The study of language 2nd edn. By George Yule (review)

Abstract

BOOK NOTICES 449 ture (the whole network of relevant socioculturel conventions), and reference (the subject matter of a text). To the extent that texts represent direct interactions , they should be studied as dialogic structures; and this is where conversational or discourse analysis comes in. F illustrates his treatment of conversational features by discussing sequencing, speech acts, and implicature (what is said 'between the lines'). It is useful, and indeed may be necessary for the full understanding of a text, to distinguish between the story and the point of view from which the story is told. In Ch. 9 F discusses four different points of view: ideological, phraseological, spatial-temporal, and psychological. Different points of view may be communicated by different registers of language, register defined as 'a distinctive use of language to fulfill a particular communicative function in a particular kind of situation' (191). Languages vary a great deal with regard to the meanings they encode, even in what would seem to be basic (universal) areas and structures of experience. The ways in which the linguistic organization ofa text relates to world view is the topic of Ch. 1 1 . Summary and conclusions follow in Ch. 12. The author, professor of English and linguistics at the University of East Anglia, has written several books on linguistics and literature. Since the contributions of practitioners in these two fields are rarely interdisciplinary, F's book should be of special interest to students of both language and literature. [Zdenek Salzmann, Northern Arizona University.] Cesky jazykovy atlas. [The Czech linguistic atlas.] By Jan Balhar, Pavel Jancák and others. Vol. 1 . Praha: Academia , 1992. Pp. 427; Vol. 2. Praha: Academia, 1997. Pp. 507. The purpose of this book notice is to call attention to the appearance of the second of five projected volumes of the Czech linguistic atlas. It is the last among the atlases dealing with West Slavic languages , and, judging by the first two volumes, it has been worth waiting for. The material for the atlas was gathered by seventeen members of the Dialectological Department ofthe Institute for the Czech Language of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. The field research for this work was conducted between 1964 and 1972 in 420 rural localities and between 1973 and 1976 in 57 urban areas. The informants as a rule were members ofthe old generation —men and women who were born and grew up before World War I. The recorded usages therefore represent the oldest ascertainable state of local dialects . In cities, the data were elicited especially from elderly craftspersons and manual workers, but in the cities ofthe newly resettled border areas, information was gathered from the members ofthe young generation who had grown up there and whose speech represents the relatively fixed contemporary local standard . The work has several features that dialectologists will appreciate. In addition to data concerning the oldest layer of traditional rural dialects, it also gives information about the urban speech of both the younger and older generations in the country's interior . When complete, the atlas will document the contemporary geographic differentiation of various aspects of nonliterary Czech spoken in Bohemia, Moravia, and the Czech-speaking part of Silesia. The first two volumes are devoted to the lexicon and cover nouns, verbs, and adjectives having to do with the local environment, the household, the farmstead , farmwork, the physical aspects of human beings, and social life (Vol. 1); gardens and orchards, fauna, flora, forests, time, weather, the village in earlier times and today, entertainment, and customs (Vol. 2). Each map is accompanied by a commentary subdivided into seven sections: (1) a listing of the elicited dialectal equivalents of the headword; (2) discussion ofthe meaning of the headword and of the significant differences among the dialectal terms; (3) a brief description of the map to facilitate the reader's overall orientation; (4) a characterization of the mapped expressions as to their relationship with West Slavic languages, and a brief etymology; (5) equivalent terms recorded in selected Czech-speaking villages in Poland, former Yugoslavia, and Romania; (6) references to related entries in West Slavic linguistic atlases and two general linguistic atlases; and, only exceptionally, (7) references to closely related entries...