The acquisition of spatial relations in a second language Ed. by Angelika Becker and Mary Carroll (review)

BOOK NOTICES 189 Appropriately for a volume dedicated to Givón, an early proponent of discourse/text-based linguistic analysis, Paul Hopper presents us with 'When "grammar" and discourse clash: The problem of source conflicts'. Other articles include Carol Lord and Kathleen Dahlgren's 'Participant and event anaphora in newspaper articles', Dan Slobin's 'Mind, Code, and Text', Frantisek Lichtenberk's 'Head-marking and objecthood', and Bernard Comrie 's "The typology of predicate case marking'. The wide range of topics helps to make this book an attractive volume for the personal library of any linguist . [Carl Rubino, Australian National University.] Syntactic iconicity and linguistic freezes: The human dimension. Ed. by Marge E. Landsberg. (Studies in anthropological linguistics, 9.) Berlin & New York: Mouton, 1995. Pp. ix, 444. DM 238.00 This book contains papers on syntactic iconicity in language, literature, psychology, and philosophy. In the introduction, Landsberg challenges the general linguistic beliefthat language has an arbitrary system with fixed word order in language serialization manifested as freezes. The predictable principles of word order such as animate precedes inanimate, human precedes animate, adult precedes adolescent, male precedes female, positive precedes negative prove to be salient linguistic nonarbitrariness. In the first paper John Askedal analyzes the diagrammatic iconicity (D-iconicity) found in Modern German clauses. A valuable theoretical contnbution in this paper is the proposal to divide the study of D-iconicity into constellational and configurational parts (15). In the second paper, David Birdsong verifies the constraints on the constituent order of freezes first posited by William Cooper and John Ross. He found the first two of the five constraints, namely 'syllable number' and 'vowel quality' to be most consistent. Franz Dotter outlines eighttypes ofnonarbitrariness /iconicity in coding. The scope in focus includes the principles of information flow, saliency, representation /experience, function, unit building, coherence of text/discourse, independence and cognitive complexity, contrast and prominence (52-53). Sandra Thompson introduces the notion oftopicworthiness to English syntax that favors recipient rather than patient in the position immediately after the verb with no preposition (159). Anna Wierzbicka debunks the notion of arbitrariness generally agreed upon when two signifiers designate a similar meaning. By pointing to the emotion words in English and Russian, she arrives at an insightful crosscultural interpretation of the difference of emotion outlook between these cultures. The paper by Linda Waugh and Madeleine Newfield provides a thorough account of sound symbolism , a basis of iconicity found in lexicon across languages. They notice imagic iconicity within diagrammatic iconicity in lexicon and state that "The fact that some phonestemes (sic) should be correlated with instances ofsound symbolism is simply a further example of the interrelation between image and diagrammatic iconicity: the strict separation ofthese two is artificial' (199). In the discussion on the iconicity of metaphor, Marcel Danesi invokes the Vico-Nietzschean view that metaphors are consequent experience. His report on Solomon Ash's cross-linguistic findings along this line indicates the presence of metaphors derived from the vocabulary of sensation. Hot, for example, stands for rage in Hebrew, enthusiasm in Chinese, sexual arousal in Thai, and energy in Hausa. William Cooper and Gayle Klouda offer the principle of least perceptual effort in explaining the determinacy in freezes that involve vertical and horizontal semantic-spatial orders. They also note that it is quicker to perceive 'up' than 'down' and 'above' rather than 'below'. This asymmetry of the up-down dimension feeds the corresponding selective preference for the sequence found in linguistic freezes (338). From their pilot study, Filip Loncke and Sophie Quertinmont suggest a degree of variation in the nativeness of using sign language. Their initial findings show deaf children of deaf parents are more at ease with the linguistic aspects of spatiality such as agreements of verbs, though the subjects are still below their operand ages, whereas the deaf children of hearing parents continue to struggle with the linguistic principles ofagreement after age 8 (347-48). There is ample evidence to support determinacy and iconic predictability in language. The publication ofthis volume together with Metaphorand iconicity: special issue ofJournal ofPragmatics vol. 22 (1997. Amsterdam: Elsevier Science) and Sound symbolism (Leanne Lipton, Johanna Nichols, and John Ohala (eds.) 1994. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) are valuable contributions...