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BOOK NOTICES
TERRENCE KAUFMAN, and COLETTE GRINEVALD. The
papers range from those which describe language en-
dangerment situations and explicate the need to docu-
ment threatened languages to ones which discuss
methodologies for documentation and strategies for
language revitalization to ones which discuss
projects underway in various parts of the world. Top-
ics include the severity of mass language extinction,
its causes in globalization, language attitudes and
other factors, large and small-scale documentation,
and accounts of particular languages such as the Ryu-
kuan languages in Japan, Alutor and Forest Nenets
in Russia, and Kawesqar and Yaghan in Chile. Most
papers are followed by a commentary or response by
one or two of the other participants.
The second volume consists of eight analytical
works on languages of Russia, Alaska, and Canada.
These range from a short report on Shamanic auto-
biographical texts in the Tungusic language Udehe
(by TOSHIRO TSUMAGIRI) and a brief note on Korak
writing (by ALEVITA ZHUKOVA) to longer reports
dealing with basic vocabulary in Kolyma Yukaghir
(by FUBITO ENDO), noun incorporation in Koryak (by
MEGUMI KUREBITO), affixes in Chukchi (by TOKUSU
KUREBITO), classifiers in Skidegate Haida (by HIRO-
FUMI HORI) and suffixes in Sliammon Salish (by
HONORÉ WATANABE). The longest contribution to the
volume (85–155) is a substantial grammar fragment
for Central Alaskan Yupik provided by OSAHITO MI-
YAOKA.
Taken together, these two volumes give a nice
sense of the range of work being done in the ELPR
project. Other reports, many of which are published
both in Japanese and in English, include work on
minority languages of East and Southeast Asia, work
on Toda vocabulary, on the prosody of endangered
dialects in Japan, on Hualapai grammar, and on folk-
tales, legends, and fairy tales by speakers of Koryak,
Nanay, Sakhalin Ainu, Saru Ainu, and Nivkh. For
those who work to preserve and revive languages,
these volumes (along with other recent work such as
Leanne Hinton and Ken Hale’s The green book of
language revitalization in practice (San Diego: Aca-
demic Press, 2001) and Nicholas Ostler’s Endan-
gered languages and literacy 2000 (Bath:
Foundation for Endangered Languages, 2000) help
to establish the environment and tools necessary for
language preservation. [EDWIN BATTISTELLA, South-
ern Oregon University.]
The C. H. van Schooneveld collection
in Leiden University library. By JAN
PAUL HINRICHS, with contributions by
A. TH. BOUWMAN. Leiden: Leiden Uni-
versity Library, 2001. Pp. 240.
From 1953 to 1982, Cornelius van Schooneveld
was associated with Mouton and Company Publish-
373
ers, most notably as the series editor of the ‘Janua
linguarum’ series, which published Chomsky’s Syn-
tactic structures, Jakobson and Halle’s Fundamen-
tals of language and hundreds of other important
titles. In 1998, van Schooneveld arranged for his
Mouton archives and his other papers to be donated
to the library of Leiden University where he taught
as Professor of Slavic languages from 1952 to 1960.
This volume, subtitled ‘Editorial correspondence and
documents relating to Mouton & Co., The Hague,
and other papers in the fields of Slavistics and lin-
guistics’, catalogues the contents of the collection
and places it in the context of the history of linguistics
publishing.
The book consists of four sections. The first, titled
‘ ‘‘A great and enthralling adventure’’ C. H. van
Schooneveld, Peter de Ridder, and Mouton & Co.’
(1–41), recaps van Schooneveld’s career and de-
scribes the history of Mouton. Van Schooneveld’s
association with Mouton began in 1953 when it was
established as a scholarly publishing house at the
instigation of Peter de Ridder, who approached the
owners of what was then the Mouton printing com-
pany. Van Schooneveld’s work as series editor for
Slavic and linguistics areas continued through his
move from Leiden to Stanford and flourished during
his long career at Indiana University, where he taught
from 1966 to 1986. De Ridder himself left Mouton
in 1974, and the publisher’s sales waned during the
1970’s (publications in the ‘Janua linguarum’ series,
for example dropped from 73 in 1973 to 45 in 1975
to 13 in 1977). Mouton was eventually purchased by
Walter de Gruyter, which today publishes the Mou-
ton de Gruyter series, and van Schooneveld left the
company in the early 1980s.
The second part of the book, the largest, consists
of ‘Illustrations and commentary’ (43–123). This in-
cludes photographs (beginning with a photo of Nico-
laas van Wijk, the Dutch Slavist to whom the ‘Janua
linguarum’ series is dedicated) and copies of tele-
grams, telexes, letters, and clippings. Included here
is material relevant to Roman Jakobson (68–77), per-
haps Mouton’s most important author, and copies of
material relating to the publication of Pasternak’s Dr.
Zhivago (77).
The book concludes with ‘A short inventory of the
C. H. van Schooneveld Collection’ (125–35), which
delineates the categories of the 97 boxes of Mouton
archives and 36 boxes of professional correspon-
dence donated by van Schooneveld. There is also a
description of various Mouton series edited by van
Schooneveld: ‘Slavistic printings and reprintings’,
‘Janua linguarum’ (with various subseries), and ‘De
proprietatibus litterarum’ (also in several subseries)
(137–82). The final section is an index of names
mentioned in the van Schooneveld materials
(183–240). This interesting book provides a nice
glimpse of what must be a fascinating collection of
374 LANGUAGE VOLUME 78, NUMBER 2 (2002)
materials for the history of linguistics, Slavistics, and
publishing. [EDWIN BATTISTELLA, Southern Oregon
University.]
Speaking of crime: Narratives of pris-
oners. By PATRICIA E. O’CONNOR. Lin-
coln: University of Nebraska Press,
2000. Pp. 206.
Narrative is often a step in self-realization and per-
sonal growth. In Speaking of crime Patricia O’Con-
nor draws on more than a dozen years of teaching
and research in prisons and over 100 narratives of
violence by prisoners in a maximum security prison
in Washington, DC. O’C shows how inmates’ narra-
tives and the narrative devices they employ in retell-
ing their life events reveal their sense of agency,
identity, and responsibility. She argues that the form
of their narratives can provide important information
about how they see their lives and how they interact
in and out of prison.
The book begins with an introduction to prison
research (1–12). This is followed by a chapter called
‘Getting into prison’ (13–37), which provides some
background on the prison system in the United States
and on theoretical issues relevant to narrative (draw-
ing on work ranging from Foucault and Vygotsky
to Labov and Goffman). Ch. 2, ‘Agency and verb
position’ (38–74), deals with the representation of
the individual as an agent in the description of events.
O’C here shows how narrative may reveal an individ-
ual’s current attitude toward past events, as when an
inmate deflects by referring to ‘catching a charge’ of
robbery or ‘exchanging gunfire’ (rather than ‘getting
caught stealing’ or ‘letting someone have it’).
Ch. 3, ‘Pronouns and agency’ (75–117), focuses
on the referential slipperiness of the pronoun ‘you’
and on the significance of the narrative shift from ‘I’
to ‘you’. The chapter examines five stabbing narra-
tives and an excerpt on stabbing from Jack Henry
Abbott’s In the belly of the beast (New York: Ran-
dom House, 1981) to explore the function of such
pronoun shifts, which may serve to distance the
speaker, involve the hearer, or position the speaker
as observing a past self. Ch. 4, ‘Reflexive language
and frame breaks’ (118–52), discusses ways pris-
oner-narrators manage and comment on discourse to
make a story understandable and how this meta-dis-
course showcases their embedded thoughts and
choices.
Ch. 5 is the study’s ‘Conclusions and implications’
(p. 153–72). Here the focus is on O’C’s view that
narrative can be potentially rehabilitative. Engaging
in new conversations with hearers whose background
forces speakers to characterize and reflect on their
actions and intentions is where the rehabilitative po-
tential lies. O’C suggests that prisons allow more
time for talk and set up pilot participatory discourse
rehabilitation programs to involve inmates in dis-
courses with noninmates. The book also has a short
appendix with sample consent forms and the inter-
view questionnaire.
Some aspects of the book will strike readers as
inconclusive: There is the problem of how to interpret
some narrative shifts (when, for example, is the shift
from ‘I’ to ‘you’ an attempt to involve the listener
in a constructed event or to distance the speaker from
a painful or incriminating one?). And how do we
assess the role of the observer’s paradox on narrative
style? Nevertheless, there is plenty of thought-pro-
voking analysis, and the book provides interesting
glimpses of the framing that inmates have of their
crimes and of prison life. [EDWIN BATTISTELLA,
Southern Oregon University.]
Metaphorically speaking. By PATTI D.
NOGALES. (Center for the Study of Lan-
guage and Information lecture notes
93.) Stanford: CSLI, 1999. Pp. 241.
In Metaphorically speaking, Patti Nogales revisits
the question that has troubled many philosophers,
psychologists, and linguists: What is a metaphor?
Armed with a conceptual approach and an empirical
methodology, she seeks to answer it. Her introduc-
tion, ‘Why metaphor’ (1–8), lays out the problem as
she sees it: To find an explanation for metaphor that
accounts for the way we use and understand meta-
phoric language. She seeks to accomplish this
through a formulation of metaphor as reconceptual-
ization, which she explains as a prelinguistic process
rather than a purely linguistic phenomenon. She then
attempts to justify her analysis through a detailed
evaluation and comparison of her own and other met-
aphor theories against a list of criteria she has devel-
oped for this purpose.
Ch. 1, ‘Metaphor as reconceptualization’ (9–40),
sets out her assumptions and terminology and de-
scribes the specific components of her analysis of
metaphor with respect to these assumptions and
terms. She claims that metaphor at its base is not a
matter of meaning but is conceptual and prelinguis-
tic, based in the reformulation that takes place when
the categories of our ‘naı̈ve metaphysics’ (17) are
challenged by nonconventional use of language cate-
gories. At the same time, metaphoric language is both
semantic and pragmatic (in other words, linguistic in
addition to prelinguistic) in that the content of a meta-
phoric utterance carries a meaning that is both deter-
mined by the words used and dependent on context.
Chs. 2–6 address various points of N’s argument,
fleshing out and defending the analysis of metaphor
she has claimed. Chs. 2 (41–61) and 3 (62–99) focus
in turn on the history of metaphoric explanation in