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Dieter Wunderlich, Foundations of linguistics.

(Cambridge Studies in Linguistics, 22)
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979.
Pp. Xvi+360.

Geoffrey Sampson

Journal of Linguistics / Volume 16 / Issue 01 / March 1980, pp 166 - 168

DOI: 10.1017/S0022226700006484, Published online: 28 November 2008

Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0022226700006484

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Geoffrey Sampson (1980). Journal of Linguistics, 16, pp 166-168 doi:10.1017/
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 SHORTER NOTICES
As for the other articles, Clements' is a careful and detailed attempt to show that certain rules of tone
sandhi in Ewe are sensitive to left-branching configurations in syntactic surface structure, in that they
will not apply to strings of the form • • • [ [ • • • . Lehiste and Ivic's contribution is in a sense the most
disappointing one in the collection: it is perhaps just because the phenomenon they investigate, the
interaction between word-accent and sentence intonation, is in itself so interesting and just because one
is aware how much work the authors have put into their investigations over the years, that one gets the
feeling that they could have said so much more than they have said. This feeling is due mainly to the
atheoretical approach of the paper. The discussion is confined for the most part to a mere description of
fundamental frequency patterns (presented in a number of spectrograms), and no attempt is made to
incorporate these observations into a theory of how tonal and intonational patterns should be represented
grammatically and at what level their interaction should be stated. There is a whole area of grammar
waiting to be explored here. Hombert's paper describes an attempt to do for tone systems what
Liljencrants and Lindbolm (1972) did for vowel systems, that is, to devise a model which on the basis of a
specification of the phonetic properties of different types of tone (static, rising and falling tones of various
levels) will generate predictions about the tone systems most likely to occur in languages. Despite the
considerably greater difficulty of dealing with tones than of dealing with vowels, the enterprise has
produced promising results. The last article in the collection appears somewhat under false pretences. It
claims to be a comparison of English intonation and certain Navajo particles as means of expressing focus
and presupposition. In fact, the English intonation enters in only because it offers a convenient way of
translating the nuances of meaning expressed syntactically in Navajo by means of particles. The real aim
of the article is to discuss Chomsky's (1969) theory of focus and presupposition from a semantic point of

REFERENCES
Chomsky, N. A. (1969). Deep structure, and semantic interpretation. Reproduced by Indiana Univer-
sity Linguistics Club.
Liljencrants, J. &Lindblom, B. E. F. (1972). Numerical simulation of vowel quality systems: the role of
perceptual contrast. Lg 48. 839-862.
Reviewed by ANDREW CROMPTON,
(Received 27 February 1979) University of Nottingham.

Dieter Wunderlich, Foundations of linguistics. (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics, 22) Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1979. Pp. xvi+360.

This is a very wide-ranging discussion of diverse problems about the nature of linguistic research,
originally published in German in 1974; it has been (well) translated by Roger Lass for the C.U.P.
edition. Subjects covered include the relationships between sciences and their social setting; the nature
of argument and of scientific explanation; philosophical logic; the notions 'grammar' and 'grammatical';
the concept of'meaning', and the relations between semantics and pragmatics; the relation of theories to
data in linguistics, and the essential properties of the most widely accepted linguistic theories; relation-
ships between idiolects, dialects, and languages. These are only the chief themes of Wunderlich's book,
and he makes passing comments on an almost endlessly diverse range of topics in the general areas
indicated.
It is not wholly clear what class of readership the book is aimed at. The breadth of Wunderlich's
coverage, and the fact that in many cases he outlines rather well-known approaches to particular issues
without taking a clear stand either for or against the views he presents, suggests that the book may have
been planned as an introduction for students. The use of asterisks to mark particularly difficult sections
seems to confirm this. However, C.U.P. have published it as a scholarly monograph rather than in their
textbook series, and the tone of the writing would make it difficult to use with students. Wunderlich
himself says in his Foreword that 'many sections of this book are rather like conversations with myself,
and that gives a good idea of the flavour: diffuse, tentative, lacking the systematic structuring and the
conciseness that help the student to find his way in a new intellectual realm.
0022-2267/80/0016-0019S00.35 © 1980 Cambridge University Press

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 JOURNAL OF LINGUISTICS
The subjects Wunderlich deals with are all extremely abstract. To my mind a book about very abstract
issues, if it is to be readable and achieve anything worth while, ought to meet at least one and preferably
both of two conditions: it should set out to argue a particular point of view, perhaps a surprising or
unfashionable view, and should be organized so as to make it clear at each point how the passage one is
currently reading fits in to the overall structure of argument; and it should make its abstractions
digestible by relating them continually to clear, concrete examples or at least to vivid metaphors.
Unfortunately, Wunderlich's book lacks both these virtues. There is no one thesis which the book as a
whole is designed to establish; Wunderlich's conversations with himself are discursive chats rather than
components of a sustained argument. Indeed, even the individual passages aim in many cases to survey
the views that have been put forward on a given topic rather than to support a particular view, and it is
sometimes quite unclear why Wunderlich chooses to take up the topics he does rather than others that he
might have included. Furthermore, there is very little in the way of concrete exemplification or other
attempts to make the material graspable; and when Wunderlich does appeal to examples, often he simply
mentions some phenomenon and leaves it as an exercise for the reader to work out how this counts as an
instance of the general point being made.
More worrying still, these briefly quoted instances sometimes begin to look distinctly vulnerable when
one tries to spell out their relevance to Wunderlich's discussion. Thus, consider thefirstpassage in which
Wunderlich descends from the general to the particular. His §i .4 has been expounding with approval the
'sociology of knowledge' thesis that the directions in which academic research develops at any given
period will be largely determined by the material interests of the society in which the research is done.
The ongoing conduct of a science... is always the expression of specific tasks and/or expectations. We
already have part of the answer to the question 'Who has what interest in this kind of science?' when
we have discovered the sources of financial support for a particular institute.. . . Scientists can (and
should!) also determine the social tasks of their science themselves: e.g., social criticism and
enlightenment are tasks which they are presumably not encouraged to engage in, but which
nevertheless fall into their proper province. . . .
On the next page Wunderlich gets down to cases:
The investigation of foreign languages (beyond Europe and the Near East) that has developed since
the seventeenth century was, among other things, necessary for colonialism and missionary work. The
present-day relevance of this is apparent if we think of the orientalist establishments in Britain and
France,. . . [further examples omitted].
It can certainly be agreed that material interests are one class of factors that help to shape programmes
of academic research. But Wunderlich, like the sociologists of knowledge, wants to attribute to the
material motive a more crucial role than this suggests; and the example I have quoted scarcely supports
him. In context his brief remark about 'orientalist establishments' can only be understood as suggesting
that Oriental scholarship in Britain and France has been funded for its use as a tool to help extend or
maintain colonial rule, and that the scholars involved have been encouraged to ignore the political
implications of their work but ought not to do so. (How 'missionary work' fits in is unclear; missionizing
is, at least superficially, as disinterested an activity as pure academic research for its own sake, but
perhaps Wunderlich is among those who see the missionaries' job as having been to soften up the ground
for the exploitative traders and governors who were to follow them.)
I know nothing of the French case, but in the case of Britain Wunderlich's suggestion is quite
misleading. The term 'orientalist establishment' here applies, if it applies to anything, to the School of
Oriental Studies (now Oriental and African Studies) of the University of London. The School opened on
a shoestring in 1917, when the British Empire was manifestly in its 'lame duck' period and the process
had already been initiated which was to lead to Indian independence thirty years later. Both before and
after that date, British government and commercial interests were extremely reluctant to endow Oriental
study even of the practical, vernacular-language kind; as Major C. M. Watson, one of the prime movers
of the scheme which led to the creation of S.O.A.S., wrote in 1887, 'Although England has greater
interests in the East than any other European country, y e t . . . she is the most behindhand in encouraging
the study of modern Oriental languages.' The establishment of chairs of Sanskrit at the ancient
universities in the late nineteenth century was a response not to our Imperial situation but to the purely
academic development of Indo-European linguistics, pioneered in Germany (which had no Eastern
empire).

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 SHORTER NOTICES

The fact is that, though material motives play some part in influencing academic life, they are only one
class of factors and often not the most important. The purely intellectual pleasure of exploring new and
rich structures of ideas is itself a powerful motive, and one which often succeeds in attracting a share of a
society's resources in competition rather than collaboration with material motives.
If Wunderlich is sometimes irresponsible with his examples he is no more reliable in his theoretical
discussions. One passage that brought me up with a jolt was his §8.1, dealing with the initial
'assumptions', as Wunderlich calls them, that Chomsky makes on p. 13 of Syntactic structures. Of
Chomsky's sentence 'The grammar of L will . . . be a device that generates all of the grammatical
sequences of L and none of the ungrammatical ones', Wunderlich says that it 'appears to be circular'. But
it is no such thing, since in its context Chomsky's remark must be understood not as an assumption but as
a definition. Having defined a 'language' as a class of word-sequences, Chomsky is suggesting that it will
then be natural to define the term 'grammar', previously taken vaguely to mean a description of a
language, as meaning specifically a definition of the class of word-sequences constituting a language, and
to define 'grammatical', said of a word-sequence, as meaning 'belonging to' this class.
It may be inappropriate to define a language as a class of word-sequences in the first place, of course.
Scholars such as Schleicher, Saussure, and Hockett have suggested that speakers extrapolate from heard
sentences to novel ones creatively, so that it is meaningless to divide the class of as-yet-unused
word-sequences into 'grammatical' and 'ungrammatical' subsets. But although Chomsky's definition of
a language as a class of word-sequences embodies an assumption which may be false, one cannot
reasonably quarrel with Chomsky's definition, as Wunderlich does in a passage earlier in the same
section, by arguing that a 'language' might alternatively be 'the class of means of communication
controlled in common by a group', or 'a special class of rules of social behaviour', etc. The reality of these
aspects of the phenomenon called 'language' (unlike the correctness of the view attributed above to
Schleicher and others) is quite compatible with the view that a language is, among other things, a
particular class of word-sequences, and Chomsky's definition represents merely a decision to use the
ordinary word 'language', rather than some neologism, in this special sense within his own writings, since
he happens not to be concerned with other aspects of the phenomenon as a whole.
The two passages of Wunderlich's book which I have criticized here are isolated ones which might be
wrong without their wrongness necessarily undermining his book as a whole. In a work of such
diffuseness one can do no more than pick on individual points for comment. Many of Wunderlich's
remarks are undoubtedly correct; at the same time, often they are not at all original. Cambridge
University Press is to be commended for taking the trouble to commission a translation of a foreign book
on linguistics, and it is to be hoped that more such ventures will make it easier for British readers to find
out what their colleagues on the Continent are doing. This particular choice, however, turns out to be a
disappointing one.
Reviewed by GEOFFREY SAMPSON,
Department of Linguistics,
(Received 4 June 1979) University of Lancaster.

Alphonse Juilland. In defense of structuralism: transformational and structural morphology: about two
rival approaches to the Rumanian verb system. (Stanford French and Italian studies 5.) Saratoga, Calif.:
Anma Libri, 1978. Pp. vi+77.

The main title is the second, and the blurb for the series announces an exploration of'the descriptive and
explanatory powers of the structural and transformational models in morphology'. In fact Juilland is
replying to a generativist critique, by Ruhlen (1974), of certain aspects of an earlier account of Rumanian
(Juilland & Edwards, 1971), though trying to draw wider lessons from it.
The last and most general sections raise familiar issues, such as that of rules and exceptions. Like other
Romance languages, Rumanian has a morphologically conditioned palatalization, which forms a subsi-
diary marker of certain inflections. Ruhlen gave a general rule, with the usual talk about 'explanation';
morphemes which do not palatalize must then be marked as exceptional. Juilland prefers to mark those
which do alternate, leaving the rest as normal. Readers of the Journal an reconstruct this argument by
themselves.
0022-2267/80/0016-0020800.35 © 1980 Cambridge University Press

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