Words in time: A social history of the English vocabulary By Geoffrey Hughes (review)

404 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 67, NUMBER 2 (1991) Hickey's 'Introduction' (1-12) surveys previous definitions of style and areas in which the interests of stylistic analysts overlap those of pragmaticists. The essays follow in three sections . George W. Turner's 'Sharing, shaping, showing: The deep uses of language' (15-27) opens the eclectic Section I ('Style in communication and comprehension'). Turner combines certain speech-act axioms—such as that grammatical forms (e.g. the interrogative) correlate only imperfectly with superficially associated 'uses of language' (e.g. asking) (20)— with several Jakobsonian terms ('metalinguistic ' [23]; 'phatic' [24]). But his 'happy' admission that in this field '[at] present ... little is certain but much is potential' (25) seems finally frustrating. Diane Blakemore's 'Linguistic form and pragmatic interpretation: The explicit and the implicit' (28-51) provides more substance . Blakemore isolates limitations in the Gricean approach to conversational implicature , showing that contextual information may influence the recovery of (supposedly independent ) propositional meaning, while conversely, explicit linguistic markers may constrain how hearers apply contextual factors to an utterance. Hickey presents empirical data in 'The style of topicalization. how formal is it?' (52-70): Spanish 'dangling topic' (54) constructions lead speakers to perceive utterances as more spontaneous . Though presented only in broad strokes, Hickey's data are more arresting than such evaluative comments as his remark that informality constitutes a 'price to be paid' for the pragmatic economy of such structures (65). Section II, 'Style in speech and situation', benefits from a unifying focus on spontaneous discourse. Flora Klein-Andreu's data for 'Speech priorities' (73-86) come exclusively from conversational Spanish. 'X-forms' (fragments that resemble topicalizations but bear no morphosyntactic relationship to their adjoining clauses) highlight the speaker's interest, she argues , rather than neutrally enhancing speakerhearer 'informativeness' (84). In 'The pragmastylistics of hypothetical discourse' (87-105), Carmen Silva-Corvalán offers a vocabulary for analyzing discourses which 'convey imaginary, conjectural information, rather than facts' (89) that is analogous to the vocabulary provided for narratives by William Labov. Applying her methods to hypothetical discourses in Spanish, she derives an index of the certainty with which subjects assert whatever claims they advance. After two essays stressing the speaker's role in stylistic choice, Margret Selting's German data for 'Speech styles in conversation as an interactive achievement' (106-32) demonstrate instead how each 'alter(n)ation of speech style' (106) depends on previous choices made by both participants in an ongoing conversation; no speech style can thus be regarded normatively as 'conventional' or 'pre-existent' (108). In the discourses studied by Jenny A. Thomas ('Discourse control in confrontational interaction '. 133-56), speech styles are also 'interactively achieved', but they result from asymmetric negotiation; socially dominant speakers exploit discoursal indicators to 'constrain the contributions ... a subordinate addressee may make' (136). Opening Section III, 'Style in literature and learning', Raymond Chapman examines novelists ' use of dialect in 'The reader as listener: Dialect and relationships in The mayor ofCasterbridge ' (159-78). Literary representations of nonstandard speech, he argues, seldom mimic dialect features precisely; even the intensity of a single character's deviant speech may vary as the author seeks instead to communicate subtleties of the pragmatic contexts in which the dialogues occur. Claes Schaar, in 'Inscriptions in Paradise lost: Five variants of a vertical context system' (179-90), displays extraordinary scholarship in constructing for crucial phrases from Paradise lost composite 'infracontexts ', clusters of allusions which convey 'associative richness' (180) not evident in the immediate context of the work itself. For Schaar's erudite reader, Nils Erik Enkvist & Gun Leppiniemi ( 'Anticipation and disappointment : An experiment in protocolled reading of Auden's Gare du midi', 191-207) substitute a group of comparative neophytes. Revealing Auden's text a piece at a time. Enkvist & Leppiniemi record their subjects' changing expectations . [Timothy R. Austin, Loyola University Chicago.] Words in time: A social history of the English vocabulary. By Geoffrey Hughes. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988. Pp. vi, 270. Cloth $34.95, paper $14.95. Geoffrey Hughes has written a well-organized and well-documented historical lexical-semantic account of the English lexicon from Alfredian Old English to the present. He is BOOK NOTICES 405 particularly concerned with cultural change as inspiring and controlling the...