REVIEWS

REFERENCES
Chafe, W. L. (1970). Meaning and the structure of language. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Fillmore, C. (1968). The case for case. In E. Bach & R. Harms (eds.), Universal in linguistic
theory. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.
Hinds, J. (1976). Aspects of Japanese discourse structure. Tokyo: Kaitakusha.
Minsky, M. (1975). A framework for representing knowledge. In P. Winston (ed.), The psychology
of computer vision. New York: McGraw-Hill.
Norman, D., Rumelhart, D., & and LNR Research Group (1975). Explorations in cognition. San
Francisco: Freeman.
Schank, R., & Abelson, R. (1977). Scripts, plans, and knowledge. Norwood, N.J.: Ablex.
Reviewed by PATRICIA M. CLANCY
Department of Linguistics
University of Southern California
(Received 13 November 1984) Los Angeles, CA 90089-1693

ROBERT NORTON, Communicator style: Theory, application, and measures.

Beverly Hills: Sage, 1983. Pp. 320.
Style is a topic that is frustratingly elusive and which often gets lost from sight
amongst the proverbial trees. Norton has succeeded in avoiding that by having an
agenda. As a result, even if one objects to particulars in Norton's work, he has at
least made it possible to respond in a focused, substantive way so that it is clear
where to go next.
Norton's concerns and ideas about style are rooted in ancient rhetorical theory
and modern social psychology. Within those traditions, attention in style is
warranted just insofar as it is found to have some utility in producing an effect on
others. This obviously fosters a radically different approach from what is typical
in the linguistic and literary traditions of work on style and stylistics.
From Norton's perspective, "style" pertains to any and all components of a
message which do not explicitly contribute information about the topic at hand,
but which nonetheless affect the way an audience reacts. He illustrates this with a
laboratory study of rat behavior, where it was found that the success of an
intruder's efforts to avoid fighting over territory varied with the strength and
intensity of its submission behavior: Exhibited submission behavior in this exam-
ple is "the message," the strength and intensity of the exhibition its style.
In terms of human communication, Norton considers that style (manner of
presentation) has two primary utilities. One is that it "signal[s] how literal
meaning should be taken, interpreted, filtered, or understood" (cf. the idea of
"meta-communication" articulated by Watzlawick, Beavin, & Jackson 1967).
The second utility is that people are led to form impressions of a person's
character and traits insofar as he/she regularly adopts certain styles.
Note that both of the functions of style that Norton specifies correspond with
topics in speech act theory and pragmatics. Searle's (1969:30) idea of an illocu-

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tionary act is essentially that the "illocutionary force indicator shows how the
[accompanying] proposition is to be taken." Further, what can be inferred - and
by what principles - about the beliefs, attitudes, and intentions of speakers from
their lexical choices, syntax and intonation has been an important consideration
in pragmatics and related work (e.g., Grice 1975; Bugental, Henker, & Whalen
1976; Labov & Fanshel 1977; Brown & Levinson 1978; Kartunnen & Peters
1979; Brown, Currie, & Kenworthy 1980).
However, Norton's orientations led him to draw from other sources than these.
As a result, his book does not have the theoretical richness it could have.
First, without reference to speech act theory, Norton had little basis for identi-
fying, and for the most part does not identify, the details of lexical choice,
syntax, and nonverbal presentation that "signal" the way in which the commu-
nicator intends the message to be taken. Further, if he had drawn from speech act
theory, Norton might have been led to consider whether the meaning of such
"signals is idiosyncratic, conventional within speech communities, context-spe-
cific, or universal. And finally, by disregarding speech act theory, Norton over-
looked criticisms that have a direct bearing on his own work, to the effect that
utterance form, content, and delivery alone do not reliably indicate the intentions
of a communicator regarding his/her message (e.g., Edmondson 1981: 20-30;
Green & Morgan 1981).
Second, in the absence of an explicit inferential procedure regarding the per-
sonal attributes of communicators such as he might have drawn from work in
pragmatics, Norton relies (tacitly) on a quasi-associationistic learning theory to
ground the idea that the regular adoption of certain styles fosters impressions of
one's character and traits. This prompts us to ask, but Norton does not resolve,
what in particular has to be regularly adopted, how regularly, and over what
period of time to form such impressions. Furthermore, he would be hard-pressed
to explain how we are (sometimes) able to form substantial impressions of others
in the course of a brief exchange on a single occasion.
But Norton might object that such considerations, though relevant, obscure
what he did accomplish, and are premature - that his book represents empirical
groundwork about what people who have a specific style actually do to exhibit it,
and that this precedes such theoretical concerns. Let us see.
Norton focuses on a set of specific, personal styles (dominant, open, relaxed,
dramatic, contentious, friendly, attentive, animated, and impression-leaving).
Most of the book reports experimental studies aimed at isolating the interpersonal
attitudes and communicative intentions with which people identify who (self-
reportedly) have that style. This is done by subjecting to factor analysis and other
statistical procedures respondents' degrees of endorsement of each of numerous
expressed attitudes and intentions that were stipulated by Norton as being (poten-
tially) relevant.
For the most part, Norton has his respondents focus on the substance of what

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they would intend to "signal" others. When the specifics of how they would
express themselves are considered, it is in isolation and out of context. Norton's
data are thus not very informative about what details of lexical choice, syntax,
and oral presentation, and in what relation to each other and the context, are
utilized by individuals who consider that they exhibit the style in question. For
example, the "open style" was found to be exhibited largely by "openly show-
ling] my disagreement with people," "tell[ing] people when I really do not like
them," "hav[ing] no trouble expressing strong negative feelings to people," and
so on. The "attentive style" was (statistically weakly) distinguished by "en-
couraging the other person to continue talking by frequently smiling," "fre-
quently nodding," "leaning toward the person," looking at him or her," "fre-
quently relating similar experiences during the conversation," and so on.
These questionnaire items are unsatisfying. They presuppose that any interper-
sonal attitude or communicative intention translates neatly into lexical choices,
syntactic forms, and nonverbal accompaniments that would consistently be em-
ployed in exhibiting, and be perceived to exhibit, the relevant personal style. If
that were not so, then it would be unclear what Norton's experiments are about.
Of course, that presupposition is very much in doubt. Linguists, sociolin-
guists, and philosophers over the last thirty years have collectively revealed the
great complexity of the relationship between specific combinations of lexical,
syntactic, nonverbal, and contextual elements and received interpretations. At
minimum, this creates an imperative to replicate and expand Norton's empirical
studies to take into account the substantive materials available in speech act
theory and pragmatics. Without that, the book's value is largely heuristic: It
indicates what the right starting point would be and provides us with research
tactics that in studies of personal style are innovative and potentially fruitful.

REFERENCES
Brown, G., Currie, K. L., & Kenworthy, J. (1980). Questions of intonation. London: Croom Helm.
Brown, P., & Levinson, S. (1978). Universals in language usage: Politeness phenomena. In E.
Goody (ed.), Questions and politeness: Strategies in social interaction. Cambridge University
Press. 56-310.
Bugental, D. E., Henker, B., & Whalen, C. K. (1976). Attributional antecedents of verbal and vocal
assertiveness Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 34:405-11.
Edmondson, W. (1981). Spoken discourse: A model for analysis. London: Longman.
Green, G. M., & Morgan, J. L. (1981). Pragmatics, grammar, and discourse. In P. Cole (ed.),
Radical pragmatics. New York: Academic. 167-81.
Grice, H. P. (1975). Logic and conversation. In P. Cole& J. L. Morgan (eds)., Syntax and semantics
3: Speech acts. New York: Academic. 41-58.
Kartunnen, L., & Peters, S. (1979). Conventional implicature. In C.-Y. Oh & D. A. Dinneen (eds.),
Syntax and semantics II: Presupposition. New York: Academic. 1-56.
Labov, W., & Fanshel, D. (1977). Therapeutic discourse. New York: Academic.
Searle, J. R. (1969). Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge University
Press.

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Watzlawick, P., Beavin, J., & Jackson, D. (1967). Pragmatics of human communication: A study of
interactional patterns, pathologies, and paradoxes. New York: Norton.

Reviewed by ROBERT E. SANDERS

Department of Communication
SUNY-Albany
(Received 27 November 1984) Albany, NY 12222

LANGUAGE VARIETIES AND SITUATIONS

ELLEN WOOLFORD AND WILLIAM WASHABAUGH (eds.), The social context of

creolization. Ann Arbor: Karoma, 1983. Pp xi + 149.
For the scholar whose diet has been the Atlantic pidgins and Creoles, this collec-
tion edited by Woolford and Washabaugh provides an informative digest on
Pacific varieties and explores some already familiar themes in the general liter-
ature of pidgins and Creoles. The volume includes three papers treating Pacific
cases (Clark, Muhlhausler, and Dutton), two treating Atlantic varieties (Wash-
abaugh & Greenfield, Ferraz), and one (Poleme) treating Bantu-based varieties
with some commentary on the case of Romance. The collection suffers from the
compression that the authors seem to have been forced to effect to keep the book
to a manageable size, but despite this, the overall impression is one of competent
precis. It is difficult though, to prevent oneself from feeling that some of the
jumps in thought and questionable logic of early Creole studies are present.
Woolford's introduction provides a tight summary of the main arguments of
the papers. She sees the issues that they address as the social conditions in which
a pidgin either becomes extinct, persists as a pidgin, or becomes a Creole. Within
its apparent simplicity, it embeds a number of important thoughts. For instance,
the likelihood that the correlation between native speakers and creolization may
be incidental cannot be ignored given the curious contemporary status and nature
of Tok Pisin. Woolford is aware of the shaky justification for pidgins and Creoles
as linguistic types and recognises that the processes that lead to their formation
would better be examined as general linguistic processes (e.g., simplification,
mixing, elaboration) rather than as particular to the languages classified as true
pidgins and Creoles. For all her astuteness though, she does not escape the
misleading proposition of Washabaugh and Greenfield in their comparison of the
outcome of plantation encounters in the Eastern Mediterranean with those of the
Portuguese Atlantic islands (see below).
Clark's paper on the social contexts of early Pacific pidgins (pre-1880) is
essentially documentary. He seeks to prove no theory about the pidgins and
related speech varieties; instead, in neutral phrasing, he presents the several
settings in which these varieties would have come into existence as well as the
circumstances that would have curtailed or favoured their use. His presentation
whets the appetite for information on the transmission of varieties from one point

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