Language and style By E. L. Epstein (review)

BOOK NOTICES 477 judicious selection of quotations (mostly) from Peirce's Collectedpapers, it is clear that S's real heroes are the 'Baltic Baron' biologist Jacob von Uexkiill (1864-1944) and the French mathematician René Thom (b. 1923)—particularly the latter, whom S considers a modern-day successor to Peirce. The first half of the book is rich in material paraphrasing and drawing upon a vast bibliography of items in various subfields of biology, with a particular focus on the relationship between animal communication ('zoösemiotic systems') in general and human communication ('anthropomorphic systems') specifically. These essays all comport well with S's over-all research outlook, which seeks to widen the scope of what he insists on calling a field to include 'the whole of oikoumenê, the entirety of our planetary biosphere' (63). The sheer number of names and works marshaled in support of this ambitious program is truly mind-boggling. (There are, however, three significant omissions: the linguists Henning Andersen and Raimo Anttila, and the ornithologist Luis Baptista.) Part II ('The masters') is a series of eight essays, all but one of which (on the connection between Peirce and Saussure) are calculated to memorialize scholars who have contributed to the 'science of signs' in greater or lesser degree and with whom S feels a particular affinity: Uexkiill, Gyula Laziczius, Roman Jakobson, John Lotz, and Joseph Greenberg. In the case of the latter three linguists (with one of whom S shares a Hungarian background ), the account relies on personal acquaintance of long standing. S motivates his singling out of men whose impact on inquiry into semiosis is hardly commensurable by (once again) widening the compass of the word 'masters', in a double meaning to embrace 'any agent that utters and any patient that interprets [a sign], any organism, be it man, woman, child, speechless creature ... in short, you or me' (xiii). One of the distinctive features of S's approach to his subject is an eschewal of critical controversy. The 'ecumenicalism' which he advocates (61-83) is evidently incompatible with partis pris. Nevertheless, he occasionally allows some sort of value judgment, albeit in attenuated form, e.g. when obliquely taking issue with Eco's utterly misguided attempt at 'debunking' Peirce's notion of icon (115)—or when assessing (though quite erroneously) Jakobson's grounds in taking sides in a dispute between two former students (227). The book is splendidly produced, and has the welcome feature of being supplied with many photographs and illustrations. [Michael Shapiro, UCLA.] Language and style. By E. L. Epstein. London: Methuen, 1978. Pp. xii, 92. Cloth $12.50, paper $5.95. Epstein's short work offers a concise discussion of a number of topics contained within the vast realm of literary 'style'. Chap. I is dominated by the question of the perception of personal style; here E presents a schema (6-7) whereby each apperceptive level of style 'acts as the identificative dimension of the succeeding level', enabling the perceiver to perform increasingly refined detective work and attribution. Chap. II, 'Types of linguistic criticism', relies on speech-act theory to help determine the characterization of styles through such features as 'rhetorical' questions. Chaps. III-IV grapple with the central thesis of the book, which is an attempt to demarcate public and private stylistic elements, often resulting in a conflation of privateness and uniqueness (which I would roughly define as a single instance of the 'public' elements). This commitment to the impossible task of clearly segregating shared, public patterns of articulation from intonation, phonology, and syntax leads E to assert, for example, the 'comparative lack of intonational structures in the acoustic texture of casual conversation' (40) as compared with those in poetry. (This statement is puzzling in view of the dependence of the casual utterance, such as Mm-hmm, upon intonation for almost its entire significance .) According, to E, such features as transition difficulties, excesses of information words with a concomitant increase in major stresses, 'emergency' phonology (41), and a paralinguistic slowing of tempo explain the obstructed style of performance of difficult poetry (including that of silent reading). Insofar as the distinction between form and content can be clear at all, it does not actually coincide...