Sprache in Gegenwart und Geschichte: Festschrift für Heinrich Matthias Heinrichs zum 65. Geburtstag Ed. by Dietrich Hartmann et al. (review)

466 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 56, NUMBER 2 (1980) investigation carried out entirely within the field under consideration. The linguistic problems are approached from a surprisingly narrow point of view, and the confrontation with philosophical problems or questions is carefully avoided. At first glance, this is not an important lacuna or failure; but it implies that the arguments presented here must be convincing in se—which they are not. MW's exposition is rather 'atomistic': the articles of the Encyclopédie are discussed separately, with no attempt at a synthesis. One can, of course, allege that, since the linguistic articles were composed by various contributors, the Encyclopédie had no fully coherent and canonized language theory. But one cannot dismiss the fact that (1) the linguistic articles can be defined as a structured field within the whole Encyclopédie on the basis of D'Alembert's Discours préliminaire; (2) Beauzée and Douchet provided a synopsis of the science of grammar in their article 'Grammaire'; and (3) the system of crossreferences (within and at the end of each article) enables us to link several articles as forming a whole. MW has made a courageous attempt. However , it seems that only 5% of the available material was studied, so that the linguistic conceptions of the Encyclopédie still need to be integrated. This would require an investigation of such important articles as 'Apposition', 'Classe', 'Concordance', 'Détermination', ' Ellipse', ' Identité', ' Mode', ' Mot',' Oraison', 'Passif, 'Phrase', 'Proposition', 'Régime', 'Sens', 'Substantif, 'Sujet', 'Supplément', 'Temps', 'Transitif, 'Verbe', and 'Voix'. [Pierre Swiggers, Belgian National Science Foundation, University ofLeuven.] Sprache in Gegenwart und Geschichte: Festschrift für Heinrich Matthias Heinrichs zum 65. Geburtstag. Ed. by Dietrich Hartmann et al. Köln: Böhlau, 1978. Pp. 352. DM 68.00. These 27 contributions in honor of Professor Heinrichs of the Free University of Berlin present a wide range of topics and relative quality. As the appended 'Schriftenverzeichnis ' (350-52) shows, Heinrichs' own publications are mostly in the field of Scandinavian and in comparative Germanic syntax, but also include diachronic dialectology . It is certainly because of the didactic de-emphasis of historical linguistics in Germany that German contributors write almost exclusively about the Gegenwart, i.e. contemporary language topics. Historical items (Geschichte) are provided by G. A. R. de Smet (188-98); by W. P. Lehmann's informative essay in English, 'Changes in the negative sentence pattern in German' (94-109); by Moscow's G. S. SCur ('Concerning some peculiarities of the perfect in English', 174-87), rejecting J. L. Dillard's alleged African substratum for Black English; by I. T. Piirainen ('Zur Entwicklung des Deutschen in der Mittelslowakei', 142-53); and by Anthony van der Lee ('Die Graphemstruktur dreier frühneuhochdeutscher Traktate ', 110-32). Van der Lee knows the work of W. Fleischer, but not Hans Moser's studies; amazingly, he seems seriously to question the possibility of phonemic analysis of Early Nsw High German, 'da wir nicht sprachkompetent sind' (111). Thus he only lists and quite competently discusses the graphemes of his texts. If phonemic analysis were applicable only to contemporary texts by native speakers, then treatment of earlier periods (e.g. of Old High German dialects, as in my Lautsystem und Lautwandel in den althochdeutschen Dialekten [1971], or of Old English) would truly seem Utopian. Some fine textual and lexical analysis of Modern German sentences can be found in the contributions of Renate Bartsch (1-18), Dietrich Hartmann (68-81), and W. H. Veith (199-208). Both Uta Quasthoff (' Bestimmter Artikel und soziale Kategorisierung', 154-73) and Otmar Werner ('Der bestimmte Artikel als All-Quantor', 215-35) write on the definite article, the topic of Heinrichs' important book of 1954. E. F. K. Koerner (82-93) credits the French phonetician A. Dufriche-Desgenettes with the first use of the term phonème, and M. Kruszewski (rather than his teacher Baudouin de Courtenay) with the phoneme concept (Phonem-Begriff). Contradicting Koerner (89), it must be noted that Edward Sapir's Language (1921) always used 'phonetic pattern' in the sense of phonemic system ('ideal sound-system' etc.), never for an individual phoneme. Space does not permit a discussion of the other contributions, some quite valuable. Among the...