Sociolinguistic problems in Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia Ed. by William R. Schmalstieg and Thomas F. Magner (review)

240 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 57, NUMBER 1 (1981) Virtually the entire illustrative material comprises short passages extracted from the latest crop of 'Moldavian' fiction, without benefit of translation into Russian or any other world language . Even so, the topics broached might, under more auspicious circumstances, have made the book attractive to theorists and generalists among foreign linguistic scholars, who will now feel frustrated—and this is the fourth paradox. Part I deals with the view of morphological category adopted by G (5-22); Part II, subdivided into 6 chapters, with 'Stylistic variation ' (23-146); and Part III, with non-stylistic variation, emphasizing the verb (147-76). An appendix takes up once more the issue ofgrammatical categories (177-211). Throughout, one discovers a good deal of information on homonymy , ergativity, fusion, clitics, and other problems much discussed in the West. The single most perplexing feature of this book is the absence of any index—of key concepts adopted or newly introduced, linguistic forms cited, languages referred to, or authorities invoked. One can, e.g., anticipate a certain concern , on the part of a professed Balkanologist, with Albanian and Modern Greek; but who could have guessed that the book contains excursuses on (or collateral references to) Basque, Finno-Ugric, the Caucasian language family, Japanese, and even—albeit sparingly—one indigenous New World language (Aztec)? Only two guides to the reader are appended to the book. First is a list of abbreviations (212-18), practically all in Cyrillic script—so that one must look under ?' to find Hjelmslev, who exerted a profound, if not always acknowledged, influence on G. Second is a list of sources (218-22)—overwhelmingly an inventory of 'Moldavian' fiction and poetry published in KiSinëv throughout the seventies; the only works credited to Rumanian research and publication centers such as Bucharest and Ia§i are three books on Macedo-Rumanian, plus a recent critical edition of Dosoftei's verse rendition of the Psalter (a.d. 1673). Samples of American linguistics have, I suspect, been widely consulted ; but only Bloomfield's Language (in a heavily edited Russian translation), plus two short articles by younger scholars, one of them channeled through a British journal, are explicitly cited. [YAKOV MALKiEL, Berkeley.] Predicate agreement in Russian. By G. G. Corbett. (Birmingham Slavonic monographs, 7.) Birmingham: Department of Russian Language & Literature, University of Birmingham , 1979. Pp. xii, 111. £2.80. There is no denying that a TG approach to grammatical problems of Contemporary Standard Russian has on occasion furnished new insights into the mechanisms at work; but this short monograph, dealing with various problems of predicate agreement—and particularly some of its substandard puzzles (cf. Krepkij (aj vredno 'Strong tea is harmful', Mne konfety nevazno 'Candy is not important to me')—does not actually add much to our better understanding of what is going on 'under the surface' of Russian morphology and syntax. Though Corbett is familiar with much—not all—of the pertinent work, both as regards data and theory, by his own admission he does not succeed in doing more than identifying a few sub-areas in need of further, in-depth investigation (cf. his 'Conclusion' on p. 103). [Henrik Birnbaum, UCLA.] Sociolinguistic problems in Czechoslovakia , Hungary, Romania and Yugoslavia . Ed. by William R. Schmalstieg and Thomas F. Magner . (Folia Slavica, 1:3.) Columbus , OH: Slavica, 1978. Pp. 176. These papers represent the proceedings of a conference on Sociolinguistics in Eastern Europe , held at the Pennsylvania State University in October of 1976. A brief introduction by the editors points to some specific sociolinguistic problems in a part of Eastern Europe, with their specific tensions and sensitivities, and summarizes the various papers of the volume. By and large, the contributions are uneven in both quality and scope. The first piece, by William Bright, represents his keynote address. It is concerned with some basic epistemological issues in linguistics, as viewed against their social setting ('Things people know about language that ain't so'), drawing parallels with comparable language situations elsewhere in the world (India, Norway, the U.S.) M. FryScák discusses 'The two official languages of Czechoslovakia', retracing the relatively recent and difficult road of Slovak toward achieving status on a par with Czech...