A study on the effect of terminology on L2 reading comprehension: Should specialist terms in medical texts be avoided? By R. E. Lankamp (review)

BOOK NOTICES 195 pleted dissertation was just one of the prerequisites for the final doctoral examinations.) The discussion of Luick's work also reveals the strange fact that he had in effect, in Vienna, no scholarly contacts with such colleagues as A. Pfalz ('Reihenschritte'), N. S. Trubetzkoy, ?. Kretschmer, Karl Buhler, and E. Richter, or with his neighbors, the linguists in Brunn (Brno) and Prague (Josef Vachek, Roman Jakobson). Part II (95-466) contains 21 papers, the welcome addresses of the authors, and indices of topics and names (453-66). Only three papers, all of high quality (by Wolfgang U. Dressler, Manfred Markus, and Matti Rissanen), deal with morphology and syntax. Eighteen papers treat phonology, particularly in the Old English dialects (10), Middle English (3), and Early Modern English (3). Many of the papers deserve more detailed discussion than is feasible within a Book Notice, since they cover such basic concepts as the graphic evidence for sound change, phonetic identification of spellings, structure of phonemic systems, and criteria for dialectal subgroupings. It becomes clear that there has been some refinement but no major advance in the methods of historical phonology since the days of Luick, who, almost inadvertently, anticipated the phonemic principle without any influence from the Prague linguists. Luick seemed, on the whole, to assume a close, almost 'biunique' connection between OE symbols and OE sounds. Eric Gerald Stanley takes him gently to task for this ('Karl Luick's "Man schrieb wie man sprach" and English historical philology', 311-34). Herbert Pilch (269-94) also concludes that Luick sometimes could not differentiate between changes in scribal habits and phonetic changes (271); he is greatly opposed to what he calls 'Buchstabenphonetik' or 'Buchstabenphonologie'. Pilch now avoids structuralistic terminology, but he correctly contrasts (286) what I would call the Common Germanic aUophonic (nondistinctive) /-umlaut and the Old English (and Old High German, Old Norse, Old Saxon) phonemic /-umlaut, also described in the book (259-68). Incidentally, safte (adv.) 'soft' versus sefte (adj.) (263. line 13 from below) is a misleading misprint for softe. The phonemic (or graphic) interpretation of OE spellings plays an important part in the articles by Christopher J. E. Ball (A-runes), Alfred Bammesberger (medial OE fricatives), Peter Bierbaumer (slips of the ear), Fran Colman (digraphs as 'templates'), Richard M. Hogg ((œ) and (e) in Kentish), and Patrick Stiles (phonemicization of back-umlaut digraphs). John Anderson (97-107, 'The great kEntish collapse') assumes a coherent process offallingtogether of all 'front monophthongs, long and short' in Kentish OE. The articles by Bernhard Diensberg (ME uw)/(eow, ew, eu» and Veronika Kniezsa (French sounds in loanwords) concern the ME period. Jerzy Wehna gives a brief history of the 'ME diphthongal system' from the 9th to the 14th century. Wilfried Wieden discusses the epenthetic vowel development in OE swalowe 'swallow', and Angelika Lutz documents and lucidly describes the changes in consonantal clusters since OE times, particularly those containing IhI, within the syllabic structure of English. The clusters are rated according to a scale of relative sonority and consonantal strength. I take it the use of the dollar sign ($) for syllabic boundaries has no metaphoric significance. The longest contribution to the volume is Robert P. Stockwell's & Donka Minkova's valuable 'The English Vowel Shift: problems of coherence and explanation' (355-94). Roger Lass (395-410) was asked to comment on the article; Stockwell & Minkova added a rejoinder (411-17). The authors discuss for the alleged 'Great English Vowel Shift' (the now usual term for all changes for long vowels and vowel clusters between 1400 and 1650 in English dialects and the London standard) the following 'problems ': inception, merger, order, dialect, and structural coherence. Their predecessors have, of course, been numerous, ranging from Luick, Otto Jespersen, Martinet, Trnka, Vachek, and Kurylowicz to Chomsky & Halle, Patricia M. Wolfe, and many others. I can only fully agree with their conclusion that the Great English Vowel Shift, as a basically uniform, causally connected series of shifts, is nothing but 'the linguist's creation through hindsight' (376f), or—in my structuralistic terminology—hocuspocus . Lass, with his metarule for the shift, differentiates between this type of hocus-pocus and attempts at actual historiography. He likes both, thus is quite sincere in...