Sound patterns in second language acquisition Edited by Allan James and Jonathan Leather (review)

BOOK NOTICES 405 particularly concerned with cultural change as inspiring and controlling the changes in the meanings of words and additions to or deletions from the lexicon. As he puts it (2): 'The past millennium of English history has witnessed huge changes in the social, economic and political structures, as well as in the make-up of the English-speaking peoples. This book is an attempt to correlate the main social and semantic shifts.' He sees the lexicon as divisible into seven major semantic fields, to each of which he devotes a chapter, treating them in the roughly chronological order in which they have become important . The titles of his chapters 2-8 supply the best outline of his method: Ch. 2, 'Words of conquest and status: The semantic legacy of the Middle Ages' (32-66); Ch. 3, 'Moneyed words: The growth of capitalism' (67-91); Ch. 4. 'The mobilization of words: Printing, the Reformation and the Renaissance' (92-124); Ch. 5, 'The fourth estate: Journalism' (125-54); Ch. 6, 'Advertising: Linguistic capitalism and wordsmithing ' (155-81); Ch. 7, 'Words and power: Democracy and language' (182-202); and Ch. 8. 'Ideology and propaganda' (203-23). An introductory chapter on 'Words and social change' is a concise but thorough theoretical account of H's general theme. He classifies semantic change under three categories: change of meaning of individual words, lexical change, 'meaning the addition of new words ... or the obsolescence of archaisms in a given word-field', and register 'denoting the special word-choice appropriate to a given social situation or literary context' (9). He deals with each of these in turn, introducing in bold-face type the technical terminology which has developed since Bréal. Throughout, he illustrates each concept with well-chosen examples from English . Ch. 2 deals with the vocabulary of feudalism , the movement up and down the semantic scale of words like knight and churl, and especially with the numerous additions to the lexicon by borrowing from Scandinavian and Norman French. Particularly interesting are his discussions of the 'moralization of status words' and the 'secularization of religious terminology ' as symptomatic of sweeping social changes in the later Middle Ages. There is not room to consider here in detail Chs. 3-8, each of which deals thoroughly with the semantic field in question. At times, H frankly reveals his own prejudices; parts of the discussion of journalism (Ch. 5), advertising (Ch. 6), and ideology and propaganda (Ch. 8) reveal that he does not share Jespersen's optimistic view that the language is progressively improving. He also seems to share the view that 'English' properly means the language of England , and that American English is 'a major dialect and variant' which has 'infiltrated' the language with 'vogue-words and idiom' (23). This rather old-fashioned view was perhaps unconsciously held by the Oxford editors, though not by Burchfield, editor of the Oxford English dictionary (OED) Supplement. One of the outstanding features of this book is the wealth ofexamples, carefully selected and perceptively discussed. Most of these are derived , as one would expect, from the OED and the four supplementary volumes, which H freely acknowledges to be indispensable aids to such study. He adopts the useful device of identifying words derived from the OED by the date of the earliest appearance followed by a raised O, or if from the Supplement a raised S. In his concluding chapter, 'Verbicide and semantic engineering' (224-50), H discusses a variety of topics, such as usage, dictionaries, slang, and U and non-U, which might be summarized under the general topic of "the state of the language'. He is not happy about that state. His final paragraph vividly summarizes his position : 'Rich and subtle words, like courtesy, rhetoric , charisma, and philosophy have been impoverished and trivialized; direct and blunt words, like lie, steal, kill, and cheat are commonly euphemized, especially when applied to establishments and institutions, key words, encapsulating the concepts and ideals on which society is based, such as democracy, liberation, culture, liberal, image and progress, are largely nebulous ... Today, caring and responsibility are vogue-words applied vaguely to any endeavour except the language. Yet serious damage is done by the potent...