Reviewed by Esther Núñez Villanueva, Bangor University

Although it has been identified as the locus of language change, teenage talk has not occupied a significant place in the linguistics research agenda. This welcome publication brings together thirteen innovative articles on the topic. Many of the articles (including all the contributions in Parts 2 and 3) use recently developed corpora of teenage conversations: the Corpus Oral del Lenguaje Adolescente (Spanish spoken corpus of youth language) and the Bergen Corpus of London Teenage Language feature predominantly.

Anna-Brita Stenström and Annette Myre Jørgensen open the volume with an introductory chapter that provides the theoretical background for the volume. A comprehensive series of guidelines for research on youngspeak is found in Klaus Zimmermann’s contribution. This article is included in Part 3 since it is specifically targeted to crosslinguistic research, but his insightful comments are broader in scope.

The volume is divided into three parts devoted to particular areas of study. Part 1 analyzes the linguistic tools that teenagers use to project their identity by expressing group membership and rejection of other groups. The three contributions to this section constitute a fruitful link between discourse analysis tools and socio-psychological methods. Argiris Archakis and Dimitris Papazachariou analyze the prosodic devices used by a group of young Greek females to differentiate the reported speech of authoritative figures from that of peers. Janet Spreckels examines how a group of German teenagers shows group membership and disaffiliation to other groups in their discourse by exaggeration and polyphonic discourse. Vally Lytra and Taşkin Baraç investigate how multilingualism is used to construct identity among young Turkish-English bilinguals in Turkish complementary schools.

The contributions in Part 2 are devoted to the study of particular linguistic expressions common in teenage speech that could become established in the language. Juan A. Martínez López identifies new intensifiers used by Madrid adolescents. Annette Myre Jørgensen discusses the use of hedging in youngspeak, a linguistic strategy used to mitigate the strength of an utterance.

Part 3 is devoted to crosslinguistic analyses of teenage speech. The four contributions contrast linguistic items, degrees of slang used, and English borrowings across languages to reveal the versatility of teenage language. Anna-Brita Stenström compares the functions of two pragmatic markers in Spanish and English, Spanish pues nada and English anyway. Eli-Marie Drange discovers that Anglicisms are not only used to fill lexical gaps but, surprisingly, to fulfill such functions as reinforcing a message or catching the attention of the hearers. Jolanta Legaudaite considers teenage slang a product of psychological and socio-cultural motives. Contrasting the functions of slang in English and Lithuanian, the author finds interesting differences in the functions and percentage of slang used.

Reviewed by Caroline Gagné, Université Laval

Sara Mills’s book offers a critical examination of the study of sexism in language. Although many previous papers have argued that sexism in language was easy to identify, M claims that even in feminist circles, sexism in language has been a problematic concept. In this volume, M develops a third wave feminist analysis of sexism that includes the specifications of the second wave. Based on her multidisciplinary studies of conversational and textual data, M identifies two forms of sexism (i.e. overt and indirect).

In the introduction, M presents her theoretical position, which is based on third wave feminism and critical discourse analysis. Additionally, she explains the differences between second wave and third wave feminist analysis—namely, that the second wave studies women’s language as a subordinated group, whereas the third wave focuses on the homogeneity of women. The remaining chapters reflect the evolution of sexism.

Ch. 2 investigates overt sexism, which is sexism that is clear and unambiguous. Overt sexism is the type of sexism analyzed by the second wave. In this book, overt sexism is used to describe generic pronouns and nouns as well as other derogatory connotation towards women. Because overt sexism is direct and focuses not only on sexism but also on racism and homophobia, antidiscriminatory language campaigns have condemned it.

In Ch. 3, M describes campaigns against discriminatory language as well as some strategies of antihomophobic and antisexist language campaigners. Common strategies include inflecting pejorative words positively and using alternative terms and neologisms. M also discusses the impact and the effectiveness of these campaigns along with some reactions to them. The remaining chapters focus on those reactions.

Ch. 4 covers political correctness. M explains why the term political correctness is viewed negatively whereas political incorrectness is viewed positively.

Ch. 5 focuses on indirect sexism, the second response feminist campaigns on language received. Indirect sexism must be studied contextually by examining and interpreting surrounding utterances. Usually, indirect sexism is hidden under humor and irony; therefore, it can be quite hard to identify. Based on the third wave feminist analysis of sexism, M offers new ways to analyze the most common forms of indirect sexism (e.g. humour, presupposition, conflicting messages, scripts and metaphors, collocation, and the androcentric perspective).

This well-written book will be useful for linguists and sociologists, especially those interested in discourse analysis or feminist and sexism studies.

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

Annual review of South Asian languages and linguistics (ARSALL) is an annual series that replaced The yearbook of South Asian languages and linguistics in 2007. ARSALL2008, the second issue, has four papers as ‘General contributions’, two invited papers as ‘Special contributions’, four ‘Reports’, four ‘Reviews and abstracts’, and two ‘Dialogues’.

Arguing that non-arbitrariness and transparency are distinct grammatical entities, Probal Dasgupta (3–19) discusses the significance of the fact that definite human nominals do not follow the same paradigm as inanimate definite nominals in Bengali. Annie Montaut (21–61), studying the semantics of reduplication, shows that total reduplication leaves the item being reduplicated with no stable value and that echo-formation or partial reduplication, through an extension, disqualification, or parody of the notional domain, leaves the notion decentered. Prashant Pardeshi (63–82) analyzes invisible agent constructions in four South Asian languages as naru ‘become’ expressions, following the Japanese linguistic tradition, and demonstrates their semantic similarity to and morphosyntactic differences from canonical passives. Arguing that modality may be responsible for the overall organization of the Hindi tense-aspect system, Ghanshyam Sharma (83–113) shows that the frequent use of the verb hona ‘to be’ to signify necessary belief qualifies it as a presumptive modal rather than a tense-marked form.

In ‘Special contributions’ Sanford B. Steever reexamines his earlier analysis of finiteness in Dravidian in the light of Hans Henrich Hock’s formulation of Dravidian and Indo-Aryan finiteness in terms of a strict-OV restriction. Hock responds that many of Steever’s formulations are based on middle and modern Tamil, extrapolated to the other Dravidian languages, and hence are not always applicable to them.

In the ‘Reports’ section, Tej Bhatia and Rajend Mesthrie report on research on South Asian languages in North America and South Africa, respectively. Niladri Sekhar Dash and Joga Singh each report on various linguistic publications in Bengali and Punjabi from 2000-2008.

In the ‘Dialogue’ section, a forum for discussion of previous papers published in ARSALL, Shishir Bhattacharja and Lionel Wee respond to two papers that appeared in ARSALL2007.

The book’s value lies in its conception as a forum where linguists working on South Asian languages can contribute to, debate, and discuss current issues in the study of these languages. The series is also useful for those interested in current trends and research orientations among South Asian linguists. That it invites responses to earlier publications and sponsors debate between two scholars makes the book a lively and engaging read.

Reviewed by Caroline Gagné, Université Laval

This book pays tribute to Gillian Sankoff’s contribution to the studies of multilingual speech communities. In the introduction, Miriam Meyerhoff and Naomi Nagy discuss the bias of sociolinguistics—namely that the studies of the last forty years are mainly about monolingual communities, even though most speech communities in the world are multilingual. The papers are divided into three parts that illustrate Sankoff’s influence on sociolinguistics.

Part 1 focuses on language ideology. By analyzing links between linguistic variables of migrant workers and localized groups of French speakers, Michelle Daveluy suggests that Francophone Canada can be described as a set of multilingual speech communities. Christine Jourdan shows that the phases of the urbanization of Honiara, Solomon Islands, and the changes in the lifestyle of its inhabitants affect their language repertoires, which are formed of Pijin, English, and sixty-four vernacular languages. Felicity Meakins argues that maintaining Gurindji’s structure in Gurindji Kriol, a mixed language spoken in Australia, echoes the land rights movement and that both the land rights movement and the language reflect the preservation of a Gurindji identity. Rajend Mesthrie suggests South-African varieties such as Tsotsitaal, Flaaitaal, Iscamtho, and Gamtaal should be considered to be a single phenomenon, mainly because of their lexical order, in that they come from the syntax of already existing languages. Bambi B. Schieffelin studies the translation of parables from the Bible into Tok Pisin (Papua New Guinea) and their impact on the understanding of the genre in a language contact situation.

In Part 2, ‘Bridging macro- and micro-sociolinguistics’, Ruth King argues that Chiac, a variety of Acadian French spoken in New Brunswick, differs considerably from other Acadian varieties in the effects of language contact. She emphasizes that the importance of English influence on Chiac is not always reflected in the gathered linguistic data. David Sankoff applies his demolinguistic model that predicts the evolution of a bilingual community to the case of Tok Pisin and English in Papua New Guinea. Pierrette Thibault focuses on the use of French in Stanstead, a bilingual community in Quebec, and uses a comparative method to study phonological and morphological variables. She also explores local identity by studying bilingualism and code-switching and the influence of English phonology on native French.

Part 3 is about quantitative sociolinguistics. Julie Auger and Anne-JoséVilleneuve discuss the use of ne deletion and draw attention to the fact that Picard and French are distinct languages even though they are closely-related. Hélène Blondeau presents a historical study of the French pronoun paradigm mainly within Montreal’s French-speaking community where English and French are in contact. Hélène Blondeau and Naomi Nagy focus on second language acquisition—specifically, how frequency affects the analysis of subordinate clauses, complementizers, and verbs of quotation in Montreal Anglophone French and English. William Labov discusses the substrate effects on Pennsylvania English, Puerto Rican Spanish, and Italian-American English. Finally, Miriam Meyerhoff suggests that an evaluation of the simplicity or complexity of creole languages must include probabilistic features. She then illustrates that there is linguistic structure encoded stochastically in those languages by studying Bislama (Vanuatu) and Tayo (New Caledonia).

Reviewed by Ana Bravo, University of Granada

The structure of stative verbs investigates the nature of stative verbs starting from the semantic distinction between Davidsonian and Kimian states. It consists of eight chapters, plus author and subject indexes. Chs. 1 (1–2) and 8 (199–206) contain the introduction and conclusion respectively. Ch. 2 (3–36) is a presentation of both the state of the art and of the theoretical background. Chs. 3 through 6 are devoted to the analysis of different types of stative verbs. Ch. 7 (173–98) offers an integrated account of event structure and argument licensing.

The book presents two main achievements. First, it challenges the traditional view of stative verbs in current linguistic theory. R succeeds in showing that the structure of stative verbs is not necessarily simple. This is the case of verbs, examined in Ch. 3, that display a systematic stative/eventive ambiguity, such as decorate. The eventive reading is seen in Irmi is filling the vase with water, while Water is filling the vase illustrates the stative. Other verbs that undergo the stative/eventive alternation are object-experiencer verbs that assign accusative case, like depress in The joke depressed Irmi; perception verbs, where hear is the stative variant of listen; and dispositional verbs, e.g. help. According to the author, they all denote a causal relationship, and hence in lexical-semantic structure they will contain the aspectual operator cause. The causal relation will hold between two events in case of the eventive variant, but between two states in case of the stative reading. In terms of lexical-semantic structure, the eventive reading exists if one or both of the aspectual operators, do and become, are added. It follows that a verb need not have a simple eventive structure to be stative.

Verbs examined in Chs. 4 and 5 allow only for a stative reading: subject-experiencer verbs (love), dative-experiencer/possesor verbs (fit, belong to), measure verbs, verbs that select for a PP-complement (such as border in The property borders the river), and verbs of position (lie), but not those of body posture (e.g. crouch). Verbs of internal causation, like gleam and squeal, are shown to be eventive in Ch. 6. The lexical-semantic structure of a non-ambiguous stative verb lacks any aspectual operator. As a result, they express a single eventuality.

Stative verbs, therefore, do not form a uniform class, neither in terms of their lexical-semantic structure nor in terms of their semantic class. Nevertheless, there exists only one class of stative verbs: the Kimian statives, and no Davidsonian statives.

The second main achievement of the book is its explanation of eventuality structure. On the one hand, it does away with the Davidsonian event argument, with one consequence that adverbs are anchored on one of the aspectual operators. On the other, it convincingly argues in favour of the hypothesis of Hale and Keyser (1993) that the number of possible eventuality structures is finite.

This book will be of interest to scholars of stative verbs and of eventuality structure in general, as well as to those interested in the relationship between causation and agency. Researchers of the verbs classes examined will also find very interesting proposals concerning their lexical-semantic structure.

Reference

Hale, Kenneth, and Samuel Jay Keyser. 1993. On argument structure and the lexical expression of syntactic relations. The view from building 20, ed. by Kenneth Hale and Samuel Jay Keyser, 53–108. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Reviewed by Thomas R. Wier, University of Chicago

Among linguists, the Georgian language is famously complex and even more notorious for its typologically unusual features. Tamar Makharoblidze’s book is intended to demonstrate that complexity in a companion to her teaching guide, Basic Georgian. This volume is thus not primarily intended for people who already have some spoken or theoretical expertise in the language but rather for an English-speaking audience with little or no background in Georgian.

As such, this book takes the reader on a crash course of Georgian grammar: nominal and pronominal morphology, postpositional phrases and adverbial modifiers, verbal polypersonalism, the peculiarities of tense/aspect formation in Georgian with particular reference to thematic suffixes, (the nonintuitive properties of) inversion in perfect evidential constructions, the distinctions between transitive and intransitive verbs (as well as both unaccusative and unergative conjugations, although those terms are not used), the causative construction, and, finally, this volume finishes with full conjugations of a number of the most intransigent irregular verbs.

Unfortunately, I cannot recommend this book as either a beginning student’s guide or as a desk reference for more advanced students or scholars of the language for many reasons. The first and most important reason is that many highly unintuitive aspects of the language are introduced very early, long before more straightforward aspects have been discussed. For example, statistically marginal deponent constructions of agentive intransitive predicates such as m-a-k’ank’al-eb-s (1sg-caus-shiver-th-3sg; in which th is an abbreviation for thematic suffix) ‘I shiver’, which have the morphosyntax of transitive causative verbs, are introduced on page 16, although understanding such examples requires knowledge of the highly complex verbal subject and object agreement that is introduced on page 42. Some aspects of Georgian grammar that are the most interesting for theorists are the most obscure for language-learners, such as the system of case-marking, which demonstrates splits in each of three series (Subj[Nom]~IO[Dat]~DO[Dat] in present, Subj[Erg]~IO[Dat]~DO[Nom] in aorist, and Subj[Dat]~IO[postposition]~DO[Nom] in the perfect) and across different classes of verb conjugations (e.g. unaccusatives behave differently from unergatives), never receive an adequate treatment or even a graphical summary as provided by Howard I Aronson (1990; Georgian: A reading grammar) or B. G. Hewitt (1995; A structural reference grammar of Georgian).

What is more troubling is not merely a confusing and convoluted discussion of concepts the author wants to convey (the prose style is sometimes truly difficult to parse and how paragraphs link together is not always clear), but that M, a native speaker of Georgian, sometimes makes major errors of analysis. For example, in her discussion of inversion, which appears to treat an agent as an indirect object with dative case and object agreement, M says “In [the perfect series], ONLY transitive verbs have inversion’ (emphasis in the original; 48). In fact, all unergative intransitive verbs (M’s medioactive verbs) also undergo inversion in the perfect, and depending on the analysis, so do dative constructions such as m-i-qvar-s (1sg-prv-love-3sg; in which prv is an abbreviation for pre-radical vowel) ‘I love her’ (Alice C Harris [1981; Georgian syntax: A study in relational grammar]). Furthermore, M often makes dubious assertions about the historical origin of constructions, as when she claims the ergative suffix -m/-ma in Georgian descends from a Proto-Kartvelian word for ‘man’ (as in the Svan word māre), whereas its Mingrelian counterpart -k supposedly stems from a different word for ‘man’ (k’oči in Mingrelian). Needless to say, M’s ruminations on ergativity in Basque are beside the point.

Ultimately, though, all theoretical debates are also beside the point. Without exaggeration, almost every page manifests some flaw in prose style or awkward or incoherent phrasing, sometimes almost oracular in nature. For example, ‘We expose the universal regulation: the semantics of the class-category is also universal’ (25); or non-English on inconsistently spelled terminology (e.g. ‘vocals’ instead of ‘vowels’, using serya rather than ‘series’, raghatsam but raghacam ‘something (nonspecific)’ three lines later [17]); or misspelled or ungrammatical English explanations of complex and unusual phenomena. This is not a book that a scholar, much less a beginning student, will be able to make heads or tails of.

Reviewed by Joseph F. Eska, Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University

This volume contains eighteen papers presented at a symposium conducted under the auspices of the Sixteenth International Conference on Historical Linguistics held at the University of Copenhagen in August 2003. As with many published conference proceedings, the papers are highly variable in quality, but one stands out in particular.

The most successful instances of internal reconstruction are often characterized by the fact that they provide unexpected explanations outside of their primary purpose or reconstruct forms that turn out to be attested. Such is the case with Jay H. Jasanoff’s article, ‘*-bhi, *-bhis, *-ōis: Following the trail of the PIE instrumental plural’ (137–50).  He demonstrates that the earliest reconstructible forms in *-bʱi were adverbs, e.g. *h₂n̩t-bʱi ‘sidewise’ (from*h₂(e)nt- ‘front, side’), which were later specialized as prepositions, e.g. Gk. amp^hí, Old High German umbi ‘around’.

*-bʱi was then remade as an instrumental plural case form, e.g. ‘arrow-wise’ → ‘with arrows’. The dative-ablative plural *-bʱios (>*-bʱos outside of Indo-Iranian) was then created by the affixation of *-os, attested in Hittite as the dative-locative plural –aš. By analogy, the instrumental plural *-bʱis was created by the addition of *-is, which can be inferred to have been the original instrumental plural desinence in the pronominal inflection on the basis of the reconstructed demonstrative instrumental plural *tṓis < the plural stem *tói- + *-is. (*-ṓis was subsequently extended to o-stem nouns.)

Jasanoff then infers that *toi– was originally a collective stem that thus would have been inflected in the singular (e.g. dative *toi-ei, genitive *toi-s). As these forms cannot be reconstructed on the basis of the attested Indo-European languages, this suggests that they were pluralized within PIE to yield a genitive plural *toi-s-oh_xom (Vedic téṣām), which explains the intrusive -s-. A second unexpected result is that previously unexplained Anatolian neuter nominative-accusative plural pronominal forms in -e continue the plural stem in *-oi by regular sound change from a period prior to its replacement by *-eh₂, which served to disambiguate them from the masculine forms.

There are four other notable papers. Moss Pike, ‘The Indo-European long vowel preterite: New Latin evidence’ (205–12), stresses the importance of manuscript evidence in demonstrating the existence of a long vowel preterite clēpit ‘3s stole’, which may have a near analogue in Tocharian, beside the sigmatic clepsit. Irene Balles, ‘The Old Indic cvi construction, the Caland system, and the PIE adjective’ (1–16), and Sabine Häusler, ‘Genitive and adjective—primary parts of the proto-Indo-European language-system?’ (73–84), offer evidence that adjectives were a very young lexical category in PIE.

Finally, Roland Pooth, ‘Proto-Indo-European ablaut and root inflection: An internal reconstruction and inner-PIE morphological analysis’ (229–54), provocatively suggests that ablaut in proto-Indo-European was not conditioned phonologically, as conventionally assumed, but morphologically, as conventionally reconstructed for proto-Semitic, which has been presumed to have roots and templates, e.g. Arabic ktb ‘write’ and uC₁C₂uC₃ (imperative), respectively. Gonzalo Rubio (2005), however, argues that proto-Semitic in fact had stems and words and was substantially different fromPIE.

Reference

Rubio, Gonzalo. 2005. ‘Chasing the Semitic root: The skeleton in the closet’. Aula orientalis 30. 45–63.

Reviewed by Angela Tan, University of California, Los Angeles

The Chomskyan approach to linguistics postulates that there is a difference between competence (i.e. an idealized mental capacity that resides in individuals) and performance (i.e. the actual production of utterances). The interactional instinct departs from this traditional viewpoint by postulating that ‘competence is performance’ (101). Language emerges from interactions between speakers, which eliminates the need to posit a biologically innate set of grammar (termed universal grammar in some instances).

Ch. 1 introduces how grammar can be viewed as a complex adaptive system (CAS), which ‘emerged through local interactions among participating agents’ (18). It is argued that languages are culturally transmitted and are thus interactional artifacts. Ch. 2 then presents evidence for the emergence of language by looking at pidgins and creoles, Nicaraguan Sign Language, and grammaticalization. Ch. 3 argues for the role of context in the study of language emergence, as opposed to seeing language as autonomous or analyzing sanitized syntax. This chapter introduces two key approaches—conversation analysis and the usage-based approach—and highlights how they each contribute to the interactional basis of language.

Ch. 4 presents behavioral evidence for the interactional instinct, in which developing children have the innate drive to attune to, mirror, and elicit interaction with other interactants in their environment through gestures, facial expressions, and vocalizations. Attention is also given to the caregivers, who are the primary sources of interaction for the infants, and how these caregivers behave differently with the infants then they do around adults. This motivates the social bonding between the child and the caregiver that ensures the child’s language acquisition.

Ch. 5 introduces a model of social affiliation that may undergird this interactional instinct. This model demonstrates how the dual system of consummatory and appetitive rewards become part of the child’s affiliative memory. The neurobiological account of affiliation shows how opiates released during the interactions between the caregiver and the infant endow in both parties the feelings of calm, well-being, and euphoria. This also deepens the bond between the caregiver and the infant and functions as the motivational mechanism that guarantees infant language acquisition.

Ch. 6 argues that affiliation precedes the primary language acquisition, in which the child’s affiliative drive binds it closely to sources of language input, allowing the child to acquire language. However, second language acquisition is never guaranteed due to neurobiological changes and variation as the child develops. The conclusion of this volume explores the relationship between the interactional instinct and other fields, such as linguistics, psychology, and biology.

The interactional instinct is revolutionary in its perception of language evolution and acquisition. It is a rich resource for a wide range of audiences as it brings together the fields of discourse, linguistics, and neurobiology and has implications on other fields like anthropology and psychology. Extensive and yet concise, this book will be a valuable read for scholars and researchers.

Reviewed by Nikolai Penner, McMaster University

This textbook from a world-renown team of scholars at the University of Essex offers an innovative way of teaching the discipline of linguistics. The authors examine language from various perspectives and theoretical standpoints.

The book is divided into three large parts: ‘Sounds’, ‘Words’, and ‘Sentences’. In each section, fundamental concepts are introduced and then applied to the several linguistic disciplines (i.e. child language acquisition, psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, and sociolinguistics). Although the overall structure remains unaltered from the first edition, the second version of the book underwent a number of important changes, including a modification of individual sections, the addition of new exercises after each chapter, and a significant expansion of the bibliography and recommended reading lists at the end of each section.

Part 1, ‘Sounds’, includes seven chapters. It begins with a brief description and classification of the sounds of the English language (Ch. 2 ‘Sounds and suprasegmentals’, 29–51) and introduces some of the more abstract concepts in phonology, such as the notion of phonemes, syllables, and their structure (Ch. 5 ‘Phonemes, syllables and phonological processes, 84–105). Chs. 3 and 4 examine the role of sounds in phonological variation and sound change, whereas child phonology and issues of speech perception and production are the topics of the final two chapters in this section.

Part 2, ‘Words’, consists of nine chapters that discuss language in terms of morphology and semantics. Chs. 8–11 focus on word formation and introduces word categories, morphemes, and morphological processes. These concepts are then applied to different languages across the globe. Ch.12 ‘Word meaning’ (193–210) deals with semantic properties of words and the implication of word meaning for the overall organization of the lexicon. The next two chapters examine the acquisition of words by children, the issues of memory, word perception, and production. Chs. 15 and 16 deal with the lexical disorders that affect the use of words and inflectional marking (e.g. aphasia and specific language impairment) and with lexical variation and change.

The final section, Part 3 ‘Sentences’, contains ten chapters that discuss the core theoretical ideas on sentence formation and introduces new terminology, such as empty categories, movement, and syntactic variation. Chs. 24–26 examine the child’s acquisition of grammar, adult processing of sentences, and syntactic disorders (e.g. agrammatism). The book concludes with the discussion of sentence use and an introduction to the core ideas of pragmatics.

By structuring this book in an unconventional way, the authors aim to provide a number of benefits to both teachers and students. For example, the division into three parts makes this textbook appropriate for smaller classes. It provides a possibility to efficiently distribute the workload between a phonetician, a morphologist, and a syntactician. In addition, each section of the book is largely self-contained and can be used as an introduction for more specialized courses. Students, on the other hand, should be able to acquire the information and engage with the subject more easily compared to the other existing introductory textbooks.

Reviewed by John R. te Velde, Oklahoma State University

This volume contains a collection of nine articles, seven of which are based on papers presented at the panel on clause combining at the International Pragmatics Conference at Lake Garda in July 2005. The title promises a cross-linguistic view, and eight languages (Indonesian, Iberian Spanish, Bulgarian, Estonian, Finnish, English, German, and Japanese) are investigated; however, few of the authors actually compare the language of their study with other languages.

Prominent themes of this volume include (i) the nature of linguistic categoriality (a number of the papers argue for polyfunctionality), (ii) the grammaticalization of conjunctions into particles, and (iii) the process by which linguistic items and constructions become opaque.

This volume begins with a paper by Robert Englebretson on yang constructions in colloquial Indonesian, which are often analyzed as relative clauses but, as Englebretson argues, can also have other functions. He suggests these functions form a continuum and thus support polyfunctionality. However, Englebretson does not consider whether a headless yang construction could have an elliptical head and in fact states that this construction is best accounted for within a conception of grammar as language- and construction-specific.

The following paper by Ricardo Etxepare utilizes syntactic notions (e.g. verbal projection, abstract elements, embedding) to examine quotative constructions in Iberian Spanish. Etxepare’s cross-linguistic study, which references numerous works within the generative framework, shows that German wh-constructions may, like their Spanish equivalents, undergo LF movement across a universal quantifier. The level of analysis in this paper stands out far above most others in this volume.

The paper by Grace E. Fielder on Bulgarian adversative connectives echoes the analysis of the first two articles: these connectives occupy various positions along a continuum that extends from conjunctions to discourse markers and operate on multiple levels of linguistic structure (e.g. syntactic, semantic, discourse-pragmatic). In written corpora, connectives are more likely to function as conjunctions, whereas in spoken corpora they often function as discourse markers.

The paper by Paul J. Hopper and Sandra A. Thompson examines a set of biclausal constructions found in conversational English and German. I found some of the data difficult to analyze because the conversational exchanges were sometimes illogical, ungrammatical, and/or too elliptical to make sense of. German constructions that begin with an embedded clause but are not followed by the main clause finite verb are analyzed through the reframing of syntactic constructions (i.e. they are no longer verb-second) in interactional terms that are motivated by real-time interactional formats. This interesting conclusion is problematic for syntacticians who may not know how to interpret ‘the intricate understanding [that] the interlocutors have of what social work their talk is doing’ (115).

Leelo Keevallik examines the Estonian complementizer and evidential particle et, which historically is associated with reported speech but in conversational usage incorporates another voice. This analysis would benefit from a syntactic perspective, one that offers a theory of ellipsis as well as a comparison with the Finnish et(tä), like that examined in the next paper by Ritva Laury and Eeva-Leena Seppänen, who argue, like other papers in this volume, that the data support nondiscrete syntactic categories.

The only study that is truly cross-linguistic is by Jean Mulder and Sandra A. Thompson on the grammaticalization of but as a final particle in conversational English (compared to Japanese and Korean). They argue that the behavior of but suggests a continuum from conjunction to discourse particle. Contrary to other papers in this volume, these authors argue that language change is highly systematic with recurring patterns of change.

The last two papers both focus on quotative tte in Japanese, the first by Shigeko Okamototo and Tsuyoshi Ono, who agree with other authors in this volume in arguing for a continuum of grammatical functions and against static grammatical categories. They additionally assert theoretical/formalist analyses of being prescriptive. The second paper by Ryoko Suzuki, who also sees a continuum from clause-introducing to noun-introducing functions, divides these functions into three patterns that involve tte linking a phrase to a prior utterance, a present entity, or introducing a new entity.

As with most volumes of this sort, the quality was quite mixed; nevertheless, most papers will make a noteworthy contribution to the field of functional linguistics.