Variation and change in language: essays By William Bright. Selected and introduced by Anwar S. Dil (review)

REVIEWS751 Variation and change in language: essays. By William Bright. Selected and introduced by Anwar S. Dil. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1976. Pp. 283. $10.95. Reviewed by Paul Friedrich, University of Chicago This is the tenth in a series, imaginatively edited by Anwar Dil, that brings together the collected essays of distinguished anthropological linguists, psycholinguists , and sociolinguists. Even more than its predecessors, this volume suggests a stock-taking of the interdisciplinary linguistics of the past decade or so : what have been the concerns, the achievements, the new questions? The suggestion is strengthened by the fact that Bright has been reticerít aboutprogramsofdo'sanddon't's— while trying, sometimes brilliantly, sometimes doggedly, to see how theory works on the vast South Asian and North American experience at his disposal. This consistent orientation toward data is part of a larger context of B's work that, of necessity, lies outside the scope of these essays but not of this review. In brief, after a spring and a summer of fieldwork he wrote a classic grammar of Karok, and after a year and a halfoffieldwork in India wrote a grammar ofKannada (mainly on the boat home) that has been uniformly praised. To my knowledge, no linguist alive has matched (or can match?) B's virtuoso ability to discover and state at a high level of validity all the complexities of a phonology and morphology; the analog that leaps to mind first is Sapir's fieldwork and Sapir's Takelma. The essays here are, then, part of a larger scientific style to be explored below. Let us begin with the sort of positive contribution represented in this volume. One of the leading issues in linguistics continues to be the locus and mechanisms of change. As against the extreme contention that only the lower class innovates, or that the upper classes do so while 'fleeing' their lower-class imitators, B has shown from the laboratory-like situation of India (e.g. in ' Social dialect and language history', 32-8) how some of the variables need to be broken down and evaluated : how, in this case, the Brahmins innovate in lexicon and by the importation and maintenance of foreign (e.g. Sanskrit) contrasts, whereas the lower castes innovate more in the phonology and morphology of native elements. Here and elsewhere (e.g. ' Language, social stratification, and cognitive orientation', 57-64), B has demonstrated how the lower castes innovate in areas of structure that are relatively unconscious, whereas the Brahmins do so in the relatively conscious ones. That this consciousness is largely a function of literacy rather than caste membership is provisionally tested (e.g. in 'Linguistic change in some Indian caste dialects', 39-46) by the data from TuIu (on the central west coast of the country) where the Brahmins, who are illiterate in TuIu, innovate in about the same way as the non-Brahmins (it would be desirable to find yet another case that compared illiterate Brahmins with literate nonBrahmins ). In another study ('Phonological rules in Literary and Colloquial Kannada', 65-73), also focusing on the social psychology of the unconscious, B shows with precise and explicitly ordered (albeit not complete) rules how the surface forms of the relatively archaic Kannada literary language are largely the same as the base forms in the colloquial language—so that, as he concludes, the phonology of the former is 'part of the linguistic competence' of the (mainly illiterate) speakers of the latter; here we have an elegant integration of a crucial sociolinguistic problem with a central theme in generative phonology. Again and again B is seen interrelating up-to-date theory to 'tough data'—in checking Lounsbury's celebrated analysis and finding that some of his rules don't work as an unordered set ('Reduction rules in Fox kinship', with Jan Minnick, 89-97); in combining linguistic and archeological methods and facts to correct Kroeber's long-standing hypothesis about Uto-Aztecan migrations into Southern California ('Archaeology and linguistics in prehistoric Southern California', with Marcia Bright, 189-205); 752LANGUAGE, VOLUME 54, NUMBER 3 (1978) and in pointing out a contradiction in Sapir's (and others') writings on language and culture, and then trying to elucidate the...