REVIEWS

records in local historical societies for children's essays, teachers' diaries, school
board reports, parents' letters, and thereby providing themselves with not only
additional regional or social data but also with a means of evaluating the consis-
tency of their concerns.
Finally, to borrow Bloomfield's terminology (1944): usage manuals purport-
edly belong to the category of secondary responses, utterances about language
(45). What, then, can linguists expect if these secondary responses are instead, as
Algeo's analysis suggests, part and parcel of the tertiary domain, static but no
less effective catalysts for increased defensiveness and hostility toward lan-
guage?

REFERENCES

Bailey, C.-J. N. (1977). Review of J. W. Lewis, A concise pronouncing dictionary of British and
American English. Language 53: 923-25.
Bloomfield, L. (1944). Secondary and tertiary responses to language. Language 20: 45-55. Re-
printed in C. F. Hockett (ed.) (1970). A Leonard Bloomfield anthology. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press. 413-25.
Heath, S. B. (1978). Social history and sociolinguistics. American Sociologist 13: 84-92.
Johnson, B. C , & Rodman, R. (1978). Review of W. Morris & M. Morris (eds.), Harper dictionary
of contemporary usage. Language 54: 188-92.
Reviewed by BOYD DAVIS
University of North Carolina
(Received 9 October 1979) Charlotte, North Carolina 28212

MODES AND CODES OF COMMUNICATION

MARVIN K. L. CHING, MICHAEL C. HALEY, RONALD F. LUNSFORD (eds.), Lin-

guistic perspectives on literature. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1980.
Pp. 332.
This collection offers a sampling of recent work in the linguistic analysis of
literature, along with a lengthy introductory essay on the current state of the art,
as seen by the book's three contributing editors. Of the eighteen papers in the
volume, all originally appeared in books or journals (notably Poetics, Language
and Style, College English, and Foundations of Language) between the years
1969 and 1976, except for the editors' own contributions, which appear here for
the first time.
Though respects are paid to Chomsky on nearly every page, there is a clear
effort to be linguistically eclectic. Transformational syntax is represented by
George Dillon's "Inversions and Deletions in English Poetry" and Samuel Jay
Keyser's "Wallace Stevens: Form and Meaning in Four Poems"; Hallidayan
thematic analysis by Shivendra Verma's "Topicalization as a Stylistic
Mechanism"; speech act theory by Michael Hancher's "Understanding Poetic
135
 REVIEWS

Speech Acts"; structural and generative narratology by Thomas Pavel's "Some

Remarks on Narrative Grammars"; predicate logic by Teun van Dijk's "Formal
Semantics of Metaphorical Discourse"; reader response research by Marvin
Ching's "A Literary and Linguistic Analysis of Compact Verbal Paradox"; case
grammar by Ching's "Interpreting Meaningful Nonsense"; semantic feature
analysis by Derek Bickerton's "Prolegomena to a Linguistic Theory of
Metaphor" and Robert Matthews's "Concerning a 'Linguistic' Theory of
Metaphor"; historical lexicography by Joseph Williams's "Semantic Laws";
and the theoretically nonaligned by H. G. Widdowson's "Stylistic Analysis and
Literary Interpretation," Irene Fairley's "Syntactic Deviation and Cohesion,"
L. G. Heller's "Toward a General Typology of the Pun," Michael Haley's "The
Linguistic Universe of Metaphor," and Ronald Lunsford's "Byron's Spatial
Metaphor."
There is a good deal less diversity, however, in the range of literary topics
treated. To begin with, as the paper titles suggest, "literature" for the purposes
of this book means Western written literature, more specifically the English
Department Central Canon. There is disappointment but little surprise in this
ethnocentrism, which simply reproduces that of literary studies as a whole,
where borders are so carefully patrolled to dispatch what is oral and/or non-
Western off to the realms of folklore, ethnography, or popular culture. This
restricted view of literature does tend to bring some limitations on approach,
notably a view of literature as an asocial phenomenon whose linguistic interest
lies either in the internal properties of texts or in individual text-reader interac-
tion. In both the papers and the introduction, the public, institutional aspects of
literature remain largely unaddressed, as do questions of how verbal art forms
function in a speech community or where they stand in relation to other verbal
activities. The possibility of a full-fledged sociolinguistics of literature never
rears its unkempt and lumpy head, nor is the mass of research in this area (mostly
by ethnographers and folklorists) acknowledged.
Even within these already narrow limits, only a few concerns of mainstream
literary studies are addressed. Only one article, Pavel's on narratology, is de-
voted to narrative. Fortunately, this selection couldn't be better. It is a lucid,
competent, readable (hard to believe it's a translation!) review of linguistic
approaches to narrative that succeeds remarkably in mediating between European
structural-anthropological models and models emerging from a specifically
Chomskyan generative framework. Pavel's unraveling of the overlapping ter-
minology (such as the different meanings of "transformation") is invaluable, as
is the extensive bibliography that accompanies his paper.
The rest of the volume concentrates almost exclusively on English poetry, with
half the papers devoted to the subject of metaphor and figurative language. Most
depart from Chomsky's analysis of metaphor as a performance phenomenon
involving interpretable violations of selectional restrictions, an analysis that they
variously attack, tinker with, reaffirm, or elaborate on. At the very least, these
136
 REVIEWS

metaphor papers will be of historical interest, especially in the light of more

recent work on the subject, such as Samuel Levin's Semantics of metaphor (Johns
Hopkins, 1977), the collection Metaphor and thought, edited by Andrew Ortony
(Cambridge, 1979), and George Lakoff and Mark Thompson's Metaphors we
live by (Chicago, 1980). Each paper contains worthwhile insights on its own as
well, such as Bickerton's demonstration that semantic features cannot be hierarchi-
cally stated, Reddy's observation that not all metaphor involves surface deviance,
Reinhart's claim that both elements of a metaphor need interpretation, van Dijk's
concepts of typical features and the relation of metaphor to counterfactuals, and
Haley and Lunsford's rich textual analyses. Nevertheless, it is in some respects
unfortunate that these essays on metaphor should come first in the book. The dis-
mal state of semantic theory - especially the perennial arbitrariness of semantic
feature sets - has made the debate on metaphor one of the least productive in the
field. (Do we really want to specify wolf as [+ avoids man] or burp as [+ caused
by gaseous pressure]? See 84-85.)
The second half of the book is, in this reviewer's opinion, much more interest-
ing and useful. Dillon's transformational description of syntax in pre-modern
English poetry is simply superb. Widdowson's demonstration of how linguistic
observations can lead to interpreting poetry, as opposed to merely supporting it,
is convincing and pedagogically suggestive. Keyser shows the kind of rich analy-
sis one can achieve by moving carefully between syntax and semantics. Along
with Dillon, Verma provides another good introduction to the role surface struc-
ture analysis can play in stylistics, with the advantage of including prose examples
as well as verse. Without delving into the technicalities of speech act theory,
Michael Hancher gives excellent practical examples of poems where incorrect
analysis of illocutionary force has led to misreadings. Heller suggests a tantaliz-
ing approach to the pun, offering both an analytical tool kit and a preliminary
typology.
A final comment remains to be made on the theoretical introduction to the
volume. Here the editors cogently review basic issues such as the relations
between linguistics and literary study and between literature and linguistic com-
petence, examine the main currents now visible in the field, and suggest a
program for the future. They work hard, and on the whole successfully, to dispel
some misconceptions that consistently trouble the linguistic study of literature.
They insist, for instance, on the psychological unreality of generative grammars
and on the fact that critics must therefore turn elsewhere for a psychologically
real theory of reading. Nevertheless, a generative model of reading is possible,
they observe, and they go on to draw a plausible outline of what such a model
might look like.
The editors take a creditable stand against the view of literature as language
different in kind from other verbal activities: "The operations of ordinary linguis-
tic competence," they argue, "are vital to the meaning and delight of literature"
(9). Regrettably, when they couple this claim with a Chomskyan notion of innate
137
 REVIEWS

universal competence, they move toward a romantic organicism that is as unten-

able as the elitism they are trying to refute. Because "linguistic competence
universally characterizes the human condition," language analysis has "the
virtuous potential... of touching upon some of the linguistic foundation stones
of great literature's universal meaningfulness and appeal" (9-10). It is here, they
argue, that the linguist's contribution can complement that of the critic. While
the latter's main task is to "explain and evaluate a work's impact on the estab-
lished world of letters," the linguist "makes observations about the same work
which tend mainly to explain only those linguistic origins of its impact on any
serious and intelligent reader" (10). Aside from the ways in which this division
of labor impoverishes the lives of both parties, one is skeptical of the idea of a
mass of "serious and intelligent readers" operating outside "the established
world of letters." One could argue that whoever takes up a work of literature
automatically operates within that world. The editors' universalist perspective
even leads them to erect a myth of origins:
The linguist is haunted by the suspicion that there must have been a first poem
sometime, somewhere, which caused some fellow (who perhaps had never
read anything but an almanac before) suddenly to see the moon as an image of
unattainable beauty And each time he rediscovers this first principle of
language at work in a new poem, the linguist is haunted again by the notion of
that hypothetical "first poem," probably because he remembers that in his
own reading experience there was indeed a first poem, one that opened his
mind.... He is not so foolish as to think for a moment that this adolescent
enthusiasm with a first poem constituted a full and mature appreciation of
poetic art, but the way in which the language of his first poem opened his
imagination, lightened his heart, or reorganized his way of looking at the
world is not a phenomenon he proposes to forget (11).
This linguist, at least, is anything but haunted, either by the thought of a primal
first poem or by nostalgia for some primal poetic experience of her own. But
perhaps this is because, in the authors' language at least, this experience is
obviously connected with the decidedly nonuniversal one of male adolescence
(not to mention almanac reading). This attempt to anchor all in a personal
primal experience gives yet another example of the impoverishment that results
from viewing literature as an individual and private matter and ignoring its
presence as a social verbal institution.
The discussion of structuralism produces some equally strange claims, such as
that sturcturalism is strictly empirical and unsuited to literary analysis because it
refuses to make value judgments about its data (whereas generative grammar
evidently does have the potential to do so!). Much more helpful is the mapping
out of the various strands of the generative-transformational tradition: transfor-
mational grammar, case grammar, generative semantics. The discussion of TG
versus generative semantics begins especially well. Indeed it is the best I have yet
138
 REVIEWS

encountered for weeding out differences between the two theories, explaining
their development and their implications for literary analysis. The discussion
takes one wrong turn when the authors decide that generative semanticists make
no distinction between propositional meaning and contextually derived meaning
(the real claim being, of course, that logical and pragmatic components together
specify underlying structures). Nevertheless, they emerge from the woods with
their hearts in the right place: "Our theory ought to distinguish between what is
articulated, what is induced from what is articulated, and what is inferred on
other grounds" (34). As for how the linguistic investigation of literature ought to
proceed from here, the bottom line for Ching, Haley, and Lunsford is that rather
than seeking out partisan positions, at this stage of the game we should be
making the best possible use of every tool we can lay our hands on. Hopefully it
is in this spirit that their very useful book will be received.
Reviewed by MARY L. PRATT
Department of Spanish and Portuguese
and Program in Comparative Literature
(Received 6 August 1980) Stanford University 94305

CHARLES KEIL, Tiv song. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979. Pp. xiii
+ 301.
This is a book about much more than Tiv vocal music. Its real subject is Tiv
ethnoesthetics: an expressive dimension and an aesthetic value that pervade Tiv
imagination and social life. To this end Tiv song serves the author less as a focus
for analysis in its own right than as an entryway to a broader picture of Tiv arts
and artists and the cultural ideas that inform their creativity. The book's five
chapters thus examine various relationships between song and its cultural con-
text: the vocabulary in which Tiv talk about music and creativity; folktales that
refer to music-making; the careers of Tiv song composers; procedures and pa-
rameters of composition; and, in a final chapter entitled "Circles and Angles,"
an "expressive grid" that links Tiv music with dance, gesture, and other visual
modes such as house forms and calabash decoration. An introduction provides a
background sketch of Tiv social organization and the circumstances of Keil's
field work (interrupted by the Nigerian civil war).
The aims of this book are commendable, but whether Keil succeeds in achiev-
ing them is another matter. My reaction to the book was that, although I applauded
the emphasis on cultural context, I thought that it had been carried a little too far.
There is very little music in this book, and what there is comes almost entirely
from someone else's recordings (from largely undisclosed sources), which Keil
had transcribed and analyzed before he went into the field. A closer reading of
the book somewhat corrected this first impression of distortion by revealing that
much of the material on cultural context is equally thin. As Keil himself remarks
139