Internordisk språkförståelse: Föredrag och diskussioner vid ett symposium på Rungstedgaard utanför Köpenhamn den 24-26 mars 1980 Ed. by Claes-Christian Elert (review)

486 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 58, NUMBER 2 (1982) men, who maintain that correctness is absolute, and linguists, who argue that usage is relative. Citing e??ef?ß from the English journal, he points out that American educators long held to prescriptivism even though it was clearly in conflict with structuralist linguistics. D concludes with a brief discussion of how transformational -generative theory reinforced the relativity of usage. The dictionary debate over Webster's third (1961) is the subject of Chap. 5. A product of American structuralism, Webster's third presumed that speech is primary, that language changes constantly, that change is normal, that correctness is dependent upon usage, and that usage is relative. In outlining the controversy, D quotes an Episcopalian bishop who linked the permissiveness of Webster's third with Castro's revolution in Cuba. In Chap. 6, D provides a very useful summary ofthe history of popular and scholarly attitudes toward Black English. Drawing upon the research of Labov, D documents the movement away from the labeling of Black English as a remedial problem, and toward awareness that it is simply a dialect of English. Throughout this chapter, it is made clear that one cannot understand the history of the study of Black English without a broad consideration of social factors . Undoubtedly, moral and social responsibility have promoted scholarship on Black English. D's work is not exhaustive, nor is it intended to be the definitive study of American prescriptivism . It has its flaws: the material is often anecdotal, the editorial comments often detract from the scholarship, and many generalizations are unsupported. The work is more a collection of notes than a sustained theory. The treatment of material is often uneven; thus the chapter on Black English is probably the first survey ofthis growing research, but the account of Webster's third has been the subject of too many other studies. Yet the book is important because it represents a growing trend in linguistic historiography : it is strongly based on the notion that extra-linguistic values and events shape linguistic theory. The researcher cannot look at language scholarship as if it were isolated from a social context. [Joseph L. Subbiondo, University ofSanta Clara.] Internordisk sprâkforstâelse: Föredrag och diskussioner vid ett symposium pâ Rungstedgaard utanför Köpenhamn den 24-26 mars 1980. Ed. by Claes-Christian Elert. (Umeá studies in the humanities, 33.) Umeâ, Sweden: Acta Universitatis Umensis, 1981. Pp. 230. Speakers ofDanish, Norwegian, and Swedish form a dialect continuum, containing three (or four) standard languages that are close enough to each other so that mutual comprehension is possible between interlocutors using their native languages. But communication is not perfect : understanding is lowest between Danish and Swedish, although Danes understand Swedes better than vice versa; and the Bokmâl variety of Norwegian is the language best understood by speakers of neighboring languages . These are some ot the findings reported in this conference volume. Conference participants represent a broad spectrum of Scandinavian linguists: Jaakko Lehtonen, Kalevi Wiik, Robert Bannert, Bertil Molde, Sigurd Fries, UIf Teleman (who gave two papers and the concluding remarks), Einar Haugen, Tuomo Tevajärvi, Stig-Örjan Ohlsson, Sven-Gustaf Edqvist, Olaug Rekdal, and ClaesChristian Elert. All the papers are in Swedish— except Haugen's, which is in an orthographically Swedish-accented Norwegian. Topics range widely over experimental, sociolinguistic, psycholinguistic , and pedagogical aspects of the problem. The book concludes with a nine-page summary in English. This book will interest a far wider group than Scandinavian specialists. Anyone interested in problems of language variation and comprehensibility between closely-related languages should find something to spark interest in these pages. [John T. Jensen, University of Ottawa.] A nyelvek közötti kölcsönzes néhány kérdésérôl, különös tekintettel 'elangolosodó' orvosi nyelvünkre. ['On questions of interlingual borrowing , with special reference to the "Anglicization" of medical terminology .'] By Miklos Kontra. (Nyelvtudományi értekezések, 109.) Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1981. Pp. 65. Ft. 15.00. This is a revision of K's 1976 dissertation on interlingual borrowing. The 'Introduction', drawing on S. Ullmann's Principles of seman- ...