Reviewed by Agnieszka Pysz, Adam Mickiewicz University

Most of the thirteen papers in this volume were presented at the workshop Evolution and Functions of Nominal Determination held at the twenty-seventh annual meeting of the German Association for Linguistics (German Gesellschaft für Sprachwissenschaft) in 2005 in Cologne, Germany.

Part 1, ‘Synchrony – And its implications for diachrony’, opens with Werner Abraham’s ‘Discourse binding: DP and pronouns in German, Dutch, and English’. Elisabeth Stark examines typological correlations in systems of nominal determination in ‘Gender, number, and indefinite articles: About the “typological inconsistency” of Italian’. Elisabeth Leiss analyzes ‘Covert patterns of definiteness/indefiniteness and aspectuality in Old Icelandic, Gothic, and Old High German’. She provides a diachronic overview of the relevant facts and interprets them in light of Abraham’s centering theory. Brigitte L. M. Bauer traces the development of the definite article in ‘The definite article in Indo-European: Emergence of a new grammatical category?’. Agnes Jäger’s ‘“No” changes: On the history of German indefinite determiners in the scope of negation’ presents the diachronic development of German indefinite determination in the scope of negation.

Part 2, ‘Synchrony – Ontological and typological characteristics’, begins with Laurel Smith Stvan’s examination of ‘The functional range of bare singular count nouns in English’. In ‘The definite article in non-specific object noun phrases: Comparing French and Italian’, Tanja Kupisch and Christian Koops demonstrate that French typically uses the indefinite article in nonspecific noun phrases, whereas Italian allows for the definite variant. Dagmar Bittner investigates the ‘Early functions of definite determiners and DPs in German first language acquisition’, taking into account sentence-internal and sentence-external functions.

In Part 3, ‘Diachrony – Universally unified characteristics?’, Werner Abraham explores ‘The discourse-functional crystallization of DP from the original demonstrative’. Abraham demonstrates that the definite article emerged from the determiner homonym. Based on the discussion of determinerless noun phrases that function as subjects of passive sentences in Old Catalan and Old Spanish, Anna Bartra-Kaufmann makes a number of claims regarding the structure of ‘Determinerless noun phrases in Old Romance passives’. ‘On the structure and development of nominal phrases in Norwegian’, by Terje Lohndal, focuses on the development of the suffixed definite article. In ‘The emergence of DP from a perspective of ontogeny and phylogeny: Correlation between DP, TP and aspect in Old English and first language acquisition’, Fuyo Osawa notes similarities between diachronic change (i.e. phylogeny) and first language acquisition (i.e. ontogeny). Finally, in ‘Demonstratives and possessives: From Old English to present-day English’, Johanna L. Wood investigates the syntactic status and the development of three nominal word order patterns based on diachronic data from English.

Overall, this book provides a valuable overview of the fundamental research questions of nominal determination. One of its strengths is the contributors’ mixed theoretical-empirical viewpoints.