Obra ressenyada: Mireia LLINÀS. Petites paraules. ¿D'on surt la gramàtica?. Barcelona: Empúries, 2001

Tubau, Susagna

Tubau Muntaña, Susagna

Diposit Digital de Documents de la UAB

In chapter 9, the book deals with thesources of documentation legal transla-tors have at their disposal. The authoroffers a general view of existing resourcesand stresses the importance of theknowledge acquired through practiceand which can take a material shape andbe systematically filed by translatorsthemselves for future use. This chapterends by giving a great deal of useful ref-erences which include electronic databases, web sites, and newsgroups.In her epilogue, the author sketchessome future perspectives for research inthe field of legal translation. She partic-ularly focuses on the usefulness of corpuslinguistics, empirical studies of transla-tion practice, and the developing of soft-ware which takes advantage of the recur-ring phraseology and structures of legaltext types. Finally, we have a generouscatalogue of literature on this subject andalso a very generous list of referenceworks for the practice of legal translationbetween English and Spanish.All in all, the book under review here isa very generous work where a profession-al and researcher lets the general publicinto some of the magic formulae other-wise reserved to those who dare to under-take this complex branch of translation.The author’s final wish, stated in the epi-logue, for the legal translator to lead a bet-ter life, is undoubtedly a guiding principlefor her research, and hers is a very remark-able contribution to that cause.ReferencesHatim, B. & I. Mason, Discourse and theTranslator, London, Longman, 1990.Esther MonzóUniversitat Jaume I de Castelló112 Links & Letters 8, 2001 Book ReviewsPetites paraules. ¿D’on surt la gramàtica?is a comprehensive overview of the basicconcepts and corollaries of Generativegrammar, a theoretical framework firstproposed by Noam Chomsky whichattempts to approach language scientif-ically by formulating and checkinghypotheses, by predicting what languagewill allow and what it will not. This the-ory basically seeks to explain (i) adultgrammatical knowledge from a globalpoint of view, that is, including all lan-guages in the world, and (ii) how lan-guage is acquired and develops in thehuman mind assuming that humans aregenetically endowed to acquire an adultgrammar.The book is divided into five mainchapters which, in turn, are further sub-divided into more specific sections head-ed by an explanatory title. A great deal ofuseful examples are included throughoutthe text in order to clarify theoreticalissues, as well as to lead the reader tothink about his or her own linguisticknowledge. An analytic index of relevantconcepts is included at the end, so thatthe book can be used for quick consul-tation.Simplicity (but not shallowness) is akey word to define the book: the authortries to move away from specialised jar-gon when possible, offering plain defin-itions and explanations whenever a tech-Mireia LLINÀS,Petites paraules. ¿D’on surt la gramàtica?Barcelona: Empúries, 2001.nical word cannot be avoided. This way,anyone interested in language, but notnecessarily a philologist or a linguist, canfollow and enjoy the reading.As Llinàs establishes in chapter 1, theaim of the book is to explain what Gen-erative grammar is about and how itaccounts for our linguistic knowledge inan understandable way. Two basic ideashave to be taken into account by thereader to grasp the essence of Genera-tive grammar: (i) grammar is the basis oflinguistic knowledge and (ii) it is innate,inherent to human beings.In chapter 2, the author addressessome of the central issues that shapeGenerative grammar, such as the ideathat we are biologically prepared to learnany language in the world, since we areborn with an internalised UniversalGrammar. According to Generative the-ory, Universal Grammar consists of aseries of principles and parameters. Prin-ciples are shared by all languages in theworld, whereas parameters are responsi-ble for linguistic diversity, since each lan-guage chooses its particular set. There-fore, all human beings have an innateknowledge of a set of grammatical oper-ations which allow us to build up sen-tences and account for linguistic creativ-ity, that is, the capacity of all individualsto create and interpret new sentenceswithout having heard them before. How-ever, grammatical operations functiontogether with words, which are stored inthe lexicon along with their phonologi-cal, morphological, semantic and syntac-tic properties. Grammar, which is one ofthe cognitive systems of the mind, ismade up of different kinds of knowledgesuch as phonology, morphology and syn-tax, among others. Among these, syntaxis considered to be the core of grammar,since other kinds of linguistic knowledgesuch as morphology depend on it. More-over, it is responsible for the structure oflanguage, which, in turn, constrainsgrammatical operations.Chapter 3 deals with syntax, struc-ture-dependence and the limits of lan-guage. Through a series of examples ofboth possible and impossible sentences,Llinàs makes the reader aware of the factthat there are certain restrictions on lan-guage: some constructions are notallowed by syntactic structure. The lim-its of language, then, are to be found bymeans of linguistic experiments, that is,by judging what sentences are possiblein language and which ones are not. Inorder to illustrate that grammaticaloperations are constrained by syntacticstructures, the author comments on (i)the relationship between pronouns andtheir reference and (ii) the existence ofcertain domains where certain gram-matical operations are not allowed.In this chapter, the notion of func-tional categories such as Determiner andComplementizer as opposed to lexicalcategories such as Noun and Verb isintroduced. Functional categories areextremely relevant in Generative gram-mar: they contain grammatical informa-tion, which is essential for the good for-mation of sentences, and are responsiblefor linguistic variation across languages.The author also deals with traces, anexample of empty categories, which areone of the main contributions of Gener-ative grammar to linguistics. Traces,which are invisible and empty of phono-logical content, signal the syntactic posi-tion of those elements that have movedaway from their original position.In chapter 4, Llinàs concentrates onthe process of language acquisition,which constitutes an important piece ofevidence in favour of the existence ofUniversal Grammar. The logical prob-lem of acquisition (Plato’s problem)refers to the fact that children acquire agreat deal of linguistic knowledge thatcannot be found in the input theyreceive. According to Chomsky, this is apiece of evidence for claiming thathuman beings are by nature endowedBook Reviews Links & Letters 8, 2001 113with Universal Grammar, an innate lan-guage acquisition device which is acti-vated by linguistic input and whichensures that any child under normal cir-cumstances will end up acquiring a lan-guage.Moreover, the process of acquisitionis basically similar across languages andfrom child to child, as the author illus-trates with examples of her two daugh-ters’ linguistic productions. The samenon-adult grammatical constructionswere produced by both of the author’sdaughters at about the same age. Veryinterestingly, Llinàs points out thatsome practices which are commonamong parents, such as correcting chil-dren and talking to them in a simplifiedway, are of little use, since the child goesthrough a series of stages necessarily, asthe process of acquisition is guided.Again, she uses some fun examples ofher own children’s linguistic productionsto illustrate the point.The author also comments on thefact that children’s constructions cannotbe regarded as mistakes, since they havea particular grammar at each stage ofacquisition, which means that, at eachstage, they have a given set of grammat-ical operations which can result in agroup of possible constructions. There-fore, children systematically produceconstructions that might be differentfrom adult grammar, but that areallowed by the set of grammar opera-tions that build up their grammar at theparticular stage of the process of acqui-sition they are in.In the last chapter, which constitutesa very good summary of the book, theauthor makes some final remarks on thepurpose of Generative grammar and itsmain contributions to syntactic theoryand linguistics in general. On the whole,the book reads easily and provides thereader with a clear picture of a theoreti-cal framework that could have appearedto be nearly esoteric if it were notexplained in such plain and accessiblelanguage.Susagna Tubau MuntañáUniversitat Autònoma de Barcelona114 Links & Letters 8, 2001 Book Reviews

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