One speaker, two languages Ed. by Lesley Milroy and Pieter Muysken (review)

Abstract

BOOK NOTICES 409 well-known, engage repeatedly in public, ritualized abuse, a cross-culturally male genre of discourse known as 'flyting'. To say this another way, 'Achaeans are proficient at blame, while Trojans perform praise poetry' (83). Of particular interest are Ch. 3, on the language of Hector, and Ch. 4, on the language of Achilles (some features of the latter were brought to the attention of readers of this journal twenty years ago: Paul Friedrich & James Redfield, Language 54.263-88, 1978). The discussion of Hector is the high point of the book: those who find this outstanding Trojan hero a particularly sympathetic character, and a poetic one, will understand much better than before the linguistic and rhetorical reasons for their impression. If M's analysis of his Greek counterpart, Achilles, is in its details somewhat less secure, this is not so much her fault but can be ascribed to the problems everyone has with defining, or confining, the character of the epic's protagonist. Nowhere in the book does M have a specifically linguistic section, but appropriate references to Roman Jakobson, Deborah Tannen, and others show up throughout and will, one may hope, encourage more classicists to examine Greek and Roman narrative conventions from a linguistic or sociolinguistic perspective. It is disappointing to find in a book with this title no mention of recent work by, notably, Jaan Puhvel and Calvert Watkins on 'real' Trojan talk, as opposed to its stylization in foreign, namely Greek, epic, and on echoes in Greek texts of second-millennium interactions between Greeks and Anatolians, on either side of the Hellespont. This leads into two small problems I have with the book. First, M does not make clear what she believes the differences between the linguistic skills of the two sides are supposed to indicate. Are they the creation of 'Homer' or do they build on an older tradition? We may never know the answer, but M must have an opinion, and the quality of her book suggests that it will be an interesting one. And second , in the second half of Ch. 4, M suggests that Homer's Achilles occasionally echoes Hesiod (see especially 140, 149, and 158), but her failure to take up the vexed issue of chronology will make this idea all the harder for many informed readers to accept. It would seem that M to some extent confuses the actual poet Hesiod with the Hesiodic genre, the far older Near Eastern style of 'wisdom literature' . A final complaint is that there are dozens and dozens of small errors in the Greek (far fewer in the English, but note the repeated line at the top of 105), most often missing or wrong accents and breathing marks. This is annoying, but also extremely odd, for these mistakes make such a sharp contrast with the elegant prose with which M invariably presents her arguments. [Joshua T. Katz, Harvard University.] One speaker, two languages. Ed. by Lesley Milroy and Pieter Muysken. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995. Pp. xii, 365. This volume is the result of a European Science Foundation Research Network initiative which brought together groups of researchers working on bilingualism and code switching in a series of meetings and other activities between 1990 and 1993. The fifteen chapters present a variety of approaches to the study of bilingualism, applied to a variety of language combinations and a variety of bilingual populations (including young children, aphasic/demented adults, immigrant families, and long-term bidialectal communities). A European focus is evident both in the list of contributors and in the languages discussed , but beyond this the book's contents are quite diverse. The stated aim of the editors is to forge links between the various fields concerned with bilingualism, to 'set an example of integrative research and writing ' (11). On the whole they succeed very well; the articles' common focus on the analysis of code switching makes them directly comparable, and there are frequent cross-references between articles. An introductory chapter by the editors sketches the history of bilingualism research and the range of approaches to code switching. A concluding chapter by Andrée Tabouret-Keller considers the theoretical challenge of modeling the interrelatedness of...