Phraseology: Theory, analysis, and applications Ed. by Anthony P. Cowie (review)

BOOK NOTICES 479 The remaining contributions are divided into three parts: history ofEnglish, history of language and linguistics , and studies on history in literary texts. I discuss only the first two, since the last, with essays on Macbeth, Sir Thomas Elyot, and Ben Jonson, along with texts on childbirth from 1547-1848, are not directly germane to linguistics. Susan Fitzmaurice's 'Grammaticalisation, textuality and subjectivity: The progressive and the Anglo-Saxon chronicle' (21-44) is a well-documented argument that the late Old English progressive marks duration and continuity. The author refers to her study as 'pragmahistorical linguistics' rather than 'historical pragmatics', although 1 fail to see any real difference between the two (44, n. 1). Nicola Pantaleo's "The language of "wit" in Piers Plowman' (50-65) borders on literary analysis and historical semantics. The author remarks that 'wit' may be glossed 'judgment', 'wisdom', or 'understanding ', but in its plural, 'senses' (51). Dieter Stein's 'Relative sentences in late Middle English: The Paston and the CeIy letters' (67-77) concludes—based on the two major corpora of letters —that the ???-relativizers stemming from French begin to supplant that only in the earlier CeIy letters (76). Rosanna Sornicola's 'The interpretation of historical sources as a problem for diachronic typology: Word-order in English rhetorical and grammatical treatises of the XVIth and early XVIlth centuries' (81-128) poses the question of the limits in our knowledge of the history of a language by offering the following pictorial comparison: "The sources examined are like pictures from a period in the history of art preceding the birth of the "portrait"; as noone would think of interpreting the figures depicted in such pictures in the same way one would a realistic representation of a person, so the linguistic material drawn from our sources cannotbe considered a representation of the "linguistic reality" of the time' (114). Gabrœlla Di Martino's 'The "new science" and the new language in seventeenth century England ' (129-49) describes the changes in English in the seventeenth century from the traditional style 'characterized by long, intricate sentences' (130). The author emphasizes that the Puritan preachers and the Royal Society influenced the promulgation of a new simplified style in prose writing. E. F. Konrad Koerner's 'Otto Tespersen as a reader of the Cours de linguistique générale' (151-64) maintains that Tespersen and de Saussure agreed on almost nothing (159). For example, the former did not accept the langue/parole dichotomy (155). Koerner seems to be more sympathetic to Saussure's views since he notes '. . . [Tespersen] simply didn't have an antenna to grasp what Saussure was really after' (160). (A typo should be corrected in the interesting Tespersen quote from 1938 which precedes Koerner's essay: '. . . 1 may not always have expressed myself in a[s] considerate a manner as possible ' [151].) In undertaking this worthwhile project, the editors have produced a splendid memorial volume in honor of one of the giants in Italian historical English linguistics . [Alan S. Kaye, California State University, Fullerton.] Phraseology: Theory, analysis, and applications . Ed. by Anthony P. Cowie. (Oxford studies in lexicography and lexicology.) Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998. Pp. xiv, 258. Phraseology is the study of phrasal lexical items. The term has currency mainly in Eastern Europe and rests on foundations built in Russia. These foundations are chiefly taxonomic and lexicographic, and these two strands are in evidence in most of the studies reported in this book as is its European provenance . AU the authors are European, and the great majority ofthe references in the consolidated bibliography are also European. It is therefore a useful work in that it deals with areas of research not often seen in the North American literature. Following an introductory chapter by Anthony Cowie the book is divided into four sections. The first contains two chapters by Russian authors drawing directly on the Russian traditions ofresearch in phraseology . Igor Mel'Cuk outlines and exemplifies his theory of meaning-text theory as it applies to collocates , and Veronika Teliya, Natalya Bragina, Elena Oparina, and Irina Sandomirskaya show how phrases reflect and illuminate aspects of a culture . The second section looks at phraseology and corpus-based linguistics with...