Linguistic Society of America

Review
Author(s): Alice Davison
Review by: Alice Davison
Source: Language, Vol. 58, No. 1 (Mar., 1982), pp. 242-243
Published by: Linguistic Society of America
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/413554
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242 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 58, NUMBER 1 (1982)
Lexical-semantic relations: A compar-
ative survey. By MARTHA W. EVENS,
BONNIE E. LITOWITZ, JUDITH A.
MARKOWITZ, RAOULN. SMITH,and
OSWALDWERNER.(Current inquiry
into language and linguistics, 34.)
Edmonton: Linguistic Research,
1980. Pp. 267.
This book surveys theories of lexical-seman-
tic relations in the fields of anthropology,lin-
guistics, psychology, and computer science.
Althoughapproximately270 articlesand books
are mentioned or briefly summarized,the au-
thors deal primarilywith relationalmodels pre-
sented in the workof Werner,Frake,and Casa-
grande & Hale (anthropology); Apresjan,
Mel'cuk & Zolkovsky, Fillmore, Chafe, and
McCawley(linguistics);Collins& Quillian,Ru-
melhart,Lindsay& Norman,Kintsch,and Rie-
gel (psychology); and Raphael, Simmons, and
Shank(computerscience).
The introductionoffers briefsketches of con-
cepts centralto the study of semanticsand lex-
ical relations: paradigmatic/syntagmatic rela-
tions, behaviorism/mentalism, competence/
performance,memory,inference,intension/ex-
tension, fuzzy sets, semantic primes, and cir-
cularity (especially Winograd'sviews). Chap.
I brieflydescribessome relationalmodelsin the
four fields.
The bulk of the book, Chap. 2, is devoted to
a discussion of five 'major relations': Taxo-
nomy,Modification,Synonymy,Antonymy,and
Grading.The authors sketch the uses of each
relationin theirfourfields;definethemin terms
of three 'formalproperties'(transitivity,reflex-
ivity, and symmetry);and show their connec-
tions with other relations. The discussion of
each relation has a section dealing with theo-
retical issues: TAXONOMY-representation (in
networks or tree structures), set membership
vs. class inclusion, intension vs. extension;
MODIFICATION-type-token relations and
memory models, symbol-mapping (whether
symbols are stored once or multiply), variability
(the 'small elephant' problem, fuzzy sets,
hedges); SYNONYMY-its existence, the prob-
lem of paraphrase (the extremes represented by
Chafe and Apresyan); ANTONYMY-contrast
sets (Kay); GRADING-segmentation of the un-
derlying continuum, the quantification of grading.
Chap. 3 sketches 'other relations' (part-whole,
cause, space and location, provenience or source,
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minorlexical functions)and presents a lengthy
discussion of 'text relations' (story or text gram-
mars, e.g. Halliday & Hasan's model of rhe-
torical structures). Chap. 4 devotes a few pages
to lexical collocations (lexical functions, cate-
gories of lexical phrases, compounding) and
derivation (word formation vs. listing).
Chap. 5 ('Conclusions') discusses the inter-
relation of data, theoretical goals, and kinds of
model; the authors conclude that those theories
whose major concern is to model conceptual
processes involve fewer and deeper semantic
relations, while those which model collocations
and derivational processes involve a large num-
ber of surface lexical relations. They close with
several unanswered questions: Is there a bound-
ary between lexical and semantic relations?
What is the relation of concept and structure
and the place of collocations? Is circularity in-
evitable, or to be avoided by searching for se-
mantic primes? Are relations universal? And can
there be a theory of relations of relations (e.g.
are synonymy and antonymy independent con-
cepts, or is synonymy an aspect of taxonomy,
while antonymy is an aspect of grading)? [JAMES
GALLANT, University of California, Davis.]
Explorations in semantics and prag-
matics. By GEOFFREY N. LEECH.
(Pragmatics and beyond, 5.) Am-
sterdam: Benjamins, 1980. Pp. viii,
133. f 30.00.
Leech's brief monograph on speech acts pro-
poses that Gricean maxims and inferences based
on them, if combined with another maxim of
'Tact', can account for the illocutionary force
which sentences may have on occasions of ut-
terance, and can explain why sentences of sim-
ilar content but different form are perceived as
expressing different degrees of politeness. This
is perhaps the only detailed work to date in
which the 'pragmatic' account of speech acts
is worked out in any detail-as an alternative
to the Ross-Sadock 'performative' hypothesis,
which describes illocutionary force in terms of
syntactic and semantic structures, and makes
no predictions about politeness. L's account is
intrinsically interesting in that, up to now, the
pragmatic hypothesis has only been alluded to,
either as a straw man in arguments for the per-
formative hypothesis, or in very general terms
as the most reasonable alternative to the per-
formative hypothesis (cf. G. Gazdar, Pragmat-
ics, New York, 1979).
 BOOK NOTICES
L's basic assumptions are unexceptionable,
and widely shared: that meanings are defined
in terms of truth-conditions, that syntax is to be
expressed in terms of some variety of transfor-
mational grammar, and that language and lin-
guistic structures have a social dimension as
well as grammatical properties. Thus he makes
the useful distinction between (a) invariant pat-
terns which are expressed as linguistic rules and
(b) context-dependent phenomena which allow
variation and exceptions, and which hence
should be described as norms rather than as
rules of behavior.
It is hard to judge the success of L's proposal
as a linguistic analysis, or as an adjunct to a
theory of grammar. The exposition shows how
it COULD account for various classes of data,
many of them originally adduced as supporting
the performative hypothesis. But the arguments
justifying particular aspects of the pragmatic
hypothesis, particularly linguistic-theoretic is-
sues, are not given in sustained form; L does
not define important issues as such, or argue
them explicitly. He has taken as given a number
of arguments against the performative hypoth-
esis, so that his basic assumption is that ONLY
a pragmatic account is possible. In his own ver-
sion of one, L has adopted various existing ac-
counts, with some modifications: Halliday's
'functionalist' views on language as a medium
of social expression; Searle's taxonomy of il-
locutionary forces; various views of logicians
on performatives-as-assertions; Brown & Lev-
inson's work on negative politeness; and Sin-
clair & Coulthard's view of speech acts as
moves in social transactions. It is not made clear
how all these analyses, separately articulated
on different grounds and for different explana-
tory goals, are to fit together in one over-all
account, or what special assumptions (if any)
must be made to bring about their harmonious
co-existence, as an adjunct to a formal theory
of syntax.
The title emphasizes L's concern with se-
mantics and pragmatics, but in fact we see little
explicit discussion of how the distinctive surface
structures of imperatives and questions are to
be related to illocutionary force, via the seman-
tic elements '!' (imperative) and '?' (question),
which are 'modal operators' on propositions.
Presumably these operators affect syntactic der-
ivation, as well as pragmatic translation; but
since they are not overt elements, like I request
and I ask, it is not clear how these relations are
to be described. Some syntactic (and pragmatic)
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243
data are described fairly fully, e.g. the pronoun-
antecedent relations which were used by Ross
to justify a higher performative clause; L shows
how at least some of these (and, by assumption,
all of them) can be derived from discourse con-
text. But very sketchy treatment is given to
other sets of data which suggest (more or less
strongly, depending on how crucial one consid-
ers syntactic generalizations to be) that refer-
ence must be made to syntactic or semantic re-
lations between illocutionary force and linguistic
constituents.
L has apparently intended to give an expo-
sition of the pragmatic approach which replies
to the linguistic work on speech acts of the mid-
1970's. Some readers would wish for a fuller
theoretical justification, discussing in more spe-
cific terms some of the very difficult semantic
issues which arise from relating meaning and
linguistic structures to illocutionary force. E.g.,
if one assumes (as L does) that illocutionary
forces are not discrete and vary along a contin-
uum, how are the meanings of distinct words
such as warn and promise distinguished in truth-
conditional semantics, and how are performa-
tive and non-performative uses of these words
related (as they surely are in some very regular
way)?
At any rate, linguists interested in speech acts
will find L's exposition of the pragmatic account
interesting and significant, even if they do not
agree that a satisfactory solution has been found
for the extremely complex issues which so far
have resisted most attempts at analysis. [ALICE
DAVISON, University of Illinois.]
English accents and dialects: An intro-
duction to social and regional vari-
eties of British English. By ARTHUR
HUGHES and PETERTRUDGILL.Lon-
don: Arnold; Baltimore: University
Park Press, 1979. Pp. x, 90. $16.50.
A wealth of information on the speech of ten
areas in the British Isles is provided in this slim
volume. An introductory discussion clearly
states the authors' position that the question of
correctness is largely irrelevant-rather, vari-
ation is dealt with in terms of its usefulness or
appropriateness. The introductory remarks pro-
vide a framework in which to set the features
of social and regional variation.
Terms used include DIALECT,a variety distin-
guished by features of grammar and vocabulary,