Grammatičeskoe var'irovanie v moldavskom jazyke: Nekotorye aspekty. [Grammatical variation in the Moldavian language: Selected aspects.] By M. A. Gabinsku (review)

BOOK NOTICES 239 even if directed to an actual auditor or a group of auditors, may be intended for two different addressees, defined as 'patients of illocutionary acts' (38). Thus, L'ordre sera maintenu coûte que coûte, uttered by a politician, is concurrently a promise addressed to 'good' citizens and a threat to 'bad' citizens (39). Quotations, or any kind of reportive or quotative expression (à ce que dit X, il paraît que), have two 'énonciateurs; defined as 'agents of illocutionary acts'. This explains the difference between car 'for', and puisque 'since', as in Sortons, car il fait beau 'Let's go out, for the weather is fine' vs. Eh bien sortons, puisqu' (*car) ilfait beau 'OK, let's go out, since [you say] the weather is fine.' Here puisque is used whenever the 'énonciateur' (here making a concession to the addressee by Eh bien) is different from the quoted speaker. Although D does not claim to deal with French syntax or with discourse strategy, he more than occasionally offers syntactic information , stating such rules as: ? general feature of morphemes used as connectors between two discrete acts ofenunciation is that they generate structures to which neither negation, nor interrogation , nor embedding can apply' (209). He has also produced a work which is essential for everyone interested in 'argumentation in language '—and, because of the rare intelligence of the analyses, for every linguist who is not exclusively 'l'homme des phrases' (18) or does not think the study of speech performance or of texts to be an inaccessible dream. [Jacques M. Julien, University of Texas, Austin.] Grammaticeskoe var'irovanie ? moldavskom jazyke: Nekotorye aspekty . [Grammatical variation in the Moldavian language: Selected aspects.] By M. A. Gabinsku. (Akademija Nauk Moldavskoj SSR, Institutjazyka i literatury.) Kisïnëv:§tüníá, 1980. Pp. 222. Rb. 2.10. This is, paradoxically, a depressing book, though one written by a versatile and sophisticated author. The first paradox, to be sure, is not of G's making: The language spoken in the Moldavian Autonomous Republic (ethnic splinter groups apart)—which, stretching from the Prut to the Dnestr rivers, forms part of the USSR—has traditionally been known as the Bessarabian subdialect of the Moldavian dialect of Daco-Rumanian (or of Rumanian for short), a language which before 1850 was sometimes called Wal(l)acho-Moldavian (e.g. in the title of Ja. Ginkulov's grammatical treatise [St. Petersburg , 1840], to which G often refers). At present, a major part of Moldavia—around the cities ofIasi, GaIaJi, and Bacäu—remains inside Rumania and looks to Bucharest for guidance, continuing to use Latin script. But the newly landlocked KiSinëv area, for which G acts as spokesman, has adopted a Neo-Cyrillic alphabet based on Russian (before 1860, Rumanians used a Paleo-Cyrillic alphabet rooted in Church Slavonic). All this tends to make the label 'Moldavian ' as equivocal as 'Macedonian' has been for ages; the situation is far more complex than in the case of Serbian vs. Croat. In any event, for advanced scholarship and science Russian has become the standard language in the KiSinëv territory, as it was of course on most levels under the Czars. A second paradox, for which G (a seasoned Balkanologist) cannot be blamed either, is the fact that—obviously for local political reasons —the Russian equivalent of the word 'Rumanian ', which in Moscow-sponsored publications seems perfectly admissible, is never used in this book except in scattered footnote references to older foreign studies and, sporadically , in the appended bibliography. This is not an isolated instance of a novel category of taboo; the tendency has been pointed out before , in a dispassionate (or, rather, compassionate ) tone, by an impartial and highly competent observer, Scandinavia's ranking Dacologist Alf Lombard, in his generally favorable review of an etymological dictionary project—for which G, incidentally, has been coresponsible . In stumbling over 'trans-Danubian varieties of Daco-Romance' and similar paraphrases , one learns to read between the lines. A third paradox, however—namely, the bizarre structure of the entire book—must, I suspect , be squarely laid at G's door. The title page informs the reader, in small print, that the text has been...