LINGUISTIC ANTHROPOLOGY
Scandinavian, that anyone interested in these fields will certainly find bits and pieces of interest in the chapters collected here. Because they display Haugen’s uniformly graceful prose, some are a pleasure to read. It is a shame that the chapters do not build on each other in a way that would produce a more unified, and so more useful, book.
Discourse Markers. Deborah Schifin. Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics, 5. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987. 373 pp. $49.50 (cloth), n.p. (paper). KATHRYN WOOLARD University of Wisconsin, Madison This painstaking contribution to discourse analysis, while primarily grounded in linguistic tradition, attends to social as well as semantic and pragmatic aspects of talk. Deborah Schiffrin operationally defines discourse markers as “sequentially dependent elements which bracket units of talk” (p. 31), and presents an exhaustive investigation of 11 such markers (oh, well, so, because, and, but, or, now, then, y’know, and I mean) in a corpus gathered in sociolinguistic interviews with sevenJewish Philadelphians. In analyzing her rich corpus, Schiffrin aims for both the “sequential accountability” of qualitative analysis and the “distributional accountability” of quantitative approaches (p. 69). Before examining markers, the author lays out a model of discourse, consisting of simultaneous structures or planes: an exchange structure (of turns, as studied by ethnomethodologists), an action structure (of the interpersonal activities of talk, as exemplified in the work of Goffman), an ideational structure (semantic), a participation framework (of speaker and hearer), and an information state (speakers and hearers as cognitive entities, interacting with the ideational structure). The model and its complexities are not gratuitous. Each structure is central to the specific analysis of some marker(s), and in her final chapter, the author explains how the complex model actually grew out of the empirical analysis. Three general research questions are developed in chapter 3: (1) what do discourse markers add to coherence, (2) do markers have meanings, and (3) do markers have functions. In the subsequent data-driven chapters, each marker is found to operate primarily on one plane. For example, the primary function of oh is to mark changes in the information state, while well works principally in the participa-
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tion framework. In the final chapter, Schiffrin concludes that markers select and display, rather than create, a meaning relation between utterances, and that all markers have an indexical function as well as syntagmatic functions on the different discourse planes. Coherence is the integration of talk not only on one of the analytical/functional planes, but among them. Discourse markers contribute to this integration as contextual coordinates, anchoring an utterance into more than one discourse component at once and indexing utterances to the local contexts in which they are produced and are to be interpreted. There is nothing frivolous in this data-filled, conscientious work. One could wish for a more compelling introduction: the literature review is often perfunctory and the preliminary elaboration of the model of discourse puzzling without a sense of the book’s goals. Repeated introductions a n d summaries guide the reader, but become tedious and even confusing at times when the book is read straight through. They will, however, make the work more valuable for consultation on discrete topics. Schiffrin’s model and interpretations undoubtedly will provide material for debate; attempts to generalize explanations occasionally seem forced a step too far. Somewhat worrisome from an anthropological viewpoint is the universalistic notion of the “social” in the social analysis, in keeping with the sociological traditions Schiffrin draws from. While the author is right that she cannot identify what may be culturally specific to her group of informants, their single ethnic and neighborhood background disappears entirely from tidy explanations of the uses of particular markers. Nonetheless, this is an impressive and important work that contributes not only a wealth of data and insights, but an ambitious systematization of discourse analysis.
The Emergence of Prose: An Essay in Prosaic~.Wlad Godzich and Jefrty Kittay. Minne-
apolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987. 282 pp. $35.00 (cloth), $14.95 (paper).
J. FRAWLEY WILLIAM University of Delaware The past decade has seen an explosion of work on literacy and its effect on culture and cognition. Anyone even marginally interested in such work must read Godzich and Kittay’s study of the emergence of prose text in medieval France. Their theory is that the emergence of prose is tied to changes in signifying practices, particularly with regard to the re-
