Linguistic Society of America

Review
Author(s): Hélène Perdicoyianni-Paléologou
Review by: Hélène Perdicoyianni-Paléologou
Source: Language, Vol. 77, No. 2 (Jun., 2001), p. 405
Published by: Linguistic Society of America
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3086814
Accessed: 07-08-2016 23:37 UTC

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Language

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 BOOK NOTICES
explores what the properties of language reveal about
the mental abilities and processes involved in lan-
guage acquisition. The originality of this book is that
it goes against the prevailing trend in generative
grammar by considering not only what is general,
exceptionless, and universal in language but also
what is irregular, exceptional, and idiosyncratic, both
in the lexicon and in syntax.
In the first chapter, Culicover discusses the rela-
tionship between the study of the learning mecha-
nism for language and the investigation of the
properties of language itself as bounding conditions
on such a mechanism. He argues that in addition to
accounting for linguistic universals, linguistic theory
should be able to accept that natural languages are
'more than simply realizations of combinations of
fixed sets of universal properties' (1). Thus, he fo-
cuses on the acquisition of properties that a particular
language does not share with other languages. An-
other question brought up in the first chapter is that
of biology vs. learning, namely of how much of lin-
guistic knowledge is biologically determined and
how much is learned. Going against the general posi-
tion, C argues that this question is an empirical one
rather than a matter of dogma or ideology. In the last
section of the introductory chapter, C identifies two
important global properties that a language learner
must have: conservatism, which precludes him from
generalizing significantly beyond the evidence that
is presented to him, and attentiveness, which makes
him form generalizations based on all and only the
evidence presented to him.
The rest of the book is organized into three chap-
ters that deal with categories, constructions, and con-
straints, respectively. The first of these chapters
presents empirical evidence to support the claim that
there is in principle an unbounded set of syntactic
categories in natural language. C investigates ele-
ments that seem to belong to more than one tradi-
tional syntactic category, including either, the
prepositional complementizerfor, various determi-
ners and quantifiers, and odd prepositions. He argues
that such elements form separate categories. On the
other hand, their apparent patterning with one or the
other of the traditional syntactic categories may be
explained from their conceptual structure properties
rather than syntactic categorization.
In Ch. 3, C considers a range of syntactic construc-
tions that possess a certain degree of idiosyncrasy,
including reduction constructions (e.g. sluicing),
movement constructions (e.g. partial wh-movement),
and inflections (e.g. do-support). He argues that even
though these constructions might normally be taken
as part of 'core' grammar, some of these aspects can-
not be derived from universal principles and there-
fore must be determined by the learner on the basis
of positive experience.
In Ch. 4, C explores some of the consequences
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405
of taking the learner to be a conservative attentive
learner. He applies the Hawkins Metric to develop
a preliminary account of which generalizations are
more accessible to the learner on the basis of positive
evidence. The goal of this chapter is to provide an
understanding of how a learner can acquire construc-
tions that appear to be exceptions to 'universal' con-
straints.
Even though the book is mainly concerned with
English, other languages, such as Italian, Icelandic,
Hungarian, and French, are discussed as well. [ASYA
PERELTSVAIG, McGill University.]
Semiostylistique: L'effet de l'art. By
GEORGES MOLINIE. Paris: Presses Uni-
versitaires de France, 1998. Pp. 284.
158 FF.
This book seeks to present a semiostylistics that
is similar to what George Molini6 called in his earlier
works, notably in Mazaleyrat and Molini6 (Vocabu-
laire de la stylistique, Jean Mazaleyrat and Georges
Molinie, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France,
1989.), semiotique de second niveau, i.e. 'the study
concerning the cultural representationalism of the
systems of anthropological value, a study which is
itself entailed in cultural semiotics' (5).
The book is divided into six chapters. In the first
chapter, M examines the significance of the pro-
cesses of semiotization, i.e. of languages or 'stabi-
lized social praxis with symbolic value' (275),
processes that are constructive of social life vis-a-
vis society.
The next two chapters deal with verbal art. M stud-
ies the 'litteralit6 des objects de l'art verbal' in the
light of the stylistics whose aim is to study exclu-
sively and methodologically the structure of the
models of emission and reception of the text as dis-
course.
In the fourth chapter, he first sheds light on the
significance of the pole of reception which measures
the textual literality; then he determines the function
of the verbal within this pole.
The fifth chapter refers to the theory of sexuality
enactment and its relationship with the body. This
chapter constitutes an interpretation of art reception
in the light of verbal analysis.
In the last chapter, M considers art as a kind of
mourning, based on the hypothesis that death, as a
horizon of the body, is also a horizon of art.
The book has a twofold interest: on the one hand,
it presents a theory integrated into art and attached
to a global semiotic system of production and recep-
tion of exchanges constructed on the model of erotic
enactment. On the other hand, M's work presents, in
general cultural semiotics, an attempt to focus on the
thought of body. [HELENE PERDICOYIANNI-PALEOLO-
GOU, Brown University.]