Beyond the sentence: Discourse and sentential form Ed. by Jessica R. Wirth (review)

732 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 62, NUMBER 3 (1986) briefly as he decides what to talk about next and how to talk about it. C relates pauses to both structure and content, and suggests that 'a considerable proportion of hesitating stems from the need to verbalize something that is low in codability' (88). The next group of three articles deals with some meanings and uses of silence. D. Tannen 's article on silence avoidance among New York Jews of Eastern European background is quite weak. T repeats material from many ofthe other articles in the anthology without achieving any synthesis. Her own material is anecdotal and unanalysed; she reinforces a common stereotype without adding to our understanding. D. N. Maltz's discussion of 'noise' in Pentecostal worship tries to deal with too many different kinds ofdata (participant observations, personal documents, theological history); but he finally makes some interesting points about the nonarbitrary contrast between Pentecostal noise and Quaker silence, arguing that 'silence is an appropriate response to a world perceived as noisy, and noise is an appropriate response to a world perceived as silent' (131). The best article in this section is P. Gilmore's analysis of silence and sulking as 'emotional displays ' in the urban classroom (Ch. 8). He explicates what teachers seem to mean by 'good' and 'bad' attitude, showing how a student who displays the former gains access to valuable resources . The discussion of 'silence displays' by teachers as well as students is imaginative, and backed by extended descriptive data. The treatment of 'stylized sulking' is sensitive, and would be useful to both new and experienced teachers who are faced with similar behavior. The next three papers are less 'cross-cultural' studies than characterizations of the predominant uses of silence in three quite different societies . Each (G. R. Saunders on Italy, G. Nwoye on the Igbo ofNigeria, and J. Lehtonen & K. Saja?AARA on Finland) is thin on data and stereotyped in conclusions. In the final section, S. Philips twists and stretches afew ideas about the opposition oftalk to silence without shedding much light on her topic, while A. Kendon presents some interesting materials on the place of gesture in discourse . Though K's paper does not really belong in a volume on silence, he raises some important issues and presents hypotheses that may be testable, e.g. that speakers 'often call upon gesture because words alone are not adequate to the task of representation that they have set for themselves' (232). Abrief annotated bibliography concludes the volume. Perspectives on silence is a redundant and oddly organized collection, worth dipping into mainly for the contributions of Scollon, Chafe, Gilmore, and Kendon. Most of the authors would benefit from confronting the issues raised in Stephen Tyler's book, The Said and the unsaid . [Philip K. Bock, University of New Mexico.] Beyond the sentence: Discourse and sentential form. Ed. by Jessica R. Wirth. Ann Arbor: Karoma, 1985. Pp. viii, 114. $10.50. These papers from a symposium at the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, in March 1980, aim to show that 'variation in syntax can be explained only by recourse to discourse and pragmatic concepts and principles' (viii). G. Sanders & J. Wirth, 'Discourse, pragmatics , and linguistic form' (1-19), observe that sentence grammars can describe decontextualized linguistic forms and meanings or the set of constituent orders possible in a language; but such grammars cannot explain utterance meaning , or the implications of choosing one form or one sequence over another which also meets syntactic well-formedness conditions. To achieve such goals, it is necessary to go beyond the sentence to the discourse which contains it, and to invoke the pragmatic principles that structure the discourse. S&W point out that a newish area like discourse analysis has problems in determining the significant concepts in the field, the best entry point for analysis, and the best terms to choose (from the variety instituted by different scholars). Care must be taken to differentiate definitional properties from empirical facts about the definiendum. R. Dunbar, 'Context and syntax: The effect of discourse pragmatics on clause structure in German' (21-9), notes that German supposedly has the verb second (V-2) in main clauses, and final in subordinate clauses; but infact, standard...