Exceptional language and linguistics Edited by Loraine K. Obler and Lise Menn (review)

REVIEWS969 Ingram, David. 1982. The possibility of a communication ethic reconsidered: Habermas , Gadamer, and Bourdieu on discourse. Man and World 15.149-61. Lantolf, James, and William Frawley. 1983. L2 performance and Vygotskyan psycholinguistics . To appear in Eleventh LACUS Forum, ed. by Adam Makkai. Columbia , SC: Hornbeam. Saarinen, Esa. 1977. Game-theoretical semantics. The Monist 60.406-18. ------. 1979 (ed.) Game-theoretical semantics. Dordrecht: Reidel. van Duk, Teun. 1977. Text and context. London: Longman. Vygotsky, Lev. 1962. Thought and language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [Received 10 October 1983.] Exceptional language and linguistics. Edited by Loraine K. Obler and Lise Menn. New York: Academic Press, 1982. Pp. xxviii, 372. Reviewed by Frederick J. Newmeyer, University of Washington This important volume represents a milestone in the development oflinguistic theory. Each of its twenty essays reports on research results in a different area of 'exceptional language' study—primarily focusing on how work in that area can bear on, and benefit from, the principles of generative grammar. Most of the authors report that generativist principles are highly relevant to the understanding of exceptional language; many go on to discuss ways in which their research shows that such principles either are instantiated or need revision. One cannot help but feel, after a reading of ELL, that generative grammar has at last come of age. Previously, it was easy for skeptics to regard the theory as little more than a device for the representation of some rather narrow generalizations about syntactic and phonological patterning. What we learn from ELL, however, is that generative grammar has a contribution to make to the understanding of human linguistic functioning in all its aspects. Obler & Menn never propose an explicit set of criteria by which a particular type of language might be identified as 'exceptional', and one might well be puzzled by the presence in the volume of two articles on child language. (What makes the speech of children more 'exceptional' than that of adults?) The term 'exceptional language' is seemingly used to refer to phenomena which linguists have characteristically ignored when constructing their theories. Since data from child language have rarely been brought to bear on the correctness of a particular grammatical model, child language is ipso facto 'exceptional'. In their preface, O&M divide exceptional language into six broad classes,1 to which they assign the essays on the basis of their content (in all cases the title of the essay reveals, without need for further comment, the type of exceptional language treated): Language in special populations: Sheila E. Blumstein, 'Language dissociation in aphasia: Evidence for linguistic theory' (203-15); Robert K. Herbert and Karen Z. Waltensperger, 'Lin1 Curiously, however, the book itself is divided into three parts that only roughly correspond to the six broad classes proposed in the preface. 970LANGUAGE, VOLUME 60, NUMBER 4 (1984) guistics, psychiatry, and psychopathology: The case of schizophrenic language' (217-46); Susan Curtiss, 'Developmental dissociation of language and cognition' (285-312); Marilyn May Vihman, 'Formulas in first and second language acquisition' (261-84); Lise Menn, 'Child language as a source ofconstraints for linguistic theory' (247-59); Loraine K. Obler, 'The parsimonious bilingual' (339-46); and Jean Berko Gleason, 'Converging evidence for linguistic theory from the study of aphasia and child language' (347-56). Language in special situations: Charles A. Ferguson, 'Simplified registers and linguistic theory ' (49-66); Adrienne Lehrer, 'Critical communication: Wine and therapy' (67-80); Veda R. Charrow , 'Linguistic theory and the study of legal and bureaucratic language' (81-101);2 Edna Amir Coffin, 'Translation: An exceptional form of language use' (103-11); and Joel Sherzer, 'Play languages , with a note on ritual languages' (175-99). Language change: Derek Bickerton, 'Learning without experience the Creole way' (15-29); and Nancy C. Dorian, 'Linguistic models and language death evidence' (31-48). Deliberately creative language use: M. P. O'Connor, "Unanswerable the knack of tongues": The linguistic study ofverse' (143-68); Galit Hasan-Rokem, 'The pragmatics ofproverbs: How the proverb gets its meaning' (169-73); and the Sherzer article cited above. Unintentionally creative language use: Arnold M. Zwicky, 'Classical malapropisms and the creation of a mental lexicon' (115-32); and Stefanie Shattuck-Hufnagel, 'Three kinds of speech error evidence for the role of grammatical elements...