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Transforming the images: Ergativity and transitivity in Inuktitut (Eskimo) by Elke Nowak (review)
- Language
- Linguistic Society of America
- Volume 74, Number 3, September 1998
- pp. 667-668
- 10.1353/lan.1998.0057
- Review
- Additional Information
BOOK NOTICES 667 rules), from another one, 'language' is a catch-all term for a loose band ofactions performed by people. For reasons of space I shall look only at some of the subjects discussed by the papers. Quite correctly the author points out in Essay 9, 'Conditions of illocutionary acts', that the hope of any explanation of meaning based exclusively on a theory of speech acts is misguided. The argument here is simple and elegant : Ifthe sentential component ofa speech act were not to constrain the meaning ofthe act itself, anything could mean anything. Consider a promise expressed by a speech act consisting in uttering ? promise to shut the door when I leave'. This could mean anything if there were no ties whatsoever between 'to shut the door' and the content or meaning of the promise itself. On pain of infinite regress then, as the author correctly points out, we need both an abstract notion of meaning for expressions and a speech-theoretical one for a language in action. One of the reasons the essays may appear dated is that they beat what appear (to me) to be dead horses. Very few people now are verificationist in the sense of tying the meaning of an expression to the conditions under which a truth-value can be assigned to it. Note that this does not mean that truthconditions play no role in understanding but rather that conditions of verification are not what determines the 'meaning' or potential to be understood of an expression. Readers will find of more interest, in the opinion of this reviewer, some of the essays (in particular in Part IV) devoted to identity and the meaning of proper names. Most of those essays were published right around the emergence ofthe (now) quasi-orthodox direct-reference theory of names which was linked to the early diffusion of Saul A. Kripke's views. In Essay 15 K points out how to distinguish certain features of Kripke's account from its metaphysical assumptions. As some readers will know, Kripke's Naming and necessity (1980. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) is a difficult book in part because it appears as a mix of a straightforward thesis in the semantics of proper names and a metaphysical thesis. The semantic thesis is that proper names (Albert Einstein, Richard Nixon, Elizabeth Windsor, etc.) have no Fregean Sinne attached to them. Proper names are purely labels (the view is a successor of some ofMill's thesis). At the same time Kripke holds a metaphysical view (sometimes dubbed essentialism ) which has to do with what the referents of proper names are. The referents are the 'very individuals '. And this is a controversial metaphysical claim. K does a good job of separating out the two components , something along the lines of the work done by Nathan Salmon, but much earlier on. The author's approach is largely Kripkean, though he tends to see more in Gottlob Frege's view on statements expressing identity than is usually conceded. The essay 'About' is an interesting exercise in which the author tackles an early ancestor of what now is known as slingshot argument. The claim (made by Nelson Goodman) is that once we state that some specific statement is about something, we commit ourselves to the idiocy that any statement has to be about absolutely anything. The exercise is to see how K attacks the problem using some of the tools of ordinary language philosophy (by looking at the uses of 'about') while now most people would straight on tackle the logical features of the argument itself. In sum: the book is worth reading. For some of the essays the dates will be telling, at least for those who follow the debates in the philosophy of language , while some retain their fresh flavors. [Adriano Palma, Ecole Polytechnique, Paris/ChungCheng University.] Transforming the images: Ergativity and transitivity in Inuktitut (Eskimo). By Elke Nowak. (Empirical approaches to language typology 15.) Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1996. Pp. xi, 309. DM 228.00. Nowak's book is an interesting contribution to ongoing debates in the Eskimology literature and seeks to locate Inuktitut with respect to such theoretical notions as ergativity and transitivity...