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230 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 68, NUMBER 1 (1992) rejects the recognition oftypes, without offering a serious alternative. Chs. 1-3 are purely philosophic in character and topic. 'Peirce and the type-token relation' (8-30) argues for an inherent conflict in the statements by the philosopher who proposed the distinction. ? survey of some writings on the type-token relation' (31-61) reviews issues that have been raised by several philosophers; The type-token relation and the aesthetic object' (62-91) examines a parallel that some theoreticians see to the abstract existence and concrete realization of works of art, and also to the score and the performance of a symphony. The next three chapters focus more narrowly on linguistics, providing theoretical discussions of selected publications and issues. 'Linguistic abstraction and linguistic knowledge' (92-125) examines statements by Ferdinand de Saussure, Hugo Schuchardt, Leonard Bloomfield, Otto Jespersen, Louis Hjelmslev, William Labov, and others. 'Grammaticality' (126-38), understood as a property of the type, is claimed not to exist. Ch. 6, 'The grammatical hierarchy' (139-61), is supposed to relate the type-token distinction to the conventional levels of language organization, but in fact H discusses context , abstraction, behaviorist approaches, and the mental lexicon in this chapter. In the 'Conclusion ' (162-68), after summarizing some issues , H explicitly admits that he is interested, not in a 'more precise or noncontradictory formulation ' of the type-token problem, but rather in 'the ontology of the linguistic system'. This is a philosophical, metatheoretical book, a succession of statements, views, and tacit assumptions made explicit, with H frequently surmising what an author may actually have meant or what may be implied by some statement. Refusing to accept types and tokens as analytical tools in a model, H keeps asking for their precise 'mode of being', frequently switching between extremely sophisticated and plain common sense considerations. Although the level of abstraction and discussion is high and the author takes pains to clarify his intentions, always providing intermediate summaries, even linguistic theory cannot do without language—nowhere do we find a detailed discussion of a single example or real linguistic feature. Many topics for which the type-token relation is immediately relevant are plainly ignored: there is no comment on emic vs. etic units or the status of structuralists ' 'allo'-forms; no mention of concepts such as lexeme, lexicalization, polysemy, sememe , or prototypes; hardly anything on morphemes or phonemes, or on the purported constant semantic identity of certain syntactic structures under transformations; and nothing on the sociolinguistic concept of variables and their variants. Some statements are just untenable —e.g. that there is 'no dispute about the nature of the linguistic system and of linguistic communication' between Labov (whose views are rendered inadequately) and Chomsky (124), that native speaker intuitions are invalid because they are not shared by speakers of other languages (136), or that the nature of a syntactic construction is purely additive (140-1). A philosopher's impression may be different, but as an ordinary empirical linguist I did not find these deliberations particularly enlightening or helpful. [Edgar W. Schneider, Freie Universität Berlin.] Report on Russian morphology as it appears in Zaliznjak's grammatical dictionary. By Eeva Ilola and Arto Mustajoki. (Slavica Helsingiensia , 7.) Helsinki: University of Helsinki, 1989. Pp. 235. If you are fascinated by statistical arcana about the morphology of Russian, then this is the browsing book you have been dreaming of. Ilola & Mustajoki have taken a Soviet-made computer-readable version of A. A. Zaliznjak's Grammaticeskij slovar' russkogo jazyka (Moscow : Russkij jazyk, 1977) and have performed very extensive searches to produce 233 tables containing all manner of statistical generalizations about the morphology and phonology of contemporary standard Russian. We can learn, for example, that there are 7 masculine nouns ending in the consonant b which have fixed desinential stress (96), that there are 10 adjectives whose stems contain 10 syllables (109), that in 20.6% of Russian imperfective lst-conjugation verbs with the suffix -a, pre-suffixal / undergoes mutation (166), and so forth. The raw statistical tables are accompanied by running annotations and examples, sometimes rather interesting. However, there is no analytical discussion of the significance of the statistical data for the linguistic...

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