The language war.

By ROBIN LAKOFF Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000. Pp. x, 312. Reviewed by TIMOTHY C. FRAZER Western Illinois University

Robin Lakoff has always shown a prescient sense of the role linguistics, as a discipline, should play in the general life of society. In an address to the LSA Summer Linguistic Institute in 1974, she warned her audience that linguistics could become marginalized if it did not address issues of importance to society in general and education in particular. A year later, her Language and woman's place began the discussion of language and gender roles, something linguists had noticed up to that point without remarking on the political implications. That book remains a seminal force in the discussion of language and society. L's latest book, I hope, will be as influential as was Lakoff 1975, for it gives linguistics a role in understanding current history, bringing our discipline very much out of the ivory tower. Writing for a general audience, L analyzes several public events of the 90s-the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill hearings before the United States Senate Judiciary Committee in 1991, the 'PC' debate in the media, the fortunes of both President and Mrs. Clinton, the arrest and trial of 0 . J. Simpson, and the Ebonics controversy touched off by the Oakland, CA, school board in 1991. In the US, most people who follow the news have followed these stories-so what can a linguist tell us about them? L's introduction (happily titled 'What am I doing here?') addresses the issue of whether the contents of the book can indeed be called 'linguistics' and in so doing opens a needed discussion of where linguists' turf boundaries truly lie as we begin another century. Perhaps half of this book will not be accepted as within the discipline by those linguists who 'confine their analyses to the safe havens of relatively small and concrete linguistic artifacts: the sound, the word, the sentence' (8). But in doing so, L argues, we ignore larger issues of meaning and the ways we use narrative to construct reality. Ch. 1, 'Language: The power we love to hate', lists fourteen public events of the past decadethe PC fight, the Hill/Thomas hearings, David Mamet's play Oleana, Hillary Rodham Clinton's role as first lady, the Bobbit affair, the Nancy Kemgan-Tonya Harding skating and fighting confrontation, the 0 . J. Simpson arrest and trial, Clinton's adultery, sexual misconduct in the military, Ebonics, the 'English Only' movement, the death of Princess Diana, and the 'Cambridge Nanny' case-and asks why they receive what appears to be undue public attention, in the form of newspaper space and TV talk time. Aren't all of these issues finally about language? And isn't language nothing more than air? [L does not cite Falstaff here.] But it is more indeed, and L invokes speech act theories, especially the notion of performative verbs, as rebuttal. Yet Austin's (1962) theory of speech acts only hints at the true power of language, for we use it in fact to make meaning and to construct reality. And the ability to do that construction is the key to power. We saw an example of this power when Ronald Reagan, after seeming to publicly endorse Jesse Helms's suggestion that Martin Luther King was a Communist, contacted Dr. King's widow. She interpreted what the president said as an apology, but the White House called it nothing more than an explanation. It is this control over words, too, which creates so much emotion in critics of (merely) descriptive dictionaries. Ch. 2, 'The neutrality of the status quo', describes the ways in which those in power render themselves invisible or, in linguistic terms, unmarked. Until recently, words inflected for feminine gender in English were marked while their masculine equivalents were neutral or normal. Thus, English does not have sentences like *the tigress is an endangered species, and he, rather than she, has been treated as the 'universal' third person singular personal pronoun. Although L does not discuss regional dialects, they offer another power example. What was once simply a regional dialect, the Northern White Inland Northern English (IN) of the Great Lakes region, is regarded by many as 'normal' because of the ideology and economic predominance of the original white settlers in the Great Lakes region, while other forms of English-African American English, for example, or rural South Midland English-are regarded as 'nonstandard'. I have learned this very painfully myself when trying to convince my students that IN is, historically at least, just as much a regional dialect as any other. That effort almost always fails, proving one of L's major points: Any challenge to the neutrality
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or the normality of the dominant groups is treated as a threat, and the response is likely to be hostile (hence the title of the book). In fact, a comment of L's is relevant here: 'speaking the standard reinforces the feeling of being one of us, and their not speaking it gives us a good reason to ignore them' (77). I have tried to communicate this idea to students for years but could never put it as well as L does here.' "Political correctness" and hate speech', Ch. 3, offers a linguistic perspective on two related issues: on the one hand the conflict between campus restrictions on hate speech and first-amendment rights, and on the other hand the strange alliance of conservatives and civil libertarians in defense of the first amendment. The chapter begins with a reminder of the power implicit in the ability to name: To call others nigger or bitch is both an act of aggression against the targeted minorities and also an expression of the power of the status quo. In an unequal distribution of power, to call the namers honky orphallocrat has nowhere near the same kind of force. Therefore, the challenge to the power to name offered by campus speech codes is threatening to the power of the status quo, hence the unlikely (and apparently unprecedented) invocation of first-amendment rights by the right wing (who also respond to speech codes with more naming: McCarthyite, Stalinist, Fascist-again defining advocates of speech codes as beyond the neutral, 'normal' pale). But the first amendment does not permit violent actions, and here, L points out, if we adapt a strict Austinian definition of language as action, we have a new definition of hate speech which would exempt it from first-amendment protection. If physical acts that cause harm are illegal, like assault or murder, then destructive verbal acts would be proscribed as well. In fact, speech act theory 'has been incorporated into the discourse of the law, by both legal scholars . . . and sociolinguists . . . But nowhere does speech act theory have such concrete and far-reaching consequences as in the definitions of hate speech and its legal status' (105). I will skip to Ch. 7 since this is the next chapter that L says linguists will agree belongs within a disciplinary scope. In 1996 the Oakland, CA, school board announced that the majority of its students spoke 'Ebonics', a 'Niger-Congo Language' which was 'genetically based' (227). Besides its obvious factual errors (not so obvious to laypeople as to linguists, unfortunately), the report was confusing, and newspapers attempting to explain the report committed even more factual errors, which L lists to begin Ch. 7. Her discussion is the best explanation of the misunderstandings and half truths that have clouded accounts of this controversy, and it is good to see linguists analyzing it in public (see also Baugh 2000). It is appalling, however, that even though some exposure to linguistics has been a part of teacher training programs for at least a generation, educators could still label a dialect 'genetic' or could so distort the creole history of AAVE as to call it a 'Niger-Congo language' in itself, or ignore its likely connections to English dialects. The remaining chapters offer a discourse perspective on the public treatment of Anita Hill, 0 . J. Simpson, Hillary Rodham Clinton, and Bill Clinton. The theme of all these chapters is that communities identify themselves by the joint narratives they share, but at the same time, as mentioned earlier, it is the powerful who always try to consolidate their position by making meaning or trying to control the making of meaning. L's examination of the Anita Hill case explains this well. 'Anita Hill forced us to accept not merely the term "sexual harassment" and what it implied, but also the right of women to define male behavior for everyone and to give that definition legal standing' (157). But a linguistic analysis of the Q and A part of the hearings reveals much about what Hill had to contend with. L's treatment of tags is of special interest here since she originally suggested (in Lakoff 1975) that tags were used by the unempowered, including women. Admitting that since the 1970s we have learned that tags cannot be assigned a single function, we now know that 'the complex structure of tags encourages their use in diverse contexts . . . [including] the power of a tag to force a response' (135). Republicans on the committee attempted to maneuver Hill by forcing her to respond to their discrediting speculations, thereby giving them some legitimacy. For example: SEN. SPECTOR: Professor Hill, you testified that you drew an inference that Judge Thomas might want you to look at pornographic films, but you told the FBI specifically that he never asked you to watch the films. is that correct? (135)
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The difficulty the tag creates for one wishing not to answer the question is, I think, fairly obvious. Citing another linguist's work (Mendoza-Denton 1995), L observes that 27% of the questions addressed to Hill were tags, far more than were addressed to Clarence Thomas (17%). On the other hand, 50% of Thomas's responses were followed by acknowledgment ('m-hm', etc.) while 46% of Hill's responses were followed by such nonresponses as a change of topic. L's treatments of the Clintons and 0.J. Simpson would probably be of less interest to readers of this journal than to students of literary criticism. The constant theme here, as elsewhere in the book, is that established elites control the narratives about public life, are threatened by alternative narratives, and are hostile to those who offer these alternatives. Because their marriage defies traditional narratives of gender, reaction to the Clintons has been especially hostile. Hillary Rodham Clinton has been subjected to 'continual public interpretation, reinterpretation, misinterpretation, and over interpretation' (185), and both the Clintons are regarded as outsiders by official Washington, part of THEM, not US. Bill Clinton is regarded as a 'hill billy' (276), but he also threatens official Washington because he is racially indeterminate. L describes this as 'culturally black' (275), which explains the way the media have tried to hypersexualize their treatment of Clinton much as Republicans tried to do to Anita Hill. The same theme appears in L's treatment of the Simpson ma1 although here we see the country divided because African Americans do not share the same narratives about the justice system as does the establishment. I enjoyed reading this book. L is not only a fine linguist, she is a witty and insightful writer. I am saddened that it will probably not reach a wider audience and be read by people who are neither linguists nor even academics. At the very least, I myself will use it in my classes so that my students, most of whom will not become professional linguists, will get an idea of the contributions linguists can make to public life. REFERENCES
AUSTIN,J. L. 1962. How to do things with words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. BAUGH, JOHN. 2000. Beyond Ebonics: Linguistic pride and racial prejudice. Oxford: Oxford University Press. LAKOFF, ROBIN. 1975. Language and woman's place. New York: Harper and Row. MENDOZA-DENNTOORNM, A.1995. Pregnant pauses: Silence and authority in the Clarence Thomas-Anita Hill Hearings. Gender articulated: Language and the socially constructed self ed. by Kira Hall and Mary Bucholz, 51-66. New York: Routledge. English and Journalism 124 Simpkins Hall Western Illinois University Macomb, IL 61455-1396 [Tc-frazer@ wiu.edu] New