Language and society. 2nd edn. By William Downes (review)

Abstract

BOOK NOTICES 215 devoted to prepositions and opens with a typically rich and well-documented historically-oriented paper by Philip Baker (41-59), one of the best in the collection , on Mauritian. This paper, as so much of Baker 's work, treats historical sources as the invaluable keys to unravelling many of the processes of creóle genesis that they are. It is marred only by the unwise division of Table 1 (42-43) at some time during the editorial process. The other papers, by Gillette Staudacher-Valliamée on Réunionnais, MarieChristine Hazaël-Massieux on Guadeloupean, and Bernadette Cervenka on prepositions in Martiniquais , concentrate more solidly on the functions of prepositions and the way they are defined. The second section (137-209) deals with adjectives , traditionally a somewhat tendentious issue in the discussion of some creóles because of their possible reinterpretation in many cases as a kind of stative verb. But in this section there is relatively little controversy ; instead we have solid descriptive papers on Guadeloupean by Ralph Ludwig (137-49), on Haitian by Robert Damoiseau (151-61), and a comparative treatment on Réunionnais and Mauritian by Leila Caid-Capron (163-92). Manuel Veiga's paper on the morphosyntax of adjectives in two dialects of Sotavento and Barlavento Cape Verdean Creole Portuguese (193-209) is especially valuable because he is one of the still small band of creóle speakers with linguistic training who writes on his creóle for an international audience. The final section (213-303) covers pronouns, especially (but not only) personal pronouns. This includes papers by the editor on the properties of personal pronouns in Mauritian (243-58), in addition to a comparative treatment of pronouns in Haitian by Dominiquf Fattier (213-41) and useful discussions of pronouns in Saramaccan by Tonjes VeensTRA , in Belizean by Genevieve Escure, and a very promising paper on relativization strategies in Ghanaian Pidgin English—little studied at that time—by Magnus Huber, who has since continued to work on forms and behavior of pronouns across creóles. My final comment on this attractive ifnot groundbreaking collection must be on production values. The publishers evidently thought that a pretty front cover makes up for an incredibly cheap perforated page-binding process which causes pages to fall out of the volume after a few openings. It doesn't. [Anthony P. Grant, University of Manchester, UK.] Language and society. 2nd edn. By William Downes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. ix, 503. The sociolinguistic textbook market is a very competitive one—more so than some of the other hyphenated so-called linguistic specializations. This is the second edition ( 1 st edn. London: Fontana Paperbacks , 1984) of a well-written, fairly comprehensive tome in the Cambridge approaches to linguistics series , edited by Jean Aitchison. Right from the start, the reader is told that sociolinguistic observations deal only with linguistic performance whereas the author makes it quite clear that the Chomskyan paradigm focuses on linguistic competence, since 'Chomsky 's conception of language is psychological or cognitive' (10). As Downes phrases it: 'Clearly, the use of language to communicate messages, form hypotheses or fix beliefs requires social explanation. But these are not part ofChomsky's language module in any case!' (11). This scenario is indeed the reason why many linguists think that an overall 'communicative competence', to use the term made famous by Dell H. Hymes, is a desideratum preferable to a mere 'linguistic competence' in explaining the goals of contemporary linguistic theory. The book discusses all the material, with one notable exception (see below), which one expects to see covered under the rubric of sociolinguistics in a university course: language death, birth, and shift; language contact; dialect, sociolect, and register; pidginization and creolization; globalization and international language; linguistic problems in Canada; diglossia and codeswitching; African-American Vernacular English (still called Black English Vernacular ); rhoticity (dialects with and without r's), etc. The basic question for any reviewer is how well these topics are presented as compared to the competition. Let us begin by considering the treatment of the ever-popular diglossia (74-80), where Charles A. Ferguson's original (long) definition of the term is reproduced ('Diglossia', Word 15.325...