Beowulf and Old Germanic metre By Geoffrey Russom (review)

188LANGUAGE, VOLUME 76, NUMBER 1 (2000) How much of subjectivity is downloaded society? How much of society is offloaded subjectivity ? How much of subjectivity is enacted, made on the spot? How much is brought to the task? How much is made by the way you speak? How much does the system of speech reinstate itself in every act of speaking? L's social-semiotic answers to these questions form a nice bridge to recent evolutionary considerations of the same problems. Deacon (1997) argues that humans have come out as they are because of the co-evolution of a symbol-using brain with massive connections for attentional and resource management, voluntary control over speech mechanisms, and reproducible speech across generations, all to solve foraging and family-building problems in our evolutionary niche. Humans' virtual-world making, 'while not the origin ofconsciousness, has produced an unprecedented medium for consciousness' (449). The evolution of a medium for subjectivity is a crucial notion for focusing research. If we are ever to unify the social and the biological, it will be by linking the evolutionary claims about physical machinery with wide ranging and important works on the semiotic medium of subjectivity like L's Talking heads. REFERENCES Blakemore, Diane. 1987. Semantic constraints on relevance. Oxford: Blackwell. Clark, Andy. 1997. Being there: Putting brain, body, and world together again. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Davidson, Donald. 1986. A nice derangement of epitaphs. Truth and interpretation, ed. by E. LePore, 433-60. Oxford: Blackwell. Deacon, Terrence. 1997. The symbolic species. New York: Norton. Ehrlich, Susan. 1990. Point of view: A linguistic analysis of literary style. London: Routledge. Flanagan, Owen. 1996. Self expressions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Frawley, William. 1997. Vygotsky and cognitive science: Language and the unification of the social and computational mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lucy, John. 1992. Language diversity and thought: A reformulation of the linguistic relativity hypothesis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Silverstein, Michael. 1981. Case marking and the nature of language. Australian Journal of Linguistics 1.227-44. Vendler, Zeno. 1972. Res cogitans. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Vygotsky, L. S. 1986. Thought and language. Cambridge, MA: ?G? Press. Wertsch, James V. 1991. Voices of the mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. -----. 1998. Mind as action. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wierzbicka, Anna. 1997. Understanding cultures through their key words: English, Russian, Polish, German, and Japanese. New York: Oxford University Press. Dept. of Linguistics/Cognitive Science University of Delaware Newark, DE 19716 [billf@copland.udel.edu] Beowulf and Old Germanic metre. By Geoffrey Russom. (Cambridge Studies in Anglo-Saxon England 23.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. 235. Reviewed by C. B. McCully, University of Manchester During the first G. L. Brook symposium held in Manchester in 1991 (McCully & Anderson 1996)—a symposium at which Russom was one ofthe distinguished contributors—Tom Shippey remarked that it would be good for metrics and philology if work on Germanic were to appear that did not take the metrics ofBeowulfas its prime object. Russom's work in the current volume goes a long way to meeting that wish and that need. Essentially, the book is a continuation and extension of the linguistic metrics Russom first introduced in book form with his 1987 volume, Old English meter and linguistic theory (OEM). Many of the key concepts of the earlier analysis, notably the word-foot theory (crudely, words are exactly co-extensive with one or more feet), and metrical subordination consequent on the presumed 'left-strength' of the verse, reappear here, forming not only an extremely valuable, REVIEWS189 language-specific diagnostic typology but also a set of crosslinguistic comparisons. The theory is in the best sense empirical: Russom works, in an exemplary fashion, from a testable database, and draws conclusions only when the evidence seems to justify them. In this sense, Beowulfand Old Germanic Metre is an essential supplement, even a corrective, to works such as Lehmann 1956. The book falls into twelve chapters—respectively an introduction, the foot, the verse, light feet and extrametrical words, metrical archaisms, alliteration, metrical subordination within the foot, resolution, word order and stress within the clause, Old Saxon alliterative verse, Hildebrandslied, and conclusions—together with a useful rule summary, bibliography, index, and list...