Language

BOOK NOTICES 489 lution, virtually all Chinese literature was written in the frozen Classical language, largely unchanged in the preceding 2500 years. But especially after the incident of May 4, 1919 (massive protests led by"the Chinese intelligentsia against terms in the Treaty of Versailles which implied the continued subservience of China to the West and to Japan), writers saw a need for a new modernized Chinese culture. The inadequacy and irrelevance of Classical Chinese for modern writing was apparent. Undoubtedly the outstanding writer of the period was Lu Hsiin (or Lu Xun in the new pinyin spelling, which I will henceforth employ). Through his career, Lu Xun obviously wrestled with the Chinese language (as did other writers of the time), trying to achieve a modern, more nearly colloquial, written language. It is this struggle which Hsu documents, by a statistical analysis ofthe sources oflexical items used by Lu Xun in selected works from each of his three main periods. H classifies text items as falling into eight categories, including spoken Modern Standard Chinese (baihua), written Modern Standard Chinese (baihuawen); Classical (wenyan), colloquial , and dialectal. Across all his works, Lu Xun is found to have employed a mean of 80.25% baihua and baihuawen, and a mean of only 8.15% Classical (with a range of 4% to 16.1%). This is a significant finding, in that many have felt that Lu Xun wrote in a more Classical style—an impression which H suggests comes from a small percentage of wenyan terms used conspicuously. That is, Lu Xun's 'Classical' appearance results from careful placement, not volume, of terms. H also attempts to trace changes in Lu Xun's style between periods as he matured; but this effort is largely confounded by Lu Xun's shift from fiction to non-fiction, resulting in a slight diminution of baihua and a slight increase in wenyan. H also compares Lu Xun's style to that of twenty other contemporary authors, applying the same measures to single short samples of their work. Compared to other leaders of the May Fourth Movement, Lu Xun in fact used fewer standard vernacular, but more Classical, dialectal, and other non-colloquial forms. H's study is interesting in that it documents a language in transition, and the writing of an author who was obviously quite conscious of many problems of linguistic style. The study also underscores some difficulties of linguistic stylistics. H admits to problems in categorizing vocabulary, and in determining whether a form was in the standard speech of Lu Xun's day. The study also suffers from a lack ofstatistical tests. H's comparisons against other authors are based on very small samples, and their significance is unclear. It also isn't clear to what extent Lu Xun's greatness as a writer derives from his linguistic style: his use of non-standard grammatical constructions may only make reading more difficult. In general, one should not be too quick to conclude that his unique style is always a positive value. A statistical study such as this cannot justify a normative conclusion. A large number of charts and tables aid in the presentation of the data base, but might more effectively have been placed within the text rather than in an appendix. [Charles L. McClenon, University of Texas, Austin.] Empirical research on language teaching and language acquisition. Ed. by R. Grotjahn and E. Hopkins. (Quantitative linguistics, 6.) Bochum : Brockmeyer, 1980. Pp. iv, 231. DM29.80. This collection of six articles (two of them in German, with English abstracts) covers a variety of topics related to the evaluation of foreign language proficiency—with particular emphasis on the collection and quantitative analysis oflanguage-acquisition data, in order to develop theoretically sound and empirically based grounds for changes in pedagogical practices. The over-all goals of the volume are to discuss and clarify the methodological bases for research , and to examine their effect upon the data obtained. The first article, 'Modelle linguistischer Kompetenz und ihre empirische Fundierung', by F. Sang and H. J. Vollmer, is an examination of the pertinent research evidence in the current controversy between unitary and multidimensional models of language competence. S&V conclude, after painstaking comparison of...