260 REVIEWS

use', in the case of `vividness', and take into consideration the learners'
individual histories, like in `eruptive' transfer, and the psychological
dimension of the language learner and user.
In sum, this volume contains a wide range of perspectives and a varied
selection of ®ndings in the ®eld of trilingual acquisition and use, and may thus
o€er a very informative panorama to all those interested in this new area, as
well as open suggestive questions for researchers in multilingual processing
and the psycholinguistic aspects of language acquisition. It also constitutes a
valuable contribution to the ®eld of language transfer.
(Received August 2002)
Reviewed by Carmen MunÄoz
University of Barcelona, Spain

REFERENCES
Kellerman, E. 1983. `Now you see it, now you don't' in S. Gass and L. Selinker (eds): Language
Transfer in Language Learning. Rowley, MA: Newbury House, pp. 112±34.
Williams, S. and B. Hammarberg. 1998. `Language switches in L3 production: Implications for a
polyglot speaking model.' Applied Linguistics 19: 295±333.

John E. Joseph, Nigel Love, and Talbot J. Taylor: LANDMARKS IN

LINGUISTIC THOUGHTS II: THE WESTERN TRADITION IN THE
TWENTIETH CENTURY. Routledge, 2001.

Landmarks in Linguistic Thought II is the second in the Routledge History of

Linguistic Thought series. As clearly stated at the very beginning of the
authors' introduction, `This book presents twentieth-century linguistic
thought as a continuation of the ideas and arguments that have made up
the warp and weft of the Western tradition in linguistic thought since its
beginnings in Classical Greece' (p. vii). For them, linguistic thought is not `a
matter of progress towards the theories that have now attained the status of
academic standards' (p. vii). As a result, the authors in this volume drop a
`progressivist' approach to linguistic thought in favour of a perspective that is
at once `continuist' and `inclusive': `continuist' in that twentieth-century
linguistic thought has continuously centred around `the same themes,
questions, issues, concepts and arguments' (p. vii), `inclusive' in that not
only linguistic professionals (Chomsky, Firth, Harris, Jakobson, Labov), but
also people from other walks of life, including anthropologists (Sapir), critical
theorists (Derrida), philosophers (Austin, Wittgenstein), psychologists (Brun-
ner, Skinner), sociologists (Go€man), novelists (Orwell), and even ®re
insurance engineers (Whorf), have all contributed to the development of
 REVIEWS 261

modern linguistics. This book contains 15 chapters, each discussing a

landmark extract within its relevant cultural and social contexts.
The authors open the ®rst chapter with the impact of Franz Boas (1858±1942)
on Edward Sapir (1884±1939) before discussing the latter's views on language,
culture, and personality. As the authors point out, Sapir rejected the reduction
of human behaviour to any simple formulaic analysis, claiming that language is
a powerful tool in moulding societies and cultures at the same time as playing
the `role as producer and product of individual psychology and personality'
(p. 16). Of course, one should bear in mind that it is painfully obvious that
Sapir's views are not without problems. For one thing, `he never managed to
®nd a satisfactory framework for scienti®c inquiry in his nexus of universal,
culture-speci®c and individualistic psychological perspectives' (p. 13); for
another, he never successfully resolved the problems and contradictions
present in his views (p. 14). And it was Benjamins Lee Whorf (1897±1941)
who enriched his teacher's ideas and developed the Whorf hypothesis, or Sapir±
Whorf hypothesis as it is sometimes called, with the view that `how we think is
moulded, if not determined by the language we speak' (p. 44). By the way, it
was Wilhelm von Humboldt who ®rst posed the Whorf hypothesis in its modern
form (Hill 1988: 14). Just as pointed out by the authors in Chapter 4, Whorf's
professional experience contributed to the development of this hypothesis that
resulted in years of heated debates focusing mainly on two sub-hypotheses,
namely, the linguistic determinism hypothesis and the linguistic relativity
hypothesis. Since linguistic determinism has su€ered heavy criticism (pp. 51±5)
and even ultimately discarded as untenable, more and more interest and
attention has been directed to the relativity principle.
In Chapter 2, the authors deal with `Jakobson and structuralism'. According
to Frantisek Galan (cited in Qian 1998: 134), it was Roman Jakobson (1896±
1982) who ®rst used the term `structuralism'. The authors imply that,
Jakobson and Saussure are, as far as their views on language are concerned,
more divergent than convergent, convergent in that both of them conceive
languages as systems of signs with distinctive features, divergent in that
Jakobson criticizes Saussure's claim that language is not substance but form,
arguing for the inseparableness between form and substance (pp. 22±3).
Moreover, Jakobson ®nds it hard to accept Saussure's rigid dichotomy of
diachrony and synchrony because for him, `the functional development of
language over time was the key to understanding its present shape' (p. 25).
And the correspondences between Jakobson and N. S. Trubetzkoy (cf.
Trubetzkoy 2001) provided Saussure's `radically arbitrary structuralism' with
a new functional perspective. And it is worth pointing out that Jakobson's
in¯uence on the development of linguistic thought can ®nd expression from
the innate universal grammar advocated by Noam Chomsky and Optimality
Theory proposed by Alan Prince and Paul Smolensky in 1991 (cf. pp. 26±7).
However, `the structuralism that was based on Saussure's concept of the
linguistic sign' (p. 190) later came under heavy attack by Jacques Derrida
(Chapter 14), who adopted a philosophical approach called `deconstruction'
262 REVIEWS

and showed, among others, that Saussure's distinction of signi®er and

signi®ed `is ultimately not a distinction at all' (p. 197).
Chapter 3 tackles `Orwell on language and politics'. With a serious concern
over the potential manipulation of language in controlling people's thoughts
without their knowledge, George Orwell (1903±50), the pen name of Eric
Arthur Blair, asserts that `language is not a ``natural growth'' but an
institution we control' (p. 42) and that `The power of language to promote
clear thinking and combat tyranny, . . . is inherent to the language of the working
classes' (p. 39; italics original).
Chapter 5 is about `Firth on language and context'. Acknowledged as the
founder of the `London School' of linguistics, John Rupert Firth (1890±1960)
argued against `the idea that langue rather than parole constitutes the linguist's
object of study' (p. 60), claiming that any sentence, which is an abstraction
and which does not have any meaning as such, must be put in speci®c
`contexts of situation' so as to expound what it means (p. 60). According to
the authors, however, Firth failed to provide `a means of ascertaining what
abstractions an utterance is an utterance of' (p. 69). In fact, his theoretical
programme was ambiguous in that he did not resolve `the tension between his
respect for words as ®xed, institutionalized objects and the dictum that every
word when used in a new context is a new word' (p. 71). And this gap was
later bridged by Roy Harris (Chapter 14), who `elaborated a comprehensive
linguistic philosophy capable in principle of illuminating all aspects of our
situation vis-aÁ-vis language' (p. 218).
Chapter 6 discusses `Wittgenstein on grammatical investigation'. Through
the adoption of a unique rhetorical method typically depending on the
construction of language games, Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889±1951) presented
his distinctive views about languages, demonstrating that grammatical
confusions and prejudices turn out to be the source of philosophical problems
(p. 77). In Chapter 7, the authors deal with `Austin on language as action'.
The tenet of John Langshaw Austin (1911±60), `the founding father of speech
act theory' (Cooren 2000: 18), can be narrowed down to the simple but
insightful statement that `to say anything is to do something' (p. 100; italics
original). In this chapter, the authors re-examine Austin's philosophical
elaboration on the two English words real and true, concentrating on the
distinction between constatives and performatives, and the distinction of
illocutionary acts with locutionary acts and perlocutionary acts. This chapter
concludes with a discussion of Austin's legacy and missing dimensions from
speech act theory. By the way, it was John Searle, his Oxford student, who
advanced `the most thorough and recognized systematization of this theory of
language' (Cooren 2000: 18).
Chapter 8 covers `Skinner on verbal behaviour'. Reading this chapter, one
cannot help feeling for Burrhus Frederic Skinner (1904±90), as Chomsky's
powerfully negative review (Chomsky 1959) of Skinner's book Verbal
Behavior, published in 1957, turned out to be a misfortune, if not a disaster,
to the latter. Chomsky's review contributed to a small readership of this book,
 REVIEWS 263

and consequently, many people knew about this book through Chomsky's
review instead of through reading it by themselves. Ironically, those people
who did not read the book at all could `tell you in detail about its denial of any
possibility of human linguistic creativity' (p. 120) though it was actually the
very task of this book. As a result, Skinner, `a failed novelist turned
experimental psychologist' (p. 109) was `worse than the forgotten man of
the twentieth-century study of language': he became `its archetypal villain
and loser' (p. 120). Looking back, however, one may ®nd some of Chomsky's
criticisms were simply mis®res or not always `levelled with deadly accuracy'
(p. 116), and some of the topics (e.g. child language acquisition) Chomsky
raised are what `Skinner in fact never broached' (p. 117). Moreover, there are
some areas that the two men actually shared with each other (p. 119).
In point of fact, even Noam Chomsky himself (Chapter 9), who launched a
revolution in our perception of language with his widely in¯uential assertion
that `some of the most general structural properties of language are
biologically determined' (p. 139), also encountered objections, and one of
them came from Jerome Bruner. As discussed in Chapter 12, Bruner, `one of
the founders of cognitive psychology' (p. 172), adopted `the empirical
methods of developmental psychology' (p. 175), showing that Chomsky's
linguistic nativism (cf. pp. 172±5) based largely on `theoretical reasoning'
(p. 175) did not hold much water. For Bruner, `the action patterns of
formatted interactions serve as developmental precursors for the child's
acquisition of the verbal patterns of language' (p. 181). Unfortunately,
however, Bruner later compromised with Chomsky, acknowledging `the
force of the nativist argument for innate features of grammatical knowledge'
(p. 182), which was rejected by Michael Tomasello, an American develop-
mental psychologist (pp. 182±6).
In Chapter 10, the authors introduce William Labov's quantitative socio-
linguistics. Subscribing to the idea of regarding `heterogeneity as an inherent
property of linguistic rules and system' (p. 143), Labov advocated the practice
of constructing and exploring linguistic theories by means of doing ®eldwork
and collecting naturally occurring speech at the same time of stressing
`introspective judgements' (p. 144). Labov's success lies in his scienti®c
methods plus modern aids in dealing with linguistic variability.
In Chapter 11, the authors discuss the sociologist Ervin Go€man's studies of
talk. According to the authors, throughout his life, Go€man tried to ®nd
answers to the following question: Since language is inherently imperfect and
ambiguous, how is it possible for people to communicate with one another
verbally successfully in normal circumstances? For Go€man, `system
constraints', `ritual constraints', presuppositions and frames, among others,
all count in his endeavour to construct `a theory of communicational
interaction' (p. 158), `a theory not only of conversational structure but also
of the structure of the communicating self' (p. 166). Of course, one should not
overlook the fact that in his socio-interactional work, Go€man relied heavily
on the notion of face, a concept `®rst introduced by the Chinese
264 REVIEWS

anthropologist Hu in 1944' (Scollon and Scollon 1995: 34). One may not
agree with Go€man's belief `that talk is an ``orderly'' or structured sort of
behaviour in which a working agreement of understanding of understanding
is a regular occurrence' (p. 158). Recent work (e.g. Thornborrow 2002) has
con®rmed that talk is a very complicated activity in which various factors play
a part, such as power or social distance caused by age, sex, or other status
considerations, and participants have to adjust themselves to the talk they are
engaged in from time to time to ensure successful interaction; in other words,
talk is a dynamic process, the structure of which is not, if not never, ®xed.
Reading this chapter is reminiscent of relevance theory advocated by
Sperber and Wilson (1995; cf. Xie forthcoming) in that both theories seem to
have given top priority to cognitive and psychological aspects of human
interaction and that both attach much importance, among others, to the
notion of `encyclopedic information' in reaching a common ground in
communication. This statement may encounter immediate retorts from
those (e.g. Mey and Talbot 1988; O'Neill 1988±89) who castigated the
inattention of relevance theory to the social aspects of communication.
However, recent studies (e.g. Jary 1998) have shown that relevance theory
does accommodate a social dimension. The ®nal chapter of this volume,
Chapter 15, is a discussion of the ape-language, which remains a topic of
concern and controversy. This book ends with helpful suggestions for further
reading, a bibliography and an index.
To sum up, this book serves as, in a sense, a miniature of the progress in
twentieth-century linguistic thought in the Western tradition. Many of the
central, con¯icting and in¯uential linguistic ideas can be found in this volume.
The authors' presentation is clear and reader-friendly. This reasonably fair,
critical overview should be welcomed by anyone interested in language.
However, one may have some small reservations as follows. The ®rst one is
related to the selection of key thinkers to be included in the present volume
characterized by `extended commentary on key passages from key writers'
(p. ix). It appears neither a good nor wise idea to question why the authors
have included in this volume these ®fteen `key thinkers' ONLY but no others
to represent the vicissitudes of twentieth-century linguistic thought in the
Western tradition. One reason given by the authors is that of space limitations
(p. ix). Another reason, in my view, may be that it seems to be no easy matter
to de®ne what `key thinkers' are and to decide on what kind of thinker can be
grouped into this very category of `key thinkers'. Further, di€erent scholars
may have in mind their own `key thinkers' when asked to produce a volume
such as the present one. As a result, one may wonder why the authors did not
devote a whole chapter to Leonard Bloom®eld (1887±1949) rather than citing
or quoting his work and his views on language now and then as practised by
the present volume (see e.g. Chapter 8). Perhaps the fact that the impact of
Saussure's thinking and that of behaviourist psychology on Bloom®eld is
evident leads the authors to decide that his ideas are merely `new threads
woven into an already-existing tapestry' (p. xi). Perhaps the authors do not
 REVIEWS 265

think highly of Bloom®eld's `streamlined approach to a knowledge of

language quite detached from culture' (p. 14). Perhaps the fact that
Bloom®eld used `mechanistic' `as a label for his own work' when other
people deemed it `as a term of abuse' (p. 108) is surprising, if not ridiculous,
for the authors. Despite all this, one should not forget that, throughout his
life, Leonard Bloom®eld strived to establish linguistics as an autonomous ®eld,
and his book Language (Bloom®eld 1933) `is considered a milestone in
linguistics, the foundation of American structuralist linguistic thinking'
(Campbell 2001: 99), or in the authors' words, `the single greatest work of
twentieth-century American linguistics' (p. 242).
To be sure, the authors ful®l their commitment to a continuist perspective
in their presentation by cross-referring various chapters in the present volume
or those concerned in the ®rst volume of this series (Harris and Taylor 1989).
However, it would be much better, or more continuist in the sense of the
authors, if some of the chapters could be put together. For instance, one may
wonder why the chapter on Whorf (Chapter 4) was not placed immediately
after that on Sapir (Chapter 1) simply because it was Whorf who developed
Sapir's ideas into the present Sapir±Whorf hypothesis, at once both
controversial and in¯uential. Further, one thing the authors did not mention
in this chapter is that these two sub-hypotheses, as insightfully claimed by
Fishman (1982), have overshadowed a third sub-hypothesis, that is, one that
`champions ethnolinguistic diversity for the bene®t of pan-human creativity,
problem solving and mutual cross-cultural acceptance'. In this sense, this
volume is not very comprehensive or up-to-date.
Despite the above-mentioned minor weaknesses, this volume provides a
good opportunity to appreciate all kinds of brilliant ideas challenging each
other for convergent goals. Actually, looking back upon the twentieth century,
`a remarkably self-contained unit of intellectual history' (p. xiii), one may ®nd
that more often than not, it is on those basic issues (e.g. What is language?
What is the relationship between language and thought?) that researchers and
scholars ®nd it hard to reach a consensus. And this is one of the concerns of the
authors of this volume looking to the twentieth-®rst century:

What the consequences will be for the development of linguistic

thought in the twenty-®rst-century is hard to predict. Will twenty-®rst-
century linguistic thought continue to focus on the same family of
related issues and topics? Will the preceding century's characteristic
questions, problems, arguments and puzzles ®nally be `solved'? Or will
they lose their charm and be forgotten, only to be replaced by others?
(p. xiii)

Let's wait and see.

(Received September 2002)
Reviewed by Chaoqun Xie
Fujian Teachers University, China
266 REVIEWS

REFERENCES
Bloomfield, L. 1933. Language. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston.
Campbell, L. 2001.`The history of linguistics' in M. Aronoff and J. Rees-Miller (eds): The Handbook
of Linguistics. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, pp. 81±104.
Chomsky, N. 1959. `Review of B. F. Skinner, Verbal Behavior.' Language 35: 26±58.
Cooren, F. 2000. The Organizing Property of Communication. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Fishman, J. A. 1982. `Whorfianism of the third kind: Ethnolinguistic diversity as a worldwide
societal asset.' Language in Society 11/1: 1±14.
Harris, R. and Taylor, T. J. 1989. Landmarks in Linguistic Thought I: The Western Tradition from
Socrates to Saussure. London: Routledge.
Hill, J. H. 1988. `Language, culture, and world view' in F. J. Newmeyer (ed.): Linguistics: The
Cambridge Survey. Volume 4: Language: The Socio-cultural Context. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, pp. 14±36.
Jary, M. 1998. `Is relevance theory asocial?' Revista Alicantina de Estudios Ingleses 11: 157±69.
Mey, J. L. and Talbot, M. 1988. `Computation and the soul.' Journal of Pragmatics 12: 743±89.
O'Neill, J. 1988±89. `Relevance and pragmatic inference.' Theoretical Linguistics 15: 241±61.
Qian, J. 1998. Jiegou Gongneng Yuyanxue: Bulage Xuepai [Structural and Functional Linguistics: The
Prague School]. Changchun: Jilin Jiaoyu Chubanshe.
Scollon, R. and Scollon, S. W. 1995. Intercultural Communication: A Discourse Approach. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Sperber, D. and Wilson, D. 1995. Relevance: Communication and Cognition 2nd edn. Oxford:
Blackwell.
Thornborrow, J. 2002. Power Talk: Language and Interaction in Institutional Discourse. Harlow,
England: Pearson Education.
Trubetzkoy, N. S. 2001. Studies in General Linguistics and Language Structure. Durham and London:
Duke University Press.
Xie, C. 2003. `Review of Eun-Ju Noh, Metarepresentation.' Studies in Language 27: 171±8.