A synchronic and diachronic study of the grammar of the Chinese Xiang dialects. By Yunji Wu. (Trends in linguistics: Studies and monographs 162.) Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2005. Pp. xxii, 438. ISBN 3110183668. $127 (Hb).

Reviewed by Picus S. Ding, Macao Polytechnic Institute

Based on extensive fieldwork in Hunan and data published in China, this book is one of the outcomes of Wu’s projects on the grammar of Xiang. Spoken in the central region of China, Xiang is among the least studied Chinese languages. This is probably the first monograph on Xiang written in English.

The book consists of ten chapters, plus an introductory chapter and ‘Final remarks’, a long list of appendices, and an index. The volume starts with the ‘Introduction’, providing an orientation to the book and an overview of Xiang grammar (1–18). Ch. 1 describes notable phonological features of Xiang, making reference to two varieties (Qiyang and Shaoyang), and explains three kinds of spoken Xiang: ‘spoken’ Changsha, ‘reading’ Changsha, and ‘plastic’ Putonghua (19–44). Ch. 2 discusses how Xiang could be written in Chinese characters, citing texts from a novel and local operas (45–71). Ch. 3 examines the morphology of Xiang and morphological development in some varieties of Xiang (72–113). Chs. 4 and 5 center on pronouns (114–38) and adverbs (139–77), respectively, addressing the evolution of personal pronouns and demonstrative pronouns as well as negative adverbs (viz. negation particles). Ch. 6 focuses on the evolution of passive and ‘disposal’ constructions in Xiang (178–206). Ch. 7 deals with perfective, anterior, and continuative markers and grammaticalization of locative markers to aspectual markers in Xiang (207–65). Ch. 8 studies the evolution of the attributive and nominalized particles, adverbial particles, and complement particles (266–97). Ch. 9 revolves around modal particles and their evolution in Xiang (298–326). Ch. 10 investigates the evolution of double-object and deconstructions in Xiang (327–63). ‘Final remarks’ summarizes the distinctive grammatical features of Xiang discussed in these chapters (364–65). The lengthy appendices encompass a description of the sounds of Xiang and details on data and their sources, among other miscellaneous items (366–403).

Rich in data, this volume is undoubtedly a valuable contribution to Chinese linguistics. Its presentation and organization, however, have some shortcomings. W has overlooked that most readers will be non-Chinese with little knowledge of the linguistic tradition and practice in China. The concept of fangyan in Chinese should not have been treated as an equivalent to dialect, for example, ‘Hunan “dialects” can be classified into: Xiang “dialects”, Southwestern Mandarin “dialects”, Gan and Hakka “dialects”, Waxiang “dialect” within the Mandarin-speaking areas’ (1). All of these ‘dialects’ are members of the big Chinese family, but of different generations. Xiang, Mandarin, Gan, and Hakka are at the same level; Southwestern Mandarin is a dialect of Mandarin only, not a dialect of Xiang or Gan. Finally, instead of relegating all maps to the end of the book, it would be more convenient for the reader if they were placed near the relevant texts.

Language and creativity: The art of common talk. By Ronald Carter. New York: Routledge, 2004. Pp. xiii, 255. ISBN 0415234492. $35.95.

Reviewed by Carolina González, Florida State University

Language and creativity: The art of common talk explores creativity in spoken English. It argues that, far from being an attribute of gifted individuals, creativity is pervasive and essential in interpersonal communication and best understood with reference to social and cultural contexts.

In the introduction (1–13), Carter discusses the origin of the book, together with its rationale and organization. While creativity is well studied from a psychological point of view, it has been neglected in linguistics. In this area, the emphasis has been on the study of creativity in written rather than spoken language, and sociocultural factors have been mostly overlooked. This book attempts to be a step in the exploration of creativity in ‘everyday spoken English’ (11) from a social rather than mentalistic point of view.

This volume is divided into six chapters organized into three parts: ‘Backgrounds and theories’, ‘Forms and functions’, and ‘Contexts and variations’. Ch. 1, ‘Approaches to creativity’ (17–52), lays the groundwork for the study of creativity in language by reviewing how different disciplines have approached this topic. Ch. 2, ‘Lines and clines: Linguistic approaches’ (53–86), argues that creativity has multiple forms and functions, varying according to the social context and the identity and values of its users.

Part 2, ‘Forms and functions’, examines creative resources in spoken language data from CANCODE (Cambridge and Nottingham Corpus of Discourse in English), a computerized corpus of spoken English with five million words recorded from 1993 to 2001. Some of the most pervasive figures of speech are exemplified in ‘Creativity and patterns of talk’ (Ch. 3, 89–114) and ‘Figures of speech’ (Ch. 4, 115–43). These include puns, wordplay, neologisms, repetition, and also metaphors, idioms, and hyperbole. These resources are used for different purposes, among them enjoyment, entertainment, and displaying identity.

Chs. 5 and 6, ‘Creativity, language and social context’ (147–69) and ‘Creativity, discourse and social practice’ (170–217), examine creativity in different social contexts and settings. C’s conclusion is that spoken creativity is probabilistic and more prevalent in specific contexts, under specific types of interpersonal relationships.

Three appendices follow. Appendix 1 (219–21) provides a list of the conventions used in the transcription of data and comments on some aspects of corpus analysis. Appendix 2 (222–26) briefly discusses creative-prone suffixes -y and -ish, frequently used to create neologisms in the CANCODE data. Appendix 3 (227–30) lists CANCODE publications from 1994 to 2003. References and a thematic index follow.

This book provides a fascinating addition to our understanding of the nature of creativity in language. It is superbly researched, well organized, and very readable. Every chapter ends with a detailed list of suggestions for further reading, which will be very helpful to researchers interested in the study of creativity in language from many different angles.

Tense and aspect in Romance languages: Theoretical and applied perspectives. Ed. by Dalila Ayoun and M. Rafael Salaberry. (Studies in bilingualism 29.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2005. Pp. x, 316. ISBN 9027241406. $155 (Hb).

Reviewed by Roberta D’Alessandro, University of Cambridge

This book brings together contributions by linguists working on the second language (L2) development of Romance tense-aspectual systems. The aim of the book is to present new experimental data and to set a common ground for their analysis, in order to start elaborating a more comprehensive model of the acquisition of tense-aspect in Romance languages.

The book is divided into seven chapters. The first chapter, by M. Rafael Salaberry and Dalila Ayoun, presents a review of the current hypotheses about the development of tense and aspect within six different theoretical approaches, classified according to the importance they place on pragmatics, semantics, text, input, cognition, and syntax. After this review, some potential theoretical and methodological challenges are identified, such as the difficulty of classifying lexical aspectual classes, the difficulty of incorporating the various insights into a coherent theoretical framework, the difficulty of separating the levels of lexical and grammatical aspect, and the problem of research design.

Chs. 2–5 present novel empirical data on the acquisition of tense and aspect in L2 Catalan (Ch. 2, by Llorenç Comajoan), L2 French (Ch. 3, by Dalila Ayoun), L2 Italian (Ch. 4, by Sonia Rocca), and L2 Spanish and L3 Portuguese (Ch. 5, by M. Rafael Salaberry). A number of theoretical issues is also addressed in these chapters, such as the extent to which grounding categories are binary (Ch. 2), whether L2 learners actually acquire both the inflectional morphology and the semantic properties associated with the AspP projection (Ch. 3), whether the aspect hypothesis proposed in Shirai 1991 and Andersen & Shirai 1994 may explain the data collected by studying the development of past forms in the Italian interlanguage of three English-speaking children (Ch. 4), and the role of lexical semantics, distributional biases in native speaker discourse, and general cognitive processes (Ch. 5).

In Ch. 6, Carl Blyth uses the results of the empirical studies presented in Chs. 2–5 to outline a proposal for classroom applications for the teaching of the aspectual distinctions in Romance languages. After an overview of the pedagogical principles derived from the research on L2 aspect acquisition, Blyth shows how to design lessons on aspect and provides a very useful appendix in which a class for beginners is sketched.

In Ch. 7, Ayoun and Salaberry summarize the results addressed in the book in order to elaborate a comprehensive model of the development of tense-aspect marking in the Romance languages.

This book is a very good example of how bringing together different approaches can result in an effective and fruitful discussion and in a better understanding of the topic as a whole.

Language and identity: National, ethnic, religious. By John E. Joseph. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Pp. 268. ISBN 0333997530. $26.95.

Reviewed by Rizwan Ahmad, University of Michigan

Much recent work in sociolinguistics focuses on the role that language plays in the construction of social identities. John Joseph’s book, which consists of eight chapters, addresses fundamental issues that inform most research on language and identity. Ch. 1 discusses the theoretical concept of identity as a social construct, rather than a natural fact. J further shows that identity is not unitary or fixed, but rather multiple and variable.

Ch. 2 provides a historical conspectus on the relevant linguistic research, which has treated language as either a system of representation or a means of communication. J argues that Bronislaw Malinowski’s view that meaning depends on the ‘context of situation’ was a breakthrough in decentering language as a system of representation and constituted pioneering research on language as a sociocultural phenomenon. J argues that linguistic identity is significant because it is both a way of communicating and a way of categorizing.

Ch. 3 situates the study of language and identity within the larger framework of the study of language. J gives an overview of the ideas and concepts that led to the emergence of scholarly interests in the language-identity issue in the twentieth century; this includes work by Valentin N. Voloshinov in the former Soviet Union, Edward Sapir in North America, and John R. Firth and his students in Britain. In Ch. 4, J discusses contributions made to the language-identity research by scholars in other fields, for example, Erving Goffman, Basil Bernstein, Howard Giles, Michel Foucault, and Pierre Bourdieu.

Ch. 5 focuses on the role of language in the construction of national identity. J gives an extensive review of the emergence of the concept of nationalism, tracing it back to the Old Testament. Then he discusses the crystallization that the concept ‘nation’ went through during the French and American revolutions. Linking his discussion of nationalism to language, J argues that language is a social construct just as much as nationalism is.

Ch. 6 is an empirical chapter that discusses the sociolinguistic situation of Hong Kong in general and the status of English in particular. J argues that what is often referred to as a ‘decline’ of English in Hong Kong may actually be a beginning of the emergence of a new variety of English, one that may serve as a marker of Hong Kong identity distinct from mainland Chinese identity.

Ch. 7 focuses on linguistic aspects of ethnic and religious identities. As an example of the power of ethnic identity, J points out that African-Americans continue to have a different dialect despite living in the same neighborhoods with caucasians for generations. He also cites studies on linguistic crossing, which highlights the ways language is used to enact ethnic boundaries. He indicates, however, that studies on crossing reinforce the conservative view that people are linguistically expected to stick to their ethnic labels. J also discusses how personal names, understudied in linguistics, serve as tokens of ethnic and religious identities.

Ch. 8 is an empirical study that discusses the role of language in the construction of Christian identity in Lebanon. J shows that the choice of the second language in the bilingual repertoire of Lebanese is a marker of religious identity. Christians, especially Maronites, of Lebanon are more likely to be French-Arabic bilinguals than are Muslims, for whom the second language is often English.

This book concludes with an afterword in which J emphasizes that for a rich and meaningful study of language, identity research must take center stage.

Standard Lithuanian. By Ian Press. (Languages of the world/materials 439.) Munich: LINCOM Europa, 2004. Pp. v, 55. ISBN 3895868329. $55.44.

Reviewed by Richard W. Hallett, Northeastern Illinois University

This brief book presents an overview of Standard Lithuanian. According to Ian Press, the standard variety of Lithuanian is based on West Aukštaitic, the dialect of Jonas Jablonskis, a linguist revered as the ‘father of Lithuanian’ (2). The main contents of the book are an introduction (v); background information on the Lithuanian language (1–2); a section on the alphabet, pronunciation, and phonology (3–6); and a section on grammar (7–53). This last section constitutes the bulk of the text.

In his concise background of the Lithuanian language, P discusses the argument as to whether the Baltic languages, of which Lithuanian is one, form a linguistic branch of Proto-Indo-European that broke off separately from the Slavic branch. P downplays this argument, stating that there is a ‘world of differences’ (1) between the modern-day Slavic languages and Baltic Lithuanian. The author then addresses the commonly held belief that Lithuanian is an ‘archaic’ Indo-European language. P prefers the term ‘conservative’ to ‘archaic’ (1) to describe the highly inflected nominal system of the language.

In the following section, P gives the thirty-two letters of the Lithuanian alphabet and mentions a few digraphs. He then presents examples of short vowels, long vowels, and diphthongs and provides a basic consonant inventory. He ends this section with examples of Lithuanian adaptations of foreign place names to illustrate Lithuanian spellings and grammatical endings.

The first feature of grammar that P discusses in the next section is the accent types of Lithuanian vowels and diphthongs, which may be long or short and, accordingly, have rising or falling intonation. The author then turns to a discussion of gender (masculine and feminine), number (singular and plural, with some dual forms remaining), case (nominative, genitive, dative, ablative, instrumental, locative, and vocative), person (first, second, and third; singular and plural), and tense (the present and the simple past being the most common). In the subsequent section on nouns, P presents five declension types. Then he presents three declension types of adjectives, and lists the personal, demonstrative, and indefinite pronouns, and for numerals: cardinals, ordinals, and fractions.

The lengthiest presentation in the grammar section is P’s explanation of Lithuanian verbs. He explains how Lithuanian verbs are inflected to mark the indicative, imperative, conditional, and oblique moods. He also examines verbal aspect, Aktionsart, conjugations, participles (including the half-participle), and gerunds. Following this long section, P presents a shorter discussion of adverbs, prepositions, conjunctions, interjections, and onomatopoeic words. P concludes this book with a final note on Lithuanian word order and particles.

This short book contains a wealth of information. P’s overview of Standard Lithuanian belongs on the bookshelves not only of linguists who study Lithuanian in particular and Baltic languages in general, but also of those who research historical linguistics, the comparative method, and (Proto-)Indo-European.

The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Ed. by Martin Haspelmath, Matthew S. Dryer, David Gil & Bernard Comrie. Munich: Max Planck Digital Library. Available online at http://wals.info/.

Reviewed by Mark Dingemanse, Max-Planck-Institute for Psycholinguistics

A common dashboard sticker in Ghanaian taxi’s has it that “If it must be done, it must be done well”, where ‘done well’ cleverly doubles as a brand name. This seems to have been the motto of the creators of WALS Online, the web version of the World Atlas of Language Structures. The massive 2005 volume and the somewhat bumpy interface of the interactive maps on the accompanying CDROM have been transformed into a slick web interface with all sorts of clever stuff going on behind the scenes. In a time where an increasing number of print sources is thrown online simply in the form of scanned pages or huge PDF files, it is refreshing to see what true adaptation to the medium of hypertext can bring us. One consequence of this is that WALS Online, rather than a second edition of WALS 2005 (Haspelmath, Dryer, Gil, and Comrie 2005), has become a separate publication, edited by the same authors but published by the Max Planck Digital Library. Significantly, both the data and the chapter texts are freely available under a Creative Commons license, in line with the project’s goal of ‘[making] information on the structural diversity of the world’s languages available to a large audience’ (as stated on the homepage).

Features and languages

WALS Online is a website consisting of five main parts. The first part, Features, functions as an index to the 142 maps and chapters of the original edition. The opening page of each feature is merely a configuration screen from where one can navigate to the chapter text or map, change the indicators used on the map, or select another feature for combined display. The chapter text is beautifully laid out, with an eye for good web typography. A minor issue is that after using the atlas for some time, the configuration screen starts to feel as an unnecessary barrier between the index and the texts and maps. It might have been better to make the chapter text directly accessible from the main index of features.

The second part, Languages, provides multiple interfaces to the languages that comprise the WALS dataset. Languages are indexed by name, by language family, and by country. Moreover, under ‘Choose by region’, an implementation of Google Maps enables the user to display the languages from any rectangular piece of the earth’s surface simply by dragging sliders on a world map (or by manually inputting latitudes and longitudes). There is no overview map of all of the languages in the sample (apparently for performance reasons; Robert Forkel, p.c. May 2008).

References and authors

The third major part of WALS Online is a database of all 5728 references perused in extracting the feature values for the individual languages. This part of the website is extensively cross-referenced from both the Feature and the Language pages. My only gripe with it is that apart from the cross-referencing, the sole interface offered to explore this part of the website is a search screen. Even if a list of all the references would be rather too long, it would have been nice if references could at least be browsed by language family and by language[1], or by author. The reference search works fine, although the display of search results could be improved (sort options are absent from the results page, for example; one has to think of selecting the right sort option while building the search).

One consequence of putting all the references in a central database is that users are dependent on the quality of the cross-referencing job. On the whole, this job seems to have been done quite well. Nonetheless, it is not too difficult to find an unlinked reference included in the database (Darwin 1878, mentioned but not linked in chapter 142) and worse, an unlinked reference which is wholly absent from the database (Zeschan 2004 in chapter 140).

The fourth part of WALS Online is simply an index of all the authors that coded features and wrote the chapter texts, with links to the features. Compared to the other parts, this one is a bit light on information; one would expect at least a few biographical notes, contact information and perhaps also the current affiliation of the authors.

The fifth part of the site is called Newsblog. The link leads to messages in the category ‘News’ on a weblog that at the same time functions as a place where comments pertaining to individual Features/Chapters can be left. To that end, every feature page includes a link ‘discuss’ which leads to a post on the blog. This is an innovative way of soliciting comments which ensures that comments and feedback end up in the right place, to be acted upon promptly if needed. There are two more links in the main navigation bar: one leads to a contact page, and one leads to an online Help feature.

Under the hood

Behind the scenes of any web application is interesting stuff that average users need not worry about, but that is the foundation of usability and extensibility. First a small gold nugget: a downloadable KML file (containing the placemarks and feature values) is provided for each page that includes a map. The same data is also available in XML format. Things like these characterize the great attention to detail that makes using WALS Online such a pleasant experience. Also notable is that every chapter contains a ‘cite’ link as well as a link to a downloadable PDF version. The PDF (which contains just the chapter text, not the maps) is presented as a ‘print version’; it is unclear why this is not simply done with a print style sheet.[2]

The reference database is an example of how an online bibliography should be done.[3] Not only is it fully searchable, but every single citation can also be exported to various formats. A very neat feature, invisible to most users, is the embedding of bibliographic data (in the COinS format) on individual reference pages. This allows OpenURL resolvers to look up the citation online or in specified databases. It also allows users of clever research tools like Zotero (reviewed here) to directly save the citation to their library. A logical extension of this feature would have been to do the same for the chapter text pages, to make those as easily citable as the references from the database.

Another well thought-out feature which may go unnoticed (though not unused) by many visitors is the URI layout, i.e. the structure of the web addresses of the individual pages. All pages on WALS Online have short, readable URIs without meaningless clutter. Even individual citations in the reference database have their own URIs (e.g. http://wals.info/refdb/record/Ameka-1991). This is a big plus, since website users tend to think of the URI as another interface to the website.[4]

Conclusion

In conclusion, then, I simply want to reiterate what this review started with: WALS Online is a formidable linguistic resource done well. It bears all the hallmarks of a well-executed web application that is here to stay for years to come. The blurb on the book version read ‘I suspect that many linguists will not be able to resist curling up with this massive volume on rainy days just for the fun facts.’ I suspect the same holds for this online version. Why not make yourself a nice cup of tea (Dahl 2008) and enjoy the World Atlas of Language Structures Online?

References

Dahl, Östen. 2008. Tea. In: Haspelmath, Martin & Dryer, Matthew S. & Gil, David & Comrie, Bernard (eds.) The World Atlas of Language Structures Online. Munich: Max Planck Digital Library, chapter 138. Available online at http://wals.info/feature/138. Accessed on 2008-07-02.

Dingemanse, Mark. 2007. Technical Notes. In: Daniella Merolla (ed.) Verba Africana Digital Materials: Ewe Stories and Storytellers from Ghana. Available online at http://www.let.leidenuniv.nl/verba-africana/ewe/technical-notes.htm. Accessed on 2008-07-02.

Haspelmath, Martin & Dryer, Matthew & Gil, David & Comrie, Bernard (eds.) 2005. The World Atlas of Language Structures. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

[1] Since May 2008, this can be done indirectly, namely via a link provided on the individual language and genus pages (accessible from the Languages part). The somewhat intimidating search screen remains the main entrance to the reference database.

[2] HTML pages can easily be styled with different cascading style sheets (CSS) according to media. An example of this can be found in the Verba Africana project (see Dingemanse 2007).

[3] Technically, that is. The data itself is not fully free from errors; for example, the editor of the 2004 volume Coordinating Constructions is cited in one reference as “Haspelmath, M.” and in another as “Haspelmath, Martin”.

[4] It is not fully worked out though: presently, the URI http://wals.info/refdb/ does not lead to the main ‘references’ page; instead, the underlying system shines through.

Syntactic structures and morphological information. Ed. by Uwe Junghanns and Luka Szucsich. (Interface explorations 7.) Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003. Pp. xxxii, 394. ISBN 3110178249. $108 (Hb).

Reviewed by Mohammad Rasekh Mahand, Bu-Ali Sina University

This book is a collection of papers presented at a workshop entitled ‘Clause structure and models of grammar from the perspective of languages with rich morphology’ at the 23rd meeting of the German Linguistic Society (February 2001, University of Leipzig). The present volume contains an introduction by the editors and ten papers.

Tania Avgustinova, in ‘Metagrammar of syntactic relations: A study with special reference to Slavic morphosyntax’, outlines a standardized taxonomy for describing systematic relations in grammar that includes both a hierarchy of relational types and a way of cross-classifying different relational types. Huba Bartos, in ‘On-line morphology: The morphosyntax of Hungarian’, investigates verbal morphology in Hungarian that appears to violate Mark Baker’s mirror principle (The mirror principle and morphosyntactic explanation. Linguistic Inquiry 16.373–415, 1985). The author claims that morphology ‘shadows’ syntax, but deviations from this shadowing may arise due to the interaction of various principles in morphology with scopal properties of the morphemes in question.

In ‘Verbal morphology and agreement in Urdu’, Miriam Butt and Louisa Sadler explore where morphology fits into a grammar; by considering case and agreement in Urdu within a lexical-functional grammar approach. Gisella Ferraresi and Maria Goldbach, in ‘Particles and sentence structure: A historical perspective’, examine the loss of the Old French sentence particle si ‘thus’, hypothesizing that such a syntactic change depends on changes in conditions of the interfaces. In ‘Subject case in Turkish nominalized clauses’, Jaklin Kornfilt discusses adjunct-argument asymmetry, and posits a role for the argument–adjunct distinction in the determination of the case of the subject.

Esther Rinke, in ‘On the licensing of null subjects in Old French’, discusses the licensing conditions in Old French that allow for omission of referential subjects. Andrew Spencer, in ‘Periphrastic paradigms in Bulgarian’, considers how periphrastic constructions for tense and aspect fit into notions of what a paradigm is. In ‘Transparent, restricted and opaque affix orders’, Barbara Stiebles offers a programmatic overview of the ordering of affixes marking diathesis. Jochen Tromer, in ‘Direction marking as agreement’, analyzes person marking and direction marking (for arguments) in Turkana and Menominee languages within a constraint-based framework, distributed optimality. Finally, Ilse Zimmermann, in ‘On the semantics of cases’, deals with the semantics of case in Modern Standard Russian, arguing for abstract semantico-syntactic features that that characterize the structural cases of complements.

(In)vulnerable domains in multilingualism. By Natascha Müller. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2003. Pp xiv, 374. ISBN 9781588113733. $101 (Hb).

Reviewed by Silvia Kouwenberg, University of the West Indies, Jamaica

The introduction and eleven chapters of this volume consider the acquisition of phenomena ranging from the DP to aspects of syllable structure in mainly bilingual children, but also cover research making comparisons between child and adult acquisition. Its aim is to bring the perspective of multilingualism to an account of the distinction between grammatical phenomena where acquisition is virtually error-free (invulnerable domains) and those that are typically prone to error in acquisition (vulnerable domains).

Although several individual papers make valuable contributions to such a goal, the notion of vulnerability is central to very few of them; lacking a discussion that draws together strands from the different papers, the reader is left to wonder about the comparability of the insights that emerge from these papers, in particular where some of the findings seem contradictory.

For example, Tanja Kupisch argues that in French the DP appears to be an invulnerable domain, impervious to the dominance effects that might be expected where a bilingual French-German child is weaker in French. By contrast, Petra Bernardini claims that dominance effects can be seen in the bilingual acquisition of Italian DPs where Italian is the child’s weaker language, Swedish being dominant. Their different findings can perhaps be attributed to the aspects of the DP considered: Kupisch studies the use of articles, which occupy the same position in the DP in French and German; differences pertain to the contexts of use. Bernardini studies the placement of adjectives and possessives, which occupy different positions in the languages involved.

Other papers that seem to be at odds are those by Marc-Olivier Hinzelin and Mary Kato, which both consider null subjects. Hinzelin studies children bilingual in Portuguese and German—languages that require the null-subject parameter to be set differently—and finds that their production is target-like in both languages early on. By contrast, Kato, in her discussion of her own early L2 acquisition of Brazilian Portuguese, claims that while no transfer of her native Japanese grammar took place with regard to, for instance, head directionality, transfer may have occurred with regard to null subjects. It should be noted, however, that the case described by Hinzelin involves bilingualism from birth, whereas Kato’s involves early dominance in Japanese, as her acquisition of Brazilian Portuguese was delayed until school entry at age six. In addition, Kato’s evidence consists of her adult competence rather than an empirical study of her acquisition of Brazilian Portuguese as a child.

Like Bernardini’s work, the paper by Conxita Lleó, Imme Kuchenbrandt, Margaret Kehoe, and Cristina Trujillo points to interaction between the languages being acquired, in their case in regard to the accelerated acquisition of codas in Spanish in German-Spanish bilingual children as compared to Spanish monolingual children. Ira Gawlitzek-Maiwald’s chapter on German-English mixed utterances similarly identifies the ‘booster’ function that competence in one language may have for the accelerated development of competence in another. A different kind of influence of bilingualism is considered by Annette Herkenrath, Birsel Karakoç, and Jochen Rehbein, who argue that a marginal type of wh-subordination in monolingual Turkish has been extended and innovated in the Turkish of bilingual German-Turkish speaking children under the influence of German.

Anja Möhring and Jürgen Meisel’s chapter compares the acquisition of the OV/VO parameter by German-French bilingual children (target-like) and by adult L2 learners of German whose first language is Italian, Spanish, or Portuguese (frequently target-deviant).

The remaining chapters include topics such as English-Spanish mixing in the speech of a single child (Margaret Deuchar and Rachel Muntz), null subjects and optional infinitives in Basque (Maria-José Ezeizabarrena), and the study of acquisition from the perspective of a theory of multiple grammars (Thomas Roeper). It is not entirely clear that these chapters make a useful contribution to the goals of this volume. Deuchar and Muntz’s attempt to consider the possible effect of dominance founders on the child’s apparently balanced bilingualism; although Ezeizabarrena’s main subject is a Basque-Spanish bilingual child, bilingualism is not considered a factor in this child’s development; and Roeper’s focus is on monolingual acquisition.

Die Interaktion der Aspektsemantik mit dem Lexikon im Marokkanisch-Arabischen. By Fadoua Chaara. (LINCOM studies in Afroasiatic linguistics 11.) Munich: LINCOM Europa, 2003. Pp. 211. ISBN 3895868701. $107.80.

Reviewed by Andrzej Zaborski, Jagiellonian University of Krakow

This book, based on Chaara’s doctoral dissertation, deals with the interaction of aspect semantics and lexicon in Moroccan Arabic. It is not clear which varieties of Moroccan Arabic can be considered as the database of this work. Contemporary Spoken Moroccan Arabic koine, which has not been codified and is still more or less fluctuating, is mentioned, but some examples are taken from William Marcais’s Textes arabes de Tanger (Paris: Ernest Leroux, 1911). The sources of the many examples are systematically quoted, which means a happy return to the old, good practice.

The basic ‘modern’ assumption that grammatical aspect and ‘the character’ (Aktionsart in German terminology) of particular verbs must be analyzed together is reminiscent of the prestructuralist approach to syntactic analysis, in which grammatical aspect, tense, and mood are not only connected with particular lexical and contextual peculiarities but are also frequently overshadowed by them (well exemplified, in the case of Arabic linguistics, by the syntactic studies on Classical Arabic by H. Reckendorf).

C discusses theoretical studies by Carlota Smith, David R. Dowty, R. Bauerle, and Hans-Jürgen Sasse, and then presents the TAM system of Moroccan Arabic following the traditional Arabist division into perfective and imperfective. C then examines participles, which, in Moroccan Arabic as well as in many other Arabic dialects, can have both perfective/resultative and imperfective/processive/approximative and stative meanings; periphrastic constructions; and a semantic classification of verbs of Moroccan Arabic. The author offers a separate detailed analysis of four basic polysemic, auxiliary verbs. According to C, the main aspect difference in Moroccan Arabic exists not between telic and atelic verbs but (allegedly there is a strong tendency in this direction) between telic verbs that lexicalize the beginning and those that lexicalize the end of a situation (204). Moreover, a lexical form with different ‘senses’ cannot be simply grouped within a single well-defined aspect class—the particular ‘senses’ of the same verb can belong to different, even incompatible and opposite, aspect classes (205).

The book is a useful contribution to the study of Moroccan Arabic and is an important methodological novelty in the field of Arabic linguistics.

Le samba leko, langue Adamawa du Cameroun: Cameroun du Nord, famille Adamawa. By Anne Gwenaëlle Fabre. (LINCOM studies in African linguistics 56.) Munich: LINCOM Europa, 2003. Pp. 430. ISBN 3895867268. $121.80.

Reviewed by Benji Wald, Los Angeles, CA

This is an important book for its ample descriptive information about a previously undescribed language, (Samba) Leko. Leko is of uncommon interest for several reasons, including its historical implications for Niger-Congo, linguistic evolution, language contact, and grammatical typology. With regard to its historical implications for the uniquely complex Volta-Congo branch of Niger-Congo, the Leko homeland is situated in an East Nigeria–West Cameroon border area where the Adamawan and Benue-Kwa branches of Volta-Congo are in close proximity and frequent contact. Symptomatic of the prior lack of data, Leko, now classified as Adamawan, was within recent decades classified as Bantoid, a deep offshoot of Benue-Kwa, presumably because of Leko’s long-standing contact with Chamba Daka, of the Dakoid branch of Bantoid. Within Volta-Congo, Adamawan and Bantoid, or any other group within Benue-Kwa, have always been by one scheme or another considered to be maximally distant from each other. This issue is discussed only in passing in the introduction (9–13), but the data made available in the book will eventually be of great service to drawing more secure historical conclusions. Leko is also of great interest for its grammatical typology, both morphological and syntactic. Just where it stands in the grammatical diversity of the larger area in which it is situated remains to further research, and here again the data provided by the study will eventually be of great service.

The descriptive study, written in French, is quite detailed and extensive, or rather, intensive, since, as Fabre explains in the introduction, the syntactic description is based on an extended folktale fully reproduced in one of the appendices to the book (373–414). Examples from this folktale are cited throughout the work. Besides identifying many of the major syntactic patterns of the language, the folktale strategy facilitates discussion of such discourse-level issues as topic (303–21) and focus (321–37), among others. There are also some ancillary elicited data exploring certain points raised by analysis of the primary data. In numerous instances, however, F indicates limitations of her explorations and identifies problems that remain to be resolved by further investigation. The description itself is given in a relatively straightforward if complex item-and-arrangement framework, using terminology accessible to readers regardless of theoretical commitment, and conveniently cross-referenced in the ‘index des notions’ (457–58).

An initial summary (7) lists the major sections (unnumbered chapters) of the book: ‘Introduction’ (9–18), ‘Phonologie’ (19–72), ‘Catégories’ (73–134), ‘Dérivations et composition’ (135–82), ‘Le constituant nominal’ (183–224), ‘Le constituant verbale’ (225–66), ‘Les schèmes d’énoncé’ (267–362), ‘Conclusion’ (363–64), ‘Bibliographie’ (365–70), ‘Annexes’ (371–456), ‘Index des notions’ (457–58), ‘Table des matières’ (459–64). The last-mentioned table of contents gives a more detailed directory of the sections of each chapter. Section subdivisions often go to a depth of four, for example, ‘1.4.2.2 La focalisation d’un terme antéposé’ (330–33). The ‘Annexes’ section centers around the folktale and includes a one-page table on the frequency of individual phonemes based on the lexicon of the folktale (371), a Samba-French lexicon (415–34), and a French-Samba Leko index (435–56).