Book Reviews Language, Cohesion and Form

Margaret Masterman was one of six students in Wittgenstein’s course of 1933–1934 whose notes were compiled as The Blue Book (Wittgenstein 1958, which is the first publication after the mimeographed copies that were circulated informally). In the late 1950s, she founded the Cambridge Language Research Unit (CLRU) as a discussion group, which evolved into one of the pioneering centers of research in computational linguistics. In her will, she requested that Yorick Wilks edit a collection of her papers for publication. The result is this book, which is important for its historical perspective on the development of computational linguistics. It consists of 11 of her reports and articles from the late 1950s to 1980 and includes a 17-page introduction and commentary by Wilks. Karen Spärck Jones also wrote a commentary on one of the papers she had coauthored. As a student of Wittgenstein, Masterman was also deeply concerned about the foundations of theoretical linguistics. Around the same time that Chomsky was developing his syntactic theories and Montague was advocating a logic-based alternative, she was proposing a “neo-Wittgensteinian” view, whose organizing principle was a thesaurus of words classified according to the “language games” in which they are used. Although no single paper in the book formulates a succinct summary that could be called a theory, the following principles are discussed throughout: