Reviewed by John R. te Velde, Oklahoma State University
This volume contains a collection of nine articles, seven of which are based on papers presented at the panel on clause combining at the International Pragmatics Conference at Lake Garda in July 2005. The title promises a cross-linguistic view, and eight languages (Indonesian, Iberian Spanish, Bulgarian, Estonian, Finnish, English, German, and Japanese) are investigated; however, few of the authors actually compare the language of their study with other languages.
Prominent themes of this volume include (i) the nature of linguistic categoriality (a number of the papers argue for polyfunctionality), (ii) the grammaticalization of conjunctions into particles, and (iii) the process by which linguistic items and constructions become opaque.
This volume begins with a paper by Robert Englebretson on yang constructions in colloquial Indonesian, which are often analyzed as relative clauses but, as Englebretson argues, can also have other functions. He suggests these functions form a continuum and thus support polyfunctionality. However, Englebretson does not consider whether a headless yang construction could have an elliptical head and in fact states that this construction is best accounted for within a conception of grammar as language- and construction-specific.
The following paper by Ricardo Etxepare utilizes syntactic notions (e.g. verbal projection, abstract elements, embedding) to examine quotative constructions in Iberian Spanish. Etxepare’s cross-linguistic study, which references numerous works within the generative framework, shows that German wh-constructions may, like their Spanish equivalents, undergo LF movement across a universal quantifier. The level of analysis in this paper stands out far above most others in this volume.
The paper by Grace E. Fielder on Bulgarian adversative connectives echoes the analysis of the first two articles: these connectives occupy various positions along a continuum that extends from conjunctions to discourse markers and operate on multiple levels of linguistic structure (e.g. syntactic, semantic, discourse-pragmatic). In written corpora, connectives are more likely to function as conjunctions, whereas in spoken corpora they often function as discourse markers.
The paper by Paul J. Hopper and Sandra A. Thompson examines a set of biclausal constructions found in conversational English and German. I found some of the data difficult to analyze because the conversational exchanges were sometimes illogical, ungrammatical, and/or too elliptical to make sense of. German constructions that begin with an embedded clause but are not followed by the main clause finite verb are analyzed through the reframing of syntactic constructions (i.e. they are no longer verb-second) in interactional terms that are motivated by real-time interactional formats. This interesting conclusion is problematic for syntacticians who may not know how to interpret ‘the intricate understanding [that] the interlocutors have of what social work their talk is doing’ (115).
Leelo Keevallik examines the Estonian complementizer and evidential particle et, which historically is associated with reported speech but in conversational usage incorporates another voice. This analysis would benefit from a syntactic perspective, one that offers a theory of ellipsis as well as a comparison with the Finnish et(tä), like that examined in the next paper by Ritva Laury and Eeva-Leena Seppänen, who argue, like other papers in this volume, that the data support nondiscrete syntactic categories.
The only study that is truly cross-linguistic is by Jean Mulder and Sandra A. Thompson on the grammaticalization of but as a final particle in conversational English (compared to Japanese and Korean). They argue that the behavior of but suggests a continuum from conjunction to discourse particle. Contrary to other papers in this volume, these authors argue that language change is highly systematic with recurring patterns of change.
The last two papers both focus on quotative tte in Japanese, the first by Shigeko Okamototo and Tsuyoshi Ono, who agree with other authors in this volume in arguing for a continuum of grammatical functions and against static grammatical categories. They additionally assert theoretical/formalist analyses of being prescriptive. The second paper by Ryoko Suzuki, who also sees a continuum from clause-introducing to noun-introducing functions, divides these functions into three patterns that involve tte linking a phrase to a prior utterance, a present entity, or introducing a new entity.
As with most volumes of this sort, the quality was quite mixed; nevertheless, most papers will make a noteworthy contribution to the field of functional linguistics.