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KELLER, Joseph R. Linguistic Theory and the Study of English: A Selective Outline. Minneapolis, Minn. : Burgess Publishing Company, 1968 91 pp. $ 2.75.
Received by M. A. MEHENDALE, Deccan College, Poona.
The purpose of this outline is stated to be, first, to point out that there is a basic coherence in the development of linguistics, from Grimm even to Chomsky and, next, to clarify "the cultural lags within linguistics." It is pointed out that linguistics in its very early stage was prescriptive; from this, after the discovery of Sanskrit, it passed through Comparative Philology and structuralism to transformational hypothesis.
The impact of these developments in linguistics on the study of old and middle English is not to be seen in the available descriptions. Tne author therefore indicates how this can be achieved. From the late Middle English to the Modern English period, however, the phonological and morphological changes are not so extreme and what one sees in this period is a large-scale borrowing of foreign words into the English vocabulary. The author therefore turns to the problems of style and usage. With regard to the former he refers to the Boas-Sapir-Whorf hypothesis regarding the relationship of world view and language structure; and as regards the latter he mentions the two extreme attitudes of doctrinaire permissiveness and doctrinaire prescriptiveness and rightly observes that''neither extreme is valid ".
As an outline, the book will be found very useful. It goes to the credit of the author to have emphasized that although the term structuralism was not invented till 1920, Grimm, while thinking about phonetic changes, thought in terms of changes in the habits of articulation which led to the restructuring of the sound systems. He also aptly points out that the practices of the neogrammarians and the structuralists do not throw each other out.
While pointing out that it would be arrogant to call modern Western European Linguistics as the only science of language the author refers to the descriptive thoroughness of Pāṇini and his predecessors who are said to shave analyzed Sanskrit in the fourth century (p. 11 ). The author here does not ay whether B. C. or A. D. But that he means the fourth century A. D. becomes clear from his later statement: 'the Hindu grammarians who described Sanskrit in the first centuries of our era" (p. 85). Since no one has ever thought of bringing down Pāņini, much less his predecessors, to a date after the beginning of the Christian era, these remarks by the author are very hard to follow.
On pp. 22-23, the author gives dates of the Germanic sound shift. He says that IE bh, dh, gh became Gmc. voiced stops b, d, g, ca. 1000 B. C., and that IE voiced stops b, d, g, became p, t, k, ca. 100-500 A. D. But if the change IE bh > Gmc. b occurred before the change IE b > Gmc. p, the question arises why the Gmc, b, arising out of IE bh, did not become p along with IEb which became p in Gmc. Obviously the change bh > b must be supposed to follow, and not
Madhu Vidyā/631
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