The Nordic Languages and Modern Linguistics 5

Journal of Pragmatics North-Holland 11 (1987)97-l 2 I 91 REVIEWS K. Ringgaard and Viggo Sorensen, eds., The Nordic Languages and Modern Linguistics 5. Arhus: Nordisk Institut. Aarhus Universitet, 1984. 413 pp. Dkr. 100.00. The volume contains the proceedings of the Fifth International Conference of Nordic Languages and Modern Linguistics, held in Arhus June 277July 1, 1983. Of the thirty-seven papers in the collection, six were given as plenary talks, while the others were presented in sections. (Page-wise, the six papers of the plenary sessions ~~pp. 1 l-165 ~ together make up almost 40% of the collection.) The volume is presumably intended for a limited audience, since only thirteen papers are in English (plus one with an English summary), and three are written in German. The rest, and thus the majority of the papers, are written in Danish, Norwegian, or Swedish. One of the important reasons for publishing collections of this type is of course to indicate in what areas linguistic research is flourishing in the Nordic countries today. Together with the publications of the Nordic Linguistic (The Journal zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGF of Nordic Linguistics and the Nordic. Linguistic Association Bulletin) and the proceedings of the bi-annually organized Scandinavian Conferences of Linguistics, the collections from the International Conferences of Nordic Languages and Modern Linguistics ~ which are organized every third or fourth year ~ make up the main joint endeavors by linguists in the Nordic countries not only to discuss linguistic issues among themselves, but also to provide the rest of the world with state-of-the-art reports from Scandinavia. The more specific aim of the Conferences of Nordic Languages and Modern Linguistics is to gather representatives of, on the one hand, the philological tradition, and, on the other hand, the more theoretical, philosophical, Chomskyan and post-Chomskyan, approaches around the same table, and to explicitly get them to discuss empirical and theoretical issues in linguistics. In and in the title of the volume, as his Foreword ~ a defence for the conjunction well as in that of the conferences ~ K. Ringgaard expresses this idea in the following lucid manner (p. 5, my translation): ‘*Linguists every now and then need to be pushed a little closer to the earth and be confronted with facts from well-known and well-documented languages, just as much as Nordists sometimes need to be lifted up in the thinner layers of the air to experience the wind blowing.” 037%2166,‘87/$3.50 CC;19X7, Elsev~er Science Publishers B.V. (North-Holland) Some of the articles seem to have been photocopied from the authors’ readymade manuscripts, resulting in varying type-setting. It seems. though, that some of the papers have been (re)typcd with the same (Danish) typewriter, but unfortunately not (well) proof-read by the authors. The volume is in paperback with glue-binding, which means (at least in this case) that pages start falling out after the reader has opened the book a couple of timcs. It is of course understandable that the editors have sought a cheap forum, and one through which the proceedings could be made rapidly available, but it would be nice to be able to call a book a book also after having read through it. The papers in this volume deal with linguistic theory, syntax and morphology, prosody and phonology. historical linguistics and dialectology, foreignlanguage teaching;learning and contrastivc analysis, computer linguistics, text and discourse analysis, and different aspects of pragmatics and sociolinguistics. It is not, however, aitogether easy to find representatives (as representatives) of these different areas in the volume, since the papers arc alphabetically ordered on the basis of the authors’ last names. In this review I will concentrate on the pragmatically relevant issues raised in the different papers, but I will try to say something about every paper ~ not therefore claiming to be an expert on every issue. In his state-of-the-art report on computational linguistics in Scandinavia (‘Statusrapport om skandinavisk datalingvistik’, pp. I l-32),’ Sture A/i& starts out by pointing to the gradual shift of interest within computer studies in general. First, computer hardware was in focus for a couple of decades, then the task of developing interesting software programs received most interest, and today the very concept of information is getting scrutinized. A.‘s survey is an excellent overview for the uninitiated of what computers can do for anyone interested in linguistic research. And for all sub-areas that he mentions, he refers to people in Scandinavia who are working within these areas. One of the numerous interesting experiments that A. discusses is that of producing haiku poems by computer. He gives an example of a computer-generated haiku poem on p. 32, but he is eager to point out that it was he himself who wrote the poem, and that the computer was just the means. a substitute for the typewriter, or for pen and paper. In his discussion of language corpora (p. 35), A. argues that corpus study and introspection are not incommensurable, and furthermore that an empirical investigation should not start with the assembling of data; one needs to have theoretical opinions and hypotheses to begin with. In principle, this is no doubt correct; it is impossible not to have ’ A.‘s paper illustrates the inherent problem ulth ;i multi-purpow collection iikc the one under review. The article proper is m Swedish. to which A. has added a t&o-pius page summary III English. The summary, however, says hardly anything about the work done in Scandinavia. which one would think - ought to be the main reason li)r having an English summary. irn_~’prior opinions about a particular research topic. However, cthnomethodologists and conversationai analysts would, of course. stress the opposite side of this problem: too many hypotheses restrict one’s vision, and may distort the results of an empirical investigation. A couple of other papers in the collection also report on computer applications. Hunnrj Ruu.s’s article, ‘Investigating the Nordic languages for the information society‘ (pp. I17-140), adds a host of examples to Allen‘s global overview, and also discusses a number sf problems in the use of computers.2 For instance, she argues that because of the Anglo-American dominance both in the field of linguistics and in that of computer science, programs made for English do not take into account the specific characteristics of the Scandinavian languages. One concrete problem that R. mentions (p. 121) is: W. considers it a good sign that Scandinavian vowel symbols are nowadays “a matter-of-course” of most computer equipment (p. 122). But I feel that what a linguist dealing with a language other than English needs is not this or that vowel added to an inventory, but a simple procedure (program) that is available to anyone for the purpose of adding, or even creating, the symbols I can s/he needs to describe a particular language or dialect. In this connection, not help mentioning Kenneth Whistler’s useful programs (Dr. UT). which he has developed explicitly for these purposes. Qther papers in the collection also take up the use of computers in linguistics. Thus, Ing&rg A~~IIersen in ‘Konkordans over de danske runeindskrifter’ (pp. 185190) reports that a KWIC concordance of the Danish runic inscriptions has just been published. But most of the papers on historical and Oskur Brdlle starts his paper dialectal issues are fairly philological in nature. zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWV “Nordiske sproghistorier; vurderinger og krav’ (pp. 69 92) with an overview of books dealing with the histories of the Nordic languages and goes on to give an interesting overview of various methods and methodological problems in stresses the importance of empirical work. Few linguists would have difficulty in agreeing with this, although I think many of zyxwvutsrqponmlkjih LIS would raise our eyebrows at B.‘s equation (p. 70) of empirical study with the study of parole and of performance. In the same vein, B. argues (p. 77) that since synchrony and diachrony can not be kept apart, the distinctions between langue and parole, and between competence and performance can not be kept up. I fail to see the direct relation between these concepts and the distinction between synchrony and diachrony. Surely the particular linguistic features of the speech of a person under the temporary influence of alcohol ~ a pcrformance feature if any ~ should not count for much in a description of his/her language as a system. As for the langueeparole distinction, we can simply note that de Saussure himself regarded both synchrony and diachrony as part of langue (cf. de Saussure (1974: 98)). I am also sceptical about B.‘s contention that de Saussure did not zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGF value diachronic study as highly as he did synchronic study. B. sees it as very important that diachronic studies focus on the Scandinavian languages as a group, and that such studies are to be done within a generalhistorical and socio-cultural frame. He argues that structural linguistics is a better apparatus for diachronic studies than generative grammar, although I do not find any real arguments for this view; his view that generative grammar involves too large an apparatus to be practically usable is a contention with little foundation in view of the recent interesting developments within diachrony in generative grammar. Also, since generative grammar is a further development of, and thus relics on central issues within, linguistic structuralism. I see no point in pretending to do the former without at the same time doing the latter. Although B. is critical not only of generative grammar. but also of Greenberg-type typological studies and area1 studies, he does end his paper (p, 89) with a plea for a synthesis of traditional diachrony, structural synchrony. and more modern methods. B. also briefly touches on pragmatic issues in his article. Here, he echoes the important theoretical and methodological question for diachronic pragmatics: Are pragmatic conditions historically constant‘? B. ~ as do all of us - hopes for detailed studies of how people greeted, thanked, apologized, addressed others, promised, etc. at different periods in time. And here, of course, the verbal manifestations of such communicative acts make up just one pragmatically interesting aspect.. The volume also includes a number of other papers that address historical dissertation in issues. Kurt Braunmiiller’s discussion of the Second grammatical Snorre’s Edda (‘Fandtcs der en fonotaktisk analyse i middelalderen?‘, pp. 221229) shows that structuralist methods were part and parcel of linguistic analyses in Iceland in the 12th and 13th centuries. In other words, not all language studies in the Middle Ages in Europe were done in the Latin tradition. Erik Vive Larsen gives an interesting presentation of the 18th century Danish grammarian Jens Pedersen Hoysgaard and his basic insights in ‘Jens Pedersen Hoysgaards beskrivelsc af dansk syntaks’ (pp. 297 -302). Kjell Ivar Yunneho’s paper ‘Mot allmenn skriveferdighet i Norge’ (pp. 3955406) gives an equally interesting historical overview (including statistics) of the social in situation in the 19th century of \vho were capable of using Norwegian writing. Ingegerd Nystriim (‘On the development of word-order in clauses in Early Modern Swedish’, pp. 3277335) gives a preliminary report on a study of the development of word order (in subordinate clauses) in early Modern Swedish. L&hisa zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Rr!ji? s paper ‘Forandring og forklaring’ (pp. 349-353) addresses historical change in general terms, and deals in particular with function-preserving processes in language. M arinm M undt discusses her classification of adverbs in the Old Icelandic Knytlinga Saga. (‘Adverb i Knytlinga Saga’, pp. 303-309.) It would be useful in such discussions not to start with a delimitation of what an adverb is, but to look at the problem from a textual and/or pragmatic point of view. For instance. M. excludes the conjunct bcr from the class of adverbs, but not the adverb &I. Note. however, that recent item stresses the dual research on Old English /XZ a parallel grammatical (semantic and pragmatic) function of such particles (cf. Enkvist (1972), W%-vik (1984), &tman (1986)). Niels A ge Nielsen (11985) reports on his work with the Danish dialect of Mols. (‘Om udforskningen af molbodialekten’, pp. 31 I-315.) One interesting issue in this paper is that N. sees it as important to work with three parallel notational transcriptions (p. 313): a phonetic notation. a phonemic notation, and a notation based on his informants’ own spelling suggestions. The last of these might seem linguistically dubious, but in Wiik and &tman (1983) we came to a similar result. When a dialect is to be written down, you have to take into account not only the phonemic principle and the functional principle (i.e. the purpose for which a writing system is devised), but also what we called the identity principle: if native speakers are to use the writing system, they have to be able to feel that he writing system mirrors a certain identity with which the\ can associate themselves. Many of the diachronic studies deal with phonological and prosodic issues. Anatol?: Liherman’s paper ‘Scandinavian accentology from a Germanic perand spective’ (pp. 93-l 15) includes the main points of his earlier interesting thought-provoking research on Scandinavian accentology, in his own summary formula: “The history of Germanic accentuation is the history of morae” and the (p. 113). In this article, Liberman compares the German SclCfiing Dutch stoottoon with the Scandinavian prosodemes. Two further quotations with general implications are in place here: “the historian should speak about syntactic phonetics and sentence rhythm, rather than about types of accent” (p. 1lo), and “We are so used to dealing with separate words in old languages that we seldom think of them as parts of phrases and sentences and recognize special ways of development only in unstressed forms” (p. 112). M ugnlis Pbtursson’s article. ‘Zu den Ursachen des Lautwandels’ (pp. 343 347), includes a critique of Liberman ~ and, in effect, of nearly all diachronic studies. P. argues that diachronic explanations deal with hog’ sound changes take place, but do not address the ultimate causal question of wh~j they occur: “Der Lautwandel wird dadurch nicht erklart, dal3 man sagt, dafi ein anderer Laut die Funktion eines verschwundenen Elements oder Lautes iibernimmt” (p. 345). P.‘s arguments would, of course, have been more powerful, had he offered us a concrete, alternative program. The topic of the papers by Stig Eliussorz and Krz~*xtqf‘ Janikm.ski is morphophonemics, although J. would probably not accept this characterization. J.‘s paper, ‘Phonologisch-morphologische Wechselbeziehungen am Beispiei des Danischen’ (pp. 277 ~282) is a reanalysis of certain morphological and phonological variations in Danish, on the basis of which he wants to draw some general conclusions about the domains of morphology and phonology. He argues in favor of a level of morphonology. which is a “ Grenzhereich, der zwischen Phonologie und Morphologic zu statuieren ist. der aber zugleich in letzter Instanz zur Morphologic gehort” (p. 280). I can not help but feeling that J.‘s discussion adds little to my knowledge of morphology and phonology that is not already dealt with in the debates collected in Joos (1957). Eliasson’s paper, ‘Is there a morphophonemic process of vowel shortening in Swedish?’ (pp. 231&235), is an analysis of the behavior of non-Germanic loanwords in Swedish. He offers convincing arguments against the traditional view of there being a morphophonemic process of vowel shortening in Swedish. E. shows that Swedish, instead of having eighteen vowel phonemes (nine long and nine short), simply has nine. The long/short ‘*alternations are compictely predictable from the phonological environment” (p. 235). Junc~z Two papers can be said to deal primariiy with issues in morphology. Ore.Cnik discusses some recent innovations in the morphology of the Icelandic imperative singular (‘lcelandic imperative singular: some innovations’. pp. 337-341), and Enriquc~ Bcmhl~~~ deals with the affixed definite article in Old Icelandic and its usage conditions. (‘The use of the affixed article in Old Icelandic’, pp. 213-219.) B. argues that it is impossible to come up with rigid rules unless “a communicative (textlinguistic) perspective” (p, 214) is adopted. His main finding seems to be that the article is used in reference to “points of special significance for the action of the narrative” (p. 216). Here I definitely lack references to work in foregrounding and backgrounding (e.g. Hopper (1979), Hopper and Thompson (1980)), and to discussions of diachronic textlinguistic issues in other Germanic languages (cf. my comments on /XI above). Although B.‘s findings are potentially very interesting, the paper is unfortunately not well-argued, and since he chose to write in English, his examples (from Old Icelandic) should have been translated.” Erik Andum~n presents an overview of syntactic research in the Nordic countries. (‘Nordisk syntaxforskning; teoretiska ramar och utvecklingsmiijligheter’. pp. 43367.) His subtitle suggests that he will discuss various theoretical frameworks for, and the future of, syntactic research. As for the former, however, A. stays safely within the Chomskyan and MIT domains. and rarely moves beyond EST, except perhaps semantically; as to the future of syntactic research, A. provides a justification for doing syntax which to me implies 3 zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA Unfortunately, R. 1s not alone III this respect zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA among the zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUT a utho rs of the present volume that somebody has been questioning syntax as being a proper sub-field of linguistics. In what seems to be an attempt to summarize (in 25 pages) the main findings in Swedish grammar over the last twenty years, A. wants particularly to stress the point that the oppositions between empiricism and hermeneutics, and between corpus linguistics and intuition-based linguistics are only apparent oppositions (p. 44). And, different types of data need to be seen as complementary to each other; corpus data and intuitions can be seen as two types of performance having a common competence (pp. 46 47). It seems to follow from this that speakers’ intuitions are instances of performance, and can not therefore alone be relied upon to get at our syntactic competence. As I see it, this leads syntactic research into trouble, if the objects of investigation are to be the grammatical sentences in a language. And since A. himself asks (p. 47): “Why do we sometimes utter ungrammatical sentences?“, he obviously also admits spoken data as part of the linguist’s corpus. It seems to me that, taking the above into account. the only reason we then need the concept ‘grammatical’, is once again ~ to make our descriptions conform to what Linell (1982) calls the ‘written language bias in linguistics’. The only other ‘purely’ syntactic paper in the collection is Eirikur Riignvaldsson’s well-argued discussion of the formal and functional characteristics of rightward NP displacement in Icelandic. (‘Rightward displacement of NPs in Icelandic’, pp. 361 368.) Functionally, his main finding is that for an NP to be able to undergo such a movement in Icelandic, “it must be possible to interpret [it] as carrying new information“ (p. 361) in Chafe’s (1976) cognitive sense of the term ‘new information’. deal mostly with the The papers by Kurin A~jmer and Svavur Sigrmdsson lexicon, although their discussions go well into pragmatics. In ‘Giirmc in Swedish’ (pp. l67-l76), Ai.jmer discusses the syntactic. semantic, and pragmatic behavior of one particular word in Swedish: giirnu, giving examples from four different corpora of spoken and written Swedish. A. argues that giirnu is a vague term whose meaning depends on context; still. its different uses can be derived from a single core meaning of ‘willingly. gladly’: not only do these uses show up as semantic nuances in the adverb, but also in the use of giirnrr as a speech act particle. Although the paper is comprehensive, I find a number of details not completely convincing. On p. 169, skullc giirnrr is said to have the meaning ‘wish’. This is certainly true in many cases, but the statement needs qualification. On the same page, A. writes “When giirnu cooccurs with km (inte) [sic] the phrase receives the meaning ‘hardly possible” ‘. As far as 1 can see. this is not true unless the negative particle into stands together with km. Also, I am not sure that it is giirna itself that is generic (p. 170); the examples given would be generic also without gtirna. On p. 17 I, glirna is said not to express Attitude in passive sentences. But surely Kalle is glad and willing in the following sentence. Malle blir garna kysst av sin flickvan. Kalle becomes gladly kissed of his girlfriend ‘Kalle is glad to be kissed by his girlfriend.’ (On passives and gZma, cf. also Leinonen and &tman (1983).) Sigmundsson gives a report on the work that has led to the first Icelandic slang dictionary. (‘Slang pi Island’, pp. 369-373.) A great part of Icelandic slang has a foreign (especially Danish and English) source, but particular Icelandic formations also exist. S.‘s seven categories of the latter type are worth mentioning (cf. pp. 369-370): (1) (2) (3) (4) -6 added to the first syllable; e.g. liberal ) 136, ‘liberal’, -at+, -heit, -ri; e.g. verkamcr&r ) verkari [sic], ‘worker’, abbreviations; e.g. geggju&r ) grgg, ‘crazy’, of Sinfbniureduplication; e.g. Si ) Sisi (, where 5’i is an abbreviation hljbmsveit i&z&, ‘The Symphony Orchestra of Iceland’), (5) addition of an emphatic prefix like hund-, ‘dog, bad’, zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfed ofsu-, ‘violently, extremely’, (6) something we could call ‘phrasal metathesis’,4 as in H6tel Borg ) Bdtel Horg, and (7) kennings, e.g. ‘man’ = grflugagn, i.e. ‘something that is useful for a girl’ (, where grl;la means ‘girl’, and gugn ‘something that is beneficial’). S. also gives an account of the recent changes in the Icelandic society which have resulted in a broader register of slang words: they have become much more accepted in the last two decades. Before I go on to deal with papers explicitly addressing pragmatic issues, I will comment on the interesting papers that deal with issues in foreign-language teaching and contrastive analysis. Aleksander Szulc’s paper, ‘Sprskfelanalys och kontrastiv lingvistik’ (pp. 375 -385), is a nice overview of different kinds of linguistic errors, but unfortunately S. provides no references to the many studies in error analysis of the last twenty years. S. distinguishes between two basic types of errors in linguistic analysis: system errors (with the primary subcategories of form- and content-errors), and interactional errors. S. also makes another distinction (and one that he considers to be a different one), viz. between going against the language system, and breaking the language norm. The former is to be related to grammaticality, and the latter to acceptability. (Unfortunately, he fails to relate the two distinctions explicitly.) Errors due to breaking the language norm are said to be more frequent, and do not necessarily diminish as one’s competence in the language system increases, 4 Or ‘spoonerisms’ as they are also called (supposedly in honor of the Rev. Spooner (d. 1930)). whereas errors due to going against the language system are said to be communicatively more serious, but to diminish as one’s linguistic competence increases. I am not happy with the equation of ‘language norm’ with the concept of ‘acceptability’, nor am I sure that I agree that making a languagesystem error is. in general, ‘communicatively more serious’ than making a socially dependent linguistic error (and I read S.‘s discussion on p. 380 as approaching this interpretation. too). S.‘s general hypothesis for predicting errors is worth quoting (p. 379, my translation): “The higher applicability deviations.” the degree of determination a sub-system of rhe Lmguage shows, the greater IS the of the rules that contstitute this sub-system. and the les\ is the zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgf p ia uslb ility for S. suggests that there are two types of interactional errors: register errors and glottopragmatic errors. The latter have to do with deviations from ritualized patterns, whereas the former relate to stylistic diffcrcnccs. S. argues that when foreigners make stylistic errors it is often bccausc of their lack of lexical competence. while the same error by a native speaker is due to a socially choicr of form. I am not convinced that this difference is a generally dependent zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFEDCBA v!alid one: the foreigner is typically taught the standard variety and its vocabulary (including SW. tits ‘eat’; cf. p. 383) which can be used in any situation. If s/he also knows a sub-standard synonym for a word (say, SW. kiiku), then s/he, too, has a choice ~ only, s;‘he might not have learnt the appropriate sociolinguistic rules governing the USCof the sub-standard alternative. In his analysis of ‘Foreign students’ categorization of Danish u:, o:, a:/’ (pp. 177 -183) Erik Andusm argues that “break downs [sic] caused by collapsed phonemic oppositions are of a more malicious nature than are other communicative break downs” (p. 177). He reports on a set of experiments that he has done, showing that subjects’ responses are not wholly predictable from the phonemic inventory of their mother tongue. He also argues that the kind of discrimination tests he has used in the experiments can be utilized for pedagogical purposes, to “help the teacher to pay attention to individual needs when programing a learning sequence for a group of students composed of multilingual individuals” (p. 183). makes a syntactic comparison of the German dativeJohn Olr Ask&i subjectivizing hekommen-passive and :fZ + past participle’ constructions in Norwegian. (‘Kontrastiv analyse av tysk “bekommen” -passiv og tilsvarende norske konstruksjoner med “fa”+ part. perf.‘, pp. 191-195.) His final sentence has general implications, and is worth quoting (p. 194-195, my translation): as a “CrrammaticaliLation as a function in relation to a systemntic need, and auxiliarization daelopment of particular morphosyntactic characteristics arc r&ted but Independent syntactic procesaea.” Hrnrik Holwzho~ discusses some methodological problems involved in lexicographic work dealing with the preparation and development of dictionaries from Danish to an immigrant language and vice versa. (‘Invandrerleksikografi i Danmark’, pp. 261 -266.) H. effectively argues against developing word-lists based on the mere frequency a word has in Danish despite the urgent need there is for dictionaries ~ since lexical fields are dissected differently in different languages and cultures, and the goal is not to get immigrants to ‘say things in Danish’, but to get them to communicate and learn how to handle different values. identities, and cultural patterns. On the other hand. H. argues, immigrants should not be given too much detailed information about, say, the valency of a verb. He suggests a glossary-type dictionary (containing some 5.000 - 10,000 words), but he also discusses probletns inherent in this type of dictionary. To me, Eugcnimz zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedcbaZYXWVUTSRQPONMLKJIHGFE Raj~7ih’s title, “‘Falsche Freunde” unter den Danischen und Polnischen Personenbezeichnungen’ (pp. 355 -360). promises a contrastive analysis of ‘false friends’ in Danish and Polish as regards the semantic Geld of terms for naming people, but although the paper has many examples (but only one of what most of us think of as false friends), R. turns out to be more interested in the theoretical aspects of false friends in general. 1 am still not sure which of his many points R. wants to be his main one; perhaps that the concept ‘false friend’ is a gradient one. In her paper ‘Second language acquisition as an adult; the importance of modified interaction’ (pp. 387-393), Anncz Trnshorg stresses the need for “adequate linguistic input to the [adult] learner and the opportunity for him;’ her to practice the second language” (p. 387). A learner has “to be exposed to and actively involved in actual, meaningful communication in the target language” (p. 387). T. has made recordings of a native speaker of Danish talking to a learner of Danish, and found that when he needed to, the native speaker modified this utterance, corrected the learner, and cooperated with the learner in order to help him express his intentions. Her important finding is that when a learner can provide a native speaker with “clues of how to modify his speech, [the learner can] create input adequate for language acquisition” (p. 393). Trosborg’s article takes us into the sphere of papers dealing explicitly with issues in pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and discourse analysis. Ole Toge+‘s excellent article, ‘Teksten er skabt af mennesket; om hermeneutisk tekstvidenskab i Skandinavien’ (pp. 141Ll65), sets out to take an hermeneutic approach to texts. He analyzes a particular text in a number of different ways to illustrate different textlinguistic theories and methods. According to T., textlinguistics has three elements: the pragmatics of the text, the syntax of the text, and the semantics of the text. T. analyzes the pragmatics of his text in terms of a hierarchical structure of linguistic acts, and in terms of its presuppositions according to the Harder-Kock system (cf. Harder and Kock (1976)). The analyses are carried out meticulously on all levels, and are bound to give even the uninitiated a nice overview of what textlinguists are doing. A more traditional linguist’s spontaneous response might. howcvcr. be that not only are T.‘s classificatory systems to some extent randomly chosen, but so are the sub-categories within each system: for instance, have the particular semantic cases used in the semantic analysis been universally established in any sense, or do they just happen to be convenient for T.‘s text’? T.‘s main point is that textlinguistic analyses differ (or should differ) markedly from linguistics as defined in the Chomskyan paradigm. He argues (p. 163) that in the same way as Chomsky could justify his rationalistic revolution of linguistics by referring to Descartes, so too can the hermcneutic reaction to Chomsky’s paradigm be justified by reference to the serious critique put forward against Descartes in 1708 by C.R. Vito in his DC zyxwvutsrqponmlkjihgfedc nostri tcw? poris studiorum rutionr. A thought-provoking paper in somewhat the same vein as Togeby’s is coauthored by hxgen Bung, JGrgcn Dnwr and Hurq Pcrridon: ‘Three aspects of a Marxist theory of communicative competence’ (pp. 197P211). (The paper is in English, except for one section in Danish.) Their main point is that the results of linguistic analyses are always “to a high degree determined by the beliefs of the analysing linguist, beliefs as to how the physical world should be interpreted, what the ‘essence of Man’ is, how society is, and ought to be, organized, etc.” (p. 197). In other words, that “the results of a syntactic and/or semantic analysis are determined by the results of a previous pragmatic analysis” (p, 199). The three questions of why we speak and write. how we do it, and what we are doing when we do it. can not be separated, as is implied in the Chomskyan paradigm. Although the authors’ points are well-argued, especially their arguments against Chomsky’s Standard Theory seem dated, and have been made by others earlier, more or less in the same words. (A reference to Haas (1973) would have been in place in the discussion of selectional restrictions.) Also, I fail to see the point with the shifts from SVO to VSO and back again on pages 199-200. The term ‘communicative competence’ in the authors’ heteronomy-ideologem is understood (p. 208) as “a socially constituted power or priviledge [sic] to have your linguistic interpretations or productions acknowledged as legitimate or legal (normal or correct)“. Let me in connection with this paper mention Kluus Kjdkr’s paper, ‘Hvad har argumentationsvidenskab og sprogvidcnskab med hinanden at gore?’ (pp. 291-296), which in a sense takes the opposite route, and argues that syntax can be used as a way to get to know more about social science in general, and argumentation in particular; he feels (p. 296) that ultimately all sciences are part of linguistics. Lars Heltqft’s paper, ‘Teknik og talehandlinger som ideologi; om tematik og relevansstrukturer i tekster om okonomi’ (pp. 2433252), is a textlinguistic analysis of a number of texts dealing with economic issues. He shows what the ideological preconditions are for the texts, and how the same topic (‘devaluation’) is dealt with differently in different newspapers: some aspects of it are treated as economic laws, while others can be influenced by the behavior of particular groups in society; and such ideological principles can be utilized for political purposes. The following three articles deal with language mixing in different areas. Bjiirn Hagstriim starts off his paper, ‘Ett exempel pa fariiiskt-danskt blandsprbk’ (pp. 237-242), with one particular letter. The letter is an example of the kinds of personal letters written in the Faroe Isles around 1930. Such letters were conceived in Faroese, then transformed into a Danish-like language structure, and finally written down in Danish orthography. The letter genre is presented as typical of the diglossia situation that reigned in the Faroe Isles for centuries, in fact until World War II. According to H., the Faroese are nowadays all bilingual in Danish and Faroese, both in speech and writing. At the end of his paper (p. 241), H. suggests a schema containing all the factors that have to be taken into account in order to arrive at an adequate understanding of bilingualism as a cultural political, social-psychological, and linguistic phenomenon. Kerstin Nurdenstam’s article, ‘Om det norsksvenska blandspraket’ (pp. 317325), discusses the language of Swedish immigrants in Norway, pointing out that although it is a case of language mixing, the resultant language has its own norm (cf. Haugen (1977)). She has looked at the frequency of Norwegian and Swedish stem- and suffix-morphemes in nouns, in order to show the regularities in the system, and to prove the hypothesis that bilingualism is governed by what Hasselmo (1974) calls ‘ordered selection’. Her results are ordered on an implicational scale to display the order in which the Swedish speakers’ competence in Norwegian develops: first, they acquire the lexemes, then their gender, then the indefinite plural forms, and lastly the definite plural forms. (N.‘s decision to treat instances in her data that are not in accordance with her hypothesis as performance errors seems methodologically somewhat dubious, though.) Solveig Zempel’s article deals with ‘The linguistic repertoire of a NorwegianAmerican author’ (pp. 407413). The author is Johannes B. Wist and Z. has investigated his language in the novel Ny’kommerhilleder (1920). She shows that Wist “is able to manipulate variations within the American-Norwegian idiom to reflect shifts in speaker, topic, and narrative perspective” (p. 412) e.g. by using ju’ no as opposed to you know to differentiate speakers of different social classes. (Z.‘s contention that content words seem to be easily borrowable as individual lexical items, but that form words can only be borrowed in the context of a set phrase or after a complete code-switch might be true in the case of Wist’s novel, but most likely need to be qualified in the light of recent research on code-switching.) The following two papers deal with sociolinguistic issues. Niels Haastrup’s paper, ‘Fremmedsprog i det sprogsociologiske billede i Danmark; nogle pointer fra turistsektoren’ (pp. 2677276), discusses sociological aspects (class and sex in particular) of people’s knowledge of foreign languages in Denmark. The article is full of important observations and convincing arguments. For instance, he finds that the preference English is given in the schools can not for most people be justified on the basis of their practical communicative needs, and in general that it is not a criterion of direct usefulness that determines people’s interest in foreign languages, but rather a general quest for education coupled with snobbery ~~or, he asks, is English being justified as having the status of being the foreign language to be studied by everyone because that makes everyone equal? J. Normann Jorgwuen (‘Fremmedarbejderberrns danske ordforrad; en sociolingvistisk undersogelse’, pp. 283290) discusses foreign workers’ children’s lexical competence in Danish in a sociolinguistic perspective, and gives the reader interesting statistics. J. finds no positive correlation between the number of years foreign children had spent at school outside Denmark, and their scores in the Danish vocabulary test. But he is eager to point out that we can not from this deduce that attending school in one’s mother tongue does not facilitate learning the vocabulary of a second language, but only that the school system as it is today does not utilize such a potential facilitation. I will end this lengthy review with Carol Henriksen’s excellent paper on ‘The ecology of language and the history of language; the case of the Danish Standard’ (pp. 2533260). H. raises the important question of /KIM:the historical linguist can even start to get away from the ‘genetic-structuralist approach’, and sets out to answer this question. Her view of language is an ecological one (p. 254): “(__.) a conceptlon of language to the language user, to be put in any givx linguistic situation and language change as an accommodation resulting from as a systematically organized set of linguistic possibilities availabie to use in accordance with the specific commumcative needs arising and where history is concerned, a conception of language history ongolng process of adaptation, a dynamic process of hnguistlc the continuous interaction between language and its environment.” H. goes on to illustrate a number of the central aspects of this view in relation tc the rise of the Danish standard language, giving particular attention to of “four interrelated factors which I believe to be essential to the understanding any changing linguistic situation: the socio-political environment, the heterogeneous nuture of‘ the language, its public communicative functions and the social And, and linguistic prestige of its users” (p. 254-255, author’s emphasis). finally, she suggests (p. 260, fn. 13) “communicative need (and not (. .) push or drag chains) as a kind of final causality in diachronic linguistics” . Although there are some notable exceptions, a general trend in many of the papers in this volume is that the ‘linguists’ seem to be addressing the ‘Nordists’, and vice versa. This often has the result that issues are dealt with too superficially, or in a too popular-science-like manner; many of the papers are instructive rather than argumentative. Again, this raises the important question of who this collection is intended for. Finally, it is a great pity for this volume that so many intercsting(-sounding) contributions at the conference were either not sent in for publication, or their authors have chosen to publish them elsewhere. Articles such as those by Peter Trudgill, Even Hovdhaugen, Eli Fischer-Jorgensen. and Sture Ureland, among others. would no doubt have increased the value of this publication. 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