Syntactic effects of morphological change. Ed. by David W. Lightfoot. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. 448. ISBN 0199250693. $134.99.

Reviewed by Claire Bowern, Yale University

This collection of twenty-one papers originated in the sixth Diachronic Generative Syntax Meeting (DIGS VI) at the University of Maryland in 2000. The volume’s theme is the consequences that changes in morphology may force in syntax, and there is a particular focus on the role of the loss of morphological marking in reanalysis. Most (but not all) of the papers assume a model of generative diachronic syntax in which change results obtain in acquisition when a child makes a different set of generalizations (and consequently sets its parameters slightly differently) from their parents. The introduction to the volume is cast in principles-and-parameters (cf. ‘[g]rammars differ sharply: a person either has a grammar with a certain property, or not’ (2)) and assumes that the only important locus of syntactic change is child language acquisition (and not, for example, adult grammar change). The papers employ several different models, although most papers are written within the minimalist framework.

An overarching question of whether changes in morphology drive changes in syntax, or whether the relationship is indirect. What evidence does morphology provide for learners acquiring syntax? Can syntactic changes be triggered simply by a change in morphological distribution? Is this the only way that syntactic change occurs? Do we ever find evidence for syntactic change instead driving morphological change?

The answers presented in this volume are mixed. Some of the papers highlight the problem of assigning a single underlying cause to a particular set of linguistic changes. Cynthia Allen, for example, argues that the trigger for the rise of combined adpositional genitives in Middle English is the loss of case marking and a more general relaxation of morphological blocking. Željko Bošković, in his commentary on Allen’s paper, asks what a principle such as the relaxation on constraints of morphological blocking means, and argues that such a principle does not have any place in the minimalist program. It remains to be seen, however, what place the minimalist program has in theories of language change (a question raised only indirectly in this volume).

The papers in this volume are grouped into four different parts. Part 1 concerns morphologically driven syntactic changes in languages such as English, Portuguese, Old Japanese, and Icelandic. Ian Roberts and Anna Roussou, for example, examine three cases of grammaticalization and argue that there is a correlation between the grammaticalization clines familiar from the functional linguistics literature and Guglielmo Cinque’s universal hierarchy of functional categories.

In Part 2, two papers discuss indirect links between morphology and syntax, using data from the history of Welsh and Portuguese. The six papers in Part 3 are all concerned with movement operations in various Germanic languages. Finally, there are two papers in Part 4 dealing with computer simulations.

This is a varied volume and many will find points of interest. I suspect that this volume will be of more use to theoreticians studying the relationships between morphology and syntax than to diachronic linguists.

What is thought? By Eric Baum. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. Pp. 495. ISBN 0262025485. $45 (Hb).

Reviewed by Chaoqun Xie, Fujian Normal University

What is the mind? How does the mind work? The ‘mind’ question is one of complexity and difficulty, and scholars make continued efforts to find answers to it. Although there are different approaches to this question from different perspectives, there appears to be one thing in common, that is, the mind is often talked about metaphorically (see e.g. The literary mind, by Mark Turner (Oxford University Press, 1996) and The algebraic mind by Gary F. Marcus (MIT Press, 2001)). What is thought? also talks about the mind metaphorically, but in this case, the mind is thought of as a computer program. In this work, Eric Baum, a computer scientist, aims to draw ‘the most straightforward, simplest picture of mind’ (2).

What is thought?, which is patterned after Erwin Schrödinger’s What is life? (Cambridge University Press, 1944), contains fifteen chapters. In Ch. 1, the introduction, B points out that the whole book can be summed up in a single sentence, namely, ‘Semantics is equivalent to capturing and exploiting the compact structure of the world, and thought is all about semantics’ (3). Or, to put it more succinctly, the mind is nothing but a program. The remaining fourteen chapters are devoted to the justification of this underlying theme, which, as B confidently claims, ‘explains everything, and does so economically’ (31). The chapters are as follows: ‘The mind is a computer program’, ‘The Turing test, the Chinese room, and what computers can’t do’, ‘Occam’s razor and understanding’, ‘Optimization’, ‘Remarks on Occam’s razor’, ‘Reinforcement learning’, ‘Exploiting structure’, ‘Modules and metaphors’, ‘Evolutionary programming’, ‘Intractability’, ‘The evolution of learning’, ‘Language and the evolution of thought’, and ‘The evolution of consciousness’.

To justify the central premise of the book, B draws upon, among other things, recent developments in artificial intelligence and neural networks, thinking highly of and attaching great importance to the modularity of mind and Occam’s razor. He argues, among other things, that ‘life is the execution of the DNA program’ (7), that ‘the mind is an evolved program that exploits the compact underlying structure of the world’ (14), and that Occam’s razor ‘is the basis of mind itself’ (8). For B, ‘our minds do vast computations of which we are not consciously aware’ (408).

All in all, this is an exciting book simply because it provides an exciting answer to an exciting question. The picture of mind as drawn by B is largely informative, impressive, and persuasive, and would surely contribute to human understanding of how the mind works. Students of artificial intelligence, linguistics, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and psychology would find this title intriguing, thrilling, and encouraging. In fact, anyone intending to know more about the nature of thought should not miss this book.

I have some additional comments. First, it seems to me that the ‘most straightforward, simplest picture of mind’ does not necessarily entail that it is the most true-to-life picture; an easy and exciting answer is not necessarily equal to a correct answer. Second, B subscribes to the prescription of Occam’s razor that ‘given any set of facts, the simplest explanation is the best’ (8). In fact, the simplest is not necessarily the best because, for it to be the best, it should first and foremost be correct. Who decides the correctness of the simplest? Which is correct, and which is not? The modularity hypothesis is not without problems either. Third, any book on the human mind is destined to be at once thought-provoking and controversial. This book is no exception, and that may in part explain why B is ‘confident that the picture herein will not convince all readers’ (2).

Weeds in the garden of words: Further observations on the tangled history of the English language. By Kate Burridge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. vii, 196. ISBN 9780521618236. $19.99.

Reviewed by Colette van Kerckvoorde, Simon’s Rock College

The English language is a garden with beautiful flowers, but some claim that our language, especially in its spoken form, also contains a lot of weeds, that is, unwanted elements. It is difficult to define what weeds exactly are: they grow in unwanted places, and they may own virtues that are yet to be discovered. These linguistic weeds, Burridge argues, are a sign that the English language is alive and well, and she attempts to explain why some of these weeds flourish while others eventually wither, why certain features become irritating to some speakers, and why we all react differently to innovations in the language.

This book is the sequel to B’s popular Blooming English: Weeds in the garden of words. Just like its predecessor, it is a collection of numerous individual pieces that can be read in any order. Since the pieces were originally designed to be read out loud on the radio, they are informal and popular. There are no footnotes or endnotes, although there is a bibliography at the end of the book.

Linguistic weeds can be found in our vocabulary, in our grammar, and in our spelling and pronunciation. Grammatical weeds seem to irritate people most. For each of the three categories listed above, B describes several specific and commonly held opinions about correct versus incorrect usage of the language, and she explains that such ‘deviant’ use may eventually become part of the standard language in the future or that it may just die out and be no more than a temporary fad. She stresses, again and again, that several features of our language now considered standard were once frowned upon. Finally, she also draws attention to the emergence of reference works and their perceived authority among the general public, as well as to the prestige of the written language. To give just a few examples of some of the topics under discussion: among the lexical weeds there is a discussion of the current yeah-no forms, the influence of political correctness on our speech, and the difference between disinterested and uninterested. Among the grammatical weeds we find a discussion of the passive voice and its alleged abuse, the group genitive, and the agreement of the verb with collective nouns. Pronunciation and spelling weeds include the question of hyphenation, and dropping a d in Wednesday or an r in February.

B’s book is entertaining, and it contains a lot of interesting anecdotes and trivia about individual words and their history. B convinces the reader that the English language is constantly changing and demonstrates that linguistic change matters to the general population. She emphasizes that linguists refrain from judging use and favor a descriptive approach. This book is easy to read and explains the history of many exceptions in the English language. It is written with language purists in mind; as such, it would be a wonderful addition for any public library and should receive popular approval.

Medical interpreting and cross-cultural communication. By Claudia V. Angelelli. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xiii, 153. ISBN 9780521066778. $36.99.

Reviewed by Colette van Kerckvoorde, Simon’s Rock College

Given the increase in the number of recent immigrants, many hospitals in the United States are faced with new challenges, since patients and their caregivers often do not share the same language. While smaller communities usually rely on relatives or friends to help out, it is clear that such ad hoc solutions are not optimal. In larger hospitals, medical interpreters are employed, and the need for such professionals is rapidly growing. In this book, Angelelli focuses on the role of the medical interpreter and examines whether the prescribed rules and codes for these professionals are realistic.

Medical interpreters are typically part of a private interaction between two people in hierarchically different positions. During such an encounter the caregiver must try to understand the symptoms and attempt to facilitate the patient’s expression of thoughts, feelings, and expectations. The official role of the medical interpreter is one of neutrality and invisibility: the interpreter supposedly does nothing beyond decoding and encoding parts of the conversation. While such an expectation of the interpreter may be quite appropriate and feasible in a court setting or in a business interaction, it does not make much sense to expect the same in the field of medical interpreting, A claims. Over a period of two years, A followed, observed, and worked with a team of medical interpreters in a California hospital in order to determine what role the interpreter plays in an interpreted communicative event (ICE). Her study included both face-to-face interactions and conversations over the speakerphone.

Her findings clearly challenge the notion that invisibility and neutrality are attainable. In fact, the interpreter is much more than a mere language-switching operator. A describes medical interpreting as a communicative act in which interpreters frequently create and own text, and thus are not invisible. She examines what triggers the interpreters’ participation in the interaction between patient and the caregiver and concludes that there is a visibility continuum: minor visibility usually happens during the highly ritualized openings and the closings of an ICE, where interpreters may modify or direct the conversation so that it conforms to the norm of the patient’s culture. Various levels of visibility may occur during the actual medical exchange: interpreters exercise agency to achieve the communicative goals of both parties involved, they may expand the renditions of the patient and/or the caregiver by producing texts that they own, and they frequently include some cultural brokering. They also orchestrate moves and coordinate information-based relations between the speakers.

This book does not require any linguistic background and is written primarily with health-care professionals, communication specialists, and students of interpreting in mind. It offers a good glimpse into the daily life of medical interpreters and stresses that medical ICEs occur within institutions that are permeable to the mandates of society, that each party brings his or her own social factors to the encounter, and that the interpreter must consider these social factors while processing information between languages and cultures.

Linguistics in the Netherlands 2005. Ed. by Jenny Doetjes and Jeroen van de Weijer. (AVT publications 56.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2005. Pp. viii, 242. ISBN 9027231656. $143.

Reviewed by Taras Shmiher, Ivan Franko National University

This volume contains a selection of papers presented at the thirty-sixth annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of the Netherlands, which took place in Utrecht on January 29, 2005. Its aim is to present an overview of research in different fields of linguistics in the Netherlands.

The Dutch language is researched from the perspectives of grammar, second language acquisition, and dialectology. Renée van Bezooijen and Charlotte Gooskens (13–24) study Dutch speakers’ abilities to understand Frisian and Afrikaans, and determine that they have fewer problems understanding Afrikaans than Frisian. Yuki Niioka, Johanneke Caspers, and Vincent J. van Heuven (139–50) prove how inverted sentences with or without question intonation influence the perception of interrogativity in Japanese speakers of Dutch as a second language. In their paper on Dutch and Sign Language of the Netherlands, Liesbeth de Clerck and Els van der Kooij (61–72) discuss the properties of the adverbial exclusive zelf and deduce that it is a twofold category composed of modifiable and real intensifier subclasses.

In the study of subject-object ambiguities in spoken and written Dutch (99–109), Frank Jansen states that the avoidance of ambiguous structures frustrates the operation of the left-right principle in writing. In the same vein, E. G. Ruys (151–63) explores analytical tools for determining prepositional complements in the Dutch middlefield.

Developing methods of dialectal analysis, Marco René Spruit (179–90) applies a quantitative measure of syntactic distance for classifying Dutch dialects. Norbert Corver and Marc van Oostendorp (73–86) examine the interplay between syntax and phonology in the formation of substantively used possessive pronouns in the Groningen and Low Saxon dialects.

In the English-language domain, Hans Broekhuis (49–60) suggests a novel view on English locative inversion and investigates some consequences for English and Dutch grammars. Jutta M. Hartmann (87–98) argues for taking wh-movement in the there-BE construction as syntactically unconstrained. From the theoretical perspective, Mark de Vries (219–30) briefly explores the properties and boundary conditions of the syntactic operation Merge.

Historical linguistics is represented by Mircea Branza and Vincent J. van Heuven (25–36), who temporally locate in the sixteenth century the critical stage in the differentiation between American Spanish subjuntivo imperfecto forms in -se and -ra. Anne Breitbarth’s paper (37–47) deals with the auxiliary ellipses that developed as a formal marker of subordination in Early Modern German (1350–1650).

Irene Krämer (111–23) explains how children at the relevant ages distinguish between two classes—‘strong’ and ‘weak’—of determiner quantifiers. Though conducted in the realm of pragmatics, this research may extend to involve cognitive development, that is, theory of mind or perspective shifting.

Louise Baird (1–12) investigates the eastern Indonesian Klon-language ‘agentive’ system of pronominal marking and identifies two types of ‘splits’. Peter de Swart (191–202) focuses on the ungrammaticality of some active constructions (‘paradigm gaps’) and the resulting obligatory voice alternation in the Coast Salish languages (the Northwest coast of North America). Craig Thiersch (203–18) summarizes Malagasy syntax and the remnant-movement approach and gives three sample problems that this analysis can explain. Jan-Wouter Zwart (231–42) surveys the phenomenon of noun phrase coordination in head-final languages that overwhelmingly employ initial conjunctions.

Jie Liang and Vincent J. van Heuven’s article (125–37) about the phonetic and phonological processing of pitch levels disproves the claim that it is only time pressure that affects the identification pattern of Chinese aphasic speakers. Raquel S. Santos and Ester M. Scarpa (165–78) discuss the acquisition of articles and the phonological bootstrapping of the same into Brazilian Portuguese.

The Celtic roots of English. Ed. by Markku Filppula, Juhani Klemola, and Heli Pitkänen. (Studies in languages 37.) Joensuu: University of Joensuu, Faculty of Humanities, 2002. Pp. xii, 330. ISBN 9524581647. €22.

Reviewed by David Stifter, University of Vienna

Whereas recent influence exerted by the vernacular Celtic languages on the local varieties of English in Wales, Ireland, and Scotland is a well-known fact, the influence of Celtic languages on the development of the early stages of English in England itself has been widely ignored or even positively denied. The received view, reiterated in influential textbooks throughout the twentieth century (1–5), holds that the invading Germanic tribes either drove out or massacred the previous inhabitants or put the earlier population in a subjugated position where—despite 1,500 years of coexistence on the British Isles—they were able to leave only a minimal amount of influence on English phonology, syntax, and lexis. Only a small number of place names is supposed to have not been taken over by the new ‘masters’. This textbook view goes against what modern contact research has taught us to expect. Languages in coexistence for such a long time normally give rise to various effects of mutual influence (Sarah Grey Thomason & Terrence Kaufmann, Language contact, creolization, and genetic linguistics, University of California Press, 1988).

The study of Insular Celtic substratum influence on the grammar, especially the syntax, of English has therefore received relatively little attention; it says something about the attitude prevalent among scholars in the Anglo-Saxon world that the main advances in the last several years have been made through the initiative of people from Germany (notably Hildegard L. C. Tristram) and Finland. In August 2001, in Mekrijärvi, Finland, a colloquium on ‘Early contacts between English and the Celtic languages’ was held to reassess and to challenge the orthodox view from historical and linguistic perspectives. Fourteen contributions to this colloquium are assembled in the present volume. The highly informative ‘Introduction’ (1–26) by the editors provides an account of the history and current state of research on ‘Early contacts between English and the Celtic languages’, together with an extensive bibliography. The editors believe ‘that the Anglo-Saxon–Celtic contact situation must have been a case of language shift of the type which involves a large shifting group, and is further characterised by a relatively rapid process of shift and imperfect learning of the target language’ (7).

The other contributions are divided into four parts: Part 1 is devoted to ‘The earliest Anglo-Saxon/British contacts: Historical and linguistic perspectives’. Richard Coates, in ‘The significances of Celtic place-names in England’ (47–86), offers the first comprehensive list, supplemented by distribution maps, for all reasonably claimed examples of Celtic place names in England. Peter Schrijver’s ‘The rise and fall of British Latin: Evidence from English and Brittonic’ (87–110) is an important contribution to the history of the formation of the British languages. Contrary to received scholarship, Schrijver argues that Brittonic was exposed to an ‘extremely heavy Latin substratum influence … which transformed its phonemic and phonetic structure’. He argues that British sound changes went parallel with developments in Vulgar Latin/Romance in Britain. Hildegard L. C. Tristram, in ‘Attrition of inflections in English and Welsh’ (111–49), suggests a multicausal model involving internal factors and drift, but also contact-induced shift between superstrate speakers of Anglo-Saxon and substrate speakers of British to explain the change of English from a language of the synthetic type to an analytic one. Finally, Nicholas Higham discusses ‘The Anglo-Saxon/British interface: History and ideology’ (29–46).

Part 2 is entitled ‘Linguistic outcomes of Medieval and Early Modern contacts’. Against the traditional view that the English (especially Old English) lexicon contains only a handful of loans from Celtic languages, Andrew Breeze, in ‘Seven types of Celtic loanword [sic]’ (175–82), adduces a considerable list of possible examples. His contribution is a survey of the research undertaken mainly by himself (sixty-six out of the seventy-two entries in the reference list are his own!); some of the examples, however, would merit a critical reevaluation. Other chapters include: David L. White, ‘Explaining the innovations of Middle English: What, where, and why’ (153–74); Stephen Laker, ‘An explanation for the changes kw-, hw– > χw in the English dialects’ (183–98); and Juhani Klemola, ‘Periphrastic DO: Dialectal distribution and origins’ (199–210).

Part 3 is devoted to ‘The early Irish input’. Anders Ahlqvist, in ‘Cleft sentences in Irish and other languages’ (271–81), outlines the development of cleft sentences in the history of Irish (‘an obligatory part of the grammar’ of VSO languages (280)) and compares it typologically and contrastively to similar constructions in other languages. Part 3 also includes chapters by Patricia Ronan (‘Subordinating ocus “and” in Old Irish’, 213–36) and Erich Poppe (‘The “expanded form” in Insular Celtic and English: Some historical and comparative considerations, with special emphasis on Middle Irish’, 237–70).

The last part, but chronologically earliest in scope, is ‘Pre-historical linguistics’. Theo Vennemann, in ‘Semitic → Celtic → English: The transitivity of language contact’ (295–330), attempts to demonstrate on typological grounds that certain peculiar features of Irish English ultimately reflect substrate and superstrate influence from ‘Semitidic languages’ spoken in prehistory in parts of Europe and the British Isles. The article contains an appendix that lists the sixty-four Hamito-Semitic linguistic features claimed for Irish by Julius Pokorny in the 1920s (324–26). Part 4 is rounded out by Kalevi Wiik’s ‘On the origins of the Celts’ (285–94).

Reviewed by Rachel Stauffer, University of Virginia

In her introduction, Martha Tennent states: ‘Translation . . . does not occupy a neutral space. It is much more than a mere cross-cultural exchange, and the task of training aspiring translators/interpreters requires new directions, as well as revisions of traditional notions concerning their roles’ (xxiv). This statement and the essays within this volume are the result of a conference known as the Vic Forum, held in Spain in 1999 at the University of Vic. The conference was attended by linguists and scholars in cultural studies, and Tennent claims that the collaboration of professionals in the two disciplines directly contributed to the creation of the present volume, a collection of papers that deal specifically with the problems of effectively training translators and interpreters to achieve cultural as well as linguistic accuracy. In recent years the field of translation and interpretation has gained in popularity and focus, and this publication seeks to continue that trend as well as to improve the state of the field by exploring strategies that better prepare and train the world’s translators.

The book is arranged into three major subject areas: training programs (sixty-three pages), pedagogy (110 pages), and theory (seventy-one pages). Part 1 on training programs contains two papers: ‘Training translators: Programmes, curricula, practices’ by Margherita Ulrych, and ‘Training interpreters: Programmes, curricula, practices’ by Helge Niska. As both titles suggest, these articles attempt to characterize the current state of existing vocational, undergraduate, and postgraduate curricula in the field. Part 2, ‘Pedagogical strategies’, contains five chapters and is the most substantial of the three. ‘Minding the process, improving the product’, by María González Davies, offers innovative and contemporary methods designed to enhance traditional pedagogy in the field, with special emphasis on experiential and task-based learning. Technology integration is addressed in Francesca Bartrina and Eva Espasa’s ‘Audiovisual translation’, which suggests strategies for the teaching of dubbing, subtitling, and multimedia translation, as well as in Richard Samson’s ‘Computer-assisted translation’. Teaching methods for simultaneous translation and interpretation appear in Daniel Gile’s ‘Teaching conference interpreting’ and in Ann Corsellis’s ‘Training interpreters to work in the public services’. In Part 3, ‘The relevance of theory to training’, on theory, Francesca Bartrina’s ‘Theory and translator training’ stresses the need for a theoretical foundation in training programs. Andrew Chesterman’s ‘Causality in translator training’ presents a scientific approach to the field by offering an empirical model of translation. Christiane Nord’s ‘Training functional translators’ emphasizes the importance of teaching translators to be interculturally competent, and Rosemary Arrojo’s ‘The ethics of translation’ recommends that instructors call attention to the responsibility of the translator to strive for accuracy as the sole means of cross-cultural and interlingual communication.

The volume’s epilogue contains Michael Cronin’s ‘Deschooling translation: Beginning of century reflections on teaching translation and interpretation’. This final part appropriately highlights the influence of technology that continues to impact the function of human translators. It is a fitting conclusion to the articles within this book as it serves to facilitate the discourse in all areas of this significant field.

Reviewed by Marián Sloboda, Charles University

Jan Blommaert is a professor of African linguistics and sociolinguistics in Belgium, whose Belgian and African life experience seems to have provided him with uncommon sensitivity to issues not only of social inequality, globalization, and migration of people but also of discourses and ways of speaking, and their effects. His view of discourse and its critical analysis differs in some respects from that of the well-established critical discourse analysis (CDA). He shares objects of interest with CDA, particularly power, social system, ideology, and identity, but he also provides a critique of several aspects of that stream of research (Ch. 2). His book is, therefore, not an introduction to CDA.

B does not aim at a mere description or overview of approaches to discourse and its critical analysis. In the course of the book he gradually develops his own approach, drawing especially on linguistic anthropology, sociolinguistics, and leftist or critical philosophy. He conceptualizes discourse widely as a social, rather than a narrowly linguistic, phenomenon (the meaning of the word ‘discourse’ is not confined to a mere linguistic object here). This is connected with his intention not only to design a critical approach to discourse for (socio)linguists, but also to provide an approach, a discourse, that could be shared with sociologists, historians, and other social scientists.

B discusses the most common topics of the critical analysis of discourse, but some marginal topics, such as the relationship between identity and space, are included as well. The book covers the following topics: ‘Text and context’ (Ch. 3), ‘Language and inequality’ (Ch. 4), ‘Choice and determination’ (for participants in discourse production and uptake) (Ch. 5), ‘History and process’ (Ch. 6), ‘Ideology’ (Ch. 7), and ‘Identity’ (Ch. 8). With every topic B (re)considers an eclectic set of concepts that can be useful in a critical analysis of discourse (the book includes also a glossary of sixty of them).

B’s approach is characterized by emphasis on the historicity of discourses, on simultaneous and patterned layering of historical and ideological positions, which emanate from different actors to which people orient (‘centering institutions’) and historical epochs, but are present in discourse synchronically. Without denying a certain amount of free choice in discourse production and uptake, B underscores the existence of prediscourse constraints imposed on people in communication and the determining role of the discourses produced. Therefore, according to him, ‘a critical analysis of discourse needs to begin long before discourse emerges as a linguistically articulated object, and it needs to continue long after the act of production’ (234). As the author shows, social inequality stems from such prediscourse conditions as differential access of people to semiotic resources for making oneself understood or from new ways of communication in the globalized world, where discourses and semiotic resources migrate to other contexts and, therefore, the functions they (can) perform often radically change, and so on.

Theoretical explications in B’s book are supported by illuminating and interesting examples of data analyses, which include, for example, an extract from a South African radio program, a contribution to an internet discussion on the last war in Iraq, and documents written by African asylum seekers in Belgium. In addition, every chapter ends with suggestions for further reading. The book is very well organized and its style makes it highly readable. It is a ‘noncompendial’ type of introductory text with an appreciable impression of an inventive author.

Reviewed by Taras Shmiher, Ivan Franko National University

This book is a concise and user-friendly account of Modern Arabic. Keeping theory to a minimum, it is intended for students at various levels as well as for scholars in language studies. It may even be of use to those Arabs who have grown up in English-speaking environments. Designed more like a reference work than a textbook, this volume dispenses with the numerous drills and exercises so useful for students looking to master the practical elements of a foreign language. The book’s structure, however, is well suited for serving less introductory aims; scholars looking to undertake common revision tasks, for example, will find the book very useful, and its grammar tables exhaustively cover all cases of word formations and locations.

The grammar is based on the type of Modern Arabic used in contemporary professional practice, in newspapers, magazines, official and business communication, and on the internet, though Classical Arabic, still popular, is represented in this volume by quotations from the Koran and ancient belles-lettres. The Arabic dialects are not treated in this volume, a decision surely motivated by the level of complexity of such a pursuit and the inherent challenge of mastering dialects for second language students.

All of the apparati are written in two languages simultaneously, English and Arabic. This approach helps to connect the grammar with the traditional Arabic system of writing grammar as well as obviating the need to present a Semitic language in the terminology of an English grammar. Though some questions could have more eloquent explications (e.g. is ‘masdar/ ﺃﻟﻣﺼﺪﺮ’ an infinitive or a verbal noun? (58)), the explanations the text provides are most often adequate.

The book consists of five parts and two indices. A short introductory section includes the author’s ‘Preface’ and ‘Notes for the user’, which introduces the abbreviations the book uses and outlines the principles governing transliteration. In ‘Letters, pronunciation, auxiliary signs, writing’, Arabic characters are accompanied by the most closely equivalent English sounds or are followed by phonetic comments. This section also develops principles of Arabic writing, stress, and root definition. The section ‘Verbs’ covers all types of verbs in terms of tense, mood, and voice. Semantic commentary on the derived forms is rather limited. The grammatical categories of nouns, participles, adjectives, pronouns, prepositions, and particles are illustrated in ‘Nouns’. ‘Syntax’ includes information about the use of articles, syntactic constructions, and sentence types, as well as a commentary on the uses of cardinal and ordinal numerals. The grouping of material about numbers alongside the other items that one would expect in a section called ‘Syntax’ reveals a feature of the Arabic linguistic tradition that is unusual, at least for the European reader. It is unlikely, however, to present a real challenge for a serious student to find the information s/he seeks. Additional data about time calculation, dates, and the Islamic calendar add a practical aspect to this reference book.

Two grammatical indices, of English and Arabic terms, help the reader to orient him/herself in this well-organized guide to the structure of Modern Standard Arabic.

Reviewed by Taras Shmiher, Ivan Franko National University

This volume contains a selection of papers presented at the thirty-sixth annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of the Netherlands, which took place in Utrecht on January 29, 2005. Its aim is to present an overview of research in different fields of linguistics in the Netherlands.

The Dutch language is researched from the perspectives of grammar, second language acquisition, and dialectology. Renée van Bezooijen and Charlotte Gooskens (13–24) study Dutch speakers’ abilities to understand Frisian and Afrikaans, and determine that they have fewer problems understanding Afrikaans than Frisian. Yuki Niioka, Johanneke Caspers, and Vincent J. van Heuven (139–50) prove how inverted sentences with or without question intonation influence the perception of interrogativity in Japanese speakers of Dutch as a second language. In their paper on Dutch and Sign Language of the Netherlands, Liesbeth de Clerck and Els van der Kooij (61–72) discuss the properties of the adverbial exclusive zelf and deduce that it is a twofold category composed of modifiable and real intensifier subclasses.

In the study of subject-object ambiguities in spoken and written Dutch (99–109), Frank Jansen states that the avoidance of ambiguous structures frustrates the operation of the left-right principle in writing. In the same vein, E. G. Ruys (151–63) explores analytical tools for determining prepositional complements in the Dutch middlefield.

Developing methods of dialectal analysis, Marco René Spruit (179–90) applies a quantitative measure of syntactic distance for classifying Dutch dialects. Norbert Corver and Marc van Oostendorp (73–86) examine the interplay between syntax and phonology in the formation of substantively used possessive pronouns in the Groningen and Low Saxon dialects.

In the English-language domain, Hans Broekhuis (49–60) suggests a novel view on English locative inversion and investigates some consequences for English and Dutch grammars. Jutta M. Hartmann (87–98) argues for taking wh-movement in the there-BE construction as syntactically unconstrained. From the theoretical perspective, Mark de Vries (219–30) briefly explores the properties and boundary conditions of the syntactic operation Merge.

Historical linguistics is represented by Mircea Branza and Vincent J. van Heuven (25–36), who temporally locate in the sixteenth century the critical stage in the differentiation between American Spanish subjuntivo imperfecto forms in -se and -ra. Anne Breitbarth’s paper (37–47) deals with the auxiliary ellipses that developed as a formal marker of subordination in Early Modern German (1350–1650).

Irene Krämer (111–23) explains how children at the relevant ages distinguish between two classes—‘strong’ and ‘weak’—of determiner quantifiers. Though conducted in the realm of pragmatics, this research may extend to involve cognitive development, that is, theory of mind or perspective shifting.

Louise Baird (1–12) investigates the eastern Indonesian Klon-language ‘agentive’ system of pronominal marking and identifies two types of ‘splits’. Peter de Swart (191–202) focuses on the ungrammaticality of some active constructions (‘paradigm gaps’) and the resulting obligatory voice alternation in the Coast Salish languages (the Northwest coast of North America). Craig Thiersch (203–18) summarizes Malagasy syntax and the remnant-movement approach and gives three sample problems that this analysis can explain. Jan-Wouter Zwart (231–42) surveys the phenomenon of noun phrase coordination in head-final languages that overwhelmingly employ initial conjunctions.

Jie Liang and Vincent J. van Heuven’s article (125–37) about the phonetic and phonological processing of pitch levels disproves the claim that it is only time pressure that affects the identification pattern of Chinese aphasic speakers. Raquel S. Santos and Ester M. Scarpa (165–78) discuss the acquisition of articles and the phonological bootstrapping of the same into Brazilian Portuguese.