Book Reviews From Issue 48:1 of Word

WORD
ISSN: 0043-7956 (Print) 2373-5112 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rwrd20
Reviews
Istvn Btori, John D. Bengtson, Ruth M. Brend, Mike Cahill, Eduardo O.
Faingold, Eduardo D. Faingold, Grazia Crocco Galas, Ray Harris-Northall,
Masataka Ishikawa, Masataka Ishikawa, Mark Janse, Roger Lass, Alan R.
Libert, Eugenio Ramn Lujn Martnez, Eugenio Ramn Lujn Martnez,
Stephen J. Matthews, Stephen O. Murray, Nick Nicholas, Charles Peck,
Edgar C. Polom, Edgar C. Polom, Heidi Quinn, Leonard Rolfe, W. Wilfried
Schuhmacher, Jyh Wee Sew, Jyh Wee Sew, Yuri Tambovtsev, Masako Ueda &
Paula West
To cite this article: Istvn Btori, John D. Bengtson, Ruth M. Brend, Mike Cahill, Eduardo O.
Faingold, Eduardo D. Faingold, Grazia Crocco Galas, Ray Harris-Northall, Masataka Ishikawa,
Masataka Ishikawa, Mark Janse, Roger Lass, Alan R. Libert, Eugenio Ramn Lujn Martnez,
Eugenio Ramn Lujn Martnez, Stephen J. Matthews, Stephen O. Murray, Nick Nicholas,
Charles Peck, Edgar C. Polom, Edgar C. Polom, Heidi Quinn, Leonard Rolfe, W. Wilfried
Schuhmacher, Jyh Wee Sew, Jyh Wee Sew, Yuri Tambovtsev, Masako Ueda & Paula West (1997)
Reviews, WORD, 48:1, 69-161, DOI: 10.1080/00437956.1997.11432464
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00437956.1997.11432464
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REVIEWS
DAVID G. LOCKWOOD, Morphological analysis and description-A realizational approach (with a "Supplementary section: Solutions to problems and
other exercises"). Textbook series in the Language Sciences. Tokyo, Taipei,
Dallas: International Language Sciences Publishers, 1993. 340 + 43 pp.
Reviewed by ISTVAN
BATORI
David Lockwood has written a course book for morphology,

devised for American and Chinese students having no direct experience
with agglutinating languages. In this context it is both sensitive and useful to treat the basic concepts of morphology, which typically remain
unexplained, if the author of the course book addresses himself to a
European audience.
The book is divided into two parts: 1. basic concepts of morphology (4 chapters) and 2. the presentation of the realizational approach (5
chapters). The main body of the presentation is followed by a voluminous glossary of terms used, a selected but rather short bibliography,
and an index of the key words. The book is accompanied by a supplementary booklet containing the solutions to the exercises. The chapters
are designed uniformly as 1. explanations, 2. list of technical terms and
3. exercises, which should be done by the students. The exercises are
drawn from a wide variety of languages. All languages (including the
English examples) are presented in phonetic transcription of their
underlying deep representation (and not in the normal orthography).
In the first part of the book Lockwood introduces the basic concept
of morphology, concentrating on inflectional morphology and treating
word formation only briefly (derivation or derivational morphology as
key words do not occur). The introductory chapters explain the internal
structure of the word, the morphological categories and processes very
69
70
WORD, VOLUME 48, NUMBER
I (APRIL, 1997)
much in the style of traditional linguistics, i.e. trying to show the diversity of actual language forms used in the inflectional patterns of natural
languages, and their restrictions. Lockwood explains allomorphy, suppletion, morphological class, stem, root, word form and so on, illustrating all these categories by examples from Czech, 1 Yiddish, Turkish,
Hopi, etc. His point is, as in traditional linguistics in general, to explain
the following phenomena: how the inflected words are organised, what
is to be expected in the morphological inventory of natural languages
(and not to present a formalism for the description of the morphological
categories), apparently without raising theoretical claims. 2 This is misleading, because Lockwood's informal introduction prepares the
groundwork for his own realizational theory.
Unfortunately Lockwood does not relate his "realizational approach" to any other competing linguistic theories; in particular there
are no references to realizational morphology as it is conceived in the
works of Stampe (1992) and Erjavec (no date). Lockwood's realizational approach to morphology can be contrasted to the generative
approach. In the generative approach morphology was considered in the
broad framework of a language understanding system. Such a system
accesses full (complete) words, carrying a number of markers taken
over from the dictionary: [Bri.ider; N, Gender: 1, Number: 2, ... ]
(Chomsky 1965: 171). For the generative approach the markers are provided; the task of the model is to take care of the proper usage of the
word forms. In the informal style of the introduction (chapters 1-4),
Lockwood presents his realizational approach to morphology, which
addresses itself to the problem of how word forms arise. 3 He explains
(p. 134): "It is not a process of change or mutation replacing one structure with another. Rather, it is a constructive process which builds an
additional representation of the words involved". Words as they occur in
actual texts are not given in advance in the lexicon: they are constructed (realized) out of stems and combinatory lexical rules. The realizational model of morphology constructs the word forms, which can be
manipulated in a subsequent syntactic model.
Lockwood's realizational model operates with four types of rule
("formulas"):
1.
Construction formulas, which are comparable to ordinary phrase

structure rules without recursion,
2.
Class-membership formulas, which correspond to disjunctive

lexical substitution rules,
71
REVIEWS
3.
Morphemic realization formulas, which are filtering rules on the

level of morphemes, and
4.
Morphophonemic realization formulas, which are filtering rules

on the phonemic level (p. 189).
The realization formulas (both morphemic and morphophonemic) are

ordered. They rely on the elsewhere condition of Paul Kiparsky, and
allow a compact notation. A good, comprehensive listing of the realizational variants is presented on p. 137. However, Lockwood fails to correlate his formulas to other formally described systems. He merely
explains the use of his formulas and illustrates their applications: The
descriptive power of the rules, their restrictions and other formal properties are not discussed further.
As already mentioned, Lockwood illustrates his realizational morphology abundantly by an impressive number of languages with rich
inflection. However, the descriptive power of his realizational system is
limited and does not offer an adequate description for a number of
important morphological configurations (which present no problem to
common phrase structure grammars for morphotactics; cf. Spencer
1991, also listed by Lockwood in his bibliography, p. 328):
1.
Lockwood's construction formulas do not allow recursion. Without such a device the internal structure of the words cannot be
treated adequately: How can we describe suffix layers or intermediate stems, which occur typically e.g. in participial forms (even
in English), like surprisingly, annoyingly, which require a stratal
structuring as in Figure 1, not Figure 2. These types of construction are very common e.g. in Uralic languages.
Adv
'"'7."1
su,lris-
Jg
Figure 1
sr,,
ly
72
I (APRIL, 1997)
Adv
~
Sfx1
Sfx2
surpris-
.I
mg
1
ly
Figure 2
2.
How can the system state the restriction that in the case of discontinuous morphemes, like Gr. le-lu-ka-men, le-lu-ka-te the
proper affixes (the first and the third: reduplication and perfect)
belong together? Or how is it to be dealt with that in modem German, the participial suffix -tl-en must be selected with the prefix
ge- e.g. in: ge-lem-t, vor-ge-schalag-en, hin-iiber-ge-rett-e-t-e?
3.
Morphophonemic realization should cover all sorts of changes

which accompany affixation (suffixation) both in the stems as
well as in the affixes. The changes invariably concern adjacent
segments (units). The formulaic description does not contain this
restriction, e.g. how to paraphrase gradation for Finnish: ka-t-u
"street Nom Sg", ka-d-un "street Gen Sg", lu-k-ee "he reads", luet "you read", in which the closing of the syllable by a suffix
affects the initial consonant of the preceding stem syllable?
But the main problem with Lockwood's realizational model is its

growing complexity. The descriptions in the closing chapters cannot be
treated in an ad hoc manner; they would require testing facilities (cf.
Sproat 1992) and they need a theoretical foundation, which Lockwood's
book lacks. He does not make reference to generally known descriptive
models belonging to mainstream linguistics, like Gazdar's GPSG,
Koskenniemi's Two-level Morphology, or to Pullum and Sag's HPSG,
which deal with morphology in a theoretically substantiated framework.
Nevertheless the didactic chapters of the book may prove to be useful in
explaining and illustrating basic morphological notions to linguistics
students.
Institut fiir Computerlinguistik
Universitiit Koblenz-Landau
Rheinau 3-4
D-56075 Koblenz
Germany
73
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ENDNOTES
1
Czech is spoken in the Czech Republic; Czechoslovakia does not exist any more, as is said
mistakenly on p. 43.
2
Lockwood borrows uncritically from traditional linguistics. On p. 71 for example he states:
"Inflection involves a set of distinctions signaled by the morph forms of a language". Inflection
does not necessarily signal distinctions; inflection involves just as much well formedness.
3
The same opposition applies also to Stampe's Model.
REFERENCES
Chomsky, Noam. 1965. Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT.
Erjavec, Tomaz. No date. "Formalising realizational morphology in typed feature structures."
Unpublished manuscript, Ljubljana, Slovenia: J6zef Stefan Institute.
Spencer, Andrew. 1991. Morphological theory. Oxford: Blackwell.
Sproat, Richard. 1992. Morphology and computation. Cambridge, MA: MIT.
Stampe, Gregory P. 1992. "Position class and morphological theory." Yearbook of morphology
/992. Eds. G . Booji and J. van Marie. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Pp. 129-80.
HELMA VAN DEN BERG, A grammar of Hunzib (with Texts and Lexicon).
(L/NCOM Studies in Caucasian Linguistics 01.) Miinchen, Newcastle: LINCOM EUROPA, 1995. 366 pp.
Reviewed by JoHN D.
BENGTSON
The author is a Dutch scholar who wrote this book as a doctoral thesis at Leiden University in January 1995, so this a book of great freshness. The field work it is based on was just completed in 1993, on the
last of three periods beginning in 1990, mostly at Stal'skoe in lowland
Daghestan, Russia.
There are only about 2,000 Hunzib speakers, Sunni Muslims whose
homeland lies in the Caucasus highlands, tucked between Georgia on
the south and west, and other Daghestanian neighbors including the
Avars on the east and north. The Hunzib villages (aul, Hunzib aX) proper, N axada, Garbutli, and Gunzib, lie some 50 or 60 kilometers east of
the border of Chechnia (Chechnya), but in the mountains traveling distances are of course much longer. The Hunzib and other Tsezic peoples
74
I (APRIL, 1997)
share a sorrowful history of deportation and forced migration with the

Chechen and Ingush, some of which is told by van den Berg (pp. 10-13;
see also Nichols [ 1995]). It will remind North American readers of their
own woeful past (e.g., the Cherokee Trail of Tears). Fortunately, the
social conditions of the Hunzib and other Tsezic peoples are more stable these days. Many now live in lowland cities like Stal'skoe, surrounded by Kumyk (Turkic) speakers, and only about 700 Hunzib
remain in the mountain villages (p. 8).
Hunzib (often Gunzib in Russian transcription) is not a written language: Russian and Avar (another Daghestanian language) function as
written languages in western Daghestan, and loan words from both of
these languages (as well as others, e.g. Georgian, Turkish, Arabic)
abound in Hunzib. Hunzib speakers also understand Bezhta, the Tsezic
language closest to Hunzib (p. 9).
Hunzib is classified as a member of the Tsezic (=Dido) branch of
the Avar-Andi-Tsez (= Avar-Andi-Dido) branch of the Northeast
Caucasian (= Nakho-Daghestanian) language family (see Ruhlen
[1987:74], Schulze-Fiirhoff [1992:190-92] for various subgrouping
proposals). A (North) Caucasian family, uniting Northeast Caucasian
with Northwest Caucasian (= Abkhazo-Adygan) is widely accepted
(Ruhlen 1987:73; 1994; Catford 1991; Bengtson 1994), but apparently
not by van den Berg (p. 3). (Henceforth, "Caucasian" will be used here
in the meaning "North Caucasian," which I believe is genetically distinct
from Kartvelian.)
The Hunzib language itself does not deviate far from the Daghestanian norm. The consonantal system is fairly simple, as Caucasian languages go. The only consonants outside of the "core consonantal features found in all Caucasian [including Kartvelian] languages" (Catford
1991: 241) are the laterals X, X', A, the glottals ? and h, and the "loan
phonemes" (voiceless velar fricative),\' (voiced pharyngeal fricative),
and n(voiceless pharyngeal fricative). The latter three are apparently due
to Avar influence, but also assist in assimilating Arabic (Islamic) loanwords complete with pharyngeals, e.g. \'amal 'behavior' and nurmat
'respect'. However, n is commonly found in the rendition of laughter as
nenene (e.g., p. 196).
Vowels, on the other hand, are rather more plenteous in Hunzib
than in most Caucasian languages. The eight vowels (i, i, u, e, a , o, a,
a) can all also occur with long or nasalized variants, though nasalization is apparently a recessive feature associated with older speakers (p.
21). Hunzib lacks the pharyngealized vowels heard in Tsez and
Khwarshi (Bokarev 1959).
REVIEWS
75
The Hunzib noun morphology is quite intricate. As in 27 other Caucasian languages (Catford 1991 :250), nouns are classified into classes
(genders), but here the system of five classes is even more complex than
that of its progenitor, Proto-Northeast Caucasian, which had only four
classes (Diakonoff and Starostin 1986:10; Schulze-Fiirhoff 1992).
Agreement with co-referant verbs and adjectives is marked by prefixes,
or for class 1, the absence of a prefix (0-). Thus gudo b-iq' .1 a-r 'the hen
grew up' (class 4) but q'a ra r-iq'.la-r 'the child grew up' (class 5, p.
79). Other features of the Hunzib noun include 13 plural markers (pp.
17, 39-41), four syntactic cases and seven local cases (pp. 41-9).
A feature of the Hunzib personal pronoun system, shared with
some other Daghestanian languages, is that the second person singular
pronoun ('thou') is suppletive, with a nominative/ergative form ma, but
the stem di-- di- - du- in other cases (p. 60).
The Hunzib verb is also complex. The verb stem may be preceded
by a class prefix (as in the examples cited above) and/or followed by a
variety of simple and complex suffixes denoting tense, aspect, or number. There is ablaut in some verbs, but it denotes the class of the Subject/Patient of the sentence rather than tense or aspect, e.g.: iyu-l kid giler 'mother put the girl down' (class 2) but iyu-l q'a ra gul-ur 'mother
put the child down' (class 5, p. 80). (As also in some Indo-European languages, 'child' belongs to the inanimate or neuter class.)
Hunzib syntax is of the SOYI AN type, like many (but not all)
Nakh-Daghestanian languages. This type also seems to be areal, found
also in nearby Kumyk and Azerbaijani (Turkic), Zan (Kartvelian), and
Armenian (Indo-European) (Ruhlen 1975). Also prevalent in the Caucasus region is the ergative construction, e.g. in Hunzib: oi-di-1 kid
hehe-r 'the boy hit the girl' but oie ut '-ur 'the boy slept' (p. 122). In the
first sentence oie 'boy' has the oblique marker -di- and the ergative
marker-/, while the patient kid 'girl' is in the nominative case. In the
second sentence the verb is intransitive, and oie 'boy' is in the unmarked
nominative case. Hunzib also has particles denoting certainty (xa, with
uvular fricative) and probability (za, p. 133).
Van den Berg provides much more than a grammar of Hunzib. The
introduction gives a brief geography and recent history of the language
and people, with maps and statistical tables. The comprehensive grammar proper is followed by 25 texts, for each of which the author provides a morphological analysis and a free translation. The Hunzib lexicon of some 2,000 words includes all the words in the grammar and
texts, and also additional lexical material from the author's fieldwork.
Each word is glossed with morphological information, its meaning,
76
I (APRIL, 1997)
characteristic endings, and foreign counterparts in the case of a loanword, e.g.:
birindzi n5 'rice'; -yo; no PL; cf. Geo. brindzi, Tu. pirin<;, Prs.
birinj.
Appendices to the lexicon apprise us of dialectal differences within
Hunzib (for example, 'hedgehog' is q 'unduz in Gunzib, but gurmuq in
Naxada); color terms; names of days and months; and adverbs with a
petrified directional marker. There is also an extensive bibliography, followed by summaries in English and Russian.
I find only the pettiest of faults in this book: e.g., the continental
spelling Januari (p. 15). Up until now detailed information about Hunzib was available only in Russian publications. Van den Berg's book is
not merely the only Hunzib grammar available in English, but it also
offers a wealth of information about this language and its people, and is
highly recommended both for specialists in languages of the Caucasus
and the general linguistic reader.
743 Madison Street NE
Minneapolis, MN 55413
U.S.A.
REFERENCES
Bengtson, J.D. 1994. "Comment on Colarusso 1994." Mother tongue 22:13-6.
Bokarev, E.A. 1959. Cezskie (Didojskie) jazyki Dagestana. Moscow: Izdatel'stvo Akademii Nauk
SSSR.
Catford, J.C. 1991. "The classification of the Caucasian languages." Sprung from some common
source: investigations into the prehistory of languages. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Pp. 232-68.
Diakonoff, I.M. and S.A. Starostin. 1986. Hurro-Urartian as an Eastern Caucasian language.
Munich: Kitzinger.
Nichols, J. 1995. "Who are the Chechen?" Dhumbadji! 2!2: 19-24.
Ruhlen, M. 1975. A guide to the languages of the world. Stanford: Language Universals Project.
- - . 1987. A guide to the world's languages. Vol. 1: Classification. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
- - . 1994. "Is Proto-Indo-European related to Proto-Northwest Caucasian?" Mother tongue
22:11-13.
Schulze-Fiirhoff, W. 1992. "How can class markers petrify? Towards a functional diachrony of
morphological subsystems in the East Caucasian languages." The Non-Slavic languages of the
USSR: Linguistic studies, Second series. Ed. H. Aronson. Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society. Pp. 189-233.
77
REVIEWS
LEONARD NEWEL, Batad lfugao dictionary: With ethnographic notes. (Special Monograph Issue, 33.) Manila: Linguistic Society of the Philippines, 1993.
xviii + 744 pp.
Reviewed by RuTH M.
BREND
This is indeed a remarkable dictionary. Its subheading is much too

modest-much more than "ethnographical notes" are included. In fact,
one might well ask what else there is to know about lfugao language and
culture that is not included here. It is designed for an English speaker
seeking to know more about Batad Ifugao.
The Batad Ifugao Dictionary (hereafter BID) begins with a "grammatical sketch" of over 90 pages. Far from being a mere sketch it presents a brief phonological account, a section on symbolization and
orthography, morphophonemics, word classes, roles of clause and sentence constituents, phrases, affixes, and various types of sentences. A
most useful index to the sketch is included and that, together with the
Table of Contents, should allow a reader to find the information sought.
Following the dictionary entries there are 35 Appendices which are
primarily lists of lexical items grouped by activities or lexical fieldse.g., Appendix 3: Parts of a traditional house and yard; Appendix 5: Calendar of rice agriculture; Appendix 13 Kinds of chicken; Appendix 22:
Pond-field payments. (The latter presents a good deal of information
concerning such payments.) Other intriguing appendices cover Fines,
Omens, Calls and cries of animals and birds, and Wash verbs.
The BID entries themselves usually contain much more information than one finds in a dictionary (all descriptions are in English). For
example the first entry is a- which "signals that a substantitive has an
undergoer relationship". Besides an example of how it combines with
another prefix and with a suffix, references to three sections of the grammar are given. The entry for higib 'a small housing cluster' gives a large
amount of information as to how housing clusters function in the
Batasociety, and includes a list of hamlet and subdivisions of the central
hamlet of Batad. The entry for taboh 'a lead percussion instrument'
besides a variety of senses, gives a chart of the synchronized rhythm of
percussion instruments for one measure of music (to me, much like a
description of the beats played by different instruments in a Javanese
Gamalan).
Roots containing prefixes are included as separate entries, with
only instructions to see the corresponding root. For example, for pamahangel, the reader is instructed to see bahangel, and under that entry one
78
WORD, VOLUME 48, NUMBER 1 (APRIL,
1997)
will find listed an explanation of the prefixed form also. (In addition,
separately, there is a very long entry for the prefix paN-, which also contains cross references to two sections of the grammar.)
The BID concludes with an English-Ifugao Index. Generally the
entries contain only an English word or phrase followed by one or more
Batad Ifugao words. A beginning note states that the intended use of this
section of BID is "to aid the user to find Ifugao words" in the main part
of the dictionary.
In short, this is a monumental work-obviously the work of a lifetime by one who is intimately acquainted with the Batad Ifugao language and culture. Anyone involved in the preparation of a dictionary
for whatever use would be well advised to note the BID's innovative
presentation and the useful information which is included. I found the
explanations to be especially clear and helpful, and I am envious of persons seeking to learn Batad Ifugao.
I would think that a similar dictionary for English, designed to be
consulted by those trying to learn English (at various stages) would be
invaluable. Obviously one of the first decisions for a prospective compiler would be which culture and dialect to describe-American?
British? both? or other(s)? All foreign language learners would benefit
greatly by having such a dictionary available-if only one had been
when I was struggling with a variety of languages! But, to my knowledge, none of those currently available come even close. Younger scholars please take note!
[No address is given in the volume for the publisher, but I have
learned that it is available (at a cost of U.S. $42.95) from the Summer
Institute of Linguistics Bookstore, 7500 W. Camp Widom Road, Dallas,
TX 75236-5626, U.S.A.; fax 972-709-2433; e.mail:academic.books
@sil.org]
3363 Burbank Dr.
Ann Arbor, M/48105
OMAR KA, Wolofphonology and morphology Lanham, MD: University Press

of America, 1994. 160 pp.
Reviewed by MIKE
CAHILL
Wolof belongs to the West Atlantic branch of Niger-Congo, and is

one of the relatively few sub-Saharan languages which is not tonal. In
REVIEWS
79
spite of the title, Ka does not pretend to give a complete picture of either
Wolof phonology or morphology. Within the chosen topics, however, it
is a good reference for Wolof. In this work, Ka includes chapters on
Vowel Harmony, Complex Segments and the Syllable, Syllable-Sensitive Rules, and Reduplication Processes.
The Introduction includes a review of previous literature on Wolof,
which is fairly extensive compared with many other West African languages. Ka then describes his theoretical framework, which is basic
autosegmental phonology, utilizing syllabic, CV, and melodic (featural)
tier levels. Particularly crucial to Ka is the notion of syllable as a distinct
unit.
Though this work was published in 1994, there appears to be no reference to theoretical advances after Ka's 1988 dissertation; the theoretical viewpoint is of the middle to late 1980's. For example, he accepts
all three of Goldsmith's (1976) well-formedness conditions and convention associations. Also, though one would expect a reference to Ito
1986 in a work stressing syllables, it is not mentioned; neither is
Clements 1985 with reference to feature geometry.
Chapter One (pp. 7-62) deals with vowel harmony in Wolof. Ka
motivates an eight-vowel system, with ATR (advanced tongue root)
contrast. The high vowels have no [-ATR] counterparts, the mid vowels
do, and the low vowel /a/ has a schwa as its [+ATR] counterpart. Length
is contrastive, except there is no long schwa in native words. Vowels in
a root, generally speaking, agree in [ATR] value. Suffixes are of two
types, those whose ATR values agree with the root and those whose ATR
value never varies. (Present-day Wolof has no productive prefixes.)
When an additional suffix follows a non-alternating suffix, the second
suffix agrees in ATR with that suffix. [ATR] is thus specified once for
each root and spread to all vowels, including the alternating suffixes,
which have no independent ATR value. Non-alternating suffixes have
their own values of ATR.
However, the behavior of the high vowels [i, u] adds interest to this
otherwise well-behaved pattern. Word-initially, [i, u] act as any other
[+ATR] vowel and agree in ATR with the other vowels in the word.
However, word-medially, they are transparent and can occur in an otherwise [-ATR] word, e.g. [ktlifa] 'leader'. Ka treats these with two different mechanisms. Initial high vowels are lexically specified with
[+ATR], which then spreads by a harmony rule. Non-initial high vowels are assigned a default [+ATR], crucially ordered after the harmony
rule, and then other vowels get [-ATR] by default.
The long vowel /aa/ is non-alternating, as is the suffix /-kat/, and
both are considered to have a lexical value of [-ATR].
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1 (APRIL, 1997)
Ka describes nominal and verbal morphology in terms of X-bar

theory, and shows that there is a mismatch between prosodic phrasing
and syntactic structure, illustrated by the span of vowel harmony.
Especially in this chapter, the reader must mentally adjust to the
fact that Ka gives data in the Wolof orthography rather than standard
IPA symbols. Thus, orthographic is [e], <6> is
[o], etc.; the orthographic accent marks have nothing to do with either
accent or tone.
In Chapter Two (pp. 63-86), Ka examines complex consonants and
their relationship to the syllable. Wolof complex consonants consist of
geminates and pre-nasalized obstruents. Word-initially, only simple
consonants and voiced pre-nasalized consonants occur. Ka lists a prenasalized and a geminate uvular stop, but not a simple one, though the
simple one does occur in some data.
Geminate consonants alternate morphologically with simple ones,
but the alternations are not always the expected ones. For example, [b]
- [bb] in [ub ], [ubbi] 'to close, to open', but continuants alternate with
geminate stops as in [f] - [pp] in [sof], [soppi] 'to join, to disjoin' and
[0] - [kk] in [dee], [dekki] 'to die, to resuscitate'. Ka analyzes the latter as having underlying stops which spirantize when not geminate
(except for [k], which deletes).
Ka then gives examples of syllable types in Wolof. There are no
vowel or consonant sequences except geminate consonants, and vowels
and prenasalized consonants. Prenasalized consonants are represented
as two melodies linked to one C-unit on the CV tier; geminates are one
melody linked to two C or V units.
Chapter Three (pp. 87-118) delves into syllable-sensitive rules of
Wolof, including gemination and degemination, vowel coalescence,
vowel and glide insertion, and prenasalization.
Ka assumes (but does not demonstrate) that medial geminates as in
[teggi] 'to remove' are split between two syllables. He considers but
rejects the idea of a floating C being responsible for gemination, saying
instead that there is a morphologically-restricted gemination rule which
must precede a second round of syllabification. Similarly, there is a morphologically-restricted degemination rule. A glide [w] or [y] is inserted
between vowels of separate morphemes to preserve syllable structure,
except that when there is a polysyllabic, V-final stem and a short V-initial suffix, there is vowel coalescence.
Two types of vowel epenthesis occur. When a stem ends in a geminate consonant and a suffix begins with a consonant, schwa is inserted.
When a stem ends in a cluster of non-identical consonants (not allowed
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81
on the surface), a copy of the preceding stem vowel is inserted, analyzed

as spreading the relevant vowel features.
Prenasalized consonants can be either underlying or derived.
Derived ones come from prefixation of a nasal segment to a verbal stem
to nominalize ([baax] 'to be good', [mbaax] 'goodness') or to a nominal stem to make into a diminutive or general ([doom] 'child', [ndoom]
'small child'). The interesting cases come when the derived words begin
with a stop ([fo] 'to play', [po] 'play', [addu] 'to speak', [kaddu]
'speech'). There is the same alternation of fricatives and stops found in
gemination. Ka, after again considering whether prenasalized consonants should be represented with NC or C on the CV tier, concludes,
somewhat reluctantly, that it is simpler for them to be a single C slot.
Chapter Four, the final one (pp. 119-38), analyzes Wolof reduplication. Reduplication in Wolof serves various derivational functions. In
each case, the reduplicant and stem are identical, and from the data
given, there is no way to tell which of the two is original stem and which
is the reduplicant. Suffixes occur on some forms, e.g. [bey-bey-aat] 'to
cultivate repeatedly'. The reduplicated forms are usually identical with
the input stems, with two exceptions. The initial consonant may alternate, in the pattern with stops and fricatives that is becoming familiar:
[fas] 'to fasten', [pas-pas] 'node'. Also, the final consonant may degeminate: [degg] 'to hear, understand', [deg-deg] 'news, understanding'.
Ideophones are always reduplicated forms.
Ka postulates a morphemic tier in which syllables a are subsumed
under morphemes !-! In reduplication, the entire morpheme !-!(and its
constituent syllables, CV units, and melodic units) is copied as a word
formation process. He symbolizes the reduplicant as being prefixed, but
as noted, this is an arbitrary choice. Ka takes a standard Lexical Phonology approach. Since the reduplicant and stem are identical, there are
some phonological rules that precede the morphological reduplication
process. Since some reduplicated forms have suffixes which show alternations, some phonological processes could also occur after reduplication. He uses up to five cycles to derive actual words from an underlying stem.
A Bibliography and Subject Index are also included.
One minor irritation is that in each chapter, some sets of data are
left unnumbered.
As mentioned, the theoretical stance of this work is several years
behind its publication date. Many of the rules mix SPE-like formalisms
with autosegmental ones, as in the vowel epenthesis rule, which combines a word-boundary symbol#, deletion of an association line to a syl-
82
WORD, VOLUME 48, NUMBER 1 (APRIL, 1997)
lable, insertion of a V into a space _ , and spreading of aF of a vowel

to the inserted V place! A more thorough feature geometric approach
would help on consistency of representation and rules. The main
strength of the book lies elsewhere, in the data itself and in the patterns
elucidated.
Some current phonological writings are woefully short on actual
data, forcing the reader either to take the writer's assertions on faith, or
go back to other sources. In contrast, the abundant data in this work
make it an easy task to check Ka's assertions and if desired, to formulate alternative theoretical explanations.
The Ohio State University
Linguistics Dept.
220 Oxley Hall
1712 Neil Ave.
Columbus, Ohio 43210
REFERENCES
Clements, G.N. 1985. "The geometry of phonological features". Phonology 2:223-50.
Goldsmith, John. 1976. "Autosegmenta1 Phonology." Ph.D. dissertation, MIT.
Ito, Junko. 1986. "Syllable Theory in Prosodic Phonology." Ph.D. dissertation, MIT.
MARfA ANGELES ALVAREZ MARTINEZ, La Gramatica Espanola en

America. Tenerife, Spain: Universidad de la Laguna, 1994. 53 pp.
Reviewed by EDUARDO D.
FAINGOLD
This book is a short but informative and erudite annotated bibliography of recent books and articles dealing with Latin American Spanish
morphology and syntax. The book covers some 250 descriptive as well
as theoretical papers and books which the author consulted in person at
the Harvard University library (see, especially, Hernandez Alonso
1992); it includes also conference papers (e.g. ALFAL, Asociaci6n
Chilena de Profesores de Lengua y Literatura, international linguistics
conferences in Puerto Rico, etc.) and works produced at language
research centers in Latin America and the US (e.g. Instituto de Filologfa
y Letras Hispanicas Dr. Amado Alonso in Buenos Aires, Instituto de
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83
Filologia de la Universidad de Chile, Instituto Caro y Cuervo in Bogota,

Instituto de Filologia Andres Bello in Caracas, Centro de Lingtiistica
Hispanica in Mexico, The University of Southern California in Los
Angeles).
The bibliography covers a wide range of grammatical phenomena
such as verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, personal pronouns, and coordinate as well as subordinate clauses. The author notes
most rightly that a modern linguistic approach to the study of Latin
American Spanish calls for the construction of a systematic (i.e. noncompartmentalized) grammar of the latter, along the lines shown in systematic studies of Spanish phonology (Canfield 1981, Resnick 1975).
According to Alvarez Martinez, the book is intended as a step in that
direction.
Alvarez Martinez draws on earlier attempts to provide a systematic account of Latin American Spanish morphology and syntax (Montes
Giraldo 1987, Moreno de Alba 1988); she provides a comprehensive list
of grammatiCal phenomena which according to this author are worthy
to have a place in a systematic grammar of Latin American Spanish,
including: (i) voseo and other related pronominal and verb forms (e.g.
cantds, cantdis, cantai, tu tenes, vos tienes, usted tienes, etc.), (ii) idiosyncratic pronominal syntax (e.g. a yo, para yo) and pronominal neutralization (e.g. uno-una, le-les), (iii) variation in the use of gender (e.g.
ellla calor, el/la azucar, etc.), (iv) idiosyncratic uses of number (e.g.
papas-papaes-papases, un cafe, tres cafe, etc.), (v) diminutives, comparatives, and superlatives, (vi) noun derivation with a variety of affixes, metaphor, and other word-coining means, (vii) idiosyncratic uses of
the imperfect (e.g. Queria rogarle unfavorcito), future, impersonal constructions (e.g hubo/hubieronfiestas, se vende (n) naranjas), and verb
periphrasis, (viii) prepositional constructions, including queismo and
dequeismo, idiosyncratic usage of prepositions (e.g. caer en (a) cama,
con base en (a), etc.), and (ix) subordinate and coordinate clauses, word
order, and topicalization (e.g. Quiere es vino).
This short book should be of great interest to all students and scholars of Spanish, since it provides a most valuable key for future research
in Latin American Spanish morphology and syntax; it is also, no doubt,
a small but firm step toward the construction of a systematic grammar
of Latin American Spanish.
Department of Languages
The University of Tulsa
Tulsa, Oklahoma 74104-3189
84
WORD, VOLUME 48, NUMBER 1 (APRIL, !997)

REFERENCES
Canfield, D. Lincoln. 1981. Spanish pronunciation in the Americas. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Hernandez Alonso, C., ed. 1992. Historia y Presente del Espafiol de America. Junta de Castilla y
Le6n:Pabecal.
Montes Giraldo, J. J. 1987. Dialectol6gia General e Hispanoamericana. Bogota: lnstituto Caro y
Cuervo.
Moreno de Alba, J. G. 1988. El Espafiol en America. Mexico: Fondo de Cultura Econ6mica.
Resnick, M. C. 1975. Phonological variants and dialect identification in Latin American Spanish.
The Hague: Mouton.
RAJEND MESTHRIE, English in language shift. The history, structure and

sociolinguistics of South African Indian English. Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1992. xix + 252 pp.

Reviewed by EDUARDO D.
FAINGOLD
This book studies the emergence of South African Indian English

(SAlE) among indentured workers brought in the 1850s to the plantations of the Natal area and their descendants in South Africa. SAlE is a
new variety of English spoken by some three-quarters of a million people-a "language shift English" similar to the "Englishes"of other ethnic (e.g. Amerindian, Hispanic, etc. English in the U.S.; Irish, Scottish,
Welsh, etc. English in Great Britain) and immigrant communities (e.g.
Yiddish English in New York; Pakistani English in Great Britain) in the
anglophone countries. But as the author of the book argues convincingly, SAlE is not your garden-variety of immigrant or ethnic language.
This language can profitably be studied with the tools employed in pidgin and creole studies, since it evolved from several substrate languages
in contact with English in a multilingual situation in which English was
not the majority language. In this interesting and well researched book
the author explores both the sociohistorical and linguistic results of
language shift in an immigrant situation, as well as parallels between
first and second language acquisition, pidginization, and creolization,
including universals of second language acquisition and transfer from
substrate languages. The book discusses also parallels between SAlE
and other varieties of Indian English (e.g., "Butler English"), other
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85
dialects of South African English, and English worldwide. The focus is

on syntactic development (the relative clause and word order) but it also
discusses some non-syntactic variation among different social classes in
the South African Indian community.
The book contains seven chapters, followed by three appendices,
notes, sources and references, and a subject index, as follows:
Chapter 1, "Historical background: the shaping of a new English"
(Pp. 1-33) presents the focus (i.e. it reveals the means by which SAlE
became established in the Indian community) and the main aim of the
study (i.e. it examines diachronic patterns of variation and processes of
language acquisition), defines SAlE as a variety of "New English" (see
above), and sketches linguistic and sociohistorical patterns of development in the Indian community in South Africa from the time of immigration and indenture in the 1850s until the post-indenture period in this
century.
Chapter 2, "Variation in SAlE: a first glimpse" (Pp. 34-70) presents
the methodology of data collection (i.e. a sample of 150 speakers of
SAlE from various parts of Natal interviewed with state-of-the-art sociolinguistic techniques) and defines SAlE as a polylectal complex (i.e.
in terms of a range of overlapping varieties or lects-basilect, mesolect,
and acrolect-such as those found in creoles).
Chapter 3, "Syntactic variation: the relative clause" (Pp. 71-100)
and Chapter 4, "Word-order principles" (Pp. 10 1-127) examine sociolinguistic patterns and theoretical principles of syntactic variation in
detail, while Chapter 5, "Non-syntactic variation" (Pp. 128-151) offers
a short phonetic, morphological, and lexical description of SAlE as well
as a brief comparison between SAlE and other varieties of English in
South Africa and elsewhere.
Chapter 6, "Perspectives from second-language acquisition" (Pp.
152-182) is concerned with syntactic (and some morphological) transfer from ancestral languages as well as with second language universals
(e.g. copula deletion, the use of only and too as focus markers, relative
clauses, and the use of articles before adjectives), Chomsky's Universal
Grammar (UG) (e.g. negation, pro-drop, word order), and general
strategies of production in second language acquisition (e.g. economy
of production and reduction of ambiguity). Most interestingly, the
author concludes that the substrate is not very influential in the emergence of SAlE, but its syntactic development shows a strong parallel to
universals of first and second language acquisition. He shows also that
second language acquisition in a language shift setting cannot profitably
be studied with the tools employed by UG, since "[I]n SAlE (and the
86
WORD, VOLUME 48, NUMBER I (APRIL, 1997)
New Englishes generally) the parameters do not stay 'set' [my emphasis]" (p. 174). In contrast, general principles of second language acquisition such as economy of production (e.g. regularization, selective production of redundant markers) and reduction of ambiguity (e.g.
transparency, maximising salience) are quite useful for explaining
developmental patterns in New Englishes.
Chapter 7, "Perspectives from pidgin and creole studies" (Pp.
183-221) shows convincingly that there exist strong parallels between
the development of SAlE and that of creole languages. For example,
SAlE's basilect has a strong resemblance to creoloid systems in South
Africa (e.g. Afrikaans) and elsewhere (e.g. Singapore English, Reunion
French); similarly, the developmental processes attested in SAlE's
polylectal complex are parallel to decreolization processes found in
other post-creole settings.
Appendices A, B, and C give, respectively, a comparison between
the SAlE sample in this book and census data for Natal Indians (considering such variables as education, ancestral language, age, ruralurban domicile, and gender), the types of relative clauses used by speakers (standard, non-standard, and zero relative clauses), and rank orders
for the use of relative clauses, topics, and morphology in the prebasilect, the basilect, the mesolect, and the acrolect.
This book is written in a scholarly but lively style. The typescript
was produced with the high degree of editorial care usually found in
such major publishers as Cambridge University Press: I have found only
one typo-on p. 32.
This book is of great relevance to the study of language development in a wide sense (language acquisition, language death, pidginization, creolization, koineization, etc.), and it makes a substantial contribution to our understanding of sociohistorical, psycholinguistic, and
linguistic processes of language shift involved in the emergence of new
languages and dialects, as well as the loss of ancestral languages, in
South Africa, in other parts of the English-speaking world, and in natural settings in general. It can be recommended also to linguists interested in such varied fields as quantitative variation of the Labovian kind
and Chomsky's generative linguistics, as well as second language studies, since in this book all these areas are approached in a non-partisan
and mostly jargon-free fashion-one which is sadly lacking in much of
linguistics nowadays. Also, this book is of relevance to educators in
South Africa and elsewhere, since SAlE is clearly not "bad" English,
but a social dialect of South African English in its own right. Educators
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87
in the U.S. and Britain cannot fail to see the parallel with the use of
Black English in the schools there.
Dept. of Languages
The University of Tulsa
Tulsa, Oklahorrw 74104-3189
KANG-HO LIE, Verbale Aspektualitiit im Koreanischen und im Deutschen.

Tiibingen: Niemeyer, 1991. 244 pp.
Reviewed by GRAZIA CRocco GALEAS
Lie's book is an illustration of the category of aspect in Korean and

German, particularly focussed on some verbal periphrases (e.g. Ger.
zum Ausdruck kommen 'to express oneself', zum Vorschein kommen 'to
come to light', zum Vorschein bringen 'to bring to light'). Such
periphrases are characterized by verbs (Funktionsverben or verba
adiecta) which in other contexts show full verb behaviour and whose
semantic value is typically related to the notion of movement and spatial collocation (e.g. Germ. kommen 'to come', bringen 'to bring' sein
'to be'; Kor. ota 'to come', kata 'to go', issta 'to be'). The theoretical
framework of Lie's study is given by Eugenio Coseriu's structural-functional linguistics, with special regard to Coseriu's treatment of the
Romance verbal system (Coseriu 1976). Despite the strong dependence
on the analysis put forward by the Romanian scholar, Lie's work is not
devoid of any novelty and is interesting as well. In my opinion the book
is remarkable for three main reasons. First, it offers a description of the
Korean tense-aspect system, which differs from the very few previous
attempts. Second, in dealing with the problem of aspectual verbal
periphrases, it points out striking analogies between two typologically
different languages. Third, its approach is not merely contrastive, but
rather functional and onomasiological; the two languages, German and
Korean, are analyzed independently, although from a unitary semanticoriented perspective.
As far as the objections are concerned, one cannot help but noting
that in Lie's discussion of the topic some major viewpoints in the liter-
88
I (APRIL, 1997)
ature are neglected. The author does not take sufficiently into account
the general debate on tense and aspect. There is very little mention of
Comrie (1976, 1985) and Dahl (1985) and, on the whole, the references
cited do not include many important contributions from recent years.
The author's arguments are supported by a limited range of works that
essentially represent only one angle of the research. Furthermore, the
theme of verbal periphrases and the auxiliaries which are involved in
them has recently been dealt with by the theory of grammaticalization.
This theory has drawn particular attention to the categories of tense and
aspect, their mutual relations, their expression by means of auxiliaries
and verbal periphrases with quasi-auxiliaries. On the contrary, Lie
examines the question of aspectual periphrases in German and Korean
without revealing knowledge of an important and vital part of linguistic
research. It seems rather evident that the author's purpose is simply to
employ the armamentarium of Coseriu's functional semantics to
explore a linguistic domain that is partially still to be investigated (particularly Korean). In this sense his analysis is restrictively oriented and
lacks the contribution of a number of diverse perspectives.
Lie claims that the goal of his study is to present two different realizations (i.e. belonging to two different languages) of the grammatical
category of aspect. The following statement is typical of Lie's structuralist-semantic approach: whenever there is a systematic correlation
between semantic values and individual forms, we can consequently
recognize a semantic phenomenon of a given language and assign to
that language proper grammatical categories. In other words, grammatical categories are expressed by morphemes and morphemes represent
grammatical categories. According to Coseriu's definition, Lie regards
a periphrasis as a concrete, compositional linguistic sign that has a single, unitary meaning, e.g. a compositional signifiant corresponding to a
simple signifie. The meaning of the periphrasis is certainly related to the
meaning of its parts, but it is not merely the sum of them. In particular,
a verbal periphrasis is one that altogether functions as a verb. Unlike the
single verb though, it is divisible into a lexical and a grammatical
domain. For instance, in the German periphrasis in Anrechnung kommen 'to be reckoned', the grammatical part is represented by the verb
kommen, whereas the lexical is expressed by the noun Anrechnung. The
verb constitutes the non-lexical component of the verbal periphrasis, but
it assigns the categorical status of verb to the whole periphrasis. One
could observe that the kind of verbal periphrases addressed by Lie differ radically from those he calls grammatical periphrases (e.g er ist
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89
gekommen 'he has come', er hat gegeben 'he has given'). He seeks to
define the difference on semantic grounds. However, he fails to recognize the categorial status of the verb. In cases such as er ist gekommen
'he has come' the verb sein 'to be' behaves as an auxiliary, that is to say
an item typically denoting distinctions of tense, aspect and/or modality.
Auxiliaries are neither clearly lexical nor clearly grammatical units, but
they also occur as main verbs (e.g. er ist ein Lehrer 'he is a teacher').
They may not be the semantic main predicate of the clause and do not
have a meaning of their own, but rather they are synsemantic or syncategorematic to the lexeme to which they apply, i.e. the main verb. These
are, among others, some of the properties showed by auxiliaries. On the
contrary, in cases such as in Anrechnung kommen 'to be reckoned' or in
Bearbeitung sein 'to be in processing' the verbs kommen and sein are
not auxiliaries because they occur as main verbs. Thus, despite the use
of the term "verbal periphrasis" by the author for both instances-er ist
gekommen and in Bearbeitung sein-the function of the verb sein 'to
be' is quite different; in the first case sein behaves like an auxiliary, in
the second case it is rather a main verb. Lie focusses on the German
verbs kommen 'to come,' bringen 'to bring,' sein 'to be,' and haben 'to
have' arguing that these verbs are instrumentally used in the verbal
periphrases, whereas in other contexts they appear as full lexemes. I
agree with the author about the fact that the above mentioned verbs
reveal a peculiar semantics when combined in periphrases such as those
he interprets as aspectual verbal periphrases, but I would not call them
nichtlexematische Hilfsverben "non-lexical auxiliaries", because they
do not show the properties of the auxiliaries.
In conclusion, the study is rich in implications and is very important as a comparative research on the interrelations of tense and aspect,
on the one hand, and the aspectual verbal periphrases of two different
linguistic systems, on the other hand.
Dipartimento di Linguistica
Universitii degli Studi di Pavia
Corso strada Nuova, 65
1-27100 Pavia
Italy
REFERENCES
Comrie, B. 1976. Aspect. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Comrie B. 1985. Tense. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
90
Coseriu, E. 1976. Das romanische Verba/system. Til bingen: Gunter Narr.

Dahl, b. 1985. Tense and aspect systems. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
HANS-JOSEF NIEDEREHE, Bibliografia cronol6gica de la lingiiistica, la

gramatica y la lexicografia del espafiol desde los comienzos hasta el afio 1600
(BJCRES). Studies in the History of the Language Sciences, 76.
Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1995. 457 pp.
Reviewed by
RAY HARRIS-NORTHALL
Scholars of the history of linguistics in Spain have undoubtedly

received, with the publication of this volume, a fundamental contribution to their field. Niederehe brings together in this bibliography almost
one thousand entries covering printed books and manuscripts known to
have been produced before the year 1600 concerning Spanish linguistics in the broadest sense, including, for example, grammars for speakers of other languages, works containing glosses on pronunciation, and
lexicographical volumes. The only criterion for inclusion in the bibliography, N. points out in his introduction, is the presence of the Spanish language, either as the object of study, or as the language of description.
Each of the entries in the bibliography is made up of several parts,
all consistently and clearly distinguished in such a way as to enable the
reader to consult an entry rapidly and with ease. The first field gives the
date of the edition and the author, if known. This is followed by the second field, in which N. reproduces all of the information on the title page,
including, as well as text, any other information such as signs, printers'
marks, portraits, and so on, given in angled brackets. The transcription
procedures followed in the reproduction of the title page are discussed
briefly in the introduction. The next field contains the place of publication (or where the copy was produced, in the case of manuscripts), and
the name of the printer.
All this information on the edition itself is expanded by another
three fields: comment, library, and bibliography, respectively. The comment field contains a variety of types of information considered relevant
by the compiler: number of pages or folios, signature marks, descriptions quoted from other bibliographical sources, and so forth. Known
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91
copies of the work are listed by current location in the library field, and
the entries close with a list of relevant bibliographical sources.
The main part of the volume (pp. 7-289) is taken up by these entries
and by a list of bibliographical source material (pp. 291-337) which follows; but its usefulness as a reference tool is considerably enhanced by
the indices which complete the volume, and list titles, places of publication, scribes or printers, current locations, and authors. The bibliography may therefore be consulted in a number of ways to provide information of interest not only to linguists and historians of linguistic
science, but also to philologists and scholars of early printing in Europe.
The only aspect of this bibliography which detracts from its otherwise high degree of practical value is the organization of the final field
of bibliographical sources, and the incomplete nature of the list of those
sources. In each entry, sources are cited by author (or editor) and year
of publication, but no distinction is made between those listed in the second part of the bibliography with full details of publication, and those
which are actually cross-references to other entries in the first part.
Thus, to take one illustration, in entry number 60 (page 21), the bibliography field includes Col6n-Soberanas 1979 and Soberanas 1981;
while the latter duly appears in the list of bibliographical sources, the
former does not, since it in fact refers to a 1979 edition of Nebrija's Diccionario latino-espafiol, and is therefore included among the primary
entries. The reader is therefore obliged to consult both sections, or the
index of authors, in order to find the reference. In itself, this is an inconvenience, but not a major obstacle to the use of the book. Unfortunately, however, it is compounded by the fact that the list of bibliographical
sources is incomplete, so that many of the references in the bibliography field of primary entries are not to be found listed anywhere: Icazbalceta 1954 (entry 123), Jones 1978 (entry 149), Stengel1975 (entry 248),
Perez Pastor 1971 (entry 31 0) are a few of the many examples of missing references.
Aside from these problems of referencing, N.'s book provides an
enormous amount of useful and fascinating information: it witnesses the
publication of the first dictionaries and studies in Spanish of the languages of the native peoples the Spanish encountered in the New World;
it documents the prestige of Spanish in sixteenth-century Europe, as
reflected in the publication of Spanish grammars and wordlists for
speakers of English, French, and other languages; and its use as a reference volume is supplemented by the fact that N. has been able to identify ghost editions mistakenly reported in other sources (for example,
entries 185 and 186). The volume is almost completely free of typo-
92
WORD, VOLUME 48, NUMBER 1 (APRlL, 1997)
graphical errors, a feat of some considerable merit in a publication such

as this. In all, it is a valuable and finely produced contribution to a field
which, outside of N.'s own dedication, has only recently begun to
receive the attention of specialists.
Department of Spanish and Portuguese

University of Wisconsin-Madison
Madison, WI 53706
WILLIAM A. FOLEY, ed. The role of theory in language description. Berlin:

Mouton de Gruyter, 1993. viii+ 467 pp.
Reviewed by MASATAKA
ISHIKAWA
The present volume grew out of a conference with the same title as
that of the book, which was organized by the editor and held in Ocho
Rios, Jamaica, in November 1987. The volume consists of 15 papers
preceded by an Introduction by the editor, and followed by a Language
Index and a Subject Index. According to the editor, the conference dealt
with the following four "distinct, yet interconnecting", issues; (i) the
gap between linguists and anthropologists with respect to their theoretical and descriptive concerns; (ii) "the nature of the linguists' object of
study"; (iii) how to reconcile formal approaches with pragmatic
approaches focusing on language-based social interactions; (iv) the linguistic data base (pp. 1-2). Broadly speaking, the contributions can be
divided into two groups; the structural-formalist approach and the nonautonomous functionalist approach. The former attempts to account for
linguistic phenomena in terms of a grammatical (coding) system. The
latter tries to describe them within an inference-based framework (based
on both grammatical and discourse factors). Within the latter, there are
two subgroups, one which considers pragmatics as a principal ingredient of language (description) and the other which emphasizes the integration of formal and functional approaches. Given the space allowed
for the present review, I will comment on individual papers mostly in
regard to the general theme of the book, namely the (relation between)
theory and representation/description in linguistic studies.
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93
Mark C. Baker ("Noun incorporation and the nature of linguistic

representation", pp. 13-44) deals with the question of whether the
(native speaker's) linguistic representation is abstract or concrete. Based
on the analysis of Noun Incorporation phenomena in native languages
of the Americas, B argues that important cross-linguistic generalizations about these polysynthetic languages and the typologically different languages of Europe can be captured only if one assumes that a
speaker's knowledge of language is represented at the relevant level of
abstraction, at which the geometrical relations of arguments are similar
in both types of languages. Joan Bresnan ("Interaction between grammar and discourse in Chichewa (Bantu)", pp. 45-60), like Baker, is concerned with capturing general properties of human language. In her
framework (LPG), because of the independence of lexical structures,
configurational structures, and functional structures in the grammar, different (grammatical) functions are not necessarily represented by different configurational representations (unlike Baker's GB approach). B
concludes that only by combining formal and functional analyses one
can capture "[d]eeper insight into the nature of language" (p. 58).
Dealing with the Burmese verb phrase structure in its semiotic and
semantic aspects, A. L. Becker ("The elusive figures of Burmese grammar: An essay", pp. 61-85) concerns himself with the issue oflocal (vs.
universal) explanations in language description. His view is that the
importance of linguistic theory in language descriptions is to highlight
dissimilarities between languages, which "may lead one to a relativistic, non-universalist attitude toward languages" (p. 81). Andrew Pawley
("A language which defies description by ordinary means", pp.
87-129), studying Kalam, a language of the New Guinea Highlands,
stresses the importance of the description of idiomatic competence. P
suggests that one should pay more attention to aspects of "untidy" and
"fuzzy" areas of language that both grammarians and speakers have to
cope with (such as lexicon) (p. 126).
In "The conceptual basis of grammatical relations" (pp. 131-174),
William A. Foley argues that grammatical primitives of language structure are relational categories that are universally definable in semantic
terms (e.g., actor and undergoer) and that notions such as subject and
object cannot be universal categories that all languages necessarily possess. He claims that a more conceptually-based approach to grammatical relations (according to the logic of a particular culture involved), as
opposed to configurational definitions, can describe human language
more accurately. In a condensed article ("The expanse of grammar in
94
the 'waste' of frames", pp. 175-191), Michael Silverstein points out the
lack of theoretical ideas which concern themselves with the understanding of the relationship between formal properties of linguistic categories and textual cohesion. S argues against "discern[ing] levels of
abstractness isomorphic to the significant segmentations" and "calling
these the objects of grammatical description (and theory)" (p. 189).
John J. Gumperz's paper ("Culture and conversational inference",
pp. 193-214) analyzes how linguistic knowledge and socio-cultural
knowledge are used (by both speakers and listeners) to "assess what is
intended" (p. 194) in the act of transmitting information. According to
G, since dialogue coherence depends crucially on socially constructed
shared background knowledge, linguistic descriptions "should account
for variability of form and interpretive processes ..." (p. 207), rather
than absolute truth value of verbal songs in isolation. M. C. O'Connor
("Disjoint reference and pragmatic inference: Anaphora and switch reference in Northern Porno", pp. 215-242) considers that an inferencebased approach to interpretation in terms of "the discourse parameter of
point of view" (e.g., logophoricity) is superior to (morpho)syntactically-based accounts since "it can give a unified account of both withinclause and across-clause uses of [anaphors and pronouns]" (p. 221).
Nicholas Evans's "interpenetrationist" view ("Code, inference,
placedness and ellipsis", pp. 243-280) argues against a strict "complementarist" position, i.e., demarcation between the (modular) coding
system (grammar) and the (non-modular) inferential system (pragmatics). E underlines the integration of socio and ethno-linguistics into formallinguistic theory and characterizes it as a challenge for the field in
the next century. Viewing language as a pragmatically driven coding
system, Doris L. Payne ("Meaning and pragmatics of order in selected
South American Indian languages", pp. 281-314) proposes that "discourse pragmatic factors must be built into" grammatical models as
fundamental principles of word order (rather than merely appended to
them) (p. 281).
Christian Lehmann ("Theoretical implications of grammaticalization phenomena", pp. 315-340), who considers language a (creative, goal-oriented) human activity with two basic dimensions (cognitive/epistemic and communicative/social), discusses what concepts and
assumptions any linguistic theory will have to include. From a diachronic point of view, L argues that linguistic theory should be based on the
view that grammatical levels and grammatical categories (seen as the
product of grammaticalization) are points on a continuum. L further
suggest that the gradient nature of general grammaticalization process-
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95
es have important implications for both the theory of language and the
theory of grammar (= a model of linguistic description). Adopting a
socio-historical and ethno-political view of language, Geoffrey Benjamin ("Grammar and polity: The cultural and political background to
Standard Malay", pp. 341-392) maintains that linguistic descriptions
are incomplete unless one goes beyond syntactic structures and takes
into consideration factors such as cultural contexts.
Examining starred vs. unstarred judgments in standard and local or
colloquial varieties, Anthony Diller ("Diglossic grammaticality in
Thai", pp. 393-420) warns of the danger of basing the construction of
grammatical theory on the grammaticality judgments of decontextualized sentences isolated from social and cultural settings. The paper by
Mohamed H. Abdulaziz ("Language use and language development:
Review of sociolinguistic theory", pp. 421-435) looks at the issue of
language planning and language development in society (such as language variation/shift) in the context of societal modernization and cultural change in Africa and urges (especially) sociolinguists to develop
integrated (and more comprehensive) theories of language use and language development. Jane H. Hill's article ("Formalism, functionalism
and the discourse of evolution", pp. 437-455) addresses the issue of language evolution from the formal and functional perspectives, and suggests that the study of language evolution should take into consideration
"the difference between the 'general architecture' of human language
and the specific ways in which this is elaborated and implemented in
local ways of speaking" (p. 453).
Each contribution takes a quite different view on what constitutes
language description and linguistic theory. Although it is certainly beneficial to be exposed to diverse viewpoints on "grammar", "language",
"linguistic theory", and "description of language", it would have been
more useful if the articles had been organized around a common point
of reference with respect to conceptions of (language) description and
(linguistic) theory (for example, concentrating on one of the four issues
addressed in the book). (As Silverstein puts it, we need to have first "a
coherent denotatum of the term linguistic theory" (p. 178). In the
absence of some common point of departure, it would also have been
more instrumental if the book had included comments by the participants on each others' ideas. To be fair, individual papers make valid
points in the respective areas of research, and point to directions for further research with interesting and thought-provoking suggestions.
These observations, and the fact that some articles are rather inconclusive, should not discourage linguists interested in this general topic
96
from reading this volume. The field certainly needs, as Diller points out,
broader perspectives for grammatical theorizing.
Department of Foreign Languages

Hiroshima University
Kagamiyama 1-7-1
Higashi-Hiroshima, 724
Japan
MICHAEL L. MAZZOLA, ed. Issues and theory in Romance linguistics:

Selected papers from the linguistic symposium on Romance languages XXIII.
Washington D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 1994. xiii + 546 pp.
Reviewed by MASATAKA
ISHIKAWA
The Twenty-third Annual Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages was held at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, on April
1-4, 1993. The volume is divided into two parts: Phonology and Syntax. As in many of the previous LSRL proceedings, syntactic studies
predominate in the present volume. Although Spanish and French are,
as usual, the two most studied languages, it is pleasant tQ see that many
of the articles are comparative in scope, dealing with two or more
Romance (and in some cases non-Romance) languages or dialects.
Part I (Phonology) contains seven papers. Barbara E. Bullock
argues that all underlying segments are licensed by the syllable (without making any distinction between heavy and light syllables) in
the prosodic structure of French. Luigi Burzio and Elvira DiFabio suggest that "[m]orphomes maintain fixed accentual properties" (p. 22) in
stress preservations in word formation (e.g., English propaganda ~
propagandist) and morpheme suppressions (e.g., Italian finisco/jiniamo). Steven R. Hoskins takes up secondary stress in French, while
Haike Jacobs analyzes epenthesis in Gallo-Romance and Old French,
arguing against the existence of segmentally empty, but prosodically
relevant constituents. Next, John M. Lipski proposes that the spread of
[+vocalic] (postvocalic) or [+continuant] (postconsonantal) is involved
in the fricative articulation of voiced obstruents in Spanish. In the penultimate paper of the phonology part, Pilar Prieto considers that vowel
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lengthening in northern Italian dialects is conditioned by interactions of

optimization of segmental and prosodic structures. In the final paper,
Irene Vogel examines three types of phonological interface (phonologymorphology; phonology-syntax; phonology-semantics) in Italian in
terms of mapping algorithms between the structures of two components
involved.
Part II (Syntax) includes 23 papers. Nancy Mae Antrim proposes an
incorporation analysis of adverbial agreement in Italian (e.g., Maria
parlava sveltalsvelto 'Maria was speaking fast' (130)). Deborah Arteaga hypothesizes that the verb agrees either with the postverbal NP or
with impersonal il in Old French impersonal constructions. Although
technical details of the analysis are left open, specific proposals made in
this article should be taken seriously in future study. In the third paper
(by Julie Auger), Picard clitics are analyzed as inflectional morphemes
with the second person clitics having two morphological subcategorization frames (allowing their dual positioning with respect to the verb),
while the first and third person clitics have only one. Valentina Bianchi
and Maria Cristina Figueiredo Silva argue that the contrasts between
Italian and Brazilian Portuguese with respect to (i) the possibility of
having referential null objects and referential null subjects and (ii) the
clitic placement can be accounted for by postulating different sets of
independent functional heads (Person/Number/Gender) for the two languages. Next, Reineke Bok-Bennema and Brigitte Kampers-Manhe
claim that clitic climbing in Spanish and Italian and quantifier/manner
adverb climbing in French are in fact manifestations of one and the
same process (T-Incorporation). This paper is a good example of solid
scholarship illustrating how one hypothesis (with a couple of secondary
assumptions) can account for various phenomena in different languages
in a straightforward manner.
J. Clancy Clements advances a unified account of Topicalization
and Left Dislocation in Spanish by proposing that (indefinite) object
drop involve null partitive pronouns. Richard Danford and Kutz ArrietaStemen's paper deals with double complementizer constructions in
Spanish (e.g., Me pregunt6 mi madre (que) quien llam6 'My mother
asked me (*that) who called' (p. 259)) and postulates that [Spec, IP] is
the landing site for wh-elements (i.e., [Spec, IP] is an A' -position).
Maarten de Wind proposes that the subject clitic (in AgrS) assigns Case
to the lexical subject in [Spec, AgrSP] under agreement in French complex inversion sentences. According to Natalia Dfaz-Insense, extraction
of nominals out of DP is possible if resulting chains do not violate
strong crossover. D-I's proposal seems to have interesting consequences
98
for movement/extraction phenomena in clauses (e.g., relativization), as

well.
The contribution by Pilar Garcia-Mayo and Paula Kempchinsky
compares Spanish and English parasitic gap constructions. They claim
that differences (e.g., clause-boundedness and tensed-vs.-non-tensed
asymmetry) follow from the possibility in Spanish of having pro in
object position with a null operator generated in [Spec, CP], contrary to
English, which, without recourse to pro, adjoins a null operator (generated in the gap (= A-) position) to CP. Luis Lopez attributes different
possibilities in Spanish and English with respect to VP-Ellipsis to different movement possibilities in the two languages. Nicole Maier considers the placement of the embedded subject and complement (clitics)
in Portuguese causative constructions with interesting comparisons of
French and Portuguese in terms of Case-assignment patterns.
In a technical, but carefully written paper, Enrique Mallen argues
that the contrast in the licensing of empty elements in [Spec, TP]
between German and Spanish in multiple wh-questions can be accounted for by assuming that Tense governs [Spec, TP] at LF in Spanish,
while Comp antecedent-governs [Spec, TP] in German. Johan Rooryck
characterizes the apparent optional nature of clitic climbing as the
optionality in the way Relativized Minimality can be satisfied. Mario
Saltarelli provides a morphosyntactic analysis of voice in Latin and
Romance in which the voice (morpheme) is analyzed as the head constituent of IP. Uthaiwan Wong-opasi hypothesizes that Romance Verbcomplement compounds are derived by deleting the (underlying) agent
head (N) from the proposed endocentric structure in accordance with
syntactic principles.
Three papers are concerned with impersonal (se) constructions.
Julia Herschensohn (French psych se) and Amaya Mendikoetxea (Spanish ARB SE) both examine the constructions in terms of Case-absorption by se, while Robert E. Vann attempts to unify middle se, inherent
se, and "no fault" se in Spanish. Also included in the volume are papers
py Sarah Cummins and Yves Roberge (a morphological analysis of
Romance clitics at the proposed Lexicon-syntax Interface level); Claudia Parodi (on morphological (in the minimalist sense) differences
between Spanish and English DPs); Liliana Sanchez (on emphatic and
adverbial readings associated with the DP modified by mismo 'self' in
Spanish); and Karen Zagona (a ditransitive analysis of the temporal
argument structure ofthe Spanish compound perfect tense).
The present volume, as the previous LSRL volumes, contains a
number of excellent papers dealing with both familiar and new problems
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99
with thought-provoking proposals. Especially, comparative approaches

taken by many papers in this volume should stimulate further research
on a wide variety of topics covered here. Also, as most of the previous
proceedings coming out of this annual conference in North America, the
majority of the contributions are written in the generative framework. In
this sense, some papers may not so easily be accessible to non-followers.
There are some missing references and typological infelicities, but this
seems to be unavoidable in proceedings of this size. One final comment.
Although broad geographical areas are covered in synchronic studies,
diachronic (comparative) investigations are under-represented. Personally, I would have liked (and certainly hope in future volumes) to see
more diachronic contributions. Speaking of the valanced representation,
the same applies to contributions in the areas of phonology and morphology. All in all, I predict that many Romance linguists (especially
synchronic syntacticians) will find this volume a valuable source of
information.
Department of Foreign Languages
Hiroshima University
Kagamiyama 1-7-1
Higashi-Hiroshima, 724
Japan
JOEL A. NEVIS, BRIAN D. JOSEPH, DIETER WANNER and ARNOLD M.

ZWICKY, eds. Clitics: A comprehensive bibliography, 1892-1991. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1994. xxxvii + 274
pp.
Reviewed by MARK J ANSE
1. Introduction. The last twenty-five years have witnessed a veritable

explosion of research on eli tics and related phenomena. This is not surprising in view of the fundamental problems clitics pose for any theory
concerned with the organisation of grammar, particularly with the interaction of discourse, syntax, morphology and phonology. Clitics typically share properties of words on the one hand and affixes on the other.
Their exact location on the word-to-affix cline, however, varies from
100
one clitic to another: some are more word-like, others more affix-like.
Again, this is not at all surprising, since historically, clitics generally
develop from words into affixes. As a consequence, it is not at all clear
that all the items which have been called clitics are similar in kind, nor
is it clear at what level(s) of grammatical description they should be
treated.
The linguist interested in clitics and related phenomena now has at
his/her disposal a precious bibliography covering exactly one hundred
years of research and comprising over 1,500 titles. The bibliography has
been compiled by Joel A. Nevis, Brian D. Joseph, Dieter Wanner, and
Arnold M. Zwicky, each of whom has published extensively on cliticsNevis on Finno-Lappic languages, Joseph on Modern Greek, and Wanner on Romance languages. Zwicky is of course best known for his pioneering work in proposing a first typology of clitics, and in establishing
diagnostic tests for distinguishing clitics from both words and affixes.
The compilers have taken 1892 as the starting-point for their bibliography, the year in which Jacob Wackernagel's famous article on what
has come to be known as "Wackernagel's Law" was published. Wackernagel observed that in the ancient Indo-European languages (particularly in Ancient Greek) (en)clitics were frequently placed in second
position after the first stressed word or constituent of the clause. Wackernagel's Law is one of the few generally accepted statements about
Indo-European word order. In addition, the phenomenon of second
position enclisis has now been reported in numerous non-Indo-European languages as well (the present bibliography contains up to 250
titles referring to Wackernagel's Law). Given the importance ofWackernagel's 1892 article, it was only logical to take 1991 as the cut-off
point, thus commemorating its centennial.
The bibliography is laid out as follows. After the preface and
acknowledgements, Joseph presents a short account of the scholarly
career of Wackernagel (whose year of birth is wrongly stated as 1852
instead of 1853 on p. xi), with particular reference to his influence on
Bloomfield (pp. xi-xii).
Then follows an essay by Zwicky on problems in the identification
and definition of clitics (pp. xii-xx). Zwicky argues that "clitic" be
taken as an umbrella term, not as a theoretical construct, because of the
"mixed" properties clitics present. Two of the possible subtypes of elitics are assigned the status of theoretical constructs, viz. "bound words"
and "phrasal affixes." Bound words are represented by clitics of the
Wackernagel type, whereas phrasal affixes can be exemplified with the
English possessive suffix's. According to Zwicky, bound words are elitics par excellence.
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Identification of clitics of either type is not unproblematic, nor is

the identification of the other types Zwicky distinguishes: "grammatical
category lexemes", "marginal category members", "invariables", "loners", "syntactic dependents", "idiosyncratic sandhi targets", "obligatory leaners", "accentless words", and "phonologically located words".
The problems in assigning particular items to any of the types just mentioned clearly illustrate the fact that clitics and related phenomena really constitute a mixed lot.
The front matter ends with an explanation of the bibliography, its
sources, the criteria for including certain items and excluding others,
and the use of the bibliography and the index (pp. xxi-xxxvii). The
compilers have been extremely generous as far as the type of work
included is concerned: books, doctoral and master's theses (both published and unpublished), monographs, and notes, as well as articles
from journals, conference proceedings, working papers, and anthologies. Understandably, unpublished manuscripts, conference presentations that never appeared in print, and the like have been neglected. The
decision to include a particular item, then, is based on the qualitative
judgement on the part of one or more of the compilers, but some items
have been excluded on practical grounds, depending on the language of
publication. Publications written in Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese, Chinese
and Thai, for instance, have been neglected, but the bibliography contains numerous references to work in Greek, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Finnish, Estonian, and many other languages.
Each entry contains a bibliographical description and, most importantly, an alphabetised list of key-word descriptors used for indexing
purposes. In most cases, the theoretical framework adopted is specified
as well, e.g., "Cognitive Grammar", "Functional Grammar", "GB Syntax", "Lexical Functional Grammar", etc. The list of key-word descriptors also contains the name(s) of the language(s) covered in the publication. In addition, titles in relatively unfamiliar languages such as
Greek, Finnish, Estonian, Russian, etc. have been translated on the
assumption that such items, even with descriptors, are more opaque to
the majority of users. In the following sections I will discuss in some
detail the use of the language and other descriptors and the coverage of
the bibliography.
2. Language descriptors. A list of the language descriptors is given
at the end of the bibliography (pp. 175-178). In a number of cases,
dialects of the language or the conventional names for different historical stages are listed as sub-descriptors. Unfortunately, sub-descriptors
are not marked off as such typographically, which makes the index
102
I (APRIL, 1997)
unnecessarily opaque. The use of italics and/or boldface would have

been helpful. The decision whether to distinguish dialects and/or historical stages and to what extent appears to be rather arbitrary, which may
give cause to confusion.
To start with sub-descriptors for historical stages, one is surprised
to find under the descriptor "Greek" separate entries for "Hellenistic"
and "Koine Greek", which actually refer to the same stage of the language. "Latin" has a sub-descriptor "Ecclesiastical Latin" which is,
strictly speaking, not a historical stage of the language. Somewhat misleading is the insertion of a sub-descriptor "Old Portuguese" under
"Portuguese". One would have preferred the more inclusive term "Old
Galician-Portuguese", which is now generally used for the common
ancestor of Portuguese and Galician. The same holds, mutatis mutandis,
for the sub-descriptor "Old Russian" under "Russian": the term "Old
Russian" refers to the common ancestor of all the East Slavonic languages, including Ukrainian and Belorussian. Equally problematic is
the insertion of a sub-descriptor "Old Bulgarian" under "Bulgarian",
since the former term is synonymous with "Old Church Slavonic", the
earliest attested Slavonic language with distinctive South Slavonic
(more specifically, Bulgarian and Macedonian) features. "Old Church
Slavonic" has a separate entry, but whereas Gribble (1988) is listed
under both "Old Bulgarian" and "Old Church Slavonic", Gribble (1989)
appears under "Old Bulgarian" only. The term "Old Turkish", which is
a sub-descriptor under "Turkish", should be corrected to "Old Turkic"
and listed either as a separate entry or as a sub-descriptor under "Turkic". Finally, it should be remarked that historical stages are not always
consistently distinguished as such. Minkova (1987), for instance, is listed under "English," but should be under "Middle English"; van Kemenade (1987) should not only be listed under "English", but under "Old
English" and "Middle English" as well.
The use of sub-descriptors for particular dialects is even more
inconsistent. One wonders why separate entries have been allotted to
the Valaisien and Val d' Aosta varieties of Francoproven~al, whereas
each of these refers to one title only. Similar remarks could be made
concerning the distinction of "Mura" and "Piraha" and "Mura-Piraha"
or of "Swampy Cree" and "Woods Cree" under "Cree". Under "Catalan" appears a mysterious sub-descriptor "Barcelona" referring to
Gavarr6 (1991), where no particular variety of Catalan is identified.
"French" has separate sub-descriptors for "Colloquial French" and
"Popular French" which are, strictly speaking, not dialects of the language. The distinction is in any event not consistently made, since
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Blanche-Benveniste (1990) on spoken French is listed under "French".

The same descriptor has separate sub-descriptors for "Acadian", "Montreal", "Newfoundland" and "Quebecois French", even though a separate sub-descriptor for "Canadian French" is used. Similar remarks
could be made for other languages as well. "Spanish", for instance, has
sub-descriptors for "Argentine" and "Rfo de la Plata," and for "Caracas"
and "Chilean", even though a separate sub-descriptor for "Latin American" is used; same for "Cuban", "Puerto Rico" and "Caribbean". "Arabic" has separate sub-descriptors for "Cairene" and "Egyptian", but
Jelinek (1983), which is on Egyptian Arabic, is listed under "Arabic". It
would have been helpful in such cases to use more extensive cross-referencing or better perhaps, to restrict the number of sub-descriptors to
collective terms like, e.g., Canadian French, Latin American Spanish,
Egyptian Arabic", etc.
For obvious reasons, similar problems arise when descriptors are
used for both individual languages and phyla, language families, subfamilies, branches or whatever. "Eskimo" has subdescriptors for "Central Siberian Yupik", "Inuit" and "West Greenlandic", but Rischel
(1971), which is on "West Greenlandic", is listed under "Eskimo".
There are three references to Rice's work on Slave, but only one of these
is referred to under "Athapaskan," whereas all three appear under the
separate descriptor "Slave". Other Athapaskan languages, like "Dogrib"
or "Navajo", again have separate descriptors, but are not referred to
under "Athapaskan". There is a general descriptor for "Uta-Aztecan"
with "Classical Aztec" as sub-descriptor. Separate descriptors for individual Uta-Aztecan languages include "Cora", "Huichol", "Mono" and
"Pochutla". The Sonoran languages "Nevome" (Pima Bajo), "Papago"
and "Tepehuan" have separate descriptors, even though general descriptors for "Piman" and even "Tepiman" are used as well. There are only
three references under "Italic", two of which are on Oscan. Both are
referred to under the descriptor "Oscan" which, however, includes four
additional titles. Separate descriptors exist for "Indo-Aryan" and
"Indic", the latter having "Old Indic" as a sub-descriptor. However,
there is also a separate descriptor for "Sanskrit", with "Vedic" as a subdescriptor. Similar observations apply to "Iranian" and "Persian", the
latter having sub-descriptors for "Classical Persian", "Middle Persian"
and "Old Persian", where separate descriptors have been used for
"Avestan" (Old Iranian) and "Pahlavi" (Middle Iranian). Again, crossreferencing would have been helpful here.
Unfortunately, there are more serious errors. The only sub-descriptor for "Dutch" is "Dialects", which has only one reference, viz. De
104
Geest (1990) on the dialect of Gent, wrongly classified as "West Flemish" instead of East Flemish". On the other hand, one finds a separate
language descriptor for "Flemish", which is not a separate language, but
a cover term for the Belgian varieties of Dutch, with a sub-descriptor for
"West Flemish", which is in fact a dialect of Dutch. The article of Stroop
(1987) under "Flemish" is on the (West) Brabantine dialect of Dutch,
that of Haegeman (1983) on West Flemish. The other articles by Haegeman are all on West Flemish, but are listed under "West Flemish"
(Haegeman 1990; 1991 a) and "Dutch" (Haegeman 1991 b) respectively.
"Raetoromance" (instead of the more current "Rhaeto-Romance") has
only one sub-descriptor, viz. "Surselvan", which is in fact a dialect of
the Romansh variety of Rhaeto-Romance. The two other varieties have
separate descriptors: "Friulian" and "Ladin", but Vanelli ( 1984a), which
is on Ladin dialects, is listed under "Raetoromance".
Finally, a number of doublets have found their way into the list of
language descriptors, for instance "Scandinavian" and "North Germanic", the latter being a sub-descriptor under "Germanic". "Komi" and
"Zyryan" have separate descriptors, but Komi is the Russian glottonym
for Zyryan. The same holds for "Udmurt" and "Votyak", where Udmurt
is again the Russian variant.
3. Other descriptors. Apart from the language descriptors, a great

number of key-word descriptors have been used for indexing purposes.
These descriptors form a conceptual framework for the study of clitics
and related phenomena and include theoretical notions such as "Agreement", "Binding", "Incorporation", "Movement", "Verb.Second" etc.,
and specifically clitic-related terms like "Clitic Climbing", "Clitic
Cline", "Clitic Doubling", "Clitic Order", etc. Particularly in the latter
group, extensive use has been made of cross-referencing between identical or related terms. For instance, the descriptors "Clitic Copying" and
"Clitic Reduplication" refer to "Clitic Doubling"; "Clitic Movement"
to "Clitic Climbing". Surprisingly, there is no cross-referencing
between "Clitic Group", "Clitic Cooccurrence" and "Synenclisis." The
related term "Clitic Sequence" is referred to under "Template", but
missing from the list. Another related term, viz. "(Clitic) Cluster", has
been omitted altogether. The general term "Clisis" occurs only in compounds like "Enclisis", "Endoclisis", "Proclisis" and "Second Position
Clisis". Elsewhere, the (processual) term "Cliticization" is used.
The reader is referred to "Complementizer" under "COMP", but
it would have been helpful to do the same under "AGR" (see "Agreement") or "INFL" (see "Inflection"). Sadock (1991), for instance,
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appears under both "INFL" and "Inflection", so why introduce separate

entries for specifically GB-related terms, the more so since a separate
descriptor for "GB Syntax" exists. This brings us to a more general
problem of the index. A number of descriptors are too general to be
descriptive, for instance "Affix", "Diachrony", "Pronoun", "Morphology", "Syntax", etc. Someone interested in, say, the order of clitic pronouns in Ancient Greek or clitic climbing in French will have to exercise much patience to collect his literature, not to mention the
theoretician interested in the history of the debate on cliticization as
syntax and/or morphology. As long as no electronic version of bibliographies of this kind is available, it might be useful to make more
extensive use of cross-references under both language and other
descriptors.
Extremely useful in this respect is the introduction of descriptors
referring to particular words in certain languages that have been (and
still are) the subject of extensive discussion in the literature, like the
Spanish and generally Romance se/si, Dutch er, or Romance en (a
descriptor subsuming Italian ne, French en, Catalan en, etc.). In most
cases, the theoretical framework adopted is specified as well, e.g. "Cognitive Grammar", "Functional Grammar", "GB Syntax", "Lexical
Functional Grammar", etc. Although it would be extremely cumbersome to check each and every one of the references under, say, "GB
Syntax", it is still helpful to know the theoretical framework if you are
only interested in generative approaches to clitic climbing or whatever.
Among the descriptors missing from the list the following pairs
deserve to be mentioned, as they have acquired a special status in
the field of comparative Indo-European linguistics: "Prepositive" c.q.
"Quasi-proclitic" and "Postpositive" c.q. "Quasi-enclitic" (the term
"Quasi-clitic" does appear in the list, but with reference to "Leaner").
The term "postpositive" is derived from the Latin translation of the
Greek hypotaktik6s, which is used by the Alexandrian grammarian
Apollonius Dyscolus in connection with the Greek enclitic pronouns.
The term "quasi-enclitic" was first introduced in the field of Greek linguistics by Wackemagel and has since gained fairly wide acceptance.
4. Coverage. The coverage of the bibliography is very impressive.

Nevertheless, as the compilers state in their preface, "bibliographic
completeness is perhaps nothing more than an abstract and ultimately
unattainable goal" (p. viii). Elsewhere (Janse 1994), I have published a
supplementary bibliography containing some 55 addenda to the present
bibliography and including some 125 additional titles for the period
106
1992-1994. The interested reader is referred to the article just mentioned for further details, but the following omissions deserve to be
mentioned right here.
Given the importance attached to Wackernagel's seminal article,
one is surprised not to find any reference to the proceedings of the colloquium on Wackernagel edited by Eichner and Risch (1990), which
contains two important papers on Wackernagel's Law in Indo-European
(Krisch 1990) and in Homeric Greek (Ruijgh 1990). It is equally surprising not to find any reference to the Alexandrian grammarians in the
bibliography, even though Uhlig's edition of Apollonius Dyscolus' treatise on syntax was published in time to be included (Uhlig 1910).
Householder's translation ofthis important work (Householder 1981) is
missing as well, just as Laum's extremely valuable discussion of the
Alexandrian system of accentuation (Laum 1928).
Finally, I have come across two references which are not listed in
the bibliography. The first is Sadock (1983), which is mentioned in the
bibliographic entry of Richardson, Mitchell and Chukerman (p. 131).
The second is Lehmann (1987), mentioned in the analytical index under
"Grammaticalization", which is probably a mistake for Aguado and
Lehmann (1987) (p. 2).
5. Conclusion. The above are of course minor quibbles which may be
quite easily emendated in future editions of this important work of reference. Anyone who has been engaged in compiling a bibliography
knows how difficult and frustrating a job it is. The four compilers have
performed a formidable task and one can only admire their courage and
perseverance. We can only hope that an updated (and corrected) edition
will soon be available. In the meantime, two more books should be mentioned which have appeared since the writing of the above mentioned
supplement (Janse 1994), and which are of the utmost importance for
anyone interested in clitics and related phenomena, viz. Halpern (1994)
and Halpern and Zwicky (1995).
Linguistic Bibliography
P. 0. Box 90407
NL-2509 LK The Hague
The Netherlands
REFERENCES
Eichner, Heiner and Helmut Rix, eds. 1990. Sprachwissenschaft und Philologie: Jacob Wacker
nagel und die lndogermanistik heute: Kolloquium der lndogermanischen Gesellschaft vom
13. his 15. Oktober 1988 in Basel. Wiesbaden: Reichert.
REVIEWS
107
Janse, Mark. 1994. "Clitics and word order since Wackernagel: one hundred years of research into
clitics and related phenomena". Orbis 37:389-410.
Halpern, Aaron. 1994. On the placement and morphology of clitics. Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Halpern, Aaron and Arnold M. Zwicky, Eds. 1995. Second position clitics and related phenomena.
Stanford: CSLI Publications.
Householder, Fred W. 1981. The syntax ofApollonius Dyscolus. Translated, and with commentary.
Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Krisch, Thomas. 1990. "Das Wackernagelsche Gesetz aus heutiger Sicht". Eichner and Rix
1990:64-81.
Laum, Bernhard. 1928. Das Alexandrinische Akzentuationssystem unter Zugrundelegung der theoretischen Lehren der Grammatiker und mit Heranziehung der praktischen Verwendung in
den Papyri. Paderborn: Schoningh.
Ruijgh, C.J. 1990. "La place des enclitiques dans l'ordre des mots chez Homere d'apres Ia loi de
Wackernagel". Eichner and Rix 1990:213-233.
Sadock, Jerrold M. 1983. "The necessary overlapping of grammatical components". CLS
19.2:198-221.
Uhlig, Gustav. 1910. Apollonii Dyscoli quae supersunt. Volumen alterum. Apollonii Dyscoli De
constructione libri quattuor (=Grammatici Graeci II, ii/iii). Leipzig: Teubner.
HENKAERTSEN and ROBERT J. JEFFERS, eds. Historical linguistics 1989.

Papers from the 9th International Conference on Historical Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1993. xvii + 538 pp.
Reviewed by RoGER LAss
Writing a short review of a conference volume recalls Dr. Johnson's

likening of a woman preaching to a dog walking on its hind legs: "It is
not done well; but you are surprized to find it done at all" (Boswell, 30
July 1763). With this in mind I will comment generally on the contents
of the volume, and single out a few particularly interesting papers out of
the characteristic (even for an edited proceedings) abysmal to near-classic range (most of the contributions, needless to say, are about in the
middle of the cline).
A collection like this should be an index of the State of the Art; the
ICHLs since the first in Edinburgh in 1973 have indeed tried to serve
just that purpose. But the picture given here is (one hopes) a rather
skewed one. Out of 34 papers, no fewer than 27 (77%) deal with IndoEuropean topics, and of these a third are on English, and a fifth on
Romance, with the rest divided pretty evenly between Germanic other
than English (Dutch, Afrikaans, Icelandic, German), and Ancient IE
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I (APRIL, 1997)
(Hittite, Sanskrit, Greek, Latin). This leaves only about 3% each for
other language families: one each on Algonquian, Iroquoian and Dravidian, two of these (Susan Herring's "Aspectogenesis in South Dravidian: on the origin of the 'compound continuative' KONTIRU' and
Marianne Mithun's "Reconstructing the unidentified", a splendidly
sophisticated and insightful cognate-hunt through Iroquoian and related
groups) among the best in the volume; and a small but interesting
remainder for general theoretical topics. Among the triumphs here are
Lyle Campbell's skeptical and typically wide-ranging "On proposed
universals of grammatical borrowing" (which shows that there aren't
many), Konrad Koerner's "The natural science background to the development of historical-comparative linguistics", another of his important
contributions to understanding the 19th-century background of our
trade, and one of the sharpest papers I have ever read on general historicallinguistic method, Sara Thomason's "On coping with partial information in historical linguistics". All but three of the papers are in English; two are in French (on the history of French) and one in German
(on German).
The rather characteristic data-base skewing is probably not hard to
explain: it is partly a reflection of the way historical linguistics tends to
be taught, and (as far as I can make out) the fact that only three of the
authors are native speakers ofnon-IE languages. One would wish that a
showcase volume like this had something more on other major language
families and/or areal groupings: but most work on other families seems
to appear in specialist rather than generalist publications, undoubtedly
to the detriment of everybody's education. Still, at least there is no neoGreenbergian "mass-comparison", and nothing on "Nostratic", "ProtoWorld" and the like, so one has to be content with minor blessings.
Theoretically, the general picture is pleasingly eclectic, with a relatively small amount of mainstream generativist work (though at least
one GB paper, Ans van Kemenade's "Syntactic changes in late Middle
English", on the complex relations between V-2 and expletive pro-drop,
is a superb example of "philology" and theoretical linguistics informing
each other). Much of the work in contemporary theoretical models,
unfortunately, rather reeks of the classroom: there are a couple that
rather read like graduate-student essays in "applying" models to datasets; only van Kemenade and Steven Nagle's "Double modals in early
English" are really contributions to the subject in general, rather than to
(unfortunately rather quickly dating) discourse within the hermetic
worlds of particular models. Though Lori Repetti's "A moraic model of
the diachronic development of long vowels and falling diphthongs in
Friulian" is well done, and worth reading if only for the data.
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109
This is not to say that the overall non-generativism is a mark of

atheoreticalness or fiat-earthism; rather, as is usual in historical linguistics these days, most of the papers lean on other kinds of theoretical
approaches, including grammaticalization and what might be called
"surface typology" (Silvia Luraghi, "Verb serialization and word order:
evidence from Hittite"), discourse analysis and historical pragmatics
(Lene Schfi)sler, "Did aktionsart ever compensate verbal aspect in Old
and Middle French?", a beautiful study of the roles of perfect and simple past in relation to information structure, Maria Manoliu-Manea,
"From staging strategies to syntax: clitic copying and direct objects in
Romanian", Laurel J. Brinton, "Episode boundary makers in Old English discourse", Masataka Ishikawa, "Diachronic syntax and information packaging: remarks on unstressed pronouns in Old Spanish").
There are also a number of excellent sociolinguistic/contact studies,
including Edith Raidt's important "The role of women in linguistic
change", on the early development of Afrikaans, John Victor Singler,
"An African-American linguistic enclave: tense and aspect in Liberian
settler English", and Jaap van Marle and Caroline Smits, "The infectional systems of overseas Dutch".
Most of the work is what I would call healthily philological, whatever its theoretical interests; I am especially happy to see so many
papers dealing with texts, citing extensively, and keeping to relatively
traditional data-based approaches, with sophisticated sensitivity to the
complexities of textual traditions (a particularly good example is Pieter
van Reenen and Astrid Wijnands, "Early diphthongization of palatalized West Germanic [u:]: the spelling uy: in Middle Dutch", an elegant
corpus-based and geographically sophisticated study of this problematic development). One interesting quantitatively based paper, Elda Morlicchio's "Zur Geschichte der Distanzstellung im Deutschen: die
Urkunden des 13. Jahrhunderts" is rather spoiled by a lack of sufficient
examples to make it entirely clear what the numbers are about, but contains fascinating data from a relatively unknown corpus about the rise of
the sentence-brace and its relation to style, clause-type, and semantics.
There is a good spread of senior and junior people; though a few of
the seniors could profitably have been omitted, notably a piece of
opaque mystagoguery by Michael Shapiro ("Drift as an organic outcome of type"), a failed attempt to set up a neo-Aristotelian theory of
"causal potencies" inherent in types as natural kinds, which seems to me
rather more romantic Naturphilosophie than linguistics of any kind.
Among the papers worth reading but not mentioned above are
Robert Coleman, "Patterns of syncretism in Indo-European", Stephanie
Jamison, "Determining the synchronic syntax of a dead language" (a
110
sharp methodological discussion largely focussed on Sanskrit), Martin

Maiden, "The role of paradigms in the phonetic detail of sound change"
(on developments in Italian), and Henry Smith, "Linking changes in Icelandic", a difficult but rewarding study of "impersonal" constructions
and the development of (among other things) non-nominative subjects.
My one overall irritation, which may be a bit idiosyncratic, is the
use of endnotes rather than footnotes. Surely with modern software
there is no difficulty printing footnotes, and they are much more userfriendly (especially when they are long and discursive) printed in the
proper place. In fact footnotes are used in other products of .the same
publisher at the same time, so there is obviously no in-house technical
problem. Anybody who passes a law against endnotes gets my vote.
Department of Linguistics
University of Cape Town
Rondebosch 7700
South Africa
DONALD WINFORD, Predication in Caribbean English creoles. (Creole

Language Library, 10). Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1993.
viii+ 419 pp.
Reviewed by ALAN R.
LIBERT
This book deals with a wide range of constructions involving predication in two dialects of Caribbean English Creole (CEC), Jamaican
Creole and Guyanese Creole; some other creoles, particularly those of
Suriname, also figure in the discussion. The first chapter gives background information on CEC and on the linguistic framework used, Generalized Phrase Structure Grammar (GPSG). Chapters 2 and 3, "The
Verb Complex" and "Auxiliary Ordering" deal with the markers of
tense, mood, and aspect, their meanings, and restrictions on their occurrence and which sequences of them are permitted. The following chapter, "Voice, Valency and Transitivity", is concerned with the passive.
The subject of chapter 5 is "Copular and Attributive Predication" while
serial verbs are treated in chapter 6. VP and S complements are discussed in chapter 7, which is followed by a concluding chapter.
After some general remarks I shall bring up several of the many
particular points which could be discussed in relation to this book.
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111
There is a wealth of data here which will be a valuable resource for

researchers on the subject even if they disagree with the theoretical
stances which Winford takes. There are many typographical errors and
other minor problems indicating sloppy writing and editing; one stylistic feature which I find annoying is the frequent use of illustrate as an
intransitive verb, e.g. "The following examples illustrate." (p. 60).
On a more theoretical level, I am not convinced that the GPSG formalism which Winford uses is really necessary. In the first chapter he
attempts to justify his use of this framework: "One of the main attractions of GPSG for an undertaking such as this is the fact that it is primarily a data-driven theory, very much concerned with explicit statements about the working of a grammar.[ ... ] A GPSG framework is also
well-suited to the subject matter of this book. Like other theories it recognizes that 'clause structure is largely predictable from the semantics
of predicates ... '(Wasow 1985:202) ... The use of GSPG formalism
in this book is to be seen simply as an application of the framework to
the data of CEC predication in order to achieve a certain level of explicitness". It is not obvious to me how by using this framework Winford
has been able to give a better or more explicit account than if he had
used, say, Government-Binding (GB) theory, or for that matter simply a
descriptive grammar-type approach. It does not appear that much of the
theoretical machinery of GPSG is used in this task, nor do any theoretical claims of the framework seem to play a crucial role (e.g. having one
level of syntactic representation as opposed to the D- and S-structures
of GB theory). Also, the account seems uneconomical; I wonder
whether some of the many rules describing the phrase structure could be
collapsed or replaced by information in lexical entries.
In chapter 5, section 4.3 Winford presents some lists of adjectives
classified according the types put forth by Dixon (1977). The first three
types, Physical Property, Dimension, and Color, "consist of items that
represent more transitory states" (p. 184), unlike the "more permanent
states" denoted by the other types, Age, Value, Human Propensity, and
Speed. While some syntactic facts may be accounted for by such groupings, one might not think that adjectives of age (e.g. yong 'young') are
necessarily more permanent than those of color or size, indeed any
organism which is young will not remain that way indefinitely, while
some organisms or objects will be the same size or color throughout
their existence. With respect to the particular type Physical Property, the
adjective ded 'dead' would not seem to be part of this grouping, semantically speaking, and it is generally not a "transitory state".
There are some dubious uses of terminology. Winford seems to use
112
I (APRIL, 1997)
vagueness and ambiguity interchangeably; while it is not necessary to

distinguish between the two concepts, it can be useful. On page 180 the
adjectives in di sik lit pikni 'the sick little child' are described as being
conjoined; in some structural analyses of such a phrase, including that in
the textbook Frornkin et al. (1990: 182), these adjectives are not conjoined.
On page 19 Winford says that "GPSG, like other contemporary syntactic theories, evolved in part out of the tradition of generative grammar
which developed from the work of Harris (1951) and Chomsky (1957)."
This is misleading, since it implies that all syntactic theory has these
roots; it seems to me that there are various "contemporary" theories
which have little to do with this tradition, such as the various types of
dependency grammar. One may not agree with such theories, but one
should acknowledge that there are frameworks outside of generative theory. Of course, this criticism can be applied to other authors besides Winford.
This book will mainly appeal to those looking for data on predication from Caribbean creoles, although wider issues are also involved,
such as the causes of change in creoles, and the question of "creole genesis".
The University of Newcastle
Newcastle
NSW2308
Australia
REFERENCES
Dixon, R. M. W. 1977. "Where have all the adjectives gone?" Studies in language 1(1):19-80.
Fromkin, V., R. Rodman, P. Collins, and D. Blair. 1990. An introduction to language. (Second Australian Edition). Sydney: Holt, Reinhart and Winston.
SlEW-YUE KILLINGLEY and DERMOT KILLING LEY, Sanskrit (Languages of the World/Materials 18). Miinchen/Newcastle: Lincom Europa,
1995. ix + 62 pp.
Reviewed by EUGENIO
RAMON LUJAN MARTINEZ
This book is a useful sketch of the grammar of Classical Sanskrit

whose aim is "to provide a description of Sanskrit for the linguist who
REVIEWS
113
is not a specialist in the language" (p. 6). But I think that even specialists in Sanskrit can find interesting ideas in it. Although the structure of
the book is very traditional (introduction, phonology, morphology, syntax, and a text), the way in which the authors present the grammatical
characteristics of Classical Sanskrit is certainly not.
After a brief summary of the external history of Sanskrit (0), 1 is
devoted to the phonology. I like the concern to provide the reader with
phonological arguments to support the status of the phonemes instead of
relying directly on the distinctions made by the devanagari script, as it
is frequently done. I only miss in the discussion on the nasals a reference to the fact that their opposition is neutralised before stops. On the
other hand, their presentation of sandhi (especially vowel sandhi) is
rather appealing: grammars of Sanskrit usually give a detailed account
of all the possible cases, but they do not provide the general abstract
rules that govern it, which is precisely what we find on pp. 16-7.
In the section on morphology (2), indeed no paradigms are presented, but the authors limit themselves to a description of the categories which are relevant in Sanskrit. And I think nonspecialists will
appreciate the effort made to elucidate the different concepts to which
the term stem is applied in Sanskrit grammar. The most innovative
aspect of the book is the presentation of the verb (2.5). The authors had
already warned (p. 6) that their terminology could conflict with that
commonly used in the description of Sanskrit, and we find, e.g. the
labels active, immediate, remote reduplicated, and predictive instead of
present, aorist, perfect, andfuture-I am not sure that using the former
will make those oppositions clearer for a linguist who is interested in
knowing which are the categories relevant to the Sanskrit verb. But it is
not only a question of terminology, as table 4 on p. 34 will show. I think
that is a good experiment, and it would be worthwhile to develop it, but
I do not find it completely satisfactory as it is presented in the book. For
instance, I do not think we can use the label indeterminate stem to subsume the immediate, remote, and predictive stems, since they are three
different stems that have in common only that they do not have specific
passive forms. On the other hand, the classification of the predictive ( =
future) as a mood and an aspect but not as a tense is questionable, and I
do not find it appropriate to call the participles untensed forms when
they can express relative tense.
Syntax is dealt with in 3. The authors include in this chapter the
exposition of what they call compound phrases, which are usually studied as a part of the compositional morphology, and the arguments they
offer for doing so are quite reasonable, since the characteristics of these
compounds are not word-like (pp. 43-4). And 4 is a text from the
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WORD, VOLUME 48, NUMBER 1 (APRIL, 1997)
Hitopadda, for which grammatical analysis of all the words and word-
to-word translations is offered.

Finally, as far as the bibliography is concerned, strangely enough
one of the fundamental works on Sanskrit, the grammar by Wackemagel
and Debrunner (189611954), has not been included.
Dpto. Filologia Griega y Lingiiistica lndoeuropea

Universidad Complutense de Madrid
28040 Madrid
Spain
REFERENCE
Wackernage1, J., and A. Debrunner. 1896/1954. Altindische Grammatik. 3 vo1s. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. 1957).
D. GARY MILLER, Ancient scripts and phonological knowledge. (Current

Issues in Linguistic Theory, 116.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins,
1994. ix + 139 pp.
Reviewed by EuGENIO RAMON LUJAN MARTINEZ
It has been argued in recent times that knowledge of linguistic segments depends directly on using an alphabet-an assertion difficult to
maintain after all the work on productive morphology carried out in the
last years. But the fact that such views have gained a certain acceptance,
and that its defenders claim that they have experimental bases to support
it, has made necessary a contribution such as D. Gary Miller's book, in
which he sets out to fight them. The way he chooses to do it is by
analysing some ancient scripts, both alphabetic and syllabic, in order to
assess that there is indeed some phonological-and linguistic, in general-knowledge that underlies all of them.
In the preface he states as the goal of his analysis "to demonstrate
the high degree of segmental awareness that was coded in the scripts and
their orthographic conventions" (p. xi). He then proceeds to summarize
recent views that challenge the traditional conceptualizations of scripts
as a mirror of speech. But even acknowledging some interesting points
of these theses, he recalls that, after all, the aim of a script is to represent some of the linguistic knowledge the speakers have about their own
language, and very sensibly concludes that "the conflict will always be
on what kind of knowledge will be mirrored, whether it will be exclusively phonological (and which aspects of that-syllables and/or seg-
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115
ments), partly morphological, partly lexical or semantic" (p. xiv). In

chapter 1 some theoretical prerequisites are introduced. First comes a
brief note on script types, in which he mentions only syllabaries and
alphabets (and not semi-syllabaries, which could be a good support for
his thesis, as I will try to show later), and makes a good point when
stressing that alphabets encode less information than syllabaries, given
that they do not render explicit the syllable structure, while knowledge
of consonants and vowels is necessary to encode correctly the information required by a syllabary. But most of .the chapter is devoted to an
exposition of the sonority hierarchy and its consequences and effects.
Chapter 2 begins the series of analyses of ancient scripts with a
detailed examination of the Linear B syllabary. Miller's goal is to prove
that "the spelling conventions of the Linear B syllabary are based directly on the Sonority Hierarchy (SH) and presuppose a sophisticated (at
least implicit) knowledge of the arrangement of segments according to
the SH in order to spell words" (p. 13), which, elaborating on previous
research, he convincingly does. The general rule that applies is: "[a]ny
sequence allowed by the SH ... as a possible onset is spelled out in the
Linear B syllabary, and any sequence specified by the SH as a possible
coda is not written ...." (p. 18), and he produces all the evidence available from Mycenaean on pp. 18-22. So /stathmos/, e.g., is spelled as tato-mo, where /s/ is not written (it is a syllable adjunct and not an onset)
while /th/ is, but this implies also, according to Miller's analysis and
applyin~ the general rules of the SH, that this word would be syllabified
as /sta-t mos/, which is supported by the fact that the copy vowel to write
/thl is o, and a would be expected if the syllable division were */stathmos/. Onsets in coda position, such as wa-na-ka for /wanaks/, are a particular case. It would be interesting to know how a Mycenaean scribe
would have spelled the cluster in words such as sy rigks, where we find
first a coda, -g- (=/nl), and then an onset in coda position; but unfortunately there seem to be no examples thereof in the Mycenaean tablets.
The major exceptions to the general rule are the sequences of glide + liquid or liquid + glide, which behave contrary to the SH rule but accordingly to a Greek specific rule that allows wr- but not rw- clusters. A minor
observation that does not affect the general contents of the chapter: in
note. 2 (p. 16) the fact that in poetry diphthongs in final position of a
word are treated as short when followed by a word beginning with a
vowel is explained as a resyllabification by which the glide comes to
open the next syllable, which could well be the case, but this explanation
leaves unparalleled the scansion oflong vowels, which under those same
conditions are also treated as short, and this can not be explained as a
resyllabification.
116
Chapter 3 is a survey of the Cyprian syllabary, in which Miller, on

the basis of the vowel copied to spell out onsets and codas, argues that
the orthographic conventions adjust to the SH but for a very few exceptions, some of which could be explained as an interference of the morphological level in that they seem to be attempts at a compositional
spelling. The correlation established on p. 29 between the almost complete absence of logograms in the Cyprian syllabary and the more complete spelling of onsets and codas, in opposition to the prolific use of
logograms (many of them acronyms, I would add) and the not writing
of codas in Linear B, is rather appealing.
The Greek alphabet is dealt with in chapter 4. What I find most interesting in it is the evidence that some of its characteristics can be related
to similar ones in the previous Greek syllabaries, a question that had not
been paid much attention to, but can be of great importance for the discussion on the date of the borrowing of the alphabet by the Greeks.
Miller is aware of these implications, and opens the chapter with some
general considerations in favor of an early date. Thus, after summarizing
how the Greeks created the vowel signs, he states (pp. 47 and 59) that it
can not be coincidental that only five vowels were represented-exactly
the same as in the Linear B and Cyprian syllabaries-although phonologically there were more than five vowels in Greek. Moreover, he even
suggests the possibility-which is worth considering-that the creation
of vowel signs is due to the influence of syllabary traditions, for in them
vowels, as heads of the syllable, are necessarily represented. Another
interesting observation is made when dealing with the supplementary
letters of the Greek alphabet: in Crete no supplementary letters were
used for /ph/ and /kh/, and Miller suggests (pp. 50-1, and 59) that this
absence can be explained as a survival of the syllabary tradition by which
there were no separate signs for aspirates and non-aspirated stops. And
the question why there should be specific signs for the clusters /ps/ and
/ks/ at all may have something to do (note 14 on p. 54, and p. 58) with the
convention in the Linear B syllabary of writing onsets in coda position,
and it is precisely -ks and -ps that are the only clusters allowed in final
position in Greek; moreover, the Cyprian syllabary had a special sign for
/ks/ in final position. Miller himself acknowledges (p. 59) that any of
these points in and of themselves may be challenged, but I agree with
him when he claims that the general picture points to a greater interaction between syllabaries and alphabet than is generally considered.
Before going on to comment about the following chapters, I would
like to bring in some data from a kind of script that Miller pays no attention to, but which-I think-can provide great support for the idea that
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117
much phonological knowledge is encoded in ancient scripts. I am referring to semi-syllabaries, and I will exemplify my claim with those
which are most familiar to me, the Paleohispanic ones, that is, those in
which the pre-Roman languages of Spain were written (see Untermann
1983, and de Hoz 1983 for more detailed data and literature on the subject). First of all, it is worth noting, from the point of view of the SH,
that there are syllabic signs for the stops, but alphabetic signs for the rest
of the phonemes (continuants, nasals, liquids, glides, and vowels). The
scripts do not have different signs for voiced and voiceless stops,
although this opposition was phonological in at least two of the languages that were written in these scripts, Celtiberian and Iberian (in the
latter with the exception of labials), but in the variety of script used in
southern France a small line was used as a diacritic in order to distinguish them (see Correa 1992). As for clusters-and I will refer now
specifically to Celtiberian, which is the language we understand better-those formed by a stop+ rare treated in three different ways (see
de Hoz 1986:49 for actual examples and further considerations): e.g.,
/tri/ can be written as ti-r-i, ti-r, or even ti. We do not know for sure how
clusters of two stops were dealt with. However, the facts so far exposed
make it clear that the users of these scripts were to some extent aware of
the phonology of their languages.
Chapter 5, devoted to the runic alphabet, closes the series of analyses of scripts. It is in my opinion the least convincing one. The point is
made that fupark, as it stands in the runic abecedaria that have come
down to us, reflects a phonetic ordering, which, in its tum, could be used
as evidence to support the theory of the archaic Mediterranean origin of
the runic script, since it would share phonetic parameters of organization with the scripts of Byblos, U garit, and the Phoenician one. However, the great number of blanks and double (and even triple) occupancies
in the table of p. 71 diminishes the force of the argument.
The idea that implicit linguistic knowledge is independent of any
kind of script is the core of chapter 6, and evidence of different kinds is
brought in to support it, mainly from language of children who can not
write yet, such as the ability to detect new words inside a sentence and
ask for its meaning, the accuracy at ordering affixes in polysynthetic
languages, or even "Pig Latin". And as an additional bit of novel evidence, I will mention in passing a children's "secret" language in Spain
which consists in inserting after every syllable the stop /p/ followed by
a copy of the vowel of the syllable, such as herpemapanopo for hermana; very few mistakes are made, and the game undoubtedly reflects
an implicit knowledge of syllables.
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I (APRIL, 1997)
To sum up, the amount of evidence displayed throughout the book

leaves no doubt that Miller has achieved his goal of refuting the idea that
(implicit) linguistic knowledge depends on writing and the kind of
script employed.
Finally, a brief comment on chapter 7, devoted to characterizing the
ideal script. After stating (p. 103) that alphabets are in some way unnatural because of the linearity of their representation, which violates the
knowledge of higher levels of organization, Miller tries to devise an efficient syllabary, which would be "one in which vowels are consistently
segmented out to the extent that vowels in isolation and with onsets
would have the same representation" (p. 106). But that sounds too close
to what an alphabet is.
Depto. Filolog{a Griega y Lingii{stica Indoeuropea
Universidad Complutense de Madrid
28040 Madrid
Spain
REFERENCES
Correa, Jose A. 1992. "Representaci6n gnifica de Ia oposici6n de sonoridad en las oclusivas ibericas (semisilabario levantino)." A/ON. Annali del Seminario di Studi del Mondo Classico (sez.
ling.), 14:253-92.
de Hoz, Javier. 1983. "Las lenguas y Ia epigraffa prerromana de Ia Peninsula Iberica." Unidad y
pluralidad en el Mundo Antigua (Aetas del VI Congreso Espaiiol de Estudios Cldsicos).
Madrid: Gredos. Pp. 351-96.
- - . 1986. "La epigraffa celtiberica." Reunion sabre epigraj{a hispanica de epoca romanorepublicana. Zaragoza: Diputaci6n Provincial. Pp. 42-101.
Unterrnann, Jiirgen. 1983. "Die althispanischen Sprachen". Aufstieg und Niedergang der romischen Welt. Vol. 29.2. Ed. Wolfgang Haase. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter. Pp.
791-818.
JOACHIM BORN, Untersuchungen zur Mehrsprachigkeit in den ladinischen

Dolomitentiilern: Ergebnisse einer soziolinguistischen Befragung. Pro Lingua,
14. Wilhelmsfe1d: Gottfried Egert Verlag, 1992. 292 pp.
Reviewed by STEPHEN J.
MATTHEWS
The four Ladin valleys of the Italian South Tirol form one of the
smallest Romance speech communities. Isolated among the Dolomites,
like the Swiss Romantsch dialects of GraubUnden, Ladin has fewer
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119
speakers (around 30,000) and less official status. The situation is of special interest from the point of view of contact-induced change, involving
not only German as in Switzerland but also Italian: two of the four valleys (Badia and Gardena) open to predominantly German speech communities, two (Fassa and Livinallongo) Italian ones. Ladin materials
from the Val Badia clearly show structural borrowing from German,
such as the use of verbal particles (lascia zeruch 'leaves behind'), suggesting the moderate to heavy borrowing stage of Thomason and Kaufman (1988). Thus when the author states (p. 1) that this book is a study
in language contact in the tradition of Weinreich 1951, one expects discussion of these issues. This expectation is misplaced, however: where
Weinreich 1953 gives copious examples of German influence on
Romantsch, Born's concerns lie elsewhere, his macro-sociolinguistic
perspective offering metalinguistic opinions and figures rather than linguistic data. Nor is the book about multilingualism, as the title suggests;
rather, it is a survey of the current position and status of Dolomite Ladin
as seen by its speakers.
The book is divided into five parts. The first reviews the historical,
cultural and political background of Ladin, its relationship to the other
Rhaeto-Romance tongues and the efforts to standardize them. There are
several useful maps, though little information is given concerning linguistic characteristics and differences. Part II describes the questionnaire investigating the areas of language competence, domains of use
and attitudes of 162 Ladin speakers. Methodologically, parallels are
drawn with the situation of Catalan, where Born's survey has served as
a model. The questionnaire, conducted in 1981, covers social, political,
journalistic and religious aspects of the status of Ladin, though surprisingly, there are no questions about the influence of German or Italian or
about code-mixing. Part III presents and discusses the results of the
questionnaire according to each of the four valleys, age, education,
mother tongue and gender. Part IV reports on a follow-up survey conducted in 1991, asking more subjective questions about attitudes to the
language, its standardization and public use.
In Part V conclusions are drawn from the two surveys. The Ladin
speech community shows considerable vitality, especially in the valleys
of Badia and Gardena where it is surrounded by German rather than Italian. Despite (or perhaps because of) the influx of tourism, there is growing recognition of the Ladin identity, pride in the language and a positive attitude to standardization. To preserve this state of affairs, however,
Born argues that greater recognition as a regional language, as in the
case of Romantsch, is needed.
120
As a study in macro-sociolinguistics, the study succeeds in providing a wealth of data on language attitudes in a minority community,
from use in church and school to gender differences (males appear
to use and value the language slightly more than females, although no
tests of significance are given; an exception is jokes, which females are
more likely to tell in Ladin). It is not common for such a small speech
community to show such signs of vitality, and the factors underlying
this will be relevant for other minority languages. As a study in language
contact, the book represents rather a missed opportunity. Exclusive
reliance on questionnaire data inevitably makes for a somewhat dry
sociolinguistics, with quantitative results taking precedence over qualitative ones. What saves the results from sterility is the inclusion of informants' open-ended responses to the follow-up survey, which bring us
into the linguistic lives of the local community and occasionally yield
insights into the language itself. Thus although none of the questions
specifically asks about Italian or German influence on Ladin, informants speak of "veneticisation" (si ventizza) and even bastardization of
the language (imbastardimento ). Mutual intelligibility among the four
valleys is also fortuitously addressed in this way ("con un pizzico di
buona volonta, ci si puo comprendere benissimo"). The responses also
reveal the complex reality behind the earlier figures: we find, for example, that the use ofLadin in the churches is a controversial issue. Regrettably, none of the responses are in Ladin: most are in German, a minority in Italian. Whether this is by design, or merely prompted by the use
of German and Italian in the questionnaire, the survey itself, by treating
Ladin only as an object of metalinguistic discussion, seems to contribute to the marginalization of the language: there is hardly a single
word of Ladin in the book that is not the name of a place, person or organization. While exhorting governments to support its use, the only contribution the book makes in this respect is to use Ladin place names in
preference to the German and Italian ones. Although Weinreich would
doubtless have been pleased to see Dolomite Ladin ending the century
in such good shape, one cannot help wondering whether he would have
missed some linguistic data.
Department of English
University of Hong Kong
Pokfulam Road, Hong Kong
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REFERENCES
Thomason, Sarah G. and Terrence Kaufman. 1988. Language contact, creolization and genetic linguistics. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Weinreich, Uriel. 1951. "Research problems in bilingualism, with special reference to Switzerland". Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia University.
- - . 1953. Languages in contact. The Hague: Mouton.
H. C. WOLFART and FREDA AHENAKEW, eds. and trs. kinehiyawiwininaw

nehiyawewin: The Cree language is our identity: The La Range lectures of
Sarah Whitecalf (with a glossary). Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press,
1993. xiv + 160 pp.
PRADEEP AJIT DHILLON, Multiple identities: A phenomenology of multicultural communication. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1994. x + 193 pp.
Reviewed by STEPHEN 0.
MuRRAY
Despite both having "identity" in their titles, these two books have
little in common other than each being based on a single speaker. One
book is devoid of explicit theory, but carefully records what "the native"
said in its entirety. The other book drowns the reader in a high surf of
theories, with occasional quotations (or translations) of some snippets
of interviews and no indication of the extent of the corpus or of the questions asked.
Wolfart and Ahenakew are both linguists (Ahenakew is Cree) with
a long-running commitment to recording Cree elders and making what
they record available in Cree (both in syllabics and romanized) and in
English, as in their earlier (1987, 1992) books based on stories and life
histories of Cree elders. Sarah Whitecalf (1919-1991) was a monolingual Plains Cree speaker. As a child, she had been kept from boarding
schools. She recalled that she "never set foot in a school, and because of
that I am truly a Cree" (p. 27). The book contains her answers toquestions in Ahenakew's class at Le Ronge, Saskatchewan on Cree language
structures. The questions appear only in "abbreviated and heavily edited form" (p. xi), which precludes analyzing the interactions. The focus
is on what Whitecalf said. Beside the three representations of what she
122
I (APRIL, 1997)
said, there is an extensive Cree-English glossary and English index to

the glossary which together occupy half the book. (Beyond a 4and-1/6th-page introduction there are no notes from the editors about
Cree language or culture, as there were in previous volumes.)
As the editors stress, "The La Ronge Lectures of Sarah Whitecalf
differ radically from most other text collections in the indigenous languages of North America [including their own earlier Cree materials]:
while she illustrates her discussion with personal experiences, Sarah
Whitecalf's purpose in these lectures is not to tell stories but to explicate Cree practices and beliefs" (p. ix). Those involved understood what
she was doing as a traditional form of elders counseling younger Cree
how to live the Cree way (the Plains Cree verb for "lecturing"). Whitecalf's learning was not entirely by observation, although some was (e.g.,
in discussing dying porcupine quills, she stated, "I learned much from
my mother by watching her" on p. 33), but she was committed to sharing her knowledge to aid in preserving Cree language and culture now
through schools (and in bilinguals) and to having written down (and
translated) what used to be transmitted orally. She welcomed respectful
interest from Whites about everything except Sundance Lodges (pp.
53-5). Like Making it their own (Valentine 1995) further east, this book
shows First Nations elders embracing new communication technology
(including publication) to sustain and reproduce identity rooted in language, 1 while encouraging bilingualism.
Dhillon's revised Stanford University School of Education dissertation, in contrast, has wave after wave of allusions to social theory, phenomenonlogical theory, and the intersection of the two iri the Marxist
phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. As interesting as these theories are, they have very little relation to the slender corpus of her data,
which are some interviews she recorded with a retired Sikh career cavalry officer, General Umrao Singh, and his wife, in postcolonial Delhi.
(Dhillon does not say anything about why she chose this general as her
nearly sole informant, how she met him, or what, if any, relationship she
had with him before her 1984-7 "fieldwork".) Although Dhillon is
interested in language as both a marker and a vehicle of identity, she
does not specify the language in which she interviewed the long-multilingual general. There is no indication that the quotations are translations, so I supposed that they were originally in English until I reached
a section on Singh's merger of Punjabi and Hindi phonology (in contrast
to another multi-lingual speaker's "standard" Mahji dialect of Punjabi
and an unspecified source of "standard" Hindi). Dhillon claims that she
wants "to be careful not to imply that linguistic acts are reflexes of con-
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123
sciousness" (p. 135), but writes of not only choice between languages
but also tone and retroflexion as "seek[ing] to preserve historically instituted ambiguity" and "conscious political gestures" without providing
even indirect evidence that anyone in India hears and evaluates General
Singh's speech as Dhillon does (let alone that his phonological mergers
of the languages he speaks are intended as signals, e.g., that Singh's
Punjabi tone deletion "is produced in this manner not to mark linguistic
action too precisely as Punjabi" [p. 132]).
Dhillon's interpretation of how the space in retired officers' bungalows reflects British officer housing in India seems more plausible to me
and more readable than most of the rest (and the chapter about space is
the only one in which anything Mrs. Singh said is reproduced).
I greatly doubt that Dhillon will convince anyone that the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl or Maurice Merleau-Ponty helps make
sense of language attitudes or phonological patterns in multilingual,
postcolonial India, or that anyone else familiar with phenomenology
will regard her analysis of tone and retroflexion as "phenomenological."
In that many of the endnote references do not match what the text purports to quote, and that a number of direct quotes lack note numbers
altogether, it is often impossible to go back even to quoted sources to try
to establish their original context. Dhillon piles reification on reification, drawing them from a diverse array of disciplines, but failing to synthesize them. There are far too many portentous (and often oddly-punctuated!) sentences like "It is possible within this approach to see the
possibility of incorporation, peripheralization, separation and silencing,
operating within consciousness suggested by the Marx of MerleauPonty" (p. 136) or the shorter "It is these processes that led to multiple
membership in speech communities spread in lateral and vertical space
in time" (p. 51).
Although the books have little in common, the cosmopolitan,
multi-lingual "native" source for Dhillon's book shares the more rooted
monolingual Sarah Whitecalf's view that "language is our identity" and
her concern about children not learning the language and the values that
should be conveyed in it. She says, "If we do not learn Punjabi, if our
language does not survive, we get further and further away from ourselves. If we get away from ourselves then we can forget it, we will lie
a floating existence with no values to anchor us" (p. 121).
El Instituto Obregon
1360De Haro
San Francisco CA 94107-3239
124
1997)
ENDNOTE
1
While arguably naturally-occurring interaction, and certainly reflecting "native" concerns,

Whitecalf's "lectures" were question-dependent. In contrast Valentine's often unobtrusively collected data are more clearly naturally occurring speech, not at all question-dependent, often not
derived from face-to-face interaction, and presented with details (and considerations) of prosody
that are missing in the two books reviewed.
REFERENCES
Ahenakew, Freda. 1987. Cree language structures: A Cree approach. Winnipeg: Pemmican Publications.
Ahenakew, Freda, ed. 1987. waskahikaniwiyiyiniw-acimowina: Stories of the House People told by
Peter Vandall and Joe Douquette. Winnipeg: University of Manitoba Press.
Ahenakew, Freda and H. C. Wolfart, eds. 1992. kohkominawak otacimowiniwawa: Our Grandmothers' lives as told in their own words. Saskatoon: Fifth House.
Valentine, Lisa Philips. 1995. Making it their own: Severn Ojibwe communicative practices. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
MARTIN HAASE, Respekt: Die Grammatikalisierung von Hofiichkeit. Edition Linguistik 03. Munich-Newcastle: LINCOM Europa, 1994. 120 pp.
Reviewed by NICK NICHOLAS
The title of H.'s work, an extension of his Master's thesis Die

Bezugnahme auf den Angesprochenen ("Addressee Reference"), claims
to deal with the grammaticalisation of Politeness. However, grammaticalisation is only one component of the approach taken by H. His intent,
in fact, is twofold: first, to set up a cross-linguistic typology of Politeness systems as manifested grammatically, rather than sociolinguistically. (In this, H. holds his work differs from Brown and Levinson's
(1978) well-known monograph, which "exceeds purely linguistic concerns". Indeed, he claims such an explicitly cross-linguistic enterprise
has "hitherto hardly been carried out".) And second, to attempt to identify functional factors conditioning the appearance of any cross-linguistic generalisations.
The cross-linguistic typology is based on a relatively small sample
of languages: Basque, German, English, Modem Greek, Japanese,
Korean, Nahuatl, and Rumanian. H. defends his decision to limit himself to an exhaustive survey of a small number of languages, rather than
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125
a more superficial survey of a greater number, by appealing to the considerable interplay between Respect (the grammatical manifestation of
Politeness) and other grammatical systems in language (such as Tense,
Aspect and Mood). H. is aware, however, that any conclusions drawn
from such a restricted corpus are necessarily of a provisional nature, and
makes no claims about their "universality".
The relevance of grammaticalisation to H.'s work is that he distinguishes Respect forms between languages according to their degree of
grammaticalisation-that is to say, how far they have advanced along
the cline phrase > lexical unit > grammeme > null, and to what extent
they acquire the characteristics of grammaticalised forms described in
works like Lehmann 1982. For example, the Modem Greek addressee
honorific/modal particle more 'Particle denoting solidarity, mildening
tone of utterance'< Middle Greek more 'stupid Masc. Voc' displays the
semantic bleaching and spread to novel paradigms (for example, allowing for female addressees) characteristic of grammaticalisation, and is
classed as further grammaticalised than parenthetical vocatives such as
German Herr Doktor or British/Australian English mate. Morphologically bound addressee honorifics, such as Basque second person auxiliary verbs, are regarded as even further grammaticalised.
After an introductory chapter detailing his methodology, H. discusses his criteria for typological classification in Chapter 2. These are
Degree of Respect, Status (Power) and Distance, and Addressee versus
Referent Honorification. Thus, English contains neither addressee nor
referent honorification; German has a small degree of addressee honorification in its informal use of the ethical dative; Basque and (less
grammaticalised) Modem Greek display addressee honorification;
Nahuatl-referent honorification; and Japanese and Korean (and, less
grammaticalised, Rumanian) display both. H. also discusses the social
conditions under which Respect phenomena occur-illustrated by
Japanese, where the conditioning factors are primarily gender, then
social distance (in-groupness), then relative status; and Basque, where
the main conditioning factor is in-groupness. Of interest is H.'s observation of a discrepancy in Japanese between pragmatical/situational
markedness and morphological markedness: the use ofhonorification is
socially unmarked speech behaviour in that language, but is still morphologically marked. As I mention below, the functional account for
this discrepancy is specific to honorification, and does not follow the
general correlation between pragmatic and morphological markedness
observed, amongst others, by Comrie (1986).
After these preliminaries, H. details in the next two chapters the
126
addressee and referent honorification systems of the languages in his

sample. Under addressee honorification, he considers, as syntactically
free forms, the German second person pronoun and vocative use of the
addressee's title or name; the Modem Greek addressing particles more
and re, and Rumanian addressing particles such as ma and mai; and as
bound forms, the German ethical dative, Japanese honorific auxiliary
verbs and affixes, Basque auxiliaries, and Korean verb forms. Under referent honorification, he considers, as free forms, German honorific titles
(e.g., Kann ich bitte Herrn Dr. Fischer sprechen?), and as bound forms,
Rumanian formal third person pronouns, Japanese affixes and auxiliary
verbs, Korean verb suffixes, and Nahuatl affixes and verb forms.
Whereas the previous chapters are primarily descriptive in nature,
the final two chapters formulate cross-linguistic generalisations for the
politeness systems considered, and attempt to find functional justifications for them. The generalisations H. observes are:
( 1) Honorific expressions are associated with a complex of features
H. terms Formality: overspecification (more than one morpheme denoting formality in the one lexeme); morphological complexity, even
where there is no overspecification (e.g. the Nahuatl honorific applicative nechmotlacelililia 'he receives something for himself from me' for
'he receives something from me'); greater length (following from the
first two properties); and the use of out-of-the-ordinary forms, be they
archaic or innovative. (This set of observations has already been made,
in a functional context, by Brown and Levinson.)
(2) The inclusion of the addressee into the utterance (German second person ethical dative, Basque second person auxiliaries, Rumanian
and Modem Greek addressee particles);
(3) Avoidance of directly agentive verbs in favour of more indirect
moods (Nahuatl reflexives and applicatives, Japanese passives and
potentials), and defocussing of the subject (Rumanian polite second
person pronoun dumnealui < Domnia lui 'your lordship');
(4) Neutralisation of semantic distinctions (coincidence of Japanese suppletive honorific forms of 'be there', 'go' and 'come'; case neutralisation in Rumanian honorific third person pronouns);
(5) !conicity (Basque palatalisation of familiar verb forms, and the
Japanese prefix o-; H. admits that there is only 'feeble' evidence for
such a generalisation, and the palatal Nahuatl honorific -tzin provides a
counterexample);
(6) curtailment of honorific forms in dependent clauses and nonindicative moods.
The functional accounts H. presents for these generalisations are
four types. The first two are based on Brown and Gilman (1958, 1960)
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and Brown and Levinson (1978), respectively; H. finds that Brown and
Levinson's framework, in particular, can provide accounts for most of
the generalisations made. For example, the Basque use of second person auxiliaries can be regarded as a positive politeness strategy aimed to
include the hearer into the speaker's in-group; the neutralisation of
semantic distinctions makes a potentially face-threatening utterance
ambiguous, and thereby 'off-record', allowing the hearer freedom of
interpretation; and so on. However, H. claims, these frameworks are
limited by the fact that they are primarily sociolinguistic in nature,
rather than oriented towards grammar in particular.
As his own contribution, H. brings two further functional motivations into play. First, he points out that Respect has not only a conative
function, in Jakobsonian terms, but also a phatic function, serving to
help maintain the Speaker-Hearer contact-although the further along
the grammaticalisation cline one proceeds, the less phatically effective
the forms are, since they become more frequent and therefore less
marked. Under the phatic rubric, H. also points out the function of
Respect in several languages (citing Basque and Japanese in particular)
to fix the addressee and the referent of an utterance. (This function of
honorification in Japanese is already well-known, and has been extensively discussed in the literature.)
Finally, in the "Pragmatic Aspect" of Respect, H. points out the
social-deictic function of Respect (discussed in Levinson 1983), and
places Respect in the context of the other linguistic deictic systems
capable of relating the speech event to the narrated event: Person, Tense,
and Mood. Like these functional categories (termed shifters by Jakobson (1971)), Respect serves to fix the relationship between either the
narrated event or a participant thereof and some aspect of the speech
event; unlike the other categories, Respect relates these with not just the
speaker, but the speaker-hearer connection. In H.'s scheme, addressee
honorification is a relationship between the narrated event and the
speaker-hearer connection, while referent honorification is a relationship between a participant of the narrated event and the speaker-hearer
connection. H. finds this formulation, distinguishing between event-oriented and participant-oriented Respect, preferable to Comrie's (1976)
classic definition, since it involves entities defineable within language,
rather than the extralinguistic Addressee and Referent, particularly
since referent honorification has been shown to involve the addressee
more often than not.
With this pragmatic/deictic perspective on Respect, H. is finally
able to explain why honorifics are dispreferred in dependent clauses:
whereas event-oriented shifters (Tense, Mood, Respect) have the func-
128
tion of deictically linking a main clause to the speech act, the priority
for dependent clauses is that they be linked to their matrix clause. As a
result, the expression of all event-oriented shifters-not just Respectbecomes constrained in dependent clauses.
H.'s work is a very readable, descriptively thorough attempt at a
cross-linguistically-based, functional account of a linguistic phenomenon whose grammatical manifestation (as opposed to its sociolinguistic conditioning) has been little studied until now. In situating politeness
phenomena squarely within the domain of grammaticalisation theory,
and in his explicit formalisation of the way Respect operates as a deictic mechanism, H. confirms the role of Respect as a grammatical system
comparable to Tense and Mood; and his functional argumentation is
well-thought out.
There are, however, some problems with this work. First of all, the
title is somewhat misleading: the main thrust of the work is not an
account of the grammaticalisation of Respect forms. Rather, the grammaticalisation cline is invoked as a criterion to typologically situate the
Respect systems of various languages, and, in a couple of instances, to
account for the behaviour of particular forms. There is no attention
given to grammaticalisation as a dynamic diachronic process, nor is
there any real attempt to introduce the discoursal origins of grammaticalisation into the discussion.
Second, the number of languages considered in the sample is rather
small, especially since, of the eight languages considered, Respect has
a vestigial presence in two (German and English), a restricted presence
in another two (Rumanian and Modem Greek), and can be fairly
described as having been "done to death" in the literature in a fifth
(Japanese). The only languages presented in the sample that might be
considered novel by linguists familiar with Politeness are Nahuatl and
Basque. There is some truth to H.'s claim that, Respect being so closely intertwined with other grammatical systems in language, a narrow
deep survey is more useful than a wide shallow survey-although this
depends on what questions are being asked; the morphological nature of
Formality could be addressed in a much shallower survey than, say, the
competition between Respect and Person deictic systems. However,
with a survey restricted to six effective data points, and with many of the
generalisations already familiar in the literature (such as those on Formality), the reader is left wishing that another five or six languages had
been thrown into the pot. It is a particular shame that no Australian languages were included in the sample (although to be fair, with the exception of extinct Nahuatl, H. was obliged to make sure he had access to
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129
consultants from all languages considered.) It would be interesting to

see to what extent mother-in-law-type avoidance languages, for
instance, follow the generalisations outlined by H. (they do have neutralisation of semantic distinctions, for one.)
Tied with this point is an impression of some imbalance in the presentation of the work: considering how widely known the results on
Japanese are in the field, and the relatively small number of languages
polled, there is an impression that an inordinate amount of space is spent
on terminological preliminaries (20 p.) and presentation of data (50 p.),
as opposed to analysis of data and argumentation (20 p.), particularly
when it is not obvious how some of the topics discussed at length, such
as the particular social factors conditioning the use of Respect forms,
are germane to the author's real point: motivating the grammar of
Respect, rather than its usage (which is why, after all, he finds Brown
and Levinson (1978) and Brown and Gilman (1958, 1960) unsatisfactory.)
Finally, as to the data used (inasmuch as I can judge the Greek data
as a native speaker): H. seems to have been quite thorough in his elici~
tations from his native speaker consultants, although some of the syntactic judgements are difficult. (Thus, the Modern Greek particle more
is less syntactically flexible in my idiolect than in H.'s consultant's.)
Admittedly, H. relays his native language consultants' doubts about
grammatical acceptability, although a sounder course of action would
have been to poll a number of consultants, and try to determine whether
there are any overall trends; none of the languages surveyed by H. are
too exotic to enable procuring more than one consultant each. Also,
despite the fact that H. has had the spelling of the Greek examples
checked with a hellenist, some spelling mistakes have still crept through
(esys for eseis; pedia for paidia).
A more serious concern is that, like many other workers in the field,
H. uses grammaticalisation as a synchronic descriptive tool, rather than
primarily a diachronic process; this means that the diachronic content of
his work is haphazard. In particular, he has failed to take note of Chatzidakis' (1895) characteristically thorough study on the diachrony and
diatopy of vre/more/re, which would have shed some more light on the
evolution of these particles (the dropping of number marking on the formerly adjectival more, for instance.) Inasmuch as grammaticalisation is
a diachronic process, diachronic data clearly has methodological priority in any study involving grammaticalisation-a principle linguists
ignore at their peril.
Despite the reservations expressed above, I commend this work as
130
I (APRIL, 1997)
an excellent first attempt-with the proviso that the story told here
needs to be expanded on with more languages, to be told in its entirety.
University of Melbourne
Parkville VIC
Australia 3052
REFERENCES
Brown, R. and A. Gilman. 1958. "Who says "Tu" to whom". ETC.: A review of general semantics.
15/3:169-174.
Brown, R. and P. Gilman, A. 1960. "The pronouns of power and solidarity". Ed. T. A. Sebeok. Style
in language. New York/London: Wiley. Pp. 253-76.
Brown, P. and S. Levinson 1978. "Universals in language usage: Politeness phonomena". Questions and politeness: Strategies in social interaction Ed. E. N. Goody Cambridge Papers in
Social Anthropology 8. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pp. 56-310.
Chatzidakis, G. 1895. "Uber das Etymon des Wortes vre." Byzantinische Zeitschifi 4:412-19.
Comrie, B. 1976. "Linguistic politeness axes: speaker-addressee, speaker-reference, speakerbystander". Pragmatics Microfiche l/7.A3-B l.
Comrie, B. 1986. "Markedness, grammar, people, and the world." Markedness: Procedurings of
the twelfth annual linguistics symposium of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, March
11-12. 1983. Eds. F. R. Eckman et al. New York: Plenum.
Jakobson, R. 1971. 'Shifters, verbal categories, and the Russian verb'. Selected writings l/. Den
Haag/Paris: Mouton. Pp. 130-47.
Kuno, S. 1973. The structure of the Japanese language. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Lehmann, C. 1982. "Thoughts on grammaticalisation: A programmatic sketch." Arbeiten des Kainer Universalienprojekts 48. Cologne: Institut flir Sprachwissenschaft.
Levinson, S. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
FRANCIS BYRNE and DONALD WINFORD, eds. Focus and grammatical

relations in creole languages. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1993. xvi + 329
pp.
Reviewed by
CHARLES PEcK
This volume is a collection of the papers presented at the Conference on Focus and Grammatical Relations in Creole Languages which
convened at the University of Chicago on 10-12 May 1990. The book
is divided into five sections with from two to four papers in each section.
Following the introductory chapter by the editors, the first section
is titled "Verb Focus, Predicate Clefting and Predicate Doubling". To
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131
get a feel for the topic of this section, consider the following Haitian
Creole example cited by Prof. Manfredi:
Se pati li pati.
(Is leave slhe left)
'S/he really left'
In this example the first pati is a copy of the main verb at the end of
the sentence-hence the "Predicate Doubling" in the title. Also, the
example can be translated 'It is leaving, [that] s/he left', which is a kind
of cleft structure-hence the term "Predicate Clefting" in the title.
(These cleft structures, however, do not have the same functions as cleft
structures in English.) The problem considered in the papers in this section is how best to fit such a phenomenon into the Govement-and-Binding (G & B) framework.
Victor Manfredi examines Haitian Creole and half a dozen
Kwa/Kra languages in inland west Africa to show that the copy of the
main verb or predicate phrase is a noun or noun phrase that shares only
the phonetic content of the verb or verb phrase, none of its thematiccontent. Different languages do different things with the copy of the
verb. Some leave it in the Predicate Phrase, some put it at the end of the
clause, and some put it at the front of the clause without any copula or
marker, and some, like Haitian, put it at the front with a preceding copula or other cleft marker.
Pieter A. M. Seuren examines the creole of the French islands of
Mauritius, Seychelles, and Rodrigues; he finds that only few laborers
were brought to these islands from Kwa language areas in west Africa
during the last century and that they made only small contributions to
the Creole spoken there today. He points out that only the creole languages with a large Kwa input retain the verb doubling habit.
Claire Lefebvre and Elizabeth Ritter look at the predicate doubling
in temporal [as soon as ... ] clauses and causal [because ... ] clauses in
Haitian Creole and relate them to the G & B framework. The causal
clauses have fewer restrictions than the temporal clauses. The authors
also look at factive [the fact that ... ] clauses and the clauses in another
dialect, and find that they are all as free of restrictions as causal clauses
are.
Section two is titled "Focus and Anti-focus" and includes four
papers on other languages such as Gullah and Tok Pisin. The first paper,
by Salikoko S. Mufwene, looks at the various privileges of occurrence
132
of the several negative words in Gullah, and at their varying scopes of

negation and their focusing functions in declarative sentences and in
interrogative sentences. Most of the negative words are taken from English but are used differently in Gullah.
Gillian Sankoff takes a more recent look at Tok Pis in and finds that
the i-prefix on verbs is less frequent than it was earlier. Interrogative
words stay in situ except some accusative question words which get
moved to the front of the clause. She describes how cleft sentences can
be formed by putting an "em" + noun or "em" + pronoun at the front of
a sentence. Also, there are a few focus particles such as yet, stret and moa
that can be used to emphasize some part of a sentence. She also traces TP
yet from Tolai iat, rather than from the corresponding yet in English.
Alain Kihm applies Cognitive Grammar and Intensional Logic to
explain fronting and clefting in highlighting sentences, questions and
relative clauses in Haitian Creole and Kriyol (of Guinea-Bissau, a Portuguese-based creole).
Qhisope 0. Oyehir~m looks at the anti-focus in Yoruba and
describes how in sentences with two NPs, the first NP can be moved to
the end of the sentence with a preposed ni (assertive marker) (somewhat
like the applicative transformation in English). The first NP may be an
object NP, a locational NP, an instrumental NP, or a manner NP, depending upon the thematic grid of the verb. The author then compares Yoruba serial-verb constructions and antifocus with Haitian serial-verb constructions and focus.
Section three is titled "Focus and Pronominals" and.includes two
papers. Derek Bickerton discusses how several creoles use pleonastic
pronouns, copulas, and other markers to do focussing and topicalizing,
and how to fit them into the G & B framework.
Francis Byrne and Alexander Caskey study the various topic markers, focus markers, emphatic pronouns and pronominals in Southern
Saramaccan. (They misuse the word "presentational" for one of markers which is not "presentational" in its function. Something like "topic
marker" would be more appropriate. Also, many of the examples are
confusingly cluttered with extraneous symbols.)
Section five is titled "Discourse patterning" and includes two
papers. Genevieve Escure studies the particle da or (less frequently, just
a) in Belizean Creole. This particle is an emphasizing particle that can
be used almost anywhere in an oral (spoken) sentence where the speaker wants to make a point. In fact, it and some other reinterpreted English
words are used as a kind of emphatic filler-words to make speech more
effective in the eyes of the speaker. (One difficulty with this paper is that
REVIEWS
133
in the examples some words are spelled in vernacular orthography

and some are spelled in English orthography, which confuses the reader.)
Arthur K. Spears examines the Tense-Mood-Aspects of Haitian
Creole and studies their usage in the foregrounds and backgrounds of
narrative discourses. He finds that verbs without any T-M-A's predominate in both foregrounds and backgrounds. The simple past marker,
which Spears calls 'anti-perfect,' is used to set the stage for both narration and explanation. The other T-M-A's are sometimes used in dependent and included clauses.
Section five is titled "Grammatical Relations" and includes two
papers. John S. Lumsden looks at the verbs rete 'remain' and manke
'lack' in Haitian Creole. These verbs have a thematic-grid of no subjectargument but a theme-argument and a locative/experiencer-argument,
somewhat like existential verbs/particles in other languages. An expletive third-person singular pronoun or the location/experiencer or the
theme may be permuted to the front of the clause. Lumsden accounts for
the features and distributions of the arguments of these two verbs.
Peter Muysken studies reflexive clauses in Papiamentu. He finds
that some verbs are inherently reflexive, some use only a pronoun
object, some use possessive pronoun + kurpa 'body', some use possessive pronoun+ mes 'self', some use possessive pronoun + pafia 'clothing', and some verbs can occur with either PPN + kurpa or PPN + mes,
usually with some difference in meaning. In conclusion, Creole languages lose the reflexives of the source-languages and then go on to
form their own new ways to express the reflexive meaning.
There is one difficulty in one of the fonts used throughout this book.
In the non-bold italic font used for the vernacular lines in examples, the
slash (diagonal/virgule) '/'has the same length and has the same slope
as an '1' (lower-case 'L'). A reader sometimes has to look carefully to
distinguish them.
Several of the articles reminded me in a way of my high school
English classes back a few decades ago when English grammar was
taught as a variant of Latin grammar; now English-speaking grammarians are imposing a grammar developed for English onto other languages. On the other hand, the authors, undoubtedly, would deny this;
they see themselves as testing and expanding the limits of Government
and Binding Theory by applying it to Creole languages.
6415H Fellowship Circle
Waxhaw, NC 28173
134
STEPHEN ANDERSON, ed. Tone in five languages of Cameroon. Arlington,

Texas: The Summer Institute of Linguisticsffhe University of Texas at Arlington, 1991. x + 125 pp.
Reviewed by EDGAR C. PoLOME
The study of tone in African languages was neglected until the thirties, when the pioneering studies of A. Burssens on ciLuba and G. Hulstaert on lonKundo paved the way for further investigation. A few years
later, M. van Spaandonck offered a synthesis of the then-available data,
and a valuable methodology for the careful study of tonal phenomena
like downstep, downdrift, tone shift, etc. This book does not contain any
retrospective look on tonology, although it bases itself on recent studies
in the field and on the inspiring teaching of a couple of visiting scholars
from Leiden.
The first section analyzes the behavior of tone in four "narrow
Bantu" languages: Makaa, Kak:>, NJmmind, Nugunu in specific contexts. Autosegmental theory is resorted to, in order to account for the
Makaa genitive syntagm, which requires a set of ten, often environmentally restrictive, rules; and the reader is invited to build a more adequately explanatory theory, with the materials added in appendix, than
the mainly descriptive approach of the author (=Daniel Heath). In order
to determine the basic tonal shape of nouns in KakJ, Urs Ernst examines
alternations in tonal contrasts: with a three-dimensional tone description, he investigates the syllabic structure of the Kak:> noun. For his
description he uses the "Register Tier" model provided by Snider, and
thus identifies a basic two-tone pattern, with more variants of the high
tone than of the low tone. Floating high tones in NJmaand locatives is
the topic of Patricia Wilkendorf's research which results in the formulation of five rules to account for the locative syntagm in the language.
Though the last three have a more restrictive application, all together
they generate any of the disyllabic surface forms. Similarly, Frankie Patman tries to posit the underlying tones in the Nugunu verb phrase,
where downstepping, tone glide, etc. make their identification difficult.
She recognizes three verb classes in the language, based on tone patterns to determine tense and mood. There seems to be a definite tendency of high tones to spread to the right, and segmental markers for tense
remain lexically associated with segments, thus making most tone
changes rather predictable and regular.
The second section covers one Chadic language: Podoko, in which
the tone behavior of verbs in independent clauses is studied by Jeanette
REVIEWS
135
Swackhammer. Downstepping characterizes the basic two-tone system;

the interplay of consonants and tone results in the identification of four
classes dividing into six subclasses. Analyzing whatever construction is
possible in independent clauses and looking at the different types of verbal extensions, the author finally formulates some ideas about the genesis of the present verb classes, which could be historically relevant.
All in all, this collection of five instructive papers brings a number
of facts to light on the tonal system of Cameroon languages, analyzed
according the most recent methods; the outcome is a set of valuable data
for the Africanist, but no smashing new discovery!
2701 Rock Terrace Drive
Austin TX 78704~3843
PETER SCHRIJVER, The reflexes of the Proto-Indo-European laryngeals in

Latin. Leiden Studies in Indo-European, 2. Amsterdam/Atlanta, GA: Rodopi,
1991 xl + 616 pp.
Reviewed by EDGAR C. PoLOME
What R.S.P. Beekes did for Greek, the author endeavors to do for
Latin, examining every facet of its phonology in detail to identify traces
of laryngeals. Deploring that the most common historical descriptions of
Latin phonology, like the latest revised editions of Sommer or Leumann,
tend to neglect giving the laryngeals proper coverage, he sets out to do
so in the minutest particulars. Though he disregards the Benvenistian
theory of the IE root-structure, he espouses his views on the basic CVC
root, in which apparently vowel-initial roots actually represent laryngeal
+ vowel. In the absence of the prothetic vowel appearing in Greek or
Armenian, it is difficult to assess if a consonant-initial in a Latin word
reflects PIE *HC- or simply *C-, if no Hellenic, Armenian, or Anatolian
cognates can be found. Schrijver, however, points to the view that, under
certain circumstances, a- might reflect the initial laryngeal, and he collects a number of cases where this might have happened. Thus, actus is
supposed to reflect the zero grade past participle *H 2g'-to-, with an analogically restored full grade, but no explanation is given for the lengthened grade (p. 26); one will also fail to be convinced by the derivation of
136
1 (APRIL, 1997)
aio <*agio<* H 2H 1g'- (p. 27); aware of the weakness of the alleged evidence, the author ultimately rightly refrains from accepting this initial
vocalization hypothesis (p. 31 ). Accordingly, without cognates in languages with obvious laryngeal reflex, it is not possible to assume initial
laryngeal before consonant in Latin, except maybe before *r-. On the
name of the "alder," the author might have referred to what Puhvel, Hittite etymological dictionary, vol. 1 (1984), pp. 29-30, has to say about
Hitt. alanza-. We must surmise that Schrijver could not consult the 1991
volume of this dictionary which lists all the Hittite words with initial h-.
His presentation of the lengthened grade (pp. 120 ff.) could also have
profited very much from the recent monograph of B. Drinka and from
her studies on Lachmann 'sLaw. Sometimes, one can hardly refrain from
the impression that laryngeals are being resorted to as a deus ex machina type of explanation, as when the lengthened grade in factus, piictus,
etc. is assumed to be due to the "restoration of the glottalic feature of the
glottalic consonant" (p. 138). The author rejects Martinet's theory that
*-eH2s yields *-aks (pp. 144-52) and that *-eH3- before vowel becomes
*-au- (pp. 155-157) with good reasons. The danger of circularity arises
when one endeavors to account for the long vowel in terms like criitis (p.
176) through a laryngeal of which no trace can be found elsewhere. The
analysis of terms with assumed resonant + laryngeal is fraught with
problems, as Lehmann had already found out in 1952 and this work further demonstrates; cf. in particular the case of -gnitus (pp. 197-205) or
parra (pp. 211-12) shows. The author is therefore very wise to tabulate
his examples into three groups according to the assumed validity: "probable, possible, doubtful"; in general, however, he takes care to base his
etymological considerations on the most reliable sources. On laryngeal
+ ilu yielding the long vowels /i:/ and /u:/-a thorny issue in the laryngeal theory-he prudently concludes from his few examples that Latin
supports the view, if a vowel is pretonic, and does not exclude it, if the
vowel is stressed (p. 249). Some explanations of /CHi/uV/ ap~ear somewhat far-fetched, as in the case of the derivations of *b erw- (pp.
254-56) or the revival of the assumed link between vapor and Gk. kapn6s, Lith. kviipas [pp. 260-263]. The loss oflaryngeals is assumed in an
unreasonable number of cases, sometimes on the basis of rather controversial etymologies.
Interesting, however, are the efforts of the author to deal with the
role of laryngeals in the morphology, which throws attractive new light
on topics like the -e- verbs or the -i- conjugation.
Schrijver also tackles Halo-Celtic from the point of view of the
development of laryngeals: to him, several changes took place at this
137
REVIEWS
stage, such as /CRHC/ > /CRa:C/. Though he does not mention the work
ofW. F. Wyatt, he is evidently bothered by the Latin a of non-laryngeal
origin as in quattuor or terms like lacus, often assumed to be of substrate
origin; he investigates the terms with a after a pure velar and thinks the
Ia! represents an older /e/ which would be preserved after palatovelars!
In other cases, he points to the delabialization of /of to Ia!, illustrated by
laviire versus Gk. loetr6n, or to lew/> /ow/ as in novus versus Gk. neos,
a long accepted view, though some of his examples like bas from *g'"'eucome under the assumption that the absence of Brugmann's law in the
corresponding Vedic gave [dat.] is due to the fact that in a laryngeal environment, the /e/ in *gwH3eu- had not yet merged with /o/! He revises the
chronology of a number of Latin changes and studies the fate of Latin /a/
between resonant and media, but has to look for alternative explanations
for counter-examples like cor (p. 484). The book ends with general conclusions summarizing the various sections of the study; there is an
appendix on the reflexes of /CHi/uC/ in Greek, Celtic and other languages, in which he tries to account for the numerous counter-examples
with /u/ instead of /u:/ on the basis of the accentuation, as he considers
the metathesis of iH/uH to Hi/Hu as post-IE! There are extensive indexes of the terms cited in the various IE languages.
To sum up: Schrijver has produced a monument of erudition that has
undoubtedly furthered laryngeal research. Whether Latinists will gladly
follow him remains to be seen, as so many of his views can appear quite
controversial to them. Though he may not convince the Indo-Europeanists on a number of issues, his arguments will undoubtedly cause
them to reflect again on many a point, and that in itself is no small merit.
2701 Rock Terrace Drive
Austin TX 78704-3843
REINHOLD STEININGER, Beitriige zu einer Grammatik des Bairischen: auf

der Grundlage von kommentierten Texten aus Oberneureutherwaid im Unteren
Bayerischen Wald. ZDL Beihefte, 85. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1995.
xviii + 174 pp.
Reviewed by HEIDI
QUINN
This book reports the results of Steininger's dialectological investigation of the Bavarian spoken in Obemeureutherwaid. To those eager-
138
ly awaiting empirical evidence for complementiser inflections and other

subordinate clause phenomena in Bavarian, this volume does not provide the answers. That is, although published in 1995, this book started
life as a master's thesis submitted in 1981, and has seen little change in
the intervening years. The research reported was indeed aimed at providing a descriptive grammar of Bavarian based on annotated (spoken)
texts, but since the project predated the more recent preoccupation with
its subordinate clauses (as seen in such works as Bayer 1984a and
1984b, Watanabe 1993), the elicitation of relevant data was clearly not
a priority.
True to its dialectological orientation, the book starts with an outline of local history and geography, a discussion of the methods
employed in data collection, and a brief description of the speakers'
backgrounds. A quick look at the methodology section reveals that
Steininger's corpus comprises texts from rather varied sources. Surreptitiously recorded narratives by older speakers are treated on a par with
casually observed (and later written down) utterances by children,
responses elicited in interviews, and examples from the author's native
speaker competence. While each of these sources of data has its merits,
the resulting grammar would be more convincing had the sample and
the methodology been uniform.
The middle section of the book contains Steininger's transcripts of
his tape-recorded and casually observed data. For each of the texts discussed, the author provides a phonetic transcription, a version in Bavarian orthography, and a literal translation into Standard German (with
grammatical idiosyncracies retained). Any lexical items identified as
typically Bavarian receive additional clarification in footnotes. All this
ensures that even readers unfamiliar with the Bavarian dialect will
understand the texts and be able to benefit from the data. General readability is further aided by the fact that Steininger uses phonetic symbols
adapted from the IPA and explains them in a table preceding the transcriptions. This table also provides the orthographic equivalents of the
sounds in Bavarian and a comparison to the phonetic symbols employed
by the Vienna School of dialectologists.
A brief summary of various aspects of Bavarian grammar forms the
final section of the book. Most of the discussion is devoted to verb
inflections, articles, pronominal paradigms, and case in nouns. In a welcome break with tradition, strong verbs are classed according to the pattern of stem vowel changes rather than the stem vowel in the preterite.
Given that one of Steininger's stated aims is to contrast Bavarian usage
to Standard German, it is somewhat surprising that the well-known dif-
REVIEWS
139
ference between Bavarian and Standard German perfect usage receives

hardly any mention. Bavarian has virtually lost its synthetic preterite
forms, and the use of the analytic perfect now extends to all contexts
requiring a synthetic preterite in Standard German, as seen below.
(1) Std German
sie war geschickt, als sie klein war

(she was talented when she little was)
'she was talented when she was little'
(2)
de is gschit gwen[ ... ] dawal's gloa gwen is

(p.30, text 1)
(she is talented been when she(clitic) little been is)
'she was talented when she was little'
Bavarian
While not prominent in Steininger's account of Bavarian morphology and syntax, the comparison between Bavarian and Standard German dominates the two chapters dedicated to phonology. Unfortunately, the differences addressed in these final chapters are not always of a
clearly phonological nature. As Steininger himself concedes, seemingly intrusive consonants such as the initial gin Bavarian Gota 'old age'
and Gschboas 'fun' (compare Standard German Alter and SpajJ) may
point to the presence of an additional morpheme rather than a special
rule of consonant insertion (p.125).
In summary, I believe that the idea behind this book is a very good
one. Indeed, readers will find much valuable descriptive information on
the Obemeureutherwaid dialect of Bavarian German. Empirical data on
regional dialects are of interest to formal linguists and dialectologists
alike, and it is to be hoped that the publication of this volume will spur
on many others to engage in similar research.
University of Canterbury
Christchurch, New Zealand
REFERENCES
Bayer, Josef. 1984a. "Towards an explanation of certain that-! phenomena: the COMP-node in
Bavarian." Sentential complementation. Ed. W. de Geest, andY. Putseys. Dordrecht: Foris Pp.
23-32.
Bayer, Josef. 1984b. "COMP in Bavarian syntax." The linguistic review 3: 209-74.
Watanabe, Akira. 1993. "Agr-based case theory and its interaction with the A-bar system." Ph.D.
dissertation, MIT.
140
JENNIFER HERRIMAN, The indirect object in present-day English. Gothenburg Studies in English, 66. Gothenburg: University of Gothenburg, 1995.291
pp.
Reviewed by LEONARD ROLFE
As Kurylowicz (1964) pointed out, the Indo-European case system,

inherited by the daughter languages including present-day English, basically indicates human participation in scenes (Fillmore 1968). The role
of the indirect object is then clear: it is that of human recipient. Soon,
however, metaphorical usages came to be adopted. These metaphorical
uses reach an intense level in present-day English. Given this outcome,
Herriman has the task of deciding which of the metaphorical usages are
sufficiently near to the original function of indirect object to be genuine
indirect objects and which are so remote as to disqualify. Since so many
metaphorical usages are available in present-day English, Harriman forgoes any semantically-based criteria (though she does mention that Indirect Object case often appears to reflect that of [human] recipient).
Instead, Herriman relies on the one formal criterion for case-variable
pronouns that they require objective case, her other criteria being functional as to position, passivization, deletability and replacement by
prepositional paraphrase. These functional criteria are often affected by
pragmatic and stylistic considerations, which Herriman deals with in
some detail.
The criteria are applied to instances to be found in the combined
Brown and Lancaster/Oslo-Bergen corpora. From these instances
eleven classes of indirect object are identified, according to which combinations of the criteria apply. All those verbs in the corpora are listed
whose complements offer instances of indirect object according to her
criteria. Such complementation introduces the notion of verb valency,
which Herriman considers in terms of "the SVO pattern". An appendix
lists these verbs according to their complementation patterns. Another
appendix arranges the verbs by frequency of occurrence in the corpora.
A set of tables orders the occurrences according to the eleven classes of
indirect object.
This summary of the book's contents shows Herriman to have successfully avoided the pitfalls arising from attempts to produce a semantically-based analysis of the Indirect Object as occurring in present-day
English: there are so many metaphorical extensions of the case that
eventually the semantic underpinning is lost. The functional approach
adopted by Herriman is probably the wisest one to follow.
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141
That approach is methodically pursued and the grounds for selecting her criteria, to the exclusion of other possible ones, are well justified. The selection of valid function criteria for identifying instances of
indirect object in present-day English is perhaps the essence of the
book, offering a powerful contribution to indirect object study. A greater
emphasis might have been placed on verb valency, but that is a moot
point. Within the framework of her functional approach each of her findings is well supported. The tables and lists provide valuable information
for the many researchers in this widely examined field of indirect object.
There is also a useful survey of previous analyses of indirect object by
leading scholars in the field. The book will be welcomed not only by
indirect object specialists but also by all those interested in the wider
issue of grammatical relations in present-day English as expressing
underlying semantic case.
Department of Psychology
(Cognitive Unguistics),
University of Lancaster,
Lancaster, LAJ 4YF
U.K.
REFERENCES
Fillmore, Charles J. 1968. "The case for case." Universals in linguistic theory. Eds. Emmon Bach
and Robert T. Harms. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. Pp. 1-88.
Kurylowicz, Jerzy. 1964. The inflectional categories of Indo-European. Heidelberg: Carl Winter.
AUGUST DAUSES; Theorien der Linguistik. Grundprobleme der Theorienbildung. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 1994. 95 pp.
Reviewed by W. WILFRIED
SCHUHMACHER
"No theory, no history!" said Werner Sombart. What is true for history ("We know only one single science, the science of history", Karl
Marx) must therefore be even more valid for a science such as linguistics. Indeed, according to Pullum (1991), to linguists, mere facts are
supposed to be anathema, since they are more interested in principles,
theories, and rich deductive structure.
142
WORD, VOLUME 48, NUMBER 1 (APRlL,
1997)
After having earlier made brief stops at theories dealing with linguistic change (Dauses 1990, 1991, 1993), in this booklet Dauses wants
to tackle some of the central models of synchronic description (pp.
9-62), viz. the concept of economy and, related to it, those of linguistic
development, deep structure, universal grammar, linguistic elements in
interaction (e.g., "Valenzgrammatik"), ontological and proto-typical
models (e.g., Coseriu's concept of word field), "Mischmodelle" (e.g.,
distinctive-feature analysis), and finally "Monosemy, Monism, and Idealism". The author blames all these models for underestimating the
human mind by paralleling human thinking and linguistic phenomena/structures, or by operating as if thinking comes after them (p. 60).
Dauses points to imprecise, suggestive, and polysemic terminology
as the cause of all this mess, stressing therefore a precise definition as
the ultima ratio which he exemplifies in dealing with "System and
Function" (pp. 62-76). His demands as far as a theory is concerned
(e.g., "reality-near", "flexible", "unpretentious", "precise") and his final
remarks on the "Paradoxon Language" (phenomenon versus interpretation) conclude the argumentation (pp. 91-92).
A sparse "Bibliography" (pp. 93-94), where we find a relatively
large group of authors who have published their opera in Tiibingen (no
name!) is added. (Noam Chomsky is incorporated here with his "Lectures of [sic] government and binding.")
What Dauses is blaming Eugenio Coseriu for, viz. that the reader
must feel like the hare in the race against the hedgehog (p. 49) (in Fiji,
crane and crayfish are the "Aktanten"; p. 38), can be said about himself
too: Readers whose mother tongue is not German may sometimes have
difficulties in grasping the meaning of the text (cf. Talleyrand's 1807
words "La parole a ete donnee a l'homme pour deguiser sa pensee").
Herbert Marcuse (1964), if still alive, would have found some more
examples for his "one-dimensional linguistics" (cf., for example, "Hier
ist der Stuhl--das hier ist der Stuhl--das ist der Stuhl''; pp. 27-28).
Ris National Laboratory
ISO- 202
P. 0. Box49
4000 Roskilde
Denmark
REFERENCES
Dauses, August. 1990. Theorien des Sprachwandels. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner.
- - . 1991. Sprachwandel durch Analogie. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner.
143
REVIEWS
- - . 1993. Prognosen des sprachlichen Wandels. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner.

Marcuse, Herbert. 1964. The one-dimensional man. Studies in the ideology of advanced industrial
society. Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
Pullum, Geoffrey K. 1991. The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax and other irreverent essays on the
study of language. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
SIK HUNG NG and JAMES J. BRADAC, Power in language: Verbal communication and social influence. (Language and language behaviors. Volume 3.)
Newbury Park: SAGE, 1993. x + 228 pp.
Reviewed by JYH WEE
SEW
This books explores one of the most fundamental issues in language use. The authors have rightly put forth the notion of power in
pragmatics. In Chapter 1, the definition of power is classified by the
authors as a continuum of two facets: "power to" and "power over".
According to the authors "power to" is, in the positive sense, realization
of personal or collective goals, or in the negative sense the hindrance of
other individuals to attain the goal; and "power over" is the relationship
between two parties within a dominance-submission bipartite. Subsequently persuasive communication which functions beyond the neutral
conduit of message transmission, as stated by Aristotle, could only be
attained through various language styles (p. 5). Even in the discourse
between a mother and her child, one could trace a power inherent negotiation as each party gears toward one's aim or goal (Ervin-Tripp 1984).
The pendulum of power in language hence swings from one end of a
dyad to the other between the interlocutors. Ultimately the characteristics of both powerful speech and vice versa should be analyzed, and
these analyses are provided in this book.
In Chapters 2 and 3, the influence of linguistic power in the speaker's communicative style is analyzed. Various forms of speech styles in
relation to the effect of persuasion are examined, arid the speech styles
are thus divided respectively into powerful and powerless styles. Findings on the connections between low power speech style components
such as hesitation forms, hedges and tag questions, and their influences
on one's perception of the speaker's credibility, are discussed. The complementary powerful speech styles indicated by marked accent, high
144
WORD, VOLUME 48, NUMBER I (APRIL, !997)
lexical diversity and accelerated speech rate are perceived as indices of

power in communication.
Unfortunately the section on power and gender in Chapter 3 is quite
brief. Important works, such as Lakoff (1990) and Tannen (1990), on
language and power from the gender point of view could have been
included in the discussion. A similar theme is found again in Chapter 8
under the subtitle Linguistic routinization of male dominance (pp.
181-7) in which the dominance of male language such as the stereotypes of male-related words and male-before-female word order in language are also discussed. Both could be merged in order to provide
greater momentum to the discussion on language power and gender.
Chapter 4 comprises findings on the variables of influence in conversation casting. The elements include hearer roles, speaker roles, tum
taking and topic control, which enhance topic maintenance and topic
change. In tum taking, for example, interruption is viewed from a different perspective as opposed to the conventional perception that
regards interruption as a rude linguistic behavior. Interruption is considered here as a possible facilitating device that might incite new information in a conversation.
Chapter 5 is one of the most insightful sections in terms of pragmatics and power. Mitigation being the focus is defined clearly as " ...
the attenuation of strength with which the illocutionary point (i.e., intention or purpose) of an unwelcome speech act is communicated. By
attenuation or softening the force of the illocutionary point of a speech
act that is intended to oblige the addressee to respond in a particular
way, mitigation renders the influence attempt less confrontational" (p.
92). Fraser's work on mitigation and politeness is acknowledged and a
varying view on this topic is postulated. The authors maintain that one
could be impolite while mitigating. This form of "rude mitigation" or
what I call anomalous mitigation is also observable in Cantonese. The
polite marker "please" in Cantonese could be used in reprimands and
imperatives. This polite marker, an indicator of mitigation, precedes an
impolite speech act to provide a form of subtle sarcasm.
The authors elaborate that indirectness is one of the techniques in
mitigation, and used as common empowering device in various societies. The ethos of indirectness is explained from the viewpoint of cultural values in order to maintain the addressee's sense of autonomy and
independence.
The noteworthy effort in their discussion is the use of discoursebased examples to demonstrate the notion of indirectness and its relation to power pragmatics. Interestingly the Bush-to-Hussein letter
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which had never reached the addressee is employed to illuminate the

conflict that arises from the varying perception of power pragmatics
between two different cultures, namely the East versus the West. The
consequence of (mis)interpretation of the communicative styles as an
attempt to empower had proven to be fatal. It should alert all language
users to be more sensitive in cross-cultural pragmatics. (Cf. Wierzbicka
1990)
One could also capitalize on the empowering devices in pragmatics. Chapter 6 tells us that the use of misleading words could confer
power to the speaker due to the potentials of these words in reducing the
speaker's vulnerability. The authors write, "There are situations in
which revelation of one's attitude or opinion can be dangerous in which
nevertheless one must say something ... The use of misleading words
is one form of communication that may enable speakers to wriggle out
... the use of misleading words confers power on the speakers." (p.
119).
Chapter 7 expounds that one could employ "masking" by means of
personal pronouns: for example, the first person pronoun "we" could
create multiple realities. Similar discussion is also provided by Lakoff
(1990). Lakoffhas expounded the myth of"we" created by man in order
to discriminate and at times to abuse or even destroy the "they" which
could be men or women. This discussion on masking by means of developing a linguistic segregation is another form of power in pragmatics.
An additional example of masking is by using unspecified verbs such as
hurt as opposed to bombed (p. 151) and kicked (p. 160). The indefiniteness designated by certain words is a means of "rendering of reality so
as to make it appear different from the actual way of the world" (p. 145).
A similar empowering technique is found in South Asian languages. A linguistic device such as echoformation (Abbi 1992 and
D'souza 1991) is a possible way of masking one's intention in pragmatics. By saying deslai-oslai (match box and etc.) a boy who speaks a particular South Asian language could create the pretext of asking for cigarettes in front of the elderly (Tiwary 1968 in D'souza 1991:297); thus
the pendulum of power in language communication is swinging to the
boy as he masks his intention and tries to mislead others.
Many ideas in Chapter 8 are potential themes that could be further
developed. This last chapter is more of a macro-view on the dominance
of a language over another. The three areas mentioned are colonialization, technology and professional specialization. The authors cite Maori
in New Zealand as a case of linguistic imperialism (cf. Miihlhausler
1994) and make a passing remark on Malay as an exception which has
146
1997)
escaped the threat of English as a killer language. The latter point is now
in doubt. This point needs further examination as there might be pragmatic implications arising from the implementation of English as the
medium of instruction in the pedagogy of science and technologies in
Malaysian universities (Sew 1994).
Linguistic practicality with respect to its applicability in technology is a contributing factor for a language to empower. The difficulty in
introducing Chinese characters onto typewriters is cited as an example.
This point is also severely challenged by the fact that the Institute of
Systems Science of the National University of Singapore and Apple
Macintosh have developed a computer program which enables one to
key in Chinese orally into a computer with 95% accuracy. Of course this
is only a recent development in computer technology which is two years
ahead of this book.
The third determinant is the specialization of professional domains
such as English in the legislation of many developing and developed
countries. The dominance of English in legal matters is one of the most
salient manifestations of language empowerment. The difficulties
incurred from the attempts to replace English with native tongues in the
legal systems of the colonialized countries are concrete examples of language dominance.
Most of the developing countries would embrace English as the
incontestable language for trade, international and national communication and education. (For English in national communication, see Sew
forthcoming). As the ability of the workers in a country to speak English
is now considered a pulling factor that attracts economic investments,
the power of English is growing by the dollar. From a micro (but significant) perspective, the dilemma faced by parents in choosing the right
tongue for their children is another case in point. The power of English
overwhelms the mother tongues as the latter are perceived as less practical and more of a hindrance to a child's formal education.
The authors have done a handsome job in introducing a fundamental topic, and point out many relevant issues in language communication, otherwise remaining fractions. This book has indeed covered many
of the powerful and powerless traits in pragmatics. It is a comprehensive
text on language communication and its underlying power.
Department of Malay Studies
National University of Singapore
10 Kent Ridge Crescent
Singapore 119260
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147
REFERENCES
Abbi, Anvita. 1992. Reduplication in South Asian Languages: an areal, typological and historical
study. New Delhi: Allied Publishing.
D'souza, Jean. 1992. "Echos in a sociolinguistic area." Language sciences 13:2.289-99.
Ervin-Tripp, Susan, M.C. O'Connor and J. Rosenberg. 1984. "Language and power in the family."
Eds. C. Kramarae, M. Schulz and W. M. O'Barr. Language and power. Beverly Hills: Sage.
Pp. 116-35.
Lakoff, Robin T. 1990. Talking power: The politics of language in our lives. New York: Basic
Books.
Miih1hausler, Peter. 1994. "Language teaching = linguistic imperialism?" Australian review of
applied linguistics 17:2.121-30
Sew, Jyh Wee. 1994. "Is there a superior language in education?" New language planning newsletter9:2.4.
Sew, Jyh Wee. Forthcoming. Review of The linguistic scenery in Malaysia, by Asmah Hj Omar.
WORD.
Tannen, Deborah. 1990. You just don't understand: Women and men in conversation. New York:
Morrow.
Wierzbicka, Anna. 1990. "Cross-cultural pragmatics and different values." Australian review of
applied linguistics 13.1:43-76.
ASMAH HAJI OMAR, The linguistic scenery in Malaysia. Kuala Lumpur:

Dewan Bahasa dan Pustaka, 1992. x + 249 pp.
Reviewed by JYH WEE SEw
This book comprises 13 chapters. The whole arrangement begins

with general linguistic issues, proceeds to more specialised topics and
ends with more intricate linguistic matters.
In chapter 1 Asmah traces the history of multilingualism in
Malaysia. Among the factors provided are religion, imperialism and
immigration. Included are literacy rates in Peninsular Malaysia, Sabah
and Sarawak between 1970 and 1980. Her tabulation of about 80 languages existing in Malaysia is incongruous with 92 languages reported
by David Harmon (1995) in the Symposium of Language Loss And
Public Policy in Albuquerque. This is an interesting onset for a research
to ascertain whether there is actually a difference of 12languages and if
so, are they actually dead?
In chapter 2 Asmah provides a closer examination on bilingualism
148
in the capital of Malaysia, Kuala Lumpur. The geolinguistic information

supplies valuable insights on the linguistic profiles of the city-dwellers.
The Chinese inhabitants are divided into 9 dialectal communities
whereas the Malays are broken into 7 distinct linguistic groups. Information on linguistic division for the Indians and foreigners is also
included. The diglossic scenario in the country is also given a new definition in this chapter.
Chapter 3 examines English in Malaysia from the nationistic and
nationalistic points of view. Despite the full nationalistic movements for
full implementation of Bahasa Malaysia or the Malay language, English
remains as the "other" language in officialdom (p. 65). English is
retained for the nationistic purposes, whereas Malay plays the nationalistic role in the country. Both languages complement each other well
though an English deficit was felt in diplomatic, business and academic
circles. (67)
In chapter 4, Asmah continues to look at the status of English in
Malaysia from the point of view of education. She believes that English
in Malaysia is declining:
... there is a marked increase ... of people who speak and read English ... Judging from the English used in mass media and by students ... there is justification
to the opinion ... that there has been a drop in the standard of English among
Malaysian speakers. (p. 87)
Another question explored in this chapter is whether English is a second

or a foreign language. The breadth of English usage in Malaysia is
pointed out by citing the fact that all societies and associations needed
to have an English name before they could be registered. More interestingly, the actualisations of many government agencies are in English (p.
92) e.g. FELDA (Federal Land Development Authority), PORIM (Palm
Oil Research Industry of Malaysia), and FAMA (Federal Agricultural
Marketing Authority); and most saliently the Malay political party that
heads the Malaysian government is better known as UMNO (United
Malays National Organisation) rather than its Malay acronym (PKMB)
Pertubuhan Kebangsaan Melayu Bersatu.
Chapter 5 contains a linguistic paradox faced by many former
colonies. The "legal" language ofthe country is primarily English. Until
1989, with the enactment of The National Language Amendment Act,
Bahasa Malaysia remained underrepresented in the court. From that
date onward, efforts have been made for the introduction of the national language into the court.
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Chapter 6 is a study on the attitude in learning English among

Malaysian students. Prior to the study, learning English was believed by
some Malays to be the onset of cultural corruption. But such a belief is
no longer true in the face of the twenty-first century. Asmah's samples
show a positive attitude in English learning, and English is regarded as
a requirement for academic reference and also for career advancement.
In chapter 7 the incorporation of foreign loan words is used as one
of the criteria in assessing the advent of languages such as Arabic, Sanskrit, Chinese and Tamil into Malay. The contact of different languages
does not necessarily result to a two-way flow as such interaction depends
on cultural dominance and familiarity of the borrowing community with
the potential source of loan elements (p. 153). Chapter 8 reaffirms the
fact that Malay is not a monocentric language. Its pronunciation varies
geographically from the rolled [r] in Brunei and Indonesia, the flapped
[r] in Northern and East Malaysia to a total silence in Southen Malaysia
(p. 159). The [a] on the other hand is realised as the low front vowel in
the Brunei, Indonesian, Sabah, Sarawak, Kedah and Perak varieties but
as a schwa in the Johor and Riau varieties.
Chapter 9 is an account of Malay pragmatics. The indirect mode of
Malay communication is outlined by Asmah, who provides four models
of indirectness in Malay communication. They are the Beating About
the Bush Model or (B.A.B.), Imagery Model, Contradicting Model and
Surrogate Model. All these models have one obvious characteristic in
common: to refrain from being explicit in verbal communication. Indirectness in Malay pragmatics could be taken as a form of politeness
(Sew 1995). As politeness is the rule of the day in Malay society one
could easily offend if one did not appreciate the need to be indirect. The
need to observe politeness especially in making a request is also universal in the pragmatics of human communication.
Chapter 10 takes the readers back to the history of Malay writing
through the agendas of the First Malay Congress and the subsequent
meetings. The initiative of the Malay intellectuals in planning the development of the language is best exemplified here. Various discussions
took place before the roman alphabet could finally be adopted as the
official writing system replacing the Arabic writing system.
In Chapter 11 and 12 Asmah looks into the emergence of a standard
version of Malay and the approaches toward this choice, respectively.
The problems of having a planned choice of Malay is inferred from the
case of Tangara Kadazan in Sarawak. Tangara Kadazan was planned to
be the standard Kadazan language to be taught as the Kadazan pupils'
own language in Sarawak in 1989, but unfortunately it turned out to be
150
a failure. The disagreement on the choice of the variety was also mentioned by Asmah elsewhere (1992:418):
Since 1987, there has been a move to institute only one standard
pronunciation of Malay in Malaysia. The principle taken is that
pronunciation should be based on the spelling of the language.
This principle was adopted not by horizontal decision but by a topdown process from the direction of Ministry of Education. It has
sparked a lot of controversy and unhappiness and has not been
fully implemented either in the school or media.
The last chapter traces the history of the Malay spelling system,
which has changed from Wikinson's to Za'ba's. Following the latter,
 becomes <o> in final closed syllables where the coda is <k>, <h>,
<ng>, or <r>. Similarly, changes to <e> in final closed syllables
where the coda is <k> or <h>. The schwa is also introduced as <e>. A
whole new writing system was adopted in August 1972 which is similar
to Wilkinson's system. The principles adopted by the Language Council for Indonesia and Malaysia (which became Language Council for
Brunei Darussalam-Indonesia-Malaysia in 1986) are practicality, simplicity, symmetricity and flexibility (pp. 239-45).
On the whole this is an informative book on Malaysian linguistics
but the scope of the content is limited to Bahasa Malaysia and English.
There are more than 50 languages in Malaysia awaiting to be described
and documented. Some spelling errors were detected; nevertheless this
is a valuable record on the evolution of Malay as a national language.
Contacts and conflicts of Malay with foreign languages, especially English, which shares her status as a high language in Malaysia, is
analysed. The claim that English is a complementary nationistic language to Malay is no longer true. English is also gradually competiting
to become a medium of instruction in education (Sew 1994).
In short, Asmah has provided a genuine observation on Malay linguistics, with authenticity and authority, as she is one of the first to be
involved in the planning of Malay. This is a must-read for anybody who
wishes to discuss Malay from a socio-political viewpoint.
Dept. of Malay Studies
National University of Singapore
10 Kent Ridge Crescent
Singapore 119260
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151
REFERENCES
Asmah Haji Omar. 1992. "Malay as a pluricentric language." Pluricentric languages: Differing
norms in different nations. Ed. Michael Clyne. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Pp. 401-19.
Harmon, David. 1995. "Losing species, losing languages: Connections between biological and
lingistic diversity." Paper presented at The Symposium on Language Loss And Public Policy.
University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, USA.
Sew, Jyh Wee. 1994. "Is there a superior language in education?" New language planning newsletter 9:2.4.
Sew, Jyh Wee. 1995. "Sound meanings in Malay." Master's Thesis, Department of Malay Studies,
National University of Singapore.
CONRAD F. SABOURIN, Quantitative and statistical linguistics: Bibliography. Montreal and Hudson, Quebec: Infolingua, 1994. 508 pp.
Reviewed by YURI TAMBOVTSEV
This is the second bibliography book in the series from Infolingua

devoted to linguistics, informatics, and communications. The first book
of this type, by the same author, is also a bibliography (Sabourin 1991 ).
The book under review has 3108 entries, though as I have indicated in
previous reviews in this journal, such Western books often omit books
and articles published in Russia and the countries of the former USSR,
especially if they are published in Kazakh, Kirgiz, or other national languages of the former USSR. Nevertheless, this bibliography is one of
the best, since it embraces all major publications in the fields of computational morphology, parsing, lexicology, machine translation, literary computing, corpus linguistics, quantitative and statistical linguistics. The main part of the bibliography consists of articles from
periodicals and proceedings (71% ). English-speaking countries (US,
England, Canada) contributed 52% of all the entries. The countries of
the former USSR contributed only 4%, which shows that many of the
publications were not available to Sabourin. The references span the
period 1950-1993. It is interesting to see the volume of publications
through this time period. During the first 30 years, only 28% of the total
were published; during the next 9 years, 55%; and during the next 3
years, merely 17%. So, during the last 13 years, 72% of all the publications in this field appeared. This indicates the recent growth of interest
in this field oflinguistics, i.e. computational and quantitative linguistics.
152
I (APRIL, 1997)
Half of this book is devoted to the subject index (pp. 247-508). It helps
the user to find the exact articles on each topic, although it is hard to
understand at times; e.g., why is "Old Dutch" in the column called "Old
English"; why is the data on Albanian, Armenian, Chuvash, etc. listed
under the heading "Hausa"; why is the English of the 17th century
called "Old English" while it is "Early Modern English" elsewhere (cf.
entry 1894 and the reference to it on p. 247)? There are some minor mistakes in the names of some authors (e.g. Aleksandrevich instead of
Alekseevich, in entries 2685 through 2691). I would recommend that in
the next edition of this book such subdivisions as "Phonemic Statistics,
Lexical Statistics, Markov Process, Distribution, Style Analysis, etc." be
given separately, not under different headings, since the same names are
repeated randomly. In short, though, the bibliography is well worth having, and obviously useful to anybody in the field, as well as, of course,
to libraries.
P. 0. Box 104
Novosibirsk-123
Russia 630123
REFERENCES
Sabourin, Conrad F. 1994. Literary computing: Style analysis, author identification, text collation,
literary criticism. Montreal and Hudson, Quebec: lnfolingua.
SVErLA CMEJRKOV A, and FRANTISEK SrfCHA, eds, The syntax

of sentence and text: Afestschriftfor Frantisek Danes. (Linguistic and Literary
Studies in Eastern Europe, 42.) Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1994. 398 pp.
Reviewed by
MASAKO UEDA
This book is a collection of articles dedicated to Frantisek DaneS,

one of the most outstanding scholars representing the Prague linguistic
tradition, on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday. The contributions were made by linguists of various specialties who came in contact
with Danes as teachers as well as colleagues from home and abroad.
Danes is perhaps best known as a general linguist involved in the
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study of functional sentence perspective (FSP) and intonation, but his

scholarry activities have a much wider scope, as shown in the preface by
Svetla Cmejrkova, one of the two coeditors. This preface, together with
the selected bibliography of Danes's publications, presents a comprehensive survey of Danes's extensive research in phonology, morpholozy, syntax and semantics, text analysis, sociolinguistics and pragmatics.
Cmerjkva also informs the reader of Danes's active participation in the
codification of the Czech language-the fact that might not have been
made explicit in literature abroad thus far.
The core of the book consists of four parts. Part I, "Prague School
Functionalism", contains four articles related to issues raised by Danes
and his predecessors from the Prague Linguistic School. Robert de
Beaugrande's article "Functionalism versus formalism in East and
West" evaluates Danes's "three-level approach to syntax" (DaneS 1964)
as a more powerful model capable of accommodating natural data and
context than the formalist approach. The issue of levels of linguistic
analysis is also addressed by PaulL. Garvin in "Karl Buhler's field theory in the light of the current interest in pragmatics". Presenting the
merits of Buhler's field theory that models language in terms of figure
and ground, notions developed in Gestalt psychology, the author argues
that a bi-dimensional model of language consisting of symbolic and
deictic fields can account for context-dependent phenomena, and he in
effect questions the status of pragmatics as an independent level of
analysis.
The other two articles deal with the status of Danes and other
Prague linguists' contribution in the light of recent developments in linguistics. In "Centre and periphery, delicacy and fuzz" Nils E. Enkvist
shows how the linguistic model based on the scalar notions of center and
periphery (DaneS et al. 1996) has continuously been integrated and
elaborated in the current fields of syntax, semantics, discourse analysis,
psycholinguistics, and sociolinguistics. Josef Vachek's article "Vilem
Mathesius as one of the forerunners of modern textological research"
presents Mathesius' classification of expository prose, of paragraph-initial and paragraph-final utterances, and his contrastive analysis of paragraphs and chapters, demonstrating the relevance of this research to
contemporary text linguistics.
Part II of the book concerns FSP and thematic progressions. Here,
five articles deal with components of information structure of text, such
as given and new information, intonation and word order, and thematic
structure of texts. In" 'I'm sorry, I'll read that again': information structure in writing" Martin Davies examines intonation in the writing sys-
154
tern of English. The author shows how grammar and lexicon usually
provide sufficient information to let the reader reconstruct the information structure of the given sentence and intonation patterns. In the article "On thematic configurations in texts: orientation and goals" Anna
Duszak, taking Dand's thematic typologies (1970178; 1974) as a starting point, argues that thematic flow in texts vacillates between two
extreme types of basic thematic progressions: one based on the linear
flow of theme-rhemehood between adjacent sentences, and the other
based on the thematic relations on a more global level that allows thematic discontinuities between adjacent sentences. The issue of thematic progression is investigated from a different angle by Roland Harweg
in "Is there implicit inclusion of preceding predicates in anaphorics of
nominals or pronominals?". The author analyzes information structure
of nominals and pronominals having antecedents, and shows that properties expressed by predicates of the antecedents are implicitly included
to varying degrees, depending on the nature of the antecedent (definite
or indefinite) and on the construction of the second anaphora (pronouns,
the + common nouns, this + common nouns, and such + common
nouns).
Jan Firbas's article "Substantiating Danes's view of givenness as a
graded phenomenon," is an attempt to extend Danes's notion of givenness ( 1974) further. The author argues that the informational properties
of givenness and newness interact most significantly with "the retrievability span", i.e, the distance between the previous reference of the
given entity and the current reference. If the current reference occurs
outside of the retrievability span, the information is new; if it occurs
within the span, the information is known, but it may express additional new information to varying degrees. "Functional sentence perspective
in modem and old Javanese", a descriptive analysis of Modem and Old
Javanese word order by Eugenius M. Uhlenbeck, acknowledges close
interaction between concepts from FSP theory and word order of Modem and Old Javanese. The author's findings, however, point to the possibility that components such as topic, comment, focus, and setting may
belong to a larger process called the "communicative articulation of the
sentence" which includes not only intonational features but also paralinguistic features, which modify the presentation of semantic information (p. 189).
The remaining three articles in this section discuss how the study of
information structure of text relates to other approaches in linguistics.
In "Functional sentence perspective within a model of natural textlinguistics" Wolfgang U. Dressler presents the dimensions in the ESP the-
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ory which significantly correlate with preference parameters of universal nature, such as those pertaining to preferred properties of the themerheme, referential devices, textual iconicity, binary relations, transparency of text, and repetition. In "Discourse as determinacy" Philip A.
Luelsdorff reinterprets the components of FSP in terms of determinacy
grammar, a model whereby the organization, acquisition, and transmission of knowledge are represented by formulaic rules and their degrees
of accuracy and completeness. The author essentially argues that
notions such as theme, rheme, thematic progression, and communicative dynamism are part of the knowledge structure that can be secondarily derived from more basic determinacy-theoretic notions. The third
article, "Some aspects of the syntactic and semantic text-composition:
the topic-comment structure of initial text sentences from a semiotic
textological point of view" by Janos Sandor Petofi explores word order
in his model of semiotic textology. The author identifies some relevant
components in the investigation of topic-comment structure: cross-language analysis, analysis of word order and prosodic patterns, and two
distinct levels of equivalence among languages-logico-semantic and
communicative.
The third part of the book, "Text and Discourse," contains eight
articles related to miscellaneous topics in stylistics and text linguistics.
"Repetition and variation as stylistic principles of a text structure" by
Jiri Kraus is one of the three articles addressing issues in the former. The
author examines stylistic effects produced by various types of repetition
in artistic texts: repetition using different referential devices (e.g.,
names, ideas, synonymous expressions), short- and long-distance intertextual repetitions, and extratextual repetitions.
The two other papers, "On mutual transformations between spoken
and written text" by Olga Miillerova and "E-mail as a new subvariey of
medium and its effects upon the message" deal with different registers
of speech. The former analyzes some characteristic changes resulting
from the process of converting spoken original texts into written texts
and vice versa. The latter presents peculiarities of texts in electronic
mail on various levels; e.g., on the level of speech situation (speakerhearer interaction, speech etiquette, and communicative goals), and on
the levels of perspective, topicality, morphosyntax, verbal semantics
and lexicon. The article essentially illustrates that spontaneity and lack
of organization are properties belonging not only to spoken texts, but
also to certain written texts.
The remaining four articles address miscellaneous issues in text
analysis. Svetla Cmejrkova's article "Voices of intention and interpreta-
156
WORD, VOLUME 48, NUMBER I
(APRIL, 1997)
tion: On 'The Czech Dreambook' by Ludvik Vaculik" shows unusual

properties of Vaculik's text not only by means of the text itself, but by
means of various readers' interpretations, which are available for this
particular book. The author points out the lack of "ideal reader"-a concept introduced in Fillmore 1982 and the corresponding notion of an
ideal writer in this diary-style book. Other properties of the text are also
discussed on the basis of reader-responses: empathy toward the reader,
concern for truth and fiction, dominant temporal strategy in the text,
language, intertextuality, poetics, limitation of individual readers.
Cmejrkova argues that "the readers' responses could be viewed as considerations on cohesion of the text, its coherence, intentionality, acceptability, informativity, situationality and intertextuality" (p. 213).
In the article "On the means of expressing vagueness and uncertainty in Czech discourse" Jana Hoffmanova applies the Prague school
notions of center and periphery to the description of vagueness in spoken Czech discourse on the level of speech situation, morphosyntax,
and lexicon. In "'Passive' moves in argumentation" Sorin Stati constructs a discourse-interactive model of argumentative texts which consists of two distinct moves: active and passive. Active moves are
attempts to persuade the interlocutor, while passive moves are related to
the process of "being persuaded". The author presents a typology of
passive moves, such as agreement, confirmation, acknowledgment, concession, disagreement and rejection. The last article "From syntax to
text: problems in producing scientific abstracts in L2 " by Eija Ventola
concerns second language acquisition. Identifying the syntactic and textual problems in English abstracts written by German scholars and
examining the degree of exposure to writing in English among them, the
author concludes that German scholars will greatly benefit from training in writing skills in English contrary to the prevailing notion that such
training is not necessary.
Part 4, "Grammar and Semantics," consists of seven articles dealing with the interaction between morphosyntactic processes and semantics and/or discourse-pragmatics. Among the five articles which take a
synchronic approach to language, "Notes on the functions of grammatical units in language system and in discourse" by Alexander Bondarko
proposes further elaboration of Danes's stratificational model of function and meaning (1967; 1987) by introducing the distinction between
two interdependent functions: "function appearing in its potential
aspect" and "function appearing in its resultative aspect" (p. 308), i.e.,
function on the utterance level and function on the textual level respectively. In "Sentential complementation and truth" Andzej Bogusiawski
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takes Dand's distinction between parataxis and hypotaxis (1985) as a

starting point, and discusses the relationship between the truth value of
sentential complements and the truth value of the relevant complex sentence. The author argues against the standard view that there is a significant difference between the two sets of truth values.
In "Simultaneous encoding of morphosyntactic and textual features
in oral narrative prose" Hansjakob Seiler discusses Danes's model
whereby semantic, pragmatic, and textual encodings may occur simultaneously and bear different degrees of significance (1988). The author,
using his data from Cahuilla, not only confirms Danes's view, but also
sheds light on invariance and variation, illustrating how non-distinctive
features on the level of phonology and morphosyntax may function as
distinctive features on the level of texts. The fourth article, "Acceptability and the scope of grammar" by Frantisek Stfcha, addresses the discrepancy between "what is believed or declared by the user of language
in general, and what is the real language behaviour of the social being",
an issue that is discussed by DaneS (1979) and others. Examining various degrees of unacceptable linguistic processes, the author proposes a
scalar typology of acceptability based on quantitative and qualitative
data. Eva Machackova's article, "Conctructions with verbs and abstract
nouns in Czech (analytical predicates)," analyzes the semantics of constructions combining a noun and a verb that have one-word (singleverb) equivalents. The author distinguishes various ways in which lexicosemantic features are distributed between verbs and nouns.
The other two articles approach grammar and semantics largely
from the historical point of view. "On relative pronouns in Czech and
German (jeni-kterj, der- welcher)" by Miroslav Komarek investigates
the unique existence of relative pronouns jeni within North Slavic languages. Showing the isomorphism between the German relative
pronominal system and the Czech counterpart, the author concludes that
the peculiar status of jeni was caused by the German influence. Igor
Nemec's article "The potential valency constituent in diachronic lexicology" reconstructs the original meaning of the Slavic verb kl{!ti s{!
which is incorrectly treated as equivalent to prisahat 'to swear' by lexicographers. The author illustrates that the verb underwent changes in
collocability in stages, and thereby demonstrating the scalar character
of valency semes which extends from center to periphery.
Admittedly, the book contains some minor grammatical and/or
stylistic curiosities. Nonetheless, it is of great significance in presenting
the impact of Dand's scholarly contribution to a variety of linguistic
disciplines, and in illustrating the richness of the Prague linguistic tra-
158
I (APRIL, 1997)
dition that inspired scholars in various fields of linguistics, who in turn

incorporated and extended the models and theories developed by the
former.
Department of Slavic Languages
Box E, Brown University
Providence, RI 02912
REFERENCES
Danes, Frantisek. 1964. "A three-level approach to syntax." Travaux linguistique de Prague
1:225-40.
- - . 1967. "0 pojmu 'jazykovy prostredek."' Slovo a slovesnost 28:341-9.
- - . 1970/1978. "Zur linguistischen Analyse der Textstruktur." Folia Linguistica 4:72-8.
- - . 1974. "Functional sentence perspective and the organization of the text." Ed. F. Danes.
Papers on functional sentence perspective. Prague: Academia, Pp. 106-28.
- - . 1979. "Postoje a hodnotfcf kriteria pri kodifikaci." Aktu6.lni ot6.zky jazykove kultury v
socialisticke spolecnosti. Prague: Academia, 79-91.
- - . 1985. Veta a text. Studie ze syntaxe spisovne cestiny. Prague: Academia.
- - . 1987. "On Prague School functionalism in linguistics." Eds. Dirven R. and V. Fried.
Functionalism in linguistics. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Pp. 3-28.
- - . 1988. "Voraussetzungen und Konsequenzen von Biihlers Prinzip der abstraktiven Relevanz." Ed. Achim Eschbach. Karl Buhler's theory of language. Amsterdam/Philadelphia:
John Benjamins. Pp. 193-201.
Danes, et al., eds. 1966. Les problemes du centre et de Ia peripherie du systeme de Ia langue.
Travaux linguistiques de Prague, 2. Prague: Academia.
Fillmore, C. J. 1982. "Ideal readers and real readers." Ed. D. Tannen Analyzing discourse: Text and
talk. Washington. Pp. 248-70.
APRIL MCMAHON, Understanding language change. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Reviewed by PAULA WEST
Understanding language change is a clear and coherent guide to

many of the complex issues of contemporary historical linguistics.
Intended as a textbook for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, the book provides an excellent overview of many of the topics
involved in language change. Some knowledge of historical linguistics
is assumed, as the book focuses on the problem of explaining language
change and a certain amount of linguistic sophistication is required, par-
REVIEWS
159
ticularly because McMahon refers to primary texts and uses authentic

examples. It is not suitable as an introductory book on historical linguistics, as McMahon omits discussion of reconstruction and assumes
knowledge of historical processes. Rather than detracting from the
book, this makes it entirely suitable for its target audience. Most areas
are carefully laid out and explained, with pointers to the primary texts
for interested students to pursue. Whilst knowledge of historical linguistics is assumed, other areas such as sociolinguistics and linguistic
typology are introduced as for the novice. However introductory sections are brief and clear, providing summaries still interesting for those
students already acquainted with the fields.
Although McMahon apologizes for the restricted scope of the
book, it is in fact extremely wide-ranging. The book contains twelve
chapters which fall into two sections. The first section introduces linguistic change: sound change, morphological change, syntactic change,
grammaticalisation, semantic and lexical change. Well illustrated with
examples from English and many other languages, these chapters draw
on some of the standard examples of linguistic change. The second section of the book, chapters eight through twelve, provides a clear
overview of some of the main themes of socio-historical linguistics.
Topics covered include linguistic variation, language contact, language
death, pidgins and creoles. Although a wide range of topics are covered,
McMahon is careful to tie them all together, and never digresses unnecessarily. As a result the book forms a cohesive and entertaining whole.
Many examples, carefully chosen and clearly laid out, make the
text highly accessible. Tables, figures and illustrations are generally
well integrated into the text. McMahon is occasionally a little repetitive
with examples and key concepts, but given that the book is intended as
a text book, this technique makes it extremely user-friendly, obviating
the need for continual cross-referencing and turning of pages. What
cross-referencing there is, is accurate and helpful and English glosses
are provided for all quotations.
The first chapter on sound change (chapter two) is an excellent
overview of the development of theories of sound change, and in fact of
the history of various schools of linguistics, which serves to contextualize the rest of the text. Neogrammarian theory, structuralism and generative theory are introduced, exemplified and evaluated clearly and concisely. This is particularly useful for students who wish to understand
the development of the discipline. Understanding language change provides a solid introduction to many of the concerns of sociolinguistics,
and in fact would be equally useful as a beginning guide to the issues
160
1997)
involved in language contact situations. Chapter ten, on Pidgins and

Creoles, is perhaps a little brief, but this is understandable given the
constraints of space and the breadth of the topic. The main literature is
pointed to and key debates are raised. The section on Bickerton's bioprogram is extremely clear and well laid out, and its relevance to theories of language change is discussed. McMahon acknowledges the challenge that pidgins and creoles present for historical linguistics,
suggesting that any theory of language change should attempt to
account for their formation.
The final chapter, entitled "Linguistic evolution?", is an excellent
conclusion to a well-balanced and interesting text. McMahon discusses
the use of biological metaphor in linguistics, arguing that such metaphor
is useful only insofar as the subtleties of the original biological usage
are understood. As well as providing an interesting overview of the
development of evolutionary theory in biology, and a concise summary
of the Darwinian theory of biological evolution, McMahon briefly
traces the history of biological metaphor in linguistics. She argues convincingly against the by now discredited view of languages as decaying
or improving organisms and explains the origin of such notions. Noting
that Darwinian evolutionary theory excludes any notion of progress or
advance (p. 316), McMahon goes on to argue that the evolution of languages should be seen in the same light. She justifies the comparison
with evolutionary biology by the fact that written records show the same
deficiencies as fossil records in biology, being randomly preserved, with
gaps in the evidence and difficulties of interpretation (p. 317). That the
biological metaphor is well-founded is further demonstrated by the
comparison of linguistic variation with random genetic variation.
McMahon's enthusiasm for the biological metaphor is apparent as she
ventures a prediction about the future of historical linguistics, writing
that "the establishment of parallels with historical biology may provide
one of the most profitable future directions for historical linguistics" (p.
340). Certainly this chapter demonstrates the fascinating debates which
evolutionary theory has generated in historical linguistics.
The final chapter also discusses the highly controversial issues of
teleological change and conspiracy. Examples are well-presented and
intriguing. Dealing with the highly controversial (since Meillet) issue of
drift and conspiracy, McMahon gives a fair exposition of Lass's (1974)
work on conspiracy, and the objections raised to it. Lass's paper argued
that a series of apparently unrelated sound changes in the history of
English could better be viewed as a conspiracy to increase the predictability of vowel length. McMahon summarizes the various counter-
REVIEWS
161
arguments, raised by Lass and others, as "we need more evidence for the
goalhood of a supposed goal than the fact that a certain number of
changes produce it." (p. 331). Assessing the evidence, McMahon adopts
a moderator's view: "I suggest that patterns arise partly from the human
predilection for seeing patterns, and partly from the operation of mutation and natural selection, random processes which may produce perceived directionality in biology and language ..." (p. 330). Nevertheless she admits that the concepts of conspiracy and teleological change
are intriguing ones, and tantalizingly suggests that directionality is in
fact a historical reality.
Understanding language change is a well thought-out book which
should be read by all students of historical linguistics. It requires a certain amount of linguistic sophistication: some knowledge of phonology,
semantics and syntax is required. Whilst it is primarily an introductory
text on the subject of explaining language change, there are sections,
particularly the final section on evolution which should prove useful
(and indeed fascinating) for more advanced students. It is an excellent
text, which covers important issues and debates in a disarmingly clear
and lucid manner, without skimping on the controversy or oversimplifying. It is a pleasure to read and should encourage students of language
change to delve further into the literature.
University of Cape Town
Rondebosch 7700
South Africa
REFERENCE
Lass, Roger (1974) "Linguistic orthogenesis? Scots vowel length and the English length conspiracy." In Anderson and Jones (eds.) Historical linguistics. North Holland: Amsterdam.

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