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REVIEW Wallace L. Chafe,Meaning and theStructure of Language (University of Chicago Press, 1970: pp. 360, $10.50) W.C.S. Professor Chafe's book should be read by every person who should be teaching language to children who cannot hear. It marks a new stage in the fast-changing science of language, but it is also a book that can be studied with profit by the educated layman. It begins with an account of Chafe's own progress in thinking about language. From structuralism through syntacticism (his apt term for generative-transformational theory) he has moved to his present semanticist view, a view best summarized by the title itself. His account of the evolution in his thought reveals by the way another of the reasons that the book is good for teachers, the modesty with which he puts forth his theory of language. As he writes, ... the complexities of the universe, linguistic or otherwise, are so vast that one cannot help but be awed and humbled by them, and ... arrogance in a linguist betrays at least a lack of perspective on the problems that confront him (p. 2). With this attitude it is natural that Chafe writes in a clear style to let the reader get at his ideas as completely as possible. His main idea too, the new direction he thinks language study should take, is one that a teacher can appreciate. He sees language as the system relating ideas to sounds, in that order. He regards meaning, i.e. "the semantic structure" as "the crucial component" of language. Structuralists never seriously doubted that it was, but much of linguistics before 1957 had an emphasis on phonetics that made semantic information in language seem like a far distant end product. Syntacticism, which has been in vogue since 1957, places the generative center of language in "deep structures" requiring processing in two directions, toward semantic interpretation and toward surface Review structures (what we see in print and writing) and their phonetic interpretations. Chafe rejects both these theoretical positions and boldly attempts to show how language starts with meanings to be expressed. In the body of the book he presents a clear explanation of semantic structures and traces the process by which they are transformed into surface structures and these into sounds. Because the whole work is a connected treatment of this meaningto -expression process, it has great significance for those who cannot hear the end product, language sound. For the same reason no summary can do it justice. Here in a brief review it is only possible to point to a few language matters, important to deaf persons, which it treats in a new and exciting way. Out of many choices I have picked the use of articles and other things with nouns, new and old information, and idiomaticization. No teacher of the deaf is satisfied with the treatment of articles or determiners in available textbooks and handbooks. Native speakers who can hear have no need to be told how to do what they have been doing with near perfect grammaticality since childhood; a brief paragraph is all that books written for native speakers of English usually devote to a and the. Materials specifically for learners of English who do not hear, e-g. Generating English Sentences (Gallaudet College Press, 1968), may deal with three articles, the, a/an, and zero-article, with two classes of nouns, count and non-count, and with two numbers, singular and pluraL These result in only five formal arrangements (surface structures) which are exemplified by such nominals, as, a glass, the glass, glass, glasses, the glasses. Making and using these structures cause trouble for the deaf learner of English; and although attention to their formative elements may bring improvement in using them, it is clear that even this treatment falls far short of adequacy. How far it falls short is immediately clear when one looks into Chapter 14 of Chafe's book. The five surface structures in the examples above are seen to reflect at least ten semantic structures; e.g. the elephant may be count and definite or count andaggregate; aglass may be count, or it may be count and generic, as...

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