BOOK R EVI EWS

R. Bruce Lindsay Brown University, Providence, Rhode Island 02912

The opinions expressed are those of the tndivtdual rewewers and are not necessarily endorsed by the Ed•tortal Board of th•s Journal.

Recherches/Acoustique, Vol. 5

Centre National d;Etudes des T•l•communications, Centre de Recherches de Lannion, Lannion, France, 1978.

x + 200 pp. No price given. Presumably gratis on request.

This volume, the fifth of a series, contains ten articles, together with a summary of another, concerning studies carried out at CNET- Lannion in 1978. There is also a foreword by P. Lotand, a list of the personnel at Lannion with their specialties, and an Introduction including lists of publications, communications, theses, etc.

The activities covered are those in speech processing and in acoustics. There is one article on analysis of speech (C. Samuelson); two on speech coding (A. Le Guyader and A. Pissard; and J. Sou- magne); one on speech synthesis (S. Maeda); one on speech percep- tion (C. Sorin); four on speech recognition (J. Siroux and A. Nou- hen; G. Gagnoulet and G. Gargan; M. T. Roth; and M. Rossi, G. Mer- cier, and C. Le Corre); and one on "General Acoustics," this latter being an acoustics study of public call boxes (R. Larvor). Finally there is an abstract entitled "Juncture in French and Prosodic

Structure" (J. Vaissiere-Maeda). Even though all of these articles are in French, each has a rather

lengthy abstract in English, and all the figures have titles in English as well as in French.

In his foreword-an English translation is included-M. Lotand expresses the hope that this volume contains representative samples of CNET activities in this field, and that "readers will be kind enough to send us, in exchange, reports of activities of their own laboratories."

F. E. WHITE

Boston College Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts 0216 7

Linguistic Variation' Models and Methods

David Sankoff, Ed. Academic, New York, 1978. xvii + 296 pp. Price $17.50.

This volume contains 20 chapters by 25 authors (some of the chap- ters being joint contributions). Most of the chapters were originally presented in draft versions at a conference on linguistic variation at the University of Montreal in 1977. There is also a preface, an au- thor's index, and a rather thorough subject index. Bibliographical references, however, are only listed separately after each contribution.

The subject matter of the chapters is wide, ranging from such top- ics as "The Acquisition of German Syntax by Foreign Migrant Work- ers" to a semantic analysis of the language of the political "right" and "left" in France. But the book also contains several contributions

dealing with phonetic and phonological problems which may be of more direct professional interest to the readers of this journal, and I will focus on some of them in the rest of the review. First, however, let me try to point out why such a diverse collection of essays has been assembled in a single volume.

All the contributions in this book address (or at least claim to ad- dress) the central theme of "linguistic variation," albeit on different levels of language communication, ranging not only from phonology

to syntax and semantics, but even to discourse analysis, and the in- teraction of body movements and speech production. As the preface to the volume states, the common denominator here is the interest in that branch of sociolinguistics, inspired primarily by the work of the American linguist William Labov, which tries "to redefine the goal, sub- ject matter, and epistemology of the scientific study of language." While the study of linguistic variation is certainly not new-although some of the methods and models are-the current interest in this area is of

considerable theoretical importance to linguists because of recent de- velopments in linguistic theory. Since the late 1950s, American lin- guistics has been considerably influenced by the theories of "genera- tive transformational grammar," advocated primarily by Noam Chom- sky and his followers. There are now several varieties of this linguistic approach and the influence of this school of thought has actually lessened in recent years. Nevertheless, its influence is still fairly sub- stantial. Transformational linguistic theory of the Chomskian variety relies heavily on a high degree of idealization of linguistic reality. One of its basic concepts is the notion of the "competence" of an ideal speaker-hearer who lives in a completely homogeneous linguistic com- munity, knows his language perfectly, has no memory limitations, makes no errors, etc. While this school of thought does not deny the existence of social and/or individual variations, it considers such variations more as a manifestation of language performance which-so it is claimed-can be insightfully studied only in terms of the ideal- ized system of competence. In contrast to this, scholars interested primarily in linguistic variations attempt to construct models that would explain actual language communication, even if that entails the positing of "competence" models that have probabilistic properties. While the line between the two linguistic approaches is not always as sharply drawn as I have suggested, the differences in basic empha- sis are nevertheless clearly noticeable. Thus the statement from this book's preface, which I quoted earlier and which speaks of new goals and new epistemology in the scientific study of language, is-at least within the confines of the contemporary situation of the field-not much of an exaggeration. Whether this book contributes in some sig- nificant ways to the resolution of this basic issue is another question to which I will return briefly at the end of this review.

Of the 20 chapters in this volume, there are five that deal with problems of phonetics and phonology. The fkst (Chapter 9), contri- buted by Mark Liberrnan, is an interesting, although highly tentative, discussion of the modeling of duration patterns in reiterant speech. Reiterant speech (RS) represents an attempt, on the part of phone- ticians, to get around the difficulties of which points, in actual speech, are to be taken into consideration in measuring segment dura- tion, since there are often several points in close succession that can be candidates for such measuring boundaries. In RS, the natural utter- ances are mimicked by the speaker by substituting some nonsense syl- lable, such as ma, for each syllable of the original utterance. This then allows the elimination of specific phonetic variables from the modeling procedure. In his research, Liberman used nine binary fea- tures to define the so-called prosodic feature set which he considered to have an effect on syllable duration. These features cover three gen- eral areas, namely, stress, boundary location (end of word, end of phrase), and rhythmic grouping (e.g., start of trochee, start of dactyl). The predicted duration of a given syllable or segment is determined by adding, to a fixed base duration, a fixed quantity (positive or nega- tive) for each prosodic feature present. The effect of the various fea- tures is thus additive and independent. Even in spite of some factors which even the author considers unlikely (e.g., little evidence of any interaction among the various prosodic features employed), the model

1087 J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 67(3), Mar. 1980 0001-4966/80/031087-02500.80 ¸ 1980 Acoustical Society of America 1087

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