Language

608 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 70, NUMBER 3 (1994) nese and Japanese learners of English in correcting mistakes by lower-status and higherstatus addressees, Takahashi & Beebe found evidence of transfer of Ll discourse patterns, not only in utterance content, but also in patterns of style-shifting between situations. In Part III, Shoshana Blum-Kulka & Hadass Sheffer (The metapragmatic discourse of American-Israeli families at dinner', 196-223) show that acculturation to L2 pragmatics can affect speakers' Ll, and indeed that interlanguage can be an Ll phenomenon. Guy Aston ('Notes on the interlanguage ofcomity', 224-50) argues that the resources used by native and nonnative speakers to establish rapport are not a diminished subset of native speakers' conversational abilities, but an independent set of successful strategies. Despite the pitfalls that the papers in Part II alert us to, writers in Part III show that interlanguage speakers can be satisfactorily competent conversational actors. The editors have succeeded in their aim of producing a volume that speaks to scholars both in pragmatics and in second language acquisition , and that will also appeal to readers interested in cultural and stylistic aspects of conversation. [Susan Meredith Burt, Normal , Illinois.] Formal grammar: Theory and implementation . Ed. by Robert Levine. (Vancouver studies in cognitive science , 2.) Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Pp. x, 439. Cloth $60.00. The present volume grew out of a conference held at Simon Fraser University (Vancouver) in 1989. Most of the papers—those by Fodor (comment by Gawron), Oehrle (comment by Jacobson ), Carpenter, and Stabler (comment by Dahl)—deal with formal aspects of syntax, whereas the other contributions cover phonology (Dresher, comment by Church), morphology (Zwicky), semantics (Crain & Hamburger), and neurolinguistics (Kean, Shapiro). Given the subtitle of Formal grammar, one might expect the main focus of the contributions to be the relationship between linguistic theories and their implementations. However, the editor explains in his brief introduction (vii-x) that the 'notion of implementation was construed rather broadly [...] embracing not only machine-based applications [...] but real-time aspects of human linguistic capability ...' (vii). However broadly the notion of implementation may be construed, some of the contributions (those by Zwicky, Oehrle, and Crain & Hamburger) are related only very loosely to either machine-based applications or real-time aspects of linguistic capacities. Because some of the main articles are less directly related to issues of implementation in a narrow sense, one would expect the commentators to try to relate the theoretical advances of the articles to implementational aspects. This, however, is not the case. But it should be noted that most of the main contributions as well as the comments reflect important research in formal linguistics. Given this constellation, it would perhaps have been a wiser choice to omit the rather misleading subtitle. In 'Learnability of phrase structure grammars ' (3-68), Janet Dean Fodor discusses whether standard Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (GPSG) is learnable. She shows that GPSG does not obey the Subset Principle in its treatment of subjacency. Consequently, a language learner equipped with a GPSG is not capable of learning several languages, since the grammar cannot proceed from more restricted to less restricted rule schemata but predicts the correctness of the less restrictive schemata. The problem is illustrated by extraction data from Polish, English, and Swedish. To overcome the difficulty, Fodor proposes an alternative version of GPSG, where negative constraints on feature propagation are eliminated in favor of default specifications and a rule-based treatment of extraction. This modification is the starting point for Jean Mark Gawron's remarks (69-78). He admits that the elimination of negative constraints seems plausible in the domain of extraction, but doubts that such a move can be made with respect to anaphoric phenomena. Richard T. Oehrle's contribution (79-128) is a presentation of a variant of categorial grammar —Dynamic Categorial Grammar (DCG)— which conforms to the Lambek-Calculus. Beside the more familiar scheme of function application, DCG includes function composition and type lifting as basic operations. DCG shows two interesting formal properties: the calculus is decidable, which means that it can be proven for any string whether it belongs to a particular language or not; and it is structurally complete—which amounts to the assumption that, if...