A Comparative Typology of English and German: Unifying the Contrasts by John A. Hawkins (review)

Book Reviews101 Still, reading Frauen-Literatur-Geschichte from cover to cover as I did, my feeling during the first three hundred pages was that I would never make it out of the nineteenth century, and that if I had to read one more time that Sophie La Roche's . . . Fräulein von Sternheim was the first major novel by a woman writing in German (three essays informed me), or Bettina's metier was Briefbücher (likewise three), or Fanny Lewald was a Jewess (two essays), I would throw down the text. Piecemeal reading carries with it the risk that one will pick the wrong sample and not give the stronger essays a chance. Among the most valuable of the editorial contributions are the extensive compilation of "Zitierte und weiterführende Literatur," organized according to concept, and the Register (a test-run on Virginia Woolf evidenced incautious editing here, too; she was to be found neither on page 226 nor 229; she was on the 19 other pages indexed). In summary, I am glad Frauen-Literatur-Geschichte is a part of my library. I recommend it for yours and that of your academic institution. SHEILA K. JOHNSON University of Texas, Austin JOHN A. HAWKINS. A Comparative Typology of English and German: Unifying the Contrasts. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986. 244 p. English and German are among the best described languages in the world. In this book, analyses of both languages are drawn together, and contrasts and similarities between them in major areas of grammar are defined. The author places particular importance on the question of whether contrasts in one area of the grammar are systematically related to contrasts in another. He also seeks to establish whether there is a sense of directionality or unity to contrast throughout the grammar as a whole. What Edward Sapir called "drift" in 1921 has come to be discussed as case syncretism in English, the phenomenon by which the historical accusative and dative cases merged into a single, objective case. This is one of the foundation stones upon which Hawkins has built the elaborate contrastive edifice of this comparative typology. The book is dedicated to Sapir's memory on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of his birth in 1984. Hawkins argues that the interrelated changes which English underwent, largely as a consequence of case syncretism, now result in contrasts with the much more conservative German, and that these changes are more extensive than Sapir realized. Hawkins also acknowledges that many of the contrasts which concern him in this typology were documented by Herbert L. Kufner in The Grammatical Structures ofEnglish and German (1 962), but with the pedagogical goals of the applied linguist. The present study is more concerned with contributing to the goal of building a theory of Universal Grammar. In posing the hypothesis that the relatedness of the major English-German contrasts explains the divergencies, Hawkins concentrates on the areas of grammatical morphology, word order, basic grammatical relations, clause-external movement rules, deletions, and rules of semantic interpretation. He argues that "where the surface structures (morphology and syntax) of English and German contrast, English regularly exhibits greater 'distance' between form and meaning in specifiable ways" (6). 102Rocky Mountain Review The first two-thirds of this study are taken up by an overview of English-German contrasts with numerous examples, concluding in a brief summary of the author's conclusions concerning the "unity of contrasts." The last third examines in more exhaustive detail the specific contrast area of verb position in the two languages. Hawkins successfully argues that the two basic parts of a language's grammar exist inherently in tension: the more complex the rules which generate linguistic forms, the simpler the rules assigning meaning, and vice versa. A thorough understanding of this principle is indispensable for effective contrastive analysis of German and English by language teachers, literary scholars, students, translators, artificial intelligence specialists, typologists, generative grammarians, historical and applied linguists. Regrettably, although the discipline of linguistics has made enormous strides in the past 25 years, not all linguists are as articulate as was Sapir back in 1921 . Hawkins unfortunately formulates interesting premises and persuasive arguments in support of his ideas in...