Rätoromanisches Colloquium Mainz Edited by W. Th. Elwert (review)

REVIEWS701 know what he means by 'lower class' or 'educated-standard compromise'. In his own words, Obviously such statements are more intuitive than scientifically valid'. In this particular instance, F's statements are not only intuitive but also inaccurate, maybe partly because his intuitions are those of a non-member of the community studied. However, I would not expect native speakers, either, to be able to give correct intuitive reports on this type of variation. A few comments on F's appendix. First, it is not true that the speech of Rosario, 'a large urban, metropolitan area north of Buenos Aires, ... at least phonologfcally, is essentially dialectically identical with the capital' (70). Second, we do not know what Juana Marconi is referring to in her quoted letter when she talks about Style 1 or Style 3. As far as we can judge, there is no guarantee that F is not misinterpreting Marconi's empirical observations. We read that she says that 'most of the things proposed can be found in [her tapes]'; but we still lack the context to know what proposed things she is accepting. As to F's quotation of a letter from this reviewer, I find it equally useless. The quoted fragment (never intended for publication) does not specify the size of the sample involved or how social classes were defined. What I was most interested in at the time, as a graduate student in sociolinguistics, was the fact that morphological conditioning seemed to control the variation left free by the phonological conditioning. Unfortunately, F did not take account of this remark, which I was offering simply as a suggestion for lines of future research. The book ends with a welcome bibliographic appendix by Hensey, presented as an addendum to Ornstein's paper. REFERENCES Hensey, Frederick G. 1972. The sociolinguistics of the Brazilian-Uruguayan border. The Hague: Mouton. Honsa, Vladimir. 1965. The phonemic systems of Argentinian Spanish. Hispania 48.275-83. Lavandera, Beatriz R. 1977. Inferencia o referencia en la teoría del languaje. Vicus Cuadernos, Lingüística, 1.117-38. Ornstein, Jacob. 1970. Sociolinguistics and new perspectives in the study of Southwest Spanish. Studies in language and linguistics, 1969-1970, ed. by Ralph W. Newton & Jacob Ornstein, 127-48. El Paso: Texas Western Press. ------. 1971. Language varieties along the U.S.-Mexico border. Applications of linguistics : selected papers of the 2nd International Congress of Applied Linguistics, ed. by G. E. Perren & J. L. M. Trim, 349-62. Cambridge: University Press. ------. 1972. Applying sociolinguistic research to the educational needs of MexicanAmerican bilinguals/biculturalsin the U.S. Southwest. Presented at 3rd International Congress of Applied Linguistics (Copenhagen). Wolfram, Walter A. 1969. A sociolinguistic description of Detroit Negro speech. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. [Received 8 July 1977.] Rätoromanisches Colloquium Mainz. Edited by W. Th. Elwert. (Románica Aenipontana, 10.) Innsbruck: Institut für Romanische Philologie der LeopoldFranzens -Universität, 1976. Pp. 175. Reviewed by John Haiman, University of Manitoba With one exception, the six papers in the present volume continue the tradition established in the parent series: they are philologically-oriented descriptive works, of interest only to the absolute specialist. The first three papers, by A. Decurtins, H. Stimm, and W. Elwert, deal with Romantsch dialects spoken in Switzerland; 702LANGUAGE, VOLUME 54, NUMBER 3 (1978) while the last three, by H. Kuen, G. Plangg, and J. Kramer, are concerned with related dialects spoken in northern Italy and Austria. The one paper in the collection which is likely to be of interest to the general reader is Stimm's 'On some syntactic peculiarities of Surselvan'. The extent to which Raeto-Romance dialects have been inundated by borrowings from the surrounding standardized languages has been well-known for some time. So evident was this that Gartner, one of the founding fathers of Raeto-Romance studies, claimed (1910) that there was no need for a separate syntactic description peculiar to these dialects. Nevertheless, this view, which S quotes on p. 31, is a mistaken one: his paper deals with two peculiarities of the westernmost Romantsch dialects and their theoretical significance. The first is the existence of two perfective auxiliaries, aver and esser, with reflexive verbs. S points out that Romance idioms may...