Reviews Of Different Books

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REVIEWS F{P,S,O,M}f{1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9}. Miltner defines his syntactic devices as the "adequate interpretation and classification" of the syntactic units he recognizes, that is to say, tagmeme, syntagma and sentence. The syntagma, a doubtlessly very useful concept, consists of a pair of two tagmemes of one utterance, which, if related immediately, form an endosyntagma, or if related by means of one or more intermediary tagmemes, become an exosyntagma (not dealt with in this work). Much less convincing and, in fact, very vague is, however, the conception of sentence, the last and most complicated syntactic unit, which our author regards to be an interconcatenation of one tagmeme functioning as predicate (Pf) and at least one more tagmeme functioning differently. A sentence like larki hamsi, "the girl laughed", is according to Miltner's system to be rendered as P 321 : S 1 (that is, P = adjectival participle in a non-ergative construction, S = substantive), whilst commonly accepted transformational-generative grammar would derive the same utterance from S + NP + VP by the extension of VP into VP - MV + Aux which, when represented graphically, would yield the diagram: NP MV Aux hams -1 larki The description of syntactic units as shown by the author benefits assuredly by the brevity of its tagmeme symbols, but suffers on many, in my estimation essential points. When adopting this system of sentence-analysis, generation and transformation, the student will have to be already aforehand wellversed in Hindi, and even then will find the method unwieldy, since the majority of operations requires the constant consultation of the list of tagmemic functors given on p. 20f. Though Miltner's monograph may, in a very general way, be of interest to linguists, the possibilities of using it practically for producing any possible and correct Hindi sentence appears to me utterly limited. A student conversant with Hindi and as such fully capable of distinguishing the lexical classes of the language and the syntactic functions performed by these classes, will scarcely deepen his insight by means of an interpretation of, for example, donom mitra haim, 'the two are friends', as the syntagma P 1.21 : S 533 (that is, P = substantive +non-participial verbal tense, intransitive, and S=collective numeral), nor will a beginner, still unable to apply the rules of this system, profit from it. It is, of course, far from my thoughts to deny that new approaches to language description are feasible as well as desirable. What seems to be absolutely requisite to me is, however, that any new theory of syntax also, or perhaps above all, includes heuristic values. It is deplorable to state that Miltner's discussions do not offer such values. Thus the research-worker on Hindi will derive very little advantage from it. Moreover, Miltner's theory of syntax, though highly abstract, is deficient in depth. No scope is given to deep structure analysis, nor are the order of words, which is of much greater importance in NIA than in OIA and MIA, or verb-compounds and 1 This fact is also expressed in other words as: The set of sentences is the Cartesian product resulting from the interconcatenation of the set of Pf tagmemes and the set of Pf tagmemes or the syntagmas (both endosyntagmas and exosyntagmas) which do not contain Pf tagmemes, that is, any sentence = Pf (Pf")" (p.36). 2 Cf. Y. Kachru, An Introduction to Hindi Syntax (Urbana 1966), p. 95. 3 The Structure of English (London, 1957), reprint.