LINGUISTICS 627

Surely not even Nabokov could have produced a texture of this richness; it must be Jakobson after all.

This volume deserves to become a classic but not in Mark Twain’s sense of “something which everyone wants to have read but nobody wants to read.” On the contrary, the book should be read for sheer pleasure as well as enlightenment because as Levi-Strauss remarks in the preface, the lectures “bring to life a great adventure of the mind’ (p. xxvi). It is to be hoped that a paperback edition will be produced so that it will be easily accessible to all those who have not yet “been liberated from the boundless power of empiricism” (p. 97).

Adverbs, Vowels, and Other Objects of Wonder. James D. McCawley. Chicago: Univer- sity of Chicago Press, 1979. xi + 303 pp. $20.00 (cloth).

David Dwyer Michigan State University

Adverbs, Vowels, and Other Objects of Wonder, a collection of McCawley’s papers published between 1965 and 1977, covers the entire gamut of linguistic concern: phonology, syntax and semantics, the lexicon, and general theory. These articles, as McCawley professes, have scarcely been modified from their original published versions, save for stylistic im- provements and occasional annotations (retrac- tions, emendations, and further insights).

Consequently, this book should not be taken to be a holistic statement of the author’s view of language theory, that known as generative semantics. In fact at first blush, there appears to be no general unifying theme behind the book, other than what the author puts forth somewhat apologetically in the preface: “If there is a single theme that unites the essays in this book, it is that there is more diversity in language and in ways in looking at language than linguists have generally recognized. Yet, surely, if this is all McCawley had in mind, he could have made his point more directly than by having us reexamine a number of articles on various aspects of linguistics, some of which are now out of date. What then, is the purpose of this collection of previously published articles? An important clue comes from the fact that

they have been presented in chronological order according to topic.

This arrangement only makes sense of the context of an evolution of thinking. The world of transformational linguistics has changed con- siderably since the presentation of the standard theory in 1965 by Chomsky. Since that time generative semantics, pioneered by McCawley, Lakoff, and others, has diverged in one direc- tion while Chomsky, Jackendoff, and others have diverged in another. And in the heart of the fray has been the independent, challenging, and insightful writing of McCawley. The chron- ological presentation then provides one way of understanding the book, as a revelation of the evolution of the thinking of one of the fields leading scholars during the last decade. With this perspective, we see a number of these ar- ticles representing important criticisms of the extant view such as “The Role of Phonoiogical Features. . . ,” “On the Role of Notation. . . ,” and the final article of the book “Some Ideas Not to Live By” in which four “pernicious” (a favorite word of McCawley’s) ideas, quite cen- tral to the general linguistic thinking of 1965, are seriously questioned. From this collection then, we gain an overall view of the character of James McCawley that we could not easily gain from reading individual, isolated articles.

But in addition to what must have been Mc- Cawley’s primary purpose, the book contains some timeless articles of more general interest. These include interpretations of Sapir’s and Whitney’s approaches to phonology, a pro- phetic parallel between Montague and trans- formational grammar, an insightful review of Lakoffs Language and Woman’s Place, and an article entitled “On Interpreting the Theme of This Conference” in which an appeal is made against narrowing the domain of linguistic in- vestigation.

I am tempted to include his “Madison Avenue, Si, Pennsylvania Avenue, Nol” as another such article. It is, for the most part, an excellent presentation of McCawley’s “anar- chistic philosophy” of how knowledge develops within a scientific community and makes the important point of separating the practice (science) from practitioners (scientists), and that what is often in the interest of one may not be in the interest of the other. But I am dis- turbed by the analogy between the operation of a scientific community and that of the American economy including such terms as “in- tellectual capital,” “retooling costs,” and the

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idea “market,” though it raises the interesting question of whether modem science in this country is but a caricature of our economic system. In this regard, however, McCawley reiterates the mythology about the benign nature of advertising, Madison Avenue. Transferring this notion to science, he claims that “responsible advertising” will lead inex- orably to the improvement of knowledge

because the quality of the product will eventual- ly win out. McCawley completes his analogy by suggesting that private support will be less damaging to this progression than public sup- port, Pennsylvania Avenue, a statement that neglects the point that any institution, public or private, has its own reasons for funding research and that the resultant “product” will. despite pleas for anarchy, be channeled along these lines.

Archaeology

Reindeer and Caribou Hunters. Arthur E. Spiess. New York: Academic Press, 1979. xiv + 312 pp. $25.00 (cloth).

Lewis R. Binford University of New Mexico

This book may be conveniently reviewed in terms of three parts: (1) a set of positiori state- ments regarding archaeology, science, and what is viewed as realistic for the archaeologist to seek to know: (2) a summary of the literature treat- ing the ethology of caribou-reindeer. (Rangi- fer) , and the ethnography of human exploita- tion of Rangifer. Such facts are integrated to serve as the justification for certain questions asked as well as methods for their solutions which he offers. Emphasis is primarily on zoo- archaeological approaches. Finally the last part (3) is an application or an analysis of a set of faunal data from several North American arctic sites as well as the Paleolithic site of Abri Pataud which was excavated over an extended period of time by Hallam Movius. I will discuss each of these segments of the book somewhat indepen- dently.

The Paradigm-or What He Expects the World to Look Like

Beginning from what appears as a very limited understanding of the arguments which have taken place in the Americanist literature over the past 20 years, Spiess summarizes con- temporary archaeology as suffering from an “80 year old schizophrenia” (p. 2). This malady is conceived as a situation where diachronic and synchronic viewpoints are assimilated to a con- trast between “science” and “history” which in

turn is characterized as a “generalizing” and a “particularizing” orientation. Spiess sagely sug- gests that an “integrative viewpoint” is needed and proceeds to offer his solution to the field of archaeology. His suggestion is to adopt the “eco- logical” perspective of John Bennett (“Anticipa- tion, Adaptation, and the Concept of Culture in Anthropology,” in Science 192, pages 847-853, 1976) which views the organism as playing a game with the environment. In this game the organism is “endeavoring to learn, manipulate, or change the rules in order to realize goals, satisfy needs, or maintain a degree of freedom of choice and action” (Bennett 1976:848). In other words, the adaptive process is seen as the evolutionary process and the explanation for evolutionary changes rests with modifications in the adaptive process which derives from goal- seeking behavior guided by man’s free will. Spiess cites with approval the following state- ment from Bennett (1976:848): ”. . . how can one speak of material causation of human ac- tions when the unpredictable and creative powers of the human mind are at work in nearly every situation.”

This question has been asked by practically every idealist since the beginning of scientific studies. For instance David Bidney (AA 48:541, 1946) writes “man . . . controls his own cultural destiny and is free to choose and realize the ends we would achieve.” Commenting on this view, Leslie White states in The Science of Culture (1949:142-143):

Opposition to the science of culture expresses itself variously, but one theme runs fairly con- sistently through most if not all of it. this is the objection that it is not culture but how people do things . . . the culturologist knows