Girls, boys, and language By Joan Swann (review)

BOOK NOTICES 619 rarely find elsewhere—native speaker analyses of an ancient language. [Brian M. Sietsema, Merriam-Webster, Inc. and Westfield State College.] Literacy and language analysis. Ed. by Robert J. Scholes. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1993. Pp vii, 217. Cloth $49.95. This volume is centered around the idea that literacy promotes linguistic awareness and hence linguistic analysis, because it objectifies language. Several of the papers exploit this idea admirably, showing how literacy affects ideas about aspects of language ranging from phonology to syntax. For example, in a survey article, Linnea Ehri shows how orthography influences readers' conception of the phonological structure of words; in a study of Kannadaspeaking school children, Prathibha Karanth and others show that the CV structure of Kannada orthography promotes awareness of individual phonemes in school children more weakly than an alphabetic orthography does; and in another study, illiterate speakers of Kannada or Hindi are shown to perform very poorly on tests involving both morphological and syntactic judgments of acceptability. Other articles go beyond this connection between literacy and awareness or analysis to a much bolder claim: that written language has an effect on spoken language. Linguists have long rejected the possibility of such influence, and the arguments provided here should not change that. Most of them depend on conflating two types of linguistic knowledge or grammar, the unconscious knowledge or grammar of the language user and the conscious knowledge or grammar that stems from linguistic analysis, which is not really knowledge, but rather theory or hypothesis. It is quite clear that orthography can have an effect on the latter, as several of the authors in this collection show, but even so provocatively titled an article as 'On the orthographic basis of morphology' provides no evidence that 'because contemporary preliterate and illiterate language users do not show any awareness of [words and parts of words], it is unlikely that they were part of the mental grammars of preliterate peoples' (Scholes, p. 73). The argument is not helped by claims that 'more primitive (that is, nonliterate) forms of language show "no use of grammatical morphology"' (Scholes, p. 93), especially for a reader who has spent much of the last few months trying to understand even the rudiments of Athabaskan verb morphology. Several articles deal with the general cognitive effects of literacy, following the claims of McLuhan. David Olson, for example, argues that the notions of logic and literal meaning arise out of literacy. For those wishing to make a necessary connection between the study of grammar and literacy, the Sanskrit tradition is something of an embarrassment, since it flourished in an almost completely oral tradition for two millennia. P. G. Patel provides a brief overview of the topic, but does not succeed in erasing the problem. Overall, this collection should be quite enjoyable for those linguists who are interested in the connection between spoken and written language and between language and linguistic analysis , even though it sometimes provides more heat than light. The book is reasonably free of typographical errors, but unfortunately, it does not seem to have been nearly as well edited as it was proofread. The latter is especially true of one or two papers by nonnative speakers, where the use of English articles is sometimes curious. [Mark Aronoff, SUNY Stony Brook.] Girls, boys, and language. By Joan Swann. (The language in education series.) Cambridge: Blackwell, 1992. Pp. ix, 261. Cloth $44.95, paper $19.95. As part of the Language in Education series, Girls, boys, and language provides a good general introduction to and summary of the last fifteen years of research on language and gender. It begins with the premise that 'girls and boys have different experiences in education' (1) and proceeds to document the role of language in establishing these differences. Swann's focus is largely practical: she intends to move educators beyond mere recognition of gender differences and inequities in schools (recognition which is evident in references to equal opportunity throughout the National Curriculum in England and Wales, the Scottish Development Programme , and the Northern Ireland curriculum) toward promoting specific curricular changes aimed at overcoming these inequities. The book is divided into nine chapters. Ch. 1 (1-13) briefly establishes...