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REVIEWS

(Approval of this omission carries with it, I suppose, disapproval of their having included the 'Cleft' sentences, which suffer from the same 'evaporation of synonymy' flaw; but J & R needed these sentences as testing frames [though they are scarcely infallible as such], and in any case they do not really pay serious attention to them, since their derivation is only given in a sort of mock form [39] to show how to apply the 'Cleft' test.) J & R's emphasis on discovery heuristics, apart from their errors, is admirable, to my mind, since showing the reader WHY it is thought that a sentence should be parsed in a given way offers the essential step from 'parse' to 'grammar'. In short, the book is certainly not without its praiseworthy aspects. What is wrong with it is that altogether too little effort was expended on getting a firm grip on the issues or on presenting clear arguments and binding them together. The aim of any grammar text is to make a language a comprehensible world; and this J & R failed to do. Revised, the book could be serviceable; as it stands, no. REFERENCES
Chomsky, N. (1957). Syntactic structures. The Hague: Mouton. Chomsky, N. (in press). Remarks on nominalization. In Jacobs, R. A. & Rosenbaum, P. S. (eds.), Readings in English transformational grammar. Walt ham, Mass.: Blaisdell. Fillmore, C. J. (1968). The case for case. In Bach, E. & Harms, R. T. (eds.), Universalsin linguistic theory 1-88. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Fraser, J. B. (1966). Some remarks on the verb-particle construction in English. MSLL 19. 45-61. Gardner, R. A. and Gardner, B. T. (1969). Teaching sign language to a chimpanzee. Science 165. 664-672. Postal, P. M. (1966). On so-called 'pronouns' in English. MSLL 19. 177-206. Rosenbaum, P. S. (1967). The grammar of English predicate complement constructions. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Wagner, K. H. (1968). Verb phrase complementation: a criticism. JL 4. 89-91.
Reviewed by W. C. WATT,

(Received 10 April 1970)

School of Social Sciences, University of California, Irvine, California 92664.

Hans Marchand, The categories and types of present-day English word-formation. Miinchen: Verlag C. H. Beck. Second edition, 1969. Pp. x-xxvii, 1-545. This book is larger than the first (i960) edition by some 160 pages: the subjectmatter is essentially the same, but it incorporates most of Marchand's work since i960, which has been published in article form (chiefly in Marchand, 1963, 1965a, 1965b, 1966, 1967). The greatest innovations are in the sections on nominal compounds. In the first edition, Marchand wrote: 'Whether a nightshirt is "a shirt for the night" or "a shirt worn at night" is quite unimportant. In forming cpds we are not guided by logic but by associations. We see or want to establish a connection between two ideas, choosing the shortest possible way'
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(22). Since that time, Marchand's views on the analysis of compounds have undergone a radical change - much of his more recent work has been on the syntax of compounds, and he and Lees have taken issue with one another on the subject (Lees, 1966). This book, however, is not a transformational approach. It is firmly in the continental, Saussurean tradition, though Marchand borrows a very mixed bag of technical terms from various sources, including 'transform', 'grammatical deep structure', and the anachronistic 'kernel sentence'. Jespersen's system of 'ranks' is employed too, and some machinery is derived from Hatcher (1956), but the main contributor to Marchand's framework is Bally (1944). A very brief and simplified re'sume' of the relevant parts of Bally's system is therefore in order. All utterances comprise two terms, the thing talked about, and what is said about it. These are respectively 'le theme' and 'le propos', or 'le determine' (determinatum) and 'le determinant' (determinant) - hereafter referred to as 'dm' and 'dt' respectively. La terre (dm) tourne (dt) is comparable with la terre (dm) est ronde (dt): the two sentences are equivalent since in the former, the intransitive verb 'joue le r61e de copule implicite' (Bally, 1944: 101). All constructions containing these two interdependent, complementary terms, the one attached to the other by a 'ligament' (copula or preposition) are 'syntagmes'. A syntagma may be a complete utterance, or part of an utterance, but 'tout ligament grammatical d'un syntagme derive de la phrase se laisse ramener a un verbe', in fact 'tout rapport grammatical est verbal' (106). Thus la maison de mon p&re is equivalent to la maison qui appartient a, qui est a, mon pere. A syntagma may be implicit, as in pire ( = plus mauvais), la marche ( = march(er) + zero morpheme) (103). Complex words are syntagmas no different in kind from sentences: em-porter is analysable as dt-dm, since it is equivalent to porter loin; labour-eur is dt-dm on the basis of homme (-eur) qui laboure. After a description of different kinds of syntagmatic relationship, Bally goes on to talk about 'lexical categories' and 'transposition'. By 'functional transposition' (116), a substantive (planite) can become an adjective {planitaire) in which the suffix is the transposer of the substantive, and a 'categorial adjective'. Participles and infinitives are verbs transposed into adjectives and substantives, in spite of the fact that they go on behaving in many ways like verbs: 'le caractere essentiel de la transposition est d'avoir un point de depart et un point d'arrivee' (118). A phrase (tu mens) can become a substantive (je sais que tu mens). These are all matters of syntax, however, and should be distinguished from 'semantic transposition', a lexical matter in which a change of meaning accompanies the change of function, as in un chaleur tropicale, versus la vigitation tropicale. This is essentially Kurylowicz's distinction between 'syntactic derivation' and 'lexical derivation' (1936). In short, the parts of speech are identified with their typical functions, and 'grammatical' transposition is distinguished from 'lexical' according to whether there is judged to be a change of meaning or not. 126

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Marchand makes considerable use of the term 'transposition', denning it as 'the use of a word in another than its normal function* (12); and although I do not criticize the distinction which he makes in practice between 'grammatical' and 'lexical', I think that a serious defect of this book is its heavy reliance on subjective judgments of meaning, and its pretence that the delimitation of word classes raises no problems. This is responsible for a good deal of non-clarity, as with the matter of prenominal modifiers: government official, versus governmental. Government here is 'merely transposed* (23) - a syntactic phenomenon. Governmental, however, has 'the same purely syntactic meaning "of the government" ', and though a characterized adjective, is 'only a syntactic "transpositional" derivative* (228).' Since, however, the point is that on formal grounds governmental is a matter for word-formation, and government is not, meaning confuses the issue here. What one misses is an adequate discussion of possible criteria of noun-hood and adjective-hood, and of how such criteria should be grouped and weighted, and any admission that there are recalcitrant cases.2 What, for instance, does one do about premodifying nominals which are resistant to 'adjectival categorizers', or other adjectival characteristics, but which nevertheless have a meaning which is perceptibly different from that which they have as heads, e.g. dwarf (roses), brute (force), capsule (history)? (See Gove, 1964, for a discussion of these and many other examples.) Should these also be dismissed as a 'mere syntactic phenomenon'? Perhaps they should-but a full discussion of such problems would be very desirable in a major work on word-formation. Bally's basic distinction between functional and semantic transposition is perhaps behind Marchand's sometimes unconvincing attempts to group combinations according to whether they have, or have not 'lexical content*. There is a 'basic difference between combinations which restrict the expression of content to the underlying syntactic relations and others where the grammatical relations are combined with semantic features' (58). This leads to some confusion. Mincemeat, bloodshed, book-keeping 'do not contain additional semantic elements which are not stated in the underlying sentence' (59), but writing table, washing machine, washday apparently do. Again, V-ing + N compounds are grouped into those based on a verbal nexus {dancing girl) and those not so based (70) {racing club). But a few paragraphs later we read that 'when sbs such as dancing ... are combined with other sbs, they fall outside the formal pattern "verbal -ingjsb" ' [1] As a further explanation, the following is quite inadequate: "The change of word class is evident in form and syntactic behaviour as one that is irreversible. The transposed words polar, criminal cannot be used again in the same word class as pole and crime respectively, quite unlike government in government official: there is nothing final in the transposition of government, the word .can at any moment be used again as a determinatum in another construction. Its primary character has not been affected by the possibility of its being used as preadjunct' (360). [2] Jespersen's 'famous treatment' of the cannon ball question is rather summarily dismissed (26). 127

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since they have acquired lexical independence (71); whereas racing club 'represents the . . . type "we (vbtr) A (at) B " ' . Marchand's position seems to be that a 'semantic description' is quite independent of a 'grammatical' one. A word may be 'fully lexicalized' so that it becomes 'primary' rather than derived from some underlying structure, yet 'grammatically speaking' still be so derived. Thus: 'Water jump cannot possibly be explained from such a sentence as "someone jumps over the water" but jump is itself a substantive reduced from "(he) jumps over it = the obstacle)" . . .Jump sb is determined by water sb' (78). He classifies compounds into three fundamental types, 'genuine' - composed of two unmistakably non-verbal elements {airship), 'pseudo' - a miscellaneous group, of which most have the IC structure 'compound-stem + suffix, and are therefore really suffixed words (paleface+a), and 'synthetic'. The latter are distinguished from 'genuine' compounds according to whether 'lexical content' is present in their verbal constituents or not. For example, watchmaker, housekeeping are synthetic on the grounds that their second elements (-maker, -keeping) have no independent existence. They are nevertheless analysable as sb-sb 'by virtue of the morphologic pattern' (16). The situation gets confusing with the introduction of 'pseudo verbal nexus compounds', such as driving test, in which the elements look as if they might be derivable from underlying verbs, but in fact have 'independent lexical status' (38-39). A second criticism concerns the way in which Marchand treats, or evades, data which cannot be accommodated to his framework. A word is a 'two facet sign' (1), i.e. it has a 'signifiant' and a 'signifie'. 'Word-formation has to do with words in so far as they are two facet signs' (391), and 'in so far as they . . . are built as syntagmas' (31). 'Word-formation can only be concerned with composites which are analysable both formally and semantically' (2). These dicta lead to a certain amount of inconsistency and defensiveness: back-derivation has to be apologized for as having 'diachronic relevance only' (392), since in this case it is the base which is the syntagma and not the derived word. Combinations like make out, get up are not treated, on the grounds that they are 'wholly unmotivated groups of pseudo-signs' (125), i.e. 'signifiants' without 'signifies'. Coordinative compounds (pianist-composer) must be explained away, since for Bally, coordinative structures are not syntagmas, so they are consigned to 'parole', as are other embarrassing phenomena which are not syntagmas in the Bally sense, such as shortenings like hopeful, facial (361), clippings (bus) and blends (smog). The latter two processes are, however, apologetically included at the end of the book. Difficulties arise over the assignment of dm-dt structure to composites. A long chapter on 'Phonetic Symbolism'3 gets no apology as not concerning syntagmas,
[3] Bally reverses Saussure's decision that 'onomatopoeia' is negligible and does not upset the principle of the arbitrariness of the sign, by admitting the possibility of 'motivation by the signifiant' (Bally, 1944; 129). (Jh. continued on next page.) 128

REVIEWS since in the case of a word like flash, 'The initial symbol [fl-] must be considered the determinant while the final symbol [-ash] is the determinatum' (403). This is difficult to accept in view of Marchand's earlier definition of the determinatum as 'that element of the syntagma which . . . can stand for the whole syntagma' (12). Semantically, the determinatum is that element 'whose range of applicability is limited by the determinant* (11). This leads to a problem in the case of suffixed words. The grammatical definition of the dm requires that it should indicate the class of the whole combination, therefore that it should be the final element. In worker, 'one (-) who works', the suffix and the subject of the sentence may be considered as equivalent; in sguireling, a natural analysis is that the suffix is - semantically at least - the dt. Bally here allows an exception to the rule that the suffix is always the dm (Bally, 1944: 399), but Marchand avoids this by suggesting an ingenious underlying sentence, 'that miniature is a squire' (44). Some composites are only with difficulty analysable in dt-dm terms. Thus, the verb outbid is explained with wholly unnecessary tortuousness. As the equivalent of 'outdo (dm) in bidding (dt)', it looks superficially like a case of the dt following the dm. But, 'The particle, which belongs to the zero determinatum is by sheer morphological necessity attached to the pseudo-determinatum (at the morphological level) bid as it can only combine with a linguistic form that is overtly expressed. Thus the semantic determinant (at the level of syntactic structure) bid(-ding) becomes the morphologic determinatum' (136). That is to say, the stem, -bid- (from a nominal form?) has become a constituent in a parasynthetic formation: the prefix and the zero suffix can be seen as added simultaneously to it. Parasynthetic structures are not at all uncommon in wordformation, however, and Marchand does not think it necessary to explain sunrise [+0] in the same terms, though this too is (on the face of it) dm-dt, from 'the sun (dm) rises (dt)'. There is, incidentally, some confusion about the nature of suffixes. Bally says that 'tout transpositeur [-aire, for instance] est un signe cate'goriel general, un categoriel, c'est-a-dire un signe marquant abstraitement la categorie d'emprunt; et ce categoriel est specifie, concretise, determine par le transponend [planet-]' (Bally, 1944: 121). Marchand accordingly states (215) that 'a suffix has no meaning in itself, it acquires meaning only in conjunction with the free morphemes which it transposes'. But in the very next paragraph he admits 'there is no telling what concept may not develop to find expression in a suffix' and later, 'Suffixes may be "synonymous" in the same way as full words are, viz. they partially overlap semantically' (227). There is much that is hard to take seriously in Marchand's Phonetic Symbolism chapter. For instance, 'An onomatopoeic word is a compound of several symbolic elements. Take the word bang, for instance: the // renders the sound the slamming of the door causes, the /rj/ is imitative of the vibration of the air following it. The /b/ is expressive of the bluntness of the explosive sound (a sharp sound would have been introduced by a /p/, cf. G pang-pang "sound of rifle-shooting")' (402). I 129

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A large part of Marchand's discussion is devoted to 'word-formation on a foreign basis of coining' (abbreviated wffb). Combinations relevant to wordformation, he says, must be 'actualized', i.e. interpretable as composites by native speakers. Coinages like hyperaesthesia, therefore, are not to be treated. A word can, however, be analysable even though it is derived 'on the morphologic basis of another language' (7). What this means is nowhere clearly stated, but a careful collection of items explicitly referred to as wffb throughout the book reveals a miscellaneous group. They include insecticide, 'not analysable as a composite on an English basis' (7); antacid, where the prefix drops its final vowel (143): anti-acid is 'native', but anticlimax, antihemisphere are coined 'on a Neo-Latin basis'. Inter-australian is 'Latin-coined' (173) but inter-university is not; digastric, dipolar are 'coined on a Greek basis' (157), apparently because they are parasynthetic, though Marchand does not say so; diacetate, diphenyl are 'native'. Words whose stems drop a final vowel before taking a suffix are wffb: allergic, propagandize (216-217), but not ebonist, querist (310). It is hard to make out Marchand's intentions, but the examples seem to combine historical {extramundane but not extrahundredal) with formal criteria - although he states (217) that history is not relevant: 'wffb concerns the physiological structure of the vocabulary*. Perhaps part of the trouble is the ambitiousness of the book's aim, which is to combine a historical description with a synchronic one. At any rate, the foreign/native distinction, as it is carried out in the book as a whole, does not appear to reflect either native-speaker feelings, or the knowledge of the historical linguist. And possibly, in the present age of widely-used 'technical' coinages, to leave out words that are not 'actualized' is to risk an incomplete description. Judgments of what is or is not actualized are likely to be as slippery as judgments about 'lexical content', but it is arguable that words like immunology, vibraphone, discomania, addressograph, amplistat represent patterns which the native-speaker-in-the-street can manipulate. Throughout the book the author uses descriptive terms in ways which contribute to obscurity. Why is pickpocket derived from a 'grammatical phrase' but blackout, show-off (380), shortcut (<'cut short', 78) from 'lexical verbal phrases'? 'Parasynthetic', 'homological', 'proparoxytonic' appear here and there without explanation; with no warning 'noun' and 'nominal' are suddenly discovered to be referring to both substantives and adjectives (176, 214); and Marchand has a cavalier way with 'morpheme' (sometimes = 'word' (e.g. 19)), and 'allomorph* (often = 'near-synonym': 'damned and fucking . . . are unmotivated allomorphs of very' (86)). In the chapters on 'motivation by the signifiant', 'pitch' and 'volume' are used rather curiously (e.g. 400), and it is unclear what the distinctions are between 'symbolic of, 'expressive of and 'emotionally expressive of. These points are trivial perhaps, but the number of such items that could be listed is not. Statements about frequency of types are vague and unsubstantiated, e.g. 'Approximately half of all combinations [adjective-noun 130

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compounds] found today are names of concrete things while 25 per cent denote persons and another 25 per cent animals' (63). There are inexcusable errors of fact, e.g. 'the subject [of preparticle combinations] is not discussed at all in Jespersen's Morphology' (108). The arrangement of the book makes it difficult to handle as a work of reference: a preliminary discussion of compounds in general is followed by a section on grammatical analysis and then a longer section in which morphological and semantic characteristics of the same material are discussed. This inevitably involves much repetition: the structure of colour-blind, for instance, is explained in at least seven places. Cross-referencing is not always adequate, though there is an index of 'type-words'. The numbering of paragraphs swells to six separate figures in places, and by the time the reader has reached 2.2.16.6.2.2, his conception of the scheme is rather hazy. There is a great deal of repetition which looks like the result of careless manuscript revision: the government official question is discussed in four different places in very similar words (23, 25, 228, 360). Finally, an exasperating feature of the book is its contentiousness: throughout, and frequently, other authorities are referred to, only to be dismissed out of hand, often in the laconic manner of a school report, e.g. 'Baugh's treatment of the suffix is unsatisfactory' (293); 'Biese's treatment of the subject surfers from a lack of discrimination' (372), not to mention the reference, in the Preface, to Jespersen's Morphology as 'not one of the best Jespersen has written'. I have not dwelt at length on what I think are the more valuable parts of the book - the treatments of individual prefixes and suffixes - since these are in essence unchanged from the first edition. Here the student will continue to find admirable historical summaries of the development of affixes and their sensegroups, and copious dated examples. There is a very full and useful bibliography. REFERENCES
Bally, C. (1944). Linguistique gtneWale et linguistique franfaise. (Second edition.) Berne: A. Francke. Gove, P. B. (1964). 'Noun often attributive' and 'adjective'. AS 39. 163-175. Hatcher, A. G. (1956). Syntax and the sentence. Word 12. 234-250. Kurylowicz, J. (1936). Derivation lexicale et derivation syntaxique. BSL 37. 79-92. Lees, R. B. (1966). On a transformational analysis of compounds: A reply to Hans Marchand. / F 7 1 . 1-13. Marchand, H. (1963). On content as a criterion of derivational relationship with backderived words. IF 68. 170-175. Marchand, H. (1965a) The analysis of verbal nexus substantives. IF 70. 57-71. Marchand, H. (1965b). On the analysis of substantive compounds and sufHxal derivatives not containing a verbal element. IF 70. 117-145. Marchand, H. (1966). On attributive and predicative derived adjectives and some problems related to the distinction. Anglia 84. 131-149. Marchand, H. (1967). Expansion, transposition, and derivation. La Linguistique 1. 13-26.
Reviewed by VALERIE ADAMS,

(Received 29 May 1970)

Department of English, University College, London.

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