Implications sémantiques dans les langues naturelles by Richard Zuber (review)

426 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 67, NUMBER 2 (1991) tive)? He stresses the connection between language and bodily movement and sees language as a learned motor skill (15-18). Eric de Grolier presents an up-to-date review of the literature on paleolinguistic studies; his 20 ages of References, including items through 1987, is a valuable contribution in itself. He roams over the diverse fields of brain, vocal tract, tool use, kinship, etc., and often contributes his own stimulating ideas. Leaving aside reservations over some of his more questionable opinions, I find his conclusion that the record falsifies the idea of a sudden origin or a series of 'revolutions' to be sensible (113), but this surely does not mean that change was always uniform, and it does not rule out 'critical dates' as reference points. Finally, the two linguistic contributions seem to me to be among the best in the volume. Mary Key is really dealing more with language development than with origin in suggesting that languages have 'red marbles'—lexicosemantic retentions from early stages. She should have mentioned Carleton Hodge's 'chronomorphs' and Aaron Dolgopolskiy's findings in this area. But I see no need to assume, as Key does, that ancient migrations account for this: it is well known that things travel very well without mass movements of people to carry them. Edwin G. Pulleyblank does a very good job of explaining the nature of duality of patterning and its absolutely vital role in human language, and he patiently and gently refutes the claims made for duality of patterning in manual sign languages, wonderful instruments that they may be in their own right. The book is well produced; I found excessive typos and errors (especially regarding References ) only in Goudsblom's article. [M. Lionel Bender, Southern Illinois University-Carbondale .) Implications sémantiques dans les langues naturelles, by Richard Zuber. Paris: Editions du CNRS, 1989. Pp. 166. F 140. On the back cover of this book Zuber is described as a 'chargé de recherche' at CNRS who studied mathematics, philosophy, and linguistics in Poland, the Soviet Union, and France. Here Z aims at providing a description of some semantic phenomena and syntactic constructions within the framework of symbolic logic. with extensive use of the principles of categorial grammar. The language material is mostly French, but Z claims that his analyses are valid for all languages. Z's broad academic background is amply reflected in his work. In the 'Introduction' (1-12) Z lays out the scope of the book and describes his goals. He articulates one of the main ideas that he takes up again in the last chapter—that semantic analyses should take syntactic structures into account , but also that certain syntactic forms must be justified by their semantic content (9). In Ch. 1 (13-26) Z introduces the basic tools of his analyses, where truth is the fundamental notion. Z invokes the notion of presupposition as one of the elements of the semantic content of a sentence; the other notion he emphasizes is affirmation. He also defines a distinction between weak and strong implications, and proposes a number oftheorems and definitions (e.g. truth values for a sentence as True, False, or Undetermined, depending on interpretation) to be used in the rest of the book. Ch. 2 (28-38) provides a description of analytic and contradictory sentences (An orphan has no parents and An orphan has parents). As an illustration of Z's descriptions in the rest of the book. I quote here two theorems that account for such sentences:'If Q presupposes P and non-P implies Q then P is analytic. If P weakly implies Q and P presupposes non-Q then P is contradictory '. The semantic content of analytic sentences does not include affirmation. Ch. 3 (3951 ) describes 'Explicit sentences and privative oppositions', which hitherto were not described in terms of formal logic. Ch. 4, 'Complex expressions' (53-66), presents the principles of categorial grammar in the description of syntactic and semantic properties of language. A division between two types of complex phrases and sentences is proposed: those whose complexity has been increased by the addition of arguments and those whose complexity has been increased by...