Word
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Reviews
Charles A. Ferguson, Alan R. Libert, Roger Lass, Eduardo D. Faingold, Martin
Haspelmath, Angela Downing, David S. Fagan, Masataka Ishikawa, Seok
Choong Song, Masataka Ishikawa, Ursula Drołc, Eung-Do Cook, Bert Peeters,
Charles Peck, Charles Peck, Antônio R.M. Simões & Elly Van Gelderen
To cite this article: Charles A. Ferguson, Alan R. Libert, Roger Lass, Eduardo D. Faingold,
Martin Haspelmath, Angela Downing, David S. Fagan, Masataka Ishikawa, Seok Choong
Song, Masataka Ishikawa, Ursula Drołc, Eung-Do Cook, Bert Peeters, Charles Peck, Charles
Peck, Antônio R.M. Simões & Elly Van Gelderen (1995) Reviews, Word, 46:1, 75-167, DOI:
10.1080/00437956.1995.11435939
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REVIEWS
SMALLEY, WILLIAM A., CHIA KOUA VANG, and GNIA YEE YANG;
MITI MOUA, project translator. The mother of writing: The origin and
development of a Hmong messianic script. Chicago and London: University
of Chicago Press, 1990. Paperback, pp. xii + 221. $15.9 5
Reviewed by
CHARLES
A. FERGUSON
1. Introduction. During the period May to September 1959, Shua
Yang, an illiterate swidden rice farmer in the mountains of northwestern Vietnam, produced a writing system for representing the sounds of
Hmong, the language of the minority ethnic group of which he was a
member. He claimed a supernatural origin for the script, maintaining
it was revealed to him by two emissaries from God, his heavenly
Father, who had sent him to be born on earth as a human being to teach
the Hmong their ancient writing system that had been lost and to teach
also the writing system of the Khmu', the minority ethnic group to
which his wife belonged. He assumed the name of Shong Lue Yang,
by which he has since been known, took the title of Savior of the
Common People, and has often been referred to as the Mother ( =
source) of Writing.
The story of the origin and development of Shong Lue Yang's
Hmong script is told in detail in this unique and important book,
including a comprehensive analysis of the relation between the symbols of the script and the phonology of the two chief dialects of
Hmong, as well as the nature of the successive improvements in the
script as further revelations produced three subsequent revised versions, held to be the 'fruit' that came after the original 'flower' ver75
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sion. The story of Shong Lue's life, from his birth in 1929 to his
assassination in 1971 is told in a companion volume (Vang, Yang, and
Smalley 1990). The volume under review is devoted primarily to the
events connected with the creation of the writing system and various
interpretations of these events. It is co-authored by William Smalley,
an American linguist specializing in the writing systems of Southeast
Asia (cf. Smalley 1976), and Chia Koua Vang and Gnia Yee Yang,
believers in Shong Lue as Savior and in the supernatural origin of the
script; it includes also a chapter on "other views" which reports the
opinions of several Hmong nonbelievers. Chia Koua Vang was apparently entrusted by Shong Lue with passing on the history of the movement and the teaching of the script. Gnia Yee Yang became associated
with the movement as a young man; he had received schooling in Lao
and graduated from a technical school in Vientiane, and he was the
first person of education to become heavily involved in the new script.
A brief synopsis of Shong Lue's life is necessary here to give a
context for the events of the writing system. For about four years after
September 1959 Shong Lue taught in his own village, at home and in
the fields where people were working, responding to people who had
come to him to learn. As knowledge of his story spread, people came
from farther and farther away to learn from him the new script and to
listen to his preaching about the need for cooperation and harmony
among the Hmong people. Many of those who came became believers.
As people in authority became suspicious of Shong Lue's activities,
they attempted to arrest him, and he fled to a village across the border
in Laos. Here he built a large round house for his followers to worship
in, named twelve Hmong clan leaders to help in worship and teaching.
In addition, he built a school to teach the script and selected individuals
who would only be teachers. From that time on, his life was one of
hiding in the jungle, teaching interested people, and choosing apostles
to spread his message. He had to avoid first the Communist authorities,
who suspected him of American, specifically CIA, connections, and
later the royal Laotian authorities, who suspected him of Chinese or
Russian Communist connections (even as the source of some of his
symbols). In 1967 he was arrested and jailed; he remained in prison
about three years during which time he made another revision of the
script (what Smalley calls the Third Stage Reduced Version). In November 1970 friends rescued him from the jail and took him to a secret
hideout, where he issued the final version of the script. Increasingly he
began to talk of his returning to God, of the coming victory of Communist forces, and the necessity of his assistant Chia Koua Vang taking
REVIEWS
77
care of his papers and notes and getting his family to safety. In February 1971 he was killed, apparently by soldiers of the anti-Communist
forces. The next four years followers of Shong Lue kept spreading the
story of his life and teaching the script. As long as Shong Lue lived,
his intent seems to have been that the script should be learned by
whoever wanted to learn it, with the hope that eventually all speakers
of Hmong would master it. Learning the script did not compel learners
to adopt the full set of beliefs and practices of the new faith, but script
and religion were closely tied together, and for many learners the script
was a crucial part of the prophet's teaching.
It is rare enough to learn of a new case of the creation of a writing
system by what has been called "stimulus diffusion," in which the
producer of the new writing system is himself illiterate (or presumably
'herself' but a woman alphabet-maker of this kind has not yet been
attested). The creator of the script becomes aware of the possibility of
writing and reading a message as a substitute or alternate version of a
spoken message and somehow succeeds in inventing a system that
works for his own unwritten language. Several famous linguists are
supposed to have said that the learning of the ambient language of a
person's speech community is the most impressive intellectual feat of
many people's lives. It may well be an astonishing intellectual feat, but
is a feat performed by every normal member of our species, whereas
the invention of a writing system from scratch is a rare accomplishment
indeed, and the documented cases of an illiterate's creation of a new
writing system by stimulus diffusion are no more than ten in the history
of the world. Having detailed case studies of such events promises
contributions to at least three bodies of theory about human behavior,
and Mother of Writing (hereafter MW) is clearly the best and most
reliable of the stimulus diffusion accounts extant.
One body of relevant theory ts that of linguistic structure, most
especially phonological theory, since the writing system is based partly
or wholly on the phonology of the language being represented. What
are the basic elements out of which the sound systems of human
languages are constructed and what are the basic principles by which
such sound systems operate? How do sound systems vary under different social conditions and change over time? Moreover, the development of literacy speaks to a central question of linguistic theorizing:
how do linguistic systems retain their socially conventionalized communicative nature even though no two members of a speech community speak exactly the same way and the shared structure itself is
constantly changing? More specifically here: what is the nature of the
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'fit' between writing systems and phonologies and how may this fit
change over time? MW probably makes its most impressive contributions to theory in this linguistic realm.
Another body of relevant theory is that of the study of the effects
of introducing literacy to a previously nonliterate community, a topic
that has become the focus of much recent scholarly attention (cf. works
by Goody, Graff, Ong, Scribner and Cole, and Street). What societal
changes typically take place when various forms of literacy arise in a
given community?
A third body of relevant theory is the role of religion in the
creation of writing systems. What aspects of the invention of writing
systems are likely to be attributed to supernatural causes and under
what conditions? What societal changes are likely to occur when a new
religious configuration in a society comes about that takes a large part
of its validation from the creation of a new writing system for a
nonliterate community? MW is unparalleled in its sensitivity to the
differing beliefs and values of the various players in the story of the
new religion and the new script. Smalley, for example, presents his
own views both candidly and with full respect for the views of others.
Smalley was one of the three Christian missionaries who devised a
Roman alphabet orthography for Hmong in 1953, which is probably
used today by more Hmong than any other writing system. (The reader
of MW who wants a deeper undertanding of Smalley's own Christian
commitment and his attitude of humane tolerance can turn to his moving autobiographical sketch (Smalley 1991)).
2. Linguistic theory.
2.1 Unit hierarchies. The history of writing systems and the creation of new ones offer evidence on the hierarchies of linguistic units.
In both cases the order in which new kinds of representation come into
the system and the details of the internal structure of the symbols
themselves give evidence of hierarchies of such units as words, syllables, phonemic segments, prosodies, and distinctive features. From a
traditional Western perspective it is often assumed that a writing system normally originates as word- or morpheme-based (logographic),
gradually proceeds to being syllable-based (a syllabary), and eventually progresses to being phoneme-based (alphabetic); see, for example,
Gelb 1963 and MW Chapter 10. The appearance of signs representing
distinctive features, which should presumably be the next step in the
progression, is usually regarded as odd or anomalous. This somewhat
ethnocentric view must at least be corrected in detail, but if the stim-
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79
ulus diffusion cases of literacy introduction are considered then the
whole hierarchy must be rejected. The evidence from the Hmong script
suggests a hierarchy of salience in human phonological processing:
syllable > phoneme > prosodic feature > segmental feature. Each
character or combination of two characters represents a syllable, the
segmental components of a syllable are represented by major elements
of the character(s), tonal features are indicated by diacritics on the
vowel signs, and segmental distinctive features of the consonants are
not represented at all. Thus in [1] 1 po (with low tone) 'to see' [2]
represents /o/, which with the diacritic [12] has low tone, and [3]
represents /p/.
2.2 Linear order. In most writing systems most of the characters are
placed in an order corresponding to the spoken order, no matter
whether the written order is left to right, right to left, or top to bottom.
In some writing systems there are a few exceptions. For example, in
the Bengali script, which runs from left to right, the vowel signs
normally follow or are placed beneath the consonant sign after which
they are pronounced; thus, [4] a follows [5] b if it follows it in pronunciation: [6] ba; but several vowel signs come before the consonant
sign after which they are pronounced, e.g. [7] i precedes what it
follows in pronunciation: [5] b + [7] i = [8] bi. The Hmong script
goes left to right, but the syllable-initial consonant sign is regularly
written after the vowel it precedes in pronunciation, as in the /po/
example given above. In this respect the Hmong script is highly unusual; it is apparently the only writing system in the world where
consonant signs are regularly written after the signs for the vowels
before which they are pronounced. This is an original feature of the
Hmong writing system, which reflects the phonology of the language
to the extent that syllables in Hmohg never have a final consonant, so
that the initial consonant of a syllable can be analyzed as a kind of
satellite and can be unambiguously expressed in writing on either side
of its vowel.
2.3 Zeroing out. It is generally recognized that if any one of a finite
set of n symbols may occur in a given place in a sequence with a
distinctive value, the representational value is retained if one member
of the set is completely omitted and only n-1 different symbols are
employed. A number of writing systems apply this principle by 'zeroing out' one of their vowel signs, notably the Ethiopian syllabary and
most of the indigenous writing systems of South Asia. Thus Bengali
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[5] b represents /b/ if it is written without a vowel sign (i.e. not [6] ba,
[8] bi, [9] bu, etc.); since /b/ also occurs without a following vowel,
the without a vowel sign can sometimes be ambiguous. The Hmong
script is unusual, perhaps unique, in zeroing out a consonant sign. A
vowel sign without an accompanying consonant sign is assumed to
include an initial /kJ. Thus, [2] without a following consonant sign
represents /ko/ with low tone; compare the representation of /po/ given
above. If there is no syllable-initial consonant the sign [10] after the
vowel sign is used to mean no preceding consonant.
The Hmong script makes one more use of the zeroing out principle: if the vowel of a syllable is /au/ with high mid tone, just the
consonant is written, as in [11] /tau/ with high-mid tone. This is not as
complete an example as the non writing of !kJ, because there are
vowel+ tone signs for /au/ that must be used if the preceding character
is a vowel sign. Since the Hmong script is unique in these zeroing out
patterns, it is highly probable that they were purely the result of Shong
Lue's analytic skills and creativity.
2.4 Vowel signs as syllable nucleus. Most phonological theorists
regard the syllable as consisting of two parts, the 'onset' and the 'rime'
(e.g. Halle and Keyser 1980), and the 'psychological reality' of this
division is supported by certain facts of poetic structure in various
languages and by phenomena of phonological development and learning to read (Bradley 1992). In many writing systems in which the
syllable plays an important role it is represented by a consonantal onset
and a rime consisting of a vowel + a consonantal 'coda'. Often the
nuclear element of the written syllable is the onset portion and the rime
is added as a satellite or diacritic. In the Hmong script, however, it is
the vocalic rime that is the nucleus and the consonantal onset that is the
satellite. Once again, it seems clear that the Shong Lue system was
influenced little or not at all by the other writing systems of the region
in spite of the doubts that have been expressed by critics.
2.5 Feature representation. Many phonological theorists today
would hold that representation of distinctive features as opposed to
whole phonemic segments is a more abstract, more revealing representation of phonological structure, although Western alphabetic orthographies are almost completely lacking in featural representation, as
are in fact most writing systems in the world. In spite of the recognition
of sound classes or distinctive features in many grammatical traditions,
REVIEWS
81
including those of Sanskrit, Greek, and Arabic, writing systems have
generally not been devised to take them into account explicitly, the
best known exception being the hangul of Korean, said to have been
instituted by King Sejong in 1446. Thus, the extent to which Shong
Lue's system included featural representation marks it again as unusually creative. To be sure, the featural analysis in the Hmong script
affects only the vowel+ tone 'rime' characters, not the consonant
signs, which are all arbitrarily different (like English p t k b d g, which
give no indication of their featural composition). The first or 'flower'
version of the script dealt with the vowel/tone characters in the same
featureless way. It had 91 arbitrarily different characters, each representing a different vowel-tone combination. In presenting these characters Shong Lue arranged them in rows and columns representing
vowel qualities and tones respectively, so it is clear that he had correctly analyzed the phonological elements involved even though there
was no indication of the analysis in the signs themselves. In what
Smalley calls the Third Stage Reduced Version, the number of
vowel+ tone signs is reduced to 26 vowel signs plus 4 diacritics. This
reduction is accomplished by having two sets of vowels (there are 13
phonologically distinct vowel segments in Hmong) and 4 diacritics
([12, 13, 14, 15]) to distinguish the various tones. In a final version,
the 'bone' version, issued about a month before Shong Lue's assassination, the vowel signs were reduced to 13 and the vowel diacritics
were increased to 7 (there are 7 phonologically distinct tones in
Hmong). Thus in the 'bone' version each vowel quality and each tone
was consistently rendered. Vowel qualities are not represented in feature terms, but if the distinctive tones are regarded as vowel features,
they are completely analyzed and consistently represented.
The Hmong 'bone' version is conceptually identical with the official Pinyin romanization of Chinese, which indicates consonants and
vowels with separate letters and indicates tones by diacritics. The
sophistication of the Hmong system is much greater than that of the
Chinese system, however, because Hmong phonology is much more
complicated: 20 simple consonants, 36 complex consonants (fricative
offglide, aspiration, prenasalization), 13 vowels, 7 tones. Thus, in
some respects Shong Lue' s achievement is greater than that of the
creators of most other writing systems, even though he had to work
without knowing any other writing system or any principles of phonological analysis. Smalley is particularly impressed because every
revision reduced the number of characters and increased the abstractness of the analysis.
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3. Literacy theory. A thoroughgoing social theory of literacy introduction does not exist, although much has been done on the effects of
literacy. Graff, for example, takes a critical stance on claims for literacy effects and investigates historical cases empirically. Street takes
a neo-Marxist position that explores the relationship between literacy
spread and control over the means of production. Huebner 1968, posit
an array of possible causal factors that may lead to relative success in
the spreading of literacy. Any general theory would have to take into
account the very different patterns of literacy in different societies and
at different times.
Patterns of 'restricted literacy', in which only special groups (e.g.
power elites, specialized 'scribes') make use of literacy for certain
limited purposes, differ widely in detail. Such patterns, of course,
were the norm in a large part of the world until late 19th and early 20th
centuries. Patterns of 'universal literacy' in which every member of the
society is expected to be able to use literacy for a wide range of
purposes, patterns that in many nations have recently come close to
reality or are accepted as a goal, likewise differ widely in detail. MW
provides much detail of the spread of literacy in its case, both in the
historical sections of the book and in Chapter 9 ''Contemporary uses
of the alphabet. ''
In this review I will comment only on the four general causal
factors identified in Ferguson 1990 as of probable importance in the
construction of a general theory of literacy spread: (1) the linguistic
choices made, (2) the source of the literacy initiative, (3) the scope of
literacy within the society, (4) institutional support and means of transmissiOn.
3.1 Linguistic choices. Which language and which variety of that
language is chosen as the language to be written? In this case, the
choice is for vernacular literacy, the mother tongue of the target group,
as opposed to alternative literacies in Lao, Thai, Vietnamese, French,
or English, all of which are available in areas where Hmong is spoken
and are in fact acquired and used by some Hmong speakers. The
writing system is carefully adapted for use by speakers of either of the
two main dialects, Hmong Daw (usually called in English White
Hmong) and Hmong Leng (Blue or Green Hmong), which differ considerablyin phonology but are mutually intelligible. The writing system employed is ''phonemic'' in that every phonological distinction
made in either dialect of Hmong is represented unambiguously, and the
script is unique to Hmong, not resembling any of the other literacies
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83
available. At least 14 serious attempts at producing a written form of
Hmong have been made in the past hundred years, of which at least six
systems are in current use somewhere by some Hmong speakers. It is
easy to document cases where the spread of literacy is slowed or
stopped because of linguistic choices, but it must be admitted that, on
the whole, the linguistic choices, fascinating though they may be to the
professional linguist, are less important than the other three factors in
accelerating the spread of literacy or in strengthening its use.
3.2 Source of initiative. Scholars interested in literacy have sometimes speculated about the relative merits of different sources of initiative. Other things being equal, a source from inside the group has
sometimes been claimed to be more effective than one from outside the
group, but things are never equal, and there are no convincing data to
support this appealing view. In any case, Shong Lue Yang was emphatically an inside source, and he was a figure respected and admired
by most who came in contact with him. He was, however, introducing
both a new writing system and a new version of traditional Hmong
religious beliefs; it is difficult at this distance in space and time and
cultural values to evaluate the advantages and disadvantages of this
particular source.
3.3 Scope of literacy. Literacy may be said to have 'caught on' in a
society when members of certain social groups regularly use it to
exchange certain kinds of messages, and it is no longer felt to be a
feature of an outside culture impinging on the society, with no function
intelligible to the local culture or worth the effort of acquiring it. One
of the important factors accounting for the speed of 'catching on' is the
nature of the first documents produced and the communicative functions performed by early literacy activities. In the Hmong script case
three communicative functions have been there since the beginning and
are persisting in present uses of the system. The first is the symbolic
function of serving as a marker of Hmong cultural pride: the very
existence of the script shows that the Hmong are not inferior to other
minority groups, they have a distinctive writing system of their own.
In some documented cases, this symbolic function may be the most
important function of literacy in a community and the literacy may
even fail to spread beyond it (cf. Blood 1988).
A second function in the Hmong case is to serve as the vehicle of
writings about Hmong language and culture. This has been emphasized
as a goal since Shong Lue announced the script, but relatively little has
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been done except for the production of literacy primers for teaching
purposes. Part of the problem of course was to achieve some form of
mass production, and MW Chapter 8 ''From handwriting to word
processing" tells the long-drawn-out saga of first making hand carved
wood blocks of the separate characters, through construction of various
makeshift typewriters to a final method using computer graphics and
sophisticated software. This last has made it it possible to print several
versions of Shong Lue's script, a romanized transcription, and English
all on the same page, even the same line, as was done in the production
of MW. It remains to be seen whether the output of mass produced
books and pamphlets on Hmong language and culture will increase in
the coming years.
Finally, the Hmong script was used fairly early to transmit personal
messages by letter among Hmong people familiar with the script. At the
present time it is estimated that out of the approximately 7000 Hmong
who have been exposed to the script about 2000 have competence to use
it and are doing so to varying degrees. MW reports that the script is
known to be in use in five locations: a mountainous hideout area of Laos,
a large refugee camp in Thailand, the military camp of the Ethnics
Liberation Organization of Laos, and clusters of Hmong in California
and the upper Midwest (Minnesota/Wisconsin). An analysis of patterns
of Hmong literacy in the camp in Thailand is given in Long 1991; Long
1993 is an ethnographic study of the camp itself and several families
in it. In all five locations letters are exchanged, sometimes smuggled
across borders; it is this function of letter writing that seems to hold the
greatest promise for continued spread of literacy in the script.
Two communicative functions of literacy which often have an
accelerating effect early on, but do not seem to have arisen in the use
of the Hmong script, are public exchange of current news by newsletter
or newspaper and personal use of lists and memos to oneself. In the
relatively successful Aleut literacy, for example, these got their start in
a bulletin board outside the Russian church and by hunters and trappers
keeping inventories of furs as they acquired them (Ransom 1945).
3.4 Institutional support and transmission. Any aspect of culture,
by definition, must have some means of being transmitted from one
generation to the next, and the acquisition of literacy skills by appropriate practitioners of the culture is no exception. Many instances of
the attempted introduction of literacy can be shown to have failed, i.e.
the literacy has not 'caught on', because of the failure to ensure a
means of transmission. Literacy transmission may take place as a
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85
regular part of language socialization in the family, by father-to-son
tutoring at the onset of puberty, or any of a number of other means.
The means most often mentioned in discussions of literacy is the
institution of the school, i.e. a place where young children at a conventional age are taught in groups by an occupational specialist, the
teacher. This solution to the transmission problem goes back at least as
far as the third millenium BC in Mesopotamia, and has persisted to the
present day, presumably because it has been adequately successful
under many different conditions. Of course, there is no guarantee that
school will work, and when literacy is introduced to a nonliterate
society from outside, it is often the case that the value of schooling is
not immediately apparent to the members of the society and the provision of schools and teachers runs into many cultural obstacles. In the
case of the Hmong script, Shong Lue at first agreed to teach anyone
who had heard of the script and wanted to learn it. Soon he also
established regular schools and teachers to the extent that this could be
done under jungle conditions and where the authorities were often
suspicious and hostile.
4. Religion and Literacy. Some things are well known about the
relation between religion and the spread of literacy. For example, it has
long been noted that the distribution of writing systems throughout the
world correlates much more closely with the religious affiliation of the
respective populations than with relations between the languages of
those populations. There has been relatively little exploration, however,
of the relation between the creation of new writing systems and religious
beliefs and practices. Two topics are of special interest here: the nature
of the supernatural revelation that is claimed or attributed in connection
with script creation, and the role of sacred texts in literacy spread.
4.1 Revelation. The production of a new writing system for a language, even if it is just a slightly modified version of another writing
system, is usually felt to be a great achievement, and two trends on
supernatural origin are to be noted. First, if there is no new religious
revelation claimed, the attribution of miraculous events tends to increase over time. That is, the originator of the new script and his
biographers or historians may emphasize at first the cleverness or
wisdom of the originator and only later develop stories of angelic
intervention or sacred visions that reveal the shapes of the characters
and the conventions of the system. Thus, for example, the early biography of Mesrop Mashtots, who invented the Armenian alphabet at
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the beginning of the 5th century, emphasizes his trial-and-error efforts
and his testing with various groups; it is only a later biographer who
praises the work of the Holy Spirit and portrays an immediate revelation of the whole system in instant perfection.
On the other hand, if the production of the new script is tied to a
new religious movement, then usually the invention of the writing
system is attributed to supernatural intervention, and when this is a
case of invention by stimulus diffusion, miracle stories arise at the
beginning, and the characteristics of the writing system tend to be of
particular linguistic interest. One of the nearest parallels to the Shong
Lue story is that of Silas John, who invented a writing system for the
Western Apache along with claims of a new religious movement. His
script does not compare in analytic sophistication with Shong Lue's
script, but has special interest because Silas John included in his system representation of phenomena other than speech sounds, such as
body orientation and physical movements. The primary purpose of his
system was to provide reminders for himself and his assistants of the
exact words and 'body language' of the prayers of the new religion,
and since he had no one to pass on to him the cultural wisdom that
writing systems should be limited exclusively to representing features
of spoken language, he naturally included some unusual material.
4.2 Sacred texts. When vernacular literacy is introduced to a nonliterate community in connection with the spread of a religion, the
innovators frequently provide a written text that has a special status in
the new ideology. Thus the Christian Bible or sections of liturgy or
catechism may be introduced, or appropriate selections from Marx and
Lenin, or the opening surah of the Holy Qur'an, or a set of prayers or
statement of beliefs of the new religion. To the extent that such texts
are publicly read or recited from memory and are provided with an aura
of holiness, they may be an extremely effective device for accelerating
the spread of literacy. Shong Lue aparently did not provide such a text,
and the lack of a sacred text embodying his exhortations to unity and
harmony among the Hmong and other aspects of his messianic message is probably a negative factor for those who are attracted either to
his religious message or his writing system.
5. Final Comment. My purpose in writing this review is to encourage scholars that are interested in linguistic theory (particularly phonological theory), in the societal effects of the introduction of literacy,
or in the relation between religion and literacy to study historical cases
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of the introduction of literacy into previously nonliterate societies for
possible contributions to their understanding of these concerns. Specifically I hope to persuade people to read the Mother of Writing as a
fascinating account of a little piece of history that is full of information
and implications. The readers of the review can probably tell that the
book attracted my interest strongly and made me want it to attract the
interest of others equally strongly. I hope it has succeeded at least to
some extent, and that others will not only read it but find a whole new
field opening up for serious research and pleasurable reading.
Departmenl of Linguistics
Stanford University
Stanford, CA 94305-2150
END NOTE
'The Hmong characters are represented in the text by Arabic numbers within square brackets; the Hmong and other characters themselves are provided in an appended table, with their
identifying numbers (p. 00).
REFERENCES
Blood, D. E. 1988. "The script as a cohesive factor in Cham society." In M. Gregerson and D.
Thomas (eds), Notes from Jndochina on ethnic minority cultures. Dallas: SIL Museum of
Anthropology.
Bradley, Lynette. 1992. "Rhymes, rimes, and learning to read and spell." In C. A. Ferguson,
L. Menn, and C. Stoel-Gammon (eds.), Phonological development: Models, research,
implications. Timonium, MD: York Press.
Ferguson, Charles A. 1990. "Then they could read and write: Case studies of the introduction
of vernacular literacy." In L. F. Bouton and Y. Kachru (eds), Pragmatics and Language
Learning Monograph Series, Vol. I. Urbana-Champaign, IL: Division of English as an
International Language and Intensive English Institute, University of Illinois.
Halle, Morris and J. R. Vergnaud. 1980. "Three· dimensional phonology." Journal of linguistic
research 1:83-105.
Huebner, Thorn. 1968. "Vernacular literacy, English as a language of wider communication, and
language shift in American Samoa." Journal of multilingual and multicultural development
7:393-411.
Long, Lynellen D. 1991. "Literacy acquisition of Hmong refugees in Thailand." In F. Dubin
and N. Kuhlmann (eds), Cross-cultural literacy: Global perspectives on reading. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.
Long, Lynellen D. 1993. Ban Vinai: The refugee camp. New York: Columbia University Press.
Ransom, Jay Ellis. 1945. "Writing as a means of acculturation among the Aleut." Southwest
journal of anthropology 1:333-44.
Smalley, William A. 1976. Phonemes and orthography: Language planning in ten minority
languages of Thailand. ( = Pacific Linguistic Series 43) Canberra: Australian National
University.
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WORD, VOLUME 46, NUMBER I (APRIL, 1995)
Smalley William A. 1991. "My pilgrimage in mission." International bulletin of missionary
research 15:70-73.
Vang, Chia Koua, Gnia Yee Yang, and William A. Smalley. 1990. The life ofShong Lue Yang.
Minneapolis: Southeast Asian Refugee Studies, University of Minnesota.
APPENDIX
Hmong and Bengali characters found in the text
[1]
.
mm
[9]
[2]
m
[10]
[3]
z..
m
[11] ~
[4]
i
[12]
~
~
[5]
~
[13]
[6]
~
[14]
[7]
f
[ 15]
[8]
fq
(j
~
•
..
.,
89
REVIEWS
KLAUS SCHUBERT, ed. lnterlinguistics: Aspects of the science of planned
languages. (Trends in Linguistics, Studies and Monographs, 42.) Mouton de
Gruyter, Berlin & New York. 1989. x + 348 pp.
Reviewed by
ALAN
R.
LIBERT
Artificial languages (henceforth ALs), such as the well-known
Esperanto and the obscure aUI and Babm, are fascinating objects of
study. 1 These linguistic entities have not received much attention from
mainstream linguistics. One might therefore welcome this book as a
means of introducing the study of these languages, and of showing its
value. I am not sure that Interlinguistics will have the desired effect:
although some interesting work is reported on, there are flaws which
could keep some readers from taking the field seriously. I shall go
through the papers collected in this volume, and mention some of the
weak points and problems in them.
The first part of the book, "Introductions", contains the "introductory note" by A. Martinet in which he briefly tells the story of his
interest in and involvement with ALs, and a paper by K. Schubert
giving a general view of the field of interlinguistics.
The section "Planned languages in Linguistics" contains three
papers. In "Ethnic language and planned language" A. D. Dulicenko
discusses, among other things, the "functional ranges" of ALs. He
brings up a fact mentioned by two other authors in this volume: the
large number of ALs (and sketches of languages) which have been put
forth: many readers may be surprised to know that more than 900 such
entities exist. Some linguists may take issue with his statement (p. 52)
that "language does not emerge and take form at a biological level, but
rather at a social level and is accordingly an acquired rather than a
natural capability of humans." I fuund that this paper was not completely clearly written (and/or translated).
D. Blanke's contribution, ''Planned languages-a survey of some
of the main problems'' may be the most useful paper of the book for
those not familiar with ALs. Among other matters, it introduces the
different types of ALs, including the traditional a priori/a posteriori
distinction. I would like to point out that even though most ALs have
never actually become languages in the restricted sense which Blanke
uses the term, since they have not reached the stage where they are
used to a significant extent, they may still be of considerable interest
to the linguist; for example one may want to investigate to what extent
the (prescribed) structure of ALs can differ from that of natural lan-
90
WORD,
VOLUME 46, NUMBER I (APRIL, 1995)
guages. Even rough and incomplete attempts at language construction
are worthy of study and analysis, as they are part of human linguistic
behavior. This possibility is also not considered by S. N. Kuznecov in
"Interlinguistics: a branch of applied linguistics?", which deals with
the notion of the field of interlinguistics.
Section Ill is "Language Design and Language Change". The
first paper, "Principles for constructing Planned Languages" by D.
Maxwell, is a set of recommended practices for language creators.
Most of the principles and their corollaries seem reasonable, but I find
some to be problematic. For example, the first corollary to Principle Ill
("Express any given meaning with precisely one form") is: "No
allomorphy is allowed.'' Certainly some allomorphy can be done away
with in an AL, and this is true of the example given by Maxwell, the
different Russian case endings found in different declensions. Howev~r,
much allomorphy is not random, but phonologically based, and
this type of allomorphy would be difficult or impossible to eliminate in
a language that is actually to be pronounced. In ''Optimization in
language planning" F. Lo Jacomo argues that language planners
should take into account the "implicit components" of language, i.e.
what is in ''the linguistic systems of the people sending and receiving
a message''. ''A few notes on the evolution of Esperanto'' by C. Piron
discusses the changes that have taken place in Esperanto over the time
that it has been in use.
The fourth section of the book is ''Sociolinguistics and Psycholinguistics". "Linguistic artificiality and cognitive competence" by J.
Pool and B. Grofman deals with the claim that ALs are lacking some
crucial elements of natural languages, and are therefore inadequate as
means of communication and cause "a degradation of the tools of
thought available to those who do their thinking [in them]" (p. 146).
The authors report on a preliminary experiment to test this claim with
respect to Esperanto. This paper appears flawed in several respects.
Pool and Grofman may at one point confuse the claim that when one
thinks in an AL such as Esperanto one's reasoning will be impaired
with the claim that knowledge of Esperanto will damage one's reasoning in general, since they speak of "the aggregate behavior of the
speakers of Esperanto" (p. 146), e.g. that they do not make up "a
linguistic cult, showing unanimous blind faith in the infallibility of the
movements leaders or doctrines" (ibid.). However, these are separate matters: theoretically, one could be caused by the defects of an AL
to have faulty reasoning when thinking in that language but still retain
REVIEWS
91
one's general reasoning ability, and so not be drawn into a cult. In any
case, I would find it a priori difficult to believe that even a highly
deficient AL, e.g. one that had not been fully worked out by its
creator, would be impossible to think logically in, as long as the words
and grammatical constructions necessary for the framing of the problem existed. As an extreme example one may think of predicate calculus, which is highly restricted, but in which (one hopes) clear reasoning is possible. I also find that the experiment could have been
better designed.
"Who are the speakers of Esperanto?" by C. Piron gives some
information on the geographical location (by continent), profession,
age, and sex of members of the Esperanto community. The last paper
of the section, "Planned auxiliary languages and communicative competence" by T. Carlevaro deals with "the motives which drive people
to create a language, to learn a planned language, and to join a movement promoting such a language" (p. 173). The paper is difficult to
understand in places because of poor writing and the unnecessary use
of jargon. Further, although I am not a psychologist, and so cannot
make definitive judgements on the matter, I am dubious about the
validity of the Freudian or pseudo-Freudian analyses in the paper. For
example, it is not obvious to me that the "sympathetic motive" for
becoming part of the Esperanto movement ("I am interested in the
ideas which the Esperanto movement carries, and for this reason also
in the Esperanto movement itself'', p. 180) is an instance of' 'language
as a vehicle of the libido" (ibid.). Again, this may be due to my
ignorance of Freudian psychology, but given that many readers of the
book may not be well-versed in psychology, Carlevaro should have
provided justifications of such claims. Likewise, I do not understand
the reasoning behind the statement that "a planned language is not
only a stimulus to activity, but, more dangerously, an invitation to
transgression. In fact, the essence itself of a planned language touches
ambivalent links with narcissism and libido." (p. 186).
Section V, "The language of literature" contains the two papers
"Planning nonstandard language" by M. Halvelik and "If Shakespeare had written in Esperanto ... '' by P. Janton. Havelik treats the
intriguing problem of translating archaic language, dialectal language,
and slang into an AL, describing how he has done so for Esperanto.
Unfortunately the paper contains grammatical and factual errors. It
seems untrue that the "level" of slang and jargon "creates havoc
in grammar and semantics, obeying almost none of the rules set
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WORD,
VOLUME 46, NUMBER I (APRIL, 1995)
out by the standard language" (p. 203), since this level mainly affects
the lexicon of a language. I am also not convinced that "the epidemic
of abbreviations" (Havelik apparently actually means acronyms) occurring in natural languages ''appears as a warning sign of linguistic
chaos" (p. 208). These and a few other problems in the paper obscure
the possible merits of Havelik's work. Janton also deals with translation, discussing three Esperanto translations of Shakespeare's 116th
sonnet. As elsewhere in this book, one has reason to feel that an author
is a partisan of the Esperanto movement: Janton speaks of "the unrivalled superiority of Esperanto over ethnic tongues" (p. 214). It may
be true that in some respects Esperanto is easier to translate into than
some natural languages; nevertheless, such remarks may be out of
place.
The sixth section, "Grammar", begins with P. Dasgupta's paper
"Degree words in Esperanto and categories in UG". On p. 244 Dasgupta says that in the construction the garden behind the house the
initial article "'announce[s]' the yet to come PP constituent [i.e. behind the house] in head-first languages like English and Esperanto".
However, this cannot be the function of the article here, since it occurs
even in NPs without such PPs, e.g. the garden. K. Schubert discusses
"An unplanned development in planned languages", namely the existence of morpheme classes (as opposed to word classes) in Esperanto, and argues that this language may illustrate properties of human
language more clearly than "ethnic languages". He incorrectly states,
with respect to Esperanto and ''most European languages'', that in
both compounds and derived words "The rightmost morpheme is the
semantic nucleus and the morphemes to its left modify it" (p. 255).
This may be true for compounds, and for prefix-root combinations, but
may not hold when root is followed by a derivational suffix. I would
disagree with Schubert's classification of numerals and (implicitly) of
prepositions as function words rather than content words, although I
am probably in the minority with respect to the latter category.
The final section is "Terminology and Computational Lexicography". W. Blanke in "Terminological standardization-its roots and
fruits in planned languages" discusses the relations between ALs (and
the Esperanto movement) and efforts of this century to establish consistency in terminology. "Terminics in the interethnic language" by
R. Eichholz deals with the creation of terminology in Esperanto. This
not uninteresting paper is marred by various errors in grammar or
punctuation. This is not entirely the fault of the author, but is also the
responsibility of the editorial staff. We again see evidence of a lack of
REVIEWS
93
objectivity concerning Esperanto: Eichholz states (p. 308), "Esperanto
is not hindered by established usage and can therefore be made better
than ethnic languages. Only because of its superior linguistic qualities
has Esperanto a chance to win in the battle to become the second
language for all." In fact, it seems to me that Esperanto could be
hindered by previous usage, just like natural languages. I also do not
like the use of terms such as "the interethnic language" or "the
International Language" (which occurs in Havelik's paper) for Esperanto: Esperanto is an interethnic and international language, but only
one of many others, including natural languages such as English, and
any other ALs which have been seen some use by people in different
countries. Also annoying is the following piece of sloppy reasoning or
writing: Eichholz states that the Esperanto word teamo, which is derived from English team "is pronounced completely different [sic]
from the original English word" (p. 300; emphasis mine, ARL). This
is obviously untrue, since they have the same consonants. "Knowledge-driven terminography for machine translation" by V. Sadler
deals with criteria for determining which entries should be included in
lexica used for machine translation.
As can be seen, a variety of subjects are presented, and so Interlinguistics gives a picture of the kind of work that is being done on
ALs. However, a better job could have been done to show how much
this field has much to offer. For those would like to learn more about
ALs, I would recommend Large (1985) and Monnerot-Dumaine
(1960).
Department of Linguistics
University of Newcastle
Newcastle, NSW 2308
Australia
ENDNOTE
1
1 thank the following for their assistance with this review: Mark Campana, Frank Ervin,
Heather Goad, Myrna Gopnik, John Matthews, Daniel Engelberg and Michel Paradis.
REFERENCE
Large, A. 1985 The artificial language movement. Basil Blackwell, Oxford.
Monnerot-Dumaine, M. (1960) Precis d'interlinguistique. Librairie Maloine, Paris.
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VOLUME 46, NUMBER I (APRIL, 1995)
COLMAN, FRAN. Money talks. Reconstructing Old English.(= Trends in
Linguistics: Studies and Monographs, 56). Berlin & New York: Mouton de
Gruyter, 1992. 391 pp.
Reviewed by
RoGER LASS
Any linguist who thinks onomastics is peripheral harmless drudgery will have to think again after reading this book. Starting from an
apparently unprepossessing corpus (moneyers' names on coins of Edward the Confessor), Fran Colman parlays them into a major contribution to Old English historical linguistics and historical methodology.
This is a magisterial addition to an important sequence of works
by C stretching back to 1977. It is an overview and further development of a field that she has made particularly her own: an at first sight
rather extraordinary confluence of numismatics, onomastics, Old English and Germanic philology, and sophisticated modern linguistic
theory. Indeed, C has a unique scholarly profile: she is an acknowledged expert on Anglo-Saxon coinage, and must be the only scholar to
have published both in the British Numismatic Journal and Mouton de
Gruyter's Current Trends series, and the only Old English linguist
currently preparing a volume of the British Academy Sylloge of Coins
of the British Isles. But rather than conducing to eccentricity, this
combination of skills leads instead to a wealth of insight into major and
persistent problems, both in linguistic historiography in general, and
Old English studies in particular.
Though there's a lot of numismatics (of a kind generally quite
palatable to outsiders, I might add), the coins are a stepping-stone to
serious linguistic matters, and her archaeological concerns have sharpened her sense of what constitutes a historical problem, and what kinds
of methodology can serve to open up the past to us (insofar as this can
be done at all). Her performance here supports a view I've held for a
long time (cf. Lass 1980: eh. 2, Appendix) that a historian is a historian is a historian: and one with expertise in more than one field is just
that much better and more worth listening to.
One particular virtue of her corpus is that it is quite firmly dateable
(not usual with Old English materials); it also represents an interesting
period which does not usually attract the fire of the heavier linguistic
artillery: 'post-classical' Old English on the verge of becoming Middle
English, when very important things were happening to the language,
especially in phonology, C's main concern here.
Roughly half the book is devoted to detailed discussion of the
evidence itself: after an introduction dealing with the orthography/
REVIEWS
95
phonology relation, onomastics, numismatics, etc., chapter 2 deals
with the lexical constituents of OE (and generally Old Germanic)
names, their combinatory rules, and presents a synchronic mini-grammar of the OE onomastic system. Chapter 3 gives the name corpus
with etymologies; chapter 4 discusses the coin-types and their chronology, and chapter 5 deals with epigraphic technicalities, including
the crucial question of error-types and how they can be identified and
discriminated from genuine variants. Chapters 6 and 7 form the central
linguistic discussion, dealing with the implications of the corpus for
various aspects of Old English phonology. The book ends with a
detailed catalogue of the names in all their variant forms, by mint,
keyed to the lemmata in eh. 3. The quality of scholarship, linguistic,
numismatic and historical, is impressive; C, unlike many younger
anglophone scholars, actually reads foreign languages (she uses German, Swedish, Danish, Dutch and French sources), and she has covered the relevant literature very well indeed (a bibliography of nearly
300 items for some 200-odd pages of actual text).
This is a rich, complex and often controversial book, worth a
page-by-page commentary; in the confines of a review I can only
single out a few points for discussion. In the general way of favourable
reviews, these will be mainly small carpings.
The name corpus is given in a somewhat difficult form, with each
cluster of name-spellings presumably representing the same name represented by a normalized, quasi-etymological lemma; while some such
organization is necessary, this one can be a bit confusing. For instance
the lemma Asfrithr actually represents a set of spellings like <OSFERB>, <OSFYRB>, <ASFERB>; the lemma is based on the
assumption that the name is North Germanic, and indeed the OE
spellings could be predicted from this. But since the actual epigraphic
forms are not given under the lemmata, but in the appendix, keyed to
the mint names in the corpus, the etymologies can sometimes be a bit
puzzling unless one turns to the appendix. This is a minor point, but it
does decrease overall user-friendliness.
The etymologies are mostly well-founded, though there are a few
problems. One (very general, and not restricted to this study) can be
exemplified by the name Hrafn 'raven', which is said to be not native
English but North Germanic. Unfortunately, in much of the standard
literature, the term 'Urnordisch' is used to cover a wealth of material
(e.g. the Gallehus Horn inscription and the like), which should now
probably be taken not as North Germanic, but as written in a NorthwestGermanic Schriftsprache (cf. Antonsen 1975), and hence belonging to
a tradition ancestral to both North and West Germanic. The name
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WORD,
VOLUME 46, NUMBER I (APRIL, 1995)
Harabanaz < */xml3n-a-z/ in fact occurs in the NWGmc runic corpus
(Jarsberg Stone, c. 450 A.D.: Antonsen 1975, No. 48); 'raven' then is
likely to be an inherited name common to both North and West Germamc.
In a few instances C takes etymologies from the literature that
seem rather farfetched. For instance Morkar (109), which she derives
(following standard authorities) from a NGmc mar-, mar 'swarm (of
ants') + unattested *ktirr 'curly-haired'. Considering the epigraphic
context, and the spelling <MARCERE> that appears as one form of
this lemma, perhaps OE mearcere 'writer, notary' (maybe a by-name)
would be at least as likely? These are minor problems, but they suggest
a need for care in accepting the macrodialectal assignments given by
the older authorities, who tend to conflate all early materials that are
not clearly East or West Germanic as 'Norse'.
Much of chapter 2 ('The game of the name') is concerned with
serious and theoretically interesting linguistic matters: among them the
way OE items like wulf 'wolf' are deployed in names. Here C employs
what I find a rather odd approach: OE names, she says (22) are 'formed
from elements cognate with common words'. Literally of course this is
true, since any word is (trivially) cognate to itself. By saying that e.g.
the name-theme wulfis 'cognate-to' the common word wulf(masculine
a-stem), she essentially proposes a 'common ancestry' for the two of
them. This is unparsimonious; since the name theme shows most of the
major grammatical features of the 'common word' (e.g. wulf as deuterotheme in a dithematic name like Ealdwulf'old wolf', being the head
of a compound, defines the name as masculine: but see below). Rather
than name-themes being 'cognates' (and hence special items), they
might be better construed simply as special uses of ordinary words.
One argument however that C uses to show the special ('item')
status of name-themes is (occasional) gender disparities, where a deuterotheme of the 'wrong' gender for the namee occurs. There are to be
sure a few standard cases: e.g. noo 'temerity', mund 'power', apparent
feminines naming men, and a handful of neuters like cild 'child'. The
feminines (though rare) are a bit of a problem, but I think there's a
solution, which I will get to in a moment; a neuter like cild probably
isn't. We could take this not as a (grammatical) 'neuter', but etymalogically as ne utrum 'neither one nor the other', hence potentially
'both' (like ModE child, or fully 'onomasticized' Evelyn, Shirley).
But such oddities do not force a complete recasting of all name
themes into a special category. Indeed, if we look at materials where
the sexes of name-bearers are distinguished, like the 9th-century Liber
97
REVIEWS
vitae (Sweet 1885: 153ff), we find that the putative grammatical gender of deuterothemes correlates overwhelmingly with sex: there are no
women with -wulf, -here, no men with -burg, -hild, -gifu. In any case
it's clear that by the time of C's corpus, there was already a weakening
of the grammatical gender system toward natural gender, so that gender assignments cannot unambiguously be referred to the 'classical'
(etymological) categories (and even these can be shaky: see the discussion in Lass 1986). It is also possible at any point in the history of
OE for a word to have more than one gender, as in horh 'rheum' (m,
n), leah 'lea' (m, f), peoh 'thigh' (m, n: Campbell 1959: §574), or
even worse sloh 'mire' (m, f, n, declined as either a-stem or 6-stem:
Campbell, §§574, 585). And given the messiness of later OE morphology, there is also nothing to prevent an original feminine 6-stem
from being taken as a u-stem: hence Gifu 'gift' as a simplex man's
name doesn't have to be a 'wrong' gender assignment, but could, for
all we know, be construed as a masculine like sunu 'son'.
The only lack in the excellent treatment of the morphology of OE
names (compounds, derivation, inflection) is a discussion of the types
of compounds that occur. Looking at the traditional (Sanskrit-based)
taxonomy of compound types, it's of some interest that the overwhelmof the 102 clearly interpretable compound
ing type is the tapur~:
names in the corpus, there are only five dvandvas (type: Beorhtric
'bright-powerful') and 12 bahuvrlhis (type: Dunbeard '(the) dunbeard(ed one)'; the remaining 85 (type: &lfgar 'elf-spear') are tatpurusas. One might ask why this is the case, and whether these results are
any different from those in other name-corpora. Interestingly, a quick
survey of some other name corpora shows roughly similar preferences.
The NWGmc runic corpus (c. 150-600 A.D.), and the compound
names in the 9th-century Northumbrian genealogies (Ms Cotton Vespasian B 6: Sweet 1885: 167ff) compare with the moneyers' names as
follows:
Tatpur~
Bahuvrlhi
Dvandva
NWGmc
82%
18%
Genealogies
76%
24%
Moneyers
83%
12%
5%
The 11th-century name corpus seems to have quite an archaic and
traditional composition; the real curiosity is the level of dvandvas,
which as an archaic lE type one might have expected to find in the
older corpora (though they do occur in the names in the OE Bede,
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WORD, VOLUME 46, NUMBER I (APRIL, 1995)
which is closer in time to the runic corpus than to the moneyers). Given
C's interest in names, the historicity of the practice in the corpus might
have been worth some more investigation. (This may of course just
reflect the reviewer's perennial temptation to get authors to write different books!)
These rather small issues suggest the kind of challenge that this
book provides on almost every page; it is provoking in the best possible
way, and the history of late Old English phonology that finally
emerges is insightful and convincing, and will have to be taken account
of by any future workers in the field. If this were a journal of English
studies I could run on for pages; in a generalist journal all I can say is
that anybody with an interest in historical linguistics, Old English,
Germanic, names or just someone who likes to see real professional
craftsmanship and creativity, ought to read this book.
Department of Linguistics
University of Cape Town
Rondebosch 7700
SOUTH AFRICA
REFERENCES
Antonsen, E.A. 1975. A concise grammar of the older runic inscriptions. Tiibingen: Niemeyer.
Campbell, A. 1959. Old English grammar. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Lass, R. 1980. On explaining language change. Cambridge: Cambridge Unversity Press.
- - . 1986. Words without etyma: Germanic 'tooth'. In D. Kastovsky, A. Szwedek (eds.),
Linguistics across historical and geographical boundaries. In honour of Jacek Fisiak on the
occasion of his fiftieth birthday, I, 473-82. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Sweet, H. 1885. The oldest English texts. Early English Text Society, OS 83.
ZAMORA MUNNE, JUAN CLEMENTE, Historiografia Linguistica. Edad
Media y Renacimiento. Salamanca: Ediciones del Colegio de Espafla. 1993.
88 pp.
Reviewed by
EDUARDO
D.
FAINGOLD
Historiografia Linguistica. Edad Media y Renacimiento (HLER)
is intended as a contribution to the history of Spanish linguistics.
HLER contains six short essays by Prof. Juan Clemente Zamora
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99
Munne, preceded by a preface written by Jose A. Martinez, from the
Dept. of Spanish Philology at the Universidad de Oviedo in Spain.
Four of the six essays in this volume are revised versions of papers
published by the author very recently or which are to appear soon in
major Hispanic journals or collections of papers ('La gramatica de la
lengua vulgar en la Edad Media espafiola: Las Regles de trobar del
monje negro' [27-37]; 'Las ortografias de Enrique de Villena, Antonio
de Nebrija y Mateo Aleman [39-49]; 'Los conceptos de dialecto y
sociolecto en el Renacimiento espafiol [51-61]; 'ldeologfa, filologfa, y
lingufstica en la gramatica espafiola del Renacimiento' [77-88]); the
other two papers are appearing in this volume for the first time
('Bosquejo de la historia de la lingufstica' [17-25]); 'Racionalismo,
universales lingufsticos y autonomfa de la gramatica en la Edad Media
y el Renacimiento' [61-71]).
HLER is a major contribution to the history of Spanish, as well as
general linguistic theories and ideas. This erudite work explores the
relationship between Spanish linguistic research and grammars from
Roman times through the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and modern linguistics. The author focuses on some well known authors (e.g.
Quintiliano, Enrique de Villena, Nebrija, etc.) and other less known
scholars (e.g. Jofre de Foixa, Raman Vidal de Besahi). He traces
certain modern linguistic problems in, e.g., sociolinguistics, dialectology, and generative grammar to the authors and works just mentioned. Central to Zamora's work are Quintiliano's views on language
contact, Valdes and Aldrete's concepts of dialectal variation, and Nebrija's grapheme-morpheme correspondences. He discusses Sanctius
(Brocense)'s Minerva, Jofre de Foixa's Regles de Trovar, and the
(well known) Grammar of Port Royal's similarities with Chomsky's
(1965) standard theory of generative grammar. Most interestingly, the
author points out further similaritks between Chomsky' s ( 1981, 1982)
(more recent) theory of government and binding and Tomas de Efurt's
(1310) Grammatica Speculativa.
It is due to Zamora's erudition and insight that s11ch bold comparisons can be made, since linguistic research in the Middle Ages and
Renaissance was strictly philological and empirical (rather than more
speculative or theoretical) in nature. The essays in this volume should
be of great interest to students and scholars of general linguistics, as
well as to specialists in Spanish grammar and Hispanic linguistics.
50 Tangier Dr.
Sound Beach
Long Island, N. Y. 11789
100
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REFERENCES
Chomsky, Noam. 1965. Aspects of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
- - . 1981. Lectures on Government and Binding. Dordrecht: Foris.
- - . 1982. Some Concepts and Consequences of the Theory of Government and Binding.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
OUHALLA, JAMAL. Functional categories and parametric variation. London: Routledge. 1991 .
Reviewed by
MARTIN HASPELMA TH
The areas where government-binding (GB) syntax has made the
most original contributions to our knowledge of human languages are
probably extraction and binding phenomena (especially wh-constructions and reflexivization). Indeed, in these areas Chomskyans have a
quasi-monopoly, because few other theorists have shown an interest in
these phenomena. Ouhalla's book, by contrast, does not deal with
binding and extraction at all, but instead presents a Chomskyan perspective on phenomena that have been widely discussed from different
theoretical points of view, in particular word order typology (e.g.
Hawkins 1983), the cross-linguistic order of verbal grammatical categories (e.g. Bybee 1985), periphrastic vs. bound tense and aspect
verb forms (e.g. Bybee & Dahl 1989), the typology of agreement and
case marking (e.g. Nichols 1986) and of action nominal constructions
(e.g. Koptjevskaja-Tamm 1988, 1993). Since Chomskyans generally
ignore work done by non-Chomskyans, it is not surprising that Ouhalla
does not cite any of these works, but given his concern for these
phenomena, his book might be of interest to a wider audience. Although it is necessarily technical in some places, I found Ouhalla's
style very readable and the presentation very clear (especially helpful
are the many tree diagrams). Coupled with the excellent introduction
to the theoretical framework in the first chapter, these features make
the book a good place to start for linguists who have not kept up with
the fast pace of change in Chomskyan syntax and would like to be
informed on what has recently been going on in that area.
Ouhalla's main theoretical point is also of potentially more general
interest (unlike theoretical issues like relativized minimality and A-bar
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101
binding, which seem to carry more prestige within Chomskyan syntax). His claim is that the parameters along which languages differ are
associated with the lexical properties of functional categories, not with
the innate principles, as is assumed standardly (i.e. by Chomsky). One
of his arguments for this view is completely convincing: We know of
many cases where a language instantiates more than one value of a
parameter in different lexical items. For example, Norwegian has two
reflexive pronouns that behave differently, and Latin has two passives
that behave differently. Clearly, then, these differences must be attributed (at least in part) to the individual categories in these languages. It
is interesting to note a certain convergence with functionalist grammatical theory here: For example, Bybee & Dahl 1989 argue that
languages do not have 'systems' of tense and aspect categories, but
that each category must be studied and understood individually, and
Himmelmann 1992 argues that grammaticalization should be seen
strictly as the grammaticalization of grammatical items (i.e. functional
categories).
But in order to give substance to his claim, Ouhalla needs an
independent definition of 'functional category', and here the problems
begin. There is universal agreement that nouns, verbs and adjectives
are not functional categories, but more constraints on functional categories do not seem to exist. The new possibilities for movement
processes that result from positing a new functional head have lead to
such a popularity of functional categories that no end of their proliferation is in sight. Ouhalla proposes that functional categories differ
from lexical categories in that they lack thematic grids, but are specified for categorial selection ("have c-selectional properties", in
Chomskyan parlance). However, his suggestion that all nouns and
adjectives also assign thematic roles is hardly convincing, and he
simply ignores cases where verbs ttre specified for categorial selection
(e.g. rely, which takes a prepositional phrase with on). Furthermore,
functional categories do not even have to be present on the surface. For
example, some English noun phrases are claimed to contain the functional head AGR(eement), although there is no such agreement in
English noun phrases. The explicit motivation for positing this category is to have a case-assigner for genitive possessors, i.e. it is completely theory-internal. Since in many cases the main motivation for
positing functional categories is to account for syntactic properties, the
claim that cross-linguistic variation is restricted to functional categories, and that functional categories "represent the flesh and blood of
grammar" (p. 8), becomes vacuous. 1
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In chapter 2, Ouhalla argues in favor of the split-INFL hypothesis of Pollock 1989, who proposed that AGR, tense (TNS) and
NEG(ation) should head their own functional projections. In the context of GB, this is somewhat redundant because the split-INFL hypothesis became standard after it was adopted by Chomsky 1991 (circulated in 1988), but it is useful for outsiders because Ouhalla presents
the arguments in a lucid way that can easily be followed. However, it
becomes all the more clear that they are exclusively theory-internal.
One argument is particularly important for Ouhalla's theory: He observes that the order of person agreement and tense markers varies
across languages, e.g. Arabic sa-ya-starii (FUT-3SG-buy) 'he will
buy', but Chichewa u-na-gwa (3SG-PAST-fall) '(it) fell'. He notes
that the non-split-INFL analysis needs extrinsically imposed ordering
rules and proposes an analysis in which Arabic has its TNS category
above its AGR category, while Chichewa has its AGR above its TNS.
This is shown in ( 1a-b).
(1)
a. Arabic
(and other TNS-initial languages)
b. Chichewa
(and other AGR-initial languages)
AGRP
TNSP
A
Spec
A
Spec
TNS'
A
A
TNS
AGR'
AGR
AGRP
A
A
Spec
TNSP
Spec
A
AGR'
TNS VP
A
AGR
VP
A
Spec
A
Spec
V
A
V
A
V
TNS'
V
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103
The verb then moves up step by step ('head-to-head movement'), and
the desired inflectional order results. The ordering rule is then reformulated in the following way: In Arabic TNS c-selects AGR (i.e. must
have AGR as its complement), while in Chichewa AGR c-selects TNS.
Despite Ouhalla's rhetoric ('a principled account of the observed orders'), it is clear that such restatements in idiosyncratic GB terminology
are no more insightful than extrinsically imposed ordering rules. The
same is true for the distinction between periphrastic and non-periphrastic constructions, which Ouhalla "explains" by saying that the
ASP(ect) and PASS(ive) category may be verbal or nominal, and that
only verbal ASP and PASS may attach to the verb. That periphrastic
constructions usually make use of nominal verb forms is of course wellknown (see Bybee & Dahl1989), so again there is no new insight here.
However, in chapter 3 Ouhalla proposes a parameter that links
morpheme order to clausal word order, and he does make a testable
claim here. The generalization that he proposes is that in VSO languages, AGR is inside TNS (e.g. Arabic, Berber, Chamorro), while in
SVO languages AGR is outside TNS (e.g. Chichewa, Italian, French).
This generalization follows from his analysis because it is assumed that
the subject is in the Spec of AGR position, which is the clause-initial
position in AGR-initial languages. In TNS-initial languages, by contrast, Spec of AGR is below TNS, and since the verb has to move to
TNS, it precedes the subject on the surface (yielding a VSO order).
Ouhalla's AGRJTNS parameter is interesting because it claims to account for another correlation: Given his assumptions, VSO languages
are predicted to lack non-agreeing infinitives (e.g. Berber, Arabic,
Chamorro) because if all clauses have a TNS category (as he assumes),
then clauses in TNS-initial languages cannot lack AGR, because
"TNS c-selects AGR". (However, it is not clear why they couldn't
have abstract AGR which does noi: show up on the surface.)
Although his evidence comes only from a handful of languages,
Ouhalla boldly claims that the correlation is a universal one. Given this
narrow empirical basis, it is not surprising that the correlation does not
survive once it is confronted with a larger set of languages. Siewierska
1993 has tested Ouhalla's prediction on a world-wide sample of 308
languages and has shown that the relation between AGRJTNS order
and VSO/SVO order is not nearly as neat as predicted by Ouhalla. Of
the 308 languages, in 262 both subject agreement and tense are expressed by a verbal affix, and they occur on the same side of the verb
(so that their mutual order can be seen) in 190 languages. Her results
are shown in Table 1.
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VOLUME 46, NUMBER I (APRIL, 1995)
Table 1.
Clause order and agreement/tense order (Siewierska 1993)
total
TNS(AGR)
AGR(TNS)
both
fused
SOY
SYO
Y1
free
subjectfirst
2
31
1
5
19
22
1
3
3
1
3
6
2
41
14
127
65
9
4
13
8
There is indeed a skewing in this table that seems to prove Ouhalla
right: SYO languages are much more likely to be AGR-initial than
TNS-initial, while verb-initial languages are equally likely to be TNSinitial and AGR-initial. But the correlation is weaker than is predicted
by Ouhalla, and he has nothing to say on SOY languages-note that
they also have a significant proportion of cases with tense outside
agreement, which Ouhalla says leads to verb-initial order.
That the correlation is not so neat does not come as a surprise to
the reader of the book because Ouhalla himself notes several exceptions to it, e.g. the fact that Modern Greek lacks non-agreeing infinitives but is not YSO, 2 or the fact that the Celtic languages are YSO but
not TNS-initial. He does propose an alternative account for Celtic, but
this involves an arbitrary stipulation ("assign nominative Case to a
noun phrase in the Spec of YP"). He does not say why not every
language could have this rule, and there is no general discussion of
how significant correlations could arise that are not absolute universals. Are all 22 verb-initial AGR-initial languages of Table 1 like
Celtic? The correlation between TNS position and the lack of infinitives is also on very shaky empirical ground. I know of no large-scale
cross-linguistic study, but counterexamples that come to mind are
Coptic and Jacaltec, which are TNS-initial and have non-agreeing
infinitives.
A further property of YSO languages that Ouhalla derives from his
theory is the fact that they usually allow SYO order as an alternative,
while SYO languages generally do not allow YSO as an alternative
(Greenberg's Universal 6). Assuming that the subject may be a topic
in the Spec of TNS coindexed with an empty resumptive pro subject in
the structural subject position, and that topics must m-command their
resumptive pronouns, it follows that the topic must be higher than the
pro resumptive and hence can be in the Spec of TNS only in TNSinitiallanguages. However, the same facts can easily be explained by
REVIEWS
105
the condition that topics must be in a marginal clause position for
functional reasons, so Ouhalla's explanation is redundant.
Although Ouhalla cites Greenberg' s data where they fit his theory,
he disregards available cross-linguistic data where they do not. Thus,
Bybee 1985:35 observes that languages are much more likely to have
person agreement outside of tense than vice versa (see also Table 1
above), and occasionally languages even undergo morphological
change that externalizes the agreement inflection (Bybee 1985:40,
Haspelmath 1993). Thus, there is a clear preference for agreement
markers to occur outside of tense markers, which is not captured by
Ouhalla' s theory. And he does not even consider the possibility that the
usual pathways of diachronic change (grammaticalization) may be responsible for the order of inflectional elements (cf. Siewierska 1993).
Since morphology is continually created out of syntax, it is much more
likely that word order determines affix order than the other way round,
as in Ouhalla's approach. But regularities of diachronic change are
systematically disregarded by Chomskyan linguistics in general, so
there is no surprise here.
Chapter 4, which deals with noun phrase structure, contains an
original proposal which is very much in the general spirit of Chomskyan syntax, where a new solution that has become standard is normally applied wherever possible. The DP analysis of noun phrases,
where the DET(erminer) element is the functional head, was largely
seen as parallel to the IP analysis of sentences, where INFL(ection) is
their functional head. After the split-INFL analysis became standard,
it was inevitable that someone would come up with a split-DET analysis. Ouhalla proposes that noun phrases, too, have two functional
heads, AGR and DET, and that some noun phrases are AGRPs and
others are DPs (the problem of distinguishing between clausal AGRPs
and noun phrase AGRPs is circumvented by assuming that AGR elements are not specified for categorial features). The structure of noun
phrases thus becomes even more similar to that of clauses, and Ouhalla
tries to show that his analysis of clause structure can be extended to the
structure of noun phrases. In particular, English prenominal genitives
are said to move to the Spec of AGR in order to get genitive Case-this
is the only motivation for positing an AGR head. The fact that Romance languages lack prenominal possessors is attributed to the lack of
AGR in their noun phrases. It is clear that this reasoning is completely
circular. But not all languages without prenominal possessors lack
AGR: Ouhalla notes that Chamorro has only postnominal possessors
but marks the possessive relation by agreement: i bisita-na si Fran-
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WORD, VOLUME 46, NUMBER 1 (APRIL, 1995)
cisco (ART visit-3SG ART Francisco) 'Francisco's visit'. His explanation is that the possessum (bisita-na) moves further up and adjoins
to DET, because the Chamorro DET i is bound, whereas in Hungarian,
for instance, the DET a in a Peter kalap-ja (ART Peter hat-3SG)
'Peter's hat' is not bound, hence no movement takes place (*a kalapja
Peter). But no independent evidence for the bound status of Chamorro
i and the non-bound status of Hungarian a is given, 3 so again the
argument is circular. 4
This summary of the arguments and analyses proposed in Ouhalla's book does not exhaust it. There is more in the book than I could
mention here, e.g. an analysis of the passive, a discussion of the place
of negation and modals, of COMP as a nominalizer. But I could not
find an exception to the general pattern that either the analyses are
mere reformulations of known facts in the idiosyncratic GB terminology, or the claims are so theory-dependent that they are not possibly
falsifiable, or the generalizations do not hold once a larger set of
languages is examined.
To sum up, a virtue of this book is that its main theoretical point
and its unusually clear presentation makes it accessible to interested
outsiders, who could use it as an introduction to the esoteric and often
bizarre world of recent Chomskyan syntax and form their own opinion.
And maybe Chomskyans will find some of its original ideas stimulating (e.g. the "split-DET" hypothesis). But due to the flaws mentioned
above, this book contributes little to our knowledge of the nature of
language.
Department of English
Free University of Berlin
D-14195 Berlin
END NOTES
1
The circularity is especially clear in footnote 15 of chapter 4, where Ouhalla attempts to
explain away the fact that nouns in some languages assign genitive Case, whereas they do not in
others-thus a case of a parametric difference in a lexical category. He seriously considers the
possibility that the Case-assigning properties are determined by the derivational affixes of derived
nouns, and presumably of empty affixes in non-derived nouns. With this methodology anything
can be explained.
2
0uhalla also claims that Modern Greek has TNS outside of AGR, but this is true only in
the periphrastic future; the past has AGR outside of TNS, e.g. fer-a-ne (bring-PAST-3PL) 'they
brought'. Quite generally, he ignores the many cases where different AGR and TNS elements
have different mutual orders in the same language.
107
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3
0n the contrary, there is evidence that Hungarian a is bound: in front of vowels, it takes
the form az (az en kalapom 'my hat'), and such alternations are not characteristic of free words.
4
Similarly, section 3.3.2.1 crucially relies on the bound status of French ne, and again no
independent evidence is given.
REFERENCES
Bybee, Joan L. 1985. Morphl~;y:
A study of the relation between meaning and form. Amsterdam: Benjamins.
Bybee, Joan L. & Dahl, Osten. 1989. "The creation of tense and aspect systems in the languages
of the world." Studies in Language 13.1:51-103.
Chomsky, Noam. 1991. "Some notes on economy of derivation and representation". In: Freidin,
Robert (ed.) 1991. Principles and parameters in comparative ~;ram.
Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 417-54.
Haspelmath, Martin. 1993. "The diachronic externalization of inflection". Linguistics 31.2:
279-309.
Hawkins, John A. 1983. Word order universals. New York: Academic Press.
Himmelmann, Nikolaus P. 1992. Grammaticalization and grammar. (Arbeitspapier, 16. (N.F.))
Cologne: Institut fiir Sprachwissenschaft der Universitat zu Koln.
Koptjevskaja-Tamm, Maria. 1993. Nominalizations. London: Routledge. (Pre-published and
circulated in 1988 as a University of Stockholm dissertation)
Nichols, Johanna. 1986. "Head-marking and dependent-marking grammar". Language 62:56119.
Pollock, J.-Y. 1989. "Verb movement, Universal Grammar, and the structure of lP". Linguistic
Inquiry 20:365-424.
Siewierska, Anna. 1993. "On the ordering of subject agreement and tense affixes". In: EUROTYP Working Papers, Series 11 (Constituent order), No. 5:101-26.
GELUYKENS, RONALD. From discourse process to grammatical construction: On left-dislocation in English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 1992. xi + 182 pp.
Reviewed by ANGELA DOWNING
The notion expressed by Halliday in the early seventies that 'the
system itself reflects the functions it has evolved to serve' (Halliday
1971:65 -6) has found support in similar statements in more recent
years (Levinson 1983, Dik 1989). According to this view, a functional
approach to language will provide a basis for explaining the nature of
the language system. Ronald Geluykens follows this trend in stating in
his opening paragraph that his aim is to 'investigate the link between
discourse function and syntactic form, and the ways in which gram-
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matical form is a reflection of communicative function'. The linguistic
form chosen is left-dislocation (LD) and the language is English.
The author rightly uses a data-base that focuses on spontaneous
conversation-the Survey of English Usage-with other discourse
types used for comparative purposes. Not surprisingly, his quantitative
data confirm a native speaker's intuitions that LD in English is far
more frequent in conversation than in any other discourse type, and
that its occurrence in the written mode, in letters and fictional dialogue, is largely a reflection of its conversational functions, with no
occurrences of LD at all in scientific writing and in fictional writing
that is not dialogue.
Unlike some corpus-based studies, however, Geluykens' work is
not limited to a purely quantitative analysis and in this he shares the
view put forward by Schiffrin (1987) that quantitive data should be
used to support a qualitative analysis. In particular, the analyst should
not deal exclusively with the prototypical instances of a pattern, dismissing the 'exceptions' as statistically irrelevant; rather, each case
should be examined on its own merits, since the apparent exception
may provide evidence for the validity of some general claim. This
accords with Schiffrin's awareness that a single instance 'can suggest
the need for an explanation which covers a wider variety of phenomena' (Schiffrin 1987:68).
Methodologically, Geluykens' study is innovative in that it combines concepts traditionally used in Discourse Analysis (DA) with
insights and methodology taken from Conversation Analysis (CA).
The merits and demerits of each of these two schools are discussed in
the ample Theoretical Preliminaries. From DA the attention accorded
to information flow is found to be invaluable, and various definitions
of Givenness and Topicality are discussed and adapted to make them
more operational. Conversely, the centring on narrative text so often
found in this approach is rejected in favour of attention to conversation, for the analysis of which the more interactional turn-taking
method of CA is adopted. It is this combination which will provide the
necessary framework for the claim which Geluykens puts forward
regarding the discourse function of LD in English.
Givenness is to be assessed in terms of 'recoverability' defined as
information which is derivable from the discourse record. Recoverable/irrecoverable are not to be understood as a simple binary distinction between recoverable and not recoverable, but rather on a scale
ranging from totally recoverable, through not recoverable to inferred.
Inferrability, based on Prince (1981), appears to include what Brown
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109
& Yule describe as 'automatically activated' connections between sentences as well as the inferencing that means work for the hearer in
order to 'bridge the gap' in the discourse (Brown & Yule 1983:257ff).
Topicality, or 'aboutness' is rightly dissociated from initial position, although as Geluykens recognises, it remains difficult to make
operation the pretheoretical notion of what a text or a part of the text
is about (Dik 1989, Downing 1990a and Downing 1991). Granting that
no perfect correlation exists between the presence of a referent in the
discourse and its relation to aboutness, Geluykens proposes his own
characterisation of topicality, based in some respects on Giv6n' s
(1983) concept of 'topic continuity'. Topic continuity is based on two
factors, 'lookback' and 'persistence'. Lookback relates to the relationship of an item to the preceding discourse, and is taken care of by
Geluykens' 'recoverability'. Persistence measures the duration of a
particular topic through the ensuing discourse. For Giv6n this is measurable "in terms of the number of clauses to the right" (Giv6n 1983:
15), which as Geluykens points out, runs into several problems.
Firstly, a cut-off point of 20 seems somewhat arbitrary; secondly, a
topic may be maintained while 'jumping a clause' as in Geluykens'
example (12a) of Chapter 1 John died. They said it was cancer. He was
77. and may even be maintained indirectly. Thirdly, it is claimed that
the quantitative approach adopted by Giv6n is unsuitable for the analysis of conversation, which requires the cooperation of at least two
participants. Instead, topicality will be adjusted to the turn-taking system, and a degree of topicality will be considered significant if an
element recurs in one of three positions: in the same speaker's turn, in
the hearer's turn, or in the turn following the hearer's turn.
These preliminaries are necessarily detailed and extensive in that
they provide the basis on which Geluykens makes his claim that the
main function of LD in English is the introduction of new (and topical)
referents in what is essentially a cooperative effort between speaker
and hearer. According to this view, the referent is introduced by a
speaker, is then acknowledged by the hearer, and in the third stage, is
typically elaborated upon by the first speaker. This fits in with the
notion of 'transition relevance place' (TRP) between turns introduced
by Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson (197 4) which occurs with the end of
syntactic units or of prosodic units, and is rare in other places, at least
among native English speakers. The grammatical construction of LD
is, therefore, the result of a conversational strategy which gets built
into the syntax.
A formal syntactic description is consequently inadequate, and a
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semantic characterisation is proposed. For this, Geluykens adopts different terms from those in current use. The noun phrase preceding the
main clause is labelled the referent (REF), the main clause itself is the
Proposition (PROP) and the coreferential pronominal element he calls
the Gap (GAP). Of these, the term 'Gap' is potentially confusing
since, as Radford points out (Radford: 1988:531), dislocation involves
no gap; on the contrary, the clause linked with the dislocated constituent contains some expression referring back, in the case of LD, to the
dislocated NP. In what in generative grammar is called Topicalization,
by contrast, there is a gap. Adapting Radford's example (9) (Radford
1988:530) for the purpose we can compare:
(1)
That kind of antisocial behaviour, can we really tolerate it?
(Left-dislocation)
(2)
That kind of antisocial behaviour can we really tolerate? (Topicalization)
The choice of the term GAP, therefore, is not the most fortunate.
As a result of the playing-down of formal features there is, furthermore, no mention, to the best of this reviewer's knowledge, of the
relationship of LD to embedding and recursiveness. In other languages, such as Spanish, left-dislocated structures can be embedded
freely (Rivero 1980) and can also occur recursively. While Radford
does not discount the operation of a recursive rule on universalist
grounds, he finds that recursive dislocation in standard varieties of
English has "a somewhat odd flavour" (Radford 1988:532) as in (3)
(Radford's (19), adapted):
(3)
?That kind of car, in this kind of parking lot, you'd be crazy
to want to leave it there.
In the standard English of the Survey of English Usage it is unlikely that instances of recursive LOs would occur; and no doubt it may
be presumed that in a "resolutely empirical" and corpus-based study
such as that of Geluykens, no examples of these features were thrown
up in the data.
More worrying is the fact that on occasion an example listed as an
instance of LD does not correspond with at least this native speaker's
intuitions of what an LD element is. Example (22) of Chapter 6 is one
such:
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A:
Ill
( .. )-/cos there was this !other !"friend of 'mine# that /knows
about the same a! 'mount as 'me #and he/actually 'got an
'honours :'viva#. ( .. ) (S.2.9.42.5)
Even though this other friend of mine is coreferential with he, it is
also an argument in a presentative there clause, rather than being an
isolated noun phrase. How does it then qualify as an LD element?
Functionally, the presentative structure itself introduces the new potential topical referent (Downing 1990). Moreover, this clause is coordinated with the PROP clause.
Other examples, such as the extract below of (23) of chapter 3
might more convincingly be analysed as non-starter sentences, rather
than instances of LD. This is suggested by the presence of are and the
pause after the Caucasians:
B:
be/cause. the Cau!Wcasians # are. 1/don't know about racial
# 1/don't really under[stand much about] race # but linlguistically they're u!nique# . (S.211.76.1)
While it is no doubt true, as Geluykens suggests, that the speaker
felt the need to introduce the Caucasians, despite its link with a previous mention of Caucasian, this does not mean that all such introductions are achieved by means of LD.
In Chapter 2, referent-introduction is examined from the point of
view of interaction. The 'acknowledgement' of the introduced referent
can be explicit or implicit; thus, LDs are classified as having an intervening turn between the REF and the PROP, as having a pause, and
as turnless and pauseless. Pauses are interpreted as 'silent acknowledgement' of the new referent on the part of the hearer. That is, since
there is no expressed rejection of the new topical referent, the speaker
takes this as tacit acknowledgement. Pauseless LDs, according to Geluykens' analysis of the data, mainly occur in specific discourse conditions, such as questions and answers. As explanation to other, more
recalcitrant instances, Geluykens suggests that in some cases the
speaker can take it for granted that his REF will be accepted by the
hearer, and so can do without an acknowledgement. One question that
springs to mind in this respect is that, if LD indeed represents a
collaborative effort between speaker and hearer, why isn't it more
common in English? And the doubt remains, that if topic-introduction
really depended on acknowledgement, few potential topics would
stand much chance of survival.
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Chapters 3 and 4 are devoted to the referent-introduction function
of LDs from the point of view of recoverability and topicality respectively. The concepts are further discussed, subclassified and illustrated
with examples from the data-base.
In Chapter 5, other functions of LD are discussed, particularly that
of contrastiveness. Here, in contrast to Halliday's view that contrastive
emphasis is a kind of newness (Halliday 1985:277), Geluykens prefers
to regard irrecoverability and contrast as separate phenomena, informationally unrelated, although both constituting forms of highlighting.
According to this view, once an item is involved in a constrastive set
its recoverability status is cancelled and becomes irrelevant, since it
will be highlighted whether it is recoverable or not.
Chapter 6 explores the prosodic aspects of LD and finds that tone
unit boundaries (tonality) and the placement of the tone nucleus (tonicity) are relevant toLD; in particular the final pitch movement on the
REF reflects the conversational function of LD.
In Chapter 7, devoted to other discourse types, Geluykens finds
that in non-conversational discourse, in which LDs are much less
frequent, some functions are almost identical to the conversational
uses, while others are quite different. The latter comprise the use of LD
for emotive reasons, for identificational reasons, or as an alternative to
a comment adverbial. Here, several of the examples quoted would fall
within the category of 'viewpoint subjuncts' (Quirk et a! 1985:8.89),
which to this reviewer at least appears as a more satisfactory classification. It might be preferable, one feels, not to attempt to draw these
into the LD category, even as 'quasi-LDs', since they tend to weaken
the distinctiveness of the LD structure. While it is true that initial
position is made use of to fulfil a variety of discourse functions, these
functions, such as retrospective linking and prospective projection,
(re)introduction of new potential topics, contrast, etc. are realised by
a number of different structures and types of unit. A tighter limit to
what LD can include, structurally, would have been beneficial here, as
in several other places in this book.
Setting LD in English within a broader perspective, in Chapter 8,
it is interesting to compare the use of LD in English with its equivalent
in other languages such as French and Italian. A comparison of formal
features and eo-occurrences is not given. Interestingly, Geluykens
finds that the English data do not confirm the floor-seeking function
that in conjunction with LD as a topic-shift device, Duranti and Ochs
( 1979) claim for Italian; the reason suggested is that, since referent
introduction is negotiated by speakers of English, a competitive floor-
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113
seeking use is not necessary. At the same time, Geluykens suggests
that the highly interactional nature of LD in English accounts for its
relative non-integration into the grammar. This, however, does not
adequately explain the fact that LDs produced by non-native speakers
of English often sound decidedly odd. Nor does it explain to what
degree left-dislocation is acceptable to educated English speakers. In
other words, where is the cut-off point at which LD becomes socially
unacceptable?
In Italian, on the other hand, since negotiation of topic introduction is less of a concern for Italian speakers, the three-stage acknowledgement process proposed by Geluykens for English is absent, and
syntactization has been largely achieved, although some interaction is
present. In French, finally, LD has progressed even further than Italian
on the road to syntactization, and the interactional dimension is judged
to be completely absent.
In general organisation, method, argumentation and wealth of
detail this book is excellent and thought-provoking. It would have been
helpful, for the purpose of identification, to have numbered the examples consecutively right through the book, instead of numbering for
each chapter separately. And if one worries at times at the inclusion of
certain of the examples under the label of LD, about the extent to
which LD is allowed to wander, and about the cooperative nature of
the device, as claimed by Geluykens, the work nevertheless provides
what will assuredly be the standard treatment of left-dislocation in
English for some time.
Dept. Filologfa lnglesa
Universidad Complutense
28040 Madrid
Spain
REFERENCES
Brown, G. & Yule, G. 1983. Discourse analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Dik, S.C. 1989. The theory of functional grammar. Part 1: The structure of the clause.
Dordrecht: Foris.
Downing, A. 1990a. "Sabre el lema t6pico en ingles." Revista Espaiiola de lingiilstica aplicada.
Anejo I. ed. M.T. Turrell. Nuevas corrientes lingii{sticas. Aplicaci6n a la descripci6n del
inglh. Pp. 119-28.
- - . 1990b. "The discourse function of presentative there in existential structures in Middle
English and present-day English: a systemic-functional perspective.'' Occasional Papers in
Systemic Linguistics. Vol. 4. Pp. 103-126.
- - . 1991. "An alternative approach to theme: a systemic-functional perspective." WORD.
42:119-43.
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WORD, VOLUME 46, NUMBER l (APRIL, 1995)
Giv6n, T. Ed. 1983. Topic continuity in discourse: a quantitative cross-language study.
Halliday, M.A.K. 1971. "Language in a social perspective." In Halliday (1973) Explorations in
the Functions of Language. London: Edward Arnold. (First published in Educational Review, June 1971)
- - . 1985. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Edward Arnold.
Levinson, S. 1983. Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Prince, E. 1985. "On the given/new distinction." Papers from the 15th Regional Meeting of the
Chicago Linguistic Society. 267-78.
Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G. & J. Svartvik. 19g5_ A comprehensive grammar of the
English language. London: Longman.
Radford, A. 1988. Transformational grammar. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rivero, M. L. 1980. "On left-dislocation and topicalization in Spanish." Linguistic Inquiry,
11:363-72.
Sacks, H., Schegloff, E. & G. Jefferson. 1974. "A simplest systematics for the organisation of
turn-taking in conversation." Language 50. 696-735.
Schiffrin, D. 1987. Discourse markers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
DAYIS GARRY W. and GREGORY K. IVERSON, Eds. Explanation in
historical linguistics. Amsterdam studies in the theory and history of linguistic
science, Series IV: Current issues in linguistic theory, 84. Amsterdam &
Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1992. xiv + 238 pp.
Reviewed by
DAviD
S.
FAGAN
This volume, the first of two, contains thirteen papers presented at
the Nineteenth Annual University of Wisconsin:Milwaukee Linguistics Symposium held in April 1990. The unifying purpose in this
volume is to address the question of what defines an explanation of
diachronic change.
Abraham analyzes the evolution of Aktionsart features in German
periphrastic tenses, the "dative passive," and the dialectal "double
periphrasis.'' He applies the concept of event structure which entails
terminative or non-terminative events as well as various phases in the
development of these events (approach, durative, resultative). He
traces the history of grammaticalization of lexical verbs which become
auxiliaries in terms of this model: increasing grammaticalization derives from a reduced connection to the event features of embedded
lexical verbs. Anttila's essay aims at the deficiencies of formalistic
linguistic theory as a means to explain historical change, specifically
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115
generative theory; in his view, in fact, one may question whether or not
the latter actually is a real theory of language (35, note 4). Language
at its core is historical and a worthwhile theory of language must be
grounded in an understanding of rational action, both individual and
collective. Anttila provides a detailed review of several rationalist
arguments and relates many points from these sources to the question
of what constitutes historical explanation. He also applies the concept
of invisible-hand explanation to language change and cites the central
role philology (as classically defined) might take in linguistic research.
Clements' paper examines the history of Korlai, a Portuguese creole
spoken on the west coast of India. In the first part, he analyzes the
impact of cultural factors and the role of typological characteristics of
the languages involved in the contact situation (Marathi and Portuguese); he also analyzes the transition in Korlai from SVO to SOY
word order as an example of mutual linguistic accommodation. In the
second part, Clements studies a case of non-accommodation in Korlai,
i.e., the maintenance of habitual and progressive aspects; these categories are undifferentiated in both contact languages. This analysis
incorporates several grammatical strategies derived from the theory of
Semantic Transparency.
Many researchers who deal with sound changes focus on "accidents'' of performance or mistaken analyses of the speech signal; Faber
proposes that linguistic competence has a direct role in the actuation of
sound changes and that competence itself is variable in nature. She
provides a convincing case history of the merger of /i/ with /1/, le! with
1£1, and /u/ with /u/ before tautosyllabic /1/ in younger speakers of the
Salt Lake Valley (Utah). Based on a portion of the responses in a
perceptual study of these mergers, it is clear that some listeners respond
better than others to secondary characteristics of the tense vowels which
have supposedly completed the !axing process. Faber outlines a possible
sequence of events in which differential learning of the secondary
characteristics (differences in amplitude in various parts of the spectrum) leads to differences in competence and, consequently, to distinctions in perception. She ends her paper with some comments on the
role of phonetic detail in the perception of change by lexical diffusion.
Forner, Gun del, Houlihan and Sanders examine the differences between
the language use of children and adults, as well as older children, in
regard to the acquisition of marked forms in phonology and syntax.
Young children, in general, are exposed to unmarked structures and they
perform accordingly as speakers; thus, marked structures are either
borrowed or evolve internally in the language used by mature speakers.
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VOLUME 46, NUMBER I (APRIL, 1995)
An example of syntactic borrowing is the stranded preposition construction in English which can be traced to English-Danish contact in
the eighth and ninth centuries; an example of phonological borrowing
occurred when Middle English dialects acquired words with initial
voiced fricatives from French and the Kentish dialect at a time when
these segments occurred only as allophones in intervocalic position.
Both the stranded preposition and voiced fricatives are marked structures. The authors provide several examples of language internal development, e.g., French nasalization, English apocope and syncope,
etc. which have parallels in rapid speech and which produce marked
forms. In Hamp's opinion, linguistic textbooks present the comparative
method in an incomplete manner with frequently superficial coverage
of examples. He reviews the concept of morphological and phonological correspondences and notes some of the problems which the comparativist faces; not the least of these is the interposition of rules which
obscure the nature of earlier base forms and rules.
Hock's paper challenges the idea that reconstructed word orders
must conform in a strict way to typological generalizations derived
from the analysis of attested languages. For example, it has been
widely held that postnominal relative clauses with relative pronouns
are restricted to SYO languages while, in fact, this structure can be
found in Latin which has an unmarked SOY order. Consequently, the
basic word order of Proto-lndo-European cannot be predicted from the
occurrence of relative clauses with relative pronouns, nor is the reverse
true. Hock studies the relative-correlative type of relative clause in
detail, starting with a rule which captures the restricted distribution of
finite verbs in SOY languages (Rule A, 109); he presents examples
from Sanskrit, Hittite, Old Latin, Tamil, and Turkish. He goes on to
suggest that if Rule A is applied to PIE, several cruxes may be better
understood, for example, the greater frequency of non-finite subordination in early lndo-European versus modern European languages.
Joseph analyzes the way in which speakers make linguistic judgements
in the areas of phonology and morphology with examples from German, English, Greek, Sanskrit and Korean. Unlike the linguist, speakers often focus on surface forms and they often adopt opaque analyses
where transparent ones could be made, or, they may eschew diachronically based rules which are still well motivated in the synchronic
grammar. One is presented with a contrast between linguists' grammars and (real) speakers' grammars and it is clear that a higher degree
of explanation will result from combining the analyses of each of them.
Kemmer's paper first sketches the history of the theory of prototypes
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117
applied to the lexicon and, subsequently, to grammatical systems, and
then provides an extended analysis of two prototypical categories, the
reflexive and the middle voice. The empirical basis for identifying
grammatical prototypes derives from the fact that they are generally
realized in a particular morphosyntactic form in contrast with nonprototype categories. Kemmer notes the various ways in which the
reflexive and the middle voice are marked in different languages, i.e.,
a single marker for the two functions, a marker for each function, or
a single marker for reflexives, leaving the middle voice to pattern with
other morphosyntactic types. Comparative evidence attests to the frequent creation of middle markers from reflexive markers and the author focuses on this type of case, examining various semantic and
formal aspects of the process; she also studies some cases of reflexive
markers which derive from emphatic markers.
Klein-Andreu analyzes the impact of socio-cultural conditions on
Peninsular Spanish linguistic norms which are undergoing changes and
eventually evolve into new standards. Her first example involves creation of feminine nouns for professions, derived from masculine forms
by addition of a feminine marker, e.g., abogado ~ abogada 'lawyer'
(masc./fem.). In the past there was resistance to this innovation because
masculine forms were accorded higher prestige value (whether referring
to male or to female referents) but the process is advancing now,
seemingly in recognition of the expanded role of women in professions.
The second example concerns the emergence of the de facto thirdperson oblique clitic system which the author views as a case of compromise between the etymological system which is preserved in Andalucfa, and the system of Castilla in which case function has been
eliminated. The socio-cultural factor at work here is the increasing
influence of bilingual, non-regional speakers who are free to reinterpret
the outputs of the two opposed regional systems and to make abductive
reanalyses. Moder reviews theories of analogy in the structuralist,
generative, and psycholinguistic frameworks and she presents the results of an experiment in which informants created past tense forms for
nonce base forms modeled on sixteen classes of English verbs. The
results indicate that the three-way distinction between rote, analogy and
rule posited by psycholinguists is less explanatory than an approach
which views morphological processing as a continuum; in Moder's
view, all of these processes involve lexical look-up. Her experiment
also revealed the fact that applicability (number of lexical items per
morphological class) had a greater correlation with productivity than
frequency did. Based on this finding, she suggests that productivity is
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tied directly to the connection between forms in the lexicon rather than
to individual forms. Niepokuj examines the reconstruction of PIE reduplicated perfects, reviewing several analyses of Old Latin, Sanskrit,
and Old Irish which attempt to identify the vowels of the reduplicated
prefixes. She concludes that the evidence for this reconstruction is
ambiguous and provides typological evidence from several language
families, e.g., Niger-Congo, Malay, Salish, to support her claim that
reduplicated prefixes with a unique vowel evolve from earlier stages
with several distinct vowels which arise from assimilation to distinct
vowels in the base. Salmons provides a critique of some current work
in "global etymology" which departs from widely accepted tenets in
diachronic linguistics such as sound correspondences, equivalent timedepth comparisons, etc. This read~
concludes that the principal contribution of "global etymology" to linguistics is that it has stirred up
a debate on scientific method and empiricism in regard to reconstruction. In that vein, I found that this collection of papers was generally
instructive and refreshing because the emphasis lay in presenting new,
empirically based approaches to old and new problems and there was
vitually no time spent fine-tuning the current orthodox positions.
P.O. Box 1172
Port Townsend, WA 98368
FREIDIN, ROBERT. Foundations of generative syntax. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 1992. ix + 368 pp.
Reviewed by
MASATAKA ISHIKAWA
The book under review reconstructs the development of GB theory
in a coherent fashion. It consists of an Introduction, eight chapters, a
comprehensive bibliography, and a subject-author index. The stated
purpose of the book is ''to bridge the gap between introductory lectures
and the frontiers of research in syntax'' (I). The book progresses
smoothly from fundamental concepts of generative syntax (such as
phrase structure, movement) to more complicated concepts and issues
(such as constraints on Empty Categories and binding theory) and their
cross-linguistic applications. In what follows, a brief summary of each
chapter and a general evaluation of the book focusing on its pedagog-
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119
ical aspects and values (since the book is intended primarily as a
textbook) will be presented.
Chapter I (The Study of Syntax, 5-21) introduces basic concepts
and notions of syntax; including generative grammar, lexical categories, (immediate) constituent, tree diagram and (the recursive property
of) a phrase structure grammar. With respect to language acquisition,
issues such as the projection problem (Peters 1972) (i.e., the problem
of projecting the primary data onto the language the child eventually
learns), Universal Grammar (in the Chomskyan, as opposed to, e.g.,
Greenbergian, sense), and the Innateness Hypothesis are discussed.
Chapter 2 (Introduction to Formal Grammar, 23-73), developing
PS rules (e.g., complements, but not adjuncts, are in the subcategorization domain ofthe head; sentential complements vs. relative clauses
with respect to N) and grammatical transformations, introduces lexical
insertion and technical notions such as c-command, m-command, Case
licensing, and government. It serves as foundation for the analyses
developed in the rest of the book. F assumes that not every lexical
category has its own phrasal projection (cf. 36) (e.g., Det in NP and
very in AP; e.g., very happy about the results of the experiment, p. 26).
In his presentation of phrase structure, different levels of phrasal categories are not represented in terms of number of bars or primes. But
rather, F chooses to distinguish only two levels, the lexical category and
their phrasal projections (indicated by a star (*), e.g., X vs. X*).
Chapter 3 (Recursion, Movement, and Bounding, 75-137) discusses a transformational account of interrogative sentences and develops general constraints on the movement operation. In his discussion of Bounding (with the notions of cycle, syntactic islands, etc.), F
generalizes the formulation of the Subjacency Condition in terms of the
Empty Category Principle (ECP) for both leftward (Wh-Movement)
and rightward (Extraposition) movements. In doing so, F disregards
the usual c-command requirement on binding.
Chapter 4 (The English Verbal Auxiliary System, 139-78) deals
with the interaction of phrase structure and transformational rules and
filters to account for the general properties of the English auxiliary
system. Analyzed in familiar transformational terms, an English auxiliary verb and its corresponding affix form a single (syntactic) unit at
an abstract level of syntactic representation (e.g., [PROG BE+ ING]).
Infl is analyzed as consisting of two parts, [±finite] and optional
[ + aux] for modal auxiliaries. Modals are base-generated in Infl, while
aspectual auxiliaries are base-generated in VP (followed by raising into
Infl).
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Chapter 5 (Infinitivals, Case, and Government, 179-212) turns to
the analysis of abstract Case (which requires the adjacency and government conditions (but cf. fn. 3, p. 330)) and discusses how this
notion determines the distribution of both lexical and non-lexical NPs
(e.g., subject of infinitival clauses). Examining lexical Case phenomena in Russian and Icelandic (viewed as a selectional restriction), it is
proposed that Case assignment and Case licensing need to be distinguished in a language like Icelandic (210).
Chapter 6 (The Analysis of Empty Categories, 213-50) studies
the distribution of PRO and wh-/NP-traces in various constructions in
terms of Case, government (the ECP), the 8-Criterion, and binding. It
is assumed that PRO is a headed empty category (i.e., [NP [Ne)]),
while a trace is a non-headed empty maximal projection (i.e., [NP e])
(249). Based on this structural distinction, F suggests that a trace
(which does not bear a 8-role) is subject to the ECP because it needs
to be identified (by proper government), while PRO is not subject to
the ECP since it bears a 8-role, which is a type of identification for an
empty category. Also dealt with are issues related to thematic relations, such as the level(s) of syntactic representation at which 8-roles
are assigned.
Chapter 7 (Binding Theory, 251-82) tackles the issue of how to
account for coindexing possibilities of lexical anaphors (reflexives and
reciprocals) (Principle A) and (bound) pronouns (Principle B) in the
IP-and NP-paradigms in syntactic terms (i.e., c-command requirement). Cross-linguistic variations with respect to the definition of binding domain are accounted for by proposing specific parameters. For
example, in Turkish, it is said that AGR (in Infl) is relevant in determining the binding domain for anaphors (257-8).
Chapter 8 (Extensions of Binding Theory, 283-317) takes up the
binding of R-expressions (Principle C) and discusses some of the problems involving the syntactic account of pronoun and anaphoric epithet
binding. Cross-linguistic variations in the binding of R-expressions are
handled, following Lasnik (1989), in terms of the referential hierarchy
of NP types (in conjunction with the prohibition on binding between
two R-expressions), dividing what has been designated as Principle C
into two subparts. This final chapter also examines the question of at
which level binding theory applies. Principles A, B, and C are assumed to apply at LF.
The book is handsomely crafted with occasional typographical
errors (which do not generally interfere with the comprehension of the
text; e.g., organizada in (iiia-c) of Exercise 3.18 should read organizado: in (29) of Chapter 4 (p. 152), [ + n, -v, + aux] should read
REVIEWS
121
[- n, + v, + aux]). It can be characterized by a well-organized and
concise exposition of each given issue at hand. The flow of the presentation is admirably smooth, guiding the reader in a step-by-step
fashion from the definition and explanation of technical terms and
fundamental concepts (printed in bold face) to the application of these
in accounting for a given body of data.
With frequent exercises, which are scattered around in each chapter
(rather than collected at the end of each), the book emphasizes the
precise formulations of grammatical rules and principles. Exercises are
thus an important and integrated component of this book. Generally
these exercises are self-contained and diagnostic in nature. They can
profitably be used to check the student's understanding of the material
at hand (done either individually at home or as in-class discussion
exercises). This feature is very helpful both to the student and to the
teacher alike.
It is amazing that starting from fairly basic concepts (such as
immediate constituent and phrase structure), the book arrives at such a
high level of syntactic analysis in terms of GB in only 300-plus pages.
The author should be commended for his analytical insight and pedagogical prudence. Although, according to the author, the intended
audience is graduate and advanced undergraduate students who have
had introductory courses or some background in formal linguistic analysis, since the book starts from basic concepts and builds up on them
gradually in a pedagogically sound fashion (e.g., Chapters I and 2 give
a good introduction to a generative syntactic analysis), it can be used
in an intermediate course with some additional readings or exercises
given by the instructor at the beginning or throughout the course.
Bibliographical Comments at the end of each chapter give the student
a good idea where to go next.
In conclusion, students who u&e this book should be able to learn
the Principles-and-Parameters theory effectively (and probably without
too much pain) and gain solid foundation in this model for further
study. Although not everyone would agree that" [t]he science of grammar as we know it today is relatively young-hardly more than three
decades old" (305), I can imagine that many would agree that this
book is one of the most concise and clearest expositions of the Principles-and-Parameters framework so far published.
Facuity of Integrated Arts and Sciences
Hiroshima University
Kagamiyama 1-7-1
Higashihiroshima City
JAPAN
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REFERENCES
Lasnik, H. 1989. "On the necessity of binding conditions." In Lasnik, Essays on anaphora.
Dordrecht: Kluwer.
Peters, S. 1972. "The projection problem." In Peters, ed., Goals of linguistic theory. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall.
POSER, WILLIAM, Ed., Japanese syntax. Center for the Study of Language
and Information, Leland Stanford .Junior University. 1988.
Reviewed by
SEOK CHOONG SoNG
The volume under review is a collection of selected papers from
the Second International Workshop on Japanese Syntax held in the
spring of 1986 at Stanford University. It is not just another one of those
international conference proceedings that keep pouring out only to be
doomed to oblivion from birth. The volume stands out above the
ordinary garden variety of similar proceedings for its diversity of topics
of theoretical interest, depth of insight, breadth of coverage as well as
quality of descriptions. As such, this book deserves critical examination. I will sample some of the more important and palatable choices
on a menu that offers the latest (at the time of publication) and arguably
choicest of Japanese linguistics today.
Although practically all the papers included espouse one or another theoretical framework of mainstream American linguistics, none
of them are adherents of standard GB to the letter. They display interesting deviations from and challenges to Chomsky, which make the
reading interesting as well as stimulating. The fun of reading, however, will often be interrupted by the question of the grammaticality of
Japanese sentences, which can be tantalizingly tortuous. A crucial
judgment depends on the linguist's judgment who analyzes the judgment or intuition of a speaker on precariously fragile evidence. Ordinary mortals are likely to be lost in the labyrinth of grammaticality
argument and might find it difficult to decide whose judgment to side
with. Fortunately, readers who persevere to the end will be richly
rewarded, finding here gems of insightful observations, brilliant analyses, solid argumentation, and sobering reflections on many important
questions of Japanese syntax. Since my comments have to be selective
and brief due to exigency of time and space, I will be fair to all
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contributors in one respect at least, giving them an equal opportunity,
by listing their titles here: Takao Gunji, "Subcategorization and Word
Order"; Masayo Iida and Peter Sells, "Discourse Factors in the Binding ofZibun"; Megumi Kageyama, "Japanese Zero Pronominal Binding: Where Syntax and Discourse Meet"; Susumo Kuno, "Blended
Quasi-Direct Discourse in Japanese"; Shige-Yuki Kuroda, "Whether
We Agree or Not: A Comparative Syntax of English and Japanese";
Kiyoko Masunaga, "Case Deletion and Discourse Context"; Shigeru
Miyagawa, "Predication and Numeral Quantifier"; Masayoshi Shibatani and Taro Kageyama "Readjustment and Compound Formation".
Gunji's paper is the only one that treats Japanese syntax within a
GPSG framework, a version of it called HPSG a la Pollard, to be
precise. He proposes an extension of PSG that makes handling word
order variation or scrambling more feasible. In the process of applying
subcategorizational schema to Japanese PSG, G replaces an NP in
English with a PP in Japanese. Since every noun phrase is accompanied
by a postposition when it appears as a complement in Japanese, he
decides to denote both subjects and objects as well as other types of
complements as PPs. Although it is merely a matter of terminology, for
the uninitiated it comes as no small surprise to learn that a sentence
subject is called a complement of a VP. The notion of a subject marked
by Nominative Case and an object marked by Accusative Case is a
grammatical relation usually predictable in terms of configurational
structure. Other complements and adjuncts which accompany lexical
postpositions indicating location, goal, direction etc. are of a different
nature. The advantage, if any, of lumping them together simply because
they accompany postpositions is not only dubious but also counterintuitive.
In order to account for reflexivization, G rejects flat structure and
adheres to hierachical structure by adopting a binary branching rule in
the expansion of the ID rule. In this process, he creates strange constituents such as one consisting of a subject and a verb (not intransitive,
caveat lector!) dominated by an odd verbal category which only subcategorizes for an object. This is neither a VP, which subcategorizes
for a subject, nor a TVP, which subcategorizes for both a subject and
an object. "Even though there is no traditional name for such a category, the following sentence indicates that Ken-ga aisiteiru can be
considered as a constituent in 'scrambled' sentences" (p.9):
Naomi-wo Ken-ga aisitei-te Tomio-ga kiratteiru.
'Ken loves, and Tomio hates, Naomi.'
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In a coordinate structure, usually only constituents are conjoined.
Therefore, G's analysis of the italicized string as a constituent is justified. Isn't this a classical case of tautology? In both cases, it is the
same descriptive apparatus that generates the string in question. Indeed, it is a moot question whether linguistic structure is inherent in
language or whether it is a matter of ordered descriptive statements.
Before discussing reflexivization, it must be pointed out, although
a minor point, that it is grossly misleading to gloss zibun as 'someone
(other than himself)' in (30 a). Nowhere does G mention that someone
in this sentence can only be the speaker, either (p. 12):
(30)a. Zibun-wo Ken-ga aisiteii·u.
self-ACC NOM love
'Ken loves someone (other than himself).'
G's highly sophisticated and complex description may provide a
satisfactory account of a causative sentence like (28) (p. 12):
(28)
Ken-ga Naomin-ni zibun-no kuruma-wo untens-aseta.
NOM DAT self-GEN
car-ACC drive-made
'Ken made Naomi drive his/her own car.'
Unfortunately, a very simple sentence like the following can be ambiguous, and I have a serious doubt that his interpretive mechanism can
stand the test.
(i)
a.
b.
Zibun-no koto-wo Ken-ga issai hanasanaideiru
'Ken is not talking about myself (=speaker) at all.'
'Ken is not talking about himself at all.'
A brief but interesting account of ''Zero Pronominalization'' concludes this ambitious paper in which G makes an attempt to deal with
word order problems within the framework of HPSG. Despite his
claim that the extention of the SUBCAT feature ''not only offers a
straightforward description of word order variation but also allows us
to give simplified conditions on reflexivization and 'zero' pronominalization" (p.l6), it is a little premature to make such a claim at this
time.
Last but not least in volume and ambitious intent is Shibatani &
Kageyama's paper. It is the only article that deals with the interface,
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or interaction, between syntax and morphology. "This paper," the
authors claim, ''brings up a hitherto unnoticed type of compounding in
Japanese, which, ... turns out to take place in the syntactic component" (p.193). They reject outright by-now-outdated transformational
derivation of compounds by Makino (1969) and Okutsu (1975). Their
post-syntactic compounds, however, are distinct from lexical compounds and "involve not only syntax but also phonological readjustment" (p. 193).
S&K' s arguments are straightforward and non-controversial and I
have little to add or subtract. I will simply note just a few minor
problems in their discussion and raise a question or two later to suggest
a possible alternative view. S&K call certain Sino-Japanese forms
'verbal nouns' and define them as "having the properties of both noun
and verb.'' But do these nouns have the intrinsic amphibian properties
the authors claim them to have or are they members of a subclass of
nouns turned into verbs when the semantically empty verb suru 'do' is
added to them? Or is this an empty question with no consequence? In
modern Japanese, there are many Anglo-Japanese forms that resemble
them, some of which I list below:
koohii(-suru), 'drink coffee,' goruhu(-suru), 'play golf,' kisu(-suru)
'kiss,' kanninggu( -suru), 'cheat in exam,' deito(suru), 'date,' rabu(suru), 'love'
Do these borrowed English nouns, e.g., koohii 'coffee', goruhu 'golf',
and kanninggu 'cheating in an exam' also have the properties of both
noun and verb? Or do they acquire such properties when they are
borrowed into Japanese? It is undoubtedly true that the same character
in Chinese can be a noun, a verb, an adjective, or a preposition depending on the context in which it is used. Some English words such
as kiss, love and date that are borrowed into Japanese can also be both
a noun and a verb. Nevertheless, it is a moot question whether those
Sino-Japanese verbal nouns have intrinsic properties of noun and verb
or they acquire verbal properties as a result of affixing suru, a verbalizer, to nouns. To be sure, not all the Sino-Japanese nouns allow suru
to be verbalized but to call those that do 'verbal nouns' with such
characterization seems to be putting the cart before the horse.
If we pursue their position to its logical extremity, we should call
the following verbs 'nominal verbs' having the properties of both verb
and noun. A semantically empty -i is added to convert these verbs into
nouns.
126
Verbs:
Nouns:
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VOLUME 46, NUMBER I (APRIL, 1995)
yasumu, "rest"; nozomu, "hope"; kaeru, "return";
hikaru, "shine"; hanasu, "tell"; hakaru, "measure";
yaku, "fire"
yasumi-i, "holiday"; nozom-i, "hope"; kaer-i, "return"; hikar-i, "light"; hanas-i, "story"; hakar-i,
"balance"; yak-i, "ware(pottery)"
We also find 'adjectival nouns' having the properties of both
adjective and noun as the following list indicates. A semantically
empty -i is added to convert them into adjectives.
Nouns:
Adjectives:
aka, "red"; kuro, "black"; siro, "white"; kiiro,
"yellow"; makkuro, "jet black"; massiro "pure
white"; haraguro, "a black-hearted person"
aka-i, "red"; kuro-i, "black"; siro-i, "white"; kiiroi, "yellow"; makkuroi, "jet black"; massiroi,
"snow white"; haraguroi, "black-hearted"
Once again, it may be a terminological question with little consequence to the main theme of discussion but a matter of historical
interest. Some forms S&K call native Japanese nouns are suspect. Of
the four forms listed, sai, ori, setu, and akatuki, I have some doubt
about sai and setu and question their somewhat indiscriminatory tolerance in the use of the term 'native.' Furthermore, this, I think, is an
entirely testable empirical question. Although there may not be an
absolute criterion, a fairly reliable rule of thumb can tell the 'native'
Japanese from the Sino-Japanese words. One of them is combinatory
possibility allowing only words of the same source to combine together. Consider the following:
sen-sai 'last time,' too-setu 'at this time.' zi-setu 'time,'
*sen-ori, *too-akatuki
Ungrammatical forms demonstrate that native Japanese words cannot
be combined with Sino-Japanese morphemes like sen- and too-. If sai
and setu do combine with native Japanese words, that fact alone indicates that they have become and are behaving more like native words
but is no fool-proof evidence that they are. That ori and akatuki can
never combine with Sino-Japanese forms, on the other hand, can be
taken as evidence for their native origin.
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127
The head nouns in S&K's (31) are, as S&K claim, "of Chinese
origin and directly complemented by preceding clauses without the
mediation of no.'' But at least the last two examples can be preceded
by no like those in their (30).
Tokyo o syuppatu no tyokuzen
New York ni totyaku no tyokugo
'right before the departure from Tokyo'
'right after the arrival in New York'
While comparing the post-syntactic with the lexical compounding,
S&K mention an interesting difference between English ''verbal compounds" and the Japanese counterparts. They point out that "while the
subject resists compounding in the English productive N-Ving formation regardless of the transitivity of the verb, Japanese does allow the
intransitive subject to be compounded.''
If we take a closer look at the examples provided, it is evident that
the subjects in the lexical compounds are not "agents" but "themes."
Furthermore, the nominalized verbs belong to the category of ''ergative", a term by now widely accepted though infelicitous. Their examples of syntactic compounds are of a similar nature. Again, the
notion of ergative nominal can be extended to their "verbal nouns"
just as well. Now this opens up a new possibility for a higher genneralization, completely dispensing with the grammatical notion of "subject" in Japanese verbal compounding just as in English. Clearly, the
ergative analysis is more advantageous than S&K's dubious application of the First Sister Principle to bridge the gap between Japanese and
English with regard to the "subject."
Their arguments in favor of post-syntactic (instead of lexical)
formation of compounds are well supported by the data they provide
and valid. This lengthy paper ends with inconclusive discussion of
some unanswered questions about the lexicon and the status of compounds in it. These are important problems that deserve further scrutiny and continuing research.
Kuno is always fun to read and his piece in this volume is no
exception. It reads almost like a mystery novel, filled with curious and
ingenious examples and masterful analyses. He guides readers through
labyrinthian mazes of complex discourse structures to a denouement
where all the puzzles are resolved to the satisfaction of all parties
concerned. K unravels intricately entangled strands in Blended QuasiDirect Discourse in Japanese, having distinguished Direct, Indirect,
and Blended Discourses to start with. He moves on to identify the
essence of the Direct Discourse in the Blended Discourse, which turns
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VOLUME 46, NUMBER I (APRIL, 1995)
out to be Quasi-Direct after all. K also discusses other interesting
topics such as extraction of elements out of embedded discourse and
speech level adjustment between embedded and main clauses. He
ends the paper by contrasting the Japanese blended discourse pattern
with the English quasi-indirect discourse pattern to draw a conclusion
that the English version is limited to a few idiomatic expressions and
cannot be considered a productive one. Although K is modest to add
in his concluding remark that "There are undoubtedly many other
interesting characteristics of this peculiar style of reported speech, but
exploration of these characteristics must await future research,'' he has
shown enough of the intriguing nature of the blended discourse that he
deserves the honor of a trail-blazer. I must warn readers, however, that
there are a few typos that will throw them off the track momentarily,
a flaw in an otherwise flawless article.
Kuroda is more enlightening than pleasing to read. He argues
against the current prevailing view that there is a parametric difference
between English and Japanese that results in essentially different deep
structure configurations and puts forth his own more agreeable new
claim that it is a matter of Agreement which is forced in English but not
in Japanese. This paper is a study of comparative syntax and makes a
major contribution to the discussion of UG and parameter setting.
Although K's style is heavy going, sometimes on the verge of becoming discursive, he pursues his points relentlessly and convincingly to
the end. His highly abstract theorizing is usually well supported by
interesting, occasionally marginal, data. His penetrating insights, lucid
analyses, and logical arguments cast a new light on some controversial
problems, less than fully understood hitherto, in Japanese syntaxdouble objects, multiple subjects, and topic. His new proposals dealing
with them mark a significant step forward not only in the description
of Japanese grammar but also in grammatical theory in general, because they are systematically dealt with on principled grounds,
namely, on the thesis that Agreement is not forced in Japanese.
As K himself admits, supporting evidence in favor of his position
is hard to come by. He declares that his own grammatical judgments
on some examples are "robust" but he is forced to rely on "the factual
evidence I have for now is marginal" or sentences that "are questionable," sometimes. He hedges that he is indicating his "judgments on
the relevant forms, though distinctions are not always clear-cut." He
escapes the dilemma by saying that ''I would think that truth lies in
between." While discussing multiple subjects, he unabashedly re-
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129
marks in regard to his proposition that ''this statement is deliberately
ambiguous.'' An interesting byproduct of this discussion is the demise
of Kuno's object marking ga, an unfortunate invention, which was
semantically oriented and, furthermore, based on English translations
of a small set of special Japanese predicates.
Readers will also be annoyed by the messy appearance of an
otherwise fine paper. It contains most typos in this collection, perhaps
more than those in the rest of the volume together. There are irregular
lines (half lines, to be more accurate), a confusing mismatch of numberings of the examples and those in the text (p.ll4), and an even
worse mix-up of one term in the text with the other in the example
when he discusses a crucial distinction between the two in relation to
another term. (p. 130). Despite the superficial defects, this is an extremely important article that not only Japanese specialists but syntacticians of all theoretical pursuasions should read carefully. They will
find essentials of Japanese grammar in a nutshell, and in addition
convincing arguments about what it really is that triggers the parametric difference between English and Japanese. Kuroda is a model exercise in comparative syntax, the finest I have read in recent years.
There are other important papers that I would like to comment on
but I have already exceeded the time and space usually allowed for a
review. Let me, therefore, conclude my selective review and recommend this fine volume by declaring that it is a genuine contribution to
linguistics as well as to Japanese linguistics.
706 Clifton Way
Vacaville. CA 95688
REFERENCES
Chomsky, Noam. 1981. Lectures on government and binding. Dordrecht: Foris.
- - . 1986. Barriers. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Hale, Ken. 1985. "On nonconfigurational structures," Susumu Kuno et al. eds. Harvard studies
in Korean linguistics.
Kuno, Susumu. 1973. The structure of the Japanese language. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Kuroda, Shige-Yuki. 1965. Generative grammatical studies in the Japanese language. Ph.D.
dissertation. MIT.
Martin, Sam. 1975. Reference grammar of Japanese. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Miyagawa, Shigeru. 1989. Structure and case marking in Japanese. New York: Academic Press.
Saito, Mamoru. 1985. Some asymmetries in Japanese and their theoretical consequences. Ph.D.
dissertation. MIT.
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HAEGEMAN, LILIANE. Theory and description in generative syntax. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. xviii + 244 pp.
Reviewed by
MASATAKA ISHIKAWA
The present book offers a detailed Government-Binding analysis
of two syntactic phenomena in West Flemish (WF), a dialect of Dutch
spoken in West Flanders, Belgium: (i) complementizer-subject agreement and doubling of subject pronouns and (ii) constituent order in two
Raising constructions, Verb Raising (VR) and Verb Projection Raising
(VPR). The book consists of four chapters, sandwiched by a Glossary,
which contains a list of technical terms, and References and an Index.
The Glossary is a convenient feature of the book for those who are not
so familiar with the GB literature.
Chapter 1 (Introduction, 1-44) presents a brief introduction to GB
and a summary of V2 phenomena in Dutch. Although some details are
simplified for expository reasons, some of the important concepts are
developed further in later chapters. It is a handy introduction to GB
aimed at those who are not familiar with the theory. (One may also
want to consult introductory works such as Lasnik and Uriagereka
1988 or Haegeman 1991 . )
Chapter 2 (Complementizers and subject pronouns in West Flemish, 45-106) deals with the distribution of WF subject clitics and
pronominal/lexical subjects and complementizer-subject agreement.
H's starting point is that WF is a "solid" V2 language "with underlying OV word order" (42) based on its similarity in relevant respects
with Dutch. It is proposed that C agrees with lP ([+Tense, + Agr] of
I are said to percolate to lP), a case of head-complement agreement.
Assuming that the WF C is stronger than the English C since the Agr
features [person] and [number] are fully specified on C (i.e., overtly
realized on C by means of the affixation of the inflectional morpheme)
in the former, H suggests, following Platzack 1983 and Koster 1986,
that Nominative Case is assigned by C in WF. In contrast, [ + Agr] in
I assigns Nominative Case in English. H relates this property to the
obligatory presence of the complementizer dat in subordinate clauses
in WF (the violation of the Doubly-filled Comp Filter) (e.g., Kweten
nie wat dan d'joengers geeten een 'I don't know what the children
have eaten') (57f). It is further argued that the content of subject pro
in [NP, lP] (e.g., da-se; pro; komt 'that-she comes', p. 74) can be
identified by the complex head [C-clitic], which governs and thus
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131
licenses the subject pro similar to the [clitic +V] complex (which
licenses the object pro) in Romance (cf. Rizzi 1986).
Next H proposes that in the WF subject doubling construction, the
clitic is the (D-structure) argument (with a 8-role) base-generated in
[SPEC, VP] (which is later incorporated by C) and the doubling
(strong) pronoun is an expletive or emphatic anaphoric element (without a 8-role) base-generated in [NP, JP]. For example, in WF doubling
constructions like (1),
(1)
[cp da- sei [1p zie [vP ti gewerkt eet]]]
that she
she
worked has = 'that she has worked'
ti, the trace of the clitic (ze = se), is in the theta-marked position
[SPEC, VP] (by V') and is A-bound by zie in [NP, lP]. Zie is in a
non-thematic position. Subject clitics are m-identified by incorporation, while subject pronouns are m-identified by Case assignment by C
(for the visibility requirement at PF). H further argues, following
Muysken (1983), that the WF subject clitic is ambivalent:
(2)
a. [+maximal, +projection] = maximal projection
b. [+maximal, -projection] = head
(2a) ( = XP) satisfies the V2 constraint, while (2b) ( = X0 ) undergoes
syntactic incorporation. The analysis of pro in non-doubling constructions (e.g., [da-sei proi ti gewerkt eet]) is less convincing.
Chapter 3 (Verb Raising and Verb Projection Raising, 107-209)
examines in detail VR (common to Dutch and WF) and VPR (exclusive to WF), in which the lower verbal projection is raised to the higher
clause (e.g., da Jan Valere t; deeg [een boek vu zen wuf kuopen]; 'Jan
made Valere buy a book for his wife', p. 108). One of the central
problems involving these two constructions is that the clitic climbing
and scope phenomena suggest that VPR produces a mono-clausal
structure, on the one hand, while anaphor and pronoun binding indicates that V(P)R constructions maintain the multi-clausal structure at
S-structure, on the other. H first reviews the multi-dimensional approach to VR and VPR proposed by Haegeman and van Riemsdijk
(1986) and discusses its empirical (e.g., scope phenomena) and conceptual problems (e.g., the way principles of the grammar apply to the
dual representations).
Based on the analysis of VP-topicalization (with scrambling) pro-
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VOLUME 46, NUMBER I (APRIL, 1995)
posed by Besten and Webelhuth (1987) and adopting Pollock's split lP
hypothesis (1989) (so that scrambling can always be analyzed as an
adjunction to XP (in WF/Dutch)), H suggests that VPR be analyzed as
an adjunction (of VP) to the AgrP (in three steps in accordance with "a
strict interpretation of the cyclicity principle" (228, fn. 50)). In the
proposed analysis, VR is different from VPR in that the former is not
a VP raising, but a head-to-head adjunction. That is, the lower V is
right-adjoined and incorporated into a higher V to form a complex
predicate, after which the former becomes transparent for government
(i.e., mono-clausal effects), but the bi-clausal structure is maintained
throughout the derivation. Thus, two possible readings in VR with a
scope-bearing element are read off two different structures, one with
scrambling (of a scope-bearing element) (wide scope reading) and
the other without (narrow scope reading). One advantage of the
VP adjunction analysis of VPR is that it can account for the incompatibility of VPR (as opposed to the compatibility of VR) with the
motional verb goan. A four-page concluding chapter (Conclusions and
topics for future research, 210-213) gives a concise summary of Chapters 2 and 3.
In sum, the book offers a detailed analysis of relatively little
studied language data (WF) in the light of recent developments in GB.
Although some of the consequences of the proposed analyses are not
articulated fully (such as (PF) consequences of scrambling and those of
the split lP analysis for WF syntax), alternative avenues are generally
examined in detail with possible analyses. Typographical errors are
minimum and on the whole the book is readable. The WF data examined in the book are informative and should be of interest to syntacticians working on other languages as well. In conclusion, the present
book constitutes an important step in the understanding of WF syntax.
The book should prove to be a significant ground work for those who
are working on Germanic languages in the GB framework.
Faculty of Integrated Arts and Sciences
Hiroshima University
Kagamiyama 1·7·1
Higashihiroshima City
JAPAN
REFERENCES
Besten, H. den and G. Webelhuth. 1987. "Remnant topicalization and the constituent structure
of the VP in the Germanic SOY languages". Paper presented at GLOW, Venice.
Haegeman, L. 1991. An introduction to government and binding theory. Oxford: Blackwells.
133
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- - , a n d H. van Riemsdijk. 1986. "Verb projection raising, scope and the typology of rules
affecting verbs". Linguistic inquiry 17, 417-66.
Koster, J. 1986. The relation between pro-drop, scrambling and verb movement. Groningen
papers in theoretical and applied linguistics, TIT!.
Lasnik, H. and J. Uriagereka. 1988. A course in GB syntax. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press.
Muysken, P. 1983. "Parametrizing the notion head". The journal of linguistic research 2,
57-76.
Platzack, C. 1983. Germanic word order and the complinfl parameter. Working papers in
Scandinavian syntax 2.
Pollock, J-Y. 1989. "Verb movement, UG and the structure of lP". Linguistic inquiry 20:
365-424.
Rizzi, L. 1986. "Null objects in Italian and the Theory of pro". Linguistic inquiry 17, 501-57.
YOUNG LYNNE. Language as behaviour, language as code. Amsterdam/
Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company. 1990. 304 pp.
Reviewed by
URSULA DROLC
The book is based on Lynn Young's doctoral dissertation. Young
taught English to foreign students and noticed several shortcomings,
e.g. inadequate linguistic descriptions as teaching materials and lack of
culture-specific explanation, which are essential to understanding the
language. These considerations provided the impetus for her study, an
investigation of Academic English. Methodologically she decided to
take a social functional approach to put more emphasis on the interaction between language and culture. Her corpus includes spoken and
written Academic English: three university lectures of sociology, engineering and economics, and three text book selections from the same
disciplines. All the transcripts of the discourses and texts are given in
the appendices.
Chapter 1, "The Social Functional Linguistic Tradition and Approach'', presents the theoretical background of the social functional
approach, its historical development and its core concepts. The theoretical model is mainly based on M.A.K Halliday. An extension of
Halliday' s theories is the so-called ''communication linguistics'' by
Gregory and Malcolm ( 1981) which was adopted for the analysis of the
corpus. An overview of both models is given at the end of this chapter.
Chapter 2, ''Analysis'', begins with the description of the corpus,
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WORD, VOLUME 46, NUMBER I (APRIL, 1995)
the Speech Community Context (native speakers of English teaching
native speakers of English in Ottawa in 1984) and the Generic Situation (the relationship between teacher and students) of the discourses
and texts on which the analysis is based. The major part of this book
is represented in Part Two of this chapter, ''Phasal Analysis''. Every
part of the corpus is subdivided into different phases. In the spoken
discourse the following phases occurred: discourse structuring, content, examples, conclusion, evaluation and interaction. The written
texts consisted of only three different phases: text structuring, content,
examples or conclusion. For each phase the three metafunctions (ideational, interpersonal and textual) and their morphosyntactical realizations are discussed. An overview of the phasal characteristics is
given as appendices. Unfortunately I was not able to figure out the
meaning of the numbers which are given in the tables.
Chapter 3, "Results", is divided into two parts. Part One discusses the registerial constructs of field, tenor and mode and their
influences on the codal selections. Part Two presents the similarities
and differences between the spoken discourses and the written texts.
Chapter 4, "Conclusion", begins with a reappraisal of her model
of analysis. First, the linguistic code is analysed within the speech
situation. Second, with phasal analysis discourse is described as a
dynamic process. The second part of the conclusion presents the pedagogical implications of her investigation. Because cultural references
are very common in university lectures, English teaching programs
should lay more emphasis on the cultural background of the language
learner and the target language instead of favouring technical language
and grammatical rules. At the end she discusses the relationship between form and meaning, asking which formal devices might facilitate
the understanding of the content.
The book is clearly structured and I greatly appreciate the practical
application of the social functional approach, which is rarely found in
the literature. My main point of criticism concerns the chosen data
sample. I would have preferred a corpus of natural discourse, consisting of spoken narratives like in Labov's "Language in the Inner City"
(1977). University lectures are not natural; they are to a very high
degree performed. The results of the phasal analysis reminded me of
my last rhetoric course where we learned how to structure a text: You
begin with discourse structuring, then follows the content, then some
examples. At the end there is the conclusion and maybe an evaluation
of the whole. Nevertheless it wasn't the author's aim to describe natural discourse, but to find an explanation for so many misunderstand-
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135
ings of foreign students learning English. The results of this study
should be used to improve English teaching programs.
Afrikanistik 11
95440 Bayreuth
Germany
REFERENCES
Gregory, Michael and Karen Malcolm. 1981. Generic situation and discourse phase: An approach to the analysis of children's talk. Mimeo. Toronto: A.L.R.W.G., Glendon College
of York University.
Halliday, M.A.K. 1976. System and function in language. London: Oxford University Press.
Labov, W. 1977. Language in the Inner City. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
MATTHIAS BRENZINGER, ed. Language death: Factual and theoretical
explorations with special reference to East Africa. Berlin: Mouton de
Gruyter, 1992. 445 pp.
Reviewed by EuNG-Do CooK
The phenomena of language death and language shift have attracted the attention of many researchers during the last two decades.
This is reflected by this volume under review, as well as another major
anthology which appeared a few years earlier (Dorian 1989). The
articles collected in the volume under review were originally prepared
by fourteen invited participants at an international symposium held at
the Werner-Reimers Foundation in Bad Homburg, Germany, in 1990.
The contributions are organized into three parts. Part I, which is
intended to be of general and theoretical interest, consists of four
essays including the first brief note (3 pp.) entitled "Social contexts of
language death" written by the editor and Dimmendaal. The other
three articles in Part I are: "Theory of language death" by Sasse,
"Codeswitching as a mechanism of deep borrowing, language shift,
and language death" by Myers-Scotton, and another contribution by
Sasse entitled "Language decay and contact-induced change: Similarities and differences". Ten contributions, headed by the editor's one
paragraph note, are put together in Part 11, as "Case studies from East
Africa''. Part Ill consists of a single item compiled by Sommer entitled
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VOLUME 46, NUMBER I (APRIL, 1995)
"A survey on language death in Africa" (117 pp). The volume also
contains three indices: "Names of scholars", "Subject index", and
"Index of languages (and variants)".
Obviously, the contributions to Part I would appeal to a more
general audience, and I would like to comment on these first, particularly on Sasse's "Theory of language death". Sasse focuses on
"three types of phenomena relevant to the study of language death",
which consist of "External Setting" (ES), "Speech Behavior" (SB),
and "Structural Consequences" (SC). As has been assumed in the
study of language contact in general, such external factors as sociological, cultural, economic, etc. processes (ES) trigger changes in the
pattern of language acquisition and use (SB), which in turn cause
changes in linguistic structure and even eventual death of a language.
Based on this general assumption, Sasse further assumes that "different ES conditions lead to different SB/SC results . . . [and] Africa
would be an ideal testing ground for this hypothesis" (p. 12).
With this statement, one would expect the ten "case studies" in
Part 11 to have established some explicit correlations between specific
conditions of ES in Africa and specific Speech Behavior and Structural
Consequences in the surviving languages. The articles in Part 11 do
have extensive accounts of ES, including in some cases (e.g. Brenzinger) rather insignificant details, but few contributions contain interesting and significant original data on the process of language death
(i.e., SB), let alone the data on Structural Consequences. It is fair to
say that some articles do deal with data on structural changes. For
example, Tosco deals with Swahili influence (both phonological and
syntactic) on Dahalo. But the case dealt with here is not a bona fide
process of language death. Mohlig's study of two Swahili dialects also
deals with structural changes, but the analysis presented in the article
is more like a traditional historical comparative treatment rather than a
language death analysis. However, the phenomenon of language shift
has provided for comparative analyses and genetic classification another means to explain unexpected irregularities (see Nurse and
Walsh's "Chifundi and Vumba: Partial shift, no death").
Dimmendaal's ''Reduction in Kore reconsidered'', dealing with
the interpretation of structural reduction in Kore as being ''more comparable to changes occurring in healthy languages [not to pidginization], though with a compressed timespan" (p. 117), is consistent with
the view shared by many scholars (see invited commentaries in Dorian
1989). It should be pointed out, however, that Dimmendaal misrepresents Schmidt when he says '' Schmidt ( 1985) attributes the shift
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137
[from morphological marking] to a fixed SVO order in the northern
Australian language Dyirbal to interference from English" (p. 131132). Schmidt was careful not to attribute the alleged shift to English
influence, but she alluded, with reference to Ochs (1982), to "children's word order strategy" which is acquired before a syntactic strategy of word order. In my own study of structural reduction in dying
languages (Cook 1989, 1992), no evidence for interference or confluence is found when the reduction is explained in terms of an impeded
process of acquisition.
Returning now to Sasse's theory of language death, he does not
offer any new analytical method or hypothesis, nor do the case studies
reveal any new insight into the process of language death. For this
reason, the articles collected in the volume would be of marginal
interest to those who are not interested in East Africa. While Sommer's
survey provides quick reference to each language ordered alphabetically, Dimmendaal' s (1989) overview in another volume (Dorian
1989) will better serve the purpose of those who are curious about the
situation in East Africa.
Overall, the contributions to the volume are uneven, both in quality and quantity. Anthropologists, sociologists, and historians might
find the articles in this collection more interesting. For those who are
interested in linguistic aspects of language death, most of the contributions do not offer original data on, or new insight into, the process
of language death, especially the phenomena of contraction, as would
be expected from the title of the book.
A more suitable title of the book might have been "Language
Survival" because the articles that deal with data on Speech Behavior
and Structural Consequences describe how surviving languages have
adjusted their structure and lexicon, rather than how and what structural changes have occurred in dying languages.
Department of Linguistics
The University of Calgary
2500 University Drive N. W.
Ca/gary, Alberta T2N JN4
Canada
REFERENCES
Cook, Eung-Do. 1989. "Is phonology going haywire in dying languages?" Language in Society
18. 235-55.
- - . 1992. The acquisition and deacquisition ofChipewyan obstruents. The 31st Conference
on American Indian Languages, San Francisco, December.
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Dorian, Nancy C. (ed.) 1989./nvestigating Obsolescence: Studies in Language Contraction and
Death. Studies in the Social and Cultural Foundations of Language 7. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Dimmendaal, Gerrit J. 1989. "On language death in eastern Africa." In Dorian 1989.
Ochs, Elinor. 1982. "Ergativity and word order in Samoan child language." Language 58.
646-71
Schmidt, Annette. 1985. "The fate of ergativity in dying Dyirbal." Language 61. 378-96.
MAXIM STAMENOV, ed. Current advances in semantic theory. Current
Issues in Linguistic Theory, 73. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
1992. xi + 565 pp.
Reviewed by
BERT PEETERS
At the end of September 1988, an international symposium on
models of meaning was held near Varna, Bulgaria. Out of the total
number of contributions read at the meeting, 41 are brought together
here, and are presented in two sections. Part I (pp. 17-202) on "Multidisciplinary Perspectives on Meaning" contains papers presented by
non-linguists (philosophers, cognitive scientists, psychoanalysts and
psychologists, a clinical worker, a social scientist and a neurophysiologist). Part II (pp. 203-553) on "Toward Broadening the Scope of
Linguistic Semantics" contains the majority of papers; all are by linguists, and taken together they probably do broaden the scope of
linguistic semantics (although few actually set out to do so on an
individual basis). Those who want to find out just how many forms of
"meaning" there are should go straight to the subject index (pp.
555-565) at the end of the volume: a reasonably careful count gets you
as high as 49 (cf. Marcelo Dascal, p. 110: "But where, if not in a
conference on models of meaning, is it more apposite to try to chart the
vast territory of theories of meaning . . . ?"). The subject index
referred to above is remarkably complete. An author index would have
been useful.
The editor's introduction (pp. 1-16), written after the symposium
and including references to all other papers, is first and foremost about
the "incommensurability of different traditions in semantics" (p. 2)
and the resulting inability of some authors to summarise research by
others in an objective manner. The tone is not always pleasing: the root
appropriate is used 12 times on pp. 1-5, and another 11 times on pp.
11-15 (admittedly, not always with respect to how others do seman-
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tics); on p. 14, the reader is referred to the "pathetic crusade of Noam
Chomsky". It may be worthwhile to point out that Stamenov's must be
one of the few collections of an essentially non-historiographical nature to be published these days where Chomsky is mentioned less often
than Saussure (four references and/or allusions as against six). Allan
(1986; reviewed by Peeters 1989) is attacked (pp. 2-3) for writing long
pages merely repeating unjust dismissals first published by others 25 or
30 years earlier. However, Stamenov fails to see that Allan also wrote
long pages on the nature of meaning, a problem which he claims is
usually "avoided" nay "repressed" (Stamenov's terms, p. 1) in
scholarly meetings. Much care had been taken to make sure that the
Varna meeting would be different, as is shown by the list of topics for
discussion printed in the call for papers and reproduced on pp. 5-8.
Whether and by whom the topics were eventually addressed is largely
left to the reader to make out: the statement on p. 8 is too short to be
really informative. Another point driven home by Stamenov is his
belief in semantics as a unique and integrative discipline, provided a
"new set of general constraints and postulates" (p. 13) is adhered to.
In the author's view, the integration remains to be achieved.
In Part I, there are three papers (out of 15) which are extremely
informative and well presented. Philosopher Marcelo Dascal distinguishes between three main "Models of Interpretation" (pp. 109127), psychologist Johannes Engelkamp reports on his research on
"Word Meaning, Imagery and Action" (pp. 129-142), and clinical
worker Varda Dascal links theory and therapeutic practice in "Movement Metaphors: Linking Theory and Therapeutic Practice'' (pp. 151157). Psychoanalyst Pierre So lie (''The Body of Discourse'', pp. 101108) knew more or less whom he was talking to and who was going to
be most likely to read him (linguists are the most likely audience for
this book, given the series in which it was published): he tries to pull
many a leg by stating (p. 101) that "[he doesn't] think this particular
chapter of 'linguistics (of hysteria)' is of great interest to the eminent
public of structural linguists participating in this congress''. Did he say
''eminent''? Reader, beware: don't think too much of yourself just yet;
Solie also bases his work "on that of [his] eminent predecessors"
(ibid.). Did he say "structural"? Don't get offended: he probably
meant it in the broadest possible way. Or did he? He does not seem to
have a profound knowledge of generative grammar, referring as he
does (p. 107), when talking about the distinction between deep and
surface structures, to a text (the French version of Chomsky 1966)
which is after all, in this particular respect, of rather secondary im-
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portance. And how many would have smiled when he said about
Schneider, a case of neurotraumatology, that "he has lost the Sophia
(yes, the name of the Bulgarian capital)" (p. 106)?
One tends to wonder how much the average eminent structuralist
will accept to learn from a paper whose author derives matter from
Lat. mater and meaning (which is closely related to moaning) from
mind/remind and further claims that the adjective real was "coined"
(!)in the 13th century to signify 'having properties' (neurophysiologist
Roland Fischer, "Model-Making Mind: Model of Meaning", pp. 5573, pp. 58 and 65). Fischer also quotes le petit mort (rather than la
petite mort) as a French expression referring to an orgasm. On the
other hand, it will come as no surprise that individual authors contradict each other: Fischer claims (p. 59) that facts exist only when pinned
down by statements which describe them, whereas cognitive scientist
Gordon G. Globus ("Perceptual Meaning and the Holoword", pp.
75-85) argues that all perceptible worlds are a priori to one's brain.
Globus's paper, and also Harry T. Hunt's ("Consciousness and the
Cognitive Psychology of Meaning", pp. 87-100), attack various
points belonging to the "orthodoxy of cognitive science".
Among the papers in Part II, several deal with Bulgarian data
(Elena Todorova, "Semantic Similarity and Opposition: Methods of
Establishment and Measurement", pp. 347-356; Radoslav Pavlov and
Rusanka Lukanova, "Situation Semantics Analysis of Some Nominals
in Bulgarian", pp. 377-383; Kornelia Ilieva, "Types of Semantic
Relations between Noun Groups in Binominative Sentences", pp.
487-493), compare Bulgarian with English (Maya Pencheva, "Semantic 'Oppositions': (Animacy)", pp. 339-345) or look at English
from a Bulgarian point of view (Andrei Danchev, ''An Outline of
Aspectuality in English within a Compromise Linguistic Model", pp.
321-337). Todorova does not really break new ground in pointing out
that synonymy and antonymy are a matter of degree. Pencheva looks
at animacy as a cognitive and linguistic category. The compromise
referred to by Danchev is between classical structuralism and generatively-oriented approaches.
Various contributions deal with ancient theories of meaning (Johannes Bronkhorst, "Panini's View of Meaning and its Western Counterpart", pp. 455-464; Alex Wayman, "Buddhist Tantra and Lexical
Meaning", pp. 465-478), celebrated themes (Stefana Dimitrova,
"Linguistic Relativity and Semantic Research", pp. 205-217, on relativity; Jacob L. Mey, "The Pragmatics of Semeiosis", pp. 219-238,
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on arbitrariness and linearity of language) 1 or latter-day concepts (Ferenc Kiefer, "Sentence Type, Sentence Mood and lllocutionary Type",
pp. 269-281; Petr Sgall and Eva Hajicova, ''Linguistic Meaning and
Semantic Interpretation", pp. 299-310, on truth conditions and possible worlds). Dimitrova's is a rather confused paper: it is not clear (to
me) whether she agrees or not with Wierzbicka's statement, quoted at
the outset, that ''it is one thing to claim that every language embodies
in its very structure a certain world-view, or a certain philosophy, and
quite another to prove this in a rigorous and verifiable way". Mey
argues that ''pragmatics has its locus where the pre-structured and the
structurable meet, in the intersection of social context and language
game" (p. 235).
There are a few introductions to particular frameworks (HansHeinrich Lieb, "Integrational Semantics: An Integrative View of Linguistic Meaning", pp. 239-268; Petko Staynov, Vasil Garnizov and
Angel Angelov, "Theses for an Ethnopragmatics", pp. 433-438;
Robert E. Longacre, "Natural Text Processing and Text Meaning",
pp. 521-534). At least two papers reflect themes explicitly addressed
by authors in Part I (Edda Weigand, ''The Problem of Literal Meaning", pp. 311-320-cf., earlier on, Nikolay Milkov, "Philosophy of
Language without Meaning, and without ... Language", pp. 197202; Roger G. van de Velde, "Is Interpretation an Illusion?", pp.
535-553-cf., earlier on, M. Dascal on models of interpretation). In
Weigand's paper, the philosopher Davidson, whose views are reported
in considerable detail by Milkov, is not even mentioned.
I haven't listed all twenty-six papers in Part Two; for reasons of
space, I can do no more than simply refer to the papers that I personally
found most stimulating (Edda Weigand, cf. above; Elda Weizman and
Shoshana Blum-Kulka, "Ordinary Misunderstanding", pp. 417-432;
Ivan Duridanov, "Lexical Meaning from Synchronic and Diachronic
Points of View", pp. 439-443). Those who, after reading the work
from cover to cover, return to the introduction, hoping to make more
sense of Stamenov's often difficult prose in the light of the papers he
refers to, will once again stumble on Stamenov's conclusion (p. 15):
"I wish the reader a difficult journey as easy journeys are an inappropriate [sic, B.P.] Ersatz in expanding the universe we live by-semantics". Was it indeed a difficult journey? Surely, for the linguist Part I
was generally far harder to take in than Part 11. But the volume was
probably well worth the read. This reviewer learnt a lot from it; collections such as this one (in spite of inevitable shortcomings and/or
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weaknesses) make the job of a reviewer an attractive and a rewarding
one.
Department of Modern Languages
University of Tasmania
GPO Box 252C
Hobart, TAS 7001 Australia
END NOTES
'Having done a lot of research on the origins of the famous phrase ''oil tout se tient'' (see
e.g. Peelers 1985, 1991), I cannot help but express my surprise at seeing Mey refer to Saussure
(1966:72) and "quote" the master as saying that "dans le langage, tout se tient". There is no
such formula to be found in Saussure' s writings (contrary to a widespread belief): its real author
seems to be Antoine Meillet.
REFERENCES
Allan, Keith. 1986. Linguistic meaning. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Chomsky, Noam. 1966. Cartesian linguistics: A chapter in the history of rationalist thought.
New York: Harper & Row.
Peelers, Bert. 1985. "'Tout ne se tient-il pas dans le systeme?' Bedenkingen bij de paradigmatische samenhang van taalelementen. '' Handelingen van de Koninklijke Zuidnederlandse
Maatschappij voor taal- en letterkunde en geschiedenis 39:141-56.
- - . 1989. "Review (in French) of Linguistic meaning, by Keith Allan." Canadian journal
of linguistics 34:119-22.
- - . 1991. "Encore une fois 'oil tout se tient'." Historiographia Linguistica 17:427-36.
Saussure, Ferdinand de. 1966 (1916). Cours de linguistique genera/e. Paris: Payot.
LEITNER, GERHARD. ed. 1991. English traditional grammars. Studies in
the History of the language sciences, vol 62. Amsterdam: John Benjamins
Pub. Co. x + 392 pp. $88.00
Reviewed by CHARLES
PECK
This book is a collection of twenty papers that deal with the
various aspects of grammars of English written for secondary and
tertiary students during the nineteenth century, mostly, with some
excursions into the eighteen and twentieth centuries. Basically, there
are two main kinds of such grammars. First, there were those grammars written in English for English speaking students. Such grammars
tended to be prescriptive-to improve the grammar of English speaking students. The second kind were grammars which are written for
German, Dutch or Czech speaking students. These grammars were
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designed to teach students how to understand written English and
occasionally to teach them how to speak English. These grammars
usually compared and contrasted the structures of English with the
structures of the other language, as a pedagogical strategy.
Another major characteristic of such grammars was that they were
written at a time when all secondary and tertiary students in all Western
countries still had to study Latin more than they had to study English.
So Latin was the usual pattern for the grammars of English (and of the
other European languages).
Latin grammars concentrated on word classes, case markings,
verb and noun inflections, moods, and basic clause patterns, with
some attention to complementary and subordinate clauses. These
things, important for Latin, became the patterns for the grammars of
English, German, Dutch, Czech and other European languages.
(For American readers, American English did not receive much
attention until the twentieth century. Most of the English grammars
considered in this book concern British English-specifically, the English of educated Londoners of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.)
The book is quite readable and at times brings a smile to the face
of a reader. The papers deal with a facet of our intellectual heritage and
should be of interest to most linguists-they deal with where we have
come from and what we have and have not left behind.
The book is divided into three sections. The first section concerns
school grammars of English written in English for English-speaking
students. The second section concerns grammars of English written in
other languages for students speaking those other languages. The third
section deals with nineteenth and twentieth century theories of grammar.
1. The first paper is an introduction by the editor of the volume,
Gerhard Leitner. He titles his paper, 'Why can't someone write a nice
simple grammar?' His answer to that question is that teachers and
students don't like new and more technical grammars with all kinds of
new concepts and terminology. Neither do they do so well with the
terms of traditional grammars. Essentially, Leitner says, the ideal
grammar would follow some middle course, and no respectable scholar
wants to take the time and effort to write a simple-minded grammar for
the masses. Also a new emphasis on including the grammars of other
dialects of English that we hear on our electronic media will complicate the job of any writer of a grammar of 'English.'
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Part 1. Native Grammars of English
2. The first paper in Part 1 is 'More than enough English grammars,'
by Ian Michael. By his count some eight hundred fifty school grammars
were published in England, in the nineteenth century, and allowing for
grammars he did not find, the total may be closer to one thousand. His
count includes school grammars, punctuation textbooks, manuals of
correct usage, elementary histories of the language and elementary
works on etymology. Most of them however, were quite similar.
The main reason for the uniformity in grammars of English at that
time was the market. Teachers wanted books that were similar to the
books from which they had learne<;l. They did not welcome innovative
works.
The most significant work was by Lindley Murray who published
his 'English Exercises' in 1797 and his book was reprinted in various
editions until the 1840's.
Following the Latin grammars, people debated about how many
parts of speech or word-classes there were in English. Suggestions
ranged from three to twelve classes. Also there was discussion over
whether to use Latin names for word-classes or to coin English names,
which in the end depended on one's philosophy and pedagogical strategy.
The grammar books usually included a chapter on the history of
the language, although scholars late in the century wondered about the
usefulness of such a chapter.
Also, late in the century, they added sentence analysis and parsing
exercises.
3. Charlotte Downey in her 'Trends that shaped the development of
19th century American grammar writing,' describes the two traditions
which dominated the 19th century. The first was the Latin-based,
prescriptive types of grammar. The second one that dominated the later
part of the century was functionalism with inductive presentations.
Lindley Murray and Goold Brown dominated the early part of the
century. They and their contemporaries saw grammar as 'art.' Their
books divided grammar into four parts: orthography, etymology (wordclasses), syntax (phrases and clauses) and prosody (poetry, rhythm,
rhyme and good style). In their view, clauses consisted of three parts:
subject nominal, verbal predicate and object nominal. Teaching devices
included parsing and correcting wrongly written sentences.
Roswell Smith and Samuel Greene dominated the latter part of the
century. They were functionalists and for them grammar was a 'sci-
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ence.' They divided their grammars into etymology and syntax and
saw clauses as divided into subjects and predicates. They also began to
treat more complementary and subordinate clauses.
4. Kurt Wachtler tells of 'W. D. Whitney's Essentials of English
Grammar. For the use of Schools' (1877). Whitney was an accomplished linguist and wrote books on Sanskrit, German, and the history
of language, and he served as editor-in-chief of the Century Dictionary. His grammar of English was quite traditional but with strains of
innovation.
5. John Walmsley discusses 'E. A. Sonnenschein and grammatical
terminology.' Sonnenschein' s career spanned four decades, from
around 1885 to around 1925. His crusade was to make a universal
grammar terminology that could be used for the grammars of all the
modern European languages. To that end, he published papers, formed
committees and published sample parallel grammars of English, French
and German. His ideas took hold by the turn of the century and stirred
debate for the next twenty years. In the end, the committees failed
because they could not differentiate function and form labels. However,
the efforts expended did lead to more insight into languages. Sonnenschein has been mostly forgotten but his influence is still with us.
6. Charlotte Downey, in discussing the 'Factors in the growth of the
English language in 18th and 19th century Ireland,' describes one of
the most remarkable facts in language history: the adoption of the
English language throughout Ireland in less than a century.
In the late 18th century, Lindley Murray' s 1795 grammar for
schools in southern Ireland and for schools in York, England, was in
wide usage. True to the tenor of the age, his grammar was presented
as 'the art of speaking and writing truly and properly.'
By the 1840's, the new science of functionalism began to affect
school grammars in England and consequently, in Ireland. Grammar
was now the science of proper usage and of principles and rules for
correct speaking and writing.
Irish authors such as Joyce, Synge, O'Casey, Shaw, Yeats, and
Eliot helped to set the standards for Irish English for later generations.
7. Robert Burchfield writes of 'The Fowler brothers and the tradition
of usage handbooks.' Henry Watson Fowler and Francis George
Fowler published their 'The King's English' in 1906 and their 'A
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Dictionary of Modern English usage' in 1926, both of which were still
in print in 1989. The books were praised by most people but were
criticized by professional linguists.
8. The last paper in part one is 'American English grammars in the
twentieth century,' by John Algeo. Algeo discusses how popular grammars have been challenged by new theories, only to integrate the new
ideas into a new synthesis. In the nineteenth century, traditional grammar incorporated historical linguistics and structuralism. In the twentieth century, it has incorporated Bloomfieldian structuralism and
Fries' signals grammar and is now in the process of incorporating
transformational-generative grammar.
The twentieth century began with reprints of late nineteenth century books. The sty le was one of rules, memorization of rules, parsing,
and correcting wrong sentences; all to improve the writing ability of
the students.
Mencken criticized the popular grammar books in 1919 and began
an effort to upgrade American text books. In 1931 and 1935, Curme
published a large and excellent grammar of English, but he did not
introduce many new ideas.
In 1940, Fries published a study of letters written to a governmental agency. His conclusion was that fluent writers used a greater
inventory of sentence structures. Least fluent writers used correct
grammar but few different grammatical structures. They were 'poverty
stricken' in terms of structural options.
In 1952, C. C. Fries published a study of English grammar based
on word classes (four main classes and fifteen minor classes) and the
signals of structure. Several people followed his signals grammar.
In the 1950's and 1960's, 'user friendly' grammars became fashionable. Such books were informal, chatty, easy to read, and conversational.
At the same time, there were attempts to construct programmedlearning grammars of English, but they were superficial.
Other grammar handbooks and text books have been published.
They have reflected different combinations of older traditional grammar and new ideas. This latter trend is likely to continue.
Part 11. Non-native grammars of English
9. Guy A. J. Tops and Xavier Dekeyser begin this section with a
discussion of 'English grammar writing: the Belgian contribution.'
Early twentieth century grammars of English for students in Belgium
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emphasized the history of English, French and Dutch and the contrasts
between the languages today. So the emphasis was more on word
derivations and inflections and basic sentence shapes. Many archaic
forms were retained.
After World War 11, Scheurweghs published a sentence grammar
of English in 1959, based on several written materials from England.
He found over five thousand examples and hundreds of sentence
forms. His aim was to help Belgium students to read and write better
English. He still used traditional Latin terms for his description of the
sentence forms.
In the 1960s and 1970s, there was a revolution in tertiary and
secondary education. There were many new ideas and new sciences,
less Latin and Greek. So students were not learning grammatical terms
and concepts before they came to study English, which required new
textbooks of English.
Dekeyser et al., 1979, provided such a text book which began
with basic concepts and described noun and verb phrases, simple sentences, and coordination and subordination in sentences.
Van Roey provided a similar book, but more traditional in 1982
for French speakers.
The knowledge of English has increased greatly in recent years in
Belgium. The text books have helped, but other social forces have
promoted the learning of English.
10. Arthur Van Essen describes the career of 'E. Kruisinga' who
devoted his entire career ( 1910 to 1940s) to the teaching of English in
his native country, Holland.
His major publications were 'A handbook of present-day English'
in 1909 and in 1932 and 'An English grammar' in 1912 and 1941. He
began with nineteenth century structuralism (mostly Sweet, of the
1880s) but incorporated newer ideas as they came along in the early
twentieth century. He emphasized phonetics and orthography, contrasting them with Dutch phonetics and spelling. Then he moved on to
morphology and syntax, always using the contrasts with Dutch and the
students' knowledge of linguistics derived from their study of Latin
and Greek.
11. Libuse Duskova tells of the 'English grammars in post-war
Czechoslovakia.' He notes that before World War 11, Czechoslovakian
education was concerned with German and French, not English.
In 1961, Prof. Vel em Mathesius' description of modern English
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was published (posthumously). Mathesius used the functional structuralism of Humbolt, de Saussure and Henri Weil, to make a contrastive study of Czech and English. (One major problem for Czech students of English is how to use the definite and indefinite articles,
because the Czech language has nothing equivalent.)
In 1975, Karel Hais published an 'English grammar,' that concerned itself mostly with English pronunciation, spelling, morphology
and syntax, mostly for advanced students.
And in 1988, Libuse Duskova published 'A grammar of contemporary English with reference to Czech'-mostly morphology and syntax, designed to help teachers and translators.
12. Wolfgang H. Strauss discusses the 'German grammars of English prior to 1860.' During the 15th and 16th centuries, several new,
improved grammars of Latin appeared, all based on the patterns of
earlier grammarians. In 1527, William Lily published a new English
grammar of Latin with English explanations, which got used for two
and a half centuries in England. In the late 17th century, the first
German grammar of English appeared in Germany.
Theodor Arnold' s 1718 grammar of English became a standard for
a century. And in 1721 Greiffenhahn' s grammar of English recommended that students study Italian and French because English grammar was based on Latin grammar.
By 1750, Germany had a dozen textbooks on English. Most of
them included a basic vocabulary, a collection of well-known sayings
and proverbs, a collection of sample dialogs, a collection of short texts
for translation practice, and a collection of sample letters. The books
all gave special attention to the main area of difficulty for German
students: the gap between the spelling and pronunciation of English.
Theoretical progress was slow. In 1790, Reichel included minor
word classes, clauses, compound sentences and complex sentences,
plus various phrases and set expressions. In 1807, Pott developed a set
of German grammatical terms. In 1736, Arnold improved the layout
and explanations of paradigms and grammar. In 1844, Van den Berg
used the German grammatical terms and gave English equivalents for
the terms. In 1857, Albrecht produced a popular textbook with simpler
terminology and discussions and better displays.
13. Gerhard Leitner relates the career of 'Eduard Adolf Maetzner'
who lived from 1805 to 1902, He studied classical philology, Latin,
Greek, French and English. His major publication on English was in
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1860 and 1865. 'Englische Grammatik' was a large work of three
volumes and 1700 pages. He used a wide selection of written English
texts, so he could describe many facets of English. His book was
widely accepted until the 20th century, when it became a thesaurus of
examples of English usage.
14. Konrad Macht tells of the work of a father and son pair in 'Karl
and Max Deutschbein' s English grammar manuals. ' Karl D. was born
in 1840 and son Max D. was born in 1876. Karl published many
books, of which his 1917 'Kurzgefasste Englische Grammatik' is a
good example. Karl was interested chiefly in pedagogy, so he did not
use the new IPA phonetics symbols for pronunciation. He said that /a/
was the basic vowel in English. His syntax consisted of observations
on usages and eo-occurrences of words.
Son Max began publishing in 1910. His major works were published and republished until the 1940s. Max was more interested linguistic theories. He used a psychological approach to syntax and discussed the sentence as consisting of a noun component and a verb
component with its aspects, modes and tenses. His books did not work
so well as textbooks for secondary students, but they won admiration
from teachers and tertiary students.
15. Hans Kirsten describes 'Adolf Lamprecht's (German) Grammar
of English.' Lamprecht published his texts books of English in the
GDR from 1956 to 1986. He was widely recognized as an original
thinker. His book is more of a reference grammar, consisting mostly of
a word-class-based traditional approach. He began with nouns, then
went on to the minor classes, then the verbs, then conjunctions and
prepositions, with notes and examples of their usage. He intended his
book to be supplemental to the textbooks that secondary teachers were
using.
His book was so successful that people in the FRG began to use
it. A 1970 edition was published in both east and west Berlin. It had
improved examples, some American English examples, and many
more formal footnotes and explanations.
In 1983, he published a paper on English sentences and in 1986,
he published a new edition of his manual that included more information on the S-P-Os of English clauses, more information on embedded
clauses and complement clauses.
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Part Ill. Grammatical analyses
16. Flor Aarts describes the 'Traditional grammars of English: Facts
and explanations.' Aarts narrows his focus to the treatment of English
noun phrases. He derives a list of fifteen features of the English noun
phrases and sees how well the various grammars treat them. R. W.
Zandvoort's 1945 'A handbook of English grammar' is taken as an
example of earlier grammars. Zandvoort treats plural nouns, genitives,
and definite and indefinite articles. He also treated relative and appositional clauses in NPs in his clause chapter. But of the fifteen characteristics Aarts sets up, traditional grammars like Zandvoort's come
out very deficient.
R. Quirk et al. 'A compreherisive grammar of the English language' ( 1985) discusses most of the fifteen features at various places
in the book. But it lacks an overview of the English noun phrases.
R. Huddleston's 'Introduction to the grammar of English' in 1984,
discusses pre-head dependents and post-head dependents. But the discussion is not quite as completes as that of Quirk et al.
As for explanations of the structure and restrictions in the noun
phrase, Zandvoort gave none, but Quirk and Huddleston did give much
better explanations. The best description of the structure of the English
noun phrase is that of Radford, 1988, who uses the TG ideas of N, N'
and N?p to account for the embedding of NPs in other NPs.
His conclusion is that the newer grammars do treat the complexities of the English noun phrase more adequately.
17. Christopher G. Lyons discusses 'Reference and articles. ' Mid
eighteenth century grammarians began to understand the uses of the
articles in English. There were two theories: 1) the familiarity theory
and 2) the uniqueness theory.
The familiarity theory is that the definite article is used for familiar
items. It goes back to second century Apollonius Dyscolus and to John
Wilkins in 1668 in England. Late eighteenth century grammarians
produced extensive studies using mostly the familiarity theory. Jesperson, 1946, gave a particularly full account of the uses of the definite,
indefinite and zero articles.
Quirk et al. (1985) used the uniqueness or identificatory way to
discuss the articles.
18. Jochen Niemeyer writes of the 'Tense and aspect in German
grammars of English in the past fifty years.' He discusses the progress
made in German grammars of English since World War 11, in their
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treatment of a) of the uses of will and shall, b) reported speech without
backshift, c) the use of will and would in if-condition clauses, d) the
use of recent-time adverbs with past tense and with present perfect
tense-aspect verbs, and e) the uses of the progressive aspect. He shows
that German grammars of English have improved as English scholars
have described the English language better.
19. Alan Walton investigates the 'Modality and the modals in traditional grammars of English.'
Sweet (1892, 1898) treated the 'chief auxiliaries' be, have, do,
will and may. He also treated should and would later.
Kruisinga (1911) made no separation between 'chief auxiliaries'
and anomalous auxiliaries, as Sweet did. Instead, he went through
each auxiliary and discussed the possible meanings. He described may/
might, can/could, must and should.
Curme (1935) discussed the auxiliaries in terms of subjunctives
and optatives.
Quirk et al. (1985) discussed the intrinsic (deontic) meanings
(permission, obligation, and volition) and extrinsic meanings (possibility, necessity, and prediction) and discussed the areas of overlap.
Quirk et al., however, suffer some ambiguity in their terminology.
Walton's preferred approach would be to test each pair of auxiliaries and place one at each end of a scale of weak versus strong.
20. The last paper is by Heinrich Ramisch and concerns 'The role of
American English in traditional grammars of English.' Ramisch
looked at a number of twentieth century grammars of English. By
mid-century, there were a few mentions of AmE. Nearer the end of the
century, AmE is being discussed more, because of the work of American linguists, along with other varieties of English.
S.I.L.
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Albrecht, August. 1857. Practische Englische Sprachschule. Leipzig: Breitkopf & Hartel.
Arnold, Theodor, B Rogler, and J.A. Fahrenkriiger. 1809. Grammatica Anglicana Concentrata.
Jena: Frommann. (1st ed. 1718).
Berg, G. van den. 1844. Practische Englische Sprachlehre fiir Schulen und zum Selbstunterricht.
Hamberg, Leipzig: Schubert & Co.
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Brown, Goold. 1851. The grammar of English grammars. New York: Wood.
- - - . 1853. The institutes of English grammar. Rev. Ed. New York: Wood. rpt. Delmar:
Scholars Facsimiles & reprints, 1982.
Curme, George Oliver. 1925. College English grammar. Richmond, Va.: Johnson.
- - - . 1931. A grammar of the English language, Vol. 3: Syntax. Boston: Heath.
- - - . 1935. A grammar of the English language, Vol. 2: Parts of speech and accidence.
Boston: Heath.
Dekeyser, Xavier, Betty Devriendt, Guy A.J. Tops, and Steven Geukens. 1979. Foundations of
English Grammar: For university students and advanced learners. Antwerpen-Amsterdam:
Nederlandsche Boekhandel. (Other editions appeared in 1984 and 1987.)
Deutschbein, Karl D. 1917. Kurzgefa?ste englische Grammatik und iibungsstiicke fiir reifere
Schiiler. (Ausgabe B). Cothen: Schulze.
Deutschbein, Max D. 1917. System der neuenglischen Syntax. Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer.
- - - . 1957. Grammatik der englischen Spracize aufwissenschaftlicher Grundlage. Bearbeitet
von Hermann Klitscher. Heidelberg: Quelle & Meyer.
Duskova, Libuse a kol. 1988. Mluvnice soucasne anglietiny na pozadi ceftiny <A grammar of
contemporary English with reference of Czech>. Prague: Academia.
Duskova. Libuse, Libuse Bubenfkova, and Jan Caha. 1979. Strucna Mluvnice Anglietiny <A
concise grammar of English>. 5th ed. Prague: Academia.
Fowler, Henry Watson. 1926. A dictionary of modern English usage. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Fowler, Henry W. and Francis G. Fowler. 1906. The King's English. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Fries, Charles Carpenter. 1940. American English grammar: the grammatical structure of
present-day American English with especial reference to social differences or class dialects.
New York: Appleton.
- - - . 1952. The structure of English: An introduction to the construction of English sentences.
New York: Harcourt.
Hais, Karel. 1975. Anglickli mluvnice <English grammar>. 2nd ed. Prague: Statni pedagogicke
nakladatelstvi.
Huddleston, Rodney. 1984. Introduction to the Grammar of English. Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press.
Jesperson, Otto. 1909-1949. A modern English grammar, on historical principles. (7 vols.).
Copenhagen: Munksgaard.
Kruisinga, Etsko. 1909. A handbook of present-day English (2 parts, 4 vols.). Groningen:
Noordhoff.
- - - . 1912. An English grammar (for Dutch students) (2 parts, 3 vols.). Groningen: Noordhoff.
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Lamprecht, Adolf. 1956. Grammatik der englischen Sprache. Berlin: Yolk & Wissen.
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Cornelsen.
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Berlin: Cornelsen-Velhagen & Klasing.
Maetzner, Eduard. 1860-1865. Englische Grammatik. Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung.
Maetzner, Eduard Adolf Ferdinand. 1874. An English grammar; methodical, analytical and
historical. Vol. Il. Translated from the German by Clair James Grece. Boston: Roberts and
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Mencken, Henry Louis. 1919. The American language: A preliminary inquiry into the development of English in the United States. 1st ed. New York: Knopf.
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Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech, and Jan Svartvik. 1985. A comprehensive
grammar of the English language. London: Longman.
Radford, Andrew. 1988. Transformational grammar: A first course. Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press.
Reichel, Chr.H. 1790. D. Lowth's Englische Sprachlehre, mit kritischen Noten, iibersetzt mit
Anmerkungen begleitet. Leipzig: Weidmann.
Roey, Jacques Van. 1982. English grammar: advanced level. Paris: Didier-Hatier.
Scheurweghs, Gustave. 1959. Present-day English syntax: a survey of sentence patterns. London: Longmans, Green & Co. Ltd.
Smith, Roswell C. 1864. Smith's English grammar on the productive system. 2nd ed. Richmond
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Sonnenschein, Eduard Adolph. 1913. "Grammatical Reform". Die Neueren Sprachen 21. 28995.
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Sweet, Henry. 1892-1898. A new English grammar, logical and historical (2 vols.). Oxford:
Clarendon Press.
Whitney, William Dwight. 1877. Essentials of English grammar. Boston: Ginn & Co. rpt.
Delmar: Scholars' Facsimiles & Reprints, 1988.
Zandvoort, Reinard Willem. 1945. A handbook of English grammar. Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff.
PLANK, FRANZ. Ed. 1991. Paradigms: The economy of inflection. Empirical approaches to language typology, No. 9. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 317
pp. DM 178.
Reviewed by
CHARLES PECK
This book is a collection of twelve papers from a workshop organized by Franz Plank at the Annual meeting of the Societas Linguitica Europaea, held at Freiburg im Breisgau, 13-15 July, 1988. Some
workshop papers were reworked and submitted later.
1. Franz Plank gives a preview of the issues in his 'Of abundance and
scantiness in inflection: A typological prelude.' He begins with two
extremes, el 'hand' (Turkish) and manus 'hand' (Greek). El has 84
forms (58 distinct) and manus has 12 forms (7 distinct). Turkish el has
separable components, Latin suffixes are more fused and not separa-
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ble, but are fused. All nouns in Turkish are inflected just like el. Latin
has several different sets of inflection classes.
Is there some reason behind the synonymies in a paradigm? Is
there a limit on how many diverse affixes there can be? How many
declensions does Latin have? Are synonymies systematic? Does semantic similarity favor synonymies? What is semantic similarity? Why
are there more nondistinctive forms in plurals?
Since the papers are about various different topics, I will summarize each paper rather than try to give and overview of the whole book.
2. Bernard Comrie, in his 'Form and function in identifying cases'
proposes formalizing the approach to cases and declensions.
First there is the formal analysis of the actual forms in the paradigm. How many distinctions are there? If any word shows a distinction between two cases, then all words have those distinctive cases.
Next, look for distribution classes. Look for contrasting functions
in clauses and phrases, and look for contrasting forms. Elegance seems
to favor not counting low frequency differences.
Then one must reconcile the formal cases with the distribution
classes. C does not come up with many new solutions to the irregularities found in many languages, but his approach will point up the
problems more clearly.
3. Silvia Luraghi in her 'Paradigm size, possible syncretism and the
use of adpositions in flective languages' discusses various case systems. She ends up with sort of a hierarchy of cases. If a language has
only two cases, they will be nominative and genitive. If three, they will
be nominative, accusative and genitive. If four, they will be nominative, accusative, genitive and dative. Further cases are instrumental
and locative (and source, route and destination cases with motion
verbs). Cases that do not have morphological marking are handled with
adposition phrases.
4. Jeffrey Heath's 'Pragmatic disguise in pronominal affix paradigms' discusses the irregularities associated with second-person singular (and first person singular with second person singular). These are
the verb forms that are involved with politeness and deference. And
many languages have special forms or honorifics. (English omits second person singular by treating all second persons as plural.)
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5. Katherine McCreight & Catherine V. Chvany in their 'Geometric
representation of paradigms in a modular theory of grammar' argue
that paradigms offer better organization for lexical insertion of some
items than do features lists. Paradigms can reflect labels that are awkward in a features list. They can show syncretism and irregularities
better. They permit better observations about the relations between
members of the paradigm and other words such as adverbs.
6. Arnold M. Zwicky, in his 'Systemic versus accidental phonological identity' points out that in certain parallel structures, systematically homophonous forms are more acceptable than accidentally homophonous forms.
For example, in English most verbs have homophonous past tense
and past perfective tense forms, different from the present tense form.
A few common verbs do not follow this patterns; their homophonies
are accidental.
So a sentence like the following is questionable: '?At present the
project managers, but in the past the executive directors, set the research priorities.' (p. 123) ('Set' has the same form in all tenses; its
homophonies are all 'accidental'.)
7. Jadranka Gvozdanovic: 'Syncretism and the paradigmatic patterning of grammatical meaning' considers the matrix of Serbo-Croatian
noun classes versus the case endings and looks at the syncretisms or
homophonous case endings. He tries to explain the syncretisms in
terms of animacy, direction, limits, marginality and so on. It turns out
that only dative occurs without a preposition. Genitive and locative
(and sometimes instrumental) take the dative form and add an appropriate prepositions. So the term 'marginal' seems to be a good term for
those forms of case markers.
Then he looks at some Nepalese languages whose matrices of
number versus person of pronouns in 'agent' case. These matrices show
various syncretisms, especially in dual and plural forms. First person
singular usually remain unique, but other persons and numbers are not.
He deals with these syncretisms by constructing binary trees for deriving
persons. If a tree is drawn right, the syncretisms make sense.
8. Franz Plank's 'Rasmus Rask's dilemma' discusses the problem
that Rasmus Rask (Denmark, 1787-1832) encountered when he tried
to find to find an order for listing cases such that all homophonous case
markers would be adjacent.
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P discusses the mathematical possibilities for making adjacent
pairs and triplets in lists, and circular arrangements with various diagonals.
Then he considers Old English with all its syncretisms and the
various ways one could list the cases so that all syncretisms would be
adjacent. He finds that 'genitive' case most often has to be set off to
one side with connections to nonadjacent cases in the main list. 'Vocative' case also has to be treated the same way, a few times.
P then examines various European languages. Some of them require lists with one of more circular (or triangular) diagrams embedded. The diagram for Polish is especially complicated, with triangles
intersecting triangles, although, again, leaving out some special forms
simplified the diagram considerably.
The nuclear cases (nominative, accusative, dative, and genitive)
seem to form a group and the marginal cases (location, oblative, allitive, commitive, and instrument) form another group with connections
to the first group--particularly to accusative and genitive.
9. Robert Coleman in his 'The assessment of paradigm stability:
some Indo-European case studies' says that paradigms are most stable
when they have the fewest syncretisms. He looks at classical Greek
and Modern Greek. His criteria predict some of the change but not all
other factors entered in to the history of Greek.
He then looks at Armenian, Lithuanian, and Old English versus
Middle English and Pre-Classical Latin versus Imperial Vulgate Latin.
Lithuanian was the most stable, Latin and English least stable.
10. Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy: 'Inflection classes' asks two questions a) How is the inflection class of a word to be indicated in the
lexicon and what mechanisms must be set up to yield the final correctly
inflected word?-the representation question. b) What is the limit on
the number of inflection classes one can set up for a certain word class
in a language?-the economy question.
C looks first at Icelandic mono-syllabic feminine nouns. The representation question is complicated by the desire to represent the large
open class with minimal rules and the small not-so-open classes with
more rules-to explain the migration of words from the smaller classes
to the large class. But there are two small classes and one is more open
than the other which complicates the situation.
The economy principle says that the number of inflection classes
should be equal to or slightly larger than the number of variant forms
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(allomorphs) in any one classification. In the Icelandic the nominativeaccusative plural row has three alternate forms, So at least three classes
are needed. However the data require four classes.
C proposes a compromise modal, the PRF (primary reference
form) model. The PRF will be the row with the most different forms,
so in Icelandic, the nominative-accusative-plural forms, with a secondary reference form added to distinguish the two small classes which
have the same primary reference form.
He then applies his PRF model to Latin and German, comparing
the PRF model with the representation model (with its PSCs (paradigm
structure conditions)) and the economy model. The result is that the
PRF can be made to work better on Latin than the other two models
can. For German verbs, C finds it best to set up separate rules for
affixes and for stem alternations.
11. Aleksander E. Kibrik; 'Organizing principles for nominal paradigms in Daghestanian language: Comparative and typological observations' looks at the nominal paradigms for twenty-two languages of
the Daghestanian subgroup of the East Caucasian language group: the
languages are closely related but have marked divergencies. They all
place number and case suffixes on nouns.
In some languages, all oblique case markers are built from the
singular ergative case and from the plural nominative case. Other
languages use the singular genitive case and the plural genitive case as
reference forms. The plural forms are always regular, but the singular
forms often have irregularities in the nuclear case forms (nominative
and ergative).
K looks a bit at what the parent language must have been.
12. Gerrit J. Dimmendaal in his 'The geometry of verb paradigms in
Teso-Turkana' looks at the Teso-Turkana languages (Ethiopia, Kenyan, Sudan and Uganda) which are a subset of the larger 140-member
Nilo-Saharan languages.
In VSO clauses, verbs are inflected for person, number, voice,
mood and negation with striking deviations from the principle of 'one
meaning-one form.' D. limits his discussion to person markers on
verbs with different moods and voices. There are syncretisms and
complications due to vowel harmony and vowel fusion.
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CAMPOS H. and F. MARTINEZ-GIL (eds). Current studies in Spanish
linguistics, Georgetown University Press, Washington, D.C., 1991.
Reviewed by ANTONIO R.M. SIMOES
This is a collection of articles on Spanish within the generative
linguistics framework. The presence of well-known and relatively new
names in Spanish linguistics in the US, Canada and Europe makes the
book very attractive. One of the book's most positive aspects is its
effort to make all the contributors work together. Most of the linguists
represented in this book have been working among themselves, reviewing and discussing each other's articles. What the book lacks is
articles that deal with empirical or experimental analysis. In terms of
theoretical (or intuitional) analysis, the articles are certainly strong,
and can be enriching in the discussions they generate. It is surprising,
however, that in an epoch of widespread access to sophisticated instruments for speech analysis, Spanish linguistics has not concomitantly had much experimental analysis, to verify empirically the impact
of these propositions in say, actual discourse. Finally, it would also be
of interest to support the publication of theoretical articles outside the
generative tradition.
The book is divided into three main sections: (1) Cognition, (2)
Syntax and Semantics, and (3) Phonology and Morphology. The section on Cognition contains an article by Carlos P. Otero, "The Cognitive Revolution and the Study of Language: Looking Back to See
Ahead," and another article by Judith Strozer, "Non-Native Language
Acquisition from a Principles and Parameters Perspective." Otero's
article is a very good survey of the evolution of science, a very personal view, of how one may look at the accomplishments of the generativists, especially Noam Chomsky, in the context of the accomplishments of world sciences. Some elements of the article, may sound
far fetched, such as the coincidences of dates and epochs repeatedly
mentioned throughout the article:
( ... ) led to the discovery of the very structure of DNA less than two years later
( 1953), 'exactly five hundred years-almost to the day-after the fall of Constantinople' to the Turks, as Gunther Stent has remarked( ... ) (10)
( ... )'one of the great discoveries ever made' in Pauling's view-reported their
fresh results in the April 25, 1953, issue of the British scientific journal Nature,
a couple months before Noam Chomsky (half a year younger than Watson)
( ... ) (10)
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The article is in fact an elegy to Noam Chomsky. It views linguistics within the realm of the sciences by placing Chomsky and the
"linguistic revolution" he generated at the same level as the works of
Galileo, Newton, Einstein, and Pauling. It would not be difficult to
argue though, that although Chomsky's work did cause a tremendous
impact in linguistics and deserves admiration, it is still premature to
place him in such a historical context. Other linguists in the past and
in the present would have to be remembered equally and it would be
difficult for me to think of Chomsky as a linguist who caused more of
an impact than say, Antonio de Nebrija, F. de Saussure, N. Trubetzkoy, R. Jakobson, Jean Piaget, and G. Pant, to mention some.
Strozer's investigation looks into non-native language acquisition
from the Principles and Parameters (also known as modular or Government and Binding) model. The author avoids the use of the term
Second Language Acquisition-SLA:
( ... ) From the perspective adopted here, the crucial distinction is between
what Chomsky calls growth of language (first, second, third, or nth), that is, the
process by which a child develops a native or perfect mastery of a language, and
what I am calling nonnative acquisition of a foreign language (second, third or
nth) after the critical period. ( . . . ) (71 , footnote)
The italics are mine, to show a terminology usage that can be
confusing, since one expects a nonnative acquisition to be acquisition
of aforeign language. The author is probably concerned with possible
cases of nonnative acquisition of a first language, such as Genie's, the
Los Angeles woman known to be exposed to a first language at the age
of 14 (Curtiss et al: 1974). Genie's case is often used in support of the
existence of a critical period to acquire a language as a native speaker,
between 2-12 years old.
Strozer's article can be profitably used in classroom discussion of
language teaching for a different view from the most common topics in
language teaching. Students would need a preliminary survey of
Chomsky's works since the publication of Lectures on Government
and Binding (1981), and of major works in neurolinguistics. The article may be used to inspire debates in a classroom, such as to what
extent "contrastive analysis" is correct in anticipating "interference"
of a first language in the acquisition process of a foreign language. Or,
does a Language Acquisition Device-LAD exist, and if so do some
invariant principles of the LAD remain active after the critical period?
Language specialists in general, however, know very little about
the generative framework and even less about its developments in the
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last decade, such as the GB model. Despite this lack of knowledge, we
have to take into account that language specialists are also framing
their own "pedagogical revolution" right now. In the sixties there
were attempts to use the TG model in language teaching, and language
teachers, correctly or not, experienced great difficulty in applying the
model, as we see in textbooks from the sixties and seventies. Fortunately, the work of D. Hymes (1971) showed the limitation of the TG
model, the lack of a communicative competence component, while
linguists, e.g. M.A.K. Halliday, kept making incursions into linguistic
work beyond sentence boundaries, in opposition to the research among
generativists which is limited to the word and sentence level. Today,
we have to admit, there is solid work in language teaching which is
highly functional and culturally based, quite far from the view in
generative research. Of course, the success of present day pedagogical
tools should not prevent research nor attempts to develop cognitive
grammars, as Strozer's article tries to show. Second Language Acquisition Research as it is today, however, should be praised for its
immediate solution to immediate needs in foreign language teaching.
The section on Syntax and Semantics has articles on the syntax of
Spanish by Hector Campos, "Silent Object and Subjects in Spanish,"
and Heles Contreras, "On Resumptive Pronouns." Their analysis centers on the pronominal system of Spanish. Two other articles in this
section deal with the pronominal system of Spanish as well, from a
historical perpective: Maria-Luisa Rivero, ''Clitic and NP Climbing in
Old Spanish," and Dieter Wanner, "The Tobler-Mussafia law in Old
Spanish". The other syntactic studies were written by Paula Kempchinski, "On the Characterization of a Class of Ditransitive Verbs in
Spanish," and Margarita Sufier, "Indirect questions and the structure
ofCP: Some consequences." On Semantics we find articles by Violeta
Demonte, "Temporal and aspectual constraints on predicative adjective phrases," and Karen Zagona, "Perfective haber and the theory of
tenses.'' Naturally, this classification implies that each study does link
linguistic components among themselves. For example, Campos' article does link the syntactic reference phenomena of pronominal elements to discourse topic in semantics; Rivero's treatment of clitics in
modern and Old Spanish deals with focalization.
The section on Syntax and Semantics does raise many questions,
with a number of counterarguments to previous theoretical analyses in
these areas: Sufier's (1988) claim that the direct object clitic has an
agreement marker feature [ + specific], which allows agreement only
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with a [ + specific] NP, as evidenced in "A ningun candidato lo entrevistaron," (They didn't interview any candidate) and "A pocos
candidatos Ios han entrevistado," (They have interviewed few candidates) is challenged by Contreras in counterexamples such as "A
ninguno de Ios candidatos lo entrevistaron" (They didn't interview any
of the candidates). I do not feel in a position to discuss these questions
because of my limited knowledge in these areas. My area of expertise
is phonetics and phonology, to which I will devote a few more lines.
The section on Phonology and Morphology has articles by Maria
Carreira, "The alternating diphthongs of Spanish: A paradox revisited;" James W. Harris, "With respect to metrical constituents
in Spanish;" Jose Ignacio Hualde, "On Spanish syllabification;"
Fernando Martfnez-Gil, "The insert/delete parameter, redundancy
rules, and neutralization processes in Spanish;" Rafael A. Nuiiez Cedeiio, "Headship assignment resolution in Spanish compounds"; and
Iggy Roca, "Stress and syllables in Spanish." It is essential that the
reading of these articles be preceded by an excellent familiarity with
the works of Harris (1983), and Halle and Vergnaud (1987), and for a
different view of this approach, it is advisable to gain familiarity with
the works of McCarthy.
Except for N uiiez Cedeiio' s article on Spanish morphology, these
are all articles dealing with metrical theory in terms of stress and
syllabification. It is always useful to know how other areas understand
what is meant by "stress." For instance, while in experimental phonetics one still does not know for sure what "stress" means (see
Bolinger 1961; Lehiste 1970; Ladefoged 1982), the metrical theory
sees "stress" as a relationship among syllables. Linguists in general,
through the assumption that this is correct, invest all their efforts into
the understanding of syllable constituents, which would allow them to
explain stress under the frame of metrical theory. In fact, the result of
this proposal has generated a flood of research that will try to find how
languages pattern their syllables (and assuming the syllable as an entity) in terms of prosodic constituents, in order to predict stress. This
is done under the assumption that the syllable exists. In linguistics, the
tradition rules that all phonetic utterances in natural languages are
made up of syllables, although no one has been able to observe them
in actual discourse.
It would be na'ive, to say the least, to try to invalidate the richness
of information gathered by linguistic studies. It becomes na'ive in any
scholar's work nowadays, however, to assume that everything is right
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in linguistic studies. Our work becomes more meaningful if we keep
even the most established data in check. For instance, as researchers,
we have almost an obligation in linguistics to look for universals. One
may wonder what would happen if we looked at the so-called ''universals of languages" as "coincidences" instead. Any of the articles
in this section, as expected, contain examples of research bias. Let's
consider Carreira's article, a bold attempt to investigate the controversial topic of diphthongs, and the even more controversial topic of the
behavior of the alternating diphthongs ([je]~,
[we]~[o)
in Spanish.
Her article tries to "account for the absence of [ow] and [wo] in
Spanish."
Aside from other problems that Carreira's article raises, I find it
particularly difficult to limit analyses to the word level and to work
with data based mostly on assumptions. To my knowlege there are no
experimental analyses of diphthongs, since we do not really know what
a diphthong is. In her only attempt to make an argument based on
empirical evidence, Carreira (417) claims, from her doctoral thesis
work, that the ''duration of VG rhymes is nearly identical to that of VC
rhymes.'' I would doubt such a claim if the measurements were not
from discourse. Analyses of discourse will show that diphthongs and
contractions are very common in Spanish, inside and outside the lexical domain. Consider the word "asiduo", or the very frequent greeting ''hasta luego, '' commonly heard in central and northern Spain as
''hasta 1[ wo ]go,'' or contractions of the kind ''uno u otro. '' Although
the "principle of Sonority" is quite common in phonological theory,
I view argumentation involving "sonority" (423, 436) as quite subjective and impressionistic. An acoustical account of the physical characteristics of [i] and [u] in the discourse will minimize these impressionistic remarks: it is known in the acoustics of speech that [i] has
more energy than [u]. Carreira could add to her theoretical study
physical information about the high vowels and glides, which I am sure
would perhaps change her claim that intrinsic characteristics of those
vowels or vocalic elements have no role to play.
In general, her analysis is a very good one. Carreira's explanation
of the monophthongal forms of the alternating diphthongs derive from
underlying sequences of two vocalic elements. Carreira's conclusion
about monophthongization, I suppose, is that the alternations are limited to unstressed rising diphthongs that share the feature value [back],
because of their structural complexity, i.e. exceed the maximum number of associations allowed, and falling diphthongs do not monophthongize because of hi-skeletal structure. Carreira's paper is a long
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paper, and it does raise a number of questions which I could keep
multiplying here; at the same time it is a provocative investigation.
All the other papers are worth considering in the context of this
publication, because of the way they are all directly linked to matters
of syllabicity and stress. The papers by James Harris and Iggy Roca are
the most interesting ones in the section. As one may see in this collection of articles, however, there is no area of Spanish Linguistics yet
that can be seen as simplified in its explanation. This leaves us to
wonder where all this effort is taking us.
Harris, in his approach to stress, seems to be conducting research
toward such a simplification-simplification in the sense of refining
through years of work in the same line of research, or simplification in
the sense expressed by W. Brian Arthur (Scientific American, May
1993):
The writer Peter Mathiessen once said, "The secret of well-being is simplicity." True. Yet the secret of evolution is the continual emergence of complexity. Simplicity brings a spareness, a grit; it cuts the fat. Yet complexity makes
organisms like us possible in the first place. Complexity is indeed a marvel
when it evolves naturally and delivers powerful performance. But when we seek
it as an end or allow it to go unchecked, it merely hampers. It is then that we
need to discover the new modes, the bold strokes, that bring fresh simplicity to
our organizations, our technology, our government, our lives.
In his article, Harris used Roca's works (1986) to continue building on a far reaching set of principles of so-called '' accentuarion''
constituents in Spanish. Both Harris' and Roca's articles are essential
in phonological studies presently. Both still raise a number of questions still unresolved. For example, Roca (1986) had already claimed
that the Conflation rule as proposed -in Halle and Vergnaud (1987) is
artifactual. In fact it is artifactual, and we know there is no existence
proof for Conflation. Conflation has been heavily criticized for its
power to eliminate metrical structure created by the Exhaustivity Condition. Blevins (1990) has proposed to abandon both the Exhaustivity
Condition and Conflation from metrical theory. Again, the proposal
may be the most accepted one we have seen in phonological theory,
but it is important to consider different views about syllable constituency, such as the one by McCarthy and Prince ( 1990), in order to keep
these developments checked. Current Studies in Spanish Linguistics
covers a broad and essential range of topics of primary interest in
Spanish linguistics, and despite the controversies it creates, it is cer-
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tainly a very good collection to be considered by anyone interested in
Spanish linguistics in general.
Department of Spanish and Portuguese
The University of Kansas
Lawrence, Kansas 66045-2166
REFERENCES
Blevins, J. 1990. Alternatives to exhaustivity and conflation in metrical theory. Austin: University of Texas, ms.
Bolinger, D. 1961. "Contrastive accent and contrastive stress." Language, 37:83-96.
Curtiss, S., V.A. Fromkin, S. Krashen, D. Rigler, and M. Rigler 1974. "The linguistic development of Genie." Language, SO, 528-54
Halle, M. and J.R. Vergnaud 1987. An essay on stress. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.
Harris, J.W. 1983. Syllable structure and stress in Spanish. A nonlinear analysis. Cambridge,
MA.: MIT Press.
Hymes, D. 1971. "Competence and performance in linguistic theory." In R. Huxley and E.
Ingram (eds.), Language Acquisition: Models and Methods. London: Academic Press.
Ladefoged, P. 1982. A course in phonetics, 2nd. ed. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Lehiste, I. 1970. Suprasegmentals. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Liberman, M. and A. Prince. 1977. "On stress and linguistic rhythm." Linguistic inquiry, 8,
249-336.
McCarthy, J.J. and A. Prince. 1990. "Foot and word in prosodic morphology: The Arabic
broken plural." Natura/language and linguistic theory 8, 209-84.
Roca, I. 1986. "Secondary stress and metrical rhythm." Phonology yearbook 3:341-70.
KELLERMANN, G. & M.D. MORRISSEY eds. 1992. Diachrony within
synchrony: Language history and cognition. Papers from the International
Symposium at the University of Duisburg 26-8 March 1990. Frankfurt am
Main: Peter Lang. xi + 563 pp.
Reviewed by
ELL Y V AN GELDEREN
This book is a collection of 25 papers read during the 1990 'Diachrony within Synchrony' conference in Duisburg. As the editors put
it in the Preface, the assumption behind the book is that "language use
and language change are interrelated manifestations of human cognition" (p. ix). The articles are divided into 5 groups: (1) Explaining
language change, (2) Language change from a cognitive point of view,
(3) Cognitive aspects of phonetic change, (4) Cognitive aspects of
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diachronic morphology and syntax, and (5) Cognitive aspects of diachronic lexical semantics. This division is on occasion a bit arbitrary:
groups 1 and 2 are not clearly distinguishable. I will list the authors of
the articles in each group and discuss several papers in more detail.
Group (1) consists of articles by Aldridge, Anttila, Hoenigswald,
Hughes, Nerlich & Clarke and Rahat. In group (2) articles by Dunbar,
Geeraerts, Gunnarsson, Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, Simons and
Winters occur. Group (3) consists of articles by Eliasson and Ohala. In
group (4), the following articles appear: Bammesberger, Goossens,
Hewson, Kastovsky, Kortmann and Ponelis. Group (5) contains articles by Bencze, Evans, Kellermann, Peters and Roos.
Aldridge (pp. 3-21) argues that items such as and and or are
highly resistant to language change; items such as but and unless are
not. But, grammaticalized from Old English butan 'outside' and similar to and in Modern English, does not just connect two parts of
speech but can have a special communicative meaning, e.g. that of
surprise over the second part in view of the first (as in Mary fell but
was not hurt). The implications of this difference between and and but
are, according to Aldridge, that a system of rules (Boolean algebra) is
basic to a part of human cognition and that as a result these parts are
less likely to change. There are some problems which Aldridge himself
raises. For instance, and can mean 'and then' (as in Emma ate an
oyster and died) and is not a true conjunction then because the second
conjunct cannot precede the first with the sentence 'true'.
Anttila (pp. 23-83) adds some historical and conceptual aspects to
'Cognitive Linguistics'. There is a long bibliography which provides
access to lesser known proponents of field theory, gestalt theory, semiotics and prototype theory. The article is not a comprehensive overview. For instance, Trier is not discussed even though in Hughes's
article (p. 112) Trier is said to be ''the architect of the semantic field''
and in Hoenigswald and Kellermann he is mentioned in this light.
Structural semanticists who use field theory (e.g. Coseriu and Greimas) are not discussed either. All in all though, an interesting overview
of gestalt and field theory is the result.
Geeraerts (pp. 183-203) stresses that since cognitive semantics is
interested in polysemy (''the synchronic reflection of diachronic semantic change") it should shed new light on historical change. The
emphasis in his paper is on prototype theory. The article clearly sets
out the aspects of prototype theory relevant to historical semantics. It
also attempts to show that a prototypical model has explanatory adequacy, i.e. that it explains why meanings change. The ultimate causes
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here, according to Geeraerts, are the expressive needs of the speakers
(expressivity) and the "tendency towards an isomorphic organization
of the relationship between form and function" (p. 191) (efficiency).
These explanations, however, seem not necessarily linked to a prototype theory but occur in many other (e.g. functionalist) models. C.
Lehmann, for instance, argues that grammaticalization is brought
about by the creativity of the speakers.
Winters' paper (pp. 265-280) applies schemas (a kind of abstraction, as in Langacker) and prototypes to syntactic change. She examines changes in French in terms of changes in schemas and of schemas
in relationship to the prototype. The latter are changes in the radial set,
i.e. the set centered around the prototype. The French subjunctive, for
instance, changes its schema from 'uncertainty of outcome' to 'subjectivity'. The triggers for this are discussed and the conclusion is that
schemas and radial sets mutually influence each other (p. 272). Winters ends with a number of unresolved questions, e.g. about the relationship between radial set and schema.
Goossens (pp. 377-394) examines the development of the English
modal can in terms of a radial set as well. The center of a radial set
determines the 'gestalt' of a lexical item for a language user. In Old
English, Goossens distinguishes two connected centers. The first can
be paraphrased as 'to know' and is more central since it has greater
frequency and more minor uses. The second is the one that combines
with an infinitive and can be paraphrased as 'know how to'. In Chaucer's English, the second center has "expanded its territory" (p. 383)
and has become the central prototype. In Modern English, the situation
is again different and some of the conclusions are that radial categories
change centers and that grammaticalization can be a factor behind
these changes.
Kortmann's paper (pp. 429-453) has a great number of instances
of participles becoming prepositions and conjunctions: during, pending, concerning, etc. In this connection, he attempts to answer such
methodological questions as: the source and target domains and the
recurrent paths of semantic change. He also identifies factors that are
necessary conditions for the reanalysis. Changes involving prepositions, conjunctions and participles are interesting in that they touch on
what the core-properties of these word classes are and therefore, as
Kortmann notes, highly relevant to cognitive linguistics.
The central question in this book is how to apply cognitive grammar to language change: field theory, gestalt, and prototypes thus
feature prominently in many of the articles. It is a useful and infor-
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mative book from those perspectives even though this reader on occasion feels that some of the discussion is really a remodeling of
structuralist arguments.
University of Groningen, English Department
PO Box 716
9700 AS Groningen, The Netherlands