Responsibility and evidence in oral discourse Ed. by Jane H. Hill and Judith T. Irvine (review)

604 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 70, NUMBER 3 (1994) listed in vol. 1:6. However, G nowhere provides a list of acronyms for serial titles. G proclaims in the first sentence of his introduction that his treatise is really about sociolinguistics . However, he clearly has both historical and theoretical interests. The most valuable portion of the book may be Part III, in which he documents the fierce academic battles that Hjelmslev fought with his Copenhagen colleagues . The basic problem G grapples with is why glossematics, Hjelmslev's theory, was a failure, both intrinsically as a theory and extrinsically in its impact on the Danish academic scene. The main reason given by G for Hjelmslev's lack of success as an academic bellwether was the intriguing of Viggo Br0ndal, a colleague of Hjelmslev's at the University of Copenhagen. Br0ndal's implacable hostility (see vol. 2:126) prevented Hjelmslev from exerting theoretical leadership. Furthermore, as has been well known for some time, Hjelmslev's closest collaborator , Hans J0rgen Uldall, was geographically separated from him by the Second World War; the theory which they had been working on together before the war languished in the forties , and when they began to publish again after the war the theory had already split into two variants. At about the same time, Hjelmslev began to spend more time on university administration , and his final years were completely unproductive due to serious illness. Thus, the first grandiose attempt at a mathematically explicit linguistic theory in the twentieth century foundered . The predicament of present-day sociolinguistics , according to G, is that it focuses its attention narrowly on variation and has consequently been relegated by structural linguists to the periphery of pure linguistics, in which the social dimension of language continues to be regarded as fundamentally irrelevant. He attributes this failure in the main to the shape of Hjelmslev's theory, heavily influenced as it was by Ferdinand de Saussure's posthumous Cours de linguistique générale. In the final section of his monograph, G offers a destructive critique of Hjelmslev's conception of the scientific method from the vantage point of recent philosophy of science , in particular the ideas of Larry Laudan. [W. Keith Percival, University of Kansas.] Responsibility and evidence in oral discourse . Ed. by Jane H. Hill and Judith T. Irvine. (Studies in the social and cultural foundations of language, 15.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Pp. viii, 3 16. Cloth $59.95, paper $19.95. In this collection, thirteen linguists and linguistic anthropologists draw on their research in the Americas, the Pacific, Asia, and Africa to discuss the concepts ofresponsibility and evidence in oral discourse. The aim of the contributors is to show that the meaning of verbal acts is to be derived from the interaction between participants in particular sociocultural contexts rather than from the intentions of individual speakers alone. The forms ofdiscourse that constitute the data base of this collection range from the everyday conversation of students in an inner -cityjunior high school to ritual poetry of the Weyewa in Indonesia, and include the divinatory utterances of the Yoruba, three speaking styles of the Seneca, and the long fishing stories told by the fishermen of the village of Icarai in northeastern Brazil. The articles are fairly technical and cannot all be touched on here. A few examples will have to suffice. The paper that relies most heavily on elicited linguistic forms is Edward H. Bendix's 'The grammaticalization of responsibility and evidence : Interactional potential of evidential categories in Newari' (226-47). Speakers of Newari (a Tibeto-Burman family of dialects spoken primarily in Nepal) must choose from among several verb suffixes to specify how a reported event is to be viewed: whether as an intentional performance of an action, or as observed evidence of an action, or as an observer's report that merely characterizes the subject ofa proposition by a predicate. Bendix shows that Newari evidential particles make for a variety of usages to express such effects deriving from particular contexts as insincerity, skepticism, and social distance. Drawing on data from the discourse ofAmerican teenagers, Amy Shuman's '"Get outa my face": Entitlement and authoritative discourse' (135-60) makes use of letters...