Introduction to Generative-Transformational Grammar by Carl L. Baker (review)

BOOK REVIEWS Malcolm Andrews. Dickens on England and the English. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1979. 201 p. $21.00. The breathtakingly broad title suggests the book's problem: a subject so immense — since the prolific Dickens rarely dealt with anything other than England and the English — as to make a comprehensible account of it impossible. The author notes that the book was intended as a companion anthology to one on America and the Americans, but "soon ran into the obvious problem, the vast amount of eligible material." His solution, to link extracts from Dickens's fiction, journalism, letters, and speeches by means of commentary giving "navigational aid" to the reader, not surprisingly ends by leaving us at sea — wondering why the demonstration of such an obvious fact as that "Dickens's relationship to his country is a continually changing one." Mr. Andrews's method of illustrating this point is to group representative Dickensian comments around recurring themes in his work. Most are familiar topics treated by critics in greater depth elsewhere: "Home" and "The Picturesque" (the English domestic scene and rural nature); "Changes" and "The World Metropolis" (the railroad as mixed blessing, and London as "Modern Babylon," at once stifling to the spirit and liberating to the imagination — see, for example, Dickens's attributing his headaches in Geneva to "the absence of streets"); his despair of social change in the face of inept officialdom and public apathy, and his concern to educate the young mind without killing its capacity for "fancy." A final chapter attempts to define the dominant strains in the English national character in terms of Dickens's two major types: buttoned-up, convention-bound, middle-class respectability (Pecksniff, Dombey) and unfettered eccentricity , of "wild imaginative energy and verbal resourcefulness" (Gamp, Micawber). The latter description inevitably calls to mind the novelist himself, and Mr. Andrews indulges in the well-worn speculation about how both types collided in Dickens's personality, concluding somewhat lamely that "the strain must have been terrible sometimes." Without insightful commentary or integrated extracts of adequate length to convey their essential point, the book serves well neither as criticism nor as anthology. What it can and should do, however, is to send the general reader to the real Dickensian feast of the novels and letters. Even such a random collection of snippets as this one cannot obscure the miraculous fecundity of Dickens's imagination and the astounding vitality and conviction of his speaking voice: contentious, hyperbolic, sentimental, by turns, but never bored or boring. MARY ROSE SULLIVAN, University of Colorado, Denver Carl L. Baker, Introduction to Generative-Transformational Grammar. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1978. 470 p. $17.95. Although Baker claims that his text "does not require any previous preparation in modern linguistics," it is clear that his desired audience is ROCKY MOUNTAIN REVIEW265 Book Reviews those who are beginning linguists. The text covers the most salient aspects of transformational theory, and shows the overall method of transformational syntactic argumentation. It also provides useful discussions relating the study of individual languages to the investigation of "universal grammar ." In all of this, the author hopes to "foster analytical and critical skills whose meaningfulness will continue long after many of the specific rules and hypotheses have been revised or replaced." The text may accomplish all of this for the dedicated neophyte, but it may also prove discouraging for the uninitiated. The first three chapters, developed very systematically, move slowly, and could prove too tedious for some. Nevertheless, the pace soon picks up and becomes quite ambitious as many topics seldom mentioned in introductory texts are introduced . These include subject raising, strict order hypothesis, partial order hypothesis, cyclic convention, complex NP constraint, rightward movement constraint, and left-branching constraint. These are followed by summaries of arguments regarding semantic interpretive rules, the uses of features, and some relationships between syntax and phonology. The text is thus an introduction to the primary issues arising from Chomsky's Aspects of the Theory ofSyntax, 1965, including arguments and counter arguments. It is a text that a well-trained teacher could use effectively with budding linguists in an introductory syntax class. Overall, it is the kind of text whose analytical, point-by...