Reviewed by Louisa Buckingham, University of Granada, Spain

This book, which is based on the author’s doctoral thesis, investigates the relationship between aspect and argument structure through a detailed examination of the resultative construction within the theoretical framework of lexical syntax. The languages examined in this book include Dutch, Catalan, and occasionally Spanish, although English is the primary language of illustration throughout the literature review. Beginning broadly, Ch. 1 introduces the concepts of aspect and argument structure, focusing on the argument structure of verbs.

Ch. 2 investigates the resultative structure of telic (i.e. terminative) events—that is, accomplishments and achievements. Subsequently, the author introduces resultative events, typical in Germanic languages, and concludes that these are not aspectually distinguishable from telic events. Nevertheless, it is possible to make a semantic distinction between resultative and telic events based on whether the resultative aspect of the event depicted is a result of the linguistic structure (e.g. John has broken the vase) or a result of contextual knowledge (e.g. John has read the book). The first example is resultative, while the second is termed telic. Furthermore, the author shows that this difference in interpretation may be derived from differences in lower level lexico-syntactic argument structure. Touching upon the likely implications of this approach, the author claims that the object is a codeterminer of aspect.

Ch. 3 focuses on resultative events, which are further divided into categories of analytic constructions in which the resultative component is expressed semantically through the verb (e.g. John broke the vase), and synthetic constructions, which do not encode the resulting state within the verb (e.g. John ate the apple up). The author then turns her attention to these synthetic constructions, particularly with respect to the use of se in Romance languages (e.g. comerse una manzana), which she claims demonstrate the same argument structure and aspectual interpretation as the Germanic resultative constructions.

The final chapter continues the analysis of the se structure and discusses the primitive and complex status of this verb. According to event type shifting, the verb is the basic element, while the resultative predicate is formed by the addition of se (e.g. John ate the apple + up / Se + comió la manzana). The lexical subordination approach argues that the basic structure is, indeed, the resultative structure, although the verb is a light verb (e.g. John V ate the apple up). This construction is subordinate to the construction with no additional resultative element and assigns the light verb its phonological content. The author supports the lexical subordination approach with the incorporation of some aspects of distributive morphology, which proposes the existence of roots in the lexicon in place of grammatical categories. The grammatical categories of verb, noun, and so forth are only assigned at a later time.

Researchers and students of aspect and argument structure will find the broad and up-to-date literature review of this volume useful and the discussions and proposals presented in various languages thought-provoking.

Reviewed by Philipp Brandenburg, University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez

In an investigation of the principles that underlie accentuation in ancient Greek, Philomen Probert focuses on nouns and adjectives with specific suffixes and concludes that the distribution of accents indeed follows a finite, although complex, set of rules.

In Part 1 (Chs. 1–4), P discusses the obstacles of research in a field where direct evidence is missing. The system of accentuation, however—as introduced by ancient grammarians in the second century BC and continuing in medieval manuscripts through the introduction of minuscule writing in the ninth century AD—is corroborated by papyri and ancient music. A refreshingly nontraditional overview of Greek accentuation, a summary of historical changes in accentuation, and a brief history of scholarship make these chapters an informative introduction to the subject. However, I do not accept the existence of an oral tradition of accentuation from Homeric times down to the grammarians (33; 44) nor that of the ‘Homeridae’ (cf. Fehling 1979).

Part 2 (Chs. 5–12) investigates how individual morphemes influence the position of accent. Recessive accentuation is the default (it is more frequent, the norm in Lesbian, applied to loanwords from Latin, and found on words that in Indo-European had a final accent). Derivational morphemes, having inherent accentual properties, may thus demand a nonrecessive accent. Adjectival suffixes often have nonrecessive accentuation, whereas nouns with the same suffixes more often than not have recessive accentuation. Exceptions to these principles occur in either highly frequent or extremely infrequent words with -ro-, -to-, and -no-. With -lo- and -mo- the situation is complicated by other factors (e.g. animacy or synchronic transparency). High frequency allows for storage of individual (i.e. irregular) forms in the mental lexicon, whereas a rare word, P says, ‘may not lose its status as a complex form and its derivational suffix will retain its synchronic identity’ (233). But where should synchronic knowledge about the morpheme’s identity derive if not from the default (i.e. mid-frequent) forms? P holds that highly frequent nondefault accentuation is (historically) correct: speakers (or scribes) could equally well apply a hypercorrect accentuation to an infrequent word exactly because of its rarity (e.g. as German wohlgesonnen currently replaces wohlgesinnt ‘well-disposed’).

This book is a valuable contribution to our understanding of accentuation in Ancient Greek and will attract both classical philologists and historical linguists. Appendices with commented word lists as well as several indices guarantee accessibility, although acquaintance with the Greek alphabet is a prerequisite. P’s vast erudition in the field of Greek literature stands beyond any doubt.

REFERENCE

FEHLING, DETLEV. 1979. Zwei Lehrstücke über Pseudo-Nachrichten. Rheinisches Museum 122.193–210.

Reviewed by Omaima Ayoub, Richard J. Daley College

This volume brings the fields of linguistics and cultural anthropology together in a series of well-rounded papers on various aspects of language, culture, and family issues in Ghana (West Africa). The papers are divided into two thematic sections: (i) ‘Language’ and (ii) ‘Culture and family studies’. ‘Language’ deals with language pedagogy, prosodic-morphology (e.g. aspects of Akan tense, aspect, and hypocorisms), Nzema morphophonology, communication disorders, and lexical borrowing, whereas ‘Culture and family studies’ encompasses the Akan family system, Akan semiotics, nonverbal taboo communication, a Krobo festival and its sociocultural relevance to the Krobo society, and Frafra (Ghana) anthroponymy (i.e. human names).

In ‘English sounds and spellings: Solving the initial reading problem in Ghana’, Alan Duthie examines the difficulties Ghanaian native speakers encounter when they learn English. He contends that, because a closer correspondence is found in the writing and sound systems of Ghanaian languages than in English, it would be helpful for Ghanaian learners to begin learning the basics of reading in a Ghanaian language before bridging onto English. In ‘Recent-/remote-past marking in Akan: A multi-tiered account’, Seth Ofori offers a multitiered moraic account of recent-past and remote-past markings in Akan and demonstrates (i) that these morphemes are both inherently moraic and (ii) they are dependent on the verbal affix hierarchy and various phonological rules for their distribution and their segmental realizations.

In ‘Negation in Nzema’, Samuel Obeng and Emmanuel Yankey discuss negation in Nzema, a Kwa language spoken in Ghana, by showing that this process involves several morphophonemic features such as tonal change, vowel harmony, consonant alternation, frication, and loss of affrication. Ebenezer Godwyll, in ‘Using the mother tongue (L1) as a medium for early identification and diagnosis for communication disorders: A look at Ghana’, addresses the development of processes for early identification and diagnosis of communication disorders in Ghanaian children as well as the rationale behind the need for such processes. Godwyll also argues that the mother tongue should be used to discern communication disorders.

In ‘Akan hypocorisms: A constraint-based approach’, Seth Ofori claims that the ranking of morphophonemic constraints is responsible for the various morphophonological processes (e.g. reduplication, deletion, vowel lengthening) that occur during the hypocoristic formation of Akan anthroponyms. In ‘Lexical borrowing: The case of Ewe’, Paul Agbedor examines loanwords that entered the Ewe language as a result of its contact with other European and non-European (i.e. Ghanaian) languages.

The section on culture and family studies starts with Cecilia Obeng’s ‘Understanding the Akan family system through discursive constructions at naming ceremonies’, in which she examines how the discourse patterns associated with Akan naming ceremonies reflect the Akan family system and lifestyle. She also explains how literary devices such as proverbs, metaphors, parallelism, and symbolism help to heighten performance and inform the audience about the sociocultural significance of Akan traditional and moral values. Kofi Agyekum, in ‘Aspects of Akan semiotics’, looks at symbols from the general framework of nonverbal communication and contends that, because semiotics carries a high degree of arbitrariness and ambiguity, it contradicts reality and therefore relies on conventions and sociocultural interpretation.

In ‘Non-verbal communication: Left hand taboos among the Akan of Ghana’, Joe Amoako addresses some of the reasons the Akan would pick up and clean dirty things with the left hand but eat and greet with the right one. He concludes with a recommendation to use the right hand in most African cultures, since using the left hand is considered taboo. John Teye, in ‘Historical and sociocultural essence of the Ngmayem festival of the Manya Krobo of Ghana’, explores the social, cultural, and religious value of Ngmayem, an annual harvest and thanksgiving festival celebrated by the Manya Krobo of Ghana.

Finally, in ‘The psychological implications of Frafra (Ghana) names’, Samuel Atindanbila discusses the psychological implications that Frafra names have on their bearers. He argues that in addition to having spiritual, historical, and social implications, Frafra names provide their recipients with status, respect, and individuality, and act as channels for identity formation and the preservation of cultural values.

Reviewed by Omaima Ayoub, Richard J. Daley College

The fourth volume to emerge from a series of conferences organized by the Columbia School (CS), this collection contributes both to the growth of the school itself and to the field’s mission of understanding human language. Attempting to take CS work beyond its origins, this anthology maintains the school’s sign-based, functionalist paradigm, while simultaneously raising questions pertinent to semiotics, phonology, grammar, the lexicon, anthropology, and linguistic theory. In this way, this volume demonstrates both consistency in CS linguistics and innovation in exploring new frontiers of linguistic research. One of the editors, Joseph Davis, sets the tone with ‘Introduction: Consistency and change in Columbia School linguistics’. The volume is then divided into four sections.

In Section 1, ‘Linguistic theory’, Wallis Reid, ‘Columbia school and Saussure’s langue’, argues that CS linguistics directly rests on a foundation laid by Ferdinand de Saussure. In ‘Diver’s theory’, Alan Huffman examines William Diver’s paper Theory (in Meaning as explanation: Advances in sign-based linguistics, ed. by Ellen Contini-Morava & Barbara Goldberg. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1995) and argues that, as the most comprehensive and final statement by the founder of CS, this groundbreaking paper emphasizes Diver’s antiapriorism—that is, a theory of language must not be a collection of a priori categories and speculations but rather a set of conclusions drawn from empirical and inductive inquiry.

Section 2, ‘Phonology’, begins with ‘Phonology as human behavior: Inflectional systems in English’, in which Yishai Tobin summarizes the basic theoretical and methodological principles of phonology as human behavior (PHB; a.k.a. CS phonology) and applies this theory to the synchronic and diachronic analysis of English inflection. Yishai Tobin and Haruko Miyakoda analyze Japanese speech errors and loanwords in ‘Phonological processes of Japanese based on the theory of phonology as human behavior. They conclude that PHB can account for why the observed phonological processes (e.g. deletion, substitution, epenthesis) occur as they do in Japanese. In ‘Phonology as human behavior: A combinatory phonology of Byelorussian’, Igor Dreer applies PHB to an analysis of the distribution of consonants in Byelorussian monosyllabic words. Adriaan Dekker and Bob de Jonge apply PHB to a corpus of Peninsular Spanish word stems in ‘Phonology as human behavior: The case of Peninsular Spanish’. Through an analysis of the distribution of nine Peninsular Spanish consonants in the lexicon, they notice that initial /k/ appears more frequently than expected, and thus, breaks the typical distribution of phonological units in lexicon. In ‘Functional motivations for the sound patterns of English non-lexical interjections’, Gina Joue and Nikolinka Collier argue that nonlexical interjections are discourse particles whose function depends on a combination of their position in conversation, denotation, and context. In the last paper in this section, ‘Phonology without the phoneme’, Joseph Davis argues that the phoneme has always been superfluous in CS phonology because the articulation of the signal, not of the phoneme, has been the thread linking phonetics, communication, and the human factor.

Section 3, ‘Grammar and lexicon’ begins with ‘Tell me about yourself: A unified account of English –self pronouns’, in which Nancy Stern rejects the traditional characterization of English –self pronouns as reflexive and hypothesizes that they signal a constant meaning of insistence on a referent. In ‘Se without deixis’, Radmila J. Gorup argues that the distribution of se in Serbo-Croatian cannot be explained by invoking a priori categories (e.g. reflexive, impersonal, middle voice) and hypothesizes that se is a signal in the semantic substance called participant focus. Ellen Contini-Morava’s contribution, ‘The difference between zero and nothing: Swahili noun class prefixes 5 and 9/10’, presents an analysis of three Swahili noun classes whose prefixes are traditionally analyzed as having Ø (i.e. meaningful absence) as an allomorph. She argues that only class 5 has a prefix, whose most frequent alternant is Ø, while classes 9 and 10 have no prefix at all.

In ‘A semantic analysis of the Swahili suffix li’, Robert A. Leonard and Wendy Saliba Leonard propose that the Swahili suffix li has a single, invariant meaning: ‘li instructs the hearer to interpret a nonhigh controller at a higher, more potent level of control than if li were not used’. Hidemi Sugi Riggs, in ‘The structure of the Japanese inferential system: A functional analysis of daroo, rashii, soo-da, and yooda’, analyzes Japanese inferential auxiliaries and argues that the prevailing view of these forms as epistemic markers is unsupported. Charlene Crupi’s contribution, ‘Structuring cues of conjunctive yet, but, and still: A monosemic approach’, argues that yet, but, and still do not comprise a closed grammatical system but rather are independent linguistic units that contribute unique and consistent clues about overall textual structure.

Finally, Section 4, ‘Beyond language’, includes two papers. In ‘The case of articulatory gestures—not sounds—as the physical embodiment of speech signs’, Thomas Eccardt makes the case that articulatory gestures, not sounds, are signifiers of human speech. Robert Leonard’s concluding paper, ‘Meaning in nonlinguistic systems: Observations, remarks, and hypotheses on food, architecture, and honor in Kenya’, analyzes data from fieldwork in Lamu (Kenya) and Thailand to offer an anthropological analysis of behavior involving the use of space and food.

Reviewed by Omaima Ayoub, Richard J. Daley College

Part of an ongoing interdisciplinary research project on form analysis, this volume explores the origins of conscious qualitative states in perception. Through an examination of the complexity of the field of vision and the integration of the tenets of Gestalt psychology with more recent scientific approaches, the contributors to this volume make a strong case for the coexistence and interaction of different types of spaces in vision, such as the qualitative space of phenomenal appearances and the optical space of psychophysics, neural elaboration, and art. In the opening paper, ‘Introduction to visual spaces’, Liliana Albertazzi presents this general framework and argues that these spaces follow different rules of organization, which must be individuated before potential implementation in cognitive agents can be explored.

Divided into three parts (‘Perception of visual spaces’, ‘Depiction of visual spaces’, and ‘Bridging perception and depiction of visual spaces’), this volume includes a wide range of topics. Within the framework of the Gestalt principles, primary and secondary cognitive processes are theoretically and experimentally analyzed by several contributors. Specifically, while Dhanraj Vishwanath discusses ‘Coplanar reflectance change and the ontology of surface perception’, Timothy L. Hubbard and Jon R. Courtney (‘Evidence suggestive of separate visual dynamics in perception and in memory’) and Barbara Tversky (‘Gestalts of thought’) rely on the principles of Gestalt psychology to offer evidence of  separate visual dynamics in perception and in memory.

Ed Conner (‘The neural space of visual shape perception’), investigates the dimensions of visual shape coding in monkeys, and within the realm of neural space, Steven W. Zucker and Ohad Ben-Shahar discuss the relationship between the law of good continuations and the geometry of visual flows in ‘Boundary Gestalt limits flow Gestalt: The geometry of good continuation’.

The theoretical and experimental relationship between perceptual and pictorial space is examined with regard to theories of painting (Alf C. Zimmer, ‘Visual perception and theories of painting: An uneasy complementarity’), canvas paintings (Liliana Albertazzi, ‘Visual quality: Drawing on canvas’), sculptures (Jan J. Koenderink and Andrea J. van Doorn, ‘Pictorial space: A modern reappraisal of Adolf Hildebrand’), children’s drawings and Paul Klee’s drawings and paintings (John Willats, ‘Rudolf Arnheim’s graphic equivalents in children’s drawings and drawings and paintings by Paul Klee’), and stereokinetic objects (Mario Zanforlin, ‘Illusory space and paradoxical transparency in stereokinetic objects’).

Gert J. van Tonder extends the paradigm of visual perception to the creation, depiction, and perception of naturalistic landscapes in ‘Order and complexity in naturalistic landscapes: On creation, depiction and perception of Japanese dry rock gardens’. Connecting the disciplines of linguistics and pictorial perception, in ‘Dynamics of picture viewing and picture description’, Jana Holšánová discusses the results of empirical studies that examine the dynamics of picture viewing and picture description.

The meaning of shape and its relation to fundamental mathematical concepts are investigated by Frederic Fol Leymarie in ‘Thoughts on shape’. Finally, in ‘Tracing axes of growth’, Athanassios Economou examines a specific class of three-dimensional designs that have one axis of growth and discusses algebraic structures that capture the symmetries of those designs.

This volume is written for an interdisciplinary scholarly audience. As cognitive science researchers specializing in visual perception and its relation to other disciplines, the contributors employ the scientific methods of their research paradigm, which starts from phenomenal appearances and proceeds to the visual field.

Reviewed by Chentir Amina, Université de Provence, France

Sami Boudelaa edits this collection of eight papers originally presented at the Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics held at Cambridge University in March 2002.

In the first paper, ‘The organization of the lexicon in Arabic and other Semitic languages’, Georges Bohas claims that a lexical organization of Arabic—based on binary combinations of feature matrices—is superior to the traditional system based on triconsonantal roots. As evidence, he cites studies by Abelhadi Razouk (e.g. La notion de racine en arabe et sa perception chez le locuteur arabophone, DEA essay: Université Paris 8, 1999–2000), in which native speakers of Arabic seem to be able to read a word even if they cannot analyze its root and pattern. To describe phonetic and semantic relations, Bohas proposes a model based on phonetic matrices and etymons. Finally, he discusses the implications of this model for language in general.

Ignacio Ferrando approaches the notion of plural of paucity (PP) in ‘The plural of paucity in Arabic and its actual scope: On two claims by Siibawayhi and Al-Farraa’. After presenting a critical examination of some classical and modern studies in this field, Ferrando concludes that the notion of PP was firmly rooted in the minds of early Arabic linguists, although with sometimes contradictory perspectives. Its representation of small quantities and the variation between natural (i.e. plural attribute with plural subject) and deflected (i.e. feminine singular attribute with plural subject) agreements have led PP to be occasionally employed by some Arabic writers and poets, although it cannot be considered a psychologically productive process used in everyday Arabic language.

In his paper, ‘Why there is no koiné in Sanʕaaʔ, Yemen’, Andrew Freeman concludes that no koiné currently exists in Sanʕaaʔ. Through an ethnographic analysis of the life-modes of migrant workers and their relationship to the permanent residents of the area, Freeman analyzes possible reasons there has not been a merging of speech varieties in this urban setting. He notes that, although there are at least two distinct dialect systems in use, these dialects remain distinct despite their continuous changes.

Michael Ingleby and Fatmah A. Baothman contribute two papers. In the first, ‘Empty nuclei in Arabic speech patterns and the diacritic sukuun’, they show that the sukuun nucleus, from the point of view of duration, is as phonetically stable as other segments. Associated with the manifestation of phonological activity, it deserves to be included in the vowel inventory of the language models needed for accurate automatic speech recognition and synthesis. In their second paper, ‘Representing coarticulation processes in Arabic speech’, Ingleby and Baothman focus on differences of directionality in nasal assimilation and pharyngeal spreading. They show that nasal assimilation in Arabic follows the same regressive pattern as in English although the spreading of pharyngealization from emphatic segments is bidirectional and nonlocal.

Salwa A. Kamel compares the basic word order of classical Arabic and English in ‘The textual component in Classical Arabic: Investigating information structure’. Kamel goes a step further from other modernist treatments of Abdul-qaahir Aljurjani’s (Dalaaʔil ʔal-Iʕjaaz, ed. by Mahmoud M. Shaker. Cairo: Matbaʕat Al-madani, 1992) model, using labels provided by M. A. K. Halliday (An introduction to functional grammar, London: Edward Arnold, 1994) to highlight similarities and differences between the ways in which information structure is coded in the two languages.

Ghada Khattab, Feda Al-Tamimi, and Barry Heselwood present ‘Acoustic and auditory differences in the /t/-/ṭ/ opposition in male and female speakers of Jordanian Arabic’. They offer some speculative remarks and discussion of the articulatory exponents of emphasis as an issue in the sociophonetics of Arabic.

The final paper, ‘Pharyngealization effects in Maltese Arabic’, by Mary Ann Walter, describes the behavior of the historical emphatics in a Maltese dialect of Arabic that has lost the consonantal contrast between emphatic and nonemphatic (i.e. pharyngealized) segments. Results show the presence of a guttural dissimilation process similar to that found in South Palestinian Arabic. This suggests a fruitful area for future research.

Reviewed by Chentir Amina, Université de Provence, France

This volume includes twelve papers presented at the Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics held in Alexandria, Egypt in May 2003 and at the University of Oklahoma in March 2004.

In the first paper, John J. McCarthy argues that together, the richness of the base (ROTB) and optimality theory are able to resolve the indeterminacy of the underlying ‘Length of stem-final vowels in colloquial Arabic’. McCarthy shows that controversy over the length of Arabic final vowels disappears once the phenomena are examined from the perspective of ROTB and a typologically responsible set of linguistic constraints.

Abdessatar Mahfoudhi, ‘Moraic syllable structure and edge effects in Arabic’, studies the variation of moraic syllable structure, with a focus on edge-related syllables in Cairene, Makkan, and Tunisian dialects of Arabic. Mahfoudhi adopts a modified version of remote-licensing with a direct attachment of all edge-related consonants to the syllable in Arabic. This allows an array of alignments constraints to be dispensed with.

Khaled Rifaat presents a preliminary description of the intonation of Modern Standard Arabic in ‘The structure of Arabic intonation: A preliminary investigation’. To emphasize its structural simplicity, Rifaat provides a description of the basic elements and rules of the complete intonational sentence and concludes with a call for more work on different styles of Arabic to verify this generalization about the simplicity of Arabic intonation.

In ‘Phonological processes in connected speech in Colloquial Egyptian Arabic’, Hanaa Salem focuses on the description of between-word processes in Colloquial Egyptian Arabic. Salem shows that a number of processes, such as elision, shortening, germination, and assimilation apply with different frequencies of occurrence.

Lazhar Zanned deals with polysemy in ‘Root formation and polysemic organization in Arabic lexicon: A probabilistic model’. Using a probabilistic model that focuses on polysemy, morphology, and the different devices working to minimize the phenomenon of polysemy, Zanned argues that the rules governing root formation generate polysemy in an unavoidable way.

In ‘Light verbs in Standard and Egyptian Arabic’, Amr Helmy Ibrahim provides a review of modern and traditional Arabic linguistic analyses of the distribution of verbal and nominal predicates. He discusses the semantic and pragmatic interpretations of constructions that use or do not use light verbs. Ibrahim also shows that the lexical origins of light verbs vary crosslinguistically.

Mustafa A. Mughazy, ‘Rethinking lexical aspect in Egyptian Arabic’, argues for four aspectual classes of verbs in Egyptian Arabic: statives, achievements, activities, and accomplishments. He presents a series of morphological and syntactic diagnostics that definitively specify the aspectual nature of any given verb.

In ‘Building a computational lexicon for Arabic: A corpus-based approach’, Sameh Al-Ansary discusses a corpus-based approach to Arabic that  depends on analyzing a set of authentic contemporary data (1500 entries), building the tools required for the analysis tasks, and then extracting lexical entries in the required formalism.

In ‘Political transition, linguistic shift: How a political communiqué (bayaan) has come to be what it is’, Naima Boussofara-Omar claims that the process by which linguistic choices and valuations are made—and in which language ideologies are produced—in political speeches is as important as their context. For example, the author concludes that in political speeches in Tunisia, authority will not accrue to fuṣħaa (i.e. Standard Arabic) users unless they obey its grammatical rules and pragmatic appropriateness.

Heidi Lorimor considers semantic agreement effects in Arabic in ‘Agreement alternations: How optional patterns of agreement arise’. She examines data from Arabic first conjunct agreement to show that these postverbal agreement alternations are not consistent with the patterns explained by a psycholinguistic model of national agreement.

In ‘Acquisition of Arabic word formation: A multi-path approach’, Fatima Badry investigates cognitive and typological predispositions employed in the development of lexical derivational processes by Moroccan Arabic speaking children. Badry shows that the root is a real mental construct and that the road to lexical derivation involves multiple paths.

In the final paper, ‘L2 acquisition of Arabic morphosyntactic features: Temporary or permanent impairment?’, Mohammad T. Alhawary discusses the status of Universal Grammar access and the nature of second language competence—or ultimate attainment—in adult monolingual English and French speakers learning Arabic as a second language. He concludes that the evidence supports a modified temporary impairment view.

Reviewed by Anastassia Zabrodskaja, Tallinn University

This volume consists of twelve papers that are dedicated to a crosslinguistic study of pragmatic particles. Among the wide range of languages studied are English, Norwegian, Dutch, German, Swedish, Spanish, and French.

Focusing on epistemic markers I think, obviously, and of course, Peter White and Motoki Sano (‘Dialogistic positions and anticipated audiences a framework for stylistic comparisons’) investigate the variability in how speakers and writers position themselves intersubjectively with respect to both other speakers and potential respondents. Aspectual particles equivalent to English already, not yet, still, and not anymore are analyzed by Willy Vandeweghe (‘Aspectual particles in some European languages’). The question of whether other languages have primary contrastive discourse markers equivalent to English but and, if so, whether these markers pattern similarly to but is raised by Bruce Fraser in ‘On the universality of discourse markers’.

The translation of the enigmatic well is addressed by Stig Johansson in ‘How well can well be translated? On the English discourse particle well and its correspondences in Norwegian and German’. Johansson uses the English-Norwegian Parallel Corpus (ENPC) and the Oslo Multilingual Corpus to investigate how well is rendered in Norwegian and German translations and which Norwegian forms give rise to well in translations into English. Also using the ENPC, Hilde Hasselgård (‘“Not now”: On non-correspondence between the cognate adverbs now and na’) notes that this time adverb has developed different discourse functions in the two languages: although now functions primarily as a textual marker (i.e. continuative) in English, na is an interpersonal, modal particle in Norwegian. Following a functional approach, Ad Foolen’s case study on Dutch toch and German doch distinguishes different uses of these particles and contrasts their polysemy patterns (‘Polysemy patterns in contrast: The case of Dutch toch and German doch’).

Using a bidirectional English-Swedish translation corpus, Bengt Altenberg (‘The function of adverbial connectors in second initial position in English and Swedish’) shows that in English and Swedish additive connectors have a strong tendency to be placed initially, whereas second position is most characteristic of contrastive and exemplifying connectors. The role of verbs as pragmatic particles in Solv, a dialect of Swedish, is explored by Jan-Ola Östman (‘Constructions in crosslanguage research: Verbs as pragmatic particles in Solv’). Using the framework of construction grammar, Östman argues for a view of pragmatic particles as constructions and elucidates the functions of particles and, in particular, the function of question particles in Solv.

Comparing English and French adversative relational pragmatic markers, Diana Lewis (‘Contrastive analysis of adversative relational markers, using comparable corpora’) proposes four language-independent parameters for marker choice constraints: (i) the nature of the adversativity, (ii) the status, (iii) the organization of the flow information, and (iv) the relative salience of successive segments. Dominique Willems and Annemie Demol (‘Vraiment and really in contrast: When truth and reality meet’) describe the multiple uses of the French particle vraiment in monolingual spoken and written French and in contrast with English really.

Using data from the British National Corpus, Angela Downing (‘The English pragmatic marker surely and its functional counterparts in Spanish’) concludes that there is no single counterpart to surely in all its nuances in Peninsular Spanish. Finally, Anna-Brita Stenström’s study is dedicated to ‘The Spanish discourse markers: O sea and pues and their English correspondences’

This volume stands out as a valuable and insightful contribution to our understanding of the intricate nature of comparing pragmatic markers and how these markers are typologically and contrastively encoded in European languages.

Reviewed by Jim Paul Wood, University of New Hampshire

Paul Portner describes his book as an informal introduction to formal semantics. He introduces students to the spirit of formal semantics without too many ‘funny symbols’ (1). The book includes nine chapters on various topics in semantics, two chapters on pragmatics (which P describes as intrinsically interwoven with semantics), and one chapter that describes the relationship of formal semantics to other fields. Ch. 1 opens with a few pages on the idea theory of meaning (i.e. that meanings are ideas) and explains why this is not how formal semanticists tend to think about meaning. P then discusses truth conditions and possible worlds and the difference between speaker meaning and semantic meaning.

Ch. 2 is about compositionality. P introduces predication and saturation using a series of informal Venn-like diagrams. In Ch. 3, P continues the discussion of predication with adjectives and transitive verbs. He introduces the notion of sets and even includes a bit of basic lambda calculus.

In Ch. 4, P discusses modifiers such as adjectives, relative clauses, and adverbs. This chapter builds off of the previous discussion of predicative adjectives, comparing them with attributive adjectives. Ch. 5 focuses on reference, introducing definiteness and ways in which semanticists have dealt with the problem of referring expressions. P then moves to a discussion of plural and mass nouns and closes with pronouns and anaphora.

Ch. 6 explores quantifiers. Again, Venn diagrams are used to describe how quantifiers refer, and P discusses whether quantifiers should be thought of as predicates or as arguments. He also includes a simple, yet insightful, discussion on the licensing of negative polarity items. Ch. 7 is a short (five page) discussion of intensional versus extensional contexts.

Ch. 8 investigates tense, aspect, and modality. P first addresses whether English has a three-way past/present/future system or a two-way past/nonpast system and then continues to give more detailed discussions of tense. In the section on aspect, P demonstrates the sometimes muddy distinction between present/past and progressive/perfect. He closes with a section on modals and possible worlds, which includes a lively discussion of deontic and epistemic modality.

Ch. 9 is the last chapter with a primarily semantic focus. Its topic of propositional attitudes makes for a nice segue into the chapters on pragmatics. Here P discusses belief worlds and how to characterize the truth-values of a person’s beliefs.

Chs. 10 and 11 focus on pragmatics, the former on what a hearer knows (or needs to know) before hearing a proposition (i.e. presuppositions) and the latter on what can be inferred after hearing a proposition. Ch. 12 closes the book with an overview of the field and a description of various theoretical perspectives.

The book is colloquially written and sometimes downright amusing (without ever being distracting). It will be useful to undergraduates and early graduate students, although the fact that it is intentionally informal will probably make it supplemental for more advanced students. P describes the book as ‘something like a walk along the beach with a marine biologist’ (206) and to this end has created an interesting, informative, and entertaining text.

Reviewed by Benji Wald, Los Angeles, CA

This weighty volume is the English translation of a Russian text published following a language typology workshop held at the St. Petersburg Institute of Linguistic Research in the late 1990s. The translation is completely fluent and unobtrusive, disregarding a few uses unusual in English—for example, taxis for ‘clause sequence’ and peripheral for ‘marginal’. The book begins with a preface (vii–x) and two chapters by the editor, Victor Xrakovskij: Ch. 1 ‘Conditional constructions: A theoretical description (meaning, calculus, typology)’ (3–95) and Ch. 2 ‘A questionnaire on conditional constructions’ (96–125).

The numerous issues introduced by Xrakovskij are wide-ranging. He notes that in certain contexts in some languages, conditionals can be expressed by nonprototypical devices—for example, give and you shall receive in addition to if you give you shall receive. Additionally, Xrakovskij describes other uses of constructions prototypically used for conditionals, typically if– and when(ever)-clauses (i.e. conditional and temporal clauses). These forms can also be used in nonassertives (e.g. if you want to make a call, the phone is in the next room) or presumptives (e.g. if she was strict she was also fair), in which the if-clause is understood to be unconditionally true.

Languages of typological importance are mentioned in Part 1—for example, Classical Arabic, in which hypothetical and counterfactual conditions are distinguished by the conjunctions used (72–73). The typological survey of conditional constructions (CCs) in individual languages begins in Part 2, which consists of two sections. Section 1, ‘Languages in which the prototypical conditional construction is the complex sentence’ (129–524), contains eighteen chapters that each survey a different language, including Bulgarian, Armenian, Dari, Hindi, Homeric Greek, Early Latin, French, German, English, Finnish, Estonian, Hungarian, Hausa, Klamath, Indonesian, Cambodian, Vietnamese, and Chinese.

Section 2 of Part 2, ‘Languages with CCs including non-finite protasis’ (525–655), covers six languages: Even, Evenki, Asiatic Eskimo, Aleut, Yukaghir, and Japanese. The major focus of Section 2 is how temporal sequencing is accomplished or interpreted in languages in which only the main clause has an explicit time orientation. Finally, the book ends with a section of references (657–73), and indexes of authors (674–76), languages and dialects (677–78), and subjects (679–701).

Most languages are richly exemplified and statistics on textual frequency are often included. Individual examples usually consist of triplet lines that display the original language, a morpheme gloss, and a translation. This is also provided for the translations of the original Russian examples, which are abundant in Part 1. However, no doubt following the original Russian text, knowledge of French and German in addition to English, are assumed without gloss or translation.

As expected of a book of this size, it contains a wealth of information. The indexes make much of this information easy to locate. There is a great deal to consider in this volume, and a careful reading will reveal the points contributors generally accept and the issues where contention lies.