Reviewed by Eitan Grossman, Hebrew University of Jerusalem

One question and two theses are at the heart of Bohumil Vykypěl’s polemical essay. The question is the relation between contemporary functionalist linguistics and the Prague School (short answer: not much). The first thesis is that there is little novelty in contemporary functionalist linguistics. In V’s view, Prague School writings have been ignored or misunderstood by ‘empirical functionalists’, his term for linguists such as Joan Bybee, Bernard Comrie, William Croft, Talmy Givón, and Martin Haspelmath. The second thesis is that empirical functionalist criticisms of structuralism have mistakenly conflated American and European schools of structuralist linguistics in framing (European) structuralism and functionalism as incompatible.

This essay is divided into eleven brief sections, most several pages long, followed by endnotes and bibliographical references. V proposes that empirical functionalists might profit from the work of the Prague School (Ch. 1), which does not fit functionalist stereotypes of structuralism since European structuralists do not hold the ‘Saussurean dogmas’ (arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, langue vs. parole, synchrony vs. diachrony) in a simplistic fashion (Ch. 2). A recurring theme (and the topic of Ch. 4) is that many of the ideas presented as novel by empirical functionalists were earlier proposed by Prague School linguists. Ch. 3 treats the Prague notions of the flexible stability of language, synchronic dynamism, and the distinction between the center and periphery of language systems. Ch. 5 shows that functionalist approaches to the relationship between reality and language echo earlier structuralist views.

Ch. 6 questions the use of the term ‘typology’ by functionalists, as well as their separation of description and explanation. In Ch. 7, V situates the Prague School vis-à-vis the Neogrammarians. V claims that empirical functionalists are ‘non-functional functionalists’ in Chs. 8 and 9. In Ch. 10, V urges functionalists to be both structuralist and functionalist. Ch. 11 concludes the essay with some ways in which empirical functionalist work might interest or benefit Prague School scholars.

Most of the argumentation amounts to referring to earlier work by Prague School scholars. V does not confront empirical functionalism on theoretical or empirical grounds, but rather highlights the fact that many linguists, regardless of affiliation, have developed functionalist approaches. Moreover, V’s critical approach applies to his own narrative as well: Prague School scholars were not the first to propose many of the ideas that they espoused, and the view of nineteenth century linguistics found in this book is as one-dimensional as V finds contemporary treatments of European structuralism to be.

If we look beyond the author’s rhetoric, however, some of his points are valid. European structuralism is more heterogeneous than it is sometimes made out to be and often differs significantly from American structuralism. Moreover, V is right to point out that for many linguists, especially those occupied with language description, structuralist and functionalist models are compatible in theory and practice.

The principal contribution of this book is in drawing connections between different functionalist traditions that were separated by all-too-common ruptures in the ‘bibliographical chain’.

Reviewed by Reda A. H. Mahmoud, Minya University, Egypt

This illuminating thirteen-chapter volume gives an authoritative stance of current research on pragmatics in second language acquisition of Japanese. A concise forward by Gabriele Kasper reviews the extensive history of Japanese interlanguage pragmatics (ILP) and its contribution to general ILP.

In the first chapter, Naoko Taguchi sketches the study of Japanese pragmatics and its influence on Japanese pedagogy and curriculum. Developing a framework of pragmalinguistics and sociopragmatics, she introduces empirical studies of the following topics: honorifics, speech style, reactive tokens, sentence-final particles, speech acts of various types, formulaic utterances, and indirect expressions. In Ch. 3, Dina R. Yoshimi surveys the literature on Japanese pragmatics, focusing on theoretical and methodological factors that shape the treatment of Japanese pragmatics in Japanese as a second language (JSL) and Japanese as a foreign language (JFL).

In the first experimental study in pragmatic competence, Kazuto Ishida investigates the pragmatic development of six beginning level Japanese learners handling the formal/informal speech-level markers desu (nominal/adjectival copula) and masu (auxiliary verb used in verbal ending) in different contexts. Keiko Ikeda conducts a task-situation study to examine qualitatively and quantitatively the use of honorifics in emails and telephone conversations by adult advanced Japanese learners. The learners use various linguistic and non-linguistic resources to project various styles of deference and demeanor in these two tasks.

Noriko Ishihara and Elaine Tarone explore the link between adult learners’ subjectivity and their pragmatic use in Japanese as a second language (L2) in a case study of how accommodation and resistance reflect on perceived L2 pragmatic norms. Using telephone message and role play tasks as measurements, Yumiko Tateyama focuses on the use of request strategies in teaching to investigate the effect of instruction on the pragmatic competence of learners of JFL. Takafumi Shimizu compares the production of three compliment responses (negative, positive, and avoidance strategies) by American learners as JSL and JFL to explore the influence of the learning context on L2 pragmatic realizations.

Megumi Kawate-Mierzejewska studies request-refusal sequences in telephone conversations. The study reveals that Japanese and American students pursue different strategies of request and refusal during interactions. Akiko Hagiwara adopts a pragmatic comprehension approach to reveal how first language (L1) and L2 speakers of Japanese comprehend three types of literal and non-literal utterances in order to understand the underlying mechanisms of utterance comprehension. Naoko Taguchi examines three types of indirect meanings of opinion and refusal to see how JFL students of different levels use the knowledge of pragmalinguistic forms and sociolinguistic norms to interpret speakers’ intentions.

Takafumi Utashiro and Goh Kawai study verbal and non-verbal reactive tokens (RTs) or ‘back-channeling’ and propose an instructional syllabus of RTs that reflects the levels and order of instructions for learners of Japanese. In her study of native Japanese and American learners of Japanese, Tomomi Kakegawa investigates the use of Japanese sentence-final particles in email correspondence with native speakers. Individual variations in email exchange point to a positive outcome in pragmatic learning. Finally, Junko Mori reviews the development of Japanese ILP and clarifies current controversies in second language acquisition and general applied linguistics research.

Reviewed by Angela Tan, University of California, Los Angeles

Traditional conversational analysis (CA) largely focused on English. Conversation analysis: Comparative perspectives brings together analyses from a variety of contexts, settings, and languages. While still very much situated in the framework of CA, this volume suggests that variations and similarities across languages are due not only to differences in language structures but also in cultures.

The book is divided into five sections. The first section consists of the editor’s introduction, including transcription conventions. The second section deals with repair and issues beyond repair. In Ch. 2, Ruey-Jiuan Regina Wu demonstrates that two Mandarin repair initiations resemble English repair initiations. They also serve to display stances, particularly of affiliation or disaffiliation, with question-intoned repeats intensifying nonalignment between speakers.

In Ch. 3, Barbara Fox, Fay Wouk, Makoto Hayashi, Steven Fincke, Liang Tao, Marja-Leena Sorjonen, Minna Laakso, and Wilfrido Flores Hernandez look at initiation repair in the same turn from a crosslinguistic perspective involving Bikol, Sochiapam Chinantec, Finnish, Indonesian, and Mandarin.  They find not only substantial variations but also universals: e.g. monosyllabic words are recycled to achieve a beat of delay and multisyllabic words afford speakers opportunities to initiate repair before completing the word. In Ch. 4, Maria Egbert, Andrea Golato, and Jeffrey D. Robinson use data from English and German to suggest that repair initiations are produced with final-falling or slightly rising intonation by hearers.

The third section looks at various aspects of response in conversation. In Ch. 5, Anna Lindstrom examines the projection of nonalignment in Swedish conversations, e.g. use of ‘curled ja’. This projection allows recipients to recast their utterances to attain alignment. In Ch. 6, Trine Heinemann looks at how Danish speakers orient to knowledge in conversations, particularly two practices where recipients treat a question as inapposite since the questioner has failed to consider prior knowledge. In Ch.7, Federico Rossano, Penelope Brown, and Stephen C. Levinson investigate gaze behavior in conversation and demonstrate that it is contingent on culture. Additionally, it is found that the questioner does more gazing than the recipient, which departs from previous analyses that take recipient gazing as a display of attentiveness. In Ch. 8, Makoto Hayashi and Kyung-eun Yoon show how response tokens in Japanese are primarily speakers’ activities and not recipient activities.

Section 4 deals with action formation and sequencing. In Ch. 9, Marja-Leena Sorjonen and Auli Hakulinen discuss alternative ways of constructing agreement to an assessment in Finnish, such as subject-initial responses and responses containing a subject pronoun. In Ch. 10, Jack Sidnell looks at the employment of if by speakers of Caribbean English as a preface to next-turn repeats and how it gives speakers opportunities to negotiate ensuing conversation. In Ch. 11, Galina B. Bolden examines the use of the Russian discourse particle –to to manage contiguity breaks, where an utterance advancing a delayed course of action is not contiguous with the immediately-preceding one.

In Ch. 12, Emanuel A. Schegloff concludes the book by giving insight into the prospects, potential problems, and possibility of comparative analysis in CA. This volume stands at the forefront of CA research and is highly recommended for scholars of this and related disciplines.

Reviewed by Reda A. H. Mahmoud, Minya University, Egypt

Dislocated elements in discourse is a panoramic study of dislocated structures in German, English, French, Italian, Spanish, and Hungarian. It is divided into three parts containing sixteen empirical and theoretical articles that provide an array of examples and analyses from syntax, semantics, prosody, and discourse analysis.

The first part is a description of the basic phenomena and structures grouped together as dislocation. The second part explores the content encoded by dislocation structures, such as semantic, pragmatic, and discourse information. The theoretical third part focuses on the distinction between integration and non-integration of dislocates into their host sentences. The organization of the volume reflects the three fundamental questions of the possibility of a general model of syntactic structure that can accommodate dislocation structures, how dislocation relates to a sentence’s information structure and illocutionary force, and the appropriateness of dislocates to fit into a theoretical framework.

In Part 1, Javier Pérez-Guerra and David Tizón-Couto investigate left-dislocated constituents from Middle to Modern English and draw attention to their high productivity in written and formal texts. Gϋnther Grewendorf examines the differences between left-periphery dislocation elements and resumptive pronouns in Italian and Spanish. Nicholas Sobin discusses the correspondence between echo questions and the complementizer phrase (CP), while Frederick J. Newmeyer investigates the category program of Chomsky’s theory of grammatical-semantic correspondence with respect to CP domain to call into question his claim that language has an optimal design. Ruth Kempson, Jieun Kiaer, and Ronnie Cann show how left and right periphery can be explained in similar terms through an examination of syntactic, discourse, and semantic properties of left and right periphery dislocation in Italian, Spanish, and Catalan.

Part 2 treats more abstract forms of dislocation by highlighting the relation of the left periphery to such notions as topic, focus, and force. Nicola Munaro and Cecilia Poletto describe sentential particles like ti and clausal typing in the Venetan dialect, and Malte Zimmermann investigates the German particle wohl. Both studies handle the syntactic and semantic properties of these particles as left-peripheral elements.

Betty J. Birner focuses on three classes of noncanonical constructions that exploit peripheral sentence position to show the role of inferential links among current and prior utterances. Sam Mchombo and Yukiko Morimoto examine discourse and semantic properties of split NPs in Chicheŵa, a Bantu language. Beáta Gyuris outlines a new approach to the narrow scope readings of quantificational contrastive topics in Hungarian, focusing on the intonational, discourse, and semantic properties of topicalization and focalization. Ariel Cohen offers a relative reading that explains how fronted quantificational adverbs change the truth conditions of a sentence.

In the first two papers of Part 3, Liliane Haegeman applies an orphan analysis approach to prove the extrasentential character of parenthetical adverbial clauses. Liliane Hageman, Benjamin Shaer, and Werner Frey explore some empirical challenges to the orphan approach represented by three phenomena in German and other languages: tense subordination, illocutionary subordination, and V2 configuration patterns. Similarly, Benjamin Shaer adopts an orphan analysis to compare N-class hanging-topic left dislocation structures in German and English.

Anikó Lipták examines the left-peripheral distribution of headless relative clauses in Hungarian and investigates their syntactic properties. Finally, Anke Holler explains the grammatical behavior of German wh-relative clauses as being due to their position as a left periphery, claiming that they establish their own non-integrated class of German relative clauses.

Reviewed by Jan Schroten, Utrecht University

This monograph proposes a syntactic derivation of demonstratives and definite articles and the semantic derivation of restrictive and non-restrictive relative clauses in the Scandinavian languages. Furthermore, the strong/weak alternation of adjectival inflection in German is analyzed.

Ch.1 sketches the relation between the definite article and demonstratives in universal grammar and in the history of Scandinavian languages. The basic descriptive model is the minimalist generative approach. The Determiner Phrase (DP), the home of the definite article and the demonstratives, is given in cartographic fashion in hierarchical order: DP, Cardinal Number Phrase (CardP), Agreement Phrase (AgrP), Article Phrase (ArtP), Number Phrase (NumP), light noun Phrase (nP), and NP. The definite article is the head of ArtP and the demonstrative is analyzed as a phrase located in the Specifier of ArtP.

Ch. 2 investigates the syntactic distribution of these determiners in historical and contemporary varieties of the Scandinavian languages. The conversion of the demonstrative into a definite article in the history of the Scandinavian (and other) languages is discussed. The different positions of these determiners in different variants are accounted for by positing two agreement domains in DP. The two domains account for the ‘split’ definite article: one part is found on the noun, the other higher up when an AP blocks movement from ArtP to DP. This is found in historical and contemporary Scandinavian languages. Agreement domains like ArtP block movement from ArtP to D and give rise to different phases, each needing part of the ‘split up’ definite article.

Ch. 3 treats the syntax and semantics of restrictive/non-restrictive modification, mainly by relative clauses in the Scandinavian languages. The author proposes that interpretation is done at different stages in the derivation of a DP modified by a relative clause. The derivations involve successive copies of the ‘low’ article originating in ArtP, analyzed at different points where restrictive or non-restrictive interpretation applies.

Ch. 4 treats the strong/weak alternation in German adjectival inflection, as in der gute Wein ‘the good wine’ and ein guter Wein ‘a good wine’, with weak gute following the definite article while strong guter following the indefinite article. The definite article is ‘strong’, with concomitant weakening of the adjectival inflection; the indefinite article is ‘weak’, leaving the strong adjectival inflection intact. The author claims that a strong determiner at the left edge of DP is the result of repeated copying of a strong determiner, with ‘impoverishment’ effects on the adjectival inflection, which is weakened. As weak determiners have no impoverishment effects, the adjective has its basic strong form.

Ch. 5 briefly summarizes the analyses and proposals.

Review by Elly van Gelderen, Arizona State University

This book derives from The Cambridge encyclopedia of the world’s ancient languages (Woodard 2004). It is one of five volumes, organized by region, that provide an affordable introduction for linguistics students and scholars. The four other volumes explore the ancient languages of (i) Europe, (ii) Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Aksum, (iii) Syria-Palestine and Arabia, and (iv) Asia Minor. Languages are considered ancient if they appear before the fifth century BC. The chapters, which are written by the leading specialists in the ancient languages, could be used as case studies in a course on historical linguistics or typology.

Each chapter focuses on an individual language or closely related set of languages. It includes a description of the name, earliest appearance, and the texts or inscriptions that still exist. I found these descriptions quite useful. The writing system, phonology, morphology, syntax, and lexicon of each language are the focus of each chapter. By necessity, the descriptions are quite short, and often, especially in the discussions of morphosyntax, I was sorry more information was not provided. However, the chapters provide good overviews that will stimulate further research.

In Chs. 2 and 3, Stephanie Jamison covers Sanskrit and Middle Indic (also known as Prakrit). The descriptions for Sanskrit are quite to the point, but I missed actual sentences with glosses.

Ch. 4, by Sanford Steever, covers Old Tamil, a Dravidian language. This chapter includes wonderfully glossed examples of Old Tamil—for example, the functions of the cases are exemplified clearly. The chapter ends with two poems that illustrate connected discourse.

Rüdiger Schmitt discusses Old Persian in Ch. 5, and Mark Hale Avestan discusses Pahlavi in Chs. 6 and 7. Again, each chapter includes nicely glossed examples and descriptions (e.g. on pronouns, enclitic pronouns, and topicalization) that make me want to read longer versions.

Ch. 8, by Alain Peyraube, focuses on Ancient Chinese. Two of the controversies that surround Ancient Chinese are whether it had subject-verb-object (SVO) or SOV word order and whether it had parts of speech. Peyraube argues (with excellent examples) that Ancient Chinese was SVO and that words did belong to specific lexical categories. Grammaticalization is also briefly mentioned.

In Ch. 9, Victoria Bricker discusses Mayan, focusing on the logosyllabic writing system as well as its origin and evolution. Ch. 10 is on Epi-Olmec, written by Terrence Kaufman and John Justeson, who deciphered its script.

Appendix I, by Don Ringe, focuses on reconstructed ancient languages. Ringe stresses the uniformitarian principle, which states that, if acquisition and use have not radically changed from prehistoric to historic times, ‘we must assume that the same types of language structures and language changes’ (234) underlie the prehistoric stages as well. He also discusses internal reconstruction and limits on reconstruction.

In short, this extremely accessible volume provides several interesting case studies of The ancient languages of Asia and the Americas.

REFERENCE

Woodard, Roger D. 2004. The Cambridge encyclopedia of the world’s ancient languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Reviewed by Anish Koshy, The English and Foreign Languages University, India

The papers in this volume were selected from presentations at the 13^th International Morphological Meeting held in Vienna in 2008. In their introductory remarks (1–13), the editors discuss types of variation (e.g. geographical, language-internal) and their causes (e.g. phonological constraints, language contact, competition between word-formation processes), which they note might lead to breaching the principles of economy in morphology. In particular, two papers raise questions about linguistic economy in morphology: Laurie Bauer, Salvador Valera, and Ana Díaz-Negrillo’s discussion (15–32) of the competition between en-suffixation and conversion in English in deriving two verbs from the same base adjective and its effects on productivity and redundancy; and Thomas Stolz’s (217–44) discussion of pleonastic redundancy in Lithuanian due to multiple definiteness marking.

Approaching the issues in terms of the desire for an optimum output from ranked constraints, Georgette Dal and Fiammetta Namer (53–73) discuss the derivation of ethnic proper names in French with respect to the interaction of four constraints within the framework of paradigmatic morphology. Similarly, Elmar Eggert (75–87) investigates variation in the derivation of French ethnonyms from toponyms as an instance of probabilistic application of various constraints or factors. Elke Ronneberger-Sibold (201–16) explores the linguistic status, communicative function, and classification or typology of word creation in German as a subtype of extragrammatical morphology within the framework of natural morphology.

Mary Paster (177–92) explores multiple exponence in Maay plurals through freely ranked constraints within the framework of optimal construction morphology. András Cser (33–51) takes up a corpus-based study of the alis-aris allomorphy in Latin due to liquid dissimilation and explains it based on the blocking effect of non-coronal consonants and the distance between the two liquids. Livio Gaeta (89–105) explains the form-meaning mismatch in the infinitive in West-Germanic perfect periphrasis (PftP) in terms of its historic originas marking telicity, its semantic incompatibility in PftP constructions, and the unbounded nature of the infinitive. Working within the framework of network morphology, Andrew Hippisley (107–27) uses the notion of separationism, the independence of form and function, to analyze Latin deponent verbs as an instance of paradigmatic reorganization.

Ferenc Kiefer (129–47) explores Aktionsart as a sprachbund phenomenon, investigating the different ways in which it may enter a language. Michele Loporcaro (149–75) explores Romance past participle agreement in perfective periphrasis as a non-canonical instance of object agreement. Helena Riha and Kirk Baker (193–200) discuss Chinese borrowing of words written in Roman script, like T-shirt and ATM, rather than zì, Chinese characters (generally mandatory in Chinese borrowing), when the words have enough of the properties of zì.

The book largely concerns European languages. Its value lies in approaching many issues in morphology through constraint and output-based explanations as well as corpus studies, and in the presentation of multiple exponence and non-reductive pleonastic redundancies. These challenge our traditional understanding of a rule-based morphological system shaped by principles of economy, uniformity, and transparency.

Reviewed by Elly van Gelderen, Arizona State University

One of the five volumes derived from the Cambridge encyclopedia of the world’s ancient languages (Woodard 2004), this volume provides an affordable and accessible introduction to The ancient languages of Syria-Palestine and Arabia. The four other volumes in this series explore the ancient languages of (i) Europe, (ii) Mesopotamia, Egypt, and Aksum, (iii) Asia and the Americas, and (iv) Asia Minor. Languages are considered ancient if they appear before the fifth century BC. Chapters of this series can easily be used as case studies in a historical linguistics or typology course. Unlike the volume on Asia and the Americas, in which many language families are discussed, this volume presents a nice overview of several ancient Semitic languages.

This book contains eight chapters: a short introduction, five chapters on Northwest Semitic, two on Southern Semitic, and an appendix on Afro-Asiatic. As in other volumes, each chapter includes a description of the name, earliest appearance, and the texts or inscriptions that are left of a particular language or group of languages. These descriptions are very useful. The writing system, phonology, morphology, syntax and lexicon of each language are the main focus of each chapter. In this volume, less attention is paid to the writing systems, possibly because they resemble each other and are not quite as spectacular as, for example, the writing systems of Mayan or Olmec.

Ch. 2, by Dennis Pardee, focuses on Ugaritic, an archaic Northwest Semitic language. Its writing system is unique in that it uses cuneiform and ‘it is not unlikely that the cuneiform system is a representation in clay of a linear alphabet’ (7). Pronouns are discussed in relative depth, as is verbal morphology. Example sentences are provided in the section on syntax but are not glossed well. I missed an assessment of what made this language archaic and different from the others.

In Ch. 3 Kyle McCarter provides an interesting discussion of the development of the Hebrew sound system as well as its pronominal and verbal morphology, its loss of case, and its use of construct chains.

Jo Ann Hacket explores Phoenician and Punic in Ch. 4. Phoenician inscriptions occur all over the Mediterranean world. Punic is the dialect of Phoenician found in Carthage, and Punic inscriptions have been found in Northern Africa and Southern Europe. A good discussion of definiteness, demonstrative pronouns, and articles is also included (93–95).

Dennis Pardee’s (very short) sketch of Canaanite dialects appears in Ch. 5. The term Canaanite is used ‘(i) to designate the dialects of Northwest Semitic spoken in the region of Canaan in the second half of the second millennium BC, and (ii) to differentiate the ‘Canaanite’ dialects of the first millennium, primarily Phoenician and Hebrew, from other Northwest Semitic languages […], primarily the Aramaic dialects’ (103). The Canaanite shift (e.g. Proto-Semitic *ā shifts to ō) characterizes this group.

In Ch. 6 Stuart Creason provides a detailed description of Aramaic, which forms the other main branch of Northwest Semitic (with Canaanite), although later in this book (180, 228–29) this classification is reconsidered, and Central Semitic is used for Northwestern as well as Arabic.

Ch. 7, by Norbert Ness and Peter Stein, focuses on Ancient South Arabian. This language is divided into the four dialects of Sabaic, Minaic, Qatabanic, and Hadramitic, which are all written using the (phonetic) Arabian Monumental Script.

Ancient North Arabian, the language of central and northern Arabia and the desert of Syria, is examined in Ch. 8 by M.C.A. MacDonald. Using the form of the definite article (208–09), North Arabian can be divided into Arabic (with ‘al) and Ancient North Arabian (h– or zero).

This volume provides a good introduction to a variety of ancient Semitic languages. Appendix I, by John Huehnergard, is helpful in relating the languages to each other and to the Afro-Asiatic family.

Reference

Woodard, Roger D. 2004. The Cambridge encyclopedia of the world’s ancient languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Reviewed by Michael W. Morgan, Mumbai, India

While Austronesian languages are numerically and geographically significant as a group and several of them are ‘world languages’, the majority are small and under-documented. Kokota, an endangered Northwest Solomonic (Meso-Melanesian, Oceanic) language, is one such language, spoken in three villages on Santa Isabel Island. Bill Palmer presents us with a corpus-based grammar of Kokota.

The core of this grammar treats phonology (5–62) and syntax (63–406). As Kokota, like most Oceanic languages, has a comparatively simple morphology, morphological details are discussed under syntax, and as certain phonological processes (such as reduplication) are morphosyntactically important, the forms are treated in the phonology chapter and their functions later in the book.

Of particular interest in the phonology chapter are the discussions of stress—which are complex and undergoing change (from moraic to syllabic trochees)—and various prosodic processes.

P’s discussion of noun phrases brings to light a number of interesting features. There are four sets of pronouns (independent, possessor-indexing, postverbal object-indexing, and preverbal subject-indexing); demonstratives distinguish five degrees of deictic proximity; and there is a second system of counting used only by old men. Adjectival forms are quite restricted, and various spatial and deictic temporal locatives and local nouns complement the sole preposition.

Of most interest are expressions of possession. Suffixes for both indirect and direct possession are head-marking and identical (except for second person singular); however, indirect suffixes are enclitic on possessed nouns, while direct suffixes are attached to one of two hosts (indicating ‘orally consumable’ and ‘non-consumable’, respectively). P devotes considerable space to discussing the semantics of each type. Possession is also expressed by a pseudo-locative construction and can be zero-marked within prepositional phrases.

The verb complex includes a number of pre- and postverbal markers of tense, aspect, mood, and adverbial functions. Kokota has two exclusive sets of preverbal subject/modal particles. One set indexes the argument highest on the semantic role hierarchy, distinguishing person but not number, and also marks three modal categories, realis, irrealis, and neutral; remarkably, it is the irrealis that is formally unmarked. Kokota also possesses a competing modal particle system that does not mark subject, and which may be in the process of replacing the system with subject-agreement. Additionally, postverbal object enclitics distinguish person and number. Kokota, like many North West Solomonic languages, has a tense-aspect-mood construction employing a generic possessor-indexing host and an appropriate postverbal subject enclitic. P’s discussion of the details of agreement assignment, valency alteration, incorporation, verb serialization, existential predicates, and the functional characteristics of adjuncts present much of interest.

As this is a corpus-based grammar, P’s treatment of clause structure includes discussion of pragmatically marked features of verbal clauses such as topicalization, focused constructions, and omitted subject, as well as verbless equative and possessive predicates. Final sections discuss two important discourse-level phenomena, recapping and discourse use of the verb ‘be thus’. A glossed narrative text (407–14) completes the presentation.

The book, a revision of P’s Ph.D dissertation, is the only complete, modern reference grammar of a Santa Isabel language. It is a welcome addition to the bookshelf of any Austronesianist, linguistic typologist, or comparative morphosyntactician.

Reviewed by Elly van Gelderen, Arizona State University

Ernst Håkon Jahr is a prolific Norwegian linguist who has published widely over the past thirty-five years on the Norwegian sociolinguistic situation, specific phonological shifts, Russenorsk, language planning and contact, the history of linguistics, and a variety of other topics. He has authored, coauthored, or edited more than forty books in addition to many articles, chapters, and presentations. In cases such as this, a Festschrift for a person that contains a collection of the person’s own writings is an excellent idea. Seven of the papers as well as the introduction are in Norwegian but even those who cannot read Norwegian will still get much out of the remaining thirteen articles. The chapters in this book are organized chronologically (from 1978–2007) rather than thematically. I will discuss a few themes in this book because organizing the volume thematically would have made it more accessible to non-Norwegians and more usable in general.

One common theme in Jahr’s work is the language situation in Northern Norway and in the pidgin Russenorsk. ‘Language contact in Northern Norway’ (97–108) discusses the multilingual situation in the eighteenth century. The major languages spoken in the region were Norwegian, Finnish, and Sami. It is interesting to read about the social status of these languages, their influence on each other, and the policies that the authorities tried to impose on the Norwegian people. Other languages spoken in the region, especially during the fishing season in the summer, were Swedish, Danish, Russian, English, German, and French. ‘On the pidgin status of Russenorsk’ (210–24) discusses the equal social status of Norwegian and Russian speakers and how a stable pidgin was able to develop and stay alive until the Russian revolution made an end to this relationship. An analysis of Russenorsk is also included. A later chapter (‘The emergence of a TMA [tense-mood-aspect] grammatical device’; 258–66) goes into more detail on a specific aspect of Russenorsk.

Another theme in this volume is phonological phenomena, which is represented by chapters on l-phonemes in Oslo cityspeak (80–96), on the development of s before l (121–29), and on sound change in Oslo Norwegian (130–35). Jahr also analyzes his own syntax in two chapters, ‘Min egen syntaks’ (73–79) and ‘Middle-aged male syntax’ (158–69), using tapes that were made while he interviewed speakers. His descriptions of Oslo urban-rural and social distinctions are also very interesting (e.g. East Oslo as a lower class and West Oslo as an upper and middle class).

Jahr has long worked on language preservation and planning, with Norway as an ideal location because of its peoples’ high regard for dialects and its two official varieties, Nynorsk and Bokmål. (The choice of one variety over the other is indicative of a person’s social and political views.) Other themes that emerge in this volume are the history of linguistics in Norway and the influence of Low German on the languages of the region.