The Complete Stylist and Handbook by Sheridan Baker (review)

Book Reviews those who are beginning linguists. The text covers the most salient aspects of transformational theory, and shows the overall method of transformational syntactic argumentation. It also provides useful discussions relating the study of individual languages to the investigation of "universal grammar ." In all of this, the author hopes to "foster analytical and critical skills whose meaningfulness will continue long after many of the specific rules and hypotheses have been revised or replaced." The text may accomplish all of this for the dedicated neophyte, but it may also prove discouraging for the uninitiated. The first three chapters, developed very systematically, move slowly, and could prove too tedious for some. Nevertheless, the pace soon picks up and becomes quite ambitious as many topics seldom mentioned in introductory texts are introduced . These include subject raising, strict order hypothesis, partial order hypothesis, cyclic convention, complex NP constraint, rightward movement constraint, and left-branching constraint. These are followed by summaries of arguments regarding semantic interpretive rules, the uses of features, and some relationships between syntax and phonology. The text is thus an introduction to the primary issues arising from Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory ofSyntax, 1965, including arguments and counter arguments. It is a text that a well-trained teacher could use effectively with budding linguists in an introductory syntax class. Overall, it is the kind of text whose analytical, point-by-point argumentation of issues should help the beginning student discover whether rigorous transformational syntax could be his or her "long suit." MELVIN J. LUTHY, Brigham Young University Sheridan Baker, The Complete Stylist and Handbook. 2 ed. New York: Harper & Row, 1980. 494 p. Students who remember passages from a composition text used in a previous year are rare; those who rave about a composition class are rarer yet. A conversation with students of both sorts originally led me to the composition texts of Sheridan Baker. The first was a bright freshman whose excellent essays had prompted me to ask of his training. He replied by describing Baker's "funnel, inverted funnel," and "keyhole" at length, things he had studied in high school, and which had evidently fired his imagination. Later I ran into college seniors who praised highly the course of an advanced composition teacher at Kansas, a professor who I found on inquiry made extensive and fruitful use of Baker's whole text. Such evidence of the quality of Baker's books should not be belittled despite the strong feelings of some who dislike Baker's emphasis on structure, or his theoretical dependence on classical rhetoric. It must be acknowledged, however, that Baker's texts are most useful for brighter students, and that Baker himself has felt the need to revise his texts for students who are less advanced. Thus, an example of a thesis contending that "Mozart's superiority lay in putting musical commonplaces to new uses" in an earlier version becomes "Learning to play the guitar 266VOL 34, NO. 4 (FALL 1980) Book Reviews pays off in friendship" in Baker's revision, and examples could be multiplied . Nevertheless, passages of advanced writing still abound, as do literary references and literary examples, and one suspects that use of Baker's text by teachers originally trained in and most comfortable with literature will continue. The main change in this most recent, 1980 edition isa welcome reduction in length; the 1976 version perhaps tried to do too many things. Otherwise, there is little of importance which is new in the present text. There is, however, one interesting and perhaps significant omission; Baker's description of the classical form of an oration which had held an important place in earlier versions, only to be shifted about later on, has now gone the way of many classical and wonderful things; it has completely disappeared. ROBERT SHENK, Air Force Academy John Barth, Letters. New York: G. P. Putnam, 1979. 772 p. $16.95. John Barth's Letters is an expansive, contrived, ingenious tour de force. Like The Floating Opera and The End Of The Road, it brims with intelligent thought. Like The Sot-Weed Factor and Giles Goat-Boy, it is darkly, comically aware that it is a fictional creation. And like Lost In...