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UPDATING A CLASSIC American Pronunciation By John Samuel Kenyon. 12th edition, expanded Edited by Donald M. Lance and Stewart A. Kingsbury Ann Arbor, Mich.: George Wahr, 1994. Pp. xxx + 410 Reviewed by erik r. thomas, North Carolina State University

John Samuel Kenyons American Pronunciation is a classic in American linguistics. In large part it consists of a detailed description of his own dialect (that of northeastern Ohio), but it also includes a great deal about the history of English and about processes such as spelling-pronunciation that lead to change. Kenyon designed it, as he said in the preface of the rst edition in 1924, as a textbook on pronunciation for teachers, both college-level and secondary-level (v). From then until 1950 it appeared in ten different editions. However, with Kenyons death in 1959, the periodic revision of this work came to an end. At the prompting of the George Wahr Publishing Company, Donald M. Lance and the late Stewart A. Kingsbury, with assistance from Stephen M. Howie, took on the perhaps unenviable task of producing an updated version. This edition, ofcially the 12th, appeared in 1994. The 12th edition is made up of several parts. First are a new preface by Lance and Kingsbury and an introduction by Lance. Next is Kenyons text from the tenth edition, including the index, all reprinted without alteration. After that is a chapter on the acoustic characteristics of English sounds by Lance and Howie, followed by a chapter on geographic and social variation in American English by Lance that largely draws on the ndings of dialectologists and sociolinguists since 1950. After Lances essay, an important paper that Kenyon wrote, Cultural Levels and Functional Varieties of English, is reprinted from the journal College English. Finally, a list of references, a bibliography of Kenyons publications, and a new index are provided. I will begin with Kenyons own text. In his introduction, he lays out two goals for the book. First, he states that the focus of the work is the description of phonetics. Second, he makes it clear that he is writing about
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how phonetics can be applied to education. He argues that the purpose of applying phonetics to education is both to combat ignorance in what is taught about pronunciation and to improve elocution. With regard to ignorance in teaching, he notes that people who hear differing pronunciations, such as [nju] or [nI u] or [nu] for new , often ask, Which is correct? and that an answer to such a question should be based on historical knowledge instead of chauvinistic defense of ones own pronunciation (6). This theme appears repeatedly in the rest of the book. Kenyon adds that the importance of phonetics for education is based not on its practicality but on its value as a branch of knowledge (6). However, he is clearly interested in applications as well. The numerous references to the pedagogical value of phonetics show that his intended audience is teachers, not just of linguistics but of English and speech, too. Kenyons text is organized into sections. In places, he provides chapter headings, though he does not always do so. He follows his introduction with a chapter entitled Historical Suggestions. Here he briey reviews the history of English from common Germanic, with emphasis on the inuence of the Norman French. This history leads to a discussion of how pronunciation changes. His description of the difference between phonetic change and analogical change is not only still current (though knowledge of the mechanisms of phonetic change has increased signicantly), but also written in a clear and understandable way. He follows that with discussions of his notions about how American English originated and about stylistic variation in speech. Here his ideas appear rather dated. For example, he states that it has been established that American English is derived from seventeenth-century standard British English, not from vernacular British dialects. However, Trudgills (1986) and Kerswills (1995) research on the leveling that occurs with dialect mixtureas happened in the settlement of the American coloniesand Fischers (1989) study of how regional British cultural and linguistic traits are preserved in the United States call Kenyons statement into question. His classication of speaking styles into familiar colloquial, formal colloquial, public-speaking style, and public-reading style has been supplanted by a series of more complicated schemes (e.g., Labov 1966; Bell 1984) as well as by the notion of register, as Lance notes (36768). Nevertheless, Kenyon, writing over 50 years ago, lacked the benet of more sophisticated classications of style. In addition, the fact that he admonishes his audience that colloquial English is not bad English (17) points out his main concern on this topic, that of ghting popular misconceptions. Subsequent sections cover the IPA symbols that Kenyon used, the articulation of the sounds of English, the denition of phoneme, syllable

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division, assimilation, and stress. In his discussion of articulation, he occasionally mentions acoustic correlates; writing before spectrographs had become widely available to linguists, he was limited by the knowledge of his time. As a result, as Lance and Howie note in their chapter on the acoustics of English sounds, Kenyon was right on some points and wrong on others. Acoustics were not the focus of these sections, though, and as a whole they are still instructive and worthwhile for students to read. Sections 10441 (81114) discuss in detail stress and its effects on vowels. He rst discusses levels of stress. Then he delves into differences between American and British pronunciation of words like imaginary and territory in which American usage preserves a secondary stress that British English has lost. He even provides historical evidence from poetry that British English once had the secondary stress. After some discussion of what he calls sense-stress, which contemporary students of intonation might call nucleus placement, he engages in a lengthy discussion of how stress levels are related to reduction of vowels to schwa. Although some of the terminology has changed, these sections on stress are still useful reading for linguists, English and ESL teachers, and speech instructors. The fact that they do not include modern phonological theories does not detract from their value; Kenyon bases his description on the examples that he provides, and such evidence is timeless even as phonological theories come and go. After that, Kenyon discusses spelling-pronunciation. These sections express some of the exasperation Kenyon felt about people, especially teachers, who proclaim that the proper pronunciation of a word is the one most like its spelling. He states that such an attitude is fundamentally in error about the nature, origin, and growth of all language (117) and lists numerous examples that demonstrate that traditional pronunciations of many English words do not conform to their spelling. For some of these words, the spelling-pronunciation had already triumphed in Kenyons time, and it undoubtedly has for more since then. However, English teachers are often the chief conveyors of the notion that pronunciation should conform to spelling, and they would benet from Kenyons discussion. It is no less instructive today than when he wrote it. The largest and nal part of Kenyons text, sections 151376 (121 234), covers the individual consonants, vowels, and diphthongs of English. For each sound, Kenyon provides exercises for students on learning its articulatory description. He also discusses each sounds historical sources at length. In many of the sections, he includes remarks on spelling-pronunciations that affect particular sounds or dialectal differences, particularly differences between British and American pronunciation. His notes about

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dialectal variants within American English are based on data that predate linguistic atlas investigationslet alone sociolinguistic studiesand are thus limited. Although the pervasive phonetic symbols may discourage some nonlinguists from reading these sections (as they might for earlier sections), as a whole they are quite clearly written and useful to the wide audience at which Kenyon was aiming. Kenyons essay Cultural Levels and Functional Varieties of English is a valuable addition to this edition. It ts largely because it is intended for the same broad audience, especially English teachers. In it, Kenyon distinguishes between cultural varieties, which today are called sociolects or similar names, and functional varieties, which today fall under the headings of style and register. While different cultural varieties might typify the usage of different groups of people, any individual uses various functional varieties. Kenyon acknowledges that he had formerly failed to make this distinction himself. Other terms that he employs have passed from linguistic use, notably semiliterate. However, this article is important from a historical perspective because the distinction that he denes had previously been widely ignored. Lance and Kingsbury hint in their preface and introduction that it was difcult to decide what else to add or change. They resolved to leave Kenyons text alone. They also decided to add the introduction to place the content of the book in its historical context and to add two chapters after Kenyons text to bring the book as a whole more in line with current knowledge about American pronunciation (xiii). They explain that they added the chapter on acoustic characteristics of English sounds because Kenyon focuses on articulation in his description of English phonemes (xiii). The purpose of Lances chapter on variation in American English is to address complaints about Kenyons use of General American for what dialectologists divide into the North Midland and Inland Northern dialects (see xviii) and also to add recent ndings about American dialects and social and stylistic variation. The chapter by Lance and Howie, Spectrographic Analysis of English Phonemes and Allophones, covers some basic phonetic terminology, with references to and corrections of statements by Kenyon, and then describes the acoustic characteristics of each sound in American English. The discussion is thorough. It covers formant structure, aperiodic components of speech sounds, pitch differences, differences between male and female voices, and numerous other aspects of speech. Special sections on /l/ and /r/ are included. It is full of spectrograms demonstrating each point, often with tables of numerical data supplementing the spectrograms. The spectrograms are a great aid to readers in understanding the text; in phonetics,

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one picture really can be worth a thousand words. One of the best features of this chapter is the extensive referencing to published papers from acoustic phonetics. I would certainly recommend it to students in phonetics classes. However, the problem with this chapter is that it is not useful to the same audiences as Kenyons text. Any reader can see that the content differs starkly from that of Kenyons text, but that in itself is not a drawback. The difculty is that while Kenyon was targeting speech and English teachers as well as linguists, Lance and Howies chapter is of use only to linguistics studentsin fact, primarily to those involved intensively in phonetics. It seems likely to me that most English instructors would nd the acoustics bafing, even with the clear explanation that Lance and Howie provide, and would nd no application for it in classroom instruction. Bird eld guides provide an analogy. Guidebooks traditionally described bird vocalizations with verbal descriptions or representations. Robbins, Bruun, and Zim (1966) introduced spectrograms to their eld guide. Though the book sold well for other reasons, most birders found the spectrograms completely useless, and other guides published subsequently have reverted to verbal descriptions. Spectrograms, while invaluable to acoustic specialists and for many kinds of research, are of limited value outside those contexts. Similarly, Lances chapter, Variation in American English, seems to target a narrower audience than Kenyons text does. In general, this chapter provides a good overview of the most important ndings of dialectology and sociolinguistics. It does not cover every issue, but it should not aim to do so. If it had, it would have been far too long. Lance attempts to relate the ndings to Kenyons text, especially with regard to Kenyons use of General American (noted above) and how Kenyons understanding of social and stylistic variation relates to the extensive research conducted on those topics since 1950. He adds some discussion of ethnic variation, which Kenyon had not addressed. This chapter succeeds in lling out Kenyons descriptions, constrained as they were by the limits of knowledge when he was writing. It also serves admirably as a concise summary of the ndings of scholars who study language variation. There are a few minor points about which one could quibble. For example, Lance writes in section 471 (356) that Labov (1991) nds fronting of /U/, as in took, to be associated with the Northern Cities Shift, but actually it is fronting of /u/, as in two. In section 477 (358), Lance says that tensing and raising of /I/ before /S/, as in sh, does not occur in the North or North Midland for generations younger than Kenyons, but it certainly does occur in the North Midland for speakers born as late as the 1920s.

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The cross-generational comparison of recordings of seven speakers from northeastern Ohio that Lance provides in sections 47478 (35759), the oldest of whom is Kenyon himself, is a nice touch. However, considering the extensive reference to acoustics in the preceding chapter and the fact that Lance is referring to Labovs acoustic research here, one wonders why Lance did not include formant plots of the vowels of these speakers. Of course, such an analysis would have interested only linguists, which brings up the major question about this chapter: how relevant is it to nonlinguists? Parts of it would certainly be of interest to the nonlinguists among Kenyons original audience. The discussions of court rulings and educational policy regarding ethnic dialects are of great importance to educators. The discussions of dictionary labels, inclusive language, high-school social divisions, and popular knowledge of dialects would also be useful. On the other hand, many nonlinguists would nd opaque the discussion of the vowel shifting patterns that Labov formulated, and the detailed discussion of dialect boundaries delineated by dialectologists could also be of limited value. As with the previous chapter, it seems as if this chapter was written primarily for linguists. This edition has numerous merits. I agree with the editors that it was appropriate to leave Kenyons own text unaltered. Even though some of its terminology has become outdated, the detailed historical derivations, the treatment of popular misconceptions, and the copious examples certainly have not. Kenyons essay on cultural levels and functional varieties is a welcome addition. The new chapters areby themselveswell written, too. Lances new introduction effectively places Kenyons text in its historical context. Lance and Howies excellent chapter on acoustic phonetics could serve as a supplementary text in any phonetics course. Lances chapter, Variation in American English, adequately summarizes the ndings on dialectal and stylistic variation that have accumulated since Kenyons last revision. Except for the essay on cultural levels and functional varieties, however, the additions fundamentally change the focus of this edition. The new chapters lack Kenyons preoccupations with historical derivation and with popular misconceptions of language. More importantly, however, they are not designed for the same audiences. Kenyons focus, a pedagogical one, was English teachers and elocutionists as well as linguists. The new chapters are much less relevant for nonlinguists and are also less pedagogical than Kenyons text had been. American Pronunciation will continue to be a valuable resource for linguists. Nevertheless, it seems clear that the constituency for whom the 12th edition is useful is narrower than Kenyon had intended.

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REFERENCES

Bell, Allan. 1984. Language Style as Audience Design. Language in Society 13: 145204. Fischer, David Hackett. 1989. Albions Seed: Four British Folkways in America. Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press. Kerswill, Paul. 1995. Children, Adolescents and Language Change. Working Papers in Linguistics 2: 20122. Labov, William. 1966. The Social Stratication of English in New York City. Washington, D.C.: Center for Applied Linguistics. . 1991. The Three Dialects of English. In New Ways of Analyzing Sound Change, ed. Penelope Eckert, 144. Orlando, Fla.: Academic Press. Robbins, Chandler S., Bertel Bruun, and Herbert S. Zim. 1966. A Guide to Bird Identication: Birds of North America . New York: Golden. Trudgill, Peter. 1986. Dialects in Contact. Language in Society 10. Oxford: Blackwell.

IS LINGUISTICS A SCIENCE? From Grammar to Science By Victor H. Yngve Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1996. Pp. xii + 350 Reviewed by douglas w. coleman, University of Toledo

Not too long ago, I went looking for reviews of Yngves From Grammar to Science and found that, although it has been out for about ve years, it had been reviewed only once, and then only electronically on the Linguist List (Hacken 1997). Considering the books potentially enormous impact on the eld of linguistics, I was surprised, to say the least. Further, when I read Hackens review, I was quite taken aback. It has several major errors of fact with regard to the books contentsbut more about that below. From Grammar to Science is aimed primarily at practicing linguists. At many points, the author speaks to them directly, often using the metaphor of moving from the old country of a linguistics based primarily on philosophical approaches to a new country in which linguistics enters the domain of hard science (see especially chap. 9, Plans for Emigrating to the New World).

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The books intent is ambitious. First of all, Yngve points out problems at the very foundation of contemporary linguistics that undermine its attempts to be scientic. At the risk of oversimplifying, I can summarize by stating that Yngve says these problems arise essentially out of what he calls domain confusions between objects of the sort studied by philosophy and objects of the sort studied by science. As Yngve (like others) argues convincingly, the objects of language are more like those studied by philosophy than those studied by science. (My own corpus-based research comparing references to the research process in texts from theoretical and applied linguistics seems to conrm this [Coleman 1999].) Note Saussures often-quoted remark on the objects of language: Far from it being the object that antedates the viewpoint, it is the viewpoint [of the obser ver] that creates the object (1959, 8). As I have often explained it to my own students, people, the noises they make, the marks they make on paper, and so on are obser vable in the real worldwhat Yngve calls the physical domain. But language (i.e., grammar) is something linguists have offered by way of explanation for what they observe. Itkonen (1978) has shown beyond doubt the dangers to linguistics of conating the former sense of observation (recording sense data from the real world) with the one in which we speak of making observations about hypothetical entities. People, Yngve argues, are objects in the physical domain; language is not. We cannot found a science on an assumption that creates its own objects of study, that is, objects of language (33). The linguistics he proposes is, rather, a human linguistics, a linguistics focused on people rather than on language (121). He takes most of chapters 19 to fully develop his arguments along these lines. Yngve outlines his conceptual framework in chapters 1018. He shows how a system of attaching properties to individuals and interactional groups in which they participate can be developed into a complex apparatus for describing human communication. It is disappointing but perhaps understandable that he provides only short examples of various communicative situations and does not develop any of his examples in great depth. The nature of his frameworkwhich includes properties of individuals participating in a communicative event, properties of the interaction, and descriptions of conditional changes of state in these propertieswould require a few chapters to develop an in-depth example, and would require prior understanding of the conceptual framework he has developed. In chapters 19 and 20, the author presents a notational system that he argues will allow linguistics to be truly scientic. To this end, he does not

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create a new notation out of thin air, but adopts standard diagramming conventions from Boolean logic. Now, here are some of the blatant misrepresentations made by Hacken (1997). In Yngves view scientic knowledge is permanent and represents truth, a position Hacken describes as so naive no philosopher would get away with it. But note what Yngve himself says: Our theories are always held to be tentative (98). Hacken also complains that Yngve [puts] the starting point of modern science in the 17th century. In fact, I cannot nd what statement of Yngves Hacken is referring to. Yngve acknowledges the key contributions of Bacon, Descartes, and Galileo (2122) in the formation of modern scienceas does, for example, Stephen Hawking (1988, 179)but at no point does he offer any kind of discrete starting point for science. Hacken chides Yngve for believing that the real world is given and explains himself by stating, Observations of the world are determined in part by our theories and metatheories. Now, Yngve warns that the natural sciences do not confuse . . . the real physical world out there with our observations of the world (97). But, in fact, Hacken is guilty of this when he conates the givenness of the real world (which Yngve asserts) and the givenness or literalness, if you will, of our observations of the world (which Yngve warns cannot be taken for granted). Hacken faults Yngves references for lack of coverage of current linguistics. For example, he cites Yngves failure to address the formulation of mentalism by Jackendoff (1993) and the outline of Chomskyan metatheory presented in Botha (1989) as reasons that his claims are not acceptable. Recall Yngves claim: the problem is that current linguistics is a linguistics of language (which is not in any meaningful sense observable in the real world) rather than a linguistics of people (who are). Botha has dealt with this issue, as has Itkonen (1978, 1981). I am not aware of anyone on the side of mentalism who has mounted a viable defense of language (grammar) as something that exists in the real world rather than as an explanation of something in the real world. Yet the data of current linguistics is language. It is true that many would nd Yngves arguments more persuasive if he had cited a great deal of metatheoretical literature from the eld. But why? It would better establish his authority, but that is a not a matter of the substance of his core argument: science studies realworld objects, and language is not a real-world object. I may be overly pessimistic about the possibility of Yngves linguistics of people replacing the current linguistics of language in the immediate future, but I do not see this as a likely outcome of the appearance of his book. After all, Itkonen (1978, 1981) presented clear and compelling

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arguments 20 years ago to the effect that intuitional data does not constitute observation in any scientic sense. (I was a graduate student when Itkonens works appeared and was forced to discover them on my own only a few years ago; they are unknown to the vast majority of my colleagues.) Itkonens point has been belabored by others for decades, yet it is essentially ignored by self-styled mainstream linguistics. I am hopeful that From Grammar to Science will nally spur some colleagues to embark on a serious attempt to recast linguistic theories within a framework of observable real-world entities and will show them how to make their theories truly scientically testable. If so, then the book will at least have served as one of the rst reliable maps to the new country for linguisticsone that does not display the realm of hard science as a largely blank area labeled merely heere be monsteres.

REFERENCES Botha, Rudolf P. 1989. Challenging Chomsky: The Generative Garden Game. Oxford: Blackwell. Coleman, Douglas W. 1999. Assumptions, Hypotheses, and Theories in Applied and Theoretical Linguistics. In LACUS Forum XXV, ed. Shin Ja J. Hwang and Arle R. Lommel, 46172. Chapel Hill, N.C.: Linguistic Association of Canada and the United States. Hacken, Pius ten. 1997. Review: Yngve: From Grammar to Science. Linguist List (online serial): 8 (1277). http://linguistlist.org/issues/8/8-1277.html. Hawking, Stephen. 1988. A Brief History of Time: From the Big Bang to Black Holes. New York: Bantam. Itkonen, Esa. 1978. Grammatical Theory and Metascience: A Critical Investigation into the Methodological and Philosophical Foundations of Autonomous Linguistics. Amsterdam: Benjamins. . 1981. The Concept of Linguistic Intuition. In A Festschrift for Native Speaker , ed. Florian Coulmas, 12740. The Hague: Mouton. Jackendoff, Ray. 1993. Patterns in the Mind: Language and Human Nature. New York: Harvester/Wheatleaf. Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1959. Course in General Linguistics. Trans. Wade Baskin. New York: Philosophical Library.

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A RHETORIC AL BIOGRAPHY OF AN UNLIKELY RHETOR From Plymouth to Parliament: A Rhetorical History of Nancy Astors 1919 Campaign By Karen J. Musolf New York: St. Martins Press, 1999. Pp. xi + 244 Reviewed by michael erard, University of Texas at Austin

From Plymouth to Parliament is a rhetorical history, a denition of which author Karen J. Musolf dispatches in a short preface: it is interdisciplinary, carefully researched, and limited in scope, and it aims for authenticity. An emerging genre, the rhetorical history is a blended form that joins historical description with rhetorical description (xi). This matters to readers of American Speech because such a title promises attention to language, speech, and discourse. Yet this modest volumewhich mostly delivers on those promisesis perhaps more appropriately dubbed a rhetorical biography, since it tells about the rhetorical skills the American-born Lady Astor brought to her 1919 bid for the House of Commons and how she deployed those skills to defeat two male opponents after a heated campaign. No theoretical bodiceripper, the book remains invested in the self-evidence of particulars. Thus, for those readers who lack the requisite cross-disciplinary social, historical, and political knowledge to situate the subject and its themes in larger terms and for those readers who believe that particulars are most interesting, productive, and compelling when they are framed in those larger terms, Musolfs book raises more questions than it answers. The introduction is a biography of Lady Astor and her husband, Waldorf Astor, whom Nancy met on a transatlantic ship in 1905 and married in 1906. Lady Astor was a study in contrasts: a well-bred Virginian (Nancy Langhorne was her given name), she loathed her snobbish classmates in nishing school in New York City; a hard-riding, hard-talking horsewoman, she shunned alcohol and became a Christian Scientist. As chapter 1 explains, Lady Astors candidacy became possible shortly after a series of laws (the Representation of the People Act of 1918 and the Qualication of Women Bill) enfranchised women and made wives equal to their husbands, opening the way for her to vie for her husbands seat in the House of Commons after he fullled his destiny by lling his deceased fathers seat in the House of Lords. When her husband called her to become a candidate, Lady Astor sought to intensify a life of public service. She was not actually the rst woman elected to Parliamentthat honor

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went to an Irish woman, Constance Markieviczbut she was the rst elected woman to claim her seat. In chapters 2 and 3, Musolf presents Lady Astor as an unlikely rhetor in an unlikely campaign. Chapter 4 describes the last few meetings of the campaign, and a conclusion discusses some challenges facing Astor in her parliamentary career until 1945for instance, she was branded a Nazi sympathizer for her association with Neville Chamberlain and his policy of appeasement of Hitlers Germany. For the most part, Musolfs method is to analyze various texts of the 1919 campaign, including Astors speeches, newspaper reports, and letters, comparing Astors word choices, gurative language, rhetorical strategies, and verbal interactions with interlocutors in order to examine how Lady Astor conducted her public appearances, managed her public persona, handled her opponents, newspaper reporters, and hecklers. Musolf compares Astors strategies to those of her opponents and shows how the candidate altered her message to different audiences. She also uses comments from audiences, reporters, and her campaign opponents to judge reactions to Lady Astors rhetorical behavior and her rhetorical effectiveness. Musolf concludes that Astors political success (in 1919 and six successive elections) was due to her rhetorical skills. In sketching Lady Astors rhetorical gifts, Musolf presents a woman probably more able than most to withstand the pressures of public life, and certainly more outspoken and well-versed in issues of the day than the 35-year-old caricature of the blatant and bloomered creature the cartoonist Linley Sambourne had imagined would be the rst woman M.P. Because one gets a vivid picture of Astor as a speaker and rhetor, From Plymouth to Parliament is better termed a rhetorical biography, a nascent genre for which Musolfs book is a model, though not always a positive one. Yet this rhetorical biographys narrow focus on Astor is as much a weakness as a strength. On one hand, Musolf has deftly mustered anecdotes from primary sources about Lady Astors verbal jousting, both public and private. Working as a nurse in a Red Cross hospital, she confronted a dying soldier with the following:
Yes, Saunders, youre going to die. Youre going to die because you have no guts. If you were a Cockney, or a Scot, or a Yank, youd live. But youre just a Canadian, so youll lie down and die! Ill have them send you up a good supper for your last meal and I bet you this wrist watch youll be dead this time tomorrow. You can keep it till then. Ill get it back when youre gone. [14]

The man nished the dinner and kept the watch for the rest of his life. Such anecdotes complete a ne-grained portrait of Lady Astor as a tough, quickwitted, intelligent speaker, someone who could be humorous, self-depre-

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cating, but also confrontational. Musolf uses written materials to advantage in her portrayal of Lady Astors campaign as well. As becomes clear, Lady Astor depended on a certain resistance from other candidates and the hecklers her opponents sent into her crowds. Heckling did not put any clamps on Astors campaign talk, Musolf writes. Instead, it provided her with the opportunity for a virtuoso performancea tour de force of rhetorical invention (92). In this sense, unlike so many linguistic studies, Musolfs gives us real words produced by a real speaker and a description of the settings and situations in which she produced them. On the other hand, the meticulous attention to Lady Astors language, one virtue of the biography, also means that Musolf disregards the social and linguistic context within which Lady Astors language was considered distinctive. Linguists will immediately notice that as a speaker, orator, or rhetor Lady Astor is not situated within any description of the public discourse of the day; in a book-length work, this must be considered a liability. Unfortunately, this is exacerbated by the fact that the only comparisons are to modern campaign practices, mostly American. This juxtaposition neither illuminates the subject nor respects the complexity of modern campaigns. There are several notions one could use to formulate context; one is Pierre Bourdieus linguistic marketplace. As he writes, linguistic utterances or expressions are always produced in particular contexts or markets, and the properties of these markets endow linguistic products with a certain value (Bourdieu 1991, 18). If rhetoric can be dened as a symbolic activity that produces symbolic products of various use-values and exchange-values within such a linguistic marketplace in order to produce social formations of identication and persuasion, then a rhetorical history should properly describe not only an individual rhetors utterances but the marketplace which values or devalues them. In the case of Lady Astor, consider heckling, which Musolf notes has been part of the British political tradition for a long time (198). Here a simple (if riskily unpositivist) historical description is more necessary than a theoretical discussion about the metaphysics of a heckling hegemony: how were parliamentar y elections so shaped by heckling that antiheckling rhetorical strategies were available to the candidates in the rst place? This would help the reader understand not only the source of Lady Astors rhetorical skills but the contemporary conventions of political discourse which she manipulated, exploited, and occasionally abandoned. Elsewhere Musolf points out that the repartee between candidates and hecklers was seriously judged (199). For Lady Astors campaign to succeed rhetorically, what exactly were the conventions governing a campaigners response to hecklers, and by what criteria were her responses judged? Musolf also claims that heckling was Astors Labor opponent William Gays rhetorical

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tactic, but in order to accept this claim, the reader must understand how Gays arsenal was constructed and managed in terms of accepted political practices of the day. Musolf also claims that Astors informal style and humor helped her cross some of the class and cultural barriers that stood between her and the women in her audience (42). Here the question concerns denitions of formal and informal and how well the contemporary reader knows how they worked in early-twentieth-century England. As it stands, Musolfs claim seems credible enough, but here she misses an opportunity to produce a thicker description of the linguistic marketplace. As examples of such thicker descriptions, one thinks of Richard Baumans Let Your Words Be Few: Symbolism of Speaking and Silence among Seventeenth-Century Quakers (1983) and Jane Kamenskys Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England (1997), both of which rely on historical documents to meet Dell Hymess 1962 call for research in The Ethnography of Speaking which, as Bauman and Joel Sherzer (1974, 6) put it, is directed toward the formulation of descriptive theories of speaking as a cultural system or as part of a cultural system. The thinness of Musolfs description is most salient where the book might contribute the most, exactly on the issue of gender, public discourse, and the early history of womens enfranchisement. She depends on an evaluation of Lady Astors rst speech by an Evening Standard reporter, one of the most remarkable political speeches ever delivered by a woman (32). What types of speeches were these listeners used to hearing from women? Musolf mentions that Astors presence in the election inuenced her opponents rhetoric by suddenly illuminating it as highly gendered. For instance, William Foots favorite election metaphor was about boxing, and he used to like to say, Let the best man win, and, Slug it out man to man, expressions which he could not use in 1919. Musolf also notes that the interactive format Astor preferred was unusual for womens meetings, which gave both Astor and the members of her audience the opportunity to enact womens participation in the political process (39). Musolf also points out that Astors candidacy affected campaign coverage, which was in turn the center of political news, the primary function of the British pressits raison dtre (104). Still, Musolf provides more information about written public discourse than about spoken discourse, which is ironic, considering that her appreciation of Astors rhetoric is mostly about her speaking. A nal comment about the rhetorical history of the books subtitle: First, it announces that a rhetorical approach has directed the scholar to describe and evaluate a persons linguistic behavior on the reasonable assumption that linguistic behavior, whether fully conscious or not, reveals

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a signicant amount about individuals, their intentions, and their times. Thus, a rhetorical history is distinct from an intellectual history (what someone thought, in terms of what was available to them to think) or a material culture perspective (what someone owned or built, in terms of what was available to own or build). It also shares the reasonable assumption that public linguistic action inuences how people think, act, and know. But why is a rhetorical history any better than any other kind of history? Musolf does not say. Second, rhetorical history announces what is as often a drawback as a strength in projects identied as rhetorical, which is that they are not bound to any disciplinary conventions of method, presentation, or conclusions. That Musolf uses terminology from the contemporary study of political campaigns indicates that her study is rooted in part in the study of rhetoric itself, but rhetorical terms are deployed haphazardly and not always dened. In the end, she leaves unjustied the interdisciplinar y nature of her project, and as a result the rhetorical approach, with its autonomy from other disciplines, becomes a liability because it does not provide reasons for that autonomy. For Musolf, a rhetorical approach seems to be warranted in Lady Astors case simply because she was an unlikely rhetor in an unlikely campaignnot, however, because the rhetorical approach builds a more complete framework for understanding this campaign, this rhetor, or the impact of this rhetor on British politics. For the most part, From Plymouth to Parliament s claims to interdisciplinarity are not earned, a conclusion which I realize is far from Lady Astors campaign but worth making. The point of interdisciplinary work is to achieve conclusions. Sometimes one can generate an interesting intellectual friction that is productive for the project if it is an energy directed towards the impossibility (or possibility) of certain types of conclusions, but we are not yet at the point where the ethos of interdisciplinarity is enhanced when not belonging to a recognizable set of disciplinary behaviors is undertaken simply for the frisson of not belonging.

REFERENCES Bauman, Richard. 1983. Let Your Words Be Few: Symbolism of Speaking and Silence among Seventeenth-Century Quakers. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Bauman, Richard, and Joel Sherzer, eds. 1974. Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Bourdieu, Pierre. 1991. Language and Symbolic Power. Trans. Gino Raymond and Matthew Adamson. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press.

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Hymes, Dell. 1962. The Ethnography of Speaking. In Anthropology and Human Behavior, ed. T. Gladwin and W. C. Sturtevant, 1353. Washington, D.C.: Anthropological Society of Washington. Kamensky, Jane. 1997. Governing the Tongue: The Politics of Speech in Early New England. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

HOW THE MIND TURNS LANGUAGE INTO MEANING The Ascent of Babel: An Exploration of Language, Mind, and Understanding By Gerry T. M. Altmann Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. xiii + 257 Reviewed by mark canada, University of North Carolina at Pembroke

In his preface to The Ascent of Babel, Altmann explains, I wanted to write this book so that it would be readable by non-specialists. I wanted to convey to them the excitement and challenge of psycholinguistics the study of how the mind turns language into meaning, and back again (vi). Altmann succeeds on both counts, making his subject both accessible and interesting. Indeed, The Ascent of Babel has all the ingredients of a successful lay introduction to a complex subject, as well as an approach that makes it an ideal textbook for a college linguistics course. In this brief but expansive overview, Altmann explores the processes by which the human brain acquires language, interprets spoken words and sentences, produces speech, and absorbs language through reading, as well as the various ways that these processes can break down. As the preface promises, the focus is on meaning. For example, while some discussions of language acquisition emphasize the stages by which infants learn to talk, Altmann examines the possible ways that infants come to make sense of the language they hear. Comparing the prosody of speech to the music behind song lyrics, he suggests that the prosodic clues that infants hear in voices may help them to distinguish syllablesan important rst step in understanding language. Meaning is also the focus of a chapter called Words, and How We (Eventually) Find Them, which examines the complex mental processes involved when a person hears and interprets a sentence. Altmann shows how aural input initially activates various words with different meaningscaptain and captive, for examplein the brain and how the brain then eliminates inappropriate meanings until it arrives at the correct

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one. Perhaps the most provocative chapter in the book is the penultimate one, Wiring-up a Brain. In some ways a culmination of earlier chapters, especially one called On the Meaning of Meaning, this portion of the book contains a fascinating look at the physiological basis of meaning in the brain. Drawing on work done with an articial neural network called an Elman net, Altmann speculates on how neurons in the brain may learn to use context and experience to encode meaning. Of course, a successful book for lay readers requires more than a fascinating subject. Above all, it requires clarity, and Altmann excels in this area. In addition to writing clear prose relatively free of jargon, he makes extensive use of examples and analogies. To illustrate the process by which various words are activated and eliminated, for example, he uses the metaphor of a combination lock in which tumblers fall into place. Subheadings and illustrations, furthermore, graphically reinforce the books organization and ideas. Less obvious but perhaps more important is Altmanns expert use of transitions. As if anticipating the inevitable confusion that a lay readeror even a linguist new to the material he is coveringmight feel in taking in all that the book covers, Altmann speaks directly to the reader with transitional statements: But again, so what? So far so good. So what should we now conclude? In one of the many transitional sections he uses to link chapters, Altmann writes, What these last two chapters have done is move us some little way closer towards understanding how a meaning is arrived at. . . . In the next chapter, we take a closer look at what meaning might be (116). Finally, the book is short. Thanks to a cogent style and a feel for what details can be omitted for a lay audience, Altmann manages a respectably comprehensive overview in fewer than 250 pages. The content and clarity of The Ascent of Babel make it an illuminating and enjoyable read for anyone interested in how human minds communicate with one another. The same features would make it an excellent text for a college course, as well. Indeed, as he moves toward an understanding of how the brain processes language, Altmann manages a nearly seamless overview of phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. Though less thorough, this overview has an advantage over the kind one might nd in a standard linguistics textbook, where concepts such as phonemes and voice onset time might strike a student as esoteric, even trivial. Because Altmann examines linguistic principles as they relate to meaning, their relevance is obvious. Finally, in addition to surveying the hypotheses that make up our current understanding of psycholinguistics, Altmann shows how Ellen Markman, William Marslen-Wilson, Stephen Crain, and other researchers have tested these hypotheses. This approach accurately depicts linguis-

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ticslike any other academic eldas something mysterious and unfolding rather than a xed body of knowledge. Indeed, particularly because of its juxtaposition of generally accepted concepts and speculation, The Ascent of Babel implicitly invites students to participate in the search for knowledge. This invitation, along with the lesson it teaches about academic inquiry, is the books most appealing and important feature.

STATUS, PREEMINENCE, AND PROMISCUITY A Bawdy Language: How a Second-Rate Language Slept Its Way to the Top By Howard Richler Toronto: Stoddart, 1999. Pp. xiii + 208 Reviewed by peter m. carriere, Georgia College & State University

This book is a compilation and reorganization of articles from Richlers column in the Gazette newspaper of Montreal, Quebec, though some new material appears in parts 1 and 2. Styled for the reading public, the book excludes standard scholarly aids like indexes and bibliographies. Nevertheless, Richler relies heavily on research from myriad sources. This approach may be an emerging trend. Nichols (1999), in her review of Wolfram and Schilling-Estes (1997), obser ves that Hoi Toide is a book on linguistics for the public and then asks, About how many of the books in our libraries can we say this? Of course, research into bawdiness has a certain compelling quality, and Richlers entertaining and witty style may be enjoyed by anyone. His mock-serious revelation at the end of chapter 3 is typical: The [lexical] progeny of a pheasant and a duck would be . . . a deasant, of course (18). Richlers general thesis is that the prominence of English as the worlds lingua franca is a result not only of the overwhelming global presence of Britain and the United States over the last few centuries but also of the English languages willingness to absorb words and phrases from a multiplicity of sources without worr ying about retaining its purity. In adopting a skeptical posture toward attempts to keep language pure, journalist Richler is working in the tradition of linguists like Mencken, who, in The American Language (1979), devoted a whole chapter to condemning English attitudes toward American linguistic barbarisms. Observed Mencken, In

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language an Americanism is generally regarded as obnoxious ipso facto and when a pungent new one begins to force its way into English usage the guardians of the national linguistic chastity belabor it (31). While Richlers book provides ample evidence that the success of English is partly because it was a language that slept its way to the top, the last two sections, parts 5 and 6, move away from that general theme. Part 6 reviews some of the word games that have occurred in English throughout its history and ends by providing the reader with challenging language puzzles, riddles, and ll-inthe-blank exercises of the type available in airport bookstores. In short chapters (two to four pages long) the other parts of the book discuss the impure conditions of English that have contributed to its rise. Each chapter culls the most bizarre and entertaining oddities pertaining to its topic rather than providing exhaustive scholarly discussions. The number of chapters in each part varies from ve in part 5 to nine in part 4. These sections and chapters may be read in any order without sacricing understanding, an organizational feature that may appeal to the reading public and enhance the books general popularity. Part 1 is devoted to a discussion of the strength of English, by which Richler means its exibility in adopting slang, portmanteau blends, colorful jargon, and words created out of new endeavors and occupations. An example is the phrase exit bag, which Richler traces to 1997 when it arose in connection with assisted suicide. Exit bag was an American Dialect Society word of the year, and Richler features some of the more unusual ones to emerge in the 1990s, like the self-explanatory starter marriage from 1995 and urban camping, a euphemism for homelessness, from 1996. Having ingratiated himself with the reader by appealing to contemporary linguistic innovations, Richler then freely explores more historical portmanteau words like Shakespeares glaze, a blend of glare and gaze , and Herman Melvilles snivelization, coined in 1849 from snivel and civilization (17). Illogical combinations like alcoholic are covered in chapter 2: An alcoholic is not addicted to alco but to alcohol (15). The contributions of slang form the topic of chapter 4, and part 1 ends with a brief discussion of the illogical and hypocritical nature of linguistic purity and those who seek it. Richlers point throughout is that the value and popularity of English have something to do with its willingness to mate with disreputable characters that other cultures and languages would eschew, to which, Richler says, Thank God for disreputable characters (19). Part 2 focuses on the benecial adulteration of English by the addition of words of foreign origin and the delightful oddities that occur when people speaking the same language are geographically separated. For example, chapter 8 covers some of the differences between British and American usage. Some of the entries are fairly well known, like the words

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diaper and nappy , but others are not, like the British phrase keeping your pecker up, equivalent to the American keeping your courage up. Chapter 9 features a discussion of the African legacy in English and the idea of Ebonics as an enduring English language variant, and chapter 10 features the inuence of Yiddish and certain words like klutz, schmuck, and nudnik words that Richler believes have endured not because they introduce a new concept but because theyre fun to say (51). The next chapter discusses the inuence of English used in former colonies, and the following three chapters are devoted to Canadianisms, where we learn that in the United States a shit disturber is more likely to be referred to as a shit-stirrer (62). Richler denes neither term, but shit-stirrer appears in Spears (1982) as a synonym for sodomite (378). The chapters of part 3 are loosely grouped around an ironic theme: Genealogy: The Pedigree of a Mongrel Language (67). Chapter 15 contains a lengthy discussion of the f-word, referred to by Richler as our [lexical] Sovereign, and chapter 16 strips the mask of gentility off words like avocado, which descended from the Aztec word for testicle (74), and vermicelli, which literally means little worms (75). Chapter 17, aptly titled Whats in a Nym, discusses acronyms, eponyms, and retronyms, a word coined by Robert F. Kennedys aide Frank Mankiewicz to describe the union of adjectives to previously solitary nouns (80), as in acoustic guitar, a two-word noun made suddenly necessary by the appearance of the electric guitar. The next chapter focuses on the origins of such geographic names as America and Canada, and chapter 19 is concerned with words that nd sudden fame (or infamy), such as paparazzi, which, according to Richler, was born in 1961, the same year as Princess Diana. The next chapter consists of a discussion of the full Monty, a protean phrase that can mean the whole thing (91) or total nudity: When performing the full monty, writes Richler, clothes can be donned as well as doffed (93). Chapter 21 concludes part 3 with a brief but informative discussion of the origins of the Oxford English Dictionary, followed by a return to the theme that to insist on purity in language is to stie its natural and engaging development: It is never the true linguists, such as Noam Chomsky, Dwight Bolinger, and Robin Lakoff, insists Richler, who are issuing the language ats (98). The rst word puzzle occurs in chapter 22, in part 4. Generally devoted to a discussion of English as an easy language to acquire in its basic form (850 words gets the job done) but difcult to really master, the puzzle illustrates the problem of meaning: Does sanction mean forbid or permit? Many of the heteronyms and heterophones Richler discusses have been the subject of small talk for years, as in the difference between bear animal or tolerate and bare undress or be naked. Never willing to stray too far from the bawdiness theme, Richler in chapter 23 covers the impor-

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tance of language in the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal; in chapter 24, the linguistic focus of political correctness; and in chapter 25, the difculty of telling euphemisms from dysphemisms euphemisms with offensive connotations, as in ball and chain wife. Chapter 26 covers acronyms, ending in an entertaining list of satirical ones, as in DOS Defective Operating System or WWW World Wide Wait (124). The rest of part 4 covers other lexical anomalies like the appearance of the euphemistic donkey to replace biblical ass, the seven deadly sins as neither deadly nor sins today, prejudices associated with the word left, and odd names: People with surnames such as Piddle, Shitler, and Daft still live in the villages of Ugly, Nasty, Foul Hole, and Swineshead (139). The divergence of the last two parts of Richlers book from his bawdiness-is-benecial theme is not total. While some chapters are devoted to such things as how proverbs change from one language to another, or how Irish is a dying language while Hebrew has been resuscitated through mouth-to-mouth reiteration, others return to English, as in those chapters in part 6 devoted to English word games like Scrabble, no longer the sole possession of the English language, or the fun of anagrams, lipograms, pangrams, palindromes, and split-definitives, words dened by their constituent parts. Thus Hebrew becomes he-brew beer with balls (197). In his introduction, Richler claims that his aim in writing A Bawdy Language is to demonstrate why the English language is in such good shape and to explain to the reader what he or she should know to fully enjoy the worlds global language (5). This rather broad topic is made necessary by the chapters that diverge somewhat from the strict scrutiny of English and its promiscuous origins. Or perhaps Richler considers word games a manifestation of linguistic promiscuity. Whatever the case, the short chapters make for quick reading, and A Bawdy Language would make an entertaining and informative addition to any library.

REFERENCES Mencken, H. L. 1979. The American Language: An Inquir y into the Development of English in the United States. 4th ed., abr. with annotations and new material by Raven I McDavid, Jr. New York: Knopf. Nichols, Patricia. 1999. Review of Wolfram and Schilling-Estes (1997). American Speech 74: 9599. Spears, Richard A. 1982. Slang and Euphemism: A Dictionary of Oaths, Curses, Insults, Sexual Slang and Metaphor, Racial Slurs, Drug Talk, Homosexual Lingo, and Related Matters. Abr. ed. New York: Signet. Wolfram, Walt, and Natalie Schilling-Estes. 1997. Hoi Toide on the Outer Banks: The Story of the Ocracoke Brogue . Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press.