Studies in Descriptive English Grammar ed. by Dietrich Nehls (review)

BOOK REVIEWS75 discussions of phonological and morphological aspects. Additions are a chapter on contemporary developments in America by Samuel R. Levin and Constantine Kaniklidis which proceeds from the Noam Chomsky focus to transformational-generative syntax and later theories, and a few illustrations by Wayne Phelps. This book is valuable for professors and for students on the upper or graduate level. The companion book has many examples ofOld and Middle English writings and excellent review questions. For the average undergraduate student, however, less on the changing sounds of the language and of its changing form would be preferable, with greater emphasis on cultural changes, especially during postinvasion periods. On the whole, too, one could hope for a better balance of phonological, morphological, syntactical , and semantic information along with more interesting detail of England 's history, and with more of the twentieth century archaeological discoveries that have changed many older theories concerning the English language and the Indo-European family to which it belongs. To use this book with such changes in mind would cause much of the contents of Roots to be omitted. The book is hardbound, with a detailed table of contents, a select bibliography, an index, and some black-and-white illustrations. LINDA J. ROBINSON, Eastern New Mexico University Dietrich Nehls, ed. Studies in Descriptive English Grammar. Heidelberg: Julius Groos Verlag, 1978. 114 p. This anthology of seven articles on the grammatical description of English as a Foreign Language consists of reprints from the /nternationai Review of Applied Linguistics (IRAL) between 1968 and 1977. It represents Volume 1 of Studies in Descriptive Linguistics, a series dedicated to the description of English, German, French, Russian and Spanish. The list of topics covered by these articles will probably agree with what most teachers of English as a Foreign Language consider as stumbling blocks: "A Teaching Grammar of the English Article System," by P. L. McEldowney, "Some Semantic Aspects of Relative Clauses in English," by O. C. Grannis, "Modal 'Auxiliaries' in Generative Grammar," by D. A. Lee, "The System of Tense and Aspect in English," by D. Nehls, "Complex Verbal Structures in English," by G. Nickel (study of the nominalization of certain verbs, ex. He looked at the castle - He had a look at the castle), "A Transformational Justification for English Split Infinitives," by D. W. Foster and "Utterance Rules, Turn-Taking and Attitudes in Enquiry Openers ," by J. R. Crawford. One of the qualities of this anthology is that it will directly face the needs of foreign learners of English to an extent that no manual of linguistics for natives could match. By this I mean not only that it deals with the pedagogy in a typical targetitnse fashion (my own foreign mind gratefully appre- 76ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW ciated the intuition prompted by foreign-language structures expressed in Lee's and Nickel's articles!) and also that it focuses on points that, indeed, baffle foreign learners but frustrate neither the native student or linguist so that they remain ignored by native grammars. My only criticism would be that, among six syntactical pieces (Crawford aiming at the "pragmalinguistic domain"), five openly articulate themselves according to the transformational-generative framework. This is a perfectly respectable choice, but hardly representative of the current distribution in the field of Applied Linguistics. Studies in Descriptive English Grammar will be of great help to students and teachers of English as a Foreign Language. JACQUES LAROCHE, New Mexico State University S. C. Neuman, Gertrude Stein: Autobiography and the Problem of Narration . Victoria, British Columbia: University of Victoria, 1979. p. English Literary Studies, No. 18. Neuman's thesis is that while most autobiographers write as though they were biographers, relating earlier experiences from a later perspective, Gertrude Stein developed increasingly complex theories and practice of narrative voice. The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), with its frontispiece of Toklas standing in an open doorway watching Stein write, uses Alice as ostensible narrator commenting on the real writer; Stein makes the autobiography "impersonal" by inserting distance between the narrator and the author's identity. In such later works as Everybody's Autobiography, Paris, France and Wars I Have Seen Stein strove to recreate being, rather than to remember it, and...