Language and experience in 17th-century British philosophy By Lia Formigari (review)

398 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 67, NUMBER 2 (1991) enteenth-century contrast between final action (PS) and currently relevant action (PC) (65). Subjects showed little significant social or demographic variation in their use of PC and PS, although middle-class subjects tended to use more PS than those whose parents were manual laborers, and subjects from the West and South of France tended to use more than those from Paris, the North, and the East (100). Ch. 5 (102-14) sets up a hierarchy of rules for tense choice between PC and PS. The only rule deemed obligatory is that PS is used when the axis of orientation or point of view is retrospective (Bull's RP-V), in which case the PS functions much like a pluperfect or past anterior (113). Other rules accounting for the various factors investigated are presented on a sliding scale of influence of tense choice (2,103-4). The conclusion (Ch. 6, 115-22) calls for more research with a wider variety of approaches, such as a study of children's acquisition of the PS as they try to use it in telling stories (120), and investigation of the use of the 'picturesque imperfect ', the historic present, and the historic future for past punctual narration (121). This last is a potentially fruitful field of inquiry. Like the Waugh & Monville-Burston study cited above, Engel's work uses newspaper articles as raw material for investigation of the use of one or two tenses, but does not integrate them into a broader description of tense choice in the French newspaper narrative, a unique prose genre with its own genre-specific tense choice rules. [Clyde Thogmartin, Iowa State University of Science and Technology.) Language and experience in 17th-century British philosophy. By Lia Formigari. (Studies in the History of Language Sciences, 48.) Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins , 1988. Pp. 178. $36.00. Crediting Bacon with charging 17th-century British linguistics with 'a kind of skepticism which tends to stress the shortcomings of language and advocate reform or even invent new languages, in order to adapt them to the real needs of communication' (1), F develops her history around the notion that Bacon's distrust of language was the catalyst for restructuring Renaissance linguistics. In fact, she organizes her book according to her thesis that there were three major evolutionary consequences of Bacon 's philosophy of language: scholars were first led to discover the imperfection of natural languages; then they developed artificial languages to replace natural languages; and finally, since they realized that artificial languages were prone to the same imperfections as were natural languages, they formulated semantic theories based on the constituents of thought. She concludes her book with an excellent bibliography that contains many rarely-cited sources. In the first section F points to John Wilkins' Mercury, a manual advancing a system of cryptography , as the start of a long line of works influenced by Bacon's distrust of natural language . She traces the intriguing 17th-century debate over whether or not the ideal language, Adamic language, was perfect; and she moves to Seth Ward's vision of constructing an artificial language which would be free of all the imperfections that creep into natural languages. She comments on John Webster's view, different from Ward's, that an artificial language should not be based on words but on Chineselike characters which would indicate the philosophical nature of their referents. F concludes her first section with a discussion of Thomas Hobbes' insistence that language is functional in that it is invented as needs dictate, so that neither Adamic language nor any natural language could remain perfect, because of an everchanging context. In her second section, F accurately traces the development of philosophical languages—artificial systems designed for international communication , which relied on symbols reflecting the philosophical nature oftheir referents. Thus, in a philosophical language, the speaker says as well as defines the word. Although she cites a large number of contributors to the movement, she draws mainly on the works of William Holder, George Dalgarno, Francis Lodwick, Commenius, and Wilkins. Surprisingly, she takes a rather well-discussed topic— 17th-century English linguistic scholarship—and offers a number of fresh insights...