The Second LACUS Forum 1975 Edited by Peter A. Reich (review)

BOOK NOTICES The Second LACUS Forum 1975. Edited by Peter A. Reich. Columbia, SC: Hornbeam Press, 1976. Pp. xi, 636. The Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States claims to have a Forum for everybody; and this volume, comprising fifty-six heterogeneous articles, certainly covers a wide range of problems in stratificational , tagmemic, and even transformational and generative grammars; phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, prosody; sociolinguistics, 'allolinguistics'; historical, applied, and the history of linguistics ; sign and body language; language contact, bilingualism, code switching, ethnography , lexicography, descriptive techniques, language use, etiquette; Neogrammarianism analogy; and analogs of linguistic structure in the cinema, music, and architecture, to select the more salient topics. I comment below on only a few of the most interesting articles. H. A. Gleason, 'Continuity in linguistics' (3-16), describes the symbiotic interdependence of theory, heuristics, results, and applications. Theory integrates heuristically determined facts; theorizing is founded upon and constrained by the body of results; applications justify the linguist's place in the community, as well as turning up neglected problems. J. D. McCawley, '¡Madison Avenue, si, Pennsylvania Avenue, no!' (17-28), discounts the effects of advertising as a major impetus for scientific revolution; a greater danger for causing undesirable or premature scientific revolution has been federal subsidy. C. F. Hockett proposes ? new point d'appui for phonology' (67-90) to eliminate some of the arbitrariness in phonological theories and methods. Proper emphasis belongs on utterance phonology, rather than segmentalization; articulation, not acoustics, is the only empirically correct basis for phonological analysis; from various alternative interpretations ofa language's phonology, that one (ifany) is favored which accounts for more facts than do the others; the basis of articulation is indicated by the 'colorless hesitation sound', and all articulatory targets for the language are definable in terms of departures from that base: reliance on this objective fact, observable in actual linguistic behavior, replaces the analyst's subjective feeling for simplicity, symmetry, or elegance. D. Bolinger, 'The in-group: one and its compounds' (229-37), sorts out the contextual distribution of indefinite compounds of -one (indicating 'closeness') and -body ('distance'). R. Anttila, 'The metamorphosis of allomorphs ' (238-48), views allomorphy as complex networks of overlapping similarities and differences, because the open-ended principles of contiguity and similarity are the perceptual bases of natural language. G. D. Little, ' Does word order in noun compounding reflect sentential syntax?' (249-54), does not believe that W. P. Lehmann's and T. Givón's typological approaches can always accurately reconstruct prior syntax from noun compounds, nor that word order in such compounds necessarily reflects synchronic syntax. R. P. Murphy and J. Ornstein, ' A survey of research on language diversity' (423-61), present an impressive 'partial who's who in sociolinguistics'. R. W. Wescott, 'Allolinguistics' (497-513), concisely classifies the areas of prelanguage (e.g. pongid vocalization and infantile babbling ), paralanguage (e.g. non-grammatical interjection and speech deformation), and metalanguage (e.g. poetry and song). S. Levin, 'Titles translated unidiomatically' (559-66) traces the histories of several titles which have propagated unusual syntagmata in English (e.g. The Brothers Karamazov, The Song ofSongs). The contents of this volume, of the other LACUS conference proceedings, and of two affiliated publications (the journal Forum linguisticum and the Edward Sapir monograph series in language, culture and cognition) are the documents of the purported linguistic 'counter-revolution'. None of the conferences has thus far approached the proportions of 'the greatest show on earth'; but then some linguists never thought the Circus Maximus an appropriate forum for scholarly debate anyway. LACUS meetings have rather resembled 'what LSA used to be', as one oldtimer put it: small, yet diverse, bordering somewhat on the eclectic—perhaps as the 754 BOOK NOTICES 755 price paid for an apparent lack of paradigmatic pressure, since organizational policy seems to favor inquisitiveness rather than inquisition. However, whether 'Future histories of linguistics will look back to, and date events from, The First LACUS Forum' (as boasted in that volume's publicity flyer), remains to be seen. [Warren A. Brewer, UCLA.] arbitrarily chosen. E.g., under 'Náhuatl', out of the hundreds of published works which deal with this language, a haphazard list is given which does...