SOURCE: “Horsey, Horsey,” in London Review of Books, Vol. 17, November 16, 1995, pp. 13-14.

In the following review, Sturrock describes the linguistic debate about the basis of language's relation to reality by contrasting Eco's thought in The Search for the Perfect Language with Gerard Gennette's.

Anyone who has ever felt drawn to the remote but seductive question of what form the first human language may have taken will have been stirred the other day by Gillian Shephard's announcement that the Government is going to spend (a very little) money on coaching our young inarticulates so that they stop ‘grunting’ and start using words. This looks rather like an attempt to recapitulate on the cheap the slow linguistic evolution of the species, as Trevor McDonald and his fellow therapists educate the grunters out of the animal and into the human state. Except, of course, that the grunts complained of are not...