Reviewed by Elisa Eileen Beshero <eeb4@psuvm.psu.edu>
The Pennsylvania State University, Dept. of English,
Room 103 Burrowes Building, University Park, PA 16802.

Submitted: Sun, 30 Oct 94 16:59 EST

Abstract: Addressed to both experts and nonexperts in linguistics, _The_Uses_of_Linguistics_ does not attempt to spoonfeed the uninitiated. Each essay stands alone as a cutting-edge development in its particular subdiscipline of linguistic research. However, nonspecialists seeking to learn more about the variety of applications of linguistics will find this book an invaluable resource.

The book is divided into four sections, each devoted to a use of linguistics. The first concerns the application of linguistics to social research, and contains articles on poetics' relation to conversation, Puerto Rican racial terminology, and bilingual linguistic mixing. The second section contains articles relating children's language acquisition with cognitive development, while the third explores the computer as a tool for linguistic research. This section offers perhaps the most practical use of linguistics in Sager's article describing computer linguistic analysis of medical charts to increase the efficiency of medical practitioners. The last section includes work with comparative languages. The articles included here involve the application of marking theory to consonant mutations in Celtic languages and an impressive multidisciplinary approach to a study of prehistoric contact between Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages in India and southeast Asia.

While the book does not cover every possible use of linguistics, it provides both linguists and nonlinguists a sense of the great strides the field has made in recent years.

Bendix claims in his introduction to _The_Uses_of_Linguistics_ that this collection of essays "provides an answer to the question, 'What good is linguistics?'"(13). Addressed to both experts and nonexperts in the field, the book does not attempt to spoonfeed the uninitiated. Each essay can stand alone as a cutting-edge development in its particular subdiscipline of linguistic research. However, nonspecialists seeking to learn more about the variety of applications of linguistics will find this book an invaluable resource. Students of linguistics will not only have material on which to cut their teeth, but may also discover in reading this book direction for their own future research.

The book is divided into four sections, each devoted to a use of linguistics. The first section is devoted to the application of linguistics to social research, and contains work by Deborah Tannen relating poetics and literary discourse to everyday conversation, a study by William A. Stewart concerning decreolization and forms of miscommunication between those using the black English vernacular and standard English, Bendix's contribution on Peurto Rican racial terminology, and Ana Celia Zentella's study contextualizing bilinguals' alternation of languages in a spoken sentence with their awareness of social situations. While the first half of the title of Stewart's article, "From Xenolect to Mimolect to Pseudocomprehension" establishes an inaccessible tone, Stewart offers a fully understandable explanation for his new coinages, and the nonexpert will find his article quite readable. Moreover, Stewart offers an informative summary of the history of research on pidgin and creole varieties of European languages as well as English.

The second section contains three articles concerning children's development in language acquisition. Katherine Nelson suggests in her article that children use more or less complicated forms of language in different cognitive contexts. A child's increased ability to think about something happening in the future influences the way the child verbalizes the situation. Thus, according to Nelson, children's speech evolves along with the development of temporal concepts, their ability to distinguish past, present, and future. Jennifer Hsu and Helen Cairns focus their study on children's interpretation of pronouns at various stages of linguistic development, and claim that children alter their concepts of grammar as they age. Gail Wasserman and Rhianon Allen's contribution provides possible reasons for delays in linguistic development of physically handicapped toddlers and emphasizes, as all of these articles do, a need for further research.

The third section explores the uses of the computer as a tool in linguistics. Here Terence Langendoen and Yedidyah Langsam offer new insights into Chomsky's theories on the comprehension of complex sentences by introducing a parsing computer program which attempts to fully describe human mental processes in decoding these grammatical structures. Their work represents an interesting advance in the growing field of psycholinguistics, which is concerned with mental deciphering of language. Here also is Naomi Sager's article describing computerized text analysis of medical charts. Providing perhaps the most practical use of linguistics described in this volume, Sager presents the computer analysis of medical records as a way to significantly reduce paperwork and increase clinical physicians' efficiency in treating patients. Sager offers her linguistic computer tool as a means to better organize and analyze patients' records than human physicians have the time to do. Moreover, Sager's computerized linguistic analyzer would also act as a base for comparing similar patient files and allowing for statistical analyses of symptom data.

The last section includes work in what used to be the main subject matter of linguistics, the comparative study of languages. Bendix claims in his introduction that while this form of linguistics is no longer the central study of the discipline, it is still pursued in terms of contemporary theoretical development. The two articles in this section thus do not reflect outmoded endeavor, but rather the use of the new applied to old problems and concerns. Penny Willis's article concerns consonant mutations in Celtic languages and applies marking theory to determine predominate forms of Celtic words in order to provide evidence that the Celtic language has altered in small ways over time, showing gradual change in the basic forms of individual words. Franklin Southworth's study of the prehistoric contact between Indo-Aryan and Dravidian languages concludes the book with an impressive multidisciplinary analysis of evidence to reconstruct a possible chain of events reflected in a present linguistic phenomenon in India.

The presence of such diverse essays within a single volume attests to the wide significance of linguistics in the world. While the book does not cover every possible use of linguistics, it provides both linguists and nonlinguists a sense of the great strides the field has made in recent years.