The real Professor Higgins: The life and career of Daniel Jones By Beverley Collins and Inger M. Mees (review)

REVIEWS191 a syllable bearing some kind of stress, whether primary, secondary, or even tertiary (FuIk 1992). On FuIk's view, syllables such as medial -od(e) carry tertiary stress, and this distinction is metrically relevant under the four-position hypothesis. It is not relevant, apparently, to the wordfoot theory. Still, if tertiary stress is linguistically (synchronically) real, and if the word-foot theory purports to be a mapping of linguistic structure into metrical form, why is this distinction invalid? True, on Russom's theory, principles of closure must state that verses end on feet which are co-extensive with acceptably-sized words, but this is to flirt with circularity, since verses may—must—also end on words that are co-extensive with acceptable feet from Russom's foot inventory. A final puzzle. One ofthe delights ofRussom's work here is that it is linguistically sophisticated enough to discriminate between intensity of stress in the respective dialects. The old catch-all '(North) West Germanic was a strong-stress language' simply won't do. As Russom shows, the fact that ON apparently had strong stress intensity accounts for the facts of syncopation, of vowel deletion, of 'forceful metrical subordination' (137), and of the relative lack of stressless material in prototypicalfornyrcislag; Old English, arguably, had a less intense stress accent, empirically predicting, in the 'classical' synchrony, less syncopation, less vowel reduction, and more use of unstressed material in anacrusis; and for OS, 'weak linguistic stress did nothing to reduce or eliminate unstressed function words and permitted restoration of vowels like those which underwent syncopation in Beowulf. Massive employment of extrametrical words in the Heliand can be attributed in part to a corresponding weakness of metrical subordination' (137). Russom's view, then, is not of three Germanic dialects as manifesting the 'strong stress' principle of the language but of a cline of stress intensity. Interestingly, the idea that Old English is not altogether characterizable as a 'strong stress' language is anticipated by, among others, Bertinetto (1989) who, in arguing that stress-timing is a scalar phenomenon, supplies testable diagnostics for the gradations of stress-timing he claims. Future research must determine whether OE is a less strongly stressed language than traditional scholarship has imagined and even whether there is any need for the Germanic foot as a functional necessity for the location of stress, but the fact that Russom, working from a different perspective, has made such significant empirical predictions from the relevant generalization is a striking result of what is a remarkable, erudite, and necessary book. REFERENCES Bertinetto, P. M. 1989. Reflections on the dichotomy 'stress' vs. 'syllable-timing'. Revue de phonétique appliquée 91-93.99-130. Cable, Thomas. 1991. The English alliterative tradition. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Dresher, B. Elan, and Aditi Lahiri. 1991 . The Germanic foot: Metrical coherence in Old English. Linguistic Inquiry 22.251-86. Fulk, R. D. 1992. A history of Old English meter. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Kiparsky, Paul. 1977. The rhythmic structure of English verse. Linguistic Inquiry 8.189-247. Lehmann, W. P. 1956. The development of Germanic verse form. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. McCully, C. B. 1988. Review of Russom, Old English meter and linguistic theory. Lingua 75.379-83. -----, and J. J. Anderson (eds.) 1996. English historical metrics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Russom, G. 1987. Old English meter and linguistic theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Department of English and American Studies University of Manchester Manchester M13 9PL United Kingdom [chris.mccully@man.ac.uk] The real Professor Higgins: The life and career of Daniel Jones. By Beverley Collins and Inger M. Mees. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1999. Pp. xxv, 571. $165.00. Reviewed by Peter Ladefoged, University of California, Los Angeles There is no way a short review can do justice to this account of the life and times of Daniel Jones (1881-1967), the greatest phonetician of this century. Collins and Mees have produced a 192LANGUAGE, VOLUME 76, NUMBER 1 (2000) meticulously researched book that is a delight to read, based on interviews with 35 individuals between 1980 and 1984 and massive research into Jones's published work (there are 306 items in their bibliography), his correspondence...