Volume 4 (2013) Issue 1
pp. 137 - 151
pp. 137 - 151
Anne E. Baker & Kees Hengeveld (eds.): Linguistics. Malden: Wiley-Blackwell 2012 (xviii + 449 pages) (ISBN 978-0-631-23036-6).[1]
The present “introduction to the field of Linguistics” (xvii) is a revised version and English translation of Appel et al. (eds) (2002)[2] which itself incorporated parts of previous work from 1992, published by the same (and other) authors; in all, ten different authors participated in the 2002 edition. A detailed list in the preface indicates which author initially wrote which chapter of the previous editions serving as a basis for the present one. However, the editors, and not the authors, of the present 2012 volume do not state in detail which parts were effectively revised. This might imply that presentations of different topics have not been updated to current linguistic research standards since 2002 or maybe even since 1992.
This “comprehensive cross-linguistic introduction to the study of language” (cf. back-cover) is specifically intended for students of language and for use in education. It is divided into six main parts and comprises 55 figures and 8 tables on 449 pages. Central linguistic terms are presented in bold letters and are included in the index of the volume. Every section has a very concise summary which is followed by “assignments” and “test yourself” questions, as well as“acknowledgements” and references for “further reading” on the subject in question.
Part I presents a highly interesting introduction into the field of linguistics via some general remarks on “Language and the Language Faculty”. Chapter 1 “From Language to Linguistics” delimits a certain number of concepts providing a basis for the treatment of different domains of linguistics treated in the book. To start with, the authors establish a distinction between human language and “other languages and communication systems”. As opposed to the stereotyped and exclusively analogous character of the latter, human language is creative, interactive, spontaneous, context-free and of an arbitrary nature[3]. The statement that unlike the bee’s wiggle dance “Human language is completely independent of the here and now” (p. 11), however, though basically correct from a systemic point of view, is dangerous from a usage perspective considering the context sensitiveness of communication. Briefly mentioning constructed languages such as Esperanto or Interglossa as well as computer languages like Java or DOS, which are both equally fundamentally different from human speech, the authors bring up a fourth type of language, i.e. non-verbal communication. Given the multimodal character of human communication, integrating segmental, supra-segmental and non-verbal phenomena, the classification of non-verbal communication as a language of its own does not seem justified[4], as – apart from emblems – non-verbal activities do not have a context-free univocal meaning.
Contrary to animal language, constructed or computer languages, human languages are marked by specific universal properties, i.e. they are compositional (small elements are used to build larger units), contain vowels and consonants, can be used to formulate a negative, an interrogative statement or issue an order, have “words”[5] for black and white ordark.
Apart from these fundamental traits of languages, the authors establish some principles which are extremely useful and testify to a modern and usage oriented approach to language study:
- there is a difference between language use and what users know about language;
- as writing is a fairly recent invention, written language is to be considered as a secondary form of language based on its spoken form;
- and, last but not least: there are no primitive languages for a linguist as every language can basically express any content whatsoever.
At the end of this first chapter, Baker & Hengeveld outline the structure of their introduction to linguistics. As opposed to traditional treatises of linguistics, presenting its different parts from the smallest to the biggest, Linguistics adopts the perspective of language use, thus proceeding from pragmatics via syntax and semantics to morphology and phonetics. The last – sociolinguistic – Part VI of the book then studies various aspects of “Languages and Communities”.
The second chapter, “The Language User”, addresses the question “Which cognitive processes underlie the production and comprehension of language?”. Starting out from Chomsky’s opposition of competence vs. performance, Baker & Hengeveld then stress the primacy of Hymes’ communicative competence, encompassing not only knowledge of the language system, but equally knowledge of the world and “of how to use language in different situations” (p. 32). As linguistic knowledge is stored in the human brain, the authors’ insights into language dysfunctions such as aphasia, repeatedly offered throughout the complete volume, are particularly useful in order to localize specific “storage areas”and to explain encoding and decoding phenomena.
As far as language comprehension is concerned, the crucial importance of contextual features and top-down interpretation is pointed out. Logically, in accordance with results from interactional linguistics, “listeners” do “not wait until the end of the sentence before starting to analyse it” (p. 41), but instead anticipate future information.
Having highlighted the modern, usage-based approach of the present introduction (cf. supra), one has nevertheless to observe that the authors employ concepts such as sentence (p. 41) or message (p. 46), which are not in accordance with an interactional perspective. Conversation analysis for instance replaces those by the far more adequate terms ofturn-construction unit (TCU) and utterance: sentences can only serve to describe a minority of utterances (just think of non-verbal activities!) in oral face-to-face communication, and as for messages, these are producer-oriented one-way language productions[6] not appropriate for the description of the interactive construction of meaning.
Chapter 3, “Language Acquisition”, addresses basic principles of first and second language acquisition as well as bilingual development (taken up again in chapter 20). Language acquisition is neither the natural outcome of Chomsky’s innate language faculty, nor just a matter of imitation. As a compromise, Baker & Hengeveld suggest that both the language environment of the child and its (innate) faculty to formulate hypotheses about the rules of its mother tongue are crucial for language acquisition. However, even if Baker & Hengeveld stress the importance of interaction “between the child and the environment” (p. 61), the proffered compromise seems too vague to provide a convincing explanation for the acquisition of interactive methods or non-verbal activities, both being acquired by imitation rather than via an innate language faculty.
Following an interesting outline as to the order of the child’s language acquisition from the pre-linguistic to the completion stage, taking into account developmental errors, Baker & Hengeveld turn their attention to different factors that influence the acquisition of a second language: contact with the target language, motivation, attitude, aptitude, and the role of teaching and learning. Just like first language acquisition, second language learning is “a sequence of different interlanguages” (p. 71) with acquisition stages characterized by natural and generally systematic deviations from the standard structure of the language.
Part II covers the topic of “Language and Interaction”. Somewhat surprisingly, given the importance Baker & Hengeveld ascribe to language use, this part is rather short (some 40 pages only), comprising two concise chapters, the first on“Discourse”, the second on “Speech Acts”.
The chapter on discourse is devoted to different aspects, at first glance rather disparate and not situated on the same analytical level. “Interpretation and Inference” deals with the importance of context for the interpretation of utterances and the principle of conversational implicature. Baker & Hengeveld even state that “Speakers and listeners cooperate in their speaking and understanding in conversation” (p. 86). It is all the more startling that they then resort to the notion ofintention (cf. p. 85), incompatible with the interactional paradigm of cooperation.
The section on “Cooperation” – without quoting Grice’s seminal logic and conversation[7] – is limited to the presentation of the “cooperative principle”[8] as well as the underlying basic maxims of conversation, i.e. the maxims of relevance,quantity and quality. No mention is made, however, of the ethnomethodological approach of “conversational negotiation” and Schütz’s (1962) reciprocity assumptions, going far beyond Grice’s primarily speaker-oriented theory towards a truly cooperative interactional approach.
Notably, the section on “Conversations” by no means reflects the state of the art in conversation analysis in particular or in interactional linguistics in general; only six pages of a volume comprising 449 pages dealing with a topic, extensively researched for almost fifty years, seem indeed disappointing for the student of language desiring to familiarize her/himself with modern linguistics. Scant remarks on turn-taking, turn-exit devices[9] from different languages,adjacency pairs[10] and conversational openings and closings seem indeed too superficial in order to reflect the“analytic mentality for the study of conversational interaction” (cf. Schenkein 1978) which has profoundly modified insight into language use, not to forget its precursory role in establishing “corpus linguistics” as a major linguistic discipline[11]. The fact that sample dialogues, apart from (15), taken from Schegloff (2000), seem to have been invented by Baker & Hengeveld, presented moreover in a “cleaned up” version in standard orthography, supports the previous statement. The further reading section alas does not indicate any of the seminal treatises of conversation analysis (apart from Schegloff 2000).
The final section of Chapter 4, “Coherence Through Linguistic Form”, differentiates coherence, including also non-linguistic means, and cohesion, a narrower notion referring to linguistic means such as anaphoric reference via pronouns. The concepts of ellipsis and paraphrase are also briefly outlined.
Chapter 5 of Part II is devoted to “Speech Acts”. Baker & Hengeveld start out stating Austin’s epoch-making idea that speakers’ “use of sentences is a form of social action” (p. 104)[12], then delineating basic principles of Speech Act Theory such as locution, illocution, performative verbs. Following Searle, direct and indirect speech acts are mentioned as well as felicity conditions to be respected to successfully produce a speech act. If examples from various languages apart from English, e.g. from Tauya (New Guinea), Tucano (South American Indian Language) or Mandarin Chinese are definitely an asset of this section[13], the fact that the concepts of sentence, utterance and speech act are used side by side without being precisely defined is definitely a point to be criticized within an introduction to linguistics which should attach the utmost importance to establishing distinctive and clear-cut notions from the very start.
Two further sections on “Information Structure” and “Pragmatic Appropriateness” seem somewhat unexpected in a chapter on “Speech Acts” as the former is studied by the theory of “functional sentence perspective”, the latter – “the social meaning of a language form” (p. 114) – being the realm of sociolinguistics or Hymes’ ethnography of speaking. Nevertheless, Baker & Hengeveld’s statement that “Knowledge of the pragmatic appropriateness of specific language forms is part of communicative competence.” (p. 115)[14], is highly pertinent, in particular for foreign language learning, and would have deserved to be developed in more detail.
Part III covers more than 90 pages presenting five chapters on the subject “Sentences and Their Meaning”. The definition of the basic concept sentence, however, does not go beyond the differentiation of simple and complex sentences (ch. 7 and 8). Baker & Hengeveld persist in affirming that “When people talk to each other, they use sentences that have a certain structure and meaning.” (p. 121) although interactional linguistics have clearly demonstrated that sentence is not an adequate concept to describe conversational activities, which can be far below SPO-sentences for instance.[15]Notwithstanding the previous observation, the different chapters of this part present interesting and pertinent insight into what can be intuitively considered as a – “complete independent” (p. 126) – sentence.
Chapter 6 “Constituents and Word Classes” develops a sketch of basic syntactic concepts in eight sections dealing with “Constituents”, “Sentences, Clauses and Phrases”, “Phrase Types”, “Heads and Modifiers”, “Constituent Structure”, Phrases Versus Words”, “Content Words” and “Function Words”. Outlined phenomena are perfectly illustrated by using examples from a great number of different world languages such as modern Greek, Mandarin Chinese, Spanish, German, an Aboriginee dialect, Samoan, English, Turkish, Russian, Tamil, Arabic, British Sign Language etc., which makes reading very interesting and enriching. However, one has to observe that Baker & Hengeveld do not quote and critically comment on sources of concepts which are presented as unquestionable certainties. “Constituents” (ch. 6.2), for instance, retrace principles of “immediate constituents analysis” and “phrase structure grammar” which have certainly played a role in the development of generative grammar, but one would have expected an explanation of this development within an introduction to linguistics. Another reservation as to the contents of this section: tree diagrams (pp. 133 and 135) of the constituent structure of “sentences”, especially as they are not explained, seem definitely too complicated for the beginner student of linguistics.
Following the outline of “categories of constituents and words”, Chapter 7 “Simple Sentences”, again calling upon many languages to exemplify the developed phenomena, focuses on the discussion of functions “that phrases serve in the construction of sentences” (p. 143) which are treated in eight sections. Notably the valency approach is introduced and developed in a clear manner. Baker & Hengeveld then proceed to distinguish semantic and grammatical roles and their marking. Two further sections deal with “Reflexive Constructions” and “Pronominalisation”, once more commenting on differences between languages.
Chapter 8, “Complex Sentences”, concentrates “on sentences with clauses as constituents” (p. 161) and studies forms (infinitival or participle constructions, nominalisations) and functions (e.g. adverbial, predicate or relative) of embedded clauses in different languages. It also discusses the “Interaction Between Main Clause and Embedded Clause” (8.4) by briefly mentioning phenomena such as equideletion, raising or the sequence of tenses. The two final sections look at coordinated clauses and their forms.
Chapter 9 presents the issue of “Constituent Order”, “often referred to as ‘word order’” (p. 178) within clauses which “have an internal, hierarchical structure” (p. 178). At the sentence level, Baker & Hengeveld distinguish three basic types of constituent order: VSO in Fijian, SVO in English, and SOV in Turkish; the SOV-type being by far the most frequently represented order, followed by the SVO, VSO, VOS, OVS and OSV-variety. Whereas German or Dutch present mixed types – Ich esse Eis (SVO in main clause) vs. …, dass ich Eis esse (SOV in embedded clause)[16], “most languages […] have one basic, neutral constituent order in their clauses […].” (p. 181). Following a quick look at clause types in Spanish – SVO for declarative, VSO for interrogative, VO for imperative clauses (as in French) –, Baker & Hengeveld turn their attention to different aspects of clause structure: its complexity, the information status of constituents which “may override the basic constituent order” (p. 185), the constituent order within constituents marked by limited variation. Examining order in various languages, it becomes obvious that there are “word order universals. […] we have two very clear, extreme positions, that is, languages with the predicate either in initial position, or in final position.” (p. 188).
Chapter 10 “Sentence Meaning” focuses on the compositional meaning of clauses, one of the defining features of natural languages. In fact, “the meaning of a sentence is not only determined by the meaning of the individual words it contains but also by the way in which these words have been combined.” (p. 197). The authors then turn to a rather detailed presentation of “Noun Phrases” dealing first with reference (10.3), then with deixis and anaphora (10.4). Using Turkish and Samoan as examples, different types and combinations of specific vs. non-specific, definite vs. indefinite and generic vs. categorical reference are discussed. Interesting examples are presented for personal deixis which can be quite different from European languages, distinguishing in fact dual (involving two) or paucal (involving a few) from simple plural forms; a distinction can also be drawn between inclusive and exclusive or even between neutral and emotive deictic reference to persons. Whereas noun phrases refer to people and objects, “verb phrases refer to something that involves the passage of time” (p. 206), i.e. to an action, event, process or state, in short: to situations. The time of the situation is localized via the grammatical category of tense. Baker & Hengeveld judiciously differentiateabsolute and relative tense in the Indo-European language family, but point out that “some languages do not use the grammatical category of tense” (p. 209), expressing time relations by using adverbs for instance. Other languages such as Amele (Papua New Guinea) have a far richer set of verb forms, e.g. three different ones to refer to the past of the same day, yesterday, and a period before yesterday (p. 209). Following some very succinct remarks on the perfectiveand imperfective aspect, the final section examines “Situation Types”, distinguishing dynamic and static, on the one hand, and controlled vs. non-controlled situations[17], on the other, notions which are systematically grammaticalized in certain languages. These two distinctions result in four different situation types.
Part IV, “Words and Their Meaning”, comprises three main chapters dealing with the “Lexicon”, “Word Formation” and “Compounds and Idiomatic Expressions”. In Chapter 11, “Lexicon”, Baker & Hengeveld first deliver a definition of the concept word, establish a relation between word form and meaning, and distinguish content and function words. Wordsare defined by way of sound and shape on the one hand and syntax on the other hand. English lexemes require at least one vowel which is not the case in Czech for instance. As for syntax, “it should be possible to place it in different positions in a clause and […] it should freely combine with other words” (p. 220)[18]. Another syntactic condition established by Baker & Hengeveld is that words “cannot be interrupted” (ibid.) which, however, is unsustainable as a look at transcriptions of authentic conversations easily demonstrates that speakers produce pauses in the middle of words or correct one part only rather than repeating the whole lexeme. Considering the extremely hazardous subject of delivering a distinctive definition of word (cf. Engel 2004: 13 for a discussion of this point), Baker & Hengeveld’s attempt to provide one in two short paragraphs remains a vain effort. Commenting on the arbitrary nature of words and the conventional nature of their meaning, iconic sign languages being an exception to some extent, Baker & Hengeveld complete their introductory remarks by discriminating content words, representing an open extendable class (borrowing from foreign languages), and function words which constitute a closed, non-extendable class.
“The Lexicon” (ch. 11.5), defined as all the words of a language (p. 226), is not what a dictionary of the language in question captures, “but by the way these words are actually used by the members of a speech community” (p. 227). Words with interrelated, albeit different meanings, are entered into a dictionary as one lemma; semantically unrelated words, however, have too distinct lemmas. Apart from taking into account “social attitudes and sensibilities” (p. 228) and, of course, “its characteristic sound pattern” (p. 230), the lexicographer should also include “a description of all those properties of words that cannot be derived using rules” (ibid.). The section on “Dictionaries”, briefly defining corpus linguistics as the study of a collection of texts[19], sketches six types of dictionary, viz. the bilingual and the frequency dictionary, the thesaurus, as well as the concordance, retrograde and picture dictionary. The following section on“Meaning and Meaning Relations” outlines semantic concepts such as polysemy, homonymy, ambiguity, hyponymy, antonymy and synonymy, denotation and connotation. In the section “Semantic Description” Baker & Hengeveld oppose traditional dictionary paraphrases or definitions of words to an approach analyzing semantic features. Similarities or correspondences between “Words Across Languages” point to common ancestors, for instance to Indo-European roots of certain languages. Family relationships are detected by help of lists comparing common concepts, e.g. by using the Swadesh list[20].
Chapter 12 treats the subject of “Word Formation” in nine sections. Words can be internally simple (accept) or complex (accept-able), the smallest identifiable components carrying meaning being called morphemes and the discipline concerned with the study of word formation being known as morphology.
Even if adult speakers possess up to 40,000 words in their native language, the need may arise – due to new developments in all domains of society – to create new items of the lexicon. Apart from “inventing” new words orborrowing them from another language[21], these may be created on the basis of existing lexemes, calling upon two major types of vocabulary extension, i.e. derivation and composition[22]. Whereas most word classes of English are concerned by derivation processes, prepositions and conjunctions very rarely are, and function words not at all.
Inflection, contrary to derivation, does not help to expand the vocabulary, its role being to integrate lexical items into the grammatical structure of its host sentences.
In a short section on “Morphological Forms”, Baker & Hengeveld introduce a number of concepts pertaining to word formation, illustrated by examples from Turkish, Jacaltec (Mayan language from Guatemala), Bontoc (Philippines), Tamazight (Berber variety in Marocco), German, Dutch, Indonesian, DGS, Ewe, Ilocano, Sranan. A word contains lexicaland non-lexical elements, the latter, called affixes, being attached to the stem of the former by processes of affixation. There are suffixes, attached to the end of the word stem, prefixes to its beginning, infixes inside the stem of a word (e.g. in Botok); Dutch or German also have circumfixes, used for instance to form past participles such as German ge-kauf-tor Dutch ge-kook-t.
Further processes of word formation are the reduplication of words, used in English for expressive purposes (hush-hush), but for the formation of the plural in Indonesian or the progressive form in Ewe, conversion defined as “category changes without morphological marking” (p. 254) (e.g. buy / V and buy / N in English), and also suppletion in the case of the verbs sein in German or to be in English which do not have one single stem and where the forms of the members or the paradigm seem rather disparate.
Considering the “pattern of regular interconnection between the structure and the meaning of a word” (p. 255), Baker & Hengeveld recall the general principle of compositionality introduced earlier. The authors also point out the difference between derivation and inflection, which is not always easy to establish as many grammatical morphemes can be used for both.
A final section of Chapter 12 is devoted to “Morphological Differences Between Languages”. Quoting examples from Quechua and Papiamentu, a creole language from the Dutch Antilles, Baker & Hengeveld contrast morphologicallycomplex – which can be agglutinating like Turkish or fusional like Tuscarora (American Indian) – and morphologicallysimple or isolating languages. To conclude, Baker & Hengeveld very briefly comment on languages as to theirconcreteness: polysynthetic languages contain several morphemes with “concrete” meanings, as opposed to languages which have one “concrete” meaning only.
Chapter 13 treats both “Compounds and Idiomatic Expressions” which is rather surprising as phraseological research generally agrees on distinguishing polylexical[24] idiomatic expressions from monolexical lexical items in order obtain a manageable linguistic category[25]. The fact that the lexeme bottleneck is quoted within the section on idiomatic expressions is indicative of possible confusion (p. 275).
Compounds differ in internal structure from derivation, dealt with in chapter 12, in that “they only take content words as their constituent parts” (p. 266), i.e. words with their own lexical meaning. However, they serve the same purpose, viz. to “expand the vocabulary of the language in question” (ibid.). This also being the case for idiomatic expressions, Baker & Hengeveld probably treat those in the same chapter as compounds, especially as the latter are admittedly often idiomatic.
Compounds cannot be interrupted by another element, e.g. boathouse or investment banker, and – in most cases – contain a head which has a determining semantic role. Unlike English or German, however, the head is not systematically in the final position, but can be, as in Hebrew (e.g. ben-dod/son-oncle for nephew), in the initial position. It is not always possible to “predict from the combination what the overall meaning of the new word will be” (p. 268), i.e. the sense is not necessarily semantically compositional; the compound noun sand glass for instance does not designate a glass made of sand or an instrument to measure sand (as an hour glass), but sand is the material used to measure time. Specific patterns exist in order to create compounds: in English, nouns can be made up of V + N (cookbook), ADJ + N (grandfather), N + N (teacup), adjectives of V + ADJ (slipshod), N + ADJ (gluten-free) or ADJ + ADJ (blue-green). Examples from Australian Aboriginal language Kayardild or Indoeuropean Italian illustrate that fundamentally different methods of compounding may be employed. Compounds can be endocentric, i.e. “the properties of the head determine the properties of the compound as a whole” (p. 270; e.g. kitchen chair or folding chairs which are both nouns), orexocentric, i.e. “the right-hand element is [not] the head” (p. 270; cf. redskin or razorback in English, or mange-tout (a kind of pea) in French or sobre-mesa (dessert) in Spanish).
“Idiomatic expressions” (IE) are defined as “usually unpredictable in meaning and somewhat fossilised as to their syntax” (p. 280)[26]. Without discussing the concept of idiomaticity[27], vaguely characterizing idioms “as a class of their own”(p. 272), and without delivering and without proposing a classification of IE, Baker & Hengeveld then turn their attention to the “fixedness” of IE. Even if the authors state that fixedness is “a matter of degree” (p. 274), their remarks on this widely discussed subject remain too succinct and do not reflect the state of the art in the abundant discussion of formulaic language[28]. The same observation applies to the section on “The Meaning of IE”. In fact, the observation that the “degree of transparency appears to be a variable property of idioms” (p. 275), while obviously not incorrect, is not a scientific statement, as transparency hinges on far too many contextual and individual factors to be distinctively established. As to metaphors which “always contain[s] figurative language use based on comparison” (p. 275), being an important source for the creation of IE, this “definition” by no means allows for determining cases of idiomatic – polylexical – metaphor as either “figurative” or “comparison” and is precisely delimitated. Brief observations on “false friends”, common “source domains” (e.g. language of sport for debates), differences in style between IE and non-IE and proverbs do not alter the impression that Chapter 13.5 on IE does not reflect the current state of phraseological research, notably omitting to propose a scientific classification of formulaic expressions and, what is more, any insight into usage of IE in authentic contexts. Accordingly, further reading advice is extremely limited[29].
Part V is concerned with “Speech Sounds” dealing extensively with the aspects of “Speaking and Listening”, “Sound Systems and Phonological Processes” and “Syllables, Stress and Intonation”.
Chapter 14 on “Speaking and Listening – Speech Sounds” establishes a clear distinction between phonetics – “the physical process of speaking and listening as well as the physical properties of the speech signal” (p. 286) – and phonology as the study of how sounds differentiate meaning, and then offers a comprehensive and precise presentation of all pertinent aspects of phonetics. An initial section on “Speaking” proposes an explanation of how speech sounds are produced via an illustrated account of the speech organs and their functioning(s). Logically, the “speech signal” is then examined, followed by remarks on its reception by the human ear. The section on “Speech Sounds” presents basic phonetic concepts, using IPA for transcription: the production of vowels and consonants, separated into pulmonic andnon-pulmonic consonants, manner (e.g. plosives or fricatives) and place of articulation (e.g. bilabial or dental sounds) is developed, followed by the description of voiced and voiceless consonants. Vowels are classified into front, central and back vowels along the horizontal dimension, and into close, mid and open vowels along the vertical dimension; diphthongs are the combination of two vowels as in house. The concluding section on “Speech Synthesis and Speech Recognition” is too short in order to be able to explain a rather complicated technical matter.
Chapter 15 “Sound Systems and Phonological Processes” takes a look at sounds as part of the language system, i.e. from a phonological perspective. Phonemes are speech-sounds which distinguish meaning, e.g. m and b as in merryand berry in English, determined by word pairs differing in one sound only, known as minimal pairs. Different realizations of the same sound which are not meaning-distinguishing are called allophones, e.g. the pronunciation of ich (I) in standard German [iç] and in Swiss German [ix]. However, not all languages have the same phonemes, e.g. Chinese does not distinguish [l] and [r], and what is an allophone in one language can be a phoneme in another one, e.g. the Englisch phonemes [i:] as in beat and [i] as in bit are just allophones in Spanish or French. Languages also have different sound systems, i.e. the complete set of phonemes which vary between 20 and 40 distinctive sounds. English has 36, Rotokas (Papua New Guinea) has 11 only, but a great number of allophones. Whereas English has five vowels only, Danish disposes of 16 vowels for 18 consonants. In tone languages such as Chinese, the intonation of a lexeme has distinctive, phonemic functions. The chapter also comments on “Distinctive Features” (voice, nasality), “Morphophonological Processes” (assimilation, allomorphs) as well as, very briefly, on “Graphemes and Phonemes”, recalling the famous ghoti example to point out that the central principle “one sound – one symbol” (p. 316) is not applicable in English or French, or even in German.
Chapter 16 “Syllables, Stress and Intonation” retraces the principles of syllabification, i.e. “the process of grouping phonemes into syllables” (cf. p. 322) which is different from orthographic and morphological structure. Some languages allow for very complex consonant clusters, for instance Russian (vstreca, meeting), whereas others such as Bahasa Indonesian may have one consonant only in onset position. The only obligatory part of the syllable is the nucleus which contains a vowel in most languages. “Stress”, produced by a higher tone, increased volume and greater length, is usually not assigned randomly, but corresponds to specific rules. Whereas there are different stress patterns in English, the position of the stressed syllable in many other languages is fixed, e.g. the last one in French, the first one in German, with the exception of loan words from non-Germanic languages. According to Baker & Hengeveld, the antepenultimate stress, i.e. two before last, seems to be the most frequent one. A very short section on “Intonation”, without delivering a distinctive definition, tries to delimit functions and different speech acts on the basis of intonational features. “Rhythm” is formed by combining syllables, often across word boundaries. The notion of foot, a rhythmic unit consisting of at least one stressed syllables, is developed as well as various types of foot structure, e.g. trochees (stressed + unstressed) oriambs (unstressed + stressed).
Part VI, finally, certainly one of the most interesting parts of the volume, covers the subject of “Languages and Communities”, involving all levels of linguistic analysis.
In five sections, Chapter 17 looks into “Differences and Similarities between Languages”. Baker & Hengeveld point out that it is “essential to compare languages” in order “to come to a better understanding of what is a human language” (p. 338). Differences and similarities can be found on any linguistic level, but, as mentioned before, there are also certain universals. Similarities can be based on genetic relationships between languages, e.g. those belonging to the Indo-European family as between Germanic and Romance languages, or on typological analogies as between Basque, Turkish and Quechua even though these are not genetically related, but belonging to a particular type of language which select the same structural options. Finally, areal similarities can be due to intensive language contact or bilinguism as between Albanian, Romanian, Bulgarian or Greek. And, of course, similarities can simply be coincidental. More often than not, homophones having the same meaning tend to be false friends. Historical linguistics, proceeding mainly by comparative reconstruction or, more rarely, by using written sources or also place names (toponymics), tries to describe and explain the origins and characteristics of language families and their development. In particular, Baker & Hengeveld comment on (proto) Indo-European, being at the origin of most European languages, with the exception of the Finno-Ugric languages and Basque for instance.
The fact that differences between languages can be related to differences between cultures is the subject of the next section. Kinship terms – Njamal (Aboriginal Australian) for instance has two different lexemes for father’s and mother’s grandfather due to their specific roles in the family – or forms of address reflect social structure and social conventions. Citing the famous article “How to ask for a drink in Subanun”, Baker & Hengeveld recall the importance of knowing social conventions in order to communicate successfully. But not all differences between languages are due to cultural variations. “There are in fact many aspects of language structure that do not appear to be related to culture.” (p. 353) Kiwai (Papua New Guinea), for instance, apart from having a singular and plural pronoun, disposes of a dualis and even a trialis form of personal pronoun, contrary to English, French or German. But there is no trace that groups of two, three or more people play a specific role in Kiwai society.
The final section of Chapter 17 discusses the Sapir-Whorf-Hypothesis, stipulating that the respective language system determines thought, and concludes that, rather than determining the way of thinking and perceiving, language might at best influence thought. In fact, “it is today generally accepted that thought is to some extent non-verbal in nature” (p. 355); evidence is provided from cases of people suffering from severe brain damage affecting their linguistic competence, but which in no way impairs their capacity to think. What is more, speakers of different languages may well dispose of exactly the same concept but express it via a different expression – take for example the idioms from chipping come chips in English[30] and On ne peut pas faire d’omelette sans casser des œufs in French. Baker & Hengeveld thus conclude: “Language does not force people to think in certain ways, but it has an influence on our perception and interpretation of the world.” (p. 357)
Chapter 18 treats the topic of “Language Variation”. Pointing out the hazardous endeavor to precisely define the notion of language – “a language is a dialect with an army” (p. 364) –, Baker & Hengeveld state that “Variation occurs in every language” (p. 362) in order to study various aspects pertaining to language variation. They define dialects as regional varieties, cite the criteria according to the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (1968) as to the official recognition of a language variety, develop different types of variation: phonological, morphological, syntactic, lexical, semantic, pragmatic. They also elaborate social factors relating to variation such as region, socio-economic class, ethnic group, sex, age as well as the linguistic context referring to situational factors like the topic of conversation or the addressee. Varieties also carry a “social meaning” and are subject to language attitudes which can be positive or negative. What is definitely positive in Baker & Hengeveld’s treatment of language varieties: they exclude any value judgment of one variety as better than another, and underline the descriptive nature of analyses rather than a normative or prescriptive approach.
Chapter 19 comments on phenomena relating to “Language Change”. Starting out with observations on historical linguistics the authors then turn to more recent changes in different languages. Language change can be due to different factors, for instance a strong influx of immigrants who are not native speakers of the country’s language; this is the case in Hebrew which is thus quickly changing. Social groups may also be at the origin of changes. Like variation, language change can be more or less positively perceived, enjoy high prestige or not, be positively valued or not.
“Bilingualism” (Chapter 20), the last chapter of the volume, is a highly pertinent subject for linguistics as “half of the world’s population is bilingual” (p. 403)[31]. What is important, according to Baker & Hengeveld, is that bilingualismdoes not imply perfect proficiency in two languages, but the daily use of two languages. Baker & Hengeveld then distinguish different types of “bilingual communities”: two languages co-exist side by side in the same country, e.g. English and French in Canada; both languages are spoken by almost everyone, which is in the case in many African countries, or, as a 3rd type: everyone speaks language A, but part of the population speaks another language B (e.g. in the US for English and Spanish). When there is functional separation between languages, one speaks of diglossia, for instance in Haiti (French and Creole). A, so to speak, neutral third language, used by people with different mother tongues, is a lingua franca, obviously, but not only, English. When minority languages are progressively replaced by the majority language, phenomena of language shift, language loss, language erosion, language death can be observed.“Language policy”, however, can try to preserve minority languages (e.g. French dialects). Presenting different types of “Bilingual Education”, Baker & Hengeveld rightly point out that a second language does not occupy space needed by the first language because “A greater proficiency in the one language is thought in fact to lead to a greater proficiency in the other.” (p. 412)[32]. Remarks on “Interference” (e.g. Anglicisms in German) and “The Emergence of New Languages”(pidgin and creole languages), since 1500 one hundred languages have developed, conclude the volume.
In their “Preface” to Linguistics, Baker & Hengeveld announce “a broad survey of the discipline” (p. xvii) and do indeed offer a more or less complete treatment of the linguistic field of study. Unfortunately, this extremely ambitious project does not completely live up to its ambitions as some subjects, in particular the ones on “Language and Interaction” and the one on “Compounds and Idiomatic Expressions”, by no means reflect the state of the art of research in the disciplines concerned. They are thus not apt to deliver basic and adequate insights into the foundations of the themes treated. Further reading references of the chapters in question cannot counterbalance these shortcomings. Most chapters, those situated in the more “traditional” domain (phonetics / phonology, syntax, semantics), on the one hand, and in the realm of “Language and Communities”, on the other, nevertheless make very interesting reading and certainly provide valuable basic knowledge on the linguistic fields presented – even more so, as Baker & Hengeveld systematically present a great number of examples from an amazing number of different languages from all parts of the world which brilliantly illustrate the great majority of linguistic aspects treated. The presentation of the volume with a variety of figures and tables is very clear and attractive; basic terms are given in bold letters. However, Linguistics does not seem suitable for self-study as no key is provided for the assignments for further studies and in particular for the “Test Yourself” questions at the end of each chapter. An answer key should be supplied in the volume or, at least, on an Internet page. One final grievance: in anintroduction to linguistics, one would expect precise and state of the art terminology, avoiding fuzzy concepts such asword, sentence or message which are not even defined in a clear-cut manner.
In spite of the aforementioned reservations, Linguistics can definitely serve as a reference book and general survey of basic linguistic concepts in the more “structuralist” domains of the discipline. Given the numerous examples from languages of the world it definitely makes interesting reading for everyone “ who want[s] to know more about modern linguistics” (xvii).
References
Appel, Rene et al. (eds) (2002). Taal en taalwetenschap. London: Blackwell (392 pages).
Engel, Ulrich, 2004. Deutsche Grammatik – Neubearbeitung. München: iudicium.
Grice, Paul, 1975. Logic and Conversation. In: Cole, Peter/Morgan, Jerry L. (eds.): Syntax and Semantics. Vol. III: Speech Acts. New York: Academic Press, 41-58.
Schegloff, Emanuel A., 2000. Overlapping Talk and The Organization of Turn-Taking for Conversation. In: Language in Society 29/1, 1-63.
Schenkein, James N., 1978. Sketch of an Analytic Mentality for the Study of Conversational Interaction. In: id.: Studies in the Organization of Conversation Interaction. New York/San Francisco/London: Academic Press, 1-6.
Schmale, Günter, 2013. Qu’est-ce qui est préfabriqué dans la langue ? – Réflexions au sujet d’une définition élargie de la préformation langagière. In: Langages 189, 27-45.
Schütz, Alfred, 1962. Collected Papers. Volume 1. Den Haag: Nijhoff.
Reviewer:
Prof. Dr. Günter Schmale
Professor of Linguistics
Université de Lorraine – Metz
UFR Lettres et Langues
Département d’Allemand
Ile du Saulcy
57045 Metz Cd 1
France
E-mail:
gunter.schmale@univ-lorraine.fr
[1] I am indebted to Ms Lisa Spicker who was so kind as to read, correct and stylistically improve the present review article. All remaining flaws are however my own.
[2] The reviewer presumes that the volume mentioned in the references of the present review is the correct one as Baker & Hengeveld do not provide a complete bibliographical reference.
[3] One should not forget, however, the more or less highly developed formulaic nature of speech, analysed by recent studies on the prefabricated nature of speech (cf. Schmale 2013).
[4] We are not referring to sign languages obviously which frequently serve as examples within this introduction.
[5] Unfortunately, the fuzzy concept word is not replaced from the start by the precise linguistic one of lexeme.
[6] Dating back to Shannon / Weaver’s Mathematical Model of Communication from 1949.
[7] Neither included in the “further reading” section nor in the general bibliography.
[8] Consistently named “cooperation principle” by the authors (cf. p. 86).
[9] The term is not being used by Baker/Hengeveld.
[10] Including a mention of the “three step” commonly used in education. The French example “for offering and receiving something”(p. 92), however, is not a standard form: s’il vous plait (offering) and merci (receiving) are used in the East of France (probably in Belgian French) only. It seems equally incorrect to state that English does not have such a pair as here you are – thank you do obviously exist.
[11] There is no chapter on this subject in the present introduction even if Baker/Hengeveld emphasize its importance in the chapter on “Language Change”.
[12] Why not quote the title of Austin’s famous lectures, i.e. How to do things with words, which is perfectly transparent and illustrative of the underlying concept?
[13] As of the complete volume which extensively calls upon an amazing number of different world languages.
[14] A direct, though unmentioned, reference to Dell Hymes.
[15] Incidentally, German for example, counts more than 200 definitions for sentence.
[16] These are the reviewer’s examples.
[17] Simple tests are proposed to determine which is which.
[18] Strictly speaking, this condition would exclude archaic elements, surviving in idiomatic expressions only, such as mickle, muckle, haywire, potluck, from the category word.
[19] Given the importance of this paradigm corpus linguistics would have definitely deserved its own chapter within this treaty of – modern – linguistics!
[20] Named after the linguist Morris Swadesh.
[21] Particularly frequent – and criticized not only by purists – in German borrowing extensively form English.
[22] The latter are nevertheless treated in a separate chapter, together with idiomatic expressions.
[24] Schmale (2013) replaces the imprecise concept polylexical by polyfactorial, thus allowing the integration of highly formulaic routine formula into the category of prefabricated expressions.
[25] Of course, Baker & Hengeveld do not claim that both belong to the same category. Treating them under the same heading is, however, liable to create confusion.
[26] This definition is delivered in the summary at the end of the chapter only.
[27] No definition is proposed, neither from a semantic nor from a usage-based perspective. In fact, the meaning of an idiom can be non-compositional semantically speaking, e.g. Strike while the iron is hot, while being perfectly transparent – “predictable” – for the user, especially in specific contexts which deliver clues for interpretation.
[28] A term not employed by the way which seems indicative (cf. Schmale (2013)).
[29] The readers of this review might perceive our remarks on the subchapter on IE as rather virulent. Considering, however, that eight pages only are devoted to a widely researched subject (the following part on “speech sounds” covers 53 pages), it is permitted to ask if the authors should not have renounced the presentation of IE.
[30] Whereas German recurs to the same concept, i.e. Wo gehobelt wird, fallen Späne.
[31] Or even “multilingual” when more than two languages are involved.
[32] This insight has motivated the authors of the “Common European Framework of Reference for Languages” to attach the utmost importance to the concept of “plurilingualism”, as distinct from “multilingualism”.