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636LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 3 (1998) foreseeable future. L demonstrates that the interests of linguists have not in fact strayed far from Whorf, but if diey ever do, that will be all the more reason for drawing their attention to him afresh. REFERENCES Gumperz, John J., and Stephen C. Levinson (eds.) 1996. Rethinking linguistic relativity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hutton, Christopher M., and John E. Joseph. 1998. Back to Blavatsky: The impact oftheosophy on modern linguistics. Language and Communication 18.181-204. Joseph, John E. 1995. The structure of linguistic revolutions. Historiographia Lingüistica 22.379-99. ------. 1996. The immediate sources ofthe 'Sapir-Whorfhypothesis'. Historiographia Lingüistica 23.365-404. Koerner, E. F. Konrad. 1995. Professing linguistic historiography. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins . Kuhn, Thomas S. 1962. The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, George. 1987. Women, fire, and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Langacker, Ronald W. 1989-92. Foundations of cognitive grammar. 2 vols. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Lee, Penny. 1994. New work on the linguistic relativity question. Historiographia Lingüistica 21.173-91. Lucy, John A. 1992. Language diversity and thought: A reformulation of the linguistic relativity hypothesis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ogle, Richard A. 1973. Aspects of a rationalist critique of the Whorf hypothesis. Papers in Linguistics 6.317-50. Rollins, Peter C. 1972. Benjamin Lee Whorf: Transcendental linguist. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University dissertation. ------. 1980. Benjamin Lee Whorf: Lost Generation theories of mind, language and religion. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms International, for the Popular Culture Association. Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 1949. Four articles on metalinguistics. Washington, DC: Foreign Service Institute, Department of State. ------. 1956. Language, thought, and reality: Selected writings, ed. by John B. Carroll. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Department of Applied Linguistics University of Edinburgh 14 Buccleuch Place Edinburgh EH8 9LN, UK fjohn.joseph@ed.ac.uk] From grammar to science: New foundations for general linguistics. By Victor H. Yngve. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1996. Pp. ix, 350. Reviewed by Carl Mills, University of Cincinnati In any introductory linguistics course there is likely to be at least one student who asks, 'OK, linguistics is the scientific study of language, but what exactly do linguists study?' Answers will vary depending upon the theoretical persuasion of the linguist, but eventually students will get the idea that linguists study utterances. But this, Victor Yngve tells us, 'reflects an illusion . . . and if the usual concept of an utterance reflects an illusion, we are also led to doubt the scientific validity of the entire conceptual framework and system of grammatical terminology developed to talk about utterances, their parts, and their properties' (9). The study of grammar is not science. Grammar and its attendant machinery—'such concepts as sentence, meaning, word, phoneme, phrase,form, content, noun, and many others well known to every linguist' (9)—are not proper objects of scientific study. If Y has attained his goals, his achievement in From grammar to science will have outstripped those of Saussure and Chomsky. This is not an attempt to introduce a new way ofdoing linguistics REVIEWS637 or a new theory of language. In fact, those adopting Y's approach will have to abandon, at least temporarily, the very notion of language. The usual definition of linguistics, the scientific study of language, is itself contradictory. Y's 22 chapters can be organized around 3 broad questions: (1) What is wrong? (2) How did linguistics get to be this way? (3) What can be done? Ch. 1 gives Y's answer to question (1). Readers may not accept all of Y's characterization of the present state of linguistics, but anyone viewing the state of the discipline over the past half-century will note the difference between linguistics and sciences like physics, chemistry, and biology. In Ch. 2, Y points out that the Stoics divided philosophy into three parts: the physical, the logical, and the ethical. According to Y, the sciences as we know them developed out of the Stoics' concern with the physical. Unfortunately, the Stoics placed the study of language within the domain of logic, and it is from mis decision that our current difficulties stem. For while the Stoics were clear that...

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