26.2327, Review: General Ling; Historical Ling; Lang Acq; Pragmatics; Socioling: Hentschel, Harden (2014)

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Subject: 26.2327, Review: General Ling; Historical Ling; Lang Acq; Pragmatics; Socioling: Hentschel, Harden (2014)

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Date: Mon, 04 May 2015 14:40:31
From: Daniel Bürkle [daniel.buerkle at pg.canterbury.ac.nz]
Subject: Einführung in die germanistische Linguistik

 
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Book announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/25/25-3516.html

AUTHOR: Elke  Hentschel
AUTHOR: Theo  Harden
TITLE: Einführung in die germanistische Linguistik
PUBLISHER: Peter Lang AG
YEAR: 2014

REVIEWER: Daniel Bürkle, University of Canterbury

Review's Editor: Helen Aristar-Dry

SUMMARY

Einführung in die germanistische Linguistik (Introduction to German
linguistics) by Elke Hentschel and Theo Harden consists of 16 chapters
designed to introduce the novice reader to the respective field or topic,
without it being necessary to read the entire book. Each chapter except the
co-authored Chapter 10 is written by either Hentschel or Harden alone. The
chapters all have attention-getting questions or statements as titles, but the
subtitles helpfully name the area of linguistics that the chapter covers.

Chapter 1, to give just one example, is titled ''Can words make you tired?
Semantics'' and was written by Hentschel. It starts by explaining the priming
studies of Bargh et al. (1996) (though without ever mentioning the term
''priming'') and uses these to argue that the mental representations of words
are connected to other words and to other aspects of cognition. After laying
out that linguistic signs are symbols rather than indices or icons, the
chapter also briefly introduces featural semantics, prototype theory, and the
semiotic triangle.

Chapter 2, “Where are words in your head and how do you access them?”
(Harden), presents modular and connectionist models of lexical access. It uses
real examples of production errors and experimental designs throughout, and
also offers jumping-off points for discussions of experimental validity and
the map-territory problem.

Chapter 3 (by Hentschel) answers the question ''Are there languages without
any grammar?'' by showing in just one Mandarin example how a supposedly
grammar-less language has strict syntactic rules and grammaticalized lexical
items. The S/A/P terminology for basic thematic roles is introduced (citing
Comrie 1987), which leads easily to a quick description of ergative-absolutive
languages as well as the basic terminology of subject, predicate, object, and
adverbial.

Chapter 4, “My holiday destination: A country without irregular verbs”
(Hentschel), is on verbal morphology. It introduces the reader to tense,
aspect, mood, and voice. The examples are almost exclusively German, but that
allows for a comprehensive overview of German verbal morphology: non-standard
analytic tenses (the ''double perfect'', as in ''ich habe dich gesehen
gehabt'', and the ''double pluperfect'', as in ''ich hatte dich gesehen
gehabt''), the absentive (''Ernst ist essen.''), and inflective interjections
(''seufz''), which German-speaking readers of this book will know from
everyday language use, are described alongside standard forms.

Chapter 5, “Why do we say ‘der Tisch’, but ‘die Lampe’ and ‘das Klavier’ – and
what is that good for?” (Hentschel), is the first of two chapters on noun
morphology. It covers grammatical gender and number.  Quite a number of terms
and topics are established in this short chapter: morphological typology,
different grammatical gender systems and possible reasons for these, different
types of number systems, nominal classifiers, and the distinctions between
bound and free as well as between lexical and grammatical morphemes.

Chapter 6, “Who? What? Whom?” (Hentschel), is the second one on noun
morphology, and describes the German case system. It lists different uses
associated with each of the four German case system, but also briefly mentions
a few other cases and the languages they exist in.

Chapter 7, “All about sounds” (Hentschel), is on phonetics and phonology and
begins by asking why speakers have so much trouble with speech sounds that are
not used in their native language, when they can easily distinguish and
produce all in their native language. The high-amplitude sucking paradigm and
well-known results from it are presented as an answer to this question. The
chapter then proceeds by establishing the distinction between consonants and
vowels, the phones of German, and minimal pairs and syllable structure as the
basics of phonology.

Chapter 8 (by Harden) asks ''What is linguistics?''. It gives a brief overview
of the history of the concept of science, from hermeneutics to structuralism
and the problem of induction, as well as an introduction to the history of
linguistics, from Panini and European scholasticism via William Jones and
Ferdinand de Saussure to the different schools of the twentieth century and
the wide-ranging and diverse field that linguistics is today.

Chapter 9, “What kind of a language is German?” (Harden), is on the history of
German. It re-introduces William Jones and the Indo-European theory, and goes
on to describe the major phonological shifts in the history of German (Grimm's
Law and the High German consonantal shift) in some detail.

Chapter 10, “That’s not a language, that’s a throat disease” (Hentschel and
Harden), is an overview of German dialectology. It illustrates the major
isoglosses of modern German and presents the methods that were and are used to
find them. The low prestige of dialects is also discussed, and this discussion
serves to set up the next chapter.

Chapter 11, “Anyone who talks this sloppily can’t be thinking properly”
(Harden), continues with the introduction to sociolinguistics. It discusses
the prestige of different dialects (using Labov 1972’s New York department
store study as one example) and establishes the difference between diglossia
and bilingualism. High and low prestige in colonial settings then leads into
an explanation of pidgins and creoles.

Chapter 12, “How do you learn to talk?” (Hentschel), presents the major stages
of first language acquisition (babbling, one word, two words, complex
utterances) and relevant research methods. For the earlier stages, the
high-amplitude sucking paradigm is explained (again); for the latter ones,
pseudoword methodologies are introduced. The rest of this chapter offers an
overview of theories of language acquisition on either side of the familiar
nature-versus-nurture debate: Chomskyan nativism is contrasted with
constructivist approaches like Skinner's behaviorism, Piaget's cognitive
theory, and more recent interactionist developments (Tomasello is mentioned as
an example).

Chapter 13, “Why is learning a second language so hard?” (Harden), begins by
laying out the relevant basic terminology of ''learn'' and ''acquire'',
''second'' and ''foreign'' languages, and ''L1'' and ''L2''. What follows is
an overview of some second language teaching methods (grammar-translation,
audio-visual, and the communicative turn) and how they are influenced by
different theories (sociocultural theories, acculturation, connectionism, and
teachability). The chapter closes by answering the question of its title,
arguing that an L2 is not as necessary for survival as an L1.

Chapter 14, “My neighbor is not in prison” (Harden), is an introduction to
pragmatics. It briefly lays out Austin's theory of speech acts, Gricean maxims
of conversation, deixis, and the idea of negative and positive face in
politeness.

Chapter 15, “And how do you write all this?” (Hentschel), presents different
types of writing systems. Icons, logograms, syllabaries, alphabets, and mixed
systems are described and illustrated. German examples are used (where
appropriate) in the discussion of different considerations that affect the
design of orthographies. Throughout the chapter, the author stresses that
there is no objectively better or worse writing system or orthography.

Chapter 16 is ''A postscript for fans of formal systems'' (by Harden). In 19
pages, it introduces several syntactic frameworks (namely phrase structure
grammar, generative grammar, dependency grammar, Optimality Theory, and
construction grammars) and provides references for further reading on them.

EVALUATION

As there are many German-language introductory linguistics textbooks on the
market readily available already, it is important for a new one to fill a
specific gap. Hentschel and Harden's book is designed to be used either as a
standard comprehensive textbook or as a collection of chapters each offering a
short standalone introduction to a specific subfield.  The book certainly
meets the first of these goals: it covers all major subfields of linguistics
with enough detail for an introductory course, and with plenty of references
for more in-depth reasoning. Chapters 8 (history of science and linguistics)
and 16 (syntax frameworks) do not have the depth that  their respective topics
demand, even for a short introduction, but they can easily be skipped or
supplemented with additional reading. Since the book also meets its second
goal, that of a collection of independent short introductions, skipping them
would not mean missing fundamental basics for the other chapters.

Some chapters will certainly be read together by most readers (Chapters 5 and
6, which both discuss noun morphology, spring to mind). This is made easier by
the accurate but approachable style, which is consistently maintained
throughout, and by the length of the chapters: Chapter 6 is the shortest, at
ten pages; Chapter 16 by far the longest, at 19 pages (and it is presented as
a “postscript”, or not as basic as the other chapters). No chapter explicitly
refers the reader to another chapter, and there is no glossary, but looking up
concepts and terms is made easy by the comprehensive index at the end of the
book. The few misspellings (“mit” in place of “mir” in the third example on
p.52, “joined attention” p.164, “Personendeixi” p. 236 in the index) and other
typographic issues (some of the lines in Fig. 2 p.22 not connecting, for
instance) are just cosmetic and do not inhibit understanding of the examples
and explanations.

In a few places, the book is not as precise as it could be. For example, it
claims Brazilian Portuguese no longer uses “the grammatically correct form” of
the object pronoun (p.214). While it is implied that this refers to the form
that is taught as correct in prescriptive textbooks of Portuguese (and not to
a form that is objectively “correct”), this implication could be lost on a
reader with no previous knowledge of linguistics. 

Each chapter ends with a topic-specific short list of references and further
reading. The authors have taken great care to cite German-language books and
articles wherever possible, but have not shied away from citing seminal
English- or French-language works as well. Readers who prefer German are
served just as well as readers who are using this book as a starting point to
in-depth studies of linguistics. However, the book makes a few very
interesting claims without supporting them (about German prepositions that
traditionally took dative noun phrases now being extended to take the genitive
as well, p.85-86; or about the phonemic status of the glottal stop in German,
based on the minimal pair “StudentInnen” (students of either/any gender) –
“Studentinnen” (female students), p.98). References to the relevant literature
would not only support these claims, but also benefit novice linguists: as
examples of state-of-the-art research, such references would answer one
question that the book itself does not ask: “What do linguists actually do?”

All the questions that it does ask, however, are answered competently.
Examples from languages other than German are used where appropriate, and
these are not limited to the typical textbook examples: for example, p.151
gives the first four lines of the Lord’s Prayer in Tok Pisin as a conspicuous
example of grammaticalization. The German examples are not just standard
textbook fare either, with reference being made to non-standard or innovative
forms like the comprehensive list of German tenses (p.47) or adjectives
(apparently) derived from prepositions (“der Mann mit dem abben Bein”, p.214).
These examples not only draw the reader in, but also make it clear to
non-experts that linguistics is the study of language as it is used. Together
with the chapters being designed to be short and independent, this makes for a
useful introductory text.

REFERENCES

Bargh, John, Mark Chen, and Laura Burrows. 1996. “Automaticity of social
behavior: Direct effects of trait construct and stereotype activation on
action”. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 71.2:230-244.

Comrie, Bernard. 1987. Language universals and linguistic typology (Second
edition). Oxford: Blackwell.

Labov, William. 1972. Sociolinguistic patterns. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.


ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Daniel Bürkle is a PhD candidate in linguistics at the University of
Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand, where he uses eyetracking and other
attention-tracking methodologies to investigate the acquisition of syntactic
variations. His research interests include variation and innovation in syntax
as well as methods in psycholinguistics and corpus linguistics.





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