Reviewed by Edmundo Luna, University of California at Santa Barbara

In this book, Ruben Stoel describes the phenomenon of focus in Manado Malay, also known as Minahasa Malay (MM), a variety of Malay spoken in the city of Manado and surrounding areas on the island of Sulawesi, Indonesia. The term ‘focus’ is used in this work in the more general sense of ‘the conveying of new information in a sentence’ (155), rather than the more specialized use frequently found in the Austronesianist literature. This sense of focus is investigated in three domains: grammatical structure, discourse particles, and intonation. The study is based on both a corpus of naturally occurring speech and experimental data. The first part of the book (Chs. 1–4) provides background information on focus in MM, as well as observations made on the basis of the speech corpus. The second part (Chs. 5–8) provides results from the experimental data.

Ch. 1 (1–3) introduces the goals and structure of the book and describes the corpus of naturally occurring speech that serves as the empirical foundation for this study. Ch. 2 (5–64) provides background linguistic and historical information on MM. This chapter also provides an extensive grammatical sketch of MM, from its phonology and morphology to clausal and extra-clausal syntax. Ch. 3 (65–98) provides a description of the wide variety of discourse particles used in MM, along with a preliminary categorization of these particles. Ch. 4 (99–131) discusses intonation in MM with a particular focus on accent (= ‘pitch accent’, since S does not discuss any intonation-related phenomenon outside of pitch). Here a distinction is drawn between basic intonation patterns (i.e. most commonly used patterns) and special intonation patterns (i.e. patterns with specialized functions).

Ch. 5 (133–54) illustrates the interaction of focus and constituent order in MM. S first discusses possible constituent orders found in the corpus data and concludes that the data are too limited to address questions that might be clarified through experimentation. His first two experiments are based on acceptability judgments of various constituent orders and focused constituents. He finds that SV and SVO orders are the most frequent/most acceptable orders in MM (no matter where the focus lies), while other orders are acceptable only with the focus associated with the appropriate constituent(s).

Ch. 6 (155–80) discusses the interaction of focus and discourse particles in MM. The notion of focus is further refined, and the results of four experiments involving discourse particles are offered. From these experiments, S concludes that only no has the strongest case of being a focus-marking particle in MM.

Ch. 7 (181–210) discusses the interaction of focus and accent placement in MM. Two experiments involving accent placement are described. The first involves accent placement in production, while the second involves the perception of accent placement and focus. S’s conclusions are that while speakers will tend to place accent on focused constituents, listeners tend to perceive (sentence-)final accents, even if the focused constituents are nonfinal.

Ch. 8 (211–13), the concluding chapter, is a concise summary of the book’s goals, the rationales behind using both corpus and experimental data, and possible avenues for future research.

This book is a valuable resource, for it not only contains a description of a little-described language, but it also considers factors such as discourse particles and intonation in the formulation of how focus can be represented in MM. It is unfortunate that the author’s use of the term ‘focus’ is not discussed in detail until Ch. 6, since it differs from its usual use among Austronesianists. An additional consideration that could be included in future accounts is the role of MM discourse particles in interaction. Perhaps this would complement the experimental work S has already done for discourse particles and focus in MM. Overall, S’s work should provide plenty of incentives for future studies of not only other little-described languages of the area, but also innovative approaches in addressing complex linguistic issues such as focus