Reviewed by Marian Klamer, Leiden University

This is not a book about linguistic field methods; instead it is an introduction to morphology and syntax for students who are preparing for fieldwork on undescribed languages. Paul Kroeger’s goal is to help students write good descriptive grammars by providing future field workers with the foundation necessary for analyzing the grammatical system of an undescribed language. Therefore, this text  differs from similar volumes (e.g. Thomas E. Payne, Exploring language structure, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006) in that it includes more advanced topics such as a typology of case and agreement, gender, and pronoun systems as well as an introduction to the semantics of tense, aspect, and modality. K explains how standard notational devices such as phrase structure trees and word formation rules can be used to adequately describe grammatical structures, thereby supplementing the clear prose descriptions that any descriptive grammar should contain. Another unique feature of this text is the appendix, which contains the outline for a grammatical sketch, a set of Swahili data, and an assignment to practice writing a grammatical sketch using the data.

The virtue of this book is that, while it does not focus on any specific theory of grammatical structure, it incorporates many major theoretical insights developed over the last two decades. K explains that his ‘basic assumptions about how human grammars work are those of Lexical Functional Grammar’ (xi), referring to Joan Bresnan (Lexical functional syntax, Oxford: Blackwell, 2001).

The book contains chapters on topics such as ‘Grammatical form’, ‘Constituent structure’, ‘Semantic roles and grammatical relations’, ‘Noun classes and pronouns’, ‘Non-verbal predicates’, ‘Derivational morphology’, ‘Non-linear morphology’, and ‘Clitics’. K provides examples from many nonwestern languages, including  Tawala (Papua New Guinea), Southern Azerbaijani (Iran), Luiseño (North America), Ngbaka (Congo), and Jacaltec (Guatemala) to mention just a few of the more than 130 languages referred to throughout the book. Numerous problem sets demonstrate how the information can be applied to the analysis of actual language data. In many places, K describes analytical problems that may be encountered and suggests practical solutions. The book contains a useful glossary (341–51) of over 200 linguistic terms, with reference to the chapter(s) where the terms are further explained. There is also a language (360–61) and subject index (362–64).

This text could be used in various types of courses. Although its primary purpose is to train for the analytical part of field work, this volume would also make an excellent textbook for an introductory linguistics course. Some may consider it a virtue that the pace of this book (as well as its scope) is less introductory than other, similar texts. Furthermore, Chs. 9 and 10, as well as many of the exercises, would provide material useful for a course on language typology. For these more eclectic uses of the book, however, the table of contents may not include enough detail about the exercises; more information such as the name of the language analyzed and the topic of the exercise would be helpful.

In all, this volume is a solid introduction to fieldwork methods. It is an excellent choice for the background knowledge necessary to begin analyzing the morpho-syntax of an undescribed language.