Reviewed by Harald Hammarström, Chalmers University, Sweeden

As the subtitle indicates, this book is an attempt at a reconstruction of Afroasiatic with an interpretation of its putative proto-vocabulary. Unfortunately, this attempt is an amateurish recasting of Ehret (1995) and the Moscow school’s work on proto-Afroasiatic (Diakonoff, Belova, Chetverukhin, Militarev, Porkhomovsky, & Stolbova 1993–1997).

The introductory chapter recounts Ehret’s (1995) hypothesis on the Afroasiatic family: that Omotic was the first subfamily to split-off at about 12,000 BC. The section is riddled with unclarities, spurious remarks, and outright errors (e.g. page 7 says Joseph Greenberg introduced Cushitic into Afroasiatic).

The chapter on phonology and phonetics recasts Ehret’s (1995) hypothesis on proto-phonemic inventory with occasional comparisons to Orel-Stolbova. There is no real comparison or critical review and the author’s remarks are often unsupported.

The chapters on morphology, syntax, and semantics follow the same pattern. Many of the analyses are so poor that they belong to nineteenth century linguistics—for example, ‘it is hard to estimate the time of introduction of s/z into the humean [sic] phoneme inventory. It porobably [sic] happened in [sic] different times in different places of the earth but hardly before 15,000 BC’ (13), ‘We can state that it is impossible to reconstruct tonal oppositions for any protolanguage. It is better not to deal [sic] the problem in spite of Ehret’s strong argument for the case (Ehret 1955. 67–78 [sic])’ (15–16), ‘Also the rivers were in principle feminine in Indo-European as they contributed fish to the food pattern of prehistoric men. Women, trees and rivers were connected with the common feature of fecundity (fertility) in the mind of human ancestors’ (53).

The last two thirds of the book is a simplified proto-Afroasiatic vocabulary taken from Ehret (1995) but without the commentary, attested forms, and proper diacritics.

This is the first time I have come across a scientific book with so many spelling and typesetting errors (pages 53–54 have commercials for books in the same series!) that it significantly detracts from reading.

Needless to say, this book offers no advantage to Ehret’s (1995) or the Moscow school’s (Diakonoff et al. 1993–1997) work. Interested readers or libraries should forgo this volume and go directly to those works.

References

Diakonoff, Igor, Anna G. Belova, Alexander S. Chetverukhin, Alexander Militarev, Victor Ja. Porkhomovsky, and Olga Stolbova. 1993–1997. Historical comparative vocabulary of Afrasian. St. Petersburg Journal of African Studies 2–6.

Ehret, Christopher. 1995. Reconstructing Proto-Afroasiatic (Proto-Afrasian): Vowels, tone, consonants, and vocabulary. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Reviewed by Dinha T. Gorgis, Jadara University

This book is a collection of twelve articles. The first article, by Anatol Stefanowitsch (1–16), focuses on some methodological problems of corpus-based research into metaphor and metonymy from both the linguistic and cognitive perspectives. Stefanowitsch describes the field as ‘still very much in its initial stages’ (12).

In ‘Metaphoricity is gradable’ (17–35), Patrick Hanks extends the idea that ‘metaphor depends on “resonance” between at least two concepts’ (31). In cases in which the resonance gets amplified, some metaphors become more metaphorical than others ‘when two concepts share fewer semantic properties’ (31).

Elena Semino’s ‘A corpus-based study of metaphor for speech activity in British English’ (36–62) is filled with new ideas, although Semino draws heavily on previous celebrated work outside the field of corpora studies. Based on a corpus of more than a quarter-of-a-million words, this study goes beyond the now classical conceptual metaphor ARGUMENT is WAR (Lakoff & Johnson 1980, 1999) and Michael Reddy’s (1979) CONDUIT metaphor.

Stefanowitsch’s second contribution, ‘Words and their metaphors: A corpus-based approach’ (63–105), is undoubtedly challenging. Set against the George Lakoffian tradition and Kövecses (1990), Stefanowitsch examines five basic universal emotions (i.e. anger, disgust, fear, happiness, and sadness) using metaphorical pattern analysis (MPA). Being committed ‘to quantification and exhaustive data extraction’ (66), MPA is demonstrated to be superior to introspective frameworks.

In ‘The grammar of linguistic metaphors’ (106–22), Alice Deignan suggests that data-driven approaches should be balanced with theory-driven methods to conceptual metaphors. Deignan argues that theory-driven methods ‘can allow linguistic patterns to be ignored, possibly at the expense of useful insights’ (121).

Similar to the preceding papers, Martin Hilpert’s ‘Keeping an eye on the data: Metonymies and their patterns’ (123–51) strongly recommends a data-driven approach over intuitive methods. Looking into a ten-million word selection from the British National Corpus (BNC), Hilpert uncovered 909 usages of eye, of which almost half are metonymic or metaphoric. He claims that ‘metonymic expressions like “under the eye of NP [noun phrase]” have entered the lexicon as constructions and are thus a matter of semantics’ (147) rather than of pragmatics.

In ‘Metonymic proper names: A corpus-based account’ (152–74), Katja Markert and Malvina Nissim discuss their study of four-thousand annotated occurrences of location and organization names extracted from the BNC. Their framework is based on seven principles designed to account for conventional and unconventional metonymic patterns as well as literal and mixed readings. Through experimentation, Markert and Nissim discovered that the reliability of their annotation scheme is exceptionally high (169).

Kathryn Allan’s article, ‘On groutnolls and nog-heads: A case study of the interaction between culture and cognition in intelligence metaphors’ (175–90), is a diachronic corpus-based study that links intelligence and density as expressed by the conceptual metaphor STUPIDITY is CLOSE TEXTURE. Investigating Old English through to present-day English, Allan notes that STUPIDITY is associated with the source domains WOOD, FOOD, EARTH as well as a few other substances.

‘Sense and sensibility: Rational thought versus emotion in metaphorical language’ (191–213), coauthored by Paivi Koivisto and Heli Tissari, is a historical study that compares metaphors associated with the English words mind, reason, wit, love, and fear as used in Early-Modern and present-day English. The authors claim that ‘cultural change is reflected in cognitive metaphors’ (210).

James H. Martin’s article, ‘A corpus-based analysis of context effects on metaphor comprehension’ (214–36), is an examination of the facilitation and inhibition effects observed in laboratory subjects. His experiments demonstrate that ‘recognition time was shorter with metaphorical context, longer with relevant literal target contexts, and much longer still with literal source contexts’ (225).

Veronika Koller, ‘Of critical importance: Using electronic text corpora to study metaphor in business media discourse’ (237–66), uses texts published between 1996–2001 from Business Week, The Economist, Fortune, and the Financial Times to compare metaphoric expressions in marketing and sales corpora with mergers and acquisition corpora. Koller focuses on ‘the socio-cultural and ideological aspects of metaphor usage’ (238).

Finally, Alan Partington, ‘Metaphors, motifs and similes across discourse types: Corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) at work’ (267–304), observes that (i) ‘the presence of certain prepositions and adverbs can be indicative of metaphors specific to a certain discourse type’ (275); (ii) ‘some discourse types are more dense in metaphor than others’ (293); (iii) ‘familiarity automatically reduces the cognitive distance of juxtaposition’ (296); and (iv) the difference between similes and metaphors is in whether scalar functionality is intended or inferred.

Disregarding dozens of typos, this book will be valuable for cognitive or corpus-oriented figurative language students and researchers.

References

Kövecses, Zoltán. 1990. Emotion concepts. Dordrecht: Springer Verlag.

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the flesh. New York: Basic Books.

Reddy, Michael. 1979. The conduit metaphor: A case of frame conflict in our language about language. Metaphor and thought, ed. by Andrew Ortony, 284–324. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Reviewed by Sharbani Banerji, Ghaziabad, India

Italian does not have a well-defined class of morphologically or syntactically marked forms to express modality, such as the English modals. However, through a rigorous diachronic analysis of the Italian epistemic system, Paola Pietrandrea demonstrates that metapropositionality in Italian affects ‘the aspectual semantics of propositional content, which can only be aspectually incomplete’ (209).

Ch. 1, ‘The notional category of epistemic modality’ (6–39), separates epistemic modality from other categories such as deontic modality, mood, illocution, reality status, and evidentiality and defines modality as ‘the performative category expressing the speaker’s genuine opinion towards the modalized proposition’ (39).

In Ch. 2, ‘A typological classification of epistemic systems’ (40–52), five parameters are identified for a typological classification of epistemic systems.

Ch. 3, ‘Epistemic modality in Italian’ (53–68), demonstrates that the epistemic future, the indicative, and the conditional (as well as the subjunctive, in subordinate clauses) forms of the modal verbs dovere ‘must’ and potere ‘can’ are identified as grammaticalized epistemic forms in Italian.

Ch. 4, ‘Semantic oppositions’ (69–99), provides a semantic analysis of Italian epistemic forms. The epistemic future emerges as the genuine epistemic form, unmarked to the degree of certainty. Deve is an epistemic-evidential form that marks a strong degree of certainty and nonmediated evidence, dovrebbe is an epistemic-evidential form that marks a medium degree of certainty and mediated evidence, può is primarily a deontic form, and potrebbe is the epistemic counterpart of può.

In Ch. 5, ‘A typological characterization of Italian epistemic modality’ (100–107), Italian is characterized as a language that (i) does not have specific forms dedicated to the expression of epistemic modality; (ii) distinguishes three degrees of certainty (i.e. strong, medium, and weak); (iii) distinguishes between genuine epistemicity and inferential evidentiality; (iv) displays a complex interaction between evidentiality and epistemicity; and (v) has low performativity.

Ch. 6, ‘Inflectional and distributional constraints: The (low) performativity of Italian epistemic modality’ (108–32), examines to what extent the morphosyntactic behavior of Italian epistemic forms obeys constraints on tense, personal inflection, and distribution, such as their occurrence in the protasis of conditional constructions and in interrogatives.

Ch. 7, ‘Aspectual constraints on the propositional content’ (133–53), argues that the only propositions that allow epistemic modalizations are those that display stative, progressive, habitual, or perfect predicates. Thus, incompleteness is an aspectual feature shared by all epistemically modalized predicates and, furthermore, all ‘predicates occurring in epistemically modalized propositions can be represented as intervals open to the right’ (153).

Ch. 8, ‘The incompleteness of the propositional content and the meta-propositionality of epistemic modality’ (154–86), demonstrates that the aspectual incompleteness that characterizes epistemically modalized propositions is an index of their propositional character. The converse also holds true: Aspectual completeness characterizes the complements of predicational predicates.

Ch. 9, ‘A diachronic hypothesis’ (187–206), puts forward a reconstructivist diachronic hypothesis concerning the rise of epistemic meanings in Italian. The little historical evidence available shows that, whereas aspectually complete predications are not susceptible to reanalysis, aspectually incomplete propositions are. The ‘Conclusions’ (207–09) summarizes the work.

Reviewed by Carolina González, Florida State University

This volume is an introduction to the fundamentals of Spanish phonetics and phonology. It is written in Spanish and intended for native speakers of English with an advanced level of Spanish. Conceived as a practical handbook of Spanish sounds, this book provides a concise presentation of the basic facts of the articulation and phonology in Spanish and its main dialectal variants (v).

The contents are organized into nine chapters, of which the first three deal with linguistics proper. Ch. 1 (6–10) introduces linguistics and its areas of study, and Ch. 2 (11–21) focuses on human language and its development as well as animal communication. The first half of Ch. 3 (22–32) presents a brief overview of modern linguistics, while the second half deals with language and the brain.

Chs. 4–6 are the core of the book and cover the basics of Spanish phonetics and phonology. Ch. 4 (33–50) distinguishes between sounds and letters and introduces the notions of syllable, stress, rhythm, and intonation. Phonemes are the topic of Ch. 5 (51–57), which also discusses neutralization and archiphonemes. Ch. 6 (58–79) is a straightforward presentation of articulatory phonetics and sound classification.

Chs. 7 and 8 deal with variation of Spanish sounds. Ch. 7 (80–89) considers instances of phonemic and allophonic variation in Spanish, outlines some phonetic and phonological phenomena, and presents pointers and examples of phonetic and phonological transcription. Ch. 8 (90–107) provides a brief history of the development of Spanish and lists the main characteristics of Spanish in Spain, Latin America, and the United States. Ch. 9 (109–17) lists a few observations and examples to improve students’ pronunciation of Spanish. The book ends with a list of references, a glossary of linguistic terms, and appendixes on vowels and phonetic alphabets.

Even though the first three chapters are more general in their scope, overall this book succeeds in providing students with a practical handbook on the basics of Spanish pronunciation and phonology. This book is best suited for undergraduate courses in Spanish phonetics for native speakers of English with no previous background in linguistics. Some chapters (especially 1–4, 6, and 8) might also be used in undergraduate introductions to Spanish linguistics.

This volume is concise, well-organized, and features clear examples and plenty of visual aids that will help the students understand the main points. Every chapter includes exercises targeted for review, discussion, and practice; additionally, Chs. 4–6 end with a comparative list between English and Spanish sounds and phonemes. However, it would be helpful to have some discussion of the rationale for transcription and phonetic alphabets, and the concept of archiphonemes should probably be avoided in a book of this type. Furthermore, the inclusion of audio recordings of Spanish sounds (either on a CD-ROM or a website) would have been a welcome addition to this volume.