Language

BOOK NOTICES Language universals: Papers from the conference held at Gummersbach/ Cologne, Germany, October 3-8, 1976. Ed. by Hansjakob Seiler. (Tübinger Beiträge zur Linguistik, 111.) Tübingen: Narr, 1978. Pp. 328. DM 68.00. The conference from which these papers come was sponsored by the Cologne Project on Language Universals (Kölner Universalienprojekt ), with a grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. The Cologne Project had been in operation for four years, and had already developed a number of theoretical concepts and methods that formed the basis of discussions. Extensive materials circulated prior to the conference have been published under the title Materials for the DFG International Conference on Language Universals (ed. by Seiler), as vol. 25 of the Arbeiten des Kölner Universalienprojekts. Twenty-four participants are listed; seventeen of them produced articles for this collection. France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, The Netherlands, Switzerland, and the United States are the countries represented, with Germany having the most participants. Of the nineteen articles, fourteen are in English, with the remainder in German and French. The topics for the five conference days were: (1) the concept of universals, (2) determination, (3) descriptivity, (4) typology, and (5) noun and verb. Seiler (pp. 11-25) introduces the collection with a statement on the objectives, theoretical notions, and strategies resulting from research at Cologne before, during, and after the conference. He lists 'Twelve questions,' previously distributed in Materials: these deal with the definition of universals; generalizations that lead to universals; diversity among languages; relationship to typological research; the problem of arguments and examples from levels other than phonology; the purposive aspect of communicative function; the relationship among conceptual (cognitive), semantic, and grammatical categories; the status of N, V, ADJ, and adv in the research; unifying principles that might account for both linguistic and extralinguistic behavior; the number oflanguages which must be researched before one reaches the point of diminishing returns; typological clustering; and a comment on a quotation by G. von der Gabelenz (1901). Paul Garvin (27-31) initiates the discussions with an epistemological perspective. He deals with the definition of 'linguistic universal' and its offshoots: implicational, regional, typological, definitional, and empirical universals. Herman Parret (125-40) lists the wide range of acknowledged universals (he gives eleven examples) that shows the need for criteria in their classification. He also points out that Plato, Leibniz, and Husserl were concerned with language universals, and that we gain perspective by looking back at the developments that brought us to our present position. This collection has particular value because of its cross-cultural perspectives, especially in articles like that by Russell Ultan (249-65) on the development of the definite article, with examples from Finnish, Germanic, Bulgarian, Romance, and Mandarin. The relative order of adjectives is discussed by Robert Hetzron (165-84); he summarizes studies since A. A. Hill (1958) and then explores this syntactic device in Hungarian, Turkish, Indonesian, Basque, Amharic, Japanese, Chinese, and Chichewa. In his recapitulation, he discusses the matter of semantic classification as a basis for the ordering principle. Of particular value are his warnings about the technical problem ofprosodyas aneglected aspect (this involves ambiguity), about idiomaticity, and about a euphonic principle. Also important in this collection is the new material brought into discussions of universals , e.g. neurolinguistics and extralinguistic (non-verbal) concomitants. Walter Huber (185-206) deals with 'universal neuro-anatomical substrates', and reviews recent work on the cerebral organization of language. Research on the brain—whether through studies of aphasia, injection of sodium amytal, or dichotic listening—can give insight into, e.g., syntactic processing, the act of naming, and 'natural' phonological processes. But neither can non-verbal aspects —intonation, symbolic gestures, facial expressions , mimicry, and other emotional expressions—be ignored in research on 464 BOOK NOTICES 465 universals; thus it has often been noted that deictic expressions are accompanied by an appropriate gesture (250). The article by Franz Stachowiak (207-28) further explores the matter of naming and descriptivity. When does naming become descriptive? The faculty of categorizing perceptual data is presupposed in the act of naming. How are the universals of space and time dimensions expressed in language ? How do speech errors (slips of the tongue) contribute to our...