Developing prototypic measures of cross-cultural pragmatics By Thom Hudson, Emily Detmer, and J. D. Brown (review)

210 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 1 (1998) 'from an integrational point ofview, such an analysis simply confirms the poverty of traditional accounts of writing. The fact is that the rationale of greeking is perfectly clear when we put it in its proper context: the printed forms have their signification, but it is a signification not related to speech, even indirectly' (85). Most linguists will balk at such inclusiveness. H's wide perspective allows him to see things that narrower thinkers ignore. For example, he analyzes a number of visual puns, like Häagen-Dazs and Extr àas (a type of Häagen-Dazs ice cream). The first is a brand name nonsense word meant to look (and it is important to stress look rather than sound) Scandinavian , and the second is a creative spelling of 'extras' that makes sense only in the context of the first. Certainly no orthodox Aristotelian or Saussurean glottocentric theoretician of writing could account for either fact. As a long-standing member of this last-mentioned group, impressed as I am with certain observations, I still have difficulty with H's all-inclusive approach. At one point he even entertains the possibility that gramophone records constitute writing: 'To dismiss the matter on the ground that current usage does not sanction including gramophone records in the class of objects designated by the term 'written texts' is not a semiological answer. On the contrary, it is a refusal to give one' (115-16). Here and elsewhere, H is on the verge of advocating an extremely naive realism, whereby the use of a term in ordinary (or in this case hypothetical) usage should dictate scientific theorizing. Nonetheless, I did learn a great deal from this book. One of H's fundamental claims is that writing is static, as opposed to speech or music or dance which are kinetic. This claim permits one to treat nonvisual forms of writing, like braille, on a par with others, and it also allows us to treat electronic signals of the sort that I look at when I 'write' using a computer as normal written language, both ofwhich seem correct. That writing is static rather than dynamic also means that we interact with written and spoken language in fundamentally different ways, which many previous authors have noted but without any theoretical basis. The book is very well produced, something that one has come to expect from books about writing, with 20 photographic plates, seven of them in color. There are also footnotes rather than the biomechanically awkward endnotes that are still unfortunately so common in monographs, despite advances in technology . My only quibble is with the size of the typeface , which is a point too small for comfort, especially given the generous leading. Perhaps it is meant as an illustration of H's theory that written communication is an integrational activity. Overall, this book will be important reading for every linguist with a serious interest in the theory ofwriting. [Crosley Shelvador, Peconic County Community College .] Developing prototypic measures of cross-cultural pragmatics. By Thom Hudson, Emily Detmer, and J. D. Brown. Manoa: Second Language Teaching & Curriculum Center, University of Hawai'i, 1995. Pp. ix, 198. The seventh in a series of technical reports published by the Second Language Teaching and Curriculum Center (SLTCC), this publication originates from the National Foreign Language Resource Center within the SLTCC. It has all the defining features of a technical report: more appendices (71-198) than text (1-69), and within the latter a lot of statistical material, usually presented in tables (1 for every 3.5 pages). The word 'paper' is used in the introduction (1-2) to refer to the text that follows. For readers unfamiliar with the overall project being described, a 'brief review of phase one' (3-7) refers to an earlier technical report in the same series. The overall aim was to develop a battery of prototypic tests for the assessment of various cross-cultural competencies. Administration of the tests was meant to provide information about two contributors to variability in performance, viz. variability associated with the social properties of the speech event and with the choices made by speakers to achieve their communicative...