Book Reviews 567

markedly less successful than other chapters torical and Comparative Linguistics; (7)
in organization and in conveying in a short Ferdinand de Saussure; (8) Edward
text a true picture of what archeology has Sapir; (9) Leonard Bloomfield; (10) J.
revealed about this important sequence of R. Firth: Contextural Theory and Prosodic
cultural development. The text is marred Phonology; ( 11) Louis Hjelmslev: Glos-
here by some errors. Who among American sematics; ( 12) Noam Chomsky : Transfor-
archeologists refers to people of the high mational Grammar and Linguistic Univer-
barbarian cultures for example? Maps 4 sals; ( 13) Summary and Conclusions.
and 5 are reversed, and a date of 350 B.C. According to the authors preface, An Zn-
for the introduction of the Neolithic period troduction to General Linguistics is in-
in southern Britain is an obvious misprint. tended to acquaint the student with a lin-
In the last chapter, Science and Modern guists approach to language. The style of
Archaeology, the book returns to the high writing is unusually well suited for upper di-
level of the earlier chapters. The reader is vision undergraduates, and students at that
presented with a quick sketch of modern ar- level will find it very interesting, informa-
cheological methods and some of the nu- tive, and, I believe, much more intelligible
merous scientific aids that are being devel- than most introductions to this field. Con-
oped for archeological research. He thus cepts are often stated in very simple terms,
ends with a whirlwind impression of the dis- which give the uninitiated a fairly clear idea
cipline on the threshold of the realm of of what a linguist is talking about without
modern scientific research. confusing him with the intricacies of theo-
One realizes throughout that this is a re- retical problems. Many scholars may take
production of the spoken word and not a lit- issue with various statements made by Din-
erary work. Some readers may find this neen, but, since this is likely to be unavoida-
slightly annoying, but it should not prevent bly true for simple statements of complex
this book from providing many laymen with phenomena, and since the criticisms would
a pleasant and exciting introduction to a be very different when coming from scholars
subject previously unknown and perhaps with different theoretical backgrounds, this
even mysterious to them, and that is pre- fact should in no way be allowed to reflect
cisely Mr. Daniels intention. negatively on the value of the book.
In Chapter 1 the author begins with defi-
LINGUISTICS nitions for a number of linguistic ternis that
the student will need to know before he can
An Introduction to General Linguistics. delve far into the subject matter of this dis-
FRANCIS P. DINNEEN. New York & Lon- cipline, such as descriptive, historical, and
don: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967. comparative linguistics. Further, he gives
xi+ 452 pp., 13 figures, 5 tables, selected some characteristics of language as a natural
general bibliography, index. $7.95 (cloth). phenomenon and under linguistic analysis
devotes a short paragraph to the discussion
Reviewed by JOE E. PIERCE of each of these items. So far, so good. This
Portland State University pattern fits well with the organization of
This book was written to present to the most introductory courses in this field.
student in two semesters the basic concepts Chapter 2 covers very superficially an enor-
of linguistics, with their historical antece- mous segment of linguistic theory and
dents. Lets begin this review by looking at a method, i.e., articulatory phonetics, English
list of the chapters, because much that will phonology, acoustic phonetics, phonemics,
be said results from the way the materials etc. For an introductory course in which the
are presented: ( 1 ) Linguistics as a Scien- students are undergraduates, however, this is
tific Study; (2) The Study of Language as not necessarily bad either, Depth could be
Sound; (3) Grammar as a Formal Sys- added by lectures and selected supplemen-
tem; (4) The Development of Language tary readings. Chapter 3 covers the rernain-
Study in the West; (5) Traditional Gram- der of analysis, i.e., the theory and method
mar; ( 6 ) The Nineteenth Century: His- of morphology and syntax. Chapter 4 gives
568 American Anthropologist
a straightforward, easily readable, and clear
description of the development of linguistics
in Greece and Rome. Chapter 6, The Nine-
teenth Century, is subtitled Historical and
Comparative Linguistics, and explains
clearly the major achievements of the last
century, particularly the discovery of sound
shifts or laws and their relationship to the
evolution of language families, and, of
course, the work of Rask, Grimm, and Ver-
ner, among many others. Chapters 7
through 12 have almost self-explanatory ti-
tles, i.e., Ferdinand de Saussure, Edward
Sapir, Leonard Bloomfield, and so forth.
In each case Dinneen explains the philo-
sophical background of the scholar being
discussed, his approach to linguistic analysis,
and the philosophy of particular individuals
who had a marked effect on the method of
language study that each man followed, e.g.,
Malinowskis influence on Firth and Durk-
heims influence on De Saussure. Each of
the theories is presented as simply and une-
motionally as possible, and from the general
tone one feels that if a given author were to
feel that he is misrepresented on any point,
this is not intentional. Dinneen appears to
be doing his best to translate the various
theories, without distortion, into ordinary
English for students. The final chapter,
Summary and Conclusions, is largely a
very simple summary of what he has pre-
sented, with no apparent conclusions.
This book is an excellent one, well written
and invaluable to the beginner in the field of
linguistics. It should certainly be added to
the required reading lists of all graduate an-
thropology students because of the way in
which it connects the scholars with their
past and their theories. It would make a fine
text for a course on the history of linguistic
thought, but it would seem to this writer to
be almost unusable as a text for most classes
in general linguistics. This statement is per-
haps not so much a criticism of the book as
it is of introductory courses in the field of
linguistics. Most linguists, when they present
their introduction to the field, follow one of
several possible logical arrangements of
language data, rather than giving a histor-
ical development of linguistic thought. In a
way, what may be needed is a course, fol-
lowing the outline of this book, that pre-
cedes most introductions to general linguis-
[71, 19691
tics. It is just possible that currently avail-
able introductory texts would be much more
intelligible to students after such a course.
Anthropological Linguistics: A n Introduc-
tion. JOSEPHH. GREENBERG. Studies in
Anthropology, 8. New York: Random
House, 1968. vi + 212 pp., 3 figures, 2
tables, list of symbols, notes, index. $3.95
(paper).
Reviewed by MARSHALL DURBIN
Tulane University
The consulting editors of this series, Mar-
vin Harris and Morton Fried, invited Joseph
Greenberg to write a book on language and
stated that they were looking forward as
much to creative synthesis as traditional
.
coverage (p. v) Greenberg attempted the
second alternative: a restatement of what
seems to have survived as the fundamental
viewpoint and achievement in linguistics
(p. v). In view of the fact that part of the
firm taxonomic and methodological founda-
tion of linguistics cLwasalready being shaken
by the first substantial impact of transforma-
tional theory on American and world lin-
guistics (p v). Greenberg hopes that the
book will help undergraduate and graduate
students at the earlier stages of their train-
ing, particularly in disciplines other than lin-
guistics, to gain a preliminary notion of the
basic nature and goals of that discipline
(pp. v-vi). I gather, then, that the book is
intended for an educated lay audience.
With the above background in mind, it is
very disconcerting to find that throughout
the book references are made to the impor-
tance of some of the observations and find-
ings of the transformational generative
grammarians. Yet I cannot find where
Greenberg has incorporated these important
observations into his discussions of phono-
logical and grammatical analyses, linguistic
change, or universals.
For example, in Chapter One, he states
that a real difference between bee communi-
cation and human language is the fact that
in English, for example, there is no longest
sentence and that the number of sentences is
infinite. This is a powerful observation that
was brought to the attention of American
linguists in the mid-1950s by Noam Chom-
sky. Thus, in his chapter on grammar,