Idioms in English: A Pragmatic Analysis by Jürg Strässler (review)

268Rocky Mountain Review nonspecialist — at whom, after all, the work is directed — the false impression that, let us say, On the Aesthetic Education of Man was written before the composition of "Die Götter Griechenlands" or Don Carlos. Both "Das Lied von der Glocke" and "Das eleusische Fest" are called ballads (55), but the Fricke and Goepfert edition of Schiller (Hanser, 1958) lists the first under Lieder and the other under philosophische Gedichte. Beate Pinkerneil has included neither in Das große deutsche Balladenbuch (Athenäum, 1978), nor does any other collection of ballads with which I am acquainted. In his discussion of the poem "Nänie," Simons makes the unqualified assertion that the ancient Greeks did not believe in life after death, a curious generalization indeed. And in explanation of the metrical form of this elegy, he misquotes the last line of Schiller's clever illustrative poem Das Distichon by giving the last word as ab instead of herab, thus turning the fifth foot, a dactyl, into a trochee. This distortion is not at all relieved by the infelicitous rendering into E nglish that follows: "In pentameters it sinks melodiously to a stop" (42). In speaking of the plot in tragedy, he calls the terms peripeteia and anagnorisis "powerful emotions" (135) instead of dramatic devices that generate them. King Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden did not enter the Thirty Years' War in the year 1632 as stated on page 103. The correct date is 1630. In his concludingchapter, Simons wishes to address the question: "which of Schiller's ideas are most influential and most relevant to us today in the United States." This discussion is couched in the form of a dialogue between the "Author" and "Schiller," a kind of bravura coda which happens to appeal to me less than a tightly constructed statement on Schiller's significance would surely have. MAXDUFNER University ofArizona JÜRG STRÄSSLER. Idioms in English: A Pragmatic Analysis. Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 1982. 162 p. English idioms are of special interest to theoretical linguists, ESL teachers, sociolinguists, and rhetoricians. A book analyzing the workings of English idioms is therefore a worthy enterprise, one that should provide important information to a wide audience. Unfortunately, Jürg Strässler's Idioms in English fails to tell us much about an important subject. Notwithstanding its title, there is very little actual analysis of English idioms here, and that present lacks rigor. Only about fifty pages of the text contain directdiscussion of individual idioms or idiom patterns; over a hundred pages are given to surveying previous work on idioms and to reproducing the standard components of pragmatic theory (the work of Grice, Searle, Austin). As a result, while Strässler offers us an accurate summary of what others have contributed to our understanding of English idioms and pragmatic theory, he has surprisingly little to add. When we do reach Strässler's own analysis, we are met with a definition of idiom which severely limits the grounds of the study. Strässler works with the Book Reviews269 premise that an idiom is "a concatenation of more than one lexeme whose meaning is not derived from the meanings of its constituents and which does not consist of a verb plus an adverbial participle or preposition." Most other writers on the subject allow phrasal verbs as idioms. Strässler explains only that he excludes them "for practical reasons." Certainly, one has the right to narrow the ground to be covered in any study. But, since phrasal verbs account for the majority of idiomatic constructions actually used by speakers, the decision to exclude them correspondingly limits the information in and usefulness of this analysis. The analysis itself is based on a corpus of some 100,000 words from tapes of private conversations and transcripts of trials. Given his restricted definition of idiom, it is not surprising that Strässler found only 92 in the 100,000 words of English speech. In spite of these small numbers, several conclusions about idioms are offered. The most notable of Strässler's findings is that idioms are "mostly used when referring to a third party." Relatedly, the author claims that when a speaker...