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  • Discussion Note
  • Sanford B. Steever

Steever replies: Author Schiff man states that, apart from the 125 lapses in copyediting, typesetting, and the like—whose incidence would surely trigger a recall in a more mundane consumer product, the remaining 125 criticisms maybe dismissed because they are not really problems at all but merely reflect a philosophical difference between author and reviewer. The difference S would urge us to accept, however, strikes me as less lofty than the term ‘philosophical’ suggests: The grammars that linguists tend to prefer, pedagogical or scholarly, are those based on clear, accurate, and reasoned descriptions of the language. It is the dearth of such qualities in RGST that places its utility in serious doubt. Readers may decide for themselves whether, for example, the book’s numerous errors of fact should be treated as copyediting gaffes or philosophical differences.

Since RGST is not a biography, the author’s intentions, experiences, classroom anecdotes, etc., matter only as they directly in form the book; to the extent they do not, they constitute digressions irrelevant to its content. S’s most explicit statement of purpose (p. i, repeated on the dust jacket) notes that he wrote RGST to make it ‘accessible to students studying the modern spoken language as well as to linguists and other specialists [emphasis added]’. The book is actively marketed to linguists; it is not structured as an ordinary language text, and its references cite the scholarly not the pedagogical literature. For these reasons and others, no special explanation is required for writing a linguistically oriented review of RGST.

The use of Tamil writing to represent ST is not objectionable in itself, only when it is used, as in RGST, to obscure the text and detract from such substantive issues as the accurate description of the language. Whether RGST’s examples can successfully function in spoken Tamil is not raised in the review; but since S asserts a radical difference between WT and ST (i), the use of written sources to supply examples of spoken Tamil undermines his claim that he is writing about the spoken variety. My review calls not for a linguistically informed survey of the grammatical literature on Tamil but merely for RGST to take seriously a dozen or so of the works cited in the body and listed in the references. It is not their methods and models which should concern the ordinary language student but their empirically superior descriptions.

Both RGST and the author’s reply confuse grammatical terms with the linguistic realities they purport to describe; in doing so, S trivializes Paramasivam’s elegant analysis as a mere terminological alternative when in fact it provides a far more satisfactory description of paired verbs than S does. Despite S’s stated aversion to fancy linguistic terminology, he introduces such terms as ‘performative’ and ‘illocutionary force’ in the book. In sum, RGST’s use of ‘transitivity’ is as careless and unmotivated as its use of ‘illocutionary force’.

S’s reply would skirt the critical process by suggesting that his 30 years of teaching experience validate RGST, whatever its shortcomings maybe. However, with so few substantive changes between the 1979 and the 1999 versions, as well as the problems common to both, the last 20 years seem not to have figured very prominently in that experience. The reply discusses various intentions, beliefs, and speculations apart from the text: One belief attributed to me is that S ‘either ignored this material, was unaware of it, failed to comprehend it, or failed in [his] responsibility to present the issue’. Such conclusions presuppose that he was paying attention to the issues; as the many lapses in the production values of the book attest, it is equally possible that he was not. Finally, S’s claim that mine is the most negative review he has ever read needs to be understood in this context: The review is not unrelated to the content of his book. [End Page 559]

[Received 19 March 2001;
accepted 19 March 2001]
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