Lexicographical and linguistic studies. Essays in honour of G. W. Turner (review)

Reviews 125 excellendy researched, weU-judged and highly analytic piece on Wace's Roman deBrut. The secret is to be simply complex, without complication. She writes about an author in context, noting matters of audience, history and how they interrelate with the reformation of the text from its source twenty years before in Geoffrey of Monmouth. H o w convergent, in reality. What Blacker-Knight enlightens is how Wace, in her word, 'depoliticises' his source, taking out much of its Britishness and Normanness as well. She claims that Wace shapes a royal and Arthurian myth. H e removes the Merlin prophecies and makes the action and its analysis more systematically courdy and unproblematically royal. This argument is well put, without fuss or frill. It puts Wace in a much stronger position than he has previously had in the transmission of the legend and explains much more fully the explosion of the legend in France and in French. The piece also establishes Blacker-Knight as a scholar worth following. Inside the pleasant frame of Ashe and Moorman, and handy as a few of them are, these essays basically form a set that only good friends or kindly supervisors would have gathered. It would be better for us all if they had stayed in the journals where they would need to work harder to converge on our attention. But, for a while anyway, the collection is worth it for Blacker-Knight. Stephen Knight Department of English University of Melbourne Burton, T. L. and J. Burton, eds, Lexicographical and linguistic studies. Essays in honour ofG. W. Turner, Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 1988; cloth; pp. xix, 202; R. R. P. £29.50. George Turner, Reader in the English Department of the University of Adelaide since 1965, is praised, in an introductory tribute by Ian Reid, for his 'dual inclinations' towards linguistics and literary scholarship. This volume does indeed honour such a writer and reader for it offers matter to satisfy a plurality of interests. George Turner is also quoted as saying that 'the most important problem in writing' is 'imagining an appropriate audience' and this volume assumes a diverse audience, including papers accessible to the general reader and papers of more specific academic interest T w o articles on lexicography would interest all who are interested in words: 'Dictator, gatekeeper, tally clerk or harmless drudge?' by Arthur Delbridge and P. H. Peters, and 'Horses for courses: the design of smaller dictionaries for particular users', by W . A. Krebs. Delbridge and Peters write on the roles a lexicographer might adopt, and the perhaps incompatible expectations that users may bring to a dictionary. In particular they discuss the lexicographer's difficulties in dealing with compounds. See also T. L. Burton on compounds, 126 Reviews below, and Luise Hercus and R. M . W . Dixon also. Krebs discusses the special problems he encountered when preparing two small dictionaries 'of a size which can comfortably be held in one hand', aimed at a specific audience: 'schoolchildren of upper primary level'. With hindsight, reading in the field of child language has given Krebs some insight into the different types of definition he had intuitively framed as more suitable for chddren. Definition by functional properties, rather than by concrete perceptual features or taxonomic positioning, appears to be more appropriate. I was reminded of the characteristics of definition by respondents in an oral culture, as described by Walter J. Ong in Orality and Literacy. The general reader will also enjoy, I think, the article by Ian Reid on epitaphs, 'A register of deaths?' and that by Haydn Williams on a little known nineteenth-century linguist, 'George Borrow: the word-master as hero'. Reid's lively discussion of numerous recorded Australian epitaphs is entertaining. His discussion of the theoretical positioning of his work (Hallidayan linguistics and Derridean literary theory) is less successful, perhaps because of lack of explanatory space in such a volume. Haydn WiUiams writes of the extraordinary life of Borrow, a young man from Norwich who spoke about twelve languages before he was eighteen. He would learn more. His great interests were Welsh literature and the gypsies and their languages. He travelled with the gypsies in England, and later in Spain...