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SummaryLeonard Bloomfield was the major force in the initial dissemination of Saussurean concepts in North America (Joseph 1989a, Koerner 1989), but his role was limited to his middle years from 1922 to 1933, and for some time thereafter American linguists paid little attention to Saussure’sCours. In fact, studies on Saussure tend to move directly from Bloomfield to Noam Chomsky (e.g., Gadet 1989, Joseph 1990), with little discussion of the intervening quarter century in American linguistics. However, when Roman Jakobson arrived in New York in 1941, he brought with him a long record of commentary and criticism on Saussure’s ideas, and through his American teaching and publications, Jakobson became the next major source of attention to Saussure’s work. In this paper, I examine Jakobson’s complex positions on Saussure, with special attention to his first two decades in the United States. I then briefly consider Jakobson’s role in a third period of Saussurean concepts in the history of American linguistics, a period of revived interest that began in the late 1950s, engaging linguists from a diversity of theories and coinciding in the next decade with the republication of Jakobson’s European writings and with the rise of North American interest in the history of linguistics.

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Both the author (in the Preface) and the publisher (on the jacket) describe this work as a textbook for "serious" students of child language acquisition, but it may have even greater value to professionals as a compendium of major studies in the field. The focus is the acquisition of phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexical semantics by children from birth to age 4 years.Following a brief Introduction, Ingram in "The History of Child Language Studies" (Chapter 2) provides an excellent overview of three major periods of research over the past century: diaries (1876-1926), large samples , and longitudinal studies (1957-present). In reality, of course, the division has not been so neat. Leopold's classic diary of his daughter Hildegard's acquisition of English and German appeared over an 11-year period beginning in 1939 (Leopold: 1939-1949), and diaries continue to form the basis of some recent studies, for example: Dromi, 1987. However, Ingram correctly identifies the dominant research methods of these periods, and his discussion of their theoretical and methodological orientations, as well as their values and limitations, is important. This chapter could serve well as required reading at the beginning of any course on child language acquisition.In "Stages of Language Acquisition" (Chapter 3), Ingram examines various uses of the term "stage" and separates descriptive periods from explanatory stages, reserving "stage" for cases in which explanation and independent evidence are provided (a useful distinction for second, as well as first, language acquisition studies). This leads to Chapter 4 on "Explanation and Language Acquisition," which is devoted largely to theories and theoretical issues in first language acquisition. Two distinctions first introduced in Chapter 2 are developed here. The distinction between two nativist views, maturational and constructionist, recurs throughout later chapters. However, a proposed opposition between "child language" and "language acquisition" is less useful, perhaps because it is somewhat artificial. According to Ingram, child language studies are conducted largely by psycholinguists, focus on descriptive data, and are less concerned with theory, whereas language acquisition research is the domain of linguists, with emphasis on linguistic theory and minimal collection and use of data. The dichotomy is weakened by insufficient references to actual, published examples of either type of research, and it is hardly surprising that Ingram calls for a "reconciliation" of the two "into Child Language Acquisition" (p. 70).The core of the book is Part 2, "Milestones." In five chapters (followed by a brief conclusion), Ingram presents "the periods" of first language acquisition from birth to 4 years of age: "Prelinguistic Development" (Chapter 5), "Single-Word Utterances" (Chapter 6), "First Word Combinations" (Chapter 7), "Simple Sentences: Phonological and Semantic Acquisition" (Chapter 8), and "Simple Sentences: Acquisition of Grammatical Morphemes" (Chapter 9). Although differing some...