{"id":971,"date":"2010-10-17T10:00:52","date_gmt":"2010-10-17T08:00:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elanguage.net\/blogs\/booknotices\/?p=971"},"modified":"2010-07-22T15:19:11","modified_gmt":"2010-07-22T13:19:11","slug":"nominal-determination","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/?p=971","title":{"rendered":"Nominal determination"},"content":{"rendered":"
Nominal determination: <\/strong>Typology, context constraints, and historical emergence. <\/strong>Ed. by Elisabeth Stark<\/strong>, Elisabeth Leiss<\/strong>, and Werner Abraham<\/strong>. (Studies in language companion series 89.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007. Pp. viii, 370. ISBN 9789027230997<\/a>. $180 (Hb).<\/div>\n

Reviewed by Agnieszka Pysz<\/strong><\/a>, Adam Mickiewicz University<\/em><\/p>\n

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 f\u00fcr Sprachwissenschaft) in 2005 in Cologne, Germany.<\/p>\n

Part 1, \u2018Synchrony \u2013 And its implications for diachrony\u2019, opens with Werner Abraham\u2019s \u2018Discourse binding: DP and pronouns in German, Dutch, and English\u2019. Elisabeth Stark examines typological correlations in systems of nominal determination in \u2018Gender, number, and indefinite articles: About the \u201ctypological inconsistency\u201d of Italian\u2019. Elisabeth Leiss analyzes \u2018Covert patterns of definiteness\/indefiniteness and aspectuality in Old Icelandic, Gothic, and Old High German\u2019. She provides a diachronic overview of the relevant facts and interprets them in light of Abraham\u2019s centering theory. Brigitte L. M. Bauer<\/strong> traces the development of the definite article in \u2018The definite article in Indo-European: Emergence of a new grammatical category?\u2019. Agnes J\u00e4ger<\/strong>\u2019s \u2018\u201cNo\u201d changes: On the history of German indefinite determiners in the scope of negation\u2019 presents the diachronic development of German indefinite determination in the scope of negation.<\/p>\n

Part 2, \u2018Synchrony \u2013 Ontological and typological characteristics\u2019, begins with Laurel Smith Stvan<\/strong>\u2019s examination of \u2018The functional range of bare singular count nouns in English\u2019. In \u2018The definite article in non-specific object noun phrases: Comparing French and Italian\u2019, Tanja Kupisch <\/strong>and Christian Koops <\/strong>demonstrate that French typically uses the indefinite article in nonspecific noun phrases, whereas Italian allows for the definite variant. Dagmar Bittner <\/strong>investigates the \u2018Early functions of definite determiners and DPs in German first language acquisition\u2019, taking into account sentence-internal and sentence-external functions.<\/p>\n

In Part 3, \u2018Diachrony \u2013 Universally unified characteristics?\u2019, Werner Abraham <\/strong>explores <\/strong>\u2018The discourse-functional crystallization of DP from the original demonstrative\u2019. Abraham <\/strong>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 <\/strong>makes a number of claims regarding the structure of \u2018Determinerless noun phrases in Old Romance passives\u2019. \u2018On the structure and development of nominal phrases in Norwegian\u2019, by Terje Lohndal<\/strong>, focuses <\/strong>on the development of the suffixed definite article. In \u2018The emergence of DP from a perspective of ontogeny and phylogeny: Correlation between DP, TP and aspect in Old English and first language acquisition\u2019, Fuyo Osawa<\/strong> notes similarities between diachronic change (i.e. phylogeny) and first language acquisition (i.e. ontogeny). Finally, in \u2018Demonstratives and possessives: From Old English to present-day English\u2019, Johanna L. Wood <\/strong>investigates the syntactic status and the development of three nominal word order patterns based on diachronic data from English.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Overall, this book provides a valuable overview of the fundamental research questions of nominal determination. One of its strengths is the contributors\u2019 mixed theoretical-empirical viewpoints.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nominal determination: Typology, context constraints, and historical emergence. Ed. by Elisabeth Stark, Elisabeth Leiss, and Werner Abraham. (Studies in language companion series 89.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2007. Pp. viii, 370. ISBN 9789027230997. $180 (Hb). Reviewed by Agnieszka Pysz, Adam Mickiewicz University Most of the thirteen papers in this volume were presented at the workshop Evolution […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/971"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=971"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/971\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":972,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/971\/revisions\/972"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=971"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=971"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=971"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}