Book Reviews
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Auteurs : Michael StubbsSource :
- Journal of Language and Social Psychology [ 0261-927X ] ; 1991-12.
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DOI: 10.1177/0261927X91104007
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Thousand Oaks, CA</pubPlace><availability><p>SAGE</p></availability><date>1991</date></publicationStmt><sourceDesc><biblStruct type="inbook"><analytic><title level="a" type="main" xml:lang="en">Book Reviews</title><author xml:id="author-1"><persName><forename type="first">Michael</forename><surname>Stubbs</surname></persName><affiliation>Universität Trier</affiliation></author></analytic><monogr><title level="j">Journal of Language and Social Psychology</title><idno type="pISSN">0261-927X</idno><idno type="eISSN">1552-6526</idno><imprint><publisher>Sage Publications</publisher><pubPlace>Sage CA: Thousand Oaks, CA</pubPlace><date type="published" when="1991-12"></date><biblScope unit="volume">10</biblScope><biblScope unit="issue">4</biblScope><biblScope unit="page" from="299">299</biblScope><biblScope unit="page" to="302">302</biblScope></imprint></monogr><idno type="istex">AB84DD5C4C08410743BF0373EB3FCF79BB807997</idno><idno type="DOI">10.1177/0261927X91104007</idno><idno 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journal-id-type="publisher-id">JLS</journal-id><journal-title>Journal of Language and Social Psychology</journal-title><issn pub-type="ppub">0261-927X</issn><publisher><publisher-name>Sage Publications</publisher-name><publisher-loc>Sage CA: Thousand Oaks, CA</publisher-loc></publisher></journal-meta><article-meta><article-id pub-id-type="doi">10.1177/0261927X91104007</article-id><article-id pub-id-type="publisher-id">10.1177_0261927X91104007</article-id><article-categories><subj-group subj-group-type="heading"><subject>Articles</subject></subj-group></article-categories><title-group><article-title>Book Reviews</article-title></title-group><contrib-group><contrib contrib-type="author" xlink:type="simple"><name name-style="western"><surname>Stubbs</surname><given-names>Michael</given-names></name><aff>Universität Trier</aff></contrib></contrib-group><pub-date pub-type="ppub"><month>12</month><year>1991</year></pub-date><volume>10</volume><issue>4</issue><fpage>299</fpage><lpage>302</lpage><custom-meta-wrap><custom-meta xlink:type="simple"><meta-name>sagemeta-type</meta-name><meta-value>Reviews</meta-value></custom-meta><custom-meta xlink:type="simple"><meta-name>search-text</meta-name><meta-value> BOOK REVIEWS to have some transcendent truths. The conclusion that there are extraordinarily complex dependencies is not very helpful. Chapter 15 examines the rhetorical aspect of speaking as a performing art. Pro- fessional and artistic skills in speaking are interesting areas of research. Radio preachers pause more than professional broadcasters, for example, but again there are different patterns from study to study. To me, it is as informative to con- clude that Jimmy Carter speaks slowly as to conclude that temporal organisation of speech is quite flexible or that people are different. I have trouble believing the data are orderly when there is so much variability that I can't see the order. The three chapters in Part Six are called 'Pulling things together'. Chapter 16 addresses speaking and writing, and criticises recent work on orality and literacy, especially if the writer suggests that speaking and writing are on a continuum. They are very different, because hesitations that occur while writing do not appear in the written product, and speaking is faster than writing. No progress can be made unless we balkanise research, making sure we separate speaking, writing, the spoken and the written. Chapter 17 repeats earlier comments about the importance of studying the tem- poral organisation of speech. Our current ignorance is because of the emphasis on that will-o'-the-wisp, the sentence, and because of the pathological insistence that departures from the written form are disfluencies. O'Connell hints that editors have reviewed some of his submissions unkindly. Other researchers, especially psycholinguists, have forgotten what true eloquence is. As a remedy, we need the deep structures of the poet. Chapter 18 pulls everything together. It turns out that psychology itself is the culprit, beset by fads, assaulted by attacks of fanaticism, and unwilling to include the subjective element in research. Instead of reading or writing this book, we should have been studying human suffering. Ian Begg Department of Psychology, McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario Psychology of Language: An Introduction to Sentence and Discourse Processes Murray Singer. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum, 1990. Pp. xi + 308. ISBN 0-8058-0005-0 (cloth): $24.95. This book summarises a large number of experimental psychological studies on language comprehension, short and long term memory for information in texts, time taken and strategies used to read texts, the place of real-world knowledge and inferencing, story grammars, computer modelling of language comprehen- sion, etc. The main argument is that language processing takes place at several different levels, including the lexical, syntactic, referential and semantic. The book is aimed at upper-level undergraduate students, and they will find it very useful as a way through the literature. It is exceptionally clearly written (as befits a book on language processing). It is, however, rather repetitious, and 299 LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY many pages have a high density of terms and concepts, which are sometimes intro- duced for their own sake. For example, restoring a proposition from long-term to working memory is 'reinstatement' (p. 127), and when a reader looks back in a text this is a 'regressive fixation' (p. 130). Singer states his position clearly in the Preface (p. ix): The contemporary study of language processes emerged around 1970 from the psycholinguistic tradition of the 1960s, which in turn has been stimulated by twin revolutions in cognitive psychology and linguistics in the 1950s . . . Over the past two decades, the initial proposals concerning the representa- tion of discourse meaning have begun to converge on a paradigm for study- ing these issues. There is growing consensus, for example, that discourse understanding results in the construction of representations of the form and idea content of a messages, and of the situation to which it refers. The men- tal processes that act upon these representations are viewed as those that apply as well in other realms of complex information processing, including problem solving, reasoning, and learning. The study of language processes, furthermore, is recognised as an interdisciplinary endeavour, pursued within the framework of cognitive science. (emphasis added.) This may be true. However, the paradigm and the consensus which Singer assumes are narrow; the interdisciplinary endeavour represented in the book is restricted to psychology and to one narrow linguistic tradition (with no social psychology, for example), and the concept of cognitive science, much bandied about these days, gets no substantial, critical discussion. There is one short final chapter on computer models of discourse. The orientation of the book is exclusively experimental-psychological. Analy- ses of real language in use, and any social theory, are entirely lacking, and the lin- guistic dimension is thin. There is one very brief discussion (pp. 22-23) of whether laboratory studies generalise to natural language, and no real problem is seen. Almost all the data discussed are isolated, invented sentences, or short, invented (and often boring) texts. The book is full of sentences such as: The ants on the wooden table ate the sweet jelly (p. 4); The pilot painted the fence with the brush (p. 31); What ate the water melon was the mouse (p. 37); and The prince sur- prised the dragon (p. 59). The first attested example of real usage in the book is not found until p. 58- a short extract from the Watergate tapes. There are only three other real examples in the whole book: half a dozen lines from a novel (p. 113), from Lewis Carroll (p. 124) and from Douglas Adams (p. 132), and these few are not central to the analyses. There are inevitable problems with such invented data. For example, in one experiment (p. 54) people were tested on how they could recall or make infer- ences about different forms of information about a route through town. But there was no test of whether the people could successfully drive through town or find the post office. There is sometimes the impression that findings are interesting and valid only if they have been supported experimentally. For example, it is said (pp. 153, 182) that sex, money and death make texts inherently interesting, but that there is no experimental evidence to support this claim! 300 BOOK REVIEWS Singer is weak on linguistic description. He distinguishes word from concept (p. 31), but makes no mention of intervening linguistic analytic units such as lexi- cal item, dictionary word (head word), lemma, etc. Nor does he discuss the struc- ture of the vocabulary, semantic relations amongst words, lexical fields, core and peripheral vocabulary, etc. Arguably, the cognitive effect of vocabulary is due to its structuring of areas of experience, not to individual words. He simply states (p. 32) that verb tense and mood, and modality generally, are not usually shown in propositional representations of sentences, but does not say why - a bit of mystification here. He gives examples (p. 58ff) of immediate constituent analysis with tree diagrams of sentences, but gives no indication how this analysis can be done, whether it is formalisable, etc. He is also vague (p. 157) about linguistic analyses of connectivity between propositions. He discusses presuppositions (p. 115), but gives no references to the large linguistic literature on the topic. In general, he is much more confident in summarising the psychological than the linguistic literature. For example, his discussion (pp. 12-15) of the role of lin- guistics in cognitive science is pretty trivial, and includes the dubious claim that before 1900, linguistics was mainly prescriptive; this unfairly dismisses most of historical comparative linguistics. Overall, I find Singer's concept of communication too deterministic. He talks, for example, of a hearer achieving 'a complete grasp of the communicative inten- tions of a speaker' (p. 47), and claims that 'for a conversation to succeed, the listener must correctly identify the speech act of every utterance that is encoun- tered' (p. 50). This is surely untrue? There is no place in Singer's conception for the vagueness and indeterminacy which are natural parts of everyday uses of lan- guage. He gives no references to the large number of textual studies in this area. This goes along with his claim (p. 51) that any utterance can be expanded to make its speech act explicit. But it is never possible to say in so many words what is meant. The concept of explicitness is very difficult, but it not discussed in this con- nection, not even in the chapter on computer modelling. The summary of the psychological literature is itself fairly uncritical, and some of the claims are dogmatic. For example, the claim is made that people prefer abstract concepts such as 'bioluminescence' over concrete concepts such as 'flash- light fish' (p. 153) but this claim is based on one 8-page article which is not other- wise summarised. More generally, almost all the studies summarised concern written language. There is an assumption (p. 42 and in the title) that sentences are the relevant unit in discourse processing. But sentences are arguably not units at all in spoken English, where information is packaged into different units (clauses and clause complexes), and topicalised by syntactic structures which are rare in written lan- guage (e.g. cleft constructions). There are no references in the index to spoken and written language, and therefore no references to the substantial differences between them. Again, a large linguistic literature is ignored. Some small quibbles. The examples are often North American: baseball exam- ples are frequent; and who is Wayne Gretzky, said (p. 79) to be a 'familiar term'? There are a few proof-reading errors, and the references have been typed by someone who does not understand German (see the Ebbinghaus and Frege titles, 301 LANGUAGE AND SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY pp. 276, 277). Singer several times makes the point that the purpose of reading a text (e.g. pleasure, proof-reading, memorisation) affects reading time and com- prehension. This is certainly true. Who but a reviewer or examiner would both proof-read the text and the bibliography of a book, as well as trying to summarise and criticise it? Within its limits, this is a very clear, helpful and useful summary of an important literature. But students should beware of the narrowness of these limits. The studies which are summarised come from a restricted range of journals: those cited in the references are overwhelmingly experimental-psychological, con- cerned with memory, perception, verbal learning and behaviour, cognitive psychology and discourse processes. Students should also know that the approach is largely uncritical, both within its own paradigm, and in its view of this paradigm. Michael Stubbs Universitat Trier LINGUISTIC MINORITIES, SOCIETY AND TERRITORY Edited by Colin H. Williams This volume presents the latest findings of leading figures in the growing inter- disciplinary field of geolinguistics. Rich in empirical detail and analytical thought it outlines the opportunities and tensions facing linguistic minorities in their attempt to influence the structure of the modem state in Europe and North America and offers a synthesis of the complex relationship between territorial identity, social change and economic development in multilingual societies. Hbk ISBN 1-85359-132-7 Price 59.00 ($125.00) MM78 344 pages Pbk ISBN 1-85359-131-9 Price 19.95 ($ 42.00) 1991 LANGUAGE IN GEOGRAPHIC CONTEXT Edited by Coln H. Williams Hbk ISBN 1-85359-002-9 Price 43.00 ($89.00) MM38 316 pages Pbk ISBN 1-85359-001-0 Price 14.95 ($32.00) 1988 MULTILINGUAL MATTERS LTD 411 Bank House, 8a Hill Road, Clevedon, Avon, England, BS21 7HH 302 </meta-value></custom-meta></custom-meta-wrap></article-meta></front></article></istex:document></istex:metadataXml><mods version="3.6"><titleInfo lang="en"><title>Book Reviews</title></titleInfo><titleInfo type="alternative" lang="en" contentType="CDATA"><title>Book Reviews</title></titleInfo><name type="personal"><namePart type="given">Michael</namePart><namePart type="family">Stubbs</namePart><affiliation>Universität Trier</affiliation></name><typeOfResource>text</typeOfResource><genre type="review-article" displayLabel="review-article"></genre><originInfo><publisher>Sage Publications</publisher><place><placeTerm type="text">Sage CA: Thousand Oaks, CA</placeTerm></place><dateIssued encoding="w3cdtf">1991-12</dateIssued><copyrightDate encoding="w3cdtf">1991</copyrightDate></originInfo><language><languageTerm type="code" authority="iso639-2b">eng</languageTerm><languageTerm type="code" authority="rfc3066">en</languageTerm></language><physicalDescription><internetMediaType>text/html</internetMediaType></physicalDescription><relatedItem type="host"><titleInfo><title>Journal of Language and Social Psychology</title></titleInfo><genre type="journal">journal</genre><identifier type="ISSN">0261-927X</identifier><identifier type="eISSN">1552-6526</identifier><identifier type="PublisherID">JLS</identifier><identifier type="PublisherID-hwp">spjls</identifier><part><date>1991</date><detail type="volume"><caption>vol.</caption><number>10</number></detail><detail type="issue"><caption>no.</caption><number>4</number></detail><extent unit="pages"><start>299</start><end>302</end></extent></part></relatedItem><identifier type="istex">AB84DD5C4C08410743BF0373EB3FCF79BB807997</identifier><identifier type="DOI">10.1177/0261927X91104007</identifier><identifier type="ArticleID">10.1177_0261927X91104007</identifier><recordInfo><recordContentSource>SAGE</recordContentSource></recordInfo></mods></metadata><serie></serie></istex></record>Pour manipuler ce document sous Unix (Dilib)
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