Fuzzy negation in English and Swedish By Gunnel Tottie (review)

BOOK NOTICES 765 one: 'the abstraction of a common denominator of meaning (an invariant) from the potentially infinite range of referential situations ' (58) in which pre- and post-posed adjectives may occur. W's theoretical constructs derive from those of Saussure and especially of Jakobson. Thus the 'common denominator' which she ultimately discovers is expressed as a 'semantic distinctive feature', which presumably exists in a system of such features. Whether the adjective precedes or follows the noun, the phenomenon of modification obtains; but when the adjective precedes the noun, the modification is 'marked'—by the feature '[+deixis of the lexical context]' (95). In other words, W believes that, when an adjective is post-posed, the modification does not necessarily presuppose the lexical meaning of the noun, as it does when the adjective is pre-posed. To take one of her examples, in poète heureux 'the poet is happy in the way any person might be happy' (95), whereas in heureux poète (translated by W as 'successful poet') 'the lexical meaning of the substantive ... is crucial to the specific interpretation of heureux. A "successful poet" is "happy" only insofar as he is a "poet" ... whereas un poète heureux is not necessarily "happy" in his capacity as a poet and may simply be "happy" as a person' (89.). Devotees of rigorous formalism will no doubt find W's analysis sometimes vague; however, I find it in all cases at least plausible, and generally very convincing. Perhaps one of the strongest arguments for W's analysis is its capacity to explain anaphoric uses of the pre-posed adjective (132-5). Here, in a given discourse, an adjective is post-posed in its first occurrence, but is later pre-posed. As W notes, 'such anaphoric uses ... conform quite naturally to our rule that pre-position of the adjective assumes ... the deictic recognition of the lexical morpheme of the substantive' (132-3). However, it is difficult to follow W's thesis as it applies to certain adjective and noun combinations. Thus in différents cas 'several cases' (vs. cas différents 'differential cases'), I fail to see why 'in order to know that "several" of the lexical items given by cas are involved, one must recognize the lexical meaning of each item' (139). Cannot différents mean 'several', regardless of what noun follows it? Since W wishes to describe langue rather than parole, she is not directly concerned with the frequency with which a given adjective occurs in one or another position, nor with stylistic or sociolinguistic variables which may play a role. While this may be a tenable theoretical stance, it is unfortunate that the very examples from which W's theory is abstracted are not more precisely identified. According to the preface and the 'data appendix', she apparently did consult at least two native speakers. Some examples, however, seem to be taken from dictionaries and other secondary sources. Do these examples all faithfully reflect the competence of the native speakers? My own informal questioning of native French speakers suggests that some of the examples may be doubtful, or at least have a strong 'literary' flavor. As Waugh herselfadmits, the book does not treat all aspects of the problem of adjective position. It does undeniably represent a large step toward understanding this phenomenon in particular, and (as is strikingly suggested in Chap. 3) French semantic structure in general. [William J. Ashby, University of California, Santa Barbara.] Fuzzy negation in English and Swedish. By Gunnel Tottie. (Stockholm studies in English, 39.) Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. Pp. 77. This volume is a contrastive study of negative adverbs and indefinite pronouns that are semantically equivalent in English and Swedish (termed 'negative quantifiers' by Tottie). She proposes (1) to establish the degree of negativity of certain negative quantifiers, (2) to compare the negative force of the English and Swedish counterparts, and (3) to examine the possible existence of positionally conditioned variation in negativity among them. Although the lexical pairs in question overlap morphologically and semantically, T cautions that these superficial similarities go only so far; close examination reveals perceptible differences in the constraints governing their individual syntactic behavior. The first chapter describes data and the literature...