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A linguistic analysis of glossolalia:

Evidence of unique psycholinguistic
processing
a
Michael T. Motley
a
Assistant Professor, Ohio State University , Columbus, OH,
43210
Published online: 21 May 2009.

To cite this article: Michael T. Motley (1982) A linguistic analysis of glossolalia: Evidence
of unique psycholinguistic processing, Communication Quarterly, 30:1, 18-27, DOI:
10.1080/01463378209369424

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/01463378209369424

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 A LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF GLOSSOLALIA:
EVIDENCE OF UNIQUE PSYCHOLINGUISTIC
PROCESSING
MICHAEL T. MOTLEY

A variety of linguistic analyses of glossolalia (the religious phenomenon of "speaking in

tongues") were performed to determine both the extent to which glossolalia is language-like
and the extent to which it is linguistically dependent upon the glossolalist's native language.
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The results indicate the glossolalia is, in more ways than not, both language-like and unlike
the speaker's native language. These results are contrary both to earlier studies of glossolalia
and to the predictions of current psycholinguistic theory. The implication is that glossolalia
manifests a unique sort of speech encoding which cannot now be, but must eventually be,
accounted for by psycholinguistic theory.

Michael T. Motley is Assistant Professor, Ohio State University, Columbus, OH 43210.

The author gratefully acknowledges the advice and assistance of Theodore Clevenger, Jr., Florida State University,
on various phases of the study reported here.

Glossolalia, sometimes called speaking in tongues,
is a rather unique religious phenomenon in which
one's speech resembles that of some language
unknown to the speaker or to listeners. Although
glossolalia usually occurs in a religious setting,
speakers may produce it at will, with or without
emotional fervor or overt emotional preparation.
The religious groups which recognize glossolalia
as a legitimate practice view it as one of several
special gifts which may be bestowed upon indi-
viduals who are deemed worthy by their Benefac-
tor. Once recognized almost exclusively by Pen-
tecostal groups, glossolalia is now practiced within
virtually every Christian denomination and within
several other religions as well, and today speakers
of glossolalia number more than 4 million in the
United States alone (Stolee, 1963; Sherrill, 1964;
Samarin, 1972).
Although there are several fascinating and curi-
ous aspects of the glossolalia phenomenon, the
present study focuses upon the overwhelming ten-
dency for glossolalia to create an impression that a
real language is being spoken. That is, upon en-
countering examples of glossolalia, the uninitiated
listener invariably evaluates the speech to be that
of some true language. Indeed, even to the linguis-
tically trained listener glossolalia does not usually
sound like random babbling or simple gibberish,
but rather sounds sophisticated and convincingly
language-like. Presumably, were it not for glos-
solalia's ostensible resemblance to true language,
the phenomenon would seem less unique or
miraculous than it does. To focus upon the linguis-
tic characteristics of glossolalia is to focus upon the
most substantive aspect of its uniqueness, and this
appears to be an obvious approach to an empirical
study of the phenomenon.
Only a few such analyses have been performed.
For the most part, the rationale for earlier linguistic
analyses of glossolalia has been, basically, that via
such analyses the intuitively supposed linguistical-
ity of glossolalia may be confirmed or discontinued.
Disconfirmation s the norm, but these studies are
not especially convincing because their analyses
typically have been relatively superficial. This sup-
erficiality often seems to be because of reasoning
which allows a single linguistically atypical charac-
teristic to satisfy the criteria requirements for dis-
confirmation of glossolalia's true linguistically. But
for whatever reasons, most earlier studies have
examined very small samples of glossolalia and/or
have employed a very limited range of linguistic
analyses (Campbell, 1965; Nida 1965; Jaquith,
1967; Goodman, 1969; Samarin, 1972).
The present study is also concerned with the lin-
guisticality of glossolalia, and again this concern is
partially one of confirming or disconfirming its intui-
tively language-like impression. The more primary
rationale for this study, however is the notion that
glossolalia may eventually provide a source of in-
formation about the psycholinguistic processing of
natural language and speech. To say that glos-
solalia gives the impression of an unknown lan-
guage being spoken is to say that glossolalia gives
the impression of a unique and perplexing kind of
psycholinguistic processing. The assumption here
is that nonglossolalist speakers are incapable of
producing such speech, because normally speak-

18 COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY, Vol. 30, No. 1, Winter 1981

 ers are bound by the psycholinguistic rules of their
own natural language(s). Thus, according to cur-
rent encoding theory, if a normal speaker were to
attempt a pseudo-language, the expected result
would be not speech which sounds like language,
but rather would be obvious gibberish which is
bound by the rules (e.g., phonological, supraseg-
mental, etc.) of his/her natural language(s).
Theoretically, adult language users cannot easily
divorce themselves from the rules of their native
language.1 The assumption has been tested and
supported. Intuitive comparisons between glos-
solalia and faked glossolalia (attempts by non-
glossolalists to imitate glossolalia or to invent a
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pseudo-language) have shown the faked glossa to
be much less language-like and much less foreign
than the glossolalia (Sherrill, 1964; Carlson, 1967).
Thus, it appears that glossolalia manifests certain
unique limits, capabilities, and activities of lan-
guage encoding processes. At least, this is what
appears upon casual listening. If this is in fact the
case, then glossolalia is a phenomenon worthy of
special attention, for it would violate certain as-
sumptions of encoding theory. But that attention is
premature, of course, until we discover more empir-
ically whether and how glossolalia encoding is in
fact unique. This discovery is the primary issue to
which the present study is addressed.
More specifically, two general categories of
questions are to be examined here. First, is glos-
solalia in fact language-like?2 If it is not language-
like (as most earlier studies seem to imply), then it
is probably not an especially promising target for
psycholinguistic research. On the other hand, if it is
language-like (is more like natural language than
like random babbling), then glossolalia becomes
very difficult to account for via contemporary en-
coding theories, and is especially worthy of further
study. Second, and especially if the first question is
answered affirmatively, does the linguistic structure
of glossolalia differ significantly from the structure
of the glossolalist's natural language(s)? Again, if
not, then the phenomenon becomes less interest-
ing. But if glossolalia does ignore the parameters
and rules of the speaker's natural language, then it
cannot be easily explained within existing theories
of speech production processes. In fact, it would
directly contradict current theories, and thus be-
come a potential subject of study toward the
necessary revision of those theories. These gen-
eral questions will be examined via descriptive
analyses of various phonological and morphologi-
cal characteristics of several glossolalia samples
by the same glossolalist subject.3
Procedure
The pre-analysis procedure was to phonemically
transcribe tape-recorded samples of glossolalia.
The glossolalist subject was a 61-year-old male
COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY WINTER 1981
Pentecostal who had been speaking in tongues for
20 years. His only natural language was American
English (henceforth "English"), and he had re-
ceived no unusual exposure to any foreign lan-
guage via courses, overseas trips, foreign ser-
vants, etc. He was, moreover, generally linguisti-
cally naive and relatively uneducated. On the oc-
casions of the speech analyzed here he spoke at
will, with no unusual overt emotion, in what was
considered to be prayers via glossolalia.4
This subject was able to speak, upon request,
either of two distinct varieties of glossolalia, one of
which was judged by competent linguists to sound
very much like Spanish (henceforth "Variety I"),
and the other of which was judged to sound re-
motely Russian (henceforth "Variety II").5 Several
recordings, each approximately 15 minutes in
length, were made at intervals of seven to fourteen
days, totaling slightly more than two hours of Vari-
ety I and one hour of Variety II. Ten percent of
these totals were extracted for the ensuing
analyses: Four 3-minute samples of Variety I and
two 3-minute samples of Variety II were selected
from the respective corpora, these selections being
random except that samples from the same record-
ing dates were avoided (i.e., no two samples had
been recorded within less than seven days of one
another). The six glossolalia samples were phonet-
ically transcribed by the author, and the transcrip-
tions independently validated by an expert phoneti-
cian. These transcriptions, plus phonemic trans-
criptions of Spanish and Russian (International
Phonetic Association, 1966), plus Denes' phonol-
ogy statistics on two samples of English (Denes,
1964), provided the data for the following analyses.
(See Appendix for examples of glossolalia Variety I
and Variety II.)
Phonology and Morphology: Analysis, Results,
Discussion
Obviously, the range of allowable linguistic
analyses is limited in situations where no semantic
information is available (see note 4). Strictly speak-
ing, the glossolalia situation limits us to phonologi-
cal analysis, and even a more liberal set of criteria
adds, at the most, only a sort of quasi-morpho-
logical analysis and a superficial analysis of su-
prasegmental features. Nevertheless, enough is
known about phonological, morphological, and
suprasegmental universals and about inter-
language trends to allow a fairly thorough examina-
tion of the glossolalia samples' linguistically. And
enough is known of the phonology and morphology
of English to allow reasonable comparisons be-
tween the subject's glossolalia and native lan-
guage. Six kinds of phonological analysis (sections
1-6 below), four kinds of morpheme analysis (sec-
tions 7-10), and a simple suprasegmental analysis
(section 11) were performed.6
19
 1: Phonetic Inventory: Ranks, Frequencies, and
Relative Frequencies of Glossolalia Phones7
Simple phonemic inventories (phoneme fre-
quency tallies) exhibit a few common characteris-
tics across natural language samples an evenly
graduated distribution of phoneme frequencies,
high intersample reliability, etc. Phonetic inven-
tories of the glossolalia samples were thus
examined for linguistically.
Analysis. The analysis examined ranks, frequen-
cies, and relative frequencies of the phones in the
four samples of glossolalia Variety I, and the two
samples of Variety II.
Results and discussion. Variety I contained
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(across the 4 samples) 4,677 phone tokens of 35
phone types; Variety II contained (across 2 sam-
ples) 2,748 phone tokens of 35 phone types. Re-
levant observations were similar for both glos-
solalia varieties.
(1) For Variety I (collapsed across samples) the
distribution of relative frequencies was not very
evenly dispersed among the phones. Rather than
being a smooth continuum composed of equally
graduated differences, as would be expected for
natural language data, the distribution was charac-
terized by a few gradual degrees of change inter-
rupted by several larger gaps. For example, al-
though the difference separating the relative fre-
quencies of most of the phones was less than 0.50
(about normal), the difference between the first-
and second-ranked phones was 5.15. Looking at
this distribution as a whole, the impression is that
there were those sounds which occurred very fre-
quently, and those which occurred very rarely, but
few in between. For Variety II, the distortions were
less severe, but the distribution was still slightly
less evenly graduated than would be expected for
natural language.8
This uneven distribution for phoneme frequen-
cies has been noticed in earlier analyses of glos-
solalia. (Campbell, 1965; Nida, 1965; Samarin,
1972) The characteristic is almost certainly
nonlanguage-like in that the phoneme frequency
distributions for samples of natural languages dis-
play a more evenly graduated phoneme distribution
than was observed here (Nida, 1965).
(2) An examination of the inter-sample phone in-
ventories revealed that there were a few inconsis-
tencies in the phone frequencies between indi-
vidual glossolalia samples. That is, there were oc-
casional instances in which a particular phone oc-
curred with much greater or lesser frequency in
one sample than in the others. For example, in Var-
iety I the phone / 8 /, had 42 occurrences in sample
B, 40 in sample C, and 32 in sample D, but did not
occur at all in sample A. Similar observations may
be made for 5 or so other phones within Variety I.
For Variety II, similar inter-sample inconsistencies
were present, but were much less severe.
20
The obvious conclusion here is that these incon-
sistencies, especially for Variety I, are atypical of
natural language. The assumption is that in natural
languages a phoneme's relative frequency should
be fairly consistent across speech samples, at
least for the more frequent phonemes (Denes,
1964).
(3) A third relevant observation from the phone
distributions is that of the 4,677 gross token
phones of the Variety I samples, there were a few
(~8) phone types which occurred only once or
twice. Ostensibly, this characteristic is again atypi-
cal of natural language, since there one would not
expect to find once- or twice-occurring phonemes
within twelve minutes of discourse.9 Variety II also
contained several (~11) instances of abnormally
infrequent phones.
(4) An additional feature of these data is that
they revealed a very complete language-like inven-
tory of phone types. Even if we ignore the relatively
infrequent phones as being allophonic variations
(see note 9), glossolalia Variety I and Variety II
contain as many phone types (-30) as most lan-
guages do phonemes (25-40). This observation is
interesting not only because it reveals a language-
like characteristic of glossolalia, but especially be-
cause it contradicts so many earlier claims that
glossolalia has a noticeably restricted phone inven-
tory, and that this is one of its primary
nonlanguage-like characteristics (Carlson, 1967;
Jaquith, 1967; Nida, 1965; Samarin, 1972).
2: Comparative Phonemic Inventories: General
Subsequent analyses will address comparisons
of the two glossolalia varieties to one another, of
glossolalia with the speaker's native language, of
the glossolalia varieties to the natural languages
that they intuitively resemble, etc. As a preliminary
step for these later analyses, phonemic inventories
for English, Spanish, and Russian were prepared.
Although these inventories represented preliminary
data, cursory comparisons of these and of the
glossolalia inventories allowed a few relevant ob-
servations: (1) In general, the phone inventories
(relative frequencies for individual phones) seem to
be quite dissimilar. Especially interesting is that the
glossolalia/English and Variety I/Variety II compari-
sons appear to reveal quite different distributions.
(2) The degree of difference of relative phone fre-
quencies between English and either variety of
glossolalia appears to be similar to, if not greater
than, the degree of difference between the three
natural languages. This is the first hint that glos-
solalia might ignore the influence of the speaker's
native language, contrary to implications of earlier
studies (Jaquith, 1967; Samarin, 1972). (3) For
both varieties of glossolalia, the most frequent
phone was / a /. This has been the case with sev-
eral previously examined glossolalia varieties
(Campbell, 1965; Jaquith, 1967), and has been in-
COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY WINTER 1981
 terpreted negatively since / a / is an extremely lax
and neutral vowel; i.e., it is articulated close to the
resting position of the vocal mechanism, as one
might expect for unsophisticated speech. The
comparative phone inventories contradict that in-
terpretation, however: first because / a / is ex-
tremely frequent also for natural languages (at
least Spanish and Russian), and second because
/ 9 / , which is even more lax and neutral than / a / ,
is much less frequent in both varieties of glos-
solalia than in some natural languages.
3: Correlations Between Samples: Relative Fre-
quencies of Phones
More detailed comparisons of the various pho-
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nemic inventories can provide insights on both of
the general questions addressed by this study. The
linguistically of glossolalia can be examined via
inter-sample comparisons of glossolalia varieties,
and by certain comparisons of glossolalia with the
natural language samples. The degree to which
glossolalia conforms to the speaker's native lan-
guage can, of course, be examined by direct com-
parison. The present section bases these compari-
sons on correlation coefficients for relative phone
frequencies of the various speech samples. The
following section (4) examines cumulative relative
frequencies. The rationale behind the various indi-
vidual analyses of these sections is implied within
the discussion of their results.
Analysis. Correlation coefficients were calculated
on the relative frequencies for each phone between
the samples. Pairwise comparisons were for all
glossolalia Variety I samples with one another;
both Variety II samples with one another; gross
Variety I with gross Variety II; both Variety I and
Variety II with English, Spanish, and Russian; En-
glish, Spanish, and Russian with one another; two
samples of English with one another; and two
samples of Spanish with one another. In all, 19 cor-
relations were analyzed, with n's generally around
35.
Results and discussion. (1) In natural language,
one would expect very high correlations between
the relative phoneme frequencies of two separate
samples of the same language. Indeed this was
the case here, with the two samples of English and
the two samples of Spanish both producing very
high correlation coefficients (r = .87, r = .84, re-
spectively). Most noteworthy, then, is the observa-
tion that all correlations between the individual
samples of a given glossolalia variety were very
high higher in fact than any other correlation ob-
tained. The six pairwise correlations between the
four samples of Variety I ranged from .90 to .97,
while the correlation between the two samples of
Variety II was .97. The implication here is that the
glossolalist subject was very consistent, phonologi-
cally, in his production of both varieties of tongue
speaking. This is typical of natural language, while
COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY WINTER 1981
in sharp contrast to Samarin's claim that "what one
[glossolalist] speaks on different occasions is not
the same in the linguistic sense" (Samarin, 1972,
p. 73).
(2) The correlation data afford a very nice com-
parison between glossolalia and the speaker's na-
tive language. Most importantly, the relative fre-
quencies of phones for either variety of glossolalia
were less like those of English than like any other
phone distribution with which they were compared
(r = .45, r = .32 for Variety I/English and Variety
Il/English, respectively). That is to say, both Variety
I and Variety II were more similar to either Spanish
(r = .71, r = .52; Variety I, Variety II, respectively)
or Russian (r = .57, r = .49; Variety I, Variety II re-
spectively) than to English. This again differs with
earlier claims that glossolalia is closely related to
the linguistic features of the speaker's native lan-
guage (Jaquith, 1967; Samarin, 1972).
(3) The range of correlations for comparisons of
natural languages with one another is from .60 for
Spanish and Russian to .38 for English and Rus-
sian. The range for comparisons of glossolalia to
natural languages is from .71 for Variety I and
Spanish to .32 for Variety II and English. The impli-
cation here is that the glossolalia phone frequency
distributions are, on the whole, completely
language-like (section 7.1 above notwithstand-
ing).10
4: Comparative Cumulative Relative Frequencies
A characteristic of random babbling or unsophis-
ticated attempts at pseudo-languages is that the
speech seems phonologically overly repetitious.
That is, despite the range of phone types, certain
types seem to be responsible for an abnormally
large share of the phone tokens. The relative
phone frequencies of the preceding analyses are
not particularly helpful in an analysis of phonologi-
cal repetitiousness or phonological variety until
they are collapsed across phone types.
Analysis. Cumulative relative frequencies were
determined for the fifteen most common phones in
glossolalia Variety I, glossolalia Variety II, English,
Spanish, and Russian. Cumulations were by
phoneme frequency rank.11
Results and discussion. Both varieties of glos-
solalia are considerably more restricted or repetiti-
ous in their use of phones than is English. For
example, to account for 50 percent of the gross
phone occurrences, only 5 phones are necessary
in Variety I, and only about 6 are required in Vari-
ety II, while 8 phones are necessary in the English
samples. To put it another way, the eight most fre-
quently occurring phones constitute 68 percent of
the gross of Variety I, 60 percent of Variety II, and
only 51 percent of the English gross. Ostensibly,
this concurs with earlier investigators' observations
that glossolalia sounds very repetitious, phonologi-
cally inflexible, and thus nonlanguage-like
21
 (Campbell, 1965; Jaquith, 1967; Samarin, 1972).
The implication that this repetitiousness is non-
language-like is contradicted by the present data,
however, since the cumulative relative frequencies
of both glossolalia varieties were very similar to,
and in several cases across the 15 entries even
lower than, those of Spanish and Russian. Earlier
accounts by American authors of the supposed re-
petitiousness of glossolalia have resulted, appar-
ently, from the fact that English is atypically flexible
so that, to an English speaker, glossolalia sounds
overly repetitious. In fact, however, the relative
phonological repetitiousness of glossolalia is quite
language-like.
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5: Phone Distribution by Place-and-Manner of Ar-
ticulation
A particularly strict examination of both the lin-
guistically of glossolalia and its reliance upon the
speaker's native language is available via an
examination of articulatory place-and-manner pat-
terns for the various phone inventories, since cer-
tain linguistic universals are common to virtually all
natural language place-and-manner distributions,
and since the distribution for English is well known.
Analysis. Standard phonemic place-and-manner
of articulation charts for both glossolalia varieties
were composed and examined, with concern for
both the degree to which the patterns were
language-like, and the degree to which they core-
sponded to the glossolalist's native English.
Results and discussion. (1) Place-and-manner
charts of natural languages usually display consid-
erable symmetry. For example, plosives, fricatives,
and affricates tend to occur in voiced/voiceless
pairs at their various places of articulation; for any
place at which plosives are present, a language will
also locate a nasal consonant; affricates exist only
when the language contains the corresponding
plosive and fricative components as phonemes, the
place of the plosive component being immediately
anterior to that oi the fricative component; etc. The
place-and-manner schemata for glossolalia Variety
I and Variety II were remarkably language-like in
this regard.12 That both varieties of glossolalia con-
form in the large majority of particulars to predic-
tions imposed by the phonological symmetry of
natural languages is especially impressive and is in
contrast to Nida's observation that the phonology
of glossolalia is asymetrical and, thus,
nonlanguage-like (Nida, 1965).
(2) There are a variety of ways in which the ar-
ticulatory characteristics of the glossolalia differed
from those of English.13 Indeed, the overall impres-
sion provided by the place-and-manner charts of
both glossolalia varieties is that their features are
obviously nonEnglish, with the degree of substitu-
tion between Variety I, Variety II, and English being
rather reasonable (see note 13, note 8, and Ap-
pendix). This analysis clearly contradicts Jaquith's
22 COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY WINTER 1981
finding that glossolalia contains no non-native
phones (Jaquith, 1967).
6: Phonotactic Characteristics
In addition to the rules of phonetic articulatory
symmetry discussed above (5.1), natural lan-
guages contain phonotactic rules which allow cer-
tain phoneme combinations and disallow others.
Within the present study, the related question is
whether the phonotactic characteristics of glos-
solalia are structured or random, and, if structured,
whether the structure is imposed by the phonologi-
cal rules of English.
Analysis. Phonotactic analysis consisted of first-
and second-order transitional probability computa-
tions for all possible phone combinations within
each glossolalia variety. That is to say, the proba-
bility of phone X occurring in the environments XY,
YX, XYZ, and YZX were determined. The transi-
tional probabilities were computed within and
across syllables of intra-juncture or phrase-like
units.
Results and discussion. (1) Since English has
virtually total freedom in its allowable VC (vowel-
consonant) or CV combinations, one would not ex-
pect comparative oddities in the VC or CV combi-
nations of glossolalia, and this was the case for
both varieties. That the glossolalia VC or CV com-
binations involving nonEnglish phones are
phonotactically nonEnglish is moot.
(2) Although earlier investigators have com-
mented on the absence of consonant clusters in
glossolalia (Goodman, 1969; Nida, 1965), both
present varieties were rich in this regard. More im-
portantly, in each variety of glossolalia there were a
few exceptionally high CC probabilities atypical of
English. In Variety I, for example, the probability
that a given / f / will be followed by / w / (/fw /) is
.50, compared to .001 in English.14 The several
large transitional probabilities of CC combinations
in glossolalia imply that glossolalia is phonotacti-
cally structured rather than phonotactically random,
and the differences between particular CC prob-
abilities for English and glossolalia imply that the
phonotactic structure of glossolalia is not governed
by the phonotactic tendencies of English.
(3) An examination of consonant clusters within
syllables comes closer to the concept of phonotac-
tic rules. The related analyses revealed that both
varieties of glossolalia contain a few consonant
clusters which violate the phonotactic rules of En-
glish; that is, both contain ntrasyllable consonant
clusters which simply do not and cannot occur in
English.15 These results are remarkable since the
intra-syllable phonotactic analysis is an especially
strong indicator of the extent to which the glos-
solalia conforms to the phonotactic rules of the na-
tive language. Although they did not perform
phonotactic analyses, Jaquith (1967) has stated
that glossolalia does conform to the phonological
 rules of the speaker's native language, and Sama- These results are difficult to interpret since com-
rin (1972) has implied the same by stating the parable analyses across various natural languages
glossolalia contains no non-native syllables. That are not generally available. The initial intuitive im-
both glossolalia varieties of the present study do in pression is that glossolalia might be composed of a
fact violate the phonological rules of English while more restricted inventory of morphemes than
apparently operating within some phonotactically would be expected for a natural language. That is
structured system is most significant within the to say, whereas Variety I contained 2355 instances
rationale of the present study. (tokens) of 282 morpheme types, one would expect
7: Morphological Inventory that a piece of natural language discourse 2355
Casual listening to glossolalia gives the impres- morpheme-tokens in length would contain consid-
sion that certain words are identifiable, in that cer- erably more than 282 morpheme types. An ab-
tain monosyllabic and polysyllabic units seem to be breviated test of this assumption, however, indi-
noticeably recurrent. This characteristic adds to the cated that the restrictiveness of glossolalia mor-
intuitive language-like impression of glossolalia, pheme inventories is at least within the broad
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and suggested a morphological analysis of the range of restrictiveness which might occur in
samples within the present study. natural language discourse. Specifically, a mor-
Obviously, the concept morpheme is being used pheme tabulation of the same glossolalist subject's
loosely here. Since morphemes are typically de- English discourse (a portion of his testimonial
fined as units of meaning (akin to roots, prefixes, speech to a religious group) contained only 423
and suffixes, in simple terms), most morpheme morpheme types within a 2350 morpheme-token
identification procedures depend upon at least a length of discourse (f = 5.5; or to compare with
preliminary knowledge of semantic units within the ^/ariety II, 269 types for the first 1323 tokens,
language being studied. 1 = 4.9), with a type frequency range of about 190
17
Since semantic information is never provided by (f = 190 for the morpheme "and"). This is proba-
glossolalia subjects, however, morpheme identifi- bly a more limited or smaller morpheme type/token
cation could not proceed here in its most common ratio than would be found in more typical English
and reliable fashion. discourse, but given that it occurred within dis-
Analysis. Although morpheme identification with- course which was presumably contextually and
out semantic information is clearly a last-resort ap- semantically analogous to the glossolalia
proach, Harris (1963) discusses criteria which (religiously-oriented discourse by the same
might be employed in such circumstances. The speaker), the morpheme inventory of the glos-
procedure of the present analysis was based upon solalia is at least remotely language-like.
those criteria: 1) All monosyllabic and polysyllabic 8: Morpheme Familiarity
units which occurred more than once within all A more testable question on the morpheme in-
samples of a given glossolalia variety were ex- ventories is that of the extent to which morphemes
tracted. 2) The monosyllabic units were identified are similar across glossolalia and English corpora.
as morphemes. 3) Extracted polysyllabic units By far the majority of morphemes in the Variety I
were divided into monosyllabic subunits, with any and Variety II corpora were not common to one
subunit common to two or more polysyllabic units another, and by far the majority of morphemes
identified as a morpheme. 4) The residual units, from either corpus were not common to English. Of
(the remaining monosyllabic units and the remain- the 282 morpheme types for Variety I and 269 of
ing polysyllabic units whose subparts were not Variety II, only 61 were common to both varieties,
common to other such units) were considered to be most of these being relatively low-frequency mor-
morphemes.16 For the impending analyses, mor- phemes. Of the 282 morpheme types of Variety I,
phemes (or more accurately, morpheme-like units) only 43 were morphemes found in English (/ an /,
thus identified were tabulated according to within- / b e / , / b i / , / d e / , / d o / , /dor/, etc.); and of the
sample frequencies for each of their various pre- 269 morpheme types of Variety II, only 41 were
and post-morpheme environments. common to English (/bait/, / b e / , / d u / , / m / ,
18
Results and discussion. Glossolalia Variety I etc.)
contained 282 morpheme types which together oc- Remembering that we are discussing only the
curred 2355 times in the four samples (f = 8.35). phonological similiarity of morpheme types (imply-
The range of frequencies for individual morpheme ing no semantic similarity), notice that this kind of
types was from f = 123 (morpheme / t a / , as in morpheme overlap is serendipitously common be-
/ porta#/, / palala/, etc.) to f = 1. For glossolalia tween natural languages. (For example, Turkish
Variety II, there were 269 morpheme types with a and English share / sik /,/ tsok /, / bir /, / buz /, etc. ;
cumulative frequency of 1036 (f = 3.85) for the two French and English share / d e / , / l e / , / s i s / ,
samples. The frequency rangs for Variety II mor- / buz /, etc.). In other words, the degree of mor-
pheme types was from f = 44 (/ vis /, as in levis I, pheme overlap observed between glossolalia Vari-
I raw's Im/, etc.) to f = 1. ety I, Variety II, and English would not be unusual

COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY WINTER 1981 23

 in comparisons of natural languages. On the
whole, certainly, the morphemes of both Variety I
and Variety II were nonEnglish.
Moreover, within either variety of glossolalia, the
morpheme sequences (two or more adjacent mor-
phemes) were virtually 100 percent nonEnglish.
That is, morpheme selection and sequencing ig-
nored the morphology and lexicon of the glos-
solalist's native language.
9: Morpheme Environment
Given that glossolalia morpheme sequencing is
nonEnglish, the question now is whether it is
language-like. An examination of the morpheme
environment (immediately adjacent morphemes of
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the morpheme tokens within each morpheme
type), revealed a reasonably high degree of struc-
ture (nonrandomness) for morpheme combinations
within both Variety I and Variety II. That is to say,
some morphemes were quite restricted in terms of
their allowable environments, while others were
quite free in this regard, as would be expected in
natural language.
For example, the morpheme Ian I occurred 61
times in glossolalia Variety I, so random selection
of adjacent morphemes (from the 282 morpheme
types) would allow up to 61 different immediately-
preceding and immediately-following morphemes.
In fact, however, all 61 instances of / an I were im-
mediately preceded by one of only 3 morphemes
(/ si /, / vi /, / ri /) and were immediately followed by
one of only 12 environments ( / # / , / d o / , / t a / ,
etc.) with only 17 different complete (pre and post)
environments. In contrast, the morpheme I ta I was
relatively unrestricted, occurring 123 times in Vari-
ety I, with 56 different preceding, 41 different fol-
lowing, and 89 different complete environments.
The degree of freedom for most of the morphemes
of Variety I and Variety II fell within the range of
these examples.19
Within the rationale of the present study, the
existence of restrictive environments for certain
morphemes is especially interesting, for it dem-
onstrates a sort of morpheme structure within glos-
solalia. This structure appears to be similar to that
generated by the rules of natural languages.
10: Glossolalia "Words" and Phrase-Position Envi-
ronments
The juncture patterns of glossolalia tend to sepa-
rate the discourse into rather long phrase-like units
rather than shorter word-like units, as with natural
speech. Although these intrajuncture units are not
acoustically segmented, the repetition of certain
morpheme sequences without common environ-
ments gives those sequences a word-like quality.
For example, the sequence I pasan I occurs 10
times in Variety I, but within 7 different morpheme
environments, and thus appears to be structurally a
glossolalia "word." Some 70 or so pseudo-words
were identifiable for Variety I and about 60 for Var-
24 COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY WINTER 1981
iety II (more or less, depending upon frequency
criteria, etc., for word identification). What is in-
teresting about these units is that some were ex-
tremely reliable in terms of their phrase-position
(technically, intrajuncture discourse) locations. In
Variety I, for example, all 10 instances of Ipatrol
occurred as the first unit of a phrase, all 15 in-
stances of I ando I terminated a phrase, all 6
I exita I's were phrase-initial, etc. The phrase-
position reliability may be observed also for certain
of the single-morpheme words 24 of 26 phrase-
initial / ke /'s, 17 of 25 phrase-final / ro is, etc. Simi-
lar restrictions were found for several of the words
of Variety II, e.g., all 7 lands is phrase-initial, all 6
/ visnlf is phrase-final, etc.
Although it is a bit far-fetched to discuss matters
of syntax for glossolalia, the high predictability of
phrase position for certain wordlike units does
suggest the operation of some sort of lexico-
syntactic rule system similar to those found in
natural languages. For example, it is easy to im-
agine a sample of French with 12 I nespa is all in
phrase-final position, but difficult to imagine any of
the 12 in alternate phrase positions. Again, the
glossolalist appears to be encoding within the
parameters of some structure, and this is an intrigu-
ing analogy to natural language encoding.
11: Stress Patterns
Stress patterns within the word-like units were
quite regular for both glossolalia varieties. Without
exception in Variety I, and with very few exceptions
in Variety II, bisyllabic "words" contained primary
stress on the first syllable if the word ended with a
vowel, or contained primary stress on the final syl-
lable if the word ended with a consonant. Similarly,
the overwhelming tendency for words of more than
two syllables and for phrases not ending in identifi-
able "words" was for primary stress to fall on the
final syllable when a consonant was in word-final or
phrase-final position, but for primary stress to fall
on the penultimate syllable when a vowel was in
word-final or phrase-final position.20 Evidence of
such structure within the stress patterns of glos-
solalia is certainly a language-like feature, although
again the suprasegmental rules followed here were
not those of the speaker's native English.
Discussion
The objectives of these analyses were to deter-
mine 1) whether glossolalia is language-like, and 2)
whether glossolalia reflects or depends upon fea-
tures of the speaker's native language, and thus to
determine 3) whether glossolalia is sufficiently un-
ique to warrant attention in psycholinguistic investi-
gations of natural language. The answers to the
first two issues imply the answer to the third.
Both varieties of glossolalia analyzed here were
nonlanguage-like in terms of their unevenly
 graduated phone distribution (section 7.1 above),
their inter-sample phone frequency inconsistencies
(7.2) and their instances of once- and twice-
occurring phones (7.3).21
Both varieties of glossolalia were language-like
in terms of their complete inventory of phones
(7.4), inter-sample phone frequency reliability (4.1),
overall phone frequency distributions (4.3),
phonological variety during discourse (5), symmet-
rical articulation by place and manner (6.2),
phonotactic structure (7.2), morpheme inventories
(8), constraints on morpheme environment (70),
restrictions on word and morpheme phrase-
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position (7 7), and predictability of stress patterns
(72).
Both varieties were language-like although unlike
the speaker's native language in terms of their rel-
ative phone frequencies 3.2, 4.2), presence of
certain nonEnglish phones (6.1), absence of cer-
tain English phones (6.1), transitional probabilities
of phones (7.2), ntra-syllable consonant clusters
(7.3), nonEnglish morphemes and morpheme
combinations (9), and stress patterns (72).22
This combination of language-like characteristics
and nonEnglish characteristics makes glossolalia
appear to be a unique kind of psycholinguistic
phenomenon. To put it another way, the several in-
stances of structure (nonrandomness) in glos-
solalia, and especially the several instances of
rather sophisticated structures which are indepen-
dent of those in the speaker's natural language,
are remarkable indeed. Psycholinguistically, this is
analogous to the aerodynamics of bumblebee flight
theoretically it should not occur. For example, let
us ignore for the moment the independence of
glossolalia structure from English, and consider
only the existence of its structure, per se. Linguistic
structure is generally viewed as an artifact of the
semantic properties of language. That is to say,
without semantic information there is little or no in-
herent rationale for the structure systems (syntac-
tic, morphological, phonological, intonational, etc.)
of language or other speech behaviors. Random-
ness is acceptable if meaning is not expected, so
structure is mandatory only if meaning transfer is
expected. Within the glossolalia examined here,
however, we have seen several examples of rather
sophisticated structure within discourse which is
presumed to be without semantic information and
which at best only resembles language. Although it
is beyond the scope of the present discussion to
resolve this paradox here, the general choices are
obvious: (1) We can decide that glossolalia must
contain semantic information and therefore is effec-
tively a language, or (2) we can accept the rela-
tively unheard of notion that linguistic structures
may be the result of some factor(s) other than
semantic information. The former choice, likely to
appeal only to glossolalists, has been dismissed by
COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY WINTER 1981
practically all glossolalia investigators (Carlson,
1967; Jaquith, 1967; Samarin, 1972; Nida, 1965).
Pursuit of the latter interpretation should provide
rich insights into the operation of psycholinguistic
encoding and decoding processes in natural lan-
guage.
Since the source of this structure is apparently
not a simple borrowing or retaining of the existing
structures within the glossolalist's native language,
the glossolalia behavior becomes especially
perplexing. Existing theory cannot easily account
for language-like nonlanguage behaviors which
exhibit either the suppression of the native lan-
guage rules or the origination of and adherence to
new rules, much less both. We can hardly assign
blame for this oversight, of course, since we have
been generally unaware that such behaviors
existed. Nevertheless, it now becomes necessary
to account for such behaviors, and the necessary
theoretical revision should prove to be exciting.
In addition to these relatively direct issues raised
by the glossolalia analysis, several more remote
issues seem at least worthy of consideration. It is
possible, for example, that glossolalia might shed
light upon the question of linguistic universals, on
the assumption that the rules of various glossas
might represent some sort of lowest-linguistic-
common-denominators of all languages. It might be
worthwhile also to examine glossolalia for insights
into language acquisition. At the very least, for
example, glossolalia challenges the classical learn-
ing approach to language acquisition (albeit nearly
defunct), since some speakers' first utterances of
new glossolalia varieties appear to have their rules
and structures intact.23 Finally, it is even possible
that the glossolalia sfafe might be worth pursuing in
psycholinguistic investigation. For example, since
glossolalists are able to manipulate linguistic struc-
tures in ways that non-glossolalists are not able,
we might assume their implementation of some
unique general cognitive state (a sort of hypnosis,
perhaps) (Samarin, 1972). It might well be fruitful to
determine that state, and then to examine various
kinds of psycholinguistic processing by inducing
that state in non-glossolalist encoders and decod-
ers; e.g. to determine the limits of the encoding and
decoding systems.
This entire discussion of glossolalia has ignored
the glossolalists' own explanation of the phenome-
non; that is, that their linguistic behaviors are Di-
vinely directed. Neither the omission of that possi-
bility nor its acknowledgement here is intended to
reflect an opinion of religious explanations of glos-
solalia. Very simply, neither agreement nor disag-
reement with religious explanations is relevant to
our discussion. Whether or not glossolalia is Di-
vinely miraculous, it is psycholinguistically spec-
tacular. Regardless of the source of the glos-
solalist's cognitive state, it will be worth our while to
25

account for the above observations of a kind of
speech behavior which displays language-like
characteristics and structure without apparent
semantic information, and which displays
language-like structures which replace the rules of
the speaker's natural language.
NOTES
1 Some mimic comedians can, of course, accomplish the same effects quite
convincingly. But whereas consistency comes to the entertainer only after
considerable practice, it seems to come to the glossolalist quite naturally.
Most importantly, of course, there is, to my knowledge, no empirical sup-
port for the supposed linguisticality of the entertainer's imitations.
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2 Note that this is not the question frequently asked by the layman, "Is glos-
solalia a true language (of the present or past)?" Glossolalia may be easily
dismissed from consideration as a true language by the fact that there are
many more glossolalia varieties than there are true languages. There are
more than 9 million glossolalists, each of whom presumably speaks a dif-
ferent variety of tongues, while there are only about 3,000 true languages
in the world (Sherrill 1964). Reports of persons speaking a true language
foreign to themselves (technically "xenoglossia") are notoriously un-
documented (Samarin 1972).
3 19 Analogous examples from English provide a perspective for these glos-
Notice in this regard that these questions are viable in a case study situa-
tion, since if the speech behavior of the case subject is antithetical to our
predictions then we must reexamine those predictions or our assessment
of the behavior.
4 the morpheme and within almost no common environments.
The subject claimed to be consciously encoding his thoughts in effect,
translating from English thoughts to glossolalia speech but was, as is
always the case with glossolalists, unwilling to later translate the recorded
glossolalia back into English. More typically, glossolalists do not claim to be
encoding, but rather to be "yielding to the Spirit"; that is, allowing output
without overt control.
5 This ability to speak more than one glossolalia "tongue" is rare, but not
unheard of. This subject also spoke a third variety of tongues, in fact, this
one being of an "Oriental" tone-language style. Although I was allowed to
witness this third variety, it was introduced at a relatively late point in the
study and was thus ignored for analysis.
6 ences between the results of the present and earlier analyses of glos-
The text will employ the symbol system of the International Phonetic Al-
phabet, except that / / and II will be used to represent the al-
veolopalatal fricatives.
7
here is some question as to whether the ensuing analyses are phonetic or
phonemic. That is to say. the absence of lexical or semantic information in
glossolalia makes it impossible to determine which sounds constitute
phoneme classes and which constitute allophonic variations of the same
phonemes. Technically, neither distinction is meaningful in this situation;
thus the analyses are most appropriately discussed in terms of "phones."
8
T h e several tables of data employed in these and the following analyses
are too cumbersome for presentation here. They are, however, available
from the author upon request. Complimentarily available tables include
data on (1) ranks, frequencies, and relative frequencies of phones within
and across samples for Var. I; (2) the same for Var. II; (3) comparative
ranks and relative frequencies of phonemes for Var. I, Var. II, English,
Spanish, and Russian; (4) the correlation coefficients discussed in section
3 below; (5) the cumulative relative phone frequencies discussed in section
4; (6) the place-and-manner charts of section 5; and (7) the morpheme
analyses of sections 7, 8, and 9.
9
Given the nature of these phones however, if is at least conceivable that
they be considered as "allophonic variations" of more frequent phones. For
example, if the two occurrences of / f / were viewed as allophones of / v /
(f = 109), then the low frequency of / f / becomes much more acceptable
(though still slightly suspicious).
10
ln other words, based on these data alone we could have at least asserted
glossolalia to be nonlanguage-like if the Glossolalia/Language correlations
had been less than .38.
11 The information provided by this analysis is similar to that of more conven-
tional Type/Token Ratio sorts of analyses, these being less appropriate
here because phoneme Type/Token ratios are predetermined by the
number of phoneme types available (i.e., any sample of more than 150 or
so phoneme tokens exhausts practically all possible phoneme types).
12 In Var. I the only significant asymmetry is in the absence of a dorso-velar
nasal (/ /) despite the relative prominence of dorso-velar plosives (/ k /,
/ g /). In Var. II the only asymmetries are the absence of a dorso-velar
nasal despite the presence of dorso-velar plosives, and the absence of a
voiced apico-alveolar fricative (/ z /) despite the presence of its voiced
complement (/ s /). Technically, there are also asymmetries in the Var. I
absence of I I. / /, and / d I. despite the presence of corresponding
/ /, / /, and / t /. Since the frequencies of / I, I s I, and / ts / are so
very small, however (f = 1, 3, and 2, respectively), these asymmetries are
trivial to judgments of linguisticality.
13 In glossolalia Var. I. for example / t /, / d /, / n /, and / r / were apicodental
rather than apico-alveolar (as in English), and / r / was either "flapped"
26
(/ I / = / r / in the remainder of the text) or trilled (/ y /). (Both of these
articulatory characteristics are common to Spanish.) A few nonEnglish
phonemes were common in Var. I (/ / , //, / x /; also common to
Spanish), and a few English phonemes were absent (/ / , / / , / /,
/ d /, / h /, / c /). Likewise, Var. II contained a few nonEnglish phones
(/ /, / r /, / r /), and was without certain English phonemes (/ w /, / /, / z /,
/ t /, / d /, / /, / j /, / h /, / v /. (These characteristics were not especially
"Russian."')
14 Other probabilities which were very high for glossolalia while very low for
English include / rn / and / tr / for Var. I, and / pr /. / br /, / mpr /, / mbr /,
/ z l / , / n d r / , a n d / n g r / f o r Var. II.
15 Specifically, Var. I contained the consonant clusters / pw /, / vr/, / fw /, and
/ wx / (English disallows any / wC / clusters), and Var. II contained / dl / and
/ sn /.
16
One of the consequences of this morpheme-identification procedure is that
it is bound to be overly liberal, generating more "morphemes" than in fact
exist, since it is almost bound to artificially divide at least a few polysyllabic
morphemes into nonmorphemic subunits. (For example, the same proce-
dure applied to an English sentence containing the words level and levy
would incorrectly identify three "morphemes," / k I, I vl /, and / vi /.)
17 This is an estimate based upon an actual count of 350 morpheme tokens
(during which but not after which the speaker was pursuing the same topic,
thus justifying the limitation). The first 250 tokens contained 108 types,
after which the discourse averaged 3 new types per 20 tokens throughout
the remaining 100 tokens. This projects 423 types per 2350 tokens.
18
Many of the nonEnglish morphemes were syllables which do occur in En-
glish but without morpheme status (e.g., / ta /), but many were nonEnglish
syllables (e.g., / vi /), these contradicting Samarin's claim that glossolalia
contains no nonnative syllables.
solalia data; The glossolalist's native language sample (discussed above)
contained 6 instances of the morpheme ism, each of which occurred in a
single complete environment (baptism of) and contained 190 instances of
20 Whereas Var. I phrases tend to end with vowels, Var. II phrases tend to
end with consonants, thus giving the casual overall impression of two very
different intonation patterns predominately final-syllable stress in Var. II
phrases, and predominately penultimate-syllable stress in Var. I phrases
despite virtually identical stress rules.
21
Notice that if our primary concern were the linguisticality of glossolalia, as
has been the case in most earlier studies, these results would have al-
lowed us to dismiss glossolalia as being nonlanguage-like, and to termi-
nate linguistic consideration of the phenomenon.
22 Perhaps this is the place to acknowledge and dismiss the several differ-
solalia. As suggested above, these differences may be due to the fact that
most earlier studies have employed very brief glossolalia samples, and
several have employed rather intuitive and quasi-empirical analyses. On
the other hand, the differences may be due not to any inadequacies of the
earlier studies, but rather to a sampling fluke in the present study. It is
certainly possible that the glossolalist subject for this study speaks an atyp-
ically "sophisticated" brand of glossolalia. Even If the present glossolalia
samples were atypical, however, the remaining points of the discussion
would still apply. That is, if some (but not necessarily all) glossolalists are
capable of the linguistic behaviors observed here, psycholinguists theory
must still consider explanations.
23 For example, the author has witnessed a recording of the first occasion on
which the present glossolalist subject spoke his third variety of glossolalia
(see Note 9). Although not formally analyzed, cursory analysis of this re-
cording indicated that the glossolalia was structured on several of the di-
mensions found here for Var. I and Var. II.
REFERENCES
Campbell, J. A. A speaking acquaintance with tongues, unpublished paper,
University of Pittsburgh, 1965.
Carlson, A. Tongues of fire, unpublished paper, University of California,
Berkeley, 1967.
Denes, P. B. On the statistics of spoken English. Journal of the Acoustical
Society of America, 1964, 35, 892-904.
Goodman, F. D. Phonetic analysis of glossolalia in four cultural settings.
Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 1969, 8, 227-239.
Harris, Z. S. Structural Linguistics. Chicago: Universrty of Chicago Press,
1963.
International Phonetic Association. The Principles of the International Pho-
netic Association. London; International Phonetic Association, 1966.
Jaquith, J. R. Toward a typology of formal communicative behaviors: glos-
solalia. Anthropological Linguistics, 1967, 9, 1-8.
Nida, E. A. A preliminary report on glossolalia, paper presented to the
American Bible Society, 1965.
Samarin, W. J. Tongues of Man and Angels. New York: Macmillan, 1972.
Sherrill, J. L. They Speak with Other Tongues. New York: McGraw-Hill,
1964.
Stolee, H. J. Speaking in Tongues. Minneapolis: Augsburg, 1963.
COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY WINTER 1981
 APPENDIX
A. GLOSSOLALIA VAR. I (Approx. 35 sec excerpt from Var. I.A, IPA trans- B. GLOSSOLALIA VAR. II (Approx. 35 sec excerpt form Var. ILA, IPA trans-
cription) cription)
tinto ttaminimti ketlta lapaltara vevsisi ropj:a komosobrln- prtaprtedi/ aprta prefnivtri/ekerevetn 11 pr/atrav'i/a trodev/
tinsiantadro mibrnls pemaramndo xira maxra mandarasan- alabraivj j | prtaborl/aprotevej apradev/apraifrij kraprtavj
tida 11 taada devioxita laplta lapatravasn dinisin tiada devisian- laprcbercj mivitn dari/lnamori/ni drtprtevi/fprtaberij labrsele
date dkasempiaddas ketravisita pasndensimo kesnda brtave/lnebertn br/tofifetarapart |j p/fe/dividit pretevl/
ekisantsinesislntiaddas ketaradtrasn dateme | pormeser'lnto aprotave drejetravj lebrt | [ protaprjekrjlnderabariv/apratelevj
komotroxte ketravasn densisindida

!"** William S. Strang, The Copyright Book. Cambridge: M.I.T. Press. 1981.
Downloaded by [the Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford] at 18:14 02 March 2015

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**** Hans J. Eysenck and Leon Kamin, The Intelligence Controversary. New York: Wiley-lnterscience, 1981.
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A collection of essays by psychiatrically-oriented authorities dealing with definition of loneliness, its victims, and its
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you liked Lasch, you'll love Zweig, who provides the background needed to understand thoroughly the role of narcissism
in contemporary thought.

*** Leonard Michaels and Christopher Ricks, (Eds.) The State of the Language. Berkeley: University ol California Press,
1980.
This is a contemporary collection of current essays on the English language produced by British and American critics
covering popular media, contemporary sociology, intellectual literature, ethnicity, gender role and sex preference,
movies, medicine, and regional peccadillos. It is an important collection for anyone interested in the vast variety of ways
our language can be used.

*** Elijah Anderson, A Place on the Comer. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1978.
This book is a well documented urban ethnic study of the "regulars, winos, and hoodlums" who spent much of their free
time inside and outside of a Chicago barroom-liquor store. The book would have special value to the reader interested
in the "processes that contribute to the construction and affirmation of the social order" in a ghetto setting. The author
includes an extensive bibliography and nine pages of chapter-by-chapter notes for the serious scholar.

*** Marie Jahoda, Freud and the Dilemmas of Psychology. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1981.
A distinguished British Freudian scholar reviews Freud's work and makes notations on the issues he dealt with and their relation
to current issues of psychology. A number of language/communication issues are noted. A good, brief commentary, worth the
effort of any communcation scholar.

** Sam B. Girgus, (Ed.). The American Self. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 1981.
This is a book of literary criticism, but useful to the studeni of contemporary rhetorical theory and practice because of
the range of its chapters. There are particularly good essays on religion, feminism and its place in literature, and crime
and pornography. The book provides an excellent background for those who wish to reconstruct the ferment of Ameri-
can society to aid understanding of rhetorical activity.

** Maurice Levi, Economics Deciphered. New York: Basic Books, 1981.

This is a literate example of how complicated material can be simplified without sacrificing important detail. For those
suffering the consequences of living on a relatively fixed income in a world of inflation and tight money, Levi's interpreta-
tions and explanations will provide a wealth of information about how to plan and what to expect. The book is also a
model for scholarly writers who could use it as an example of how to clarify their own writing.

** Paul Evans and Fernando Bartolom, Must Success Cost So Much. New York: Basic Books, 1981.
This is an extended report on a survey of organization pressures and stresses and their consequences for individuals.
The book is useful to researchers in organizational communication both in its contents and in the report of the
methodology. The authors, both American trained but based in Europe, bring sophisticated international savvy to their
report.

COMMUNICATION QUARTERLY WINTER 1981 27