Language, education & society in a changing world (review)

BOOK NOTICES 195 as Bloomfield never fathomed the profoundness of Prague doctrine' (55). In 'Ferdinand de Saussure and the Prague School of linguistics' (2.59-72), Frantisek Cermák points out that the relationship between the two is more complicated than the commonplace statement that 'de Saussure's influence in Prague is undisputable and clear'. Certain Saussurean principles were notreflected in the writings ofthe members of the Circle, while on the contrary, some linguistic concepts and methods originated in Prague—e.g. the notions of function and of the potentiality of linguistic phenomena. Edwin Battistella contributes two articles on markedness. In 'Jakobson and Chomsky on markedness' (1.55-72), he compares the concept in the Jakobsonian and the Chomskyan traditions, and in 'Marked and unmarked punctuation signs in English ' (2.235-48), he argues that 'punctuation can be understood in terms of a system of marked and unmarked oppositions among punctuation signs. . . [and that] the process of analyzing the binary relations among punctuation signs is itself useful' (2.246). Several generalizations concerning the development of unrelated and typologically distant languages are made by Zuzanna Topoliñska m 'Convergent evolution, creolization and referentiality' (1.239-47), using the Balkan Sprachbund as her source of data. An attempt to show that distinctive feature analysis can successfully be applied also to the study of asymmetrical semantic relationships is the subject of Yishai Tobin's 'Focusing on the negative: A neoPraguean approach' (2.121-55), with Hebrew as the source of examples. The concept of discourse is taken up in several papers. Frantisek Danes in his article "A static view and a dynamic view on text and discourse' (1.185-99) compares and contrasts the two views and in conclusion stresses the importance of a multidisciplinary approach to the study of language in communication. Frantisek Stícha presents a contrastive view on implicitness in language and discourse in a paper by the same title (2.331-46). In it he distinguishes several types ofimplicitness, among them juxtaposition of two nouns to express attributive relation (car door), elliptical construction (she is expecting), and context-bound implicitness (open up). In 'Iconicity m the lexicon' (2.251-84), Linda R. Waugh discusses the relevance of such iconicity for morphology and its relation to semantics; she concludes by stating that 'our theory of language must be close to that with which the Prague School began' (2.277). In reading these and other contributions to the two volumes one is reminded over and over again how much and how well some topics of contemporary linguistics were foreshadowed in the works of the original members of the Prague Circle. These brief comments should indicate that in this series of Travaux linguists of different specialization will find many things of interest to them. The volumes are well produced, butfuture ones would be more helpful if indexed. [Zdenek Salzmann, Northern Arizona University.] Language, education & society in a changing world. Ed. by Tina Hickey and Jenny Williams. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 1996. Pp. 287. This volume of proceedings consists of 29 contributions selected from over a hundred papers given at a conference with the same theme. Held in Dublin in June 1994, the conference was hosted by the Irish Association for Applied Linguistics. Both the conference and the volume received financial support from the Commission of the European Community within the framework of the LINGUA program The contributions to this volume cover widely different topics. The editors organized them into nine general areas: language and education (a paper by Rosamond Mitchell and a response by Mary Ruane), language and society (a paper by John Edwards and a response by Helen O Murchú), language planning (with papers by Bernard Spolsky, Sean Farren, Muiris O Laoire, Anneli Sarhimaa, Svetlana Ter-Minasova, Charles Mann, and Katherine Langan), bilingualism (with papers by Marc Spoelders et al., and Ad Backus), translation (with papers by Gunilla Anderman, Maeve Olahan & Christoph Zähner, and Eithne O'Connell), discourse analysis (with papers by Britt-Louise Gunnarsson and Margaret Gibbon), cultural awareness (with papers by Liam Mac Mathúna, and Peter Hefferman), second language learning acquisition (containing papers by Andrew Cohen, John Harris & Lelia Murtagh, Edith Buchholz & Antje Düsterhöft, Angela Chambers, Ema Ushioda...