Disorderly discourse: Narrative, conflict, and inequality ed. by Charles L. Briggs (review)

A Joke On his first day of prison, a man joins a group of long-term prisoners talking in the mess. One of them says, 'tell us a joke, somebody'. There is silence for a second, and then another prisoner says, '17!'. All of the long-term prisoners instantly burst out laughing. The new prisoner is confused by this, but pretends to laugh anyway. Suddenly, another prisoner calls out '29!'. This is greeted by floods of laughter. The new prisoner turns to a short man in spectacles standing next to him and, discretely, asks why everyone is laughing at mere numbers. 'Well', is the reply, 'we've all been here so long that we have given numbers to all the jokes we know. Now we only have to call out the number.' 'Oh', says the new prisoner. When the laughter has quieted a little, he blurts out '21!' picking a number at random. The whole cafeteria is dead silent, not even a chuckle. The short man in spectacles turns to him woefully and says, 'Sorry, mate, but it's how you tell them'. The 'how you tell them' signals the irreducibly temporal aspect of joke-telling or, more generally, of any affective speech. A comedian has 'good timing', or is not a comedian. The joke never coincides with the punch line, or with a summary of whatever logical twists it 'consists' of, and certainly not with a numerical marker. Analogous, then, to Levinas's famous distinction between the saying and the said is, perhaps, telling and told. This is still more the case in that most obviously temporal of discourses, narrative. (And of course many jokes, like the one above, are miniature narratives.) I wish to investigate the experience of narrative with respect to the specific question of its relation to some form or other of understanding. My thesis is that such experience necessarily (although most often obscurely) reveals an openness which is genuinely transcendent with respect to understanding. The various sections of this paper will break down into three parts: first, a critical discussion of the phenomenon of narration as a type of understand-ing; the second part, relating the problem of narration to the ethical idea of 'virtue', including a discussion of the revealing notion of 'surprise'; finally, a corresponding reading of Shakespeare's King Lear. Narrative as understanding At minimum, a narrative is a sequence of events which forms a 'figure', or at least an abstract pattern. This figure has at least three varieties. First, the narrative as a whole can provide a concept of a type or genre of character or adventure. The story can be a detective story, a bitter-sweet romance, a tragedy, a bawdy comedy, and so on, and the character can be a heroine, a rogue, a tempter, a sacrifice-maker, and so on. In such cases, the type of figure dominates the narrative. In the second variety, the narrative figure (again, as a whole) has no sense on its own, but refers to something beyond itself which is its proper meaning: the moral of the fable, the real in realism. This meaning, however, is transportable. The moral fable, or the realistic fiction, does not need this particular narrative to explicate its ultimate referents. For these two, as each event is narrated, a fuller and fuller picture of, say, a character and of that character's world is revealed. The more details we have, the more we can anticipate with confidence what will happen next. The narrative thus functions as a device for understanding, for describing the unity of a multiplicity. In the third variety, the narrative provides a unity to events simply by their being a part of that narrative. This happens even if (perhaps especially if) it breaks down genres and character patterns in some new way, or contains deep thematic or moral ambiguities. Such a narrative simply brings things together as things which ipso facto belong together. The figure itself, and such as it is, dominates, and for the first time is unique, rather than being one of many possible instances of a type, or one of many possible vehicles of a meaning. …

David B. Kronenfeld, Plastic glasses and church fathers: Semantic extension from the ethnoscience tradition. (Oxford studies in anthropological linguistics, 3.) Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. xii, 273. Hb 24.95. - Volume 27 Issue 3

REVIEWS395 functions of individual suffixes. The book contains only a few formal errors, but future editions should streamline the abbreviations in the text3 and include a list oftables and of all abbreviations. These few minor reservations aside, this study is a must for all those interested in the history of English, contact-induced morphological change, historical word-formation and corpus-based research on affixation. REFERENCES Baayen, Harald. 1992 Quantitative aspects of morphological productivity. Yearbook ofMorphology 1991, ed. by Geert Booij and Jaap van Marie, 109-49. Dordrecht: Kluwer. ------, and Antoinette Renouf. 1996. Chronicling the Times: Productive lexical innovations in an English newspaper. Language 72.69-96. Bailey, Charles-James N., and Karl Maroldt. 1977. The French lineage of English. Pidgins —creóles—languages in contact, ed. by Jürgen Meisel, 21-53. Tübingen: Narr. Bybee, Joan. 1985. Morphology: A study of the relation between meaning and form. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Dalton-Puffer, Christiane, and Elke Mettinger-Schartmann. 1993. Frenglish? Sur la productivité de la morphologie française dans le moyen anglais. Travaux de linguistique et de philologie 31.183-93. Górlach, Manfred. 1986. Middle English—a creóle? Linguistics across historical and geographical boundaries : In honor of Jacek Fisiak, ed. by Dieter Kastovsky and Alexandr Szwedek, 329-44. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Kurath, Hans, and Sherman M. Kuhn (eds.) 1954—. Middle English dictionary. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Marchand, Hans. 1969. The categories and types ofpresent-day English word-formation. 2nd edn. München: Beck. Institut fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik Phihpps-Universitàt Marburg Wilhelm-Ropke-Str. 6 D D-35032 Marburg Germany [plag@mailer.uni-marburg.de] Language contact in Japan: A sociolinguistic history. By Leo J. Loveday (Oxford studies in language contact.) Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. xii, 238. Reviewed by James Stanlaw, Illinois State University Someone with little knowledge of Japan or Japanese might be in for a very interesting surprise upon their first visit. Like the cherry blossoms in spring, the English language is everywhere in the country. However, instead of fading away with the first winds of summer, Japanese-style English is perennial. Whether you view English as an ever-present linguistic weed that should be uprooted or a beautiful flower that should be cultivated, you cannot ignore this elementary fact: Even the most rudimentary conversations cannot be conducted in Japanese these days without the use of at least a few English loanwords or trendy catch-phrases. Another thing our surprised visitor might notice is that on second glance the 'English' in Japan often bears little resemblance to fJiat back home. Meanings of old familiar words may be changed 3 For example, the following abbreviations are opaque or not used consistently: 'NTEST' (128), 'stem/sim' (138 table 7.6), ?? language' (141), past participles are sometimes encoded as 'PP', sometimes as 'PastPart' (96, 94, respectively). The Middle English dictionary is consistently abbreviated as 'MED', but is listed in the reference section only under the name of its chief editor, Hans Kurath (incidentally, with a wrong year of publication, 1956—). 396LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 2 (1998) (cunning becoming 'cheater', for instance), and new forms get coined (for example, nice middle meaning a sexy and attractive middle aged man). I would suggest that a majority of the terms in the common Japanese-loanword dictionaries (e.g. Kamiya 1994, Webb 1990, Miura 1985) would not be transparent to most native English speakers. It is this pervasive use of English (and a few other languages) that is the topic of Loveday's ambitious and interesting new work. The first half of L's book examines in great detail how various languages have met Japanese, both as friend and foe. He begins his study by describing the earliest language contact situation in Japan, that with Chinese starting about 1400 years ago. Not only was a complex—and in many ways, unsuitable—writing system adopted by the Japanese, but also an extensive Chinese vocabulary and literary style. The legacy of this, of course, is three of the four orthographies in common use in Japanese today (Sino-Japanese characters and two syllabaries). European languages—and the roman alphabet—first came to Japan in the sixteenth century via Spanish...

David B. Kronenfeld, Plastic glasses and church fathers: Semantic extension from the ethnoscience tradition. (Oxford studies in anthropological linguistics, 3.) Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. xii, 273. Hb 24.95. - Volume 27 Issue 3

In a time when some scholars are bemoaning an apparent drop in attention to the role of ideology in legal settings, Philips's new book comes as a welcome intervention. The author uses fine-grained analysis of courtroom language to reveal the pervasive influence of ideology on trial court judges' practices. Followers of Philips's pioneering work on legal language will not be disappointed; the volume lives up to the exacting standard she set for the field in her early articles on courtroom (and classroom) discourse. The study uses discourse analysis of guilty pleas in an Arizona criminal court to uncover how wider social-structural and political divisions are affecting the administration of justice – a process mediated by ideology and enacted in the minute details of linguistic exchanges.

This is a very personal book, a poignant book, a compelling book, from beginning to end. The Preface sets the tone: self-reflexive and confessional. Wilce once wanted to be a medical doctor; he became instead a missionary in Bangladesh, but felt “guilt and pervasive disquiet” in that role; and while in Bengal – actually, in neighboring Calcutta – he suffered a “nightmarish” family tragedy involving medical practitioners. He later resigned from the mission and went to graduate school; then he returned to Bangladesh to study complaint and lament as expressed in one locality within the Bangla-speaking area. (“Bangla” and “Bengali” are two names for the same language. Wilce refers to the language as Bangla; so shall I.)

212 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 1 (1998) rather than to linguistics per se. Accordingly, S has not only translated K's work but also added numerous annotations detailing the intellectual history of various concepts adduced in the original. S has also added footnotesjustifying his solution to a numberof terminological problems posed by such a translation. Like the manytypographical errors, these added footnotes may prove distracting to the reader. But for those who do not read German, these distractions will doubtless be more than offset by the fact that K's work is now more accessible to them thanks to S' s otherwise accurate and reliable French translation . [Gary H. Toops, Wichita State University.] Plastic glasses and church fathers: Semantic extension from the ethnoscience tradition. By David B. Kronenfeld. (Oxford studies in anthropological linguistics , 3.) New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. xii, 273. This book, parts of which draw on articles published by Kronenfeld since 1973, would be of particularinterestto linguistic anthropologists. It is divided into five parts of two to three chapters each. In Ch. 10, K presents his semantic theory, applies it to data in Ch. 11, and in the earner chapters introduces and discusses its intellectual antecedents and the major findings and problems that led to the theory. Part I, 'Introduction and linguistic background' (1-43), includes a discussion of Saussure's approach to language and meaning and of the contribution of the Prague School to componential analysis (in the form of distinctive feature analysis). In Part II, "The ethnoscience tradition' (45-70), K briefly explains ethnoscience and componential analysis, illustrating his discussion with the pioneering studies of Hanu- ??? pronouns by Harold C. Conklin, Pawnee and Seneca kinship semantics by Floyd G. Lounsbury, the meaning of American English kinship terms by Anthony F. C. Wallace and J. Atkins, and other articles . In his discussion of conjunctivity, marking, and information processing limits in Part III, 'Explanatory principles' (71-143), K points out that in the analysis of semantic structures there exists an upper limit of about ten dimensions that can be handled, and that to handle them sequentially would take time and pose problems of information storage and retrieval . K's theory is presented in Part IV, 'Semantic extension ' (145-94). According to K, 'a theory that has to treat "chair" (what we sit on) as being totally unrelated to the "chair" (the leader of our meeting) is . . . inadequate as a theory of our semantic competence ' (171). Very briefly (K's extended discussion must be greatly abbreviated), the application of K's theory involves distinguishing between core and extended referents (roughly Brent Berlin and Paul Kay's distinction between focal and nonfocal color terms, and Lounsbury's distinction between kernel and nonkernel referents of kin terms); acknowledging that core referents represent the entities through which sense relations and reference are tied together; making denotative and connotative extensions within the domain to which the core item belongs but making metaphoric extensions (in a broad sense) to an item outside the domain; and recognizing the need to distinguish between form and function (denotation versus connotation). Extended applications (under that title) are made in Part V (195-236) to the following topics: the domainof 'cups' and 'glasses' in English in comparison with similar domains in Hebrew and Japanese; the Blackfoot uses of the concepts 'full blood' and 'mixed blood' in tribal political discourse; the terms in which an opposition between certain religious groups was understood by the parties involved; and a 1980 study of a population of households in Los Angeles in which the wives worked as nurses at a local hospital (section titled '"Men's work" versus "women's work" in Los Angeles'). The work concludes with 'Appendix: Piagetian schémas' (237-42), a bibliography, and an index. [Zdenek Salzmann, Northern Arizona University.] Russian motion verbs for intermediate students. By William J. Mahota. (Yale language series.) New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1996. Pp. viii, 139. This useful and well-organized handbook is devoted entirely to Russian motion verbs, a notoriously complex and difficult area of grammar for Englishspeaking students. Mahota provides a thorough treatment of verb forms for students in the second and third year ofRussian language study, integrating...

152LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 1 (1998) Inoue, Kazuko. 1976. Henkei bunpoo to nihon-go. Tokyo: Taisyukan-Syoten. Kayne, Richard. 1994. The antisymmetry of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kjnsui, Satoshi. 1993. Judoo-bun no koyuu/hi-koyuu-sei ni tsuite. Kindaigo-Kenkyuu 9.474-508. ------. 1997. The influence of translation upon the historical derivation of the Japanese passive construction. Journal of Pragmatics, to appear. Klima, Edward S. 1964. Negation in English. The structure of language: Readings in the philosophy of language, ed. by J. Fodor and J. Katz, 246-323. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Kuno, Susumu. 1973. The structure of the Japanese language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Kuroda, S.-Y. 1965. Generative grammatical studies in the Japanese language. Cambridge, MA: MIT dissertation . ------. 1969. Attachment transformations. Modern studies in English, ed. by D. A. Reibel and S. A. Schane, 331-51. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. ------. 1972. The categorical and the thetic judgment: Evidence from Japanese syntax. Foundations of Language 9.153-85. ------. 1980. Bun no kozo. Nichi-ei hikaku koza, II: Bunpo, ed. by T. Kunihiro, 23-62. Tokyo: Taishukan. Masunaga, Kiyoko. 1988. Case deletion and discourse context. Japanese syntax, ed. by William J. Poser, 145-56. Stanford: CSLI. Matsuda, Yuki. 1996. A syntactic analysis of focus sentences in Japanese. Cambridge, MA: MIT Working Papers (SCIL). McCawley, Noriko A. 1972. On the treatment of Japanese passives. Chicago Linguistic Society. 8.259-70. MiyAGAwa, Shigeru. 1989. Syntax and semantics 22: Structure and case marking in Japanese. New York: Academic Press. Nishigauchi. Taisuke. 1986. Quantification in syntax. Amherst: University of Massachusetts dissertation. Ogihara, Toshiyuki. 1987. 'Obligatory focus' in Japanese and type-shifting principles. West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics 6.213-27. Oka, Toshifusa. 1988. Subject in Japanese. Tsukuba, Japan: Tsukuba University, ms. Saito, Mamoru. 1983. Case and government in Japanese. West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics 2.247-59. ------. 1985. Some asymmetries in Japanese andtheirtheoretical consequences. Cambridge, MA: MIT dissertation . Tada, Hiroaki. 1988. Comments on Aoun and Li's paper. Paper presented at the workshop on Japanese and Logical Form, University of California at San Diego. Takano, Yuji. 1996. Movement and parametric variation in syntax. Irvine: University of California dissertation Takezawa, Koichi. 1987. A configurational approach to case-marking in Japanese. Seattle: University of Washington dissertation. Ueyama, Ayumi. 1997. Scrambling in Japanese and bound variable construal. In Bennis et al. Watanabe, Akira. 1992. Subjacency and S-structure movement ofwh-in-situ. Journal ofEast Asian Linguistics 1.255-91. Department of Linguistics University of Southern California Los Angeles, CA 90089-0002 [hoji@mizar.usc.edu] Sounds like life: Sound-symbolic grammar, performance, and cognition in Pastaza Quechua. By Jams B. Nuckolls. (Oxford studies in anthropological linguistics.) New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996. Pp. iv, 297. $65.00. Reviewed by Jill Brody, Louisiana State University This wonderful book is both highly original and technically masterful. It focuses on a category of words much neglected in linguistic analysis, though present in many of the world's languages, traditionally called 'ideophones'. Ideophones are nonarbitrary and incorporate some aspect of sound symbolism; because they carry meaning in a nonarbitrary fashion and are difficult to define in any ordinary sense, sound symbolic elements are often denied full word status, and REVIEWS153 their integration into the grammar of language has seldom been imagined, much less investigated. They have previously been very little explored, with notable exceptions being Feld 1982 and Mannheim 1991. Using data from the Pastaza dialect of Quechua, Nuckolls carries out a pioneering analysis of sound symbolic words both as they are used in everyday expression and as they function in grammar; this very connection of use and grammar represents the best in the tradition oflinguistic anthropology. In order to carry out this kind of analysis, a subtle and sophisticated knowledge of the language is required, especially since ideophones are undefinable in the traditional sense of the word. In her general introduction to the language and her fieldwork, N discusses her methodology of asking about sound symbolic words during the course of conversational narratives . In eight chapters she demonstrates that sound symbolic words are particularly well integrated into the language in that they function grammatically (in the aspectual and modal systems), performatively (as part...

* Introduction Learning Language, Learning Culture * What No Bedtime Story Means: Narrative Skills at Home and School Shirley Brice Heath. * Detective Stories at Dinnertime: Problem-Solving Through Co-Narration Elinor Ochs, Ruth Smith, and Carolyn Taylor. * Hard Words: A Functional Basis for Kaluli Discourse Steven Feld and Bambi B. Schieffelin. Gender, Power, And Discourse * A Cultural Approach to Male-Female Miscommunication Daniel N. Maltz and Ruth A. Borker. * Norm-Makers, Norm-Breakers: Uses of Speech by Men and Women in a Malagasy Community Elinor Keenan (Ochs). * The Whole Woman: Sex and Gender Differences in Variation Penelope Eckert. Genre, Style, Performance * Biography of a Sentence: A Burmese Proverb A. L. Becker. * Any Man Who Keeps Moren One Houndll Lie to You: A Contextual Study of Expressive Lying Richard Bauman. * Carne, Carnales, and the Carnivalesque: Bakhtinian Batos, Disorder, and Narrative Discourses Jos E. Limn. Language As Social Practice * Grog and Gossip in Bhatgaon: Style and Substance in Fiji Indian Conversation Donald Brenneis. * Reflections on a Meeting: Structure, Language, and the Polity in a Small-Scale Society Fred R. Myers. * When Talk Isnt Cheap: Language and Political Economy Judith T. Irvine. * Monoglot Standard in America: Standardization and Metaphors of Linguistic Hegemony Michael Silverstein. * The Grammar of Consciousness and the Consciousness of Grammar Jane H. Hill.

In the years since Chester Himes's success in the 1950s and 60s, there has been a comparative dearth of African American detective fiction. The genre was once perceived by African Americans as trivial or, given its primarily white focus, irrelevant. Recently, however, the tide has turned, as writers have started to emerge who have glimpsed, only the possibilities of the genre for the expression of the African American experience, but also, more importantly, the ways in which it is perfectly designed for the purpose. The most prominent of these writers (who include Barbara Neely, Eleanor Taylor Bland, Penny Mickelbury, and Gary Phillips) is Walter Mosley, who follows Himes in choosing to work within the hard-boiled variant of the genre: his novels are in fact set in the same period in which Himes was writing, although the locale is 1950s and 60s South Central Los Angeles rather than Harlem. Given the turbulent and often violent nature of the times, the reasons a writer might choose to reflect them through the medium of hard-boiled detective fiction might seem self-evident. But Mosley's work has made the point increasingly explicit that there is more to his authorial decision than simply zeitgeist. More important is his perception that the narrative principles and the mores of the hard-boiled detective story, especially as they pertain to the investigative figure and his methods of operation, have a resonance that transcends the formula of the genre when the detective in question is African American. Mosley's Easy Rawlins, it transpires, is a lot more than simply a darker-skinned version of Philip Marlowe or Sam Spade. The world of the hard-boiled detective story, popularized in the 1930s and 40s by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, is essentially one of urban societal corruption and moral ambiguity. Rather than working to preserve social standards and values, as a detective does in a traditional mystery, the hard-boiled detective fights a lone battle against them while struggling to prevent himself from being infected by the corruption on which they are based. This struggle is additionally complicated by his constant immersion in the criminal milieu since an essential tool of his trade is his intimate knowledge and understanding of the criminal psyche: his ability just to penetrate it, but, when necessary, to identify his own psyche with its corruption. The hard-boiled detective's task, then, is not simply a matter of determining who the guilty party is but of defining his own moral position ... [in] a complex process of (Cawelti 146). These implications require the detective to redefine continually even such apparently basic terms as criminality: if a crime is a disruption or transgression of an established social order, for example, what constitutes criminal behavior in a society governed by moral chaos? The detective figure in the hard-boiled story, then, operates in a frequently murky borderland between good and evil, where he can never be sure at any given time which is which. He is thus an essentially liminal figure, with a foot in both camps, struggling to preserve the distinction between them, even if he is often unable, given the odds, to cause the good to prevail. The ambivalence and duality necessarily inherent in such a detective's perception both of society and of himself take on a more profound significance in Walter Mosley's novels, where they become a powerful metaphor for the African American experience of double-consciousness (in W. E. B. Du Bois's phrase), especially in the urban America of the period. The changing of the investigative process become infinitely more complex, and painful to negotiate, when a black detective finds himself haunting an additional borderland, that where the interests of his own community and those of the broader, predominantly white, society uneasily co-exist and frequently collide. Mosley's protagonist, Easy Rawlins, is in fact characterized and motivated most centrally by his experience of duality and by a resultant ambiguity of attitude toward the cases he investigates, often reluctantly. …

It is a feature of the twenty-first century that world languages are displacing local languages at an alarming rate, transforming social rela-tions and complicating cultural transmission in the process. This language shift the gradual abandonment of minority languages in favor of national or international languages is often in response to inequalities in power, signaling a pressure to conform to the political and economic structures represented by the newly dominant languages. In its most extreme form, language shift can result in language death and thus the permanent loss of traditional knowledge and lifeways. To combat this, indigenous and scholarly communities around the world have undertaken various efforts, from archiving and lexicography to the creation of educational and cultural programs. What works in one community, however, may not work in another. Indeed, while the causes of language endangerment may be familiar, the responses to it depend on highly specific local conditions and opportunities. In keeping with this premise, the editors of this volume insist that to understand language endangerment, researchers and communities must come to understand what is happening to the speakers, not just what is happening to the language. The eleven case studies assembled here strive to fill a gap in the study of endangered languages by providing much-needed sociohistorical and ethnographic context and thus connecting specific language phenomena to larger national and international issues. The goal is to provide theoretical and methodological tools for researchers and organizers to best address the specific needs of communities facing language endangerment. The case studies here span regions as diverse as Kenya, Siberia, Papua New Guinea, Mexico, Venezuela, the United States, and Germany. The volume includes a foreword by linguistic anthropologist Jane Hill and an afterword by poet and linguist Ofelia Zepeda.

Reviewed by: Speaking through the silence: Narratives, social conventions, and power in Java Benjamin G. Zimmer Laine Berman. 1998. Speaking through the silence: Narratives, social conventions, and power in Java. Oxford Studies in Anthropological Linguistics 19. New York: Oxford University Press. 276 pp. ISBN: 0-19-510888-4. $60.00. The title of Laine Berman's provocative and insightful study of Javanese discourse brings to mind several kinds of "speaking" and several kinds of "silence." First and most obviously, the title refers to the everyday conversations of working-class women recorded by Berman, which are permeated by telling silences under the constraints of powerful Javanese social conventions. Second, the "speaking" could refer to Berman's own scholarly representation of her ethnographic subjects, which gives them a "voice" that would normally be denied to them in the silence-inducing hegemonic structures of Javanese life, particularly given the oppressive nature of the Indonesian state in general. Third, Berman is "speaking through the silence" of Javanese studies both in Indonesia and the West, which she argues has elided all but the most elitist views of the ethnic group's ostensibly "refined" and "elegant" language and culture. I will use these three readings of the title to provide different avenues into appreciating the lively, personal descriptions and rich interactional data presented within the book's covers. Berman bases her study in the central Javanese court town of Yogyakarta, which, along with the nearby town of Surakarta, is typically characterized as the "exemplary center" of Javanese courtly language and culture. The idealized exemplariness of refined Javanese speech hierarchically ordered around the kraton or [End Page 182] royal palace has been much discussed by linguists and anthropologists fascinated by the language's highly elaborated system of address styles commonly referred to as "speech levels." But rather than focusing on the traditional kraton-centered elite called priyayi, Berman chooses to study the interaction of those living and working in the shadow of the kraton, resigned to marginalized status in the Javanese social hierarchy. Such speakers, she emphasizes, may be perfectly competent in the most refined styles of Javanese, but this does not necessarily imply that the "speech-level" system is pragmatically salient in their speech as indexical of formality or deference towards addressees, as is often assumed in the literature on Javanese. Rather, she argues that manipulation of the speech-level hierarchy is a relatively minor concern to the majority of Javanese speakers, who may index "power and solidarity," as famously termed by Brown and Gilman (1960), via a myriad of other stylistic variables. Thus instead of concentrating solely on the lexical level of usage in refined vocabulary, Berman turns her attention to the discursive level of "storytelling," drawing on a framework of narrative analysis pioneered by William Labov and others. After a preliminary chapter on Javanese and Indonesian gender ideologies, Berman sets out her methodological approach to Javanese storytelling, combining techniques of discourse analysis and linguistic anthropology to identify and contextualize oral narratives as they occur in everyday conversation. Javanese women rely on conversational narratives, she maintains, as both presupposing and entailing indexes (cf. Silverstein 1976) of their social relations with other speakers and the community at large. Berman observes that the shared work of coconstructing stories reflects "a striving for unanimous understanding of events" (69) and is "a means through which the world can be made more harmonious" (84). She pinpoints certain types of deictics or indexicals—past-tense adverbials, reported speech, speech-level shifts, and discursive boundary markers—as structurally significant in determining "how firmly these women tie their own sense of self to the social contexts they are currently a part of" (99). The women's narratives tend to deploy such discursive indexicality as a means of shifting emphasis away from the individual speaker to a broader social collectivity. The final three chapters of the book take the reader through a trio of vivid narratives involving the protagonist Sari, a young woman in Berman's host family who works at the local garment factory. In the first speech situation, Sari endeavors to construct a discourse of protest involving her fellow workers as a way of building solidarity in the face of mistreatment by...

Speaking of Law and Power<i>Gender, Law, and Resistance in India</i>. By Erin P. Moore. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1998.<i>Ideology in the Language of Judges: How Judges Practice Law, Politics, and Courtroom Control</i>. By Susan U. Philips. Oxford Studies in Anthropological Linguistics 17. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Reviewed by: Seldom ask, never tell: Labor and discourse in Appalachia by Anita Puckett Alan S. Kaye Seldom ask, never tell: Labor and discourse in Appalachia. By Anita Puckett. (Oxford studies in anthropological linguistics 25.) Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Pp. xv, 309. $85.00. This book deals with language and socioeconomic relations in Appalachia, the mountainous area of the eastern United States which includes parts of twelve states and all of West Virginia, with a total population of approximately 22 million. It is a revised version of Puckett’s PhD dissertation of the same title but subtitled ‘Speech acts and socioeconomic relationships in a rural eastern Kentucky community’ (University of Texas-Austin, 1993). In the author’s own words: ‘This book … focuses on how tropes, expressions, and other conventionalized verbal forms (metapragmatic designations) designate and interpret imperatives and other speech forms that effect a division of labor for the production, circulation, and consumption of resources in the rural eastern Kentucky community I have given the pseudonym of Ash Creek’ (vii). P’s fieldwork was carried out in rural Kentucky from 1985–87; in addition, she lived close to Ash Creek (with a useful map [18]) from 1987–93, with the exception of one year. This was most fortunate; since she stayed in close touch with members of the community, many things could later be checked and verified. Following federal guidelines as well as the American Anthropological Association’s Statement on Ethics (1990), all 36 linguistic consultants were given pseudonyms (227, n. 2), although one can understand why some of them wanted their real [End Page 820] names to have been used. Appendix A presents information on all of them, accurate for 1986 (217–20). These informants supplied 180 hours of audiotaped discourse in what many would stereotypically refer to as ‘hillbilly talk’ (here it is easy to make reference to the vintage American television series The Beverly Hillbillies). The volume is valuable for several reasons, not the least of which are the transcribed texts which make for marvelous reading by themselves, for example, ‘Wake him up—Now ya got my keys on ya—An don’t lose εm—Cause I couldn’t gIt in the house if ya do—Go with Im Tommy’ (171). P explains her transcriptional system for the conversational analysis presented here (xiii–xv). I think a phonetic transcription would have resulted in a more accurate rendition, since ‘don’t’, for example, would, in all likelihood, not be pronounced with a /t/. This work may profitably be consulted by sociolinguists and English dialectologists alike. One of the many conclusions offered as a result of the painstaking analysis of the gathered data is that ‘get’ is pronounced with epsilon more often by women than by men. This is rightly considered a genderlect, and also ‘in some cases, a register shift to more proper speech’ (xiv). (The use of the word ‘proper’ is prescriptive, in my view, and should have been avoided.) Another fascinating observation has to do with the use of the imperative. It was surprising to learn that adult men do not use an imperative or other order constructions with other adult men (169). Imperatives in the aforementioned context are ‘not only inappropriate but highly abrasive as well’ (169). Of course, this does not mean that imperatives do not occur in the Ash Creek texts; they do. Ch. 6 focuses on the nonrequesting uses of imperatives (117–29). Cindy once told the author ‘Come to supper’ (117), and then when the response was, ‘I can’t. Not tonight.’, Cindy further remarked to Anne: ‘Does she think I’m really askin her to supper?’ (117). Imperatives often merely mark social amiability; in this particular case, the ‘Come to supper’ signaled leave-taking (other ways to do this include ‘Come see us’ [= English ‘see ya’], ‘Come home with me’, ‘Stay now/You stay’ [122]). These examples are reminiscent, in my opinion, of the Firthian ‘context of situation’ and reinforce the perspective that trying to analyze language without constant reference to meaning is absolutely meaningless (to paraphrase the famous quote by Roman Jakobson). Alan S. Kaye California State University, Fullerton Copyright © 2002 Linguistic Society of America

Special epistemological problems arise when exotic systems of ideas and affects are studied by a foreigner. Difficulties in knowing “the native view” are discussed, and a partial solution for this epistemological problem is proposed. Exemplification through substantive semantic analysis of a key morality term used by Montenegrin tribesmen results in a descriptive portrait of the moral self. In contrast to certain trends in ethnographic semantics, which are antiseptically formal, overstructured, unduly self‐contained, or static, emphasis here is placed upon open‐ended semantic inquiry and fuller articulation with the general ethnographic context by taking native decisions and social processes into direct account. [methodology/theory, morality, psychological anthropology, linguistic anthropology, Circum‐Mediterranean]