Explorations in Korean Syntax and Semantics (review)

Book Reviews205 while a living grandmother "adds to the consumer burden," despite her contribution to child care long after men have retired from the fields (p. 182). But these are minor lapses. There is a certain circularity in the author's assertion that the residents of San'gongni preserve "fundamental principles of family continuity, division oflabor, and kinship obligation" (p. 230), whereas "most of the social change that can be observed in the Korean household is relatively superficial" (p. 231). While Sorensen's "fundamental principles" are well demonstrated through his demographic calculations and observations, it would require a very different kind of ethnography to capture the emotional tone of family life in San'gongni when migrant children earn extra-domestic incomes, choose their own marriage partners, and live on their own until they must accommodate aged and dependent parents. But that, as they say, is another story. Over the Mountains Are Mountains succeeds at its intended task. Sorensen demonstrates how Korean families in a rural village have adapted to profound economic and demographic changes while remaining recognizably Korean families. Rural development planners, no less than anthropologists, would benefit by understanding the distinctively Korean social arena in which the more universal processes of "mechanization," "capitalization," and the "green revolution" have been transacted. Laurel Kendall American Museum ofNatural History Explorations in Korean Syntax and Semantics. By Seok Choong Song. Berkeley: University of California, Institute of East Asian Studies, Center for Korean Studies, 1988. Korea Research Monograph 14. Pp. xiv, 378. $20. The author, professor of linguistics at Michigan State University, takes the opportunity in his Preface to this clearly printed, neatly bound volume to document in vivid detail the sea of troubles that nearly wrecked his book's publication: not only did he have to convince the University of California's Berkeley Center for Korean Studies that Korean linguistics really has something to do with Korean studies, and not only did he have to solicit money to subsidize the 206"Journal ofKorean Studies volume from Korean business and religious sources in the United States, but he also had to cope for twenty years with his wife Taekja, "who served as typist, editor, informant, . . . and reluctant partnerin -research," all the while pointing out to her husband "that very few people will ever read this book" (p. xiv). Mrs. Song may or may not have been right; but if she was, it is unfortunate, and it is also a good thing that her husband did not let her discourage him, because this book should be widely read. Quite aside from what it may tell the reader about the Korean language, it has a great deal to teach of importance and value for anyone interested in the larger, overall problem of how modern Korearr.academic circles perceive (and have received) contemporary Western linguistic thought and methodology ; largely unwittingly, it provides rich materials for a contrastive study of that reception on the one hand with the parallel but substantively very different phenomenon to be observed in modern Japan; and on and along the way it also recounts, sometimes in considerable detail and always with an almost contagious enthusiasm, the debates of recent decades in Korean "national language" scholarship on a number of moot issues in Korean syntax. But over and above all its other interesting features, the book will easily demonstrate to any interested reader, whether Koreanist or general linguist, what linguistics has pretty much come to mean everywhere in the English-reading world in these post-Chomsky decades ; and that alone means that, pace Mrs. Song, it deserves as wide a readership as possible. Future historians of science writing on the decline and fall of linguistics in the last decades of the century will find it particularly rewarding. They will especially wish to study the extent to which Dr. Song does (or as often does not) hew to the received line of the Perfect Chomskyite. At first glance he seems to be a model soldier-in-the-ranks, if not a front-line flag bearer: one soon locates the obligatory passage hailing Chomsky's revolt as an example of one of Kuhn's "scientific revolutions" (p. 337). S.E. Martin is canonically castigated since he...