In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Languages within language: An evolutive approach by Ivan Fónagy
  • Alan S. Kaye
Languages within language: An evolutive approach. By Ivan Fónagy. (Foundations of semiotics 13.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2001. Pp. xiii, 828. ISBN: 1-55619-038-7. $114.00.

The author states that this book has been years in the making (xi), and even a cursory glance at the enormous bibliography (699–784) is proof enough that much effort has been exerted gathering information in semiotics, linguistics, psychology (especially Freud), and related fields. The volume proved difficult to read for two main reasons. First, the seventeen chapters are disjointed and struggle desperately, unsuccessfully in my view, to amalgamate such diversified topics as jokes and metaphor, poetic language, gestures, intonation and music, semantic erosion, the cliché, euphemisms, cacophemisms, and so on, into a cohesive whole. Second, the style is cumbersome, for example, in word choice, note ‘evolutive’ (in the title—for ‘evolutionary’), and the author’s admission concerning his ‘predominantly French and Hungarian language habits’ (xiii). Furthermore, the documentation is superfluous, often to the point of distraction. For instance, page 610 has 5 lines of text with 41 lines of footnotes on ‘style’ with references to publications from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the numerous descriptions of ‘style’ offered detract from the overall content, including one which bespeaks the waste of it all: ‘style is a misleading and meaningless concept which must be discarded’ (611).

I shall restrict the following remarks to a few details apt to concern general linguists. Ch. 1, ‘Diversity of the lexicon’ (1–17), takes up the topics of arbitrariness and iconicity, among other interrelated subjects, but erroneously maintains that onomatopoetic words are arbitrary (2). Granted, the cock’s crow is conventionally rendered cock-a-doodle-doo in English and kokekokkoo in Japanese, that is, similar but not identical, but the sound of a cat’s meow is something like [miaw] in German, French, Spanish, Hebrew, Chinese, and Japanese ([niaw]), thus disproving the thesis; these forms are not wholly arbitrary.

Ch. 10, ‘Playing with language: Joke and metaphor’, contains a wealth of data about jokes, including many actual illustrations (275–336), though with a hyperbolic generalization: ‘If we acknowledge children’s presence in our conversations, we unwittingly change our manner of speaking: we become somewhat more serious than usual’ (275). If this were true, why would the author’s housekeeper’s wife remark to his two-year-old son: ‘If you don’t wipe your feet on the mat I’ll cut them off’ (276)? This is a good example of the reverse—of becoming silly or ‘just joking’ when involving a child in a humorous interaction.

Ch. 13, ‘The semantic structure of possessive constructions’, contains data from many languages about various types of possessive constructions (e.g. Hebrew, Persian, Turkish, Japanese, Samoan, Adyghe [Upper Circassian]). One conclusion is that dates may govern a possessive in English, for example, the fifth of December, but not in French or German (515).

Ch. 14, ‘Semantic structure of punctuation marks’, discusses the various functions of punctuation marks (531–61). Among the claims made is that the German and Hungarian rules for commas are strictly syntactic, but not so in English and French (532, fn. 2).

Ch. 15, ‘Why gestures?’, is a review of the literature in this area with little originality (562–86). Unfortunately, it is not very relevant today to read that Cicero and Quintilian ‘considered gestures an integral part of speech’ (read ‘communication’—ASK) (562).

Ch. 17, ‘Languages within language: Dynamics and evolution’ (601–98), postulates that ‘metaphor is at the centre of linguistic change and evolution’ (635). This perspective remains to be proven.

A reader would need much patience in attempting to get through this volume—a virtue which may garner only scant reward. [End Page 652]

Alan S. Kaye
California State University, Fullerton
...

pdf

Share