Lecture1BookReview

1、Lecture 1 Book ReviewExample 1LinguisticsH. G. WiddowsonOxford University Press 1996 134pp. 5.50ISBN 0 19 437206 5Linguistics, the first in the new series of Oxford Introductions to Language Study, is a much-awaited book. There are three main reasons for this. Firstly, many existing introductions (e

2、.g. Crystal 1985, Brown 1984, Yule 1985) are intended for students of linguistics: guiding them through fundamental concepts and ideas and preparing them for more advanced studies in particular areas. Secondly, although language is an essential part of our everyday life, introductions to linguistics

3、 can make considerable academic demands on the reader. Thirdly, there are many people who are interested in how language works but are not concerned with a more serious study of linguistics.In the Preface, Widdowson states two purposes for the present series of introductions: “(1)t o provide a large

4、-scale view of different areas of language study as the precondition for more particular enquiry “(2)t o accommodate the broader interests of many people who take an interest in language without being academically engaged in linguistics per seso these books are meant to be introductions to language

5、more generally as well as to linguistics as a dispcliine ” (p. x).Linguistics serves these two purposes. The book follows no particular theories or schools of linguistic analysis and does not go into technicalities on any particular subject (like phonology or syntax or semantics). The survey constit

6、utes six chapters: 1. the nature of language; 2. the scope of linguistics; 3. principles and levels of analysis; 4. areas of enquiry: focus on form; 5. areas of enquiry: focus on meaning; 6. current issues.The book consists of four sections: 1. Survey; 2. Readings; 3. References; and 4. Glossary. 77

7、 pages are devoted to the survey and, though one third of the size of other introductions, touch upon the nature of language, the scope of linguistics, principles and levels of analysis, form, meaning, and current issues. Section 2 consists of 24 selections from original texts, accompanied by questi

8、ons, to complement each of the survey chapters. Section 3 is an annotated bibliography, with indication of three levels of difficulty (introductory, more advanced and technical, and specialized and very demanding). Section 4 lists alphabetically 100 key concepts introduced in the book, and each is f

9、ollowed by a brief definition and page references to the Survey section.The first chapter opens with the beginning of language and language as a distinctive characteristic of the human being and other animals. Normally, books of this kind would cite the Bible, discuss existing theories of possible o

10、rigins of language, and describe experiments to show that human beings and animals are different. However, the author of this book cites the Talmud, Shakespeare and W. H. Auden, using his literary craft to give the reader a sense of freshness and urge her to read on.In the second chapter, you even s

11、ee a map of the London Underground (p. 19)! This is not an unfamiliar sight for many teachers of English as a foreign language who employ the communicative approach to language teaching. Nevertheless the purpose of such a map here is not to discuss CLT, but to use the relation of a map to the actual

12、 complex underground network to show that complex as language is, linguistics is there to provide models of language which reveal features which are not immediately apparent (p. 18). This is exactly the same point that Widdowson has made to language teachers (e.g. Widdowson, 1990). The chapter also

13、discusses such fundamental issues in linguistics asla ngue and parole, competence and performance, and knowledge and ability.The third chapter shows how analysis of language can be made at different levels, referring to such concepts as lexical items, phonetic and phonemic, syntagmatic and paradigma

14、tic, constituent structure, graphology, phonology, morphology, syntax, text, cohesion, context, discourse, and pragmatics. The author shows the relations between these concepts in a smooth flow of language, naturally picking up samples of language from Shakespeare and thOe xford Handbook (q.v. p. 35

15、).Chapters Four and Five focus on the essential areas of linguistic enquiry: phonetics and phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics and pragmatics. These are the central areas of interest for linguists of today and it is thus particularly difficult to write briefly without following particular schoo

16、ls of thought. While most basic ideas in phonetics and phonology, morphology, semantics and pragmatics are common ground (and the theoretical issues frequently discussed and argued about by professional scholars are not the concern of the book anyway) in syntactic analysis, it is not always easy to

17、shy away from current theoretical issues and approaches developed in the field of syntactic theories. However, in this part of the chapter, only the term constituent structure is introduced (pp. 50-2), and this, to me at least, is inadequate and out-dated.Compared with Chapter 4, Chapter 5 deals wit

18、h semantics and pragmatics in much more detail, and the author goes into issues in pragmatics in some depth.Chapter 6, Current Issues, is not concerned with theoretical arguments in the field of linguistics, as these would not be appropriate here. Instead it outlines how linguistic study can be exte

19、nded to wider horizons including psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, functional linguistics, formal linguistics, corpus linguistics, and applied linguistics and second language acquisition (SLA). It also touches upon error analysis and interlanguage, which is essential to SLA studies.I would recomm

20、end this book highly to all trainee language teachers as an easily accessible introduction to the essential field of linguistics.Shi Baohui, Department of Foreign Languages, Beijing Forestry UniversityReferencesBrown, E. K. 1984. Linguistics Today. London: Fontana.Crystal, David. 1985. Linguistics (

21、2nd edn.). London: Penguin.Widdowson, H. G. 1990. Abstraction, actuality and the conditions of relevance. In Wang Zuoliang (edE.) LT in China. Beijing: Foreign Language Teaching and Research Press, pp. 39-46.Yule, George. 1985. The Study of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.The reviewe

22、rShi Baohui is Professor and Chairman of the Department of Foreign Languages at Beijing Forestry University, People s Republic of China. He has an MA in Descriptive and Applied Linguistics from Essex University and his main interests are phonology, syntax and TEFL methodology.(From ELT Journal, 52/1

23、, 1998)Example 2DOES THIS MAN EVER SLEEP ?(A book review of Noam Chomsky: A Life of Dissentby Robert F. Barsky, MIT Press: 1997. Pp. 237. $27.50, 17.95) Geoffrey K. PullumThe world s most cited living person is a theoretical linguist. Noam Chomskya hs published about 70 books and more than 1,000 art

24、icles, shaken up the study of natural language syntax several times, and won the Kyoto Prize for Basic Sciences, while supervising scores of PhD students at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), spending 20 hours a week on personal correspondence, lecturing all over the world, building a worl

25、dwide reputation as a radical critic of American foreign policy and media culture, and being father to three children. Does he ever sleep?Robert Barsky bso ok does not tell us. It offers hardly any clear glimpses of Chomsky sp ersonal life, despite being so rich in quotations from him that the blurb

26、 touts it as“the autobiographyhe will never write.” It has the faults of autobiography buht en ovitr tuesthere are scattered subjectivejudgements and unverified anecdotes from Chomsky without any connected first-person narrative to give a sense of him as a person.Barsky does not compensate by provid

27、ing competent intellectual biography. His letters from Chomsky are basically his only primary source (although a few photographs appear here for the first time). Barsky does not mention undertaking any interviews with people significant in Chomskys life. He seemsnot only with linguistics references

28、to Chomsky s work are in vapid phrases such as “ conducting linguistic research that could lead us to a better understanding of the mind/brain but also with linguists. ” Two linguists nam es (apart from Chomsky s)a ppear in his acknowledgments, and one of those is misspelled. Most of Chomsky sM IT c

29、olleaguesBromberger, Flynn, Hale, Harris, Keyser, O Neil go unmentioned.Barsky has simply not done the fact-checking and critical analysis that we expect from a biographer. The 1958 Texas conference at which Chomsky debated with leading establishment opponents is described by Chomsky in a letter wri

30、tten 37 years later; Barsky quotes no other participant. The section on a teacher ”cit es no discussions with any of his 60 or so doctoral students. Barsky just recycles three quotations from women graduates about whether Chomsky is a sexist, taken from a 1988 magazine article. Interesting questions

31、 about Chomskys career remain for a conscientious intellectual biographer to explore;for example, the almost total absence of refereed journal papers from his voluminous publications(essentially all his work seems to be published by invitation), or his baffling insistence that hehas beenshunned and

32、ignored throughout his career. (In truth he has been welcomed worldwide as a political speaker and has increasingly dominated formal linguistics more than 80 per cent of the theoretical syntax papers at the last two conferences of the Linguistic Society of America were Chomskyan.) One will not find

33、these topics examined in Barskys book.The writing is pretentiously sycophantic, from the opening sentence (“The task of writing a bNoam Chomsky gives new meaning to the word daunting”)t o the final verbless encomium ( “ Noam Chomsky, sixty-eight years old, institute professor, linguist, philosopher,

34、 grandfather, champion of ordinary people ”). Between these bookends of cliche lie 215 pages of narrative ranging from soporifics such as “ theyw ere determined to provide a serene and comfortable life for their young children t”o ludicrous verbiage such as“ Humboldt and other enlightenment thinkers

35、j odionn the intellectual mti lieu surroundingand influencing Chomsky, they were always already there, waiting to be reilluminated.Barsky does not even reillumina te the chronology of major events in Chomskys life. The section called“Thef ounding of MIT sg raduate program in linguistics for”ge ts to

36、 tell us when the programme was founded (1959 or earlier is implied; actually the first regular graduate class entered in 1961). Events such as the 1975 Royaumont debate with Piaget or Chomsky sp ivotal 1979 sabbatical in Pisa are overlooked completely.Chomsky sp olitical life dominates Barsky pse r

37、spective. Vastly more is said about Chomsky lsin ks to radical leftist groups and Jewish political organizations than about his academic work. But, even in the political arena, his life story is not adequately chronicled. The reader cannot find out from this book when it was (some time during the Vi

38、etnam War) that Chomsky visited Hanoi or even that he went there at all.Nor can we find out from the section called “ Chomsky and Montreal ” whether he ever visited th Omitting the one fact that we might have expected, the section drifts off mysteriously into a discussion of Quebec fascism in 1942.T

39、he most serious of Barsky osm issions is his failure to check Chomsky sre collections for accuracy or consistency. Chomskys testimony about his celebrated academic war against“ generative seroughly from 1967 to 1975, amounts to denying that he even participated in it, which is an astonishing histori

40、cal claim, even from a victor. Chomsky adds that“ every single appointment” madin the relevant period was of a GS practitioner. The idea that Chomsky, with his enormous prestige, could not have ensured the appointment of the colleagues he wanted cannot be taken seriously. He cited Paul Postal as an

41、example of a GS hiring; but Postal left MIT in 1965, years before the battle over GS began. Furthermore, Chomsky omits mention of Joan Bresnan a major opponent of GS who was hired during 1974-75 with Chomsky s strong support. Then, in a later section, where a charge of running a patriarchal departme

42、nt is being discussed, he offers in defence his successful advocacy of Bresnan asp pointment. Barsky does not explore the conflict between these passages (and fails to mention Bresnan in his index).If Chomsky never writes an autobiography, and this amateurish cut-and-paste hack job is his biography,

43、 then the life of the most lionized intellectual of the twentieth century and most famous linguist in history will remain largely terra incognita .Geoffrey K. Pullum is in the Department of Linguistics, University of California, Santa Cruz, California 95064, USA (email: ).Text A(F

44、rom Nature, Vol. 386, 24 April 1997, p. 776)DNA And Cell Culture EquipmentIntegral bioscience has announced the release of new DNA and cell culture equipment, including the independent multichannel stepper pipette for cordless, electronic pipetting (Reader Service No.102). Other new products include

45、 the Pipetboy with colour coding to keep pipettors identified for specific purposes. The company also offers Matrix disposable filter tips for PCR and other applications. For cell cultureware, there is alsomixing routines. These products can beCellspin and Cellroll, two products that are designed fo

46、r flexible cell adapted for large scale cultivation and are said to be useful for problematic cell lines. The Tecnomat Petri dish pouring system is designed to complement the AgarClav, a combined autoclave and bulk media preparation unit.Finally, there is Tecnomouse, a bioreactor system that produce

47、s monoclonal antibodies without the need foranimals. The manufacturer states that it consistently produces monoclonal antibodies from widely differing cell lines, including human, mouse and rat hybridomas, as well as CHO cells in concentrations up 10 mg ml.Text BDiehl SYSTEM TRACK 300DIEHL introduce

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49、dicator-WLI-will simply let you know when to replace the track system. The rubber of the bushings will be visible!DIEHL System Track 300 shall operate between 3000 and 5000 hours depending upon the terrain.Please contact DIEHL Canada Ltd. for price and availability collect atDIEHL Canada LtdR.R. -Hw

50、y.245Guelph, OntarioN1J6J3Tel:(519)836-0001Fax:(519)836-4602Text CKid s GardenKids are close by, but engaged in their own delights. Some parts of the yard allow for some crossover. One is the sinuous border garden along the perimeter of the property. Its flowing form and varied colours and texturesa

51、ppeal to Michauds aesthetic sensibilities, but also are planted with tough plants that could withstand the pummelling of tiny feet and stray toys.“ I didnt want the kids to feel they couldnt kick balls, or be afraid of squishing the plants, ”Michaud says.When she planted the original border, she inc

52、luded a lavish array of sweet woodruff ( Galium odoratum ), low growing juniper, wintercreeper (Euonymus fortuneiradicans ), and candytuft (Iberis semperivirens )-all plants that can take a beating and still thrive. She has since added more delicate varieties, as her childrens self-control developed

53、. Today, beds of pachysandra, hostas, Euonymous Emerald Gaiety, and impatiens fringe the grassy area.Text D TROPICAL RAIN FOREST ECOLOGY2nd Edition, D. J. Mabberley, 1992. Blackie, Glasgow. 300pp.17.95 (paperback) 39.00 (hardback).The first edition of David Mabberleys Tropical Rain Forest Ecology wa

54、s a welcome addition to the literature when published in 1983, and it was sad that all too soon it went out of print. Those who have long awaited the second edition , however, will not be disappointed. Thoroughly updated, it remains an impressively concise synthesis of the subject yet at the same ti

55、me one that is rich in interesting detail. After an introductory chapter, key aspects of the physical environment of the humid tropics are presented, followed by a discussion of soils and nutrient cycling. Subsequent chapters look at succession; geographical and morphological diversity and plant and

56、 animal cycles; plant animal interactions; species richness; human impacts on the tropical rain forests, both past and present; and the prospects for conservation. Although the treatment is comprehensive, speciesdiversity and the role of animals are two key areas which crop up continually. In fact,

57、the chapter on plant-animal interactions, entitled “ coexistence and co-evolution ” , is over fifty pages, the longest in the book, accounting for about a fifth of its overall length ,excluding appendices. Compared with its main“ competitor ”,T.C.Whitmores INTRODUCTION TO Tropical Rain Forest (revie

58、wed in Volume 5 No.2 of this journal),Mabberleys book is at least half as long again, but while it contains a number of photographs, maps and tables, they cannot match Whitmores profuse collection. Mabberleys style is more “ literary ” than Whitmores-though this should not detract from the fine qual

59、ity of the latters prose-and his structure more fluid, bearing similarities to tropical rain forest ecosystems, perhaps, in the way that the main themes are constantly linked together. In short, the two books are complementary. Tropical Rain Forest Ecology is essential and affordable reading for advanced undergraduate and postgraduate students of tropi