Prague Linguistic Circle Papers. Travaux du cercle linguistique de Prague, new series. Vol. 3 (review)

As in the first two volumes of TCLP (see Language 74:194–5), the list of the 23 contributors to this third one is international: Eleven are from the Czech Republic, twelve are from seven foreign countries, including three from the United States. The contents of the volume is also diversified: It is subdivided into sections that deal with the history of ideas, phonology, morphology, sentence structure, language in society, and ‘resounding of ideas’. Most of the papers are versions of lectures delivered in Prague in March 1996 to mark the 70^th anniversary of the Prague Linguistic Circle and the centennial of Roman Jakobson’s birth.

Jakobson’s wide-ranging effect on scholarship related to language and its use is evident throughout the book. In one paper, for example, Linda R. Waugh traces Jakobson’s intellectual influence in America by listing subjects he considered that others went on to pursue: shifters and deixis, the contribution of Charles Sanders Peirce, a multifunctional perspective on communication, the concept of implicational laws, a dynamic view of synchrony, and the pioneering study of language acquisition by children as seen from a universal viewpoint—to mention only a few of the many topics. And because Jakobson explored the relationship of language to literature, semiotics, anthropology, folklore, and other fields, his interdisciplinary contributions were far-reaching. As if all this were not enough, Helmut Schnelle reminds us that research on brain structure and linguistic processing was also stimulated by Jakobson.

All but 3 of the 21 papers are in English (2 are in French, 1 in German), and three-fourths of them are of a general nature. To sample some of the topics: The late Oldřich Leška, one of the coeditors of the volume, writes about the early history of the Prague Linguistic Circle; according to him, the PLC was characterized by flexibility and openness—‘unity in diversity’. By using examples from English, Libuše Dušková shows that in most instances grammatical word order and functional sentence perspective are in basic agreement and points out the devices English has to resort to when the two major word order principles are in conflict. Petr Sgall contributes a typologically oriented discussion of language types and probabilistic implication laws. In his view, full-scale typologies constitute a challenge for language theory and should not be sacrificed to ‘partial typologies’ that have been gaining attention in recent years. Cornelis H. van Schooneveld speculates whether the ordering of phonological distinctive features is structural fact or merely metaphor. Edward Stankiewicz tries to show how the nominal and verbal patterns differ in Slavic, Semitic, and Bantu languages but also points out that the underlying principle of the noun/verb opposition is everywhere the same. And Jiří V. Neustupný attempts to show that ‘the sociolinguistic legacy of the [prewar] Circle was extensive, varied and built on rigorous foundations’ (275). In the opinion of this writer, sociolinguistic aspects of the early circle were only subtle and implicit.

The volume is topically very rich and should appeal to a wide readership. The papers are short and to the point, and the volume is attractive and well-edited.