Text, discourse, and process: Toward a multidisciplinary science of texts By Robert de Beaugrande (review)

REVIEWS463 experimental tree' must (cf. Table 7) refer to Fig. 8, though previously it refers to Fig. 7. (It is also used to refer to other trees that occur later.) P. 59, line 2, and p. 60, lines 5-6: for 'U', read TV. P. 87: in the first paragraph, for the link 'think'-'girl', read 'think'-'sorry'. On the branches with 'unique predicates', I don't follow the descriptions of the trees: the first tree referred to (Fig. 18, p. 68) has no case where both branches below a node have unique predicates (i.e., where each predicate dominates only one set of terms); and the other tree (Fig. 22, p. 86) has one such case, not three (Alive-Fix). Again, in the latter tree, four (not five) sets of terms have unique predicates (p. 88, line 12). The desired comparison between the trees persists, but is less striking. Pp. 62 and 205: Levin 1977 is omitted from the bibliography (? = S. R. Levin, The sense of metaphor, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press) Despite these shortcomings of Keil's work, it is interesting to see an empirical , experimental investigation involving such basic ontological concepts, having among its results that a substantial part of the vocabulary of two natural languages (and presumably many more) has a sense-structure that apparently obeys the MC—and further that very young children's rudimentary trees obey it, and continue to do so as they are replaced with more complicated trees. It seems clear that the lines of investigation which Keil has studied deserve to be pursued further. REFERENCES Clark, Herbert H. 1973. Space, time, semantics, and the child. Cognitive development and the acquisition of language, ed. by Timothy E. Moore, 27-63. New York: Academic Press. Katz, Jerrold J. 1966. The philosophy of language. New York: Harper & Row. ------. 1972. Semantic theory. New York: Harper & Row. Sommers, Fred. 1959. The ordinary language tree. Mind 68.160-85. ------. 1963. Types and ontology. Philosophical Review 72.327-63. ------. 1965. Predicability. Philosophy in America, ed. by Max Black, 262-81. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. ------. 1971. Structural ontology. Philosophia 1.21-42. Tversky, A. 1977. Features of similarity. 1977. Psychological Review 84.327-52. Vendler, Zeno. 1967. Linguistics in philosophy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. [Received 21 July 1981.] Text, discourse, and process: Toward a multidisciplinary science of texts. By Robert de Beaugrande. (Advances in discourse processes, 4.) Norwood, NJ: Ablex; London: Longman, 1980. Pp. xv, 351. $27.50; £13.00. Reviewed by Jef Verschueren, Belgian National Fundfor Scientific Research and University ofAntwerp Linguists have for a long time been venturing upon semi-literary analyses and studies of text-related varieties of style—or, in the Neo-Firthian terminology , 'registers'. Until 1970, however, instances ofwhat would now be called 'text linguistics' were scarce—although a handbook of the subject appeared quite early, viz. Dressier 1972. Beaugrande, who co-authored a revised English version of this introduction (Beaugrande & Dressier 1980), realized that Dressler 's original approach, which 'had been to extend the usual linguistic methodology to the domain of texts', was 'too narrow from the perspective of 1980'; we cannot, he says, 'treat texts simply as units larger than sentences, or as 464LANGUAGE, VOLUME 58, NUMBER 2 (1982) sequences of sentences' (p. xi). This point of view, motivating the replacement of 'text linguistics' by 'multidisciplinary science of texts' in his subtitle, is the leitmotif of Text, discourse, and process (TDP). The book is a somewhat strange hybrid between a handbook and a monograph . In principle, no one could object to an attempt at combining a more or less systematic overview of a certain area of scholarship with an exposition of one's personal points of view and the results of one's own investigations. However, in the case of TDP, this mixture—which may have come about unintentionally—seems to be a weakness. Clearly, B's major intent was to present a coherent, though provisional, theory of texts. As a theorizer, he is relatively successful. But the teacher in him leads him to intersperse his treatise with long lists of references—which, useful as they may be, tend to impede reading—and, in addition, he seems to consider it his duty to...