N. S. Trubetzkoy's letters and notes Prepared for publication by Roman Jakobson (review)

424LANGUAGE, VOLUME 53, NUMBER 2 (1977) which is not valid in this sort of intensional context. And even if such substitution were allowed, all that would follow is that A-C means that the chief instantiates the property of being angry—which is still not right. B sees this problem, and tries to meet it by saying that the rule he states is to be 'understood' as not implying what it obviously implies, but rather as entailing, 'A-C means that the chief is angry', which it does not imply (224). But he does not say how we are to understand his rule so that it will have these consequences. B does suggest replacing the word 'that' in his rule with 'something which is true if and only if.' The rule then says ' if s consists in p-n, then s means something that is true if and only if the thing ? names instantiates the property ? connotes.' This entails no particular meaning statements at all, even given assumptions about which things are named or connoted. Finally, B's discussion of syntax contains a number of errors. E.g., the rules he gives for his simple formal language (243) do not accurately capture the relation between variables and variable-binding operators, and therefore they count as well-formed sentences certain expressions with free variables and with variable-binding operators that bind no variables, contrary to his intentions.10 B treates Chomsky's passive transformation as a relation among sentences so as to imply that, because John is hitting Mabel is grammatical, so is Mabel is been hitting by John (249-50). B identifies presenting syntax 'in generative form', i.e. by means of explicit rules, with presenting it in the form of rewriting rules. He claims that the syntax of his formal language can be expressed by phrase-structure rewriting rules, although it would seem that the rule for 'clauses' must clearly be transformational. And, in restating some of his rules as phrase-structure rewriting rules, he changes the structures assigned to sentences, although he claims to be merely expressing the same syntax in a different form (251). REFERENCES Grice, H. P. 1957. Meaning. Philosophical Review 66.337-88. ------. 1968. Utterer's meaning, sentence-meaning, and word-meaning. Foundations of Language 4.225-42. Jeffrey, Richard C. 1965. The logic of decision. New York: McGraw-Hill. Lewis, David K. 1969. Convention. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Quine, W. V. 1960. Word and object. New York: Wiley. [Received 22 September 1976.] N. S. Trubetzkoy's letters and notes. Prepared for publication by Roman Jakobson. The Hague: Mouton, 1975. Pp. xxiii, 506. /190.00. Reviewed by Josef Vachek, Prague Non solum libelli, etiam epistolae fata sua habent ... These words will occur to anyone who goes through the 214 letters written by the great Russian linguist (1890-1938). The majority, 196 of them, were sent to his close friend Roman Jakobson, the editor of this volume. They cover the period between 1920 and 1938, the year of T's untimely death, tragically speeded up by the Nazi occupation of Austria. Other letters were sent to N. N. Durnovo, A. Meillet, J. J. Mikkola, and some others. In addition, the volume includes the texts of T's papers on racism (which was to become the main cause of his persecution by the Nazis) and on L. Tolstoy; a paper by Durnovo, meant originally for the International Conference on 10 In his notation, one example would be ??? B Blank2 Denn C Blank?'. REVIEWS425 Phonology held at Prague in 1930; N. Porzezinski's recommendation of T, dating from as early as 1913, for a professorship at Moscow University; and finally the list of T's courses and seminars given at Vienna University between the years 1923 and 1938. As shown by this survey of the contents, the bulk of the volume consists of T's letters to the editor. All of them are reprinted in their original Russian, with J's editorial apparatus in English. It can only be regretted that the published correspondence is unilateral: J's letters to T have not been preserved, since they were confiscated by the Gestapo searching T's flat, and...