language and symbolic systemsby yuen ren chao
TRANSCRIPT
Language and Symbolic Systems by Yuen Ren ChaoReview by: Chin-chuan ChengFoundations of Language, Vol. 7, No. 3 (Aug., 1971), pp. 439-440Published by: SpringerStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25000547 .
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REVIEWS 439
Yuen Ren Chao, Language and Symbolic Systems, Cambridge University Press, 1968. 240+xv pp. $ 1.95.
In 1968 Professor Chao published three books: Sayable Chinese (Asian Language Publications, San Francisco), A Grammar of Spoken Chinese, and the book under review, Language and Symbolic Systems. It is truly inspiring to witness the continuing creativity of a scholar who was born in the last century.
The book, as Professor Chao says in the Preface, is written for "the general reader - general reader in the sense that he may be a specialist in some other
subject, but new to the field of liguistic inquiries" (v). The following topics are included in the twelve chapters: language and the study of language, phonetics, phonemics, vocabulary and grammar, meaning, change in lan
guage, languages of the world, writing, language and life, languages in con tact, language technology, and symbolic systems. The coverage is compre hensive. However, the content is similar and in some parts almost identical to that of one of Professor Chao's own earlier books in Chinese entitled Yi}ydn wenti (questions in linguistics, published by National Taiwan Uni
versity, Taipei, 1959), which consists of sixteen lectures he gave at Taiwan
University in 1959. It is odd that Professor Chao in no place mentions that book, but it is fortunate that many of the ideas given in the earlier work are now presented to English readers.
In most English introductory linguistics texts the emphasis is on western
languages. The Chinese language, which has a written history of more than three millennia and a geographical spread covering the larger part of Asia, is unfortunately rarely considered. As Professor Chao says (p. 5), just like the mathematician who is proud of being poor at figures, a linguist is often
proud of not being a polyglot. Professor Chao is a great linguist and is proud of being able to cite and speak many dialects of China and many languages of the world. In this book the Chinese language finds its proper place. Even
though no detailed structure of Chinese is given, the casual and frequent mentioning of Chinese in many places already provides a balanced view of
language. In this regard, however, it is surprising that Chapter 2, which deals with phonetics and phonetic symbols, does not discuss tone, which most of the general readers know to be a most distinct characteristic of many Asian
languages. I feel that a more balanced view of language would include, along with consonants and vowels, the nature of tone and the five-point scale which Professor Chao himself devised to measure tones and which has been used since the 1930's.
As to the linguistic theory underlying this book, it is quite clear that Pro fessor Chao is presenting mostly the basic ideas of the American descriptive
Foundations of Language 7 (1971) 439-440. All rights reserved.
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440 REVIEWS
linguistics. He says in the outset that "a language exists primarily in the brain of its speaker as a set of habits and dispositions" (p. 9). When he talks about grammar he gives order, modulation, phonetic modification, and selec tion as features of grammatical process. In fact he himself says, "Perhaps I owe it to the reader in the profession to explain what school of thought I
belong to, though a glance over a few pages of the book will quickly give me
away as a practising phonetician and a descriptive linguist" (vi). Neverthe less he has a section (pp. 64-65) on generative and transformational gram
mars, where he speaks of kernel sentences and transformations. But he does not explicitly mention the more important aspects of the philosophy of
generative-transformational grammar, such as the view of language as a set of rules, the differentiation of competence and performance, etc. Moreover, in the Suggested Further Readings one finds no titles in generative-trans formational grammar. It seems to me that a general reader should also be
directed to the generative-transformational literature for a balanced view of
language theory. Professor Chao says in the Preface that this is a somewhat personal book
and the personal pronoun 'I' appears very often. In fact he gives freely not
only his own linguistic experiences but also those of one of his daughters and his granddaughter. Moreover, we find almost in every page that Professor Chao approaches his subject with warmth and humor. His book will make
interesting and pleasant reading for the specialist in linguistics as well as the
general reader.
University of Illinois CHIN-CHUAN CHENG
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