L'enfant aux deux langues By Claude Hagège (review)

REVIEWS139 to do an act, for instance) is essentially the goal of the interaction. G's interactional effects (such as 'threatens r's negative face') are not goals in the sense that one can mark them as 'achieved' at some point (as one can the transactional effect) but are perhaps better described as indirect consequences of making a request. Furthermore, the interactional effect can vary greatly depending on the relationship between initiator and responder, as well as other factors. I should emphasize that everything that G says about the topic seems otherwise quite sensible; it simply strikes me as very difficult to formalize this aspect of interactions, and indeed G seems to incorporate interactional effects into his interaction structures somewhat half heartedly. Ch. 5, 'Indirect speech acts' (121-40), addresses the question of whether there are conventionalized indirect speech act forms. G discusses three familiar theories of indirect speech acts and concludes that what matters is not so much the form of utterances like Could you pass the salt but rather the context in which they are used. G elaborates on this problem in Ch. 6 ('Conventions of use', 141-83), in which he proposes the existence of a 'pragmatic stratum' that maps semantic features, pragmatic meaning features, politeness, style, and register features into linguistic features that determine the forms of utterances. In particular, he discusses the noncompositional nature of colloquial request forms. G also introduces discourse representation theory (DRT; Kamp and Reyle 1993) in this chapter. In Ch. 7 ("The structure of conversation', 184-214) G shows how DSAT can be incorporated into DRT. Some basic knowledge of DRT would be helpful in fully appreciating these chapters. The book ends by sketching how a conversation machine might generate contextually appropriate utterances that are consistent with a communicative plan. Both speech act theorists and conversational analysts have tended to be pessimistic about the prospects of marrying speech act theory to conversational analysis. DSAT goes a long way towards demonstrating how this goal can be achieved. REFERENCES Kamp, Hans, and Uwe Reyle. 1993. From discourse to logic: Introduction to model theoretic semantics of natural language, formal logic and discourse representation theory. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Searle, John R. 1969. Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Loyola Law School 1441 West Olympic Boulevard Los Angeles, CA 90015-3980 [ptiersma@lmulaw.lmu.edu] L'enfant aux deux langues. By Claude Hagège. Paris: Éditions Odile Jacob, 1996. Pp. 298. Reviewed by H. Stephen Straight, Binghamton University (SUNY)* Even the title of this important book resonates with overtones of recognition, irony, and promise. The first construal of the title that would occur to most linguists and perhaps a fair number of general readers is 'the bilingual child'. This construal would correspond to an expectation for a review of research on child bilinguality by the most illustrious French linguist of our day. Claude Hagège—the first linguist to be awarded the Gold Medal of the CNRS (in 1995, following the likes of anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in 1967 and sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in 1993)—does not entirely disappoint this expectation, but the purpose of his book is more political than scientific: In a second possible construal, the enfant of the title is the typical French child, and the deux langues are French and some other language this child will study in school. * The content of this review benefited materially from the advice of Mats Oscarson, who occupied the National Foreign Language Center Mellon Fellow office adjacent to mine in spring 1996, and Sanda GoIopentia . 140LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 1 (1998) H openly and provocatively addresses what may well be the most pressing question ofeducational policy today: how to prepare French schoolchildren—and by extension schoolchildren across Europe and around the world—for the multilingualism that will pervade the 21st century.1 The first four chapters (the 'Première partie') of this thirteen-chapter book focus on 'Les blocages de l'adulte et les grâces de l'enfant', though H's choice of words as usual provides rich multiple interpretations, among which are (1) adult difficulty in acquiring languages (blocages) as nationalistic 'blockading' or even as the 'rubble...