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Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays by Stanley Cavell Review by: Martin Warner The Modern Language Review, Vol. 74, No. 1 (Jan., 1979), pp. 122-127 Published by: Modern Humanities Research Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3726909 . Accessed: 28/06/2014 18:26 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Modern Humanities Research Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to The Modern Language Review. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 91.220.202.31 on Sat, 28 Jun 2014 18:26:51 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essaysby Stanley Cavell

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Page 1: Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essaysby Stanley Cavell

Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essays by Stanley CavellReview by: Martin WarnerThe Modern Language Review, Vol. 74, No. 1 (Jan., 1979), pp. 122-127Published by: Modern Humanities Research AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3726909 .

Accessed: 28/06/2014 18:26

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Modern Humanities Research Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend accessto The Modern Language Review.

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Page 2: Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essaysby Stanley Cavell

eclectic, Professor Lyons somewhat extends his scope beyond the narrow confines of structuralism, and it is precisely where he does so that he makes his most original and useful contributions to what may one day be a comprehensive - and rational- theory of human language. T. . WALDRON

T. P. W^ALDRON UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

Must we mean what we say?: A Book of Essays. By STANLEY CAVELL. London: Cambridge University Press. 1976. xxx + 365 pp. ?7.50 (paperbound ?2.95).

Professor Cavcll's book was originally published by Scribner's in I969. Little noticed at the time, it has gradually aroused widespread interest and Cambridge is to be congratulated on reissuing it. Six of the ten essays had already appeared in print by 1969, but the book is more than a mere collection of disparate essays, for the papers are mutually illuminating in a number of ways. In particular, the fact that they are arranged in approximately chronological order enables the reader to follow the author's intellectual development, and hence appreciate better the subtleties of the later essays. Thus the book has a coherence its provenance would not lead one to expect.

The papers range over a wide field. To use conventional terminology, three are primarily essays in literary criticism (on works by Beckett, Kierkegaard, and Shakespeare), three are essays in aesthetics (with particular reference to literature and modern music), one is a philosophical essay (on 'Knowing and Acknowledg- ing'), and the remaining three are concerned with metaphilosophy (discussing 'ordinary language philosophy', and the practices of Wittgenstein and Austin respectively). But an underlying thesis of the book is that such conventional cate- gories are problematic. The distinction between philosophy and metaphilosophy is explicitly repudiated, with the rider 'that philosophy is one of its own normal topics ... [is] defining for the subject' (p. xviii); doubts are expressed about 'aesthetics'; and it is urged that 'in wishing to deny that some of these essays are philosophical and others not, I do not deny that there are differences among them, and differences between philosophy and literature or between philosophy and literary criticism; I am suggesting that we do not understand these differences' (p. xviii). One way of taking the book is to see it as exploring the relations between philosophy and literature and the ways in which each can illuminate the other.

But this is by no means the only way of taking the book. Professor Cavell draws attention to the distinction between 'the modern and the traditional, in philosophy and out' (p. xix) as a theme running through the book, and the title suggests yet another way of approaching it. In the later essays all three themes together illumi- nate yet another; the dethroning of knowledge as an ideal and its replacement by something more closely akin to sensibility. Although these themes by no means exhaust the book, they appear to represent its main integrating elements, making it more than a mere collection of essays.

The title-essay is also the earliest and has a curiously period flavour. It represents a defence of 'ordinary language philosophy' as practised in Oxford in the 1950S from the standpoint of one deeply influenced by Wittgenstein and Austin. This defence, which is presupposed and elaborated throughout the rest of the book, focuses on the appeal to what we ordinarily say and mean in attempting to resolve philosophical perplexity and argues that what is said is necessarily normally what is meant; we may not, of course, understand what our sayings mean (hence much philosophical perplexity) but it is only against a background of stable meanings that

eclectic, Professor Lyons somewhat extends his scope beyond the narrow confines of structuralism, and it is precisely where he does so that he makes his most original and useful contributions to what may one day be a comprehensive - and rational- theory of human language. T. . WALDRON

T. P. W^ALDRON UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE

Must we mean what we say?: A Book of Essays. By STANLEY CAVELL. London: Cambridge University Press. 1976. xxx + 365 pp. ?7.50 (paperbound ?2.95).

Professor Cavcll's book was originally published by Scribner's in I969. Little noticed at the time, it has gradually aroused widespread interest and Cambridge is to be congratulated on reissuing it. Six of the ten essays had already appeared in print by 1969, but the book is more than a mere collection of disparate essays, for the papers are mutually illuminating in a number of ways. In particular, the fact that they are arranged in approximately chronological order enables the reader to follow the author's intellectual development, and hence appreciate better the subtleties of the later essays. Thus the book has a coherence its provenance would not lead one to expect.

The papers range over a wide field. To use conventional terminology, three are primarily essays in literary criticism (on works by Beckett, Kierkegaard, and Shakespeare), three are essays in aesthetics (with particular reference to literature and modern music), one is a philosophical essay (on 'Knowing and Acknowledg- ing'), and the remaining three are concerned with metaphilosophy (discussing 'ordinary language philosophy', and the practices of Wittgenstein and Austin respectively). But an underlying thesis of the book is that such conventional cate- gories are problematic. The distinction between philosophy and metaphilosophy is explicitly repudiated, with the rider 'that philosophy is one of its own normal topics ... [is] defining for the subject' (p. xviii); doubts are expressed about 'aesthetics'; and it is urged that 'in wishing to deny that some of these essays are philosophical and others not, I do not deny that there are differences among them, and differences between philosophy and literature or between philosophy and literary criticism; I am suggesting that we do not understand these differences' (p. xviii). One way of taking the book is to see it as exploring the relations between philosophy and literature and the ways in which each can illuminate the other.

But this is by no means the only way of taking the book. Professor Cavell draws attention to the distinction between 'the modern and the traditional, in philosophy and out' (p. xix) as a theme running through the book, and the title suggests yet another way of approaching it. In the later essays all three themes together illumi- nate yet another; the dethroning of knowledge as an ideal and its replacement by something more closely akin to sensibility. Although these themes by no means exhaust the book, they appear to represent its main integrating elements, making it more than a mere collection of essays.

The title-essay is also the earliest and has a curiously period flavour. It represents a defence of 'ordinary language philosophy' as practised in Oxford in the 1950S from the standpoint of one deeply influenced by Wittgenstein and Austin. This defence, which is presupposed and elaborated throughout the rest of the book, focuses on the appeal to what we ordinarily say and mean in attempting to resolve philosophical perplexity and argues that what is said is necessarily normally what is meant; we may not, of course, understand what our sayings mean (hence much philosophical perplexity) but it is only against a background of stable meanings that

Reviews Reviews I22 I22

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Page 3: Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essaysby Stanley Cavell

we are able on occasion to say one thing and mean another; meaning is not just a function of the speaker's intentions, but also of the rules of the language he is speaking. These rules provide us with implications but, although they are perfectly comprehensible to anyone who can speak, they cannot be formalized in logical systems. Only under certain conditions is a particular concept intelligible, thus the use of the concept implies that such conditions hold; but while the implication 'must' hold if the concept is to be intelligible, this is not a straightforwardly logical 'must' - being concerned with the a priori possibility of the application of concepts it falls under the heading of Kant's 'transcendental logic', or of what Wittgenstein called 'grammar'. These implications are 'necessary and not analytic' (p. 31), and if we insist that all necessity is logical then they must be construed in terms of a 'logic' which is neither deductive nor inductive. With all their limitations, and Professor Cavell is critical of Austin at several points, Wittgenstein and Austin opened fresh possibilities of exploring this 'logic' thereby establishing 'a new common practice in thinking' (p. xxv). The whole book can profitably be seen as essays in this 'new practice'.

At this point the concern with the meaning of what we say links with the contrast between 'the modern and the traditional', for how new is this 'new practice'? In another early essay, 'The Availability of Wittgenstein's Later Philosophy' the contrast is drawn very sharply. Dr David Pole's book on Wittgenstein is subjected to savage criticism as representing the failure by an exponent of 'traditional philosophy' to comprehend the radical newness of what Wittgenstein was doing, a newness elsewhere described as 'another guise of the issue of the modern' (p. xxv). A crucial instance of this conflict appears when Dr Pole wishes to ask whether a given 'language-game' ought to be played (for it is traditional for philosophy to question the credentials of a given practice, e.g. the worship of God), and Professor Cavell insists that the question is absurd; taking examples rather more favourable to his thesis than the one I have instanced, he writes: 'What sense does it make to suggest that one or the other of these games ought or ought not to be played ? The question is: what would our lives look like, what very general facts would be different, if these conceivable alternatives were in fact operative?' (p. 5 ). There is nothing more fundamental than our 'forms of life' by which we can assess them or the 'language-games' that arise out of them. 'It is a vision as simple as it is difficult, and as difficult as it is (and because it is) terrifying' (p. 52).

This vision has striking affinities with other areas of our 'modern' sensibility, especially in music and literature. Professor Cavell pays close attention to music and its associated criticism in the post-Webern era, and argues that some of its most problematic features have their roots as far back as the later Beethoven when certain decisive breaks with tradition were made. By now we have reached the stage where the modern (in music, painting, and sculpture) is not only problematic in itself, for we cannot rely on tradition to provide us with criteria for distinguishing between the genuine and the fraudulent, but also puts in question its own tradition, 'we have yet to discover what at any given moment has been essential to our accepting something as music' (p. 220); our own sensibilities, with all their ambiguities and treacheries, are our only final touchstones. Such a problematic relation between the present practice of an enterprise and its own history (which is taken as definitive of the 'modern') may be found also in modern literature, and here Beckett's Endgame is taken as exemplary. 'The classical demand of art' is that 'the artist achieve perspective which grants independence from the world within which he is centred' (p. I I6), but such autonomy is a prime problem in modernist arts for the conventions on which this perspective depended are now in question; interpreters of Beckett are criticized for failing to take the measure of this problem and hence to grasp Beckett's solution.

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Page 4: Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essaysby Stanley Cavell

I24 Reviews

Beckett, in Endgame, is not marketing subjectivity, popularising angst, amusing and thereby excusing us with pictures of our psychopathology; he is outlining the facts - of mind, of community - which show why these have become our pastimes. The discovery of Endgame, both in topic and technique, is not the failure of meaning (if that means the lack of meaning) but its total, even totalitarian, success - our inability not to mean what we are given to mean. (pp. 16-II7)

That is, he is laying bare certain fundamental features of our 'form of life', in a way analogous to that in which Wittgenstein lays bare the grammar of our 'language- games'; this parallel is rendered plausible by a reading of the text in which special attention is paid to its use of grammar and the ways in which it 'defeats' and 'ex- ploits' the conceptual implications of ordinary language, a reading fully integrated with the play's more obvious features. The required perspective, one might say, is here a (quasi-) grammatical one.

But this seems to raise problems for the polemic against Dr Pole, for what is the status of this perspective? At the close of his essay on Endgame Professor Cavell proposes a confrontation with Ash Wednesday, for

the confrontation with Christian writing would perhaps be the final test of the power of Beckett's sensibility... Eliot's Christianity ought to raise raw the fundamental aesthetic question of the relation of belief to art, since it contains the highest versions of both - where his belief is organizing his art and his art is testing his belief. If the direction Eliot descries can really be described, then Beckett's vision can be encompassed within Christianity ... But can we really believe all this [that is, the Christian interpretation of experience], or must these explanations be given in bad faith, blinding us to what we do believe? Beckett tests this because he is the contemporary writer complex and single enough to match with Eliot. (pp. 161-62)

Now in his essay on Kierkegaard's On Authority and Revelation Professor Cavell claims that Kierkegaard's 'religious stage of life' should be 'thought of as a Wittgen- steinian form of life' (p. 172), and therefore (since the Kierkegaardian stage is not merely religious but also Christian) it would appear that a Wittgensteinian 'form of life' is open to some form of assessment, even if this assessment is more in terms of sensibility than those provided by the traditional epistemological perspectives. Thus Dr Pole's question, even in Professor Cavell's own terms, does not deserve the abuse it receives.

This suggests that the distinction between 'traditional' and 'modern' is not so sharp as the earlier essays make it appear, and in the later essays the complexity of this relationship is increasingly recognized, most explicitly in 'Knowing and Acknowledging' where it is persuasively argued that 'so far as the appeal to what we should ordinarily say is taken to provide an immediate repudiation of skepticism, that appeal is itself repudiated' (p. 238). That is, the sceptical tradition is sufficiently resilient to adapt to the terms of 'the new practice in thinking' and needs to be met by that practice in its new shape. In his attempt to meet it Professor Cavell rejects the conception of knowledge presupposed by the tradition and points to the feelings of presence and separateness which provide the foundation of the commonsense view of the world, together with their expressions in such phenomena as sympathy, indifference, and acknowledgement; reference is made to Heidegger's phenomeno- logical analyses, the influence of which is increasingly marked in the later essays. The criticism of scepticism is rather more fragmentary than the earlier part of the paper which is concerned to show its power, and requires more space than it is given; a fact which comes out clearly in the last two paragraphs where a shift takes place from 'some mental phenomena' to 'pain', without this transition being defended, where what is at issue is precisely whether pain is one of the 'phenomena' in question.

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Page 5: Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essaysby Stanley Cavell

Some of the ways in which philosophy and literature are used to illuminate each other have already been touched on. The 'new common practice in thinking' established in philosophy is but one aspect of the 'modern' which can be found elsewhere, not least in literature, and this practice involves a shift from the old epistemological paradigms to encompass also paradigms of sensibility. This thesis is elaborated in the essay 'Aesthetic Problems of Modern Philosophy', where Wittgensteinian methods are applied to problems in aesthetics (particularly to the 'Heresy of Paraphrase'), and it is then argued that the canons of aesthetic judge- ment are importantly similar to those of 'ordinary language philosophers' generally and Wittgenstein in particular; that 'Kant's "universal voice" is, with perhaps a slight shift of accent, what we hear recorded in the philosopher's claims about "what we say": such claims are at least as close to what Kant calls aesthetical judgments as they are to ordinary empirical hypotheses' (p. 94). If this is so, we should expect aesthetic canons to be relevant to the criticism of philosophical writing, and thus it is no surprise to find considerable attention paid to the question of philosophical style (especially as exemplified in the Philosophical Investigations and Austin's characteristic methods of criticism) and 'a new literary-philosophical criticism' (p. I o) is envisaged. But if literary criticism can illuminate philosophy, the reverse can also hold; not only does the book contain persuasive exercises in metacriticism (as in the treatment of the 'Intentional Fallacy') but (as in the case of Beckett) Professor Cavell's philosophical preoccupations have a direct impact on his critical practice.

All the book's leading themes come together in the last, and most ambitious, of the essays, 'The Avoidance of Love: A Reading of King Lear', which can be read on at least two levels. On the more straightforward level it falls into two parts, a critical reading of the text, followed by an analysis of the nature of dramatic criticism using this reading as a case-study. The reading itself is stimulating and profound. It takes its start with the objections raised by Professor Alpers to the 'sight pattern' reading of the play, and in trying to rescue what is of value in that reading Professor Cavell is led into his own, which interprets King Lear as primarily concerned with the ways in which men avoid love and with the consequences of this avoidance. This reading is not merely sensitive to the text, but also bears the marks of the book's more philosophical preoccupations, for a prime method of avoidance lies in saying more (or less) than one means, and self-deception can lie in failing to appreciate the meaning of what one says; the play is seen as exhibiting such possi- bilities. The second part of the essay considers the nature of critical disagreement; given the proposed solutions to the play's various problems, 'suppose my answers are true. The problem is then unavoidable: how can critics not have seen them?' (p. 310). The nature of critical disagreement turns out to have much in common with philosophical disagreement, for both turn on the difficulty of seeing the obvious, and the notion of 'avoidance' here plays a crucial role. But apart from this major preoccupation much else is explored, in particular the propriety and limits of treating the 'characters' of a play as 'real' characters, an exploration which involves a further development of the running dialogue with the 'New Criticism' which is a feature of the book; a fascinating examination is undertaken of the ways in which the characters of a Shakespearean play are 'present' to us in the context of the ways in which 'real' people are encountered, thus harking back to the problem of scepticism. The relations between text, performance, analysis, and feelings of the audience are all drawn in as the discussion proceeds, and on this level the essay works very impressively.

On the more complex level I am not so certain. Here the concepts involved in the interpretation of King Lear are used diagnostically in an interpretation of our 'modern' predicament, seen as one in which the very possibility of writing tragedy

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Page 6: Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essaysby Stanley Cavell

I26 Reviews

is itself problematic. A fundamental strategy of the 'avoidance of love' in King Lear is the 'theatricalization of others' (p. 306), and the breakdown of traditions in contemporary life makes it increasingly difficult to 'acknowledge' their 'presence'. But this problem has its roots in traditions from which the 'modern' has sprung, particularly in 'the development of the new science and the establishing of epistemo- logy as the monitor of philosophical inquiry' (pp. 322-23); Bacon, Galileo, and Descartes are seen as founding fathers. Shakespeare's mode of tragedy is alien to this tradition, and 'the loss of presentness - which is what the disappearance of that mode of tragedy means - is what works us into the idea that we can save our lives by knowing them. This seems to be the message both of the new epistemology and of Shakespeare's tragedy themselves' (p. 323). The 'presentness' in question is the sense of connexion with others and the world around us that sceptical epistemology puts in doubt, and the manners in which it is ignored, avoided, or acknowledged in King Lear are seen as clues for coming to terms with it both in philosophy and in society more generally. Professor Cavell himself remarks on 'the desperate obscurity' (p. 325) of these undoubtedly suggestive remarks, and also comments that only one who has responded to King Lear as he has done is likely to 'credit or consider' (p. 320) what he says about it - and hence, presumably, what he says more generally in so far as it is grounded in his understanding of the play. This makes a proper assessment extremely difficult, but in view of his insistence on the importance of philosophical style it should be remarked that not all the obscurity is dictated by the difficulty of the subject matter.

Partly it can be traced to a simple lack of clarity about what is being discussed and when. At various points we appear to be reading about King Lear, about 'Shakespeare's mode of tragedy' and about tragedy in general, but the distinctions are often not clearly marked. Partly also it can be traced to a gratuitous delight in the paradox and the non sequitur, which raise questions about the manner in which we are to read the surrounding material. One example of each will have to suffice. For paradox (or what the unsympathetic might call self-contradiction) we have: 'Tragedy, could it now be written, would not show us that we are helpless - it never did, and we are not. It would show us, what it always did, why we (as audience) are helpless' (p. 346). For non sequitur we have: 'Classical tragedies were always national, so perhaps it is not surprising that nations have become tragic' (p. 344). (Compare: Classical comedies were always imaginative, so perhaps it is not surprising that the imagination has become comic.)

But the developing obscurity of the book as it becomes increasingly enmeshed in Heideggerian preoccupations is not the only way in which its style puts its major themes in doubt; it also raises questions both about Professor Cavell's understand- ing of the nature of philosophy, and about his appeal to sensibility and 'acknowledge- ment' as a counterblast to the traditional appeal to 'knowing'. For it is essential to his position that there be no distinction between philosophy and metaphilosophy, yet in practice he does not use the procedures he describes as central to philosophy (i.e. the appeals to ordinary language) where he is discussing its nature, although he does when he is arguing about the nature of knowledge or problems in aesthetics. The difference in procedures employed appears to embody the distinction officially denied.

Questions about the status of sensibility are sharply raised by a number of passages which seem less to provide a 'perspective' on the writer's world than to be thoroughly enmeshed in it; the clearest cases are those where distance of time and place renders the rhetoric particularly hollow. For example, the essay on Endgame was written in 1964 and includes a long excursus on 'the bomb' and Dr Strangelove, a section which tells us more about liberal culture in the United States during the I96os than it does about Endgame. In his 'Foreword' Professor Cavell shows himself alive to such

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Page 7: Must We Mean What We Say?: A Book of Essaysby Stanley Cavell

problems: 'Am I talking only about a condition within America? If so, it is said in the spirit in which a certain kind of American has usually spoken of his country's release from the past ... If others do not share these doubts, or find these dangers, I certainly have no wish to implicate them' (p. xxiii). But to be alive to problems is not to resolve them. If sensibility is to play the role assigned to it, one is bound to ask what controls there are to enable it to provide the 'perspective' on one's culture which is demanded of, and found in, Beckett. Further, it is clear from the main body of the book that the author does not really believe that his key distinction between traditional and modern sensibility is merely a projection of American historical consciousness. The publishers correctly describe this book as 'a distinguished personal work'; it purports, however, to be more than merely personal, and its weakness is that one is left at the end asking how far it succeeds in being more than this.

MARTIN WARNER UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK

Grundziige der Sprachtypologie: Mllethodik, Empirie und Systematik der Sprachen Europas. By HARALD HAARMAN. (Urban-Taschenbucher, 242) Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. 1976. i6o pp. DM Io.

This book concentrates on the typology of the languages of Europe, which are taken to include Finno-Ugric languages such as Finnish and Estonian and a Semitic language such as Maltese. The author's preliminary chapter on theory leans heavily on Gabelentz and Coseriu. The relnaining three chapters deal with the typology of complete systems, sub-systems, and units in systems respectively. He sketches several theories which purport to describe the typology of whole systems and comes to the conclusion that a description of the whole is best reached through a description of its sub-systems, since different morphological systems, for example, may show different structural tendencies: thus in Bulgarian the nominal system is largely analytic whereas the verbal system is largely synthetic. To show the typology of sub-systems the author uses tense and aspect in verbs. There are languages with grammaticalized tense, such as German and English, and those with grammati- calized tense and aspect, such as the Slavonic languages. There are also languages with grammaticalized tense and Aktionsart (a type of aspectual distinction for which there is no ready equivalent in English), but the author's designation of the English progressive, Peter is living in Hamburg, as an Aktionsart is unusual and not to be recommended. Using such categories as tense, aspect, and Aktionsart, which are difficult to define semantically, makes this whole chapter rest on not very sure foundations. B. Comrie, Aspect (Cambridge, 1976) would have helped a great deal, but it presumably appeared after the manuscript was completed. In the final chapter there is a list of European 'universals', for which the author has coined the dreadful word Europem (Europeme), at the phonological, morphological, and syntactic levels, and also a much shorter list of isolationisms or traits found only in very few languages. One of these is the opposition the author says exists in Maltese between /r/, a tongue-trilled r, and /l/, a uvular r (pp. I48 f.). J. Aquilina, Maltese (English Universities Press, I965), not cited in the bibliography, does not mention this. The author extrapolates the opposition from a remark of Martinet on Arabic and projects it on to Maltese. In Arabic, however, this opposition is not really between two r-sounds, for the uvular phoneme is a voiced fricative, not a trill or a flap, which has a voiceless counterpart. Although this book contains many interest- ing examples the reviewer thinks they should be carefully checked. The book

problems: 'Am I talking only about a condition within America? If so, it is said in the spirit in which a certain kind of American has usually spoken of his country's release from the past ... If others do not share these doubts, or find these dangers, I certainly have no wish to implicate them' (p. xxiii). But to be alive to problems is not to resolve them. If sensibility is to play the role assigned to it, one is bound to ask what controls there are to enable it to provide the 'perspective' on one's culture which is demanded of, and found in, Beckett. Further, it is clear from the main body of the book that the author does not really believe that his key distinction between traditional and modern sensibility is merely a projection of American historical consciousness. The publishers correctly describe this book as 'a distinguished personal work'; it purports, however, to be more than merely personal, and its weakness is that one is left at the end asking how far it succeeds in being more than this.

MARTIN WARNER UNIVERSITY OF WARWICK

Grundziige der Sprachtypologie: Mllethodik, Empirie und Systematik der Sprachen Europas. By HARALD HAARMAN. (Urban-Taschenbucher, 242) Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. 1976. i6o pp. DM Io.

This book concentrates on the typology of the languages of Europe, which are taken to include Finno-Ugric languages such as Finnish and Estonian and a Semitic language such as Maltese. The author's preliminary chapter on theory leans heavily on Gabelentz and Coseriu. The relnaining three chapters deal with the typology of complete systems, sub-systems, and units in systems respectively. He sketches several theories which purport to describe the typology of whole systems and comes to the conclusion that a description of the whole is best reached through a description of its sub-systems, since different morphological systems, for example, may show different structural tendencies: thus in Bulgarian the nominal system is largely analytic whereas the verbal system is largely synthetic. To show the typology of sub-systems the author uses tense and aspect in verbs. There are languages with grammaticalized tense, such as German and English, and those with grammati- calized tense and aspect, such as the Slavonic languages. There are also languages with grammaticalized tense and Aktionsart (a type of aspectual distinction for which there is no ready equivalent in English), but the author's designation of the English progressive, Peter is living in Hamburg, as an Aktionsart is unusual and not to be recommended. Using such categories as tense, aspect, and Aktionsart, which are difficult to define semantically, makes this whole chapter rest on not very sure foundations. B. Comrie, Aspect (Cambridge, 1976) would have helped a great deal, but it presumably appeared after the manuscript was completed. In the final chapter there is a list of European 'universals', for which the author has coined the dreadful word Europem (Europeme), at the phonological, morphological, and syntactic levels, and also a much shorter list of isolationisms or traits found only in very few languages. One of these is the opposition the author says exists in Maltese between /r/, a tongue-trilled r, and /l/, a uvular r (pp. I48 f.). J. Aquilina, Maltese (English Universities Press, I965), not cited in the bibliography, does not mention this. The author extrapolates the opposition from a remark of Martinet on Arabic and projects it on to Maltese. In Arabic, however, this opposition is not really between two r-sounds, for the uvular phoneme is a voiced fricative, not a trill or a flap, which has a voiceless counterpart. Although this book contains many interest- ing examples the reviewer thinks they should be carefully checked. The book

Reviews Reviews 127 127

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