Essays in Semantics and Pragmatics in Honor of Charles J. Fillmore.

• Author: Miller, Roy Andrew

The Jubilar whose sixty-fifth birthday this volume celebrated is best known for his 1968 paper, "The Case for Case."(1) This captured the imagination of a generation that until then had rarely heard "meaning" mentioned in connection with linguistics, one also that had never encountered a language in which grammatical case played much of a part. The initial elan of this discovery has survived better than the case it originally made,(2) but contributors to this book document several of Fillmore's subsequent successes. Particularly noteworthy has been his 1977 discovery that knock in he knocked on the door with his fist means something different from knock in he knocked the door down (p. 10); and there is a glowing description of the day (year unspecified) when he walked into George Lakoff's office and "asked coyly if I had ever thought about the sentence 'From my office, I can see the bay'" (p. 133).

Understandably, this level of insight has been impossible to sustain throughout all fourteen papers by sixteen contributors.(3) Most of the authors content themselves with a modicum of encomium and then proceed to discuss topics only vestigially related to Fillmore's achievements. The main concern of the volume is modern English; but four papers occupying approximately a third of the book may possibly be of interest to readers of the Journal.

Ervin-Tripp, Nakamura, and Guo, "Shifting face from Asia to Europe," pp. 43-71, disarmingly confess at the outset that "we are far from reaching more than a crude preliminary analysis" (p. 44). With this it is impossible to disagree. They take English face in the sense of 'honor, reputation' as a Platonic ideal, and view their problem as finding out how this "concept" is expressed "in Asian languages" (pp. 48 and passim). Since these special senses of English face are easily documented calques on Chinese, while the Korean and Japanese data that they cite also involve calques on Chinese, together with original etymological materials further conflated by loanwords, the least that may be said of their search for the "Asian expressions" of this "concept" is that they have got the direction of their quest precisely backwards. In view of this, it is perhaps not surprising that the authors show themselves totally unaware of the existence of the categories of loanwords and calques, neither of which they ever mention. When they write, "mentsu is the Japanese equivalent of [Chin.] mianzi" (p. 57), they mean that the Japanese word is a recent (early twentieth century) loan from the Chinese form. And their unfamiliarity with the phenomenon of the calque is particularly poignant because, after all, English face in the senses with which they are concerned is nothing more than a calque on Chin. lian id.(4) Numerous elementary errors in data and their interpretation of the same (e.g., the incorrect allegation that "Kor. nach and elkwul . . . are used interchangeably," p. 49) might have been avoided by consulting standard lexical sources,(5) none of which are placed under contribution. Consulting good dictionaries would also have helped them edit out many of their near-pidgin glosses (e.g., Chin. bu yao lian 'shameless',(6) here rendered 'not want face', p. 49). These are not only misleading but at times verge upon racist caricature.

19. Y. Fujii, "Mental-space builders," pp. 73-90, studies "English and Japanese utterances that are to be understood . . . as an expression of wish [sic]" (p. 74), as hommage to another of the Jubilar's insights, his 1987 exegesis of the levels of conditionality inherent in if I were your father, I would spank you. This "expression of wish" may, as we might expect, be translated into Japanese in several different ways, a number of which Fujii explores.(7) But about the curious term in her title she is...