Language and gender: Interdisciplinary perspectives Ed. by Sara Mills (review)

BOOK NOTICES 233 such a way that machine translation systems can solve it. The last claim is less closely linked to the others. M identifies generative grammar as mainstream linguistics inspired by Noam Chomsky but also including systems such as LFG and HPSG. These approaches have in common that they aim to cover the syntax of a language in terms of formal rules determining whether a sentence is grammatical or not. According to M, this approach makes it impossible for them to cover fundamental ambiguity, so that they are restricted to domain-specific language covering the so-called utterly boring world (UBW). Whereas in the motivation for the first two hypotheses one might object to the oversimplification of the arguments, in arguing in favor of the last hypothesis M really goes over the top. The absence of precise page references makes it difficult to trace the origin for most claims attributed to Chomsky. Some claims seem to be based on Aspects, others on video recordings of interviews, but for quite a few I doubt that references can be found in Chomsky's works at all. One of the central points is the attitude to semantics . As Chomsky repeatedly made clear, his system for grammar does not cover core semantics. The system M attacks (140-41) is closer to Richard Montague 's compositional semantics than to anything Chomsky ever wrote. Moreover, some of the semantic theories which claim to be compatible with generative grammar explicitly reject the mere enumeration of senses, e.g. James Pustejovsky's (1995) Generative lexicon. Thus M seems to be tilting at windmills. Perhaps for some readers the unscientific character of the text is compensated for by its rhetorical qualities . M's missionary zeal is directed against the evil of 'objectivism', of which Chomsky is said to be the main exponent. The style ranges from quasi-scientific to highly colloquial. It includes many personal notes where the author describes his own conversion and a rather curious conclusion where the author says how funds should be redistributed. [Pius ten Hacken, University ofBasel.] Language and gender: Interdisciplinary perspectives. Ed. by Sara Mills. Harlow : Longman, 1995. Pp. xiv, 282. This is a collection ofpapers which were presented at a language and gender conference in 1992 and revised for this publication. It contains six sections, with two or three essays each, reflecting the interdisciplinary approach mentioned in the subtitle. A paper by Jennifer Coates on the consequences of women's speech style for their careers, and Deborah Cameron's position paper on the recent popularization of the language and gender field form the first section. Section 2 focuses on lesbian poetics. Liz Yorke examines the work of five lesbian poets in order to find the strategies employed to claim their literary space. Margaret Williamson compares Sappho's love poems to those by Anacreon, finding a very different use of voice in the two poets. Deborah Tyler-Bennett in her analysis of The ladies almanac shows how Barnes crosses the boundaries of literary genre to write lesbian history. Section 3 on gender/genre deals with the masculinist genre of science fiction and the language feminist science fiction writers have developed. In her essay on cyberpunk, Jenny Wolmark analyzes Joanna Ross' Thefemale man and its redefinition of a female voice as male. Elisabeth Mahoney looks at Haden Elgin's Native tongue and its secret women's language which was conceived in order to make the expression of specifically female concepts and experiences possible. Gender, language, and education is the topic of Section 4. Joan Swann and David Graddol observe the move towards valorization of communicative talk in schools in the 1980s and warn about its dangers if the value system is not changed as well. Cleopatra Altini examines Greek primary teachers' attitude towards boys' disruptiveness, an attitude which typically reinforces stereotypical gender roles. Jane Sunderland describes an interesting scene in an English comprehensive school which makes it clearthat girls feel free to play with their gender identity in order to get the teacher's attention, a behavior which the boys there would never consider. The next section deals with a related area: gender, language, and children. In the first paper, Farida Abu-Haidar...