This book is a revision of the author's Cornell University PhD thesis of 1978.) /. This, I think, is the last book review I shall ever write. A book review ought to be principally about the book in question; the reviewer and his feelings ought to be kept to a minimum, and that minimum should be somewhat remote. But more and more I find, my own book reviews are essays about what I think and feel. Why not, then, just write the essays? Seeing no convincing rejoinder to that logic, I have decided to make this my swan song in the genre-though not, I trust, in some of the others. Now in a fellow's swan song it seems only reasonable to allow him liberties that one would not ordinarily permit: forgive me if I speak feelingly of things I have witnessed or felt if they are at all relevant to the book under review. I recall, as one of the high points of my education in linguistics, sitting in the Indiana University Ethnolinguistics Seminar when Henry Lee Smith visited us (I believe it was in the early part of 1950, and in the cold of winter) to lay before the faculty and graduate students the system of intonational analysis that he and George Trager had worked out and were about to publish as An Outline of English Structure. In that work, many readers will recall, these two men vigorously advocated four phonemic pitches for English, four phonemic stresses, and four phonemic junctures. A tiny footnote to the fading history of those days is that one of the graduate students at I.U. got up an "intonational Nicene Creed," which thereafter we sometimes fell to reciting in a mock-solemn singsong: "I believe in four pitches, four stresses, and four junctures. . ." and so on. Do not think, Reader, that this was real mockery: it was rather the intellectual horseplay that young people allow themselves when they are caught up in movements which they deem so meaningful that horseplay is needed for release from tension. It was, indeed, a form of worship-of respect for ideas, of admiration for one's teachers, and of wonder that we were a part of it all. In fact, many of us

It is well known that an English sentence may have its accent, or point of greatest prominence, on any of several syllables. This phenomenon has been called SHIFT.1 It is the feature of English that permits us to render such a sentence as The man can see the boy in a variety of ways, as follows:The man can see the Boy.The man can SEE the boy.The man CAN see the boy.The MAN can see the boy.

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The word DERIVATION and its cousins DERIVE and DERIVATIONAL are technical linguistic terms. Thus they ought to be models of sober precision. But in fact these words carry several meanings and they have a way of slipping from one sense to another without warning, so that when an author uses a word from this group his meaning is not always unmistakable.