440LANGUAGE, VOLUME 56, NUMBER 2 (1980) McCawley, James D. 1978. Conversational implicature and the lexicon. Pragmatics (Syntax and semantics, 9), ed. by Peter Cole, 245-59. New York: Academic Press. McCawley, Noriko A. 1976. Reflexivization: A transformational approach. In Shibatani, 51-116. Okutsu, Keiichirö. 1969. Süryöteki hyögen no bumpö. Nihongo Kyöiku 14.42-60. Oyakawa, Takatsugu. 1973. Japanese reflexivization I. Papers in Japanese Linguistics 2.94-135. Sagawa, Masayoshi. 1978. Sika-nai construction and ne-que construction. Descriptive and Applied Linguistics 11.119-35. Shibatani, Masayoshi. 1973. Semantics of Japanese causativization. Foundations of Language 9.327-73. ------ (ed.) 1976. Japanese generative grammar. (Syntax and semantics, 5.) New York: Academic Press. ------. 1977. Grammatical relations and surface cases. Lg. 53.789-809. Suzuki, Hidekazu. 1977. Qualification of the Tensed-S Condition: Evidence from Japanese. Glossa 11.139-54. Tonoike, Shigeo. 1976. The case ordering hypothesis. Papers in Japanese Linguistics 4.191-208. [Received 10 August 1979.] Post-structural approaches to language: Language theory in a Japanese context. By J. V. Neustupny. Tokyo: University of Tokyo Press, 1978. Pp. vii, 307.¥2,000. Reviewed by Roy Andrew Miller, University of Washington Both the alluring promises of this book's trendy, double-barreled title prove on inspection to be quite hollow: Neustupny has next to nothing of interest to say about any scientific approach to language, whether post-, mid-, or pre-structural, and he tells us even less that is of value about Japanese. N attempts to identify the subject with which his book will concern itself as follows (p. 3) : 'The expression "post-structural", used in the title of this book, refers to a typology of linguistic theories and should be interpreted as a mere technical term rather than an evaluative device. It appears to me to be a convenient descriptor for studies in grammar and sociolinguistics which took over from structural linguistics in the late 1950's and 1960's.' As a 'descriptor', all this may or may not be 'convenient', but it surely is far from clear; and the several hundred pages that follow this representatively murky passage do little to substitute clarity for convenience. In general, this book fails to be ofeither academic interest or scholarly value, because it is not really a book at all. Rather it is, for the most part, N's careful self-anthology of most of his own previously published shorter pieces on a variety of subjects. He has now had them printed together in a single volume—as if these quite disparate fragments could thus, by a simple act of will, be made to fall into place as chapters in a book. They cannot, and do not. Several of N's ephemera that now find their ill-fitting places as 'chapters' in this non-book originated as short journalistic pieces of the type that every resident foreigner in Japan is more or less expected to turn out, in return for hospitality extended. These, originally published in Japanese, are now rendered into English by N. In a disarming note (p. vii), he names several Australian friends who attempted to correct his idiosyncratic English, both in these translations and in other portions originally written and published elsewhere in N's English. He also engagingly apologizes to these same well-meaning friends for not having taken their corrections more seriously : 'my obstinacy alone is responsible for my not following their advice.' The puzzled reader will REVIEWS441 often wish that N had been less obstinate, or that his Australian friends had been more stubborn. As matters stand, N's English is so exotic that the reader is at a loss, in passage after passage, whether to conclude that N's grasp of elementary linguistic science is really as sketchy as it would appear from a literal reading, or whether N's struggle to express himself in a foreign language has simply defeated his scholarship. Whichever may be the case, one reads many astonishing statements here: 'Outside of Japan, Japanese grammar has received non-paradigmatic attention in the extensive Soviet studies, in German philology and in the work of G. Wenck' (10); 'For the articulation of [v] teeth often touch the upper parts of the...
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Nov 1, 1988
Ryunen Teranishi 
