Сравнительная грамматика монгольского письменного языка и халхасского наречия: Введение и фонетика. [Comparative grammar of the Mongolian literary language and the Khalkha dialect: Introduction and phonetics.] By Борис Яковлевич Владимирцов [Boris Yakovlevich Vladimircov]. (LINCOM gramatica 125.) Munich: LINCOM Europa, 2012. Pp. xii, 436. ISBN 978-3862901906. $111.

Reviewed by Mikael Thompson, Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia
Boris Vladimircov’s work, originally published in 1929, is a classic of Mongolian studies that deserves reprinting. It was the most important study of the Khalkha dialect (the standard dialect of Mongolia) before Nicholas Poppe’s grammar of 1951, and it retains value to linguists today for its description of contemporary Khalkha pronunciation.

V’s book has three parts. The introduction (1–50) surveys the dialects of Mongolian and provides a historical overview. Part 1 proper (51–89) discusses the sound system of Khalkha and classical Mongolian script. As the modern Cyrillic alphabet was introduced in the early 1940s and a Latin script based on Turkic Romanization systems (widely used in the 1930s but never made official) was only developed around the time this work was published, comparison between the literary language and Khalkha required the citation of words in classical script. While the absence of standard Cyrillic forms renders this book less immediately accessible to linguists, its treatment of classical script is very good. Khalkha forms are transcribed in standard Cyrillic phonetic transcription.

Part 2 (91–421), a comparative study of literary Mongolian and contemporary Khalkha, makes up the bulk of the work. After a short section of general remarks (93–96) follow discussions of stress and vowel harmony (97–142), vowels (143–345), and consonants (346–421). While the focus is a comparison of the sound systems of the literary language and Khalkha, it includes much data from other dialects. As the number of pages suggests, V’s treatment of vowels is richer than that of consonants, and while changes in the Mongolian vowel system are extensive, the fact remains that V’s treatment of consonants lacks some detail. Finally, the end matter consists of an index of Khalkha roots (422–32), an index of Khalkha morphemes (433), and errata (434–36).

As a comparative and historical study of Mongolian, this book is a transitional work from the time the basic knowledge of the field was being collected and refined; rather, Nicholas Poppe’s introductory work in 1955 is the starting point for studies of Mongolian dialectology. On the other hand, for Mongolists interested in the development of the field, it is well worth reading. Moreover, much of the content is still useful. The section on stress (which includes a useful discussion of poetic meter) and the discussions of classical script generally hold philological interest even today: literary Mongolian is a written language whose monuments span eight centuries, and V’s discussions of the changes in the script and the development of loanwords at different periods are well worth reading. Nonetheless, the book is likely to be predominantly of interest to specialists, and the price makes it suitable primarily for university libraries.

A grammar of Savosavo. By Claudia Wegener. (Mouton grammar library 61.) Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2012. Pp. xvi, 400. ISBN 9783110289473. $196 (Hb).
Reviewed by Michael W. Morgan, NDFN, Kathmandu

Savosavo, spoken on Savo Island in the Solomons, is the easternmost non-Austronesian (i.e. ‘Papuan’) language. Although three other non-Austronesian languages are also spoken in the Solomons, none are particularly closely related to Savosavo. In fact, Savosavo shares more vocabulary (about 20%) with neighboring Austronesian languages than it does with these ‘Papuan’ languages (3.7% and below). With 98% of the population of Savo Island being first-language speakers of Savosavo, it is a small (ca. 2,500 speakers) but ‘safe’ language (although that situation could well change, as almost all Savo Islanders, including young children, also speak Solomon Islands Pijin).

This excellent reference grammar consists of front matter (i–xvi), ‘The language and its speakers’ (1–12), ‘Phonology’ (13–42), ‘Word formation’ (43–47), ‘Word classes and phrase types’ (48–115), ‘Noun phrases’ (116–60), ‘The verb complex’ (161–95), ‘Independent basic clauses’ (196–246), ‘Complex clauses’ (247–97), ‘Nominalization with -ghu “NMLZ”’ (298–329), appendices (330–86), ‘Bibliography’ (387–93), and ‘Index’ (394–400).

The treatment of phonology is fairly straightforward, as Savosavo is not particularly exceptional phonologically. Especially appreciated is the section on intonation, for which audio files are available online. Although the chapter on word formation is short, this is due to the fact that suffixes and enclitics, as well as reduplication types, are simply listed here and crossreferenced to the chapter sections where they are dealt with in depth.

Ch. 4 is a mini-grammar of Savasavo, covering all ‘minor’ word classes and also presenting a very good overview for the chapters that follow on noun phrases and verb complexes. Savosavo has a number of features of note: e.g. the use of ‘seawards’ vs. ‘bushwards’ as absolute frames of reference rather than relative frames such as ‘right’, ‘left’, ‘front’, and ‘back’; flexible gender and especially its use to highlight discourse prominence; a morphologically marked nominative but an unmarked accusative; object-agreement rather than subject-agreement on verbs.

Noun phrases are strictly structured with regards to the order of elements (e.g. head final, except for emphatic and limiting markers such as ‘really’ and ‘only’). Verbs have independent inner and outer layers of morphology (inner marking includes object marking and transitivity-changing, whereas outer marking includes tense-aspect-mood (TAM), finiteness, and nominalization). Like most languages in the region, serial verbs—fully lexical verbs, aspectual verbs, and transitivity-changing verbs—are common in Savosavo.

Chapters on various clause types are too detailed to summarize here; presentation is organized according to both form and function and is very clear. The final separate chapter on the nominalizer -ghu is indicative of its prevalence in Savosavo discourse, both to derive nouns and also in a variety of verb and predicate constructions. Texts in ‘Appendix A’, in addition to narratives (standard for De Gruyter Mouton grammars), also include a number of locational descriptions elicited by the ‘Man & Tree game’, photos of which precede the texts.

The grammar under review is extremely well organized, and the various overviews are especially useful. The book will interest specialists in Papuan and Pacific languages and also language typologists. It is yet another in the growing number of excellent grammars of this linguistically diverse area of the world.

Konstruktionsgrammatik: Konzepte und Grundlagen gebrauchsbasierter Ansätze. By Alexander Ziem and Alexander Lasch. (Germanistische Arbeitshefte 44.) Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2013. Pp. xii, 232. ISBN 9783110272949. $35.
Reviewed by Thomas Hoffmann, University of Osnabrück

Over the last twenty years, construction grammar has established itself as a successful theory of language that has spawned a large body of research, including lexical, morphological, and syntactic studies, in a wide range of languages in fields such as first and second language acquisition, psycholinguistics, and neurolinguistics. Yet, somewhat surprisingly, no construction grammar textbook had been published so far. This book by Alexander Ziem and Alexander Lasch now closes this gap by offering an introduction to usage-based construction grammar approaches.

After a short introductory chapter, Ch. 2 outlines basic constructionist assumptions and notions, including the view of grammars as cognitive and social phenomena, the definition of constructions as form-meaning pairings, and psychological evidence supporting constructionist approaches to language.
Ch. 3 first surveys the history as well as development of construction grammar as a linguistic school. After that, Ch. 4 discusses cognitive, usage-based, and typological constructionist approaches (namely cognitive construction grammar, cognitive grammar, and radical construction grammar), while Ch. 5 looks at more formal approaches (Berkeley construction grammar, sign-based construction grammar, embodied construction grammar, and fluid construction grammar). Ch. 6 then summarizes the major methods and data sources used in construction grammar (from introspection to corpus linguistic approaches to experimental approaches).

Chs. 7–8 focus on major aspects of usage-based constructionist approaches as cognitive linguistic theories, and introduce central construction grammar tenets (the lexicon-syntax continuum, taxonomic constructional networks and inheritance, and the role of frequency, productivity, and prototype effects in usage-based approaches). Finally, Ch. 9 provides an in-depth analysis of the internal structure of constructions and constructional meaning from a usage-based point of view.

The focus then shifts to constructionist analyses of selected phenomena of German. Ch. 10 outlines the potential of usage-based constructionist approaches for various types of linguistic research on German (from language change studies to work on interactional linguistics and language acquisition). This is followed by two sample studies, one on the lexically-specified Leonhard abgeholt construction in Ch. 11, and the other on the sound-as-motion-verb rumpeln construction in Ch. 12.

Finally, Chs. 13–15 consist of a short summary chapter as well as a glossary and solutions to all exercises, while Chs. 16–17 comprise the list of abbreviations, tables, and figures, as well as the reference section.

This book is not only written in German but its focus is also on the usage-based constructionist analysis of German phenomena. Nevertheless, since it is the first officially published introduction to construction grammar, it is a landmark publication that should inspire many future generations of German linguists to fruitfully adopt a constructionist approach in their own research.