The Workings of Language: From Prescriptions to Perspectives, and: Language Alive in the Classroom (review)

Over the past decade, we have seen several public debates on language issues take place in which some policy promoters were uninhibited by linguistic expertise (the most recent example is the California initiative against bilingual education). Despite efforts by organizations such as LSA or TESOL to influence such public discussions, linguists’ voices are hardly heard, let alone appreciated, at least in part because of the prevalence of folk-beliefs about the nature of language. One indication of growing awareness of this problem is the series of pamphlets published by LSA, edited by Betty Birner, which address linguistic questions such as ‘Does the language I speak influence the way I think?’ and ‘Why do some people have an accent?’ Although it is not clear how and where they might best be distributed, the pamphlets attempt to educate nonlinguists about the importance and fascination of our discipline.

At the same time, linguists frequently find themselves employed in English departments, possibly surrounded by colleagues who may or may not have a clear idea of what exactly a linguist should bring to an English program or to general education (something also not often addressed by graduate programs in linguistics). Rebecca S. Wheeler addresses both these situations with a pair of edited volumes, one aimed at students in a general education linguistics course, the other aimed at English teachers at all levels (elementary grades through college) who want to know how linguistics can contribute to the teaching of language and literature. What unifies her enterprise is a concern for determining what is important for an educated person— teacher or citizen—to know about language.

The goal for the first volume, The workings of language, is to ‘help undo common misinformation on language’ (xi) by covering what college graduates should know about language. Seventeen articles are divided among three sections, ‘Ways of talking’, ‘Englishes, English-only and languages in danger of extinction’, and an eclectic section, ‘Language and politics, prejudice, the media, creativity, humor and gender’.

W. makes an excellent choice in beginning the first volume with a reprint of Steven Pinker’s merciless treatment of ‘The language mavens’ (3–14). Pinker begins the project of myth demolishing by coming to the defense of negative concord, I could care less, zero-derivation, hopefully, and slang, and demonstrates the lack of linguistic foundation for the fulminations of prescriptivists, whose rules survive by ‘the same dynamic that perpetuates genital mutilations and college fraternity hazing’ (5). Four articles on American English dialects follow: Salikoko Mufwene, in an article that may be heavy going for linguistic novices, discusses African American Vernacular English (AAVE) as the result of dialect divergence and social segregation rather than of pidgincreolization. Geoffrey K. Pullum ‘African American Vernacular English is not Standard English with mistakes’ (39–58) demonstrates the rule-governed nature of AAVE with data on copula deletion, invariant be, remote-present been, negative concord, and consonant cluster simplification, and discusses how knowledge of dialect differences and similarities can be used to improve students’ success in school. Rebecca S. Wheeler, in her own article, follows with specifics on projects in dialect awareness education. ‘Southern Mountain English: The language of the Ozarks and Southern Appalachia’, (67–70) by Bethany K. Dumas, presents features of these stigmatized regional dialects, regional lexical items, double modals, a-prefixing, and so on as valuable testimony to the inevitability of linguistic diversity and change. A final chapter in this section, by Lynn S. Messing (‘On the other hand: American Sign Language, Signed Englishes and other visual language systems’ (81–87)), concisely discusses the rule-governed nature of sign languages, the independence of signed and spoken languages, and the distinction between genuine sign languages and manual representations of spoken languages.

Section 2 extends discussion...