Noam Chomsky: A bibliography By L. S. Ramaiah and T. V. Prafulla Chandra (review)

710 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 62, NUMBER 3 (1986) and tested, and the range of data expanded to cover other system types—as well as historical change. The domain hypothesis is admittedly too strong: Can it be modified so it will work? Other claims by M may also be incorrect, such as his statement that negative morphological conditions, which specifically exclude certain forms, relate only to general cases, not to special ones; M then must resort to a questionable 'redundancy rule' when the special case of -s plural doesn't apply to Dutch words in -isme. This ploy simply immunizes his claim from falsification. Finally, a comparison with theories other than generative morphology would be helpful; cf. the interesting proposals by U. Wurzel, Flexionsmorphologie undNatürlichkeit (1984), who considers productivity dependent on the stability and typological congruity of inflection classes in a language. In spite of these criticisms, M's study is important in focusing attention on morphological creativity and on the paradigmatic axis of morphological structure, as well as for the challenges it presents to generative morphology. Perhaps it can provide a viable general framework to investigate morphological systems and morphological change—areas which, despite recently renewed interest and research, are still badly in need of firm theoretical foundations. [Thomas F. Shannon, Berkeley.] Noam Chomsky: A bibliography. By L. S. Ramaiah and T. V. Prafulla Chandra. (Subject bibliography series , 7). Gurgaon: Indian Documentation Service, 1984. Pp. viii, 92. $12.00. Bibliography, by its very nature, can be risky. With a still-active scholar as the topic ofinquiry, even the latest compilation will necessarily miss the most recent items; and with a prolific writer like Chomsky, whose work ranges over many topics and disciplines, there is always the danger of a lack of comprehensiveness. R&Cs admirable attempt suffers somewhat on both counts. Though their book was published in 1984, the bibliographical entries end with 1982. It postdates (and cites) both H. Weydt's bibliography (Noam Chomskys Werk, Tübingen, 1976) and that ofW. Karrer & E. Palascak (Language Sciences 40.8-16, 1976); but it does not give the full range of bibliographic details, especially as to reprintings, which are found in the others (nor does it provide commentary and annotations , as they do). Finally, though R&C attempt to integrate Chomsky's political and linguistic writings, much is undoubtedly omitted (e.g. newspaper articles) in the political sphere. The book contains a perfunctory 'biographical note' (pp. vi-vii) which, while giving some basic information on Chomsky's life, nonetheless includes such evaluative and therefore arguable statements as 'this innovative system [Transformational or Generative Grammar] was responsible for a revolution in linguistic studies ', and 'he is a genius'. The major part of the book, a list of 'works on Noam Chomsky' (pp. 25-92), is potentially useful, but does not quite achieve utility. What one finds is an odd assortment of works which mention Chomsky in some way, ordiscuss some aspect of his linguistic, philosophical, and psychological hypotheses. There is no rationale to the selection, which does not even approach exhaustiveness or completeness (probably an impossible task); it is apparently not even the case that a complete listing of reviews of Chomsky's books is included. A further problem with the book is the occurrence of incomplete references (e.g. to Chomsky 1968a on p. 9, to Chomsky 1969c on p. 10, to Chomsky 1974b on p. 17, to the Lori Davis article on p. 36, and to the England book on p. 39). In such entries, some of or all the following data are omitted: publisher, place and year of publication, volume and page numbers. R&C give some references to unpublished papers (e.g. Chomsky & Miller 1957, Chomsky 1959a); these are perhaps helpful to the historian oflinguistics, but pointless for most users, given the unavailability of the works. Finally, there are a number of typos, though most are selfcorrecting . On the positive side, R&C do include several works not given in the other bibliographies, even for the period up to 1976; of course, they also cover the period from 1976 to 1982. So even with its flaws, this bibliography can be of use until superseded by a yet more recent and complete compilation. Two such have recently been announced...