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BOOK REVIEWS 807 Du Langage, A. Martinet et M. Merleau-Ponty. By GHYSLAIN CHARRON. Editions de L'Universite d'Ottawa, Collection Philosophica, 197~. Pp. 187. This book is a careful and intelligent piece of analysis which will be read with profit by any philosopher interested in the philosophy of language and, more particularly, in the philosophical (i.e., conceptual) investigation of contemporary linguistics. But there is something a little schizophrenic about this work. It consists of two parts which are more juxtaposed than interrelated. The first part is a careful, analytical exposition of the major conclusions of A. Martinet's work in linguistics. The second part is an exposition of the linguistic philosophy of Merleau-Ponty. The purpose of the author, as stated in the preface, is to teach philosophers something of what they need to know about contemporary linguistics and at the same time to teach the linguists why philosophers continue to be interested in the problems of language even after the creation of their new science. Why is it that even after the advent of Structuralism some questions about language still remain which the linguist is incompetent to answer? Charron takes the corpus of Martinet as typical of the structuralist approach to language as it was developing in France from 1980-1960, at the very time during which the first major philosopher of the French (or any other) tradition began to address himself to its problems in their importance for philosophy. This exposition is meant to serve as the basis for a discussion of what the structuralists, on the one side, and the phenomenologists, on the other, have in common in order to focus on the points at which they diverge (if we are hard-headed) or at which they complement one another (if we are more eirenic). The trouble is that the author is very good at putting himself in the place of and in speaking the language of each of the combatants; what does not quite come off is the dialogue which is supposed to take place between them. The section on Martinet's contributions to linguistics will be very useful for the non-specialist philosopher who is unacquainted with linguistics. It is, in fact, an excellent non-technical introduction to the methods of linguistic structuralism as exemplified in the work on phonology by this one author. But it is by the same token considerably out of date and will be of little value to those who have followed the development of linguistics past Martinet up to the present time, since a large number of the theses Martinet propounds arid defends {such as, for instance, his attempt to ·suppress the concept " word " as being insufficientJy rigorous to be useful in scientific linguistics, pp. 45 ff.) can only be fully understood in the light of later criticism, refinement, and development. It will also dissatisfy the linguist inasmuch as we are given here. only Martinet's 808 BOOK REVIEWS conclusions and none of the reasoning which led him to them. While, at the same time, the philosophical reader will remark that Martinet was only one of the structuralists whom Merleau-Ponty read and by whom he was influenced, others, like Saussure and Guillaume especially, had a much wider and deeper influence on him. Nevertheless, in spite of these criticisms, this book serves a good and important service at the present time. Merleau-Ponty was the first major philosopher we know of to concern himself with linguistics as a science and with the importance of this developing science for philosophy. By contrast, until most recently, Anglo-American philosophical analysis (in Wittgenstein, in Ryle, in Austin, in Strawson and their numerous colleagues and followers) has limited itself almost exclusively to the commonsensical analysis of speech-acts without showing much interest in the science of linguistics as such. This state of affairs has now begun to change rapidly, and we find that many of the younger American philosophers of languageparticularly as a result of the challenges of Chomsky and his students-are becoming more and more sensitive to scientific linguistics and its value for philosophy-not only because it gives us a body of scientific literature which nobody, least of all...

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