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more issues than it resolves. Similarly, in his chapter on disadvantage, he gives a lengthy description of Bernstein's work and discusses detractors such as Rosen and Labov, but he never sets the debate in its historical context, the growing Civil Rights Era of the 1960s and 1970s. Here his attempts to be distanced and objective are not very enlightening, as neither discussion reflects how debates about language are part of larger changing political scenes. In the end, I found An Introduction to Sociolinguistics a surprisingly good read, both clearly written and thorough. As a linguistic anthropologist, I would not use it as a textbook, although I strongly recommend it as a basic reference work. Wardhaugh's broad range of topics and extensive examples, particularly his long quotations from texts (for instance, multiparagraph examples that show the differences between Norwegian Bokmal and Nynorsk) make it an invaluable resource for teaching and an excellent place to go for further information on subjects connected to sociolinguistics. Although the structure of the book sometimes betrays the fact that it is a fourth edition rather man an entirely new work, Wardhaugh's diligence in providing the latest sources on the topics he does cover makes this most recent edition very worthwhile. Indiana University Department of Communication and Culture Ashton-Mottier 1790 East 10th St. Bloomington, IN 47405 monaghan @ indiana.edu
Global Semiotics. Thomas A. Sebeok. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001. xxiii + 238 pp.
RICHARD J. PARMENTffiR Brandeis University
Global Semiotics brings together 17 papers by the late Thomas A. Sebeok, who was arguably the leading semiotician in the world. Several of the included papers are revisions of major lectures given at academic conferences, institutions, and congresses; several are expansions of previously published papers; several are addresses honoring or memorializing semiotic colleagues (Roberta Kevelson, Umberto Eco, Jakob van Uexkull, Milton Singer, Sydney Lamb, Irmengard Rauch, and Vilmos Voigt); and several are what could be kindly labeled "occasional" papers. The papers are of unequal length, polish, and importance. Readers with limited time should go straight to the title essay "Global Semiotics" (chapter 1) and men consider the comprehensive "Nonverbal Communication" (chapter 8), the programmatic "Signs, Bridges, Origins" (chapter 5), and the speculative "The Cognitive Self and the Virtual Self' (chapter 11). Some readers may find the two papers detailing Sebeok's role in the establishment of Finno-Ugric studies at Indiana University (chapters 16 and 17) of limited interest. Taken together, however, the papers can be seen as contributing to three interrelated themes that run throughout Sebeok's distinguished scholarly career. First, they show Sebeok's effort to look at semiotics as a "global" enterprise, not in the imperialist sense of being the metalanguage or organon for all scientific and humanistic fields of inquiry, but in the spatially and temporally inclusive senses of comprehending scholarly
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activity around the globe and encompassing sign phenomena through all evolutionary phases of life. Trained initially in linguistics and anthropology, Sebeok extended his scholarly interests to include many fields ranging from ethology to literature. The vast erudition displayed in these papers is frequently manifest in insightful considerations of diverse topics such as Galen's theory of 'indications" in Greek medical symptomatology, the syncretic artistic devices of Mozart's Don Giovanni, the signifying behavior of the domestic cat, humans' limited ability to interpret internal bodily signals such as chest pains, literary references to horses in detectivefiction,and jokes in which the punch line is a gesture. Sebeok claims a self-conscious motivation behind this omnivorous learning: that "more or less anomalous semiosic phenomena" (p. 122) are particularly revealing of the paths Unking the global semiotic web. Second, the papers consistently stress the point that is one of the hallmarks of Sebeok's contribution to semiotic theory, namely, mat while life is coterminous with sign phenomena, from the microscopic activity of bacteria, neurons, and genes to the macroscopic behavior of plants and animals to the ecosystem as a totality, articulate language is the unique capacity of human beings. Sharply critical of those researchers, victims of what he calls the "language-endowed-animal illusion" (p. 89), who claim language ability for animals and especially for nonhuman primates, Sebeok argues that while "all species engage in species-specific sign action, none other than humans communicate by means of language" (p. 90), and he asserts that the claim that apes have learned American Sign Language is a "fairy tale" (p. 192). (Part of the problem, he notes, is the phenomenon called the "Clever Hans Effect," named after a stallion in Berlin whose apparent ability to tap out answers to arithmetic problems was rather the result of unintentional cueing from the behavior of the human questioners.) On the other hand, Sebeok demonstrates that "the attentive, empirically founded study of communicative systems in the other animals will clarify fundamental questions about the evolution of language in hominids" (p. 180). Third, these papers reveal Sebeok's energetic commitment to documenting the personalities and human relationships that make up the semiotic web. Relying on his remarkable memory for detail as well as on exhaustive bibliographic control, Sebeok recounts in several of the papers his personal encounters with the famous and not-so-famous practitioners of semiotics around the world. His recollections of formal encounters at lectures and symposia and informal conversations over meals or on extended walks provide for numerous illuminating and amusing anecdotes. Sebeok was in the audience in New York when Ernst Cassirer delivered his paper on structuralism in linguistics in 1944 and in Bloomington when Margaret Mead baptized the term semiotics at an interdisciplinary conference in 1962. The historical sections of the book follow what Sebeok calls the "genealogical method to semiotic historiography" (p. 171), a phrase alluding to W. H. R. Rivers's protocol for kinship analysis grounded in the particularities of interpersonal relationships ( A Genealogical Method of Collecting Social and Vital Statistics," Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 30:74-82, 1900). Some may object to the anecdotal and personal aspects of this method, but Sebeok writes not as a professional historian but as an "implicated deponent" and "predisposed witness" (p. 33). Since Sebeok was present at most of the important semiotics conferences for the past 40 years, had an editorial hand in the publication of thousands of journal articles, monographs, and collected volumes, and had personal ties with practically every major semiotician around the globe, these genealogical passages will be of great value to future historians of semiotics. Notable are Sebeok's efforts to rescue "neglected" figures in the history of semiotics—from Galen, the "subtle founder of clinical semiotics" (p. 52), whose ideas about symptoms anticipates Peirce's concept of indexical legisigns, to Susanne Langer, whose theory of the "symbolic expression of intuitive cognition" (p. 143) foreshadowed contemporary work on secondary and tertiary modeling systems. Several of the papers detail the story of Sebeok's championing of Yuri Lotman, the key figure in the Tartu school whose manuscripts on the semiosphere Sebeok first carried to the West, and Jakob van Uexkull,
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a biologist whose writings on the Umwelt in the early decades of the 20th century provided a foundation for modern biosemiotics. Readers of this journal will undoubtedly be familiar with Sebeok's classic anthropological linguistic studies of Cheremis verbal art, which demonstrate the fruitfulness of Jakobsonian poetics for a range of language-based phenomena (Sebeok, Structure and Texture: Selected Essays in Cheremis Verbal Art, Mouton, 1974). Sebeok's later semiotic essays, now published here SO years after his early studies in Uralic linguistics, should be no lessrelevantfor the present generation of linguistic anthropologists, who could hardly disagree with Sebeok's claim that semiosis (or culture) is the "ceaseless ebb and flow of messages, which are formal, insubstantial concepts, strings of abstract signs. Messages are copied, handed down, from one generation to the next" (p. vii). Through this book, published in the last year of his life, Tom Sebeok reveals himself as the truly global citizen and ambassador of modern semiotics. Department of Anthropology Brandeis University Mail Stop 006 Waltham, MA 02454-9110
[email protected]
A Matter of Taste: How Names, Fashions, and Culture Change. Stanley Lieberson. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000. xvi + 334 pp. BETSY RYMES University of Georgia, Athens
An expanded version of this review is available at the JLA website: http://www.cuianet.org/sla/jla/jlamain.html, under volume 13, number 2. Why are some names popular and some fleeting? Why doesn't anyone name a child Hester anymore? Why did Issur Danielovitch Demsky choose Kirk Douglas as a stage name? And what do the answers to these questions tell us about culture? In A Matter of Taste: How Names, Fashions, and Culture Change, Stanley Lieberson performs the rarely accomplished task of posing seemingly insurmountable questions about therelationshipbetween language (specifically names) and culture, and answering them through compelling evidence and argument Lieberson begins to approach this problem in chapter 1 by asking, "Why Do Tastes Become Tastes?" His first broad question is simply, "Are names a matter of taste?' lieberson's vast compendium of line graphs showing the percentage of name turnovers per year since 1600 provides convincing data to support his argument that since the late 19th century, names have become a matter of fashion (rather than custom). In chapter 2, "Becoming a Fashion," he graphically juxtaposes other social changes—school attendance, urbanization, divorce rate, household size, television ownership, movie attendance, radio listenership—with the increasing rate of name turnover. He refrains, however, from any grand claims about causal relationships. At best, he explains, one can point to a cluster of factors (including all of the above) that contributed to the acceleration of naming as fashion. Lieberson then begins to tackle the second of his broad questions: Once something is understood to be a "matter of taste," what influences the form of that taste? He suggests that the "social order" (e.g., issues of race, class, gender) w of negligible influence. In chapter 3,
