] 9 8

Behavior Res. Lab., University of California, Berkeley.

Slobin, D. I., 1970. Unlversals of grammatical develop- mant in children. In: Levelt, W. & Flores d'Arcals, G. B. Advances in psycholinguistic research. Amsterdam.

Snow, C. E., 1972. Mother's speech to children learning language. Child Development 43, 549-565.

Waterson, N., 1971. Child phonology: a prosodic view. JQurnal of Linguistics 7, 179-211.

Weir, R., 1962. Language in the crib. Den Haag.

Gutknecht, Christoph (ed.), Grundbe~riffe und HauptstrS- mungen der Lin~uistik, Hamburg: Hoffmann und Camps, 1977, 380 pp., DM 25.00.

Gutknecht's reader aims at giving a survey of various dis- ciplines of Applied Linguistics. Maybe a different title could have made this aim more obvious in the first place. As it is, an explanation of the title is left to Gutknecht' brief and very informative introduction with short sun~na- rles of all the articles and an addltional blbliography (7-15).

The volume contains the following articles: in the first part under the heading "Sprecher und HSrer in der Kommuni- kationssituation'z Eike ThUrmann, 'Die phonetischen Wissen- schaften. Trends und Entwicklungen.'; William J. Barry, 'Soma Areas of Applied Phonetics'; Christoph Gutknecht/ Wolfgang Mackiewicz, 'Prosodische~ paralinguistische und intonatorische PhAnomene im Englischen.'; Leonhard Lipka, 'Functional Sentence Perspective, Intonation, and the Speaker.'; John Laver, 'Neur01ingulstlc Aspects of Speech Production.'; GUnter Peuser, 'Patholinguistik: ein neues Gebiet der Angewandten Sprachwissenschaft.'; Hans Peter LUtjen, 'Neuere Entwlcklungen der Psycholingulstik.'; Klaus-Uwe Panther, 'Neuere Tendenzen der linguistischen Pragmatik: Sprechakttheorie.'; Henry G. Widdowson, 'Ap- proaches to Discourse.'; Adelheid Schumann, 'Zur Differen- zierung yon Sprachstilen des gesprochenen FranzSsisch.'; L. K. Engels, 'The Complexity of Cognitive Learning Pro- cesses for Foreign Languages.'; in the second (by far smaller) part under the heading "Wort und Text": Dieter Kastovsky,'Problems of Word-Formation.'; Johann N. Schmidt, 'Zur llnguistischen Analyse poetischeD Texte.'; and Klaus ThomamUller, 'Probleme der Textkritik.'.

Even the division of the volume indicates the general shift of interest away from "traditional", i.e. non-applied, the- oretical linguistics to the application of linguistic meth- ods and theory to problems in related fields. Only three

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articles (Kastovsky, Schmldt, ThomamUller) deal with what one might call "pure" linguistics, and even of these three, two "apply" linguistics, namely to poetry and to textual criticism. The rest of the book treats linguistic ques- tions in the context of and applied to fields which soma twenty years ago would hardly have been considered neigh- bouring sciences. It does, in fact, show that the dicho- tomy of "pure" vs. "applied" linguistics is an artificial one and depends rather more on the emphasis a particular scholar chooses to put on describing one or the other side of one and the same coin. W. J. Barry describes the situation perfectly well for phonetics, but the sentence may well be applied to the whole of linguisticsz "We wish to avoid creating the impression that it is possible in practice to separate applied phonetics from theoretical phonetics." (83) But the book shows at the same time that Applied Linguistics is far more than just the theory of foreign language ~eaching - as is so often suggested either implicitly or even explicitly -, but that it has generally to do with "... die kom~unlkatlve Rolle der menschllchen Sprache unter BerUckslchtlgung der damit ver- bundenen biologischen, peychischen und sozlalen Aspekte..." (Gutknecht, EinfUhrung, 7.)

The scope of the book may be well represented - in addi- tion to the list of titles at the beginning of this review - by a more detailed discussion of two articles, of which one deals with a fairly recent application of phonetic the- ory, whereas the other treats the more conventional field of language teaching.

In his article on neurolingulstic aspects of speech pro- duction (142-155) John Laver sees speech "... as the prod- uct of the action of a complex effector system ..." (142) and stresses that "Any neurolinguistlc theory must capi- talize on the accepted structures of traditional phonetic theory." (143) He then gives a concise account of the brain's work as the temporal control factor which coordi- nates the various effector sub-systems. He uses the work- ing of the muscles concerned in the movements of the soft palate to exemplify the complexity of this control sys- tem. Outlining the components of an overall neurolinguis- tic model of speech production, Laver posits - for "much later in the future" (147) - "... a strictly neurophyslo- loglcal element dealing with such matters as the possible 1 o c a 1 i z a t i o n (reviewer's italics) of particular neurollngulstlc control functions in specific parts of the brain." (147) Whereas Laver himself calls such considera- tions "premature" (147), the Soviet neuropsychologlst A. R. Luria rejects the idea of strict localization altogether: "Naturally all mental processes such as ..., speech..., cannot be regarded as isolated or even indivisible 'facul- ties', which can be presumed to be the direct 'function' of limited cell groups or to be 'localized' in partlcular

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areas of the brain." (The Workin~ Brain, Harmondsworth, 1973, 29) and revises the concept of "localization" al- together (l.c., 30-34), stating that "... mental func- tions ... must be or~anlze d in systems of concertedly workln~ zones r each of which performs its role in com- plex functional system (slc~), and which may be located in completely different and often far distant areas of the brain." (1.c., 31). So Laver restricts the discus- sion "... to considerations of logical relations between the different control functions that need to be posited." (148) He then sketches a model in which there are the levels of "linguistic planning, motor planning, the neuro- muscular conversion of the motor plan to actual commands to the muscles, and monitorlng of the approprlacy of all these activities." (149). The units on which this program works seem to be tone g~oups rather than syllables or even sounds. By way of a feedback loop the outputs on the various levels of the program are monitored and checked against the semantic content of the idea to be expressed and against each other. The data on which Laver's theory is based come chiefly from studi~ on speech errors, but, as he says, material from such areas as language acquisi- tion and pathology should also open up new insights, so that ultimately" "Phonetics, in learning more about the production of speech, may be able to tell us more about one of our ultlmate mysteries, the brain." (154)

An article which approaches language acquisition rather from the practical teaching side than from the neurolin- guistic one is L. K. Engels' "The Complexity of Cognitive Learning Processes for Foreign Languages." (285-298). Af- ter a violent attack on behavioristic learning theory and rote-learning Engels advocates foreign language learning via cognitive concepts. This applies not only to the learning of words and word meanings but malnly to the learning of grammar. Rule learning in grammar, he says, should be achieved by the inductive method in the intro- ductory, by the deductive method in the remedial phase. Grammatical formulae stay in memory much longer than ver- bally formulated rules. Rather than with granmmtlcal rules he proposes to work with symbols which stand for these rules, so that in the end these symbols can be used as me- diators to produce correct utterances; but these symbols also work the other way round: "The transition of a symbol as a CONCEPT to the s~bol as a MEDIATOR when producin~ a language act is only a chan~e of dlrection r because the same symbol is at the same time both a concept and a sign of action. I:t is indeed used in two dlrectlons: elt~er a correct ~rammatical insi~htf or a ~rmmuaticall~ expressed language act." (290}. Engels sees the advantage of his system over the use of the pattern-drill as lying in the fact that the former allows a high degree of transferabil- ity and does not fix the learner to a particular pattern. He works with cognitive stimuli which contain information

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about the situation, the semantics and the syntax of an utterance, so that these stimuli should enable the student to produce communicatively correct sentences and finally to converse freely (and consciously) in the foreign lan- guage. Engels' approach seems very appealing for someone who is used to putting the main stress on inductive work. It remains to be seen, however, how his hypotheses work in practice. It is hard to understand why he so vlolently rejectstheorles which are based on the fact that students learn a foreign language also without guidance - data from this type of language acquisition should rather be integ- rated into his own theory. One point of principle remains to be criticized: On page 291 Engels says: "Foreign lan- guage teaching is still one of the youngest scientific dis- ciplines..." Foreign language teaching itself is certain- ly not a scientific discipline, it is a skill. Only the systematic description or a theory of this skill could be a science. That t~is scientific discipline, however, is a valuable and necessary support for the skill is beyond any doubt.

Most of the articles in this volume present one particular aspect of applied linguistics, a few give a survey of a whole field. It is a question of the reader's temperament rather than one of principle whether he prefers the one approach or the other. For quick information certainly the former is the more valuable. If it is as brilliantly pre- sented and as thoroughly documented as, e.g., W. J. Barry's article on applied phonetics, such an article offers a wealth of information.

The arrangement of some of the individual bibliographies according to subject-matter makes reading somewhat diffi- cult. It may be a good idea to give a collective alphabet- ical bibliography at the end of the whole volume instead.

All things taken together the book presents a very useful and readable Survey of the whole field of applied linguis- tics. I doubt, however, whether it really is in all parts - as the cover text promises -"... auch dem Nicht-Lingu- isten verst~ndlich(e)...".

Dietrich Lange PAdagogische Hochschule Abt. 5/Englisch Malteserstr. 74-100 D-1000 Berlin 46