adaptable to the uses we make of them over time.

For Saussure, to acknowledge the arbitrariness of the sign is of paramount importance. Only when we accept this principle can we see how a language functions and changes. It is only because the semiological and social rules governing languages as systems of signs are arbitrary, that languages are not submitted to individual human will and whimsy. These rules are imposed on us by the language we learn to use. They are not freely accepted by us, instead we are trained to follow them when we learn a language. However, although these rules are taught normatively, they are not experienced as normative, but rather as a natural law (arbitrary means at the same time necessary). We cannot simply imagine alternatives, we take the rules for granted, they are self-evident for us, and what is more, we usually do not even notice them or that we follow them. This self-evidence and the certainty with which we follow the rules blindly, lies for us beyond the justified and the unjustified (cf. Heringer 1985:271). Every language is autonomous because it is arbitrary, and that means that it sets its own limits as well as the limits of our world.

Whether this is the right way of looking at the nature of language is, naturally, up for debate, as we have indicated at the beginning of this review. Whereas generativists (in the broadest sense) would wholeheartedly accept the doctrine of arbitrariness, cognitivists would not. Although their work (especially Langacker 1987) is based on Saussurean terminology (signifier, signified, etc.), their conception of the linguistic sign is more compatible with what Saussure (not Peirce) called symbol (they therefore speak quite often of symbolisation, 'symbolic constructions' etc.) We shall therefore conclude this review with a quote from Garciá's book in which Saussure writes about the symbol in his last and third course: "(1135) A propos du mot de symbole: (1136) Nous avons grand scrupule à employer ce terme. (1137) Le symbole a pour caractère de n'être jamais complètement arbitraire; le symbole n'est pas vide. Il y a un rudiment de lien entre idée et signe, dans symbole" (CLG/E: 155) (Garciá:106).

As an author who writes in various language which are not her native ones, BN sympathises with Garciá's plight, and admires her impeccable German. However, the French quotes in particular should have been checked thoroughly by a native speaker.

REFERENCES

Bréal, Michel (1924[1897]). Essai de sémantique (Science des significations). Reprint of the 4th ed. Paris: Gérard Monfort.

Heringer, Hans-Jürgen (1986): "Not by Nature nor by Intention: The Normative Power of Linguistic Signs" In; Linguistic Dynamics. Ed. Th. Ballmer. Berlin/New York, p. 251-278.

Langacker, Ronald W. (1987). Foundations of Cognitive Grammar, vol. 1: Theoretical Prerequisites. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.

Nerlich, Brigitte & David D. Clarke (1997). Review of Paul J. Thibault. Re-reading Saussure. The Dynamics of Signs in Social Life. London & New York: Routledge, 1997. Newsletter of the Henry Sweet Society for the History of Linguistic Ideas 28, 18-22.

Pinker, Steven (1994). The Language Instinct. The new science of language and mind. Harmonsworth: Penguin Books.

Saussure, Ferdinand de (1967-1974) Cours de linguistique générale. Édition critique par Rudolf Engler. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2 vols. (= CLG/E)

Sinha, Chris (1996). "Signifying Subjects". Paper presented at the Symposium Semiotic Systems and Semiosis organized by Christiane Moro and Cintia Rodriguez. IInd Conference for socio-cultural research Vygotsky-Piaget, Geneva 11-15 September 1996. (MS)

Tomasello, Michael (1995). "Language is Not an Instinct". Cognitive Development 10, 131-156.

Brigitte Nerlich & David D. Clarke, Nottingham

Penny Lee

The Whorf Theory Complex: A Critical Reconstruction.

Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1996. [Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science. Series III, Studies in the History of the Language Sciences, 81]. xix + 323 pp. ISBN 90 272 4569 X (Eur., Hb.). ISBN 90 272 4570 3 (Eur., Pb.)

"[…]

it is wrong, all wrong". Pinker's condemnation of the concept of linguistic relativity known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is typical of the sneering attitude of many towards Benjamin Lee Whorf, one of the prime whipping-boys of introductory texts on linguistics. Lee's book defends Whorf against such summary judgements, which are presented as the combined result of cursory reading and Whorf's 'visionary' style. By careful examination of Whorf's work, including a number of unpublished writings examined for the first time, she presents a picture of a network of interrelated, mutually supportive ideas which, as a whole, form the theory complex of the book's title. Lee is clearly trying to right the damage done by the over-simplifications of the past, and the reviewer hopes his summary of the main points will not distort the ideas she so carefully presents.

The book is well laid out, with the text simultaneously falling into natural sections and forming a flowing, coherent whole, complemented by the extensive bibliography. In addition, the inclusion as an appendix of the little-read 'Yale report' allows the reader to sample first-hand an extensive example of Whorf's writing.

The first, introductory chapter falls into two equally useful sections. The first summarises his career; as well as providing a background, it also makes the reader aware of Whorf's activities outside of the field, important parts of his life which influenced his ways of thinking and style of writing. Throughout the book, the reader sees how these often gave Whorf a novel perspective on his subject matter, whilst at the same time underlying his tendency to be rather esoteric; this latter trait occasionally infuses Lee's style also, although this adds more to the charm than it subtracts from clarity. The second section of this gives an overview of the theory complex, sketching an outline to be filled in by the chapters that follow.

Chapter two discusses the notions of patternment and linguistic thinking, which Lee believes to form the 'hard core' of the theory complex. Perhaps the crucial point of this chapter is that Whorf claimed only that it is the ability to talk which is distinctive about human cognition; specifically, he did not claim that all conceptual activity is linguistic, nor did he claim that language functions only to facilitate conceptual activity. Throughout this chapter, and indeed the book as a whole, Lee carefully interweaves quotes from Whorf, along with her explanations and analyses of his ideas, with those of his forebearers, contemporaries and successors. The reader must therefore be mindful of whose version of a particular conception of language is being discussed at any given moment. Nevertheless, such careful reading is worthwhile, as one can then appreciate both the context in which Whorf was writing, essential if one is to avoid the misunderstandings which Lee shows to have dogged much discussion of Whorf's writings. In addition, Lee is keen to point out that Whorf's notions of patternment and entrenchment have their echoes in more recent thinking, in particular connectionist models of cognition; this is an intriguing parallel, which one may hope will be explored in greater detail in future.

The third chapter elucidates the theory of linguistic relativity, perhaps the most well-known and misunderstood areas of Whorf's work. Essentially, what he argued is that perceptual processes make a set of 'isolates of experience' universally available, from which human beings selectively make meaning by extracting patterns of salience or coherence; different societies will do this in different ways, and their selection of 'isolates of meaning' will be reflected in their languages. Chapter four discusses covert categories and cryptotypes, the meanings of such categories. This chapter, whilst worth reading in its own right, gives the impression of being an aside which the author felt should somehow be included. Hence here the theory complex breaks down somewhat, and it is significant that covert categories and cryptotypes are not mentioned in the summary of the complex at the end of the first chapter.

In chapter five we return to the main stream of the complex with an examination of the related topics of abstraction and universals. Lee is keen to point out that, in keeping with Whorf's dynamic conception of language as a whole, abstraction is first and foremost a process, rather than the result of such a process. Her discussion of Whorf's views on universal greatly benefits from the clear distinction drawn between experiential, conceptual, and linguistic universals. As mentioned above, Whorf argued that we all have access to the same stock of isolates of experience. These potential conceptual universals need not be actualised; if they always were, then there would be no question of linguistic relativity. Lee argues, however, that some isolates of experience may, due to their salience, be universally realised as concepts, and that they could then become linguistic universals by being manifested as linguistic elements. This point, she concedes, is not made explicitly by Whorf, being part of Lee's reconstruction; it does, however, mesh well with Whorf's ideas, as is typical of the comparison and skilled interweaving of ideas from a variety of sources throughout the book.

The final chapter tackles probably the most daring aspect of Whorf's thinking, that of the benefits of awareness of the patterns of thought embodied in different languages, and the improvements it could bring to individual cognitive abilities, scientific thinking, and intercultural understanding. These points are discussed in detail and argued for convincingly on the whole; Lee concludes with a whole-hearted embrace of this most humanistic side of Whorf, her tone containing much of the passion of that of her subject.

All in all, this book strikes a fine balance between expository simplicity and the complexity of the ideas in question and the context in which they were formed. As such, this book an informative contribution to the history of linguistics, and also to current linguistics, since the better understanding of Whorf's writings which it provides sheds light, as Lee points out, on many areas of research, both current and potential.

Anthony Parry-Jones, Oxford

Ian Michael

English as a Subject: Its Development over Four Centuries.

University of Southampton : Centre for Language in Education. 1994. Occasional Papers, 23.

T

HIS paper is the text of a lecture delivered at the Centre for Language in Education at the University of Southampton in May, 1994. Anyone who has ever heard a stimulating talk, live or on the radio, and lamented that they did not have a copy of it to study at leisure, will welcome the text being made available in this way. It is also a positive sign that academic institutions are prepared to increase the awareness of their students that their subject - in this case English teaching - actually has a history.

Michael's theme is the slow emergence of "English" as a curriculum subject in schools up to the nineteenth century. The first problem, as he rightly points out, is the complexity of the concept of "English" as "a subject." According to Keddie, "... subjects are what practitioners do with them ..." (Keddie, 1979: 144) and in the absence of a single stable definition one can sympathize with Michael's approach in pulling together many of the activities which have come to constitute part of the English syllabus, and putting them in a historical perspective.

In order to exercise some kind of control on his material, Michael sets up three "constants" as guidelines for what should be included in or excluded from his survey: expression, interpretation and control (that is, of both expression and interpretation - i.e. grammar and logic). Within this framework, he looks back through history at the various genres through which these aspects have been expressed.

To do this, Michael divides the period under discussion into three phases: (1) up to 1700; (2) the eighteenth century, and (3) the nineteenth century. He then does a quick "scamper through" each period, sketching in its "main lines of growth" (p. 2), summarising the main points at the end of each section. The lines of growth in each period are illustrated by a representative work for one of the genres studies. (The 22 works chosen - dating from c.1530 to 1869, and arranged neither chronologically nor in alphabetical order by author, but in order of their introduction in the text - are listed on p.13). This treatment in successive "slices" of history well brings out the changes which take place century by century. In the first phase, works are treated under one of six heads: oral expression, written expression, interpretation, logic, grammar and literacy. By the 19th century, interpretation ("literature") has moved into first place, followed by grammar and literacy. Oral expression is not treated at all, and logic appears to have got lost in the eighteenth century.

Among the merits of this publication are that it puts - for historians of linguistics - grammar, rhetoric and logic in the wider context of the world in which they were used. Here, a more detailed picture is skilfully sketched in, with variations in age, social status (the aristocracy, the poor) and the kind of school (grammar, dame, petty, major public school, as well as the home) being taken into account at the appropriate points. Particularly illuminating is the variety of genres alluded to - rhetorics, commonplace books, miscellanies, hornbooks, primers, anthologies, readers etc. - since the concept of genre is often important to the historian of linguistics for the accurate assessment of individual works.

Michael's conclusions suggest a continued unhappiness at the diffuse nature of the term "English." Quite rightly, he stresses the speculative nature of what we know, or think we know, about teaching methods - (How were these "subjects" actually taught?), - and about the books themselves - (Who possessed them - the teacher? the pupils? And how were they used?). Thus, while the presentation maps out the major areas for us, it also brings out how superficial our knowledge of many of these areas still is, and hence how much still remains to be done.

The vast amount of research and knowledge which underlies this apparently superficial scamper through history will be apparent, even to the uninitiated reader, from numerous asides. It is a pity that the sourcebook which could best help interested readers or listeners further (Michael, 1987) should not have been given greater prominence, perhaps by being better integrated in the main text: it is in fact located at the end of "Occasional Papers so far published" by the Centre for Education.

Altogether, the survey offers a useful platform for considering the momentous developments which have taken place under the mantle of "English" this century, when the same complaint of heterogeneity is still made: "... the English syllabus not only tends to fragment into the conventional compartments of language and literature, with sub-divisions for composition, grammar, and vocabulary, and for poetry, prose, and drama, but also spills over from both of these spheres in very diverse directions - into current affairs, play-acting, debating, journalism, logic, choral speaking, italic handwriting, miming, puppetry, and a host of other no doubt excellent but diffuse activities ..." (Mittins, 1964: 91). Michael seems to take the view that "a subject gains from fluidity among its components" (p. 12). More recent history suggests that this fluidity is less productive when major components such as language and literature develop in different directions. What we have witnessed in the U.K. this century has been a series of sustained attempts on the part of literature specialists to eradicate the study of language ("grammar") from the curricula of schools, if not of universities (cf. Mittins, 1964: passim). If works such as Michael's help to make teachers more conscious of such currents in the history of their profession, so much the better.

REFERENCES

Keddie, N. (1971) Classroom Knowledge. In: M.D.F. Young (ed.) Knowledge and Control. London: Collier Macmillan, 133-60.

Michael, I. (1987) The Teaching Of English From The Sixteenth Century To 1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Mittins, W.H. (1964) "The teaching of English in schools". In: R. Quirk and A.H. Smith (eds.) The Teaching of English. London: Oxford University Press. (1st. publ. 1959), 87-109.

John Walmsley, Bielefeld

Brigitte Nerlich & David D. Clarke

Language, Action and Context. The Early History of Pragmatics in Europe and America, 1780-1930.

Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company (Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science, Volume 80), xii + 497pp.

T

HE history of pragmatics, according to a recently published book, "is the distinctively American philosophy". Now this opinion can be defended if one extends the adjective 'American' to 'American and British'. To most learners of linguistics pragmatics indeed seems to have its origin in the works of Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914), William James (1842-1910), John Dewey (1859-1952), John Langshaw Austin (1911-1961) or John R. Searle. And one may even list other American and British thinkers having contributed to the development of pragmatic thought. Now, the main problem in pragmatics is its conceptualization: what do we mean when we speak of pragmatics? Is pragmatics the only notion one has to deal with when one studies its development in scientific history? It seems plausible to assume that pragmatics cannot be the only concept. If one takes for instance Searle's 'theory of speech acts' his theory seems to be just a small part of pragmatics. On the other hand, Peirce's concept of 'pragmatics' was used by other thinkers, like James, which caused Peirce to coin the term 'pragmaticism' to distinguish it from James's way of doing pragmatics. So, what we mean by pragmatic research should be made clear before one could write its history.

But a second point to consider is the geographical restriction of pragmatic thought. Is it true that American philosophy is 'distinctively pragmatic' or can pragmatic thought also be found for instance in German, French or Dutch linguistic work?

A third aspect, finally, is the domain-specific character of pragmatics: Is it only linguistics which is concerned with pragmatics or are there other disciplines where elements of pragmatic thought can be found, for instance in anthropology? So lots of historiographical, conceptual and geographical problems must be solved before one can even think of writing a 'history of pragmatics'. My starting-question is: did Nerlich and Clarke (NC) succeed in solving them?

The authors seem to have found a rather simple but efficient solution to the aforementioned problems in their book Language, Action, and Context. They restrict themselves to a terminology which seems to mirror the basic notions in pragmatic research. They create a pragmatic ontology in which individual thinkers and their pragmatic/ pragmaticist approaches in Europe and America have their own place. And in this universe of basic notions comparisons between individual thinkers are made so as to find out what pragmatics is really about. In their introduction NC go into several methodological problems concerning the definition of pragmatics, the need of a history of pragmatics, and the relation between pragmatics and speech act theory. The fact that pragmatics by defining it as the study of specific problems (one might call them analogous to the concept philosophemes 'pragmat(h)emes') related to language, its users, context, and action can be found in over 2000 years of 'pragmatic' research is conceded by the authors and therefore - also because of maters of competence which seems to be a general problem of the historiographer educated in a particular 20th-century discipline - they restrict themselves to "the route leading to modern linguistic pragmatics at the juncture of the 18th and 19th centuries" (p.8). On their way from 1700 up to the 1950s, the eve before the institutionalization of pragmatics as a serious topic in linguistic research, the role of the language user in speech contexts (the social dimension of language) is made the central issue in tracing candidates for a place in the "history of pragmatic ideas":

The scope of this book is however not only limited as to the periods and geographical spaces it covers, it is also restricted to a more social view of pragmatics, leaving aside the area of 'formal semantics' and 'formal pragmatics'. (p.8)

The more analytical and philosophical traditions the authors seem to maintain are excluded in their book, although, for instance, Edmund Husserl (1859-1938) and other phenomenologists like Alexius Meinong (1853-1920) are discussed. And precisely these authors, according to Michael Dummett, should be considered to be the founders of British analytical philosophy next to thinkers like Gotlob Frege (1848-1925). And this road they did not want to follow. I presume that the "history of pragmatic ideas" made the NC that enthusiastic about what they found in for instance Husserl's or Meinong's work that they did not want to leave it out of their "history of ideas" - which immediately shows the danger of the history of ideas to end up in an overwhelming number of author's, concepts, traditions, disciplines etc. So if one takes the author's limitation to the less formal tradition of pragmatic ideas this seems to be not quite correct.

In their search for sources of 19th and 20th-century pragmatic thoughts NC take the following essentially pragmatic insights as their point of departure:

1. "the theory of moods [indicative, interrogative, and imperative] known since Graeco-Roman days" (p.9); this already reveals an important aspect of pragmatic thought: its fixation on sentences in which not primarily the referential function of language is expressed but the communicative function - the illocutionary force of language explicitly presupposes insights in the structure of different sentence-types;

2. "the theory of deixis" (p.10); language is also anchored in reality. This reality (cf. Karl Bühler's (1879-1963) 'I-here-now' as the origo of deictic concepts) reveals the situation in which language is actually used and which may serve as a commonplace in language use;

3. "the field of rhetoric" (p.10); the persuasion of the other to believe one's words was a technique practized since antiquity and part of the medieval trivium which could be learned and used and therefore may be relevant to pragmatics;

4. "the awareness, [...], of a possible incongruence between linguistic forms and their functions" (p.11); with the development of psychological research in the 19th and 20th centure and the empirical study of human linguistic behaviour this shift from a more formal analysis of language into an empirical, situationally influenced study of human action and language use was realized;

5. "language is based on convention and therefore abitrary" (p.12); with this opinion, to be found among others in the work of De Saussure, the linguistic sign received its meaning by its use in certain (linguistic and social) contexts;

6. "a last source of inspiration, especially for speech act theorists, [...is] the philosophy of law or legal actions" (p.12); in social interaction following rules (a central topic in later Witgenstein's 'philosophical investigations') is be presupposed. Without social conventions, codified in claims and obligations, a human society seems impossible. And, of course, language and the consequences of the use of language are important in the codification of claims and obligations.

Next to these positive 'influences' on the development of pragmatic thought which can be abstractly reduced to the concepts 'contextualism' and 'functionalism' (cf. p.376) three developments have negatively influenced a more functional study of language:

1. "the rejection of a reductionist notion of the sentence";

2. "the notion of language as an organism";

3. "the notion that language represents thought" (p.11).

These developments have excluded the role of the interlocutors in human linguistic use. The act of speaking was inferior to the purely grammatical, the biological or purely

logical analysis of linguistic structures. In fact, Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) was one of the first scientists in Germany who stressed the function of the "act of speaking" (p.11) as the true essence of language without , however, losing sight of the spiritual character which underlies the possibility of speaking.

Now, if one looks closely at the structure of NC's book they do not systematically develop the different theoremes which underlie their search for pragmatists in the 18th, 19th, and 20th centuries. They rather chronologically list the main representatives of what they call 'protopragmatics in Europe' (1785-1835) - implicitly criticizing the opinion that the main ideas of pragmatics were in fact an American invention -, 'pragmatism (1860-1930 in the United States', and 'pragmatism avant la lettre (1880-1935) in Europe'. By the end of the book, in part 11.5, NC say something about the recent development of pragmatics in its institutionalized form, in the form Austin and Searle handed it over to the linguistic audience, i.e. without their forerunners. They have forgotten 'to hand over' their own struggle with the tradition of pragmatic ideas which actually did exist as NC show (cf. p.373). And therefore a reconstruction of the theoretical 'roots' of this institutionalized' pragmatics as a part of the linguistic curriculum seems to be justified by the lack of interest in historiographical maters shown by "the 'father' of pragmatics": Austin, and his followers (p.373).

One can criticize the way NC 'do' pragmatic historiography by choosing certain concepts, certain geographical regions, and certain 'overall' labels to cover the history of pragmatics but the way they develop pragmatic thought in different European and American regions chronologically deserves our admiration. They have limited themselves to among others linguists, philosophers, psychologists, sociologists who really had something to say on the functions of language, on language use(rs) and the work is a Fundgrube for those interested in the history and historiography of pragmatic research. NC give a short biography of the main author's in their selection of pragmatic thinkers, they list the important primary and secondary sources for each person and link their main ideas to those of contemporary or earlier colleagues working in the field. It is, for instance, interesting to know and to consider a possible effect of the role of the Gesammelte Schriften of the German legal author Adolf Reinach on Gilbert Ryle (1900-1976) who owned a copy which "survives, with annotations, in the Library of Linacre College in Oxford" (p.214) or the fact that elements of pragmatic thought can as well be found in what we nowadays would call the empirical as in the rational traditions in philosophy, linguistics, etc. NC also give the original version of the English, translated quotations at the end of the book; they also add an extensive bibliography of primary and secondary literature and an index of names with dates.

It would lead a reviewer of this book too much into details if s/he would go into the careful and adequate observations made by NC. On the other hand, it would have been easier for a reviewer, if the authors would have made another choice, i.e. not to give this amount of information to the reader but had described one or two of the aforementioned sources of pragmatic research and had worked out the reception and analysis of these pragmatic themes in the texts of a more or less 'coherent' group of pragmatic thinkers - for instance around 1900 in Germany or France. Thus, NC have shown that a lot of work is still to be done in the history and historiography of pragmatics

Frank Vonk, Velp /Doetinchem

Riccardo Rizza (main ed.) withMaria Helena Abreu, Encarnación García Dini, Enrico Giaccherini, Walter Pagani, Peter Wolfgang Waentig

Colloquia, et dictionariolum octo linguarum Latinae, Gallicae, Belgicae, Teutonicae, Hispanicae, Italicae, Anglicae, Portugallicae.

Viareggio-Lucca-Italy: Mauro Baroni editore s.d. [1996], I-XVI + [XVII] + [1-4] + 5a and b-189a and b + 190-200 + [201-204] pp. ISBN 88-85408-32-X. It. Lira 100,000.00

T

HE most reliable sources for the historiographical reconstruction of teaching and learning a foreign language in the centuries of the past are, of course, textbooks. The first to be printed for languages other than the classical ones, in this case for German and Italian, is Adam of Rottweil's Introito e porta, published in Venice in 1477. As a textbook-type it was similar to older textbooks which circulated as manuscripts, for example the Liber in volgaro of Magister George of Nuremberg, which was written in 1424 - also in German and Italian, and also in Venice. These books, obviously meant for self-study, differed from the older as well as the contemporary Latin textbooks by their practical approach, although there were also common features. Such are, most of all, to be found in the topically-ordered word-lists. But the selection of vocabulary, its arrangement, the incorporation of grammar in communicative phrases and the dialogues prove that their aim was not the bookish competence in Latin and Greek but a command of foreign languages for everyday practical purposes.

Introito e porta developed into a wide spread of affiliated works between 1477 and 1555 (Bart 1984). In all, 90 different editions are known to us with eventually as many as eight languages arranged side by side. This means that the textbook was available in all relevant language areas of Europe and resulted in its leaving its mark on foreign language teaching and learning in its special way almost everywhere. Latin was also included, not as a learned language but as the common means of communication that the Humanists wanted it to be. The development of a whole textbook-family from one single publication is typical of the 16th and 17th centuries. It happened not only with Adam of Rottweil's Introito e porta, but also with Colloquia et dictionariolum, a publication by Noel de Berlaimont in Antwerp. The first extant edition of this textbook appeared in 1530, but there were almost certainly earlier ones. The first known full title reads:

Noel van Berlaimont scoolmeester Tantwerpen Vocabulare von nyens gheordineert. Ende wederom gecorrigeert om lichtelic francois to leeren lezen scriven ende sprecen dwelc gestelt is meestendeel bi personagien.

Vocabulaire de nouveau ordonne & de rechief recorrige pour aprendre legierement a bien lire escripre & parler francois & Flameng lequel est mis tout la plus par person naiges.

Dese vocabularen vintmen te coope Tantwerpen tot Willem Vorsterman Inden gulden Enhoren Int jaer M.D.xxxvi. 4°.

Between 1530 and 1703 more than one hundred different editions of this book appeared, again in up to eight European languages (Verdeyen 1925-1935; Lindemann 1994). Like Introito e porta, the Colloquia et dictionariolum was a work which spread over all relevant language areas of Europe and left its characteristic imprint on the teaching and learning of foreign languages, including 'common' Latin.

There is a third textbook-family with a similar impact. It originated from William Bathe's Janua linguarum, first published in Salamanca in 1611. It is a systematically arranged collection of sentences (O Mathúna 1986). Some thirty editions came out in various West-European languages before 1634. Further editions are mentioned, particularly in Slavonic languages, but these cannot be verifie.. In 1631 Comenius appropriated the title and the principles of William Bathe's book, while changing its contents considerably. This was published as his Janua linguarum reserata, of which more than one hundred editions in all relevant European languages are known.

The story of the textbook-families proves that, from the beginning until the end of the 17th century at least, the teaching of foreign vernaculars was an international affair, a cultural activity in Europe of a homogeneous character which did not alter with the languages taught. National individualisation was only to occur only much later. It is therefore doubtful whether a treatment of the history of language teaching at that time based on national divisions (Caravolas 1994) can be adequate.

To my knowledge there is no reprint of Introito e porta available. This makes historiographical research difficult. There is, however, a critical edition of Liber in volgaro (Pausch 1972). The only reprint of one of the many editions of Colloquia et dictionariolum is Verdeyen (1925-1935), which is difficult to get hold of nowadays. There is no reprint of Bathe's Janua, although a thorough study of this work is available (O Mathúna 1986). Comenius' Janua was reprinted in the Opera Omnia, volume 15/I (1986). The publication by Ricardo Rizza and his team of a reprint of one of the eight-language editions of Colloquia et dictionariolum cannot be too highly praised. With this, historiographical research will be better placed to do justice to this extraordinary textbook by analysing its lexis, its arrangement, and its dialogues. The exact title of the reprinted book (continuing from the main title of the reprint) reads:

Liber omnibus linguarum studiosi domi, ac foris apprime necessarius.

Colloques ou Dialogues avec un Dictionaire en huict langues, Latin, Flamen, Francois, Alleman, Espaignol, Italien, Anglois et Portuguez: nouvellement reveus, corrigéz, et aug[u]mentéz de quatre Dialogues, très profitables et utils, tant au faict de marchandise, qu'aux voiages et aultres traffiques.

Colloquien oft t'samen-sprekingen met eenen Vocabulaer in acht spraken, Latijn, Francois, Neerduytsch, Hoochduytsch, Spaens, Italiens, Enghels ende Portugijsch: van nieus verbetert ende vermeerdert van vier Colloquien, seer nut ende profijtelick tot Coopmanschap, reyse ende a[n]der handelinghen.

Venetiis, Ex Typographia Iuliana, MDCLVI. Superiorum Permissu, et Privilegijs.

The title shows the aim of the work and its approach to language teaching. The text is printed across the pages in eight parallel columns, repeating the sequence of languages as mentioned in the title. There is a short introduction clarifying the responsibilities of the various co-editors. A brief text introduces the reader to the Berlaimont textbook-family. The columns are printed carefully, with clear distinction between Roman and italicised fonts, variants of spelling given in the footnotes. Pp. 5a+b to 9a+b contain the address "To the Reader", pp. 10a+b to 12a+b "The Table of this Booke". There then follow seven dialogues: "A dinner of ten persons" (pp.12a+b to 48a+b), "For to learne to buye and sell" (pp. 48a+b to 60a+b), "For to demaunde debtes" (pp.61a+b to 66a+b), "For to aske the way, with oter familiar communicationis" (pp. 67a+b to 73a+b), "Common talke being in the Inne" (pp. 67a+b to 86a+b), "Communication at the [v]prising" (pp. 86a+b to 93a+b), and "Proposes of marchandise" (pp. 931+b to 112a+b). These are presented with dramatis personae and in as realistic terms as possible, although a comparison with other dialogue books of the time shows that the scenes are prototypical rather than original. The dialogues are followed by tables giving numbers and the days of the week (pp. 112a+b to 113a+b). Next comes a letter-writer's guide with a number of model letters (pp. 114a+b to 138a+b), and finally an alphabetical dictionary (pp. 139a+b to 189a+b). The work concludes with a short treatise on pronunciation and grammatical morphology written in French for French, Italian, and Spanish, but written in Italian for German, concluding with a few remarks, again in French, for Italian, Spanish, French, and Low-Dutch. Each of these diverse parts of the book deserves a close analysis with reference to the language, the methods of language teaching and learning, and details of cultural history. Colloquia et Dictionariolum is now available for everybody who is interested in these questions. It is hoped that libraries all over Europe will learn of its existence and add it to their stock.

REFERENCES

Bart, Alda Rossebastiano(1984): Antichi vocabulari plurilingui d'uso popolare: la tradizione del 'Solenissimo Vochabulista'. Alessandria: Edizioni dell'Orso.

Caravolas, Jean-Antoine (1994): La didactique des langues. Précis d'Histoire I 1450-1700. Montreal/Tübingen: Les Presses de l'Université de Montréal/Gunter Narr.

Comenius, Johannes Amos (1636/1986): J. A. Comenii Janua Lingvarum Reserata sive Seminarium Lingvarum Et Scientiarum Omnium. Hoc est [...]. Primúmque anno 1631 edita. Ed. by Marie Kyralová and Martin Steiner. Opera Omnia Jan Amos Komenský, vol. 15/I, Praha: Academia, pp. 257-301, notes pp. 482-509.

Lindemann, Margarete (1994): Die französischen Wörterbücher von den Anfängen bis 1600. Entstehung und typologische Beschreibung. Tübingen: Niemeyer.

O Mathúna, Seán P. (1986): William Bathe, S.J., 1564-1614. A Pioneer in Linguistics. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Pausch, Oskar (1972): Das älteste italienisch-deutsche Sprachbuch. Eine Überlieferung aus dem Jahre 1424 nach Georg von Nürnberg. Wien: Hermann Böhlau (Österreichische Akademie der Wissenschaften).

Verdeyen, R. (1925-1935): Colloquia Et Dictionariolum Septem Linguarum. Gedrukt door Fickaert Te Antwerpen In 1616 Op Nieuw Uitgegeven Door Prof. Dr. [...]. I. Antwerpen/s'Gravenhage: Nederlandsche Boekhandel/M. Nijhoff 1926; II. Id. 1925; III. Antwerpen: Solvijnstraat, 70, 1935. Vereeniging Der Antwerpsche Bibliophilen, Uitgave Nr. 39, 40, 42.

Werner Hüllen, Essen