Reviewed by Manuel Padilla Cruz, University of Seville

This volume gathers eighteen interesting papers by twenty-two leading researchers to honor scholar Laurence R. Horn. It starts with an introduction in which the editors summarize the prolific and influential work by this linguist, mainly devoted to delineating the boundary between semantics and pragmatics.

In the first contribution, ‘Where have some of the presuppositions gone?’, Barbara Abbott clarifies the distinction between presuppositions and implicatures, and why some presupposition triggers get their presuppositions neutralized. In ‘The top 10 misconceptions about implicature’, Kent Bach reflects on frequent misconceptions about implicatures. In ‘Inferential relations and noncanonical word order’, Betty J. Birner argues that inferable information in noncanonical constructions can be better explained if ‘discourse-old’ information is seen as inferentially connected to previous context.

In the fourth paper, ‘Sherlock Holmes was in no danger’, Greg Carlson and Gianluca Storto discuss the semantics and pragmatics of context-sensitive lexical items with a variable that is assigned a value in a specific context by pragmatic processes. In ‘Free choice in Romanian’, Donka F. Farkas analyses the uses of the Romanian determiner any from an indefinitist standpoint. In ‘Polarity, questions, and the scalar properties of even’, Anastasia Giannakidou explores the behavior of three Greek expressions that seem to be the equivalents of ‘even’.

In the seventh paper, ‘Discourse particles and the symbiosis of natural language processing and basic research’, Georgia M. Green discusses some attitudinal discourse markers whose apparently meaningless occurrence unveils the speaker’s feelings. Next, Michael Israel accounts for how speakers use attenuation and understatement to reduce the content of what they say in ‘Saying less and meaning less’. In ‘I can’t seem to figure this out’, Pauline Jacobson reflects on the scope of the constituents of the can’t seem to construction.

In the tenth contribution, ‘Referring expressions and conversational implicatures’, Andrew Kehler and Gregory Ward argue that there must be ‘nonfamiliarity implicatures’ that implicate that the referents of some expressions are nonfamiliar to the hearer. Then, Steven R. Kleinedler and Randall Eggert deal with the semantics and pragmatics of personal pronouns and their lexicographical challenges in ‘Indexi-lexicography’, contending that recourse to pragmatics is necessary for their definitions. In ‘Why defining is seldom “just semantics”: Marriage and marriage’, Sally McConnell-Ginet centers on the function of some instrumental definitions for developing concepts, understanding, and social life.

In the thirteenth paper, ‘Negation and modularity’, Frederick J. Newmeyer supports a modular account of English negation. In ‘A note on Mandarin possessives, demonstratives, and definiteness’, Barbara H. Partee analyses some problems posed by Mandarin possessives, numerals, and demonstratives in combinations related to definiteness and partitivity. In ‘On a homework problem of Larry Horn’s’, Francis J. Pelletier and Andrew Hartline discuss a solution to the problem of the meaning of ‘or’ proposed by Larry Horn.

In the sixteenth contribution, ‘Impersonal pronouns in French and Yiddish’, Ellen F. Prince examines the impersonal subject pronoun ‘one’ in these languages in terms of its truth-conditional meaning and discourse anaphora possibilities. In ‘Motors and switches: An exercise in syntax and pragmatics’, Jerrold M. Sadock defends the validity of the Gricean approach developed by Larry Horn to account for some natural language connectives. Finally, in ‘Fine-tuning Jespersen’s Cycle’, Scott A. Schwenter provides additional evidence to prove that Jespersen’s cycle regarding negation markers needs some adjustments.

Reviewed by Debra Ziegeler, IPrA Research Center, Antwerp

What makes grammaticalization is a comprehensive volume comprising eleven chapters of new works put together following a workshop organized by one of the editors, Björn Wiemer, with the title ‘Grammatikalisierung vs. Lexikalisierung’, 1–3 February 2001 in Constance, Germany. The aims of the workshop were to address two main questions: first, the distinctions between grammaticalization and lexicalization, and second, whether it is possible to include under a broader description of grammaticalization the areas less likely to conform to the strict parameters first established by Lehmann, such as the grammaticalization of grammatical material not generally associated with morphological analysis (Christian Lehmann, Thoughts on grammaticalization , LINCOM Europa, 1995). Nearly half of the chapters are at least partially devoted to research in Slavic languages.

The book is composed of four parts: ‘General issues’, ‘On building grammar from below and from above: Between phonology and pragmatics’, ‘Grammatical derivation’, and ‘The role of lexical semantics and of constructions’. There are a subject index, an author index, and a language index. In Part 1, Björn Wiemer and Walter Bisang, offer an overview of the current research on grammaticalization and an introduction to the range of topics offered in the chapters that follow. ‘Lexicalization and grammaticalization’, by Nikolaus P. Himmelmann, addresses the problems associated with the element-based approach to grammaticalization and the necessity for studying grammaticalizing elements within their syntagmatic environments. With regard to the distinctions between lexicalization and grammaticalization, Himmelmann emphasizes that lexical generality is the most important distinguishing feature of the two processes.

In Part 2, Livio Gaeta’s chapter, ‘Exploring grammaticalization from below’, focuses on morphological elements in grammaticalization as a counter motivation for degrammaticalization, in that the functional and semantic efficiency of morphemes over lexemes creates the unidirectionality of grammaticalization processes. Susanne Günthner and Katrin Mutz discuss the development of pragmatic markers from subordinators in German and Italian in independent subordinate clauses occurring in spoken discourse, suggesting the adoption of the term ‘pragmaticalization’, as a subcategory of grammaticalization. Bisang’s chapter on ‘Grammaticalization without coevolution of form and meaning’ discusses tense, aspect, and modality in mainland Southeast Asian languages, addressing, among other questions, the suggestion of a past tense emerging in Mandarin Chinese. He concludes that there is insufficient evidence in such languages for the precise form-meaning relationships found in Indo-European languages, and that their overall pragmatic polyfunctionality precludes a strictly temporal reference function for the Chinese perfective marker. Daniel Weiss’s chapter on the rise of the indefinite article in Macedonian provides evidence that the specification of the noun phrase by attributives or relative clauses is a stronger determining factor of grammaticalization than simply referential status alone.

In Part 3, Volkmar Lehmann, in ‘Grammaticalization via extending derivation’, looks at Russian aspectual categories and offers a broader notion of grammaticalization in which the nature of Slavic aspect is seen as derivational, not inflectional. Katharina Böttger, in a corpus study covering seventeenth-century texts, also studies Russian aspectual morphology and concurs with Lehmann that the expression of aspect in verb stems with affixes characterizes a grammaticalization that does not involve any accompanying formal changes.

In Part 4, Ekkehard König and Letizia Vezzosi discuss the grammaticalization of reflexivity, arguing that the interpretation of predicates as other-directed vs. non-other-directed, the feature of contrast where the former type is concerned, and the environment of third-person singular subjects will together provide the optimum historical conditions for the onset of grammaticalization of reflexive markers in English and other languages. Björn Hansen’s chapter discusses modality in Slavic languages using semantic maps and suggests that this category is less grammaticalized than either tense or mood, but does reflect the framework of grammaticalization proposed by Lehmann (1995). Wiemer’s chapter, the longest and final chapter in the book, discusses the evolution of passives as grammatical constructions in Northern Slavic and Baltic languages, using a basic role and reference grammar analysis, and arrives at the conclusion that since passives are not an obligatory category and do not alter the lexical meaning of the active counterpart predicate, they constitute a special case of grammaticalization of a construction, rather than a morphological category.

In all, the collection presents some interesting questions and challenges for the development of grammaticalization theory generally, providing a great deal of impetus for similar future research endeavors in the field. If one criticism should be raised, it would only be in presentational aspects, where for some of the chapters more thorough proofreading might have been possible, and perhaps the inclusion of interlinear glosses for readers not familiar with the languages under discussion.

Reviewed by Chaoqun Xie, Fujian Normal University

The meaning of meaning has been and still is a central concern for scholars of various persuasions, including those in philosophy, semantics, and pragmatics. Recently, more and more effort has been devoted to exploring the dynamics of meaning. Is meaning dynamic? If yes, how is dynamic meaning possible? Many scholars have reached the consensus that meaning is and should be dynamic, especially when it is discussed in certain social-interaction contexts, which certainly involve various complex factors. Meaning: The dynamic turn, however, largely focuses on another question: Why is meaning dynamic? This book adopts a very formal approach to a very dynamic topic.

This volume, which developed out of papers presented to a workshop held in Prague in September 2001, consists of a general introduction followed by three parts. In the introduction, editor Jaroslav Peregrin provides some background information and briefs the chapters to follow. Part 1 is devoted to foundational issues of dynamic semantics. In ‘Structural properties of dynamic reasoning’, Johan van Benthem argues for dynamic inference in communication by means of a concrete representation theorem. In ‘Construction by description in discourse representation’, Noor van Leusen and Reinhard Muskens deal with the question of declarativity versus procedurality in dynamic theories and present a view on linguistic processing. Richard Breheny’s contribution, ‘On the dynamic turn in the study of meaning and interpretation’, merits particular attention. Breheny discusses three points: (i) dynamic and nondynamic processes are distinguished by a focus on process, (ii) the empirical issue of underdetermination and compositionality is not adequately tackled by current dynamic approaches, and (iii) the current dynamic paradigm cannot solve the underdetermination of context adequately and properly. The first part ends with Wolfram Hinzen’s elaboration of what ‘Real dynamics’ really means.

The four chapters in Part 2, ‘Syntax, semantics and discourse’, focus on dynamic approaches in various areas of the theory of language. While Ruth Kempson, Wilfried Meyer-Viol, and Masayuki Otsuka deal with the dynamics of syntax, Klaus von Heusinger talks about ‘The double dynamics of description in discourse representation’. Petr Sgall’s chapter is devoted to dynamics within the sentence and dynamics in discourse. Timothy Childers and Vladimír Svoboda argue that the meaning of a prescriptive sentence is hard to tell ‘unless we understand how it works in various normative language games’ (198). In ‘Imperative negation and dynamic semantics’, Berislav Žarnić defends the view that ‘an imperative and its negation are equipotent with respect to their binding force and layers of informational content’ (201).

Part 3, Semantic games’, includes three chapters: ‘Dynamic game semantics’ by Tapio Janasik and Gabriel Sandu, ‘About games and substitution’ by Manuel Rebuschi, and ‘In defense of (some) verificationism: Verificationism and game-theoretical semantics’ by Louise Vigean.

This collection of papers represents the state of the art in the ongoing discussion of dynamic semantics, casting some new light upon the nature of meaning. Written by a team of experts, this volume is of high-quality, with arguments that are largely convincing, and it should be most welcomed by those with a keen interest in logic, formal semantics, or formal pragmatics. I have one reservation, though. When I first read the title of this book, I was full of expectations, looking forward to knowing more about the whats, hows, and whys of the dynamic turn of meaning in real-life social interaction. I was a bit disappointed, however, upon reading it; I am not sure how dynamic meaning can be realized or how far the catchphrase ‘dynamic meaning’ can go if it resorts to formalization procedures, and if it still holds on to the somewhat rigid and prescriptive Chomskyan paradigm, disregarding ‘the view that linguistic meanings are externally fixed by language-world relations, language use, or by beliefs attached to utterances, jointly with a level of representation’ (117). Although there is, given the computational nature of mind as advocated by scholars of artificial intelligence, some element of truth in saying ‘linguistic meaning derives solely from the internal and naturally necessary workings of the mind’ (177), the more immediate and important question is: What is taken into account when the mind is doing computations and working out linguistic meaning? ‘Real dynamics’ worked out within the tradition of generative grammar cannot be real at all. Finally, I am not sure if the question of why meaning is dynamic has been adequately answered in this volume.

Reviewed by Lara Reglero, Florida State University

This book is a collection of selected papers presented at ‘The Romance Turn’, a workshop on first and second language acquisition held in Madrid in 2004. The book is divided into five parts: Part 1, ‘Clitics, determiners and pronouns’; Part 2, ‘Verbs, auxiliaries and inflection’; Part 3, ‘Movement and resumptive pronouns’; Part 4, ‘Syntax/discourse interface’; and Part 5, ‘L2 acquisition’. All of the papers adopt a generative approach to the study of language acquisition.

Part 1 opens with ‘The production of SE and SELF anaphors in Spanish and Dutch children’ by Sergio Baauw, Marieke Kuipers, Esther Ruigendijk, and Fernando Cuetos, who show that Spanish children perform like adults on se anaphors but have difficulty with self anaphors, in contrast to Dutch children, who exhibit exactly the opposite behavior. In ‘On the acquisition of ambiguous valency-marking morphemes: Insights from the acquisition of French SE’, Isabelle Barrière and Marjorie Perlman Lorch propose a modified version of the maturation hypothesis to explain the order of acquisition of French se and related constructions. Anna Gavarró, Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux, and Thomas Roeper’s ‘Definite and bare noun contrasts in child Catalan’ examines the acquisition of definites and bare nouns in child Catalan from a semantic perspective. In ‘Null arguments in monolingual children: A comparison of Italian and French’, Natasha Müller, Katrin Shmitz, Katja Cantone, and Tanja Kupisch account for the differences in the acquisition of object clitics in child French and Italian by proposing different licensing strategies for each language. Maren Pannemann explores crosslinguistic interaction in the bilingual acquisition of determiners and adjectives in ‘Prenominal elements in French-Germanic bilingual first language acquisition: Evidence for cross-linguistic influence’.

In Part 2, Claudia Caprin and Maria Teresa Guasti’s ‘A cross-sectional study on the use of “be” in early Italian’ analyzes the different omission rates of copula and auxiliary ‘be’ in child Italian. In ‘Patterns of copula omission in Italian child language’, Elisa Franchi investigates the omission rates of the Italian copula in declarative contexts and their absence in wh-contexts. In ‘Looking for the universal core of the RI stage’, Manola Salustri and Nina Hyams propose that the imperative is the equivalent of the RI stage in null subject languages. Vincent Torrens, Linda Escobar, and Kenneth Wexler’s ‘The acquisition of experiencers in Spanish L1 and the external argument requirement hypothesis’ explores the difficulties Spanish-speaking children exhibit with the acquisition of psych verbs that do not project a subject as their external argument. Jacqueline van Kampen studies how tense/agreement omission and root peripheral truncation relate in ‘Early operators and late topic-drop/pro-drop’.

Elaine Grolla’s‘The acquisition of A- and A′-bound pronouns in Brazilian Portuguese’ opens Part 3 by providing a unified analysis for the acquisition of pronominal elements in Brazilian Portuguese. In ‘Acquiring long-distance wh-questions in L1 Spanish: A longitudinal investigation’, María Junkal Guiérrez Mangado accounts for the nonadult constructions produced by a Spanish-speaking child while acquiring long-distance wh-questions. Magda Oiry and Hamida Demirdache argue in their article, ‘Evidence from L1 acquisition for the syntax of wh-scope marking in French’, that French-speaking children use nonadult scope marking strategies to produce long-distance questions.

In Part 4, João Costa and Kriszta Szendröi’s ‘Acquisition of focus marking in European Portuguese: Evidence for a unified approach to focus’ explores whether children can distinguish between syntactic and prosodic marking of focus in European Portuguese. In ‘Subject pronouns in bilinguals: Interface or maturation?’, Manuela Pinto investigates the acquisition of subject pronouns by two Dutch-Italian bilinguals.

In Part 5, Claudia Borgonovo, Joyce Bruhn de Garavito, and Philippe Prévost’s ‘Is the semantics/syntax interface vulnerable in L2 acquisition? Focus on mood distinctions clauses in L2 Spanish’ shows that interface phenomena can be acquired, at least in the domain of the interpretation of DPs marked by mood in Spanish. In ‘The development of the syntax-discourse interface: Greek learners of Spanish’, Cristóbal Lozano argues that L2 learners’ difficulties with discursive focus are due to a deficit with the uninterpretable [focus] feature. Finally, in ‘Beyond the syntax of the null subject parameter: A look at the discourse-pragmatic distribution of null and overt subjects by L2 learners of Spanish’, Silvina Montrul and Celeste Rodríguez Louro examine how L2 learners acquire the morphosyntactic and discourse-pragmatic aspects of Spanish subjects.

The acquisition of syntax in Romance languages provides an extensive and thorough collection of papers that will be of great interest to researchers working on any syntactic aspect of Romance language acquisition from a generative perspective.

Reviewed by Lara Reglero, Florida State University

This book is the fifth edition of the Linguistic variation yearbook. Like its predecessors, the book contains a number of papers addressing issues of linguistic variation within the minimalist framework, addressing a variety of topics ranging from relative clauses, wh-questions, adjacency effects, and harmony patterns, among many others. The focus of the papers is methodological, theoretical, and/or empirical in nature.

The book opens with an ‘Introduction’ (1–3) from the editors in which they summarize the contents of the articles to follow. In ‘Reconstruction in relative clauses and the copy theory of traces’ (5–35), Carlo Cecchetto examines reconstruction effects in relative clauses that contain an unaccusative head. He notes that reconstruction effects are only found in identity sentences, as opposed to subject-predicate sentences. Based on this contrast, he argues that reconstruction effects are not the result of combining the copy theory and a raising analysis of relative clauses. Instead, he argues for a nonraising analysis in which the semantics of identity sentences plays a crucial role.

Gisbert Fanselow, Reinhold Kliegl, and Matthias Schlesewsky’s ‘Syntactic variation in German wh-questions: Empirical investigations of weak crossover violations and long wh-movement’ (37–63) discusses the findings from three experiments on syntactic variation in German wh-questions. In an acceptability rating experiment, the authors investigate weak crossover violations. The results indicate that the variation they found is due to extra-grammatical factors. The second experiment (sentence completion task) targets wh-movement out of finite clauses. In this case, the authors found that the variation could be dialectal. A follow-up training experiment, however, indicates that the variation is also due to nonlinguistic factors.

Anikó Lipták explores the internal structure of temporal adverbial clauses in ‘Relativization strategies in temporal adjunct clauses’ (65–117). She uncovers a new strategy in Hungarian, IP-relativization, which probably also applies in German and Serbian. By comparing Hungarian with Hindi and Basque, the author suggests that IP-relativization is a syntactic alternative to nominalization. In ‘Microvariations in harmony and value-relativized parametrization’ (119–64), Andrew Nevins considers parametric variation in harmony patterns. By examining Yoruba and Modern Manchu dialects, the author proposes that alternating morphemes searching for a harmonic value may have access to all values, only a single-value, or to contrastive values. Adam Szczegielniak’s ‘Two types of resumptive pronouns in polish relative clauses’ (165–85) examines adjacent resumptives and embedded resumptives in Polish relative clauses. The author argues that embedded resumptives are regular resumptive pronouns. In contrast, adjacent resumptives are truncated/cliticicized forms of the relative operator.

In ‘Microparameters for Norwegian wh-grammars’ (187–226), Øystein Alexander Vangsnes proposes three microparameters to account for the lack of V2 effects in matrix wh-questions across different Norwegian dialects. The proposed microparameters rely on whether interrogative C must be lexicalized, and whether a short wh-word or a complemetizer can lexicalize C. Peter Svenonius analyzes the structure of idioms in his article ‘Extending the extension condition to discontinuous idioms’ (227–63). He proposes that Merge can apply to subconstituents even after Merge has already applied to the structure. The resulting structures are called Banyan trees and contain more than one root. Finally, Charles Yang’s ‘On productivity’ (265–302) investigates why grammars contain exceptions. For this, the author studies morphological phenomena and advances a learning model in which productive processes and exceptions are internalized in a different way.

The Linguistic Variation Yearbook 2005 successfully brings together a collection of papers that will be of great interest to researchers working on comparative studies within the generative framework.

Reviewed by Liang Chen, University of Georgia

Conversation analysis: Studies from the first generation is dedicated to Harvey Sacks, whose research into talk-in-interaction proved foundational to the field of conversation analysis. The editor Gene H. Lerner opens the volume with a brief introduction to Sacks’ work and influence, to the contributors, all of whom were students and/or colleagues of Sacks’, and to the articles themselves (1–11). Gail Jefferson (13–31) provides a technical introduction to the transcription conventions she originated. She focuses on the value of careful transcription, especially emphasizing the transcription of nonlinguistic features of conversation, such as laughter and timing. The rest of the book consist of three parts: ‘Taking turns speaking’, ‘Implementing actions’, and ‘Sequencing actions’.

In Part 1, Harvey Sacks (35–42) presents his groundbreaking work on fundamental organizational aspects of turn-taking in conversation such as taking one turn at a time, minimizing overlaps and gaps between turns, and so forth. Gail Jefferson (43–59) then continues with the problem of simultaneous speech or overlap, focusing on the systematic forms of overlap and methods for ‘post-overlap retrival’ of overlapped talk.

Part 2 focuses on the various ways speakers accomplish conversational goals. Emmanuel A. Schegloff (63–107) examines the sequence organization in the simple act of answering the phone. Specifically, he discusses the effect of the telephone summons—who is qualified to be the answerer and how that person will answer the summons. Anita Pomerantz (109–29) examines data of reported absences from an attendance clerk at a high school to see how people carry out conversational tasks related to their institutionally relevant identities. The methods that the clerk employs are found to include being neutral, focusing on the procedures of the school, avoiding subjective comments, and compensating for incomplete and possibly incorrect records. In her third contribution to the volume, Gail Jefferson (131–67) examines newspaper reports and conversational data and finds that, in extraordinary circumstances, people tend to select ‘first responses’ that contain an ordinary interpretation of the extraordinary event.

Part 3 focuses on the placement of specific action sequences within conversations, and on the connection between linguistic features and social action. Alene Kiku Terasaki (172–223) examines the ‘pre-announcement sequence’, which is one type of preliminary or small sequence of actions designed to come before the main action sequence, and which she divides into three components: pre-announcement, solicitation, and announcement. She suggests that syntactic and sequential features are at least as important as content features in determining what in a conversation will be perceived as the ‘announcement’. Gene H. Lerner (225–56) examines collaborative turn sequences: those sequences with one speaker completing the in-progress turn constructional unit of another speaker. He discusses the ways in which this completion can be either accepted or disregarded. In the final contribution, Jo Ann Goldberg (257–97) examines how a speaker can change loudness from one utterance to the next to sustain engagement or demonstrate disengagement in the closing-sequences of telephone calls.

The articles in this volume merit the praise as an excellent collection reflecting the ever-widening appeal and potential of conversation analysis, specifically as influenced by Harvey Sacks. I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in the analysis of talk in interaction.

Reviewed by Liang Chen, University of Georgia

The acquisition of complex sentences presents a usage-based approach to the acquisition of complex sentences in English. It consists of eight chapters plus a substantial appendix. Two conclusions are drawn from a detailed examination of some 12,000 multiple clause utterances from five English speaking children. First, ‘the development of complex sentences originates from simple nonembedded sentences that are gradually “transformed” to multiple-clause constructions’ (3). Second, ‘children’s early complex sentences are organized around concrete lexical expressions. More schematic representations of complex sentences emerge only later when children have learned a sufficient number of lexically specific constructions to generalize across them’ (3).

The introduction (Ch. 1) includes a discussion of the methodology of the study and the two hypotheses behind it, the structure of the book, and the definition of complex sentences—sentences with a matrix and a finite or nonfinite subordinate clause (either complement, relative, or adverbial), or sentences with coordinate clauses.

Ch. 2, ‘A dynamic network model of grammatical constructions’, presents a rationale for carrying out the study within a functional cognitive framework and briefly introduces construction grammar and the usage-based approach to grammar.

Ch. 3, ‘Towards a definition of complex sentences and subordinate clauses’, defines complex sentences as ‘grammatical constructions that express a specific relationship between two (or more) situations in two (or more) clauses’ (41). The chapter ends with a summary of the features of prototypical subordinate clauses.

Ch. 4, ‘Infinitival and participial complement constructions’, examines the acquisition of nonfinite complement constructions. Diessel claims that the earliest nonfinite complement constructions in child speech constitute propositions that made reference to a single situation and thus do not actually involve embedding. Through a process of clause expansion, the nonembedding nonfinite complement constructions develop into truely embedding ones that can be considered two propositions.

In Ch. 5, ‘Complement clauses’, D suggests that the acquisition of finite complement clauses is also accomplished through the process of clause expansion, whereby a single proposition expressed in early complement clauses expands in later development into two independent propositions. D observes that early complement clauses are typically accompanied by formulaic matrix clauses, which are performative (e.g. as epistemic markers or attention getters) rather than assertive. He suggests that the development complement clauses go through a process whereby first formulaic constructions occur, then performative matrix clauses, then assertive matrix clauses.

Ch. 6, ‘Relative clauses’, discusses the development of relative clauses from simple, lexically specific constructions into full-fledged biclausal structures. The earliest relative clause (i.e. predicate nominal amalgams as D calls them) is not independent of the matrix clause. Only later do children produce fully biclausal structures in which two independent propositions are expressed. The development of relative clauses is therefore very similar to the development of finite and nonfinite complement clauses since each involves an incremental development from simple to more complex clauses via a process of clause expansion.

Ch. 7, ‘Adverbial and co-ordinate clauses’, suggests that adverbial and coordinate clauses, which D subsumes under the term ‘conjoined clauses’, are developed through the common process of clause integration, whereby two independent clauses are integrated in a biclausal construction.

In the conclusion (Ch. 8) D relates the findings about the development of the various complex sentences to the usage-based model and cognitive grammar. It highlights the two claims made throughout the book that complex sentences start as simple clauses, and that complex sentences emerge as lexically specific constructions and develop into constructional schemas.

1Each chapter of the book can be read independently. The language is concise and fairly comprehensible. I would highly recommend it to anyone who is interested in language acquisition and the syntax of complex sentences.

Reviewed by Andreea S. Calude, The University of Auckland

Thompson’s book is concerned with how language represents time. The main aim of the work is ‘to provide an analysis of the structure of time which accounts for the systematic correlation between the temporal meaning and structure of sentences’ (3).

The analysis is conducted within a generative-grammar framework, specifically the minimalist program, assuming the principles outlined in universal grammar. The readers are assumed to be familiar with the syntactic framework employed in the book, and little in the way of theoretical explanations is given throughout. The author makes use of a Reichenbachian approach to handle discussions relating to tense marking, and a Vendlerian classification for analysing aspect. The data comes almost exclusively from English (though there is a handful of examples in the endnotes from Chinese, German, Russian, and Spanish). Ch. 1 outlines the background to the study and explains how the seven chapters of the book are organized.

Ch.apter 2,: ‘The structure of time adverbials’ (15–49), is concerned with the syntax of tense. The discussion is not only limited to the tense phrase (TP), but also includes temporal information given throughout the clause, such as the Event time represented in the VP, and the Reference time in the AspectP. Temporal adjunct clauses constitute the focus of Ch. 3, ‘Adjunct clauses and the structural representation of simultaneity’ (51–85). T argues that the interpretation of various temporal adjunct clauses is reflected in their position within the clause.

Ch. 4, ‘The temporal syntax of arguments: Reduced relatives in subject position’ (87–117) gives an analysis of gerundive clauses that occur in subject position, with particular reference to the ambiguity problems regarding their temporal interpretation. It is proposed that gerundive relative clauses, which receive their temporal interpretation from the Event time, are correlated with a VP-internal interpretation of the subject (11).

The adverb then is at the heart of the discussion in Ch. 5, ‘Principles of time in discourse: Temporal syntax beyond the sentence’ (119–55). Here T examines the representation of tense at the discourse level, arguing that the analysis of tense presented in Ch. 2 accounts for the correlation between the meaning of then and its position within the clause.

In Ch. 6, ‘The structure of aspect’ (157–81), there is a shift in focus from tense to aspect, with the aim of showing that the theory developed in the pervious chapters for tense applies similarly to the investigation of aspect. In particular, it is once again shown, this time with reference to structures involving aspectual interpretations, that Event time is located in the VP and Reference time in AspectP.

Finally, T concludes with an analysis of aspectual verbs given in Ch. 7, ‘Syntax and semantics of aspectual verbs’ (183–204).

Time in natural language is intended for linguists interested in the minimalist framework and provides an account for how this framework could be applied to tense and aspect.

The linguistics of history. By Roy Harris. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005. Pp. 256. ISBN 0748619305. $89.

Reviewed by Andreea S. Calude, The University of Auckland

The linguistics of history is a fascinating account of how issues surrounding language, such as the use of language, the obligatory reliance on and employment of linguistic materials, the bias of language, and so on, affect the historian and historical research. It offers a connecting link between the Western philosophy of history and the Western philosophy of language, spanning as far as back as Ancient Greece and as far into the present as the advent of television.

The book contains seven chapters. The first, ‘Language and the historian’ (1–33), addresses the question of how and if historians might be able to verify that their interpretations of linguistic resources used to depict past events are indeed accurate and faithful to their original intended purpose. Ch. 2, ‘History and the literate revolution’ (33–67), looks at how the invention of writing drastically changed our view of the past, how it helped record the past, and how it made ‘a continuous historical consciousness possible’ (66).

In Ch. 3, ‘History as a palimpsest’ (68–100), Harris explores the lingering impact of the literate revolution on language, politics, and historical truth. In particular, he explains that these aspects have become interlocked in such a way that it is increasingly difficult to disentangle them from each other. Ch. 4, ‘Historicism and linguistics’ (101–36), will perhaps be of most interest to linguists, since it concerns the birth of linguistics, in particular comparative philology, as a science, and the way in which the history of its founding was constructed to fit certain national and personal goals.

H returns to the responsibilities of the historian in Ch. 5, ‘History and ordinary language’ (137–67), where he deals with the use of ordinary language, prescriptivism, the limits and bias of language as a tool, as well as several ramifications of this bias. Ch. 6 (168–97) treats the issue of ‘autonomy’ of history and the extent to which one can talk about such an autonomy.

Finally, Ch. 7 (198–228) concludes with a philosophical discussion of truth in historical accounts, and the integration between oral language, written language, and historical truth. Significantly, this final chapter contains a detailed discussion of the various formats (oral, written) available to the historian for presenting the past, and the implications they each bring with them to the final chronicle.

The linguistics of history is an engaging read, for both historian and linguist alike. It is a fascinating mixture of philosophy, linguistics (especially spoken and written language and communication), and history. While the book is not, however, a straightforward, simple read for the unseasoned researcher, it does prove a rewarding and stimulating one for those willing to pursue it.

Strength and weakness at the interface: Positional neutralization in phonetics and phonology. By Jonathan Barnes. (Phonology & phonetics.) Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2006. Pp. ix, 292. ISBN 9783110185218. $137 (Hb).

Reviewed by Anna Balas, Adam Mickiewicz University

The book is a revision of the author’s doctoral dissertation completed at the University of California, Berkeley in 2002. The study investigates the typology and implementation of positional contrast in the world’s vowel systems with the purpose of accounting for regularities in this typology and explaining the relationship between phonetics and phonology. The study adopts a diachronically oriented phonologization approach.

The ‘Introduction’, the first of five chapters, clearly defines positional neutralization, presents phonetic and phonological considerations in the treatment of positional neutralization, defines the relationship between phonetics and phonology in the phonologization approach, and sets the goals for the study: to probe the controversies concerning the positional neutralization and the role of phonetics in phonology more generally. Chs. 2 through 4 examine the operation of phonetic principles in phonologization on the bases of diverse empirical findings. Ch. 2 presents the licensing asymmetries between stressed and unstressed syllables, and demonstrates that unstressed vowel-reduction patterns are mostly based on the neutralization of vowel-height contrasts in duration-dependent undershoot. Ch. 3 presents positional neutralization effects in final syllables. They vary crosslinguistically, and they are, on the one hand, limited by domain-final lengthening and articulatory strengthening of preboundary elements, and on the other hand, enhanced by radical drops in subglottal pressure, drop in F0, lower intensity, and devoicing. This line of argumentation leads to a conclusion that the approach, in which the inherent strength or weakness of structural positions is encoded in universal grammar, gives less precise predictions than the approach that derives the typology of positional neutralization from the phonologization of phonetic patterns and that can thus account for the effects of opposing phonetic tendencies. Ch. 4 offers an analysis of positional neutralization in domain-initial syllables, arguing that, although positional neutralization affecting initial syllables is rare and in fact limited to vowel harmony, it is not a consequence of the initial position itself, but rather the effect of the crosslinguistic phonetic characteristics of initial syllables. Ch. 5 offers a discussion of the enterprise of phonological typology and the phonetics-phonology interface. The conclusion is that the synchronic connection between the phonological regularities and the phonetic patterns is not enough to account for the positional neutralization. Typological patterns are argued to be best explained by phonetic factors, whereas categorical positional neutralization in synchrony is best explained by phonetics-free phonological approaches.

A question a reader might want to consider is whether it would be possible to find a framework which incorporates and sees phonetic motivation for changes, phonologization. and a synchronic state as a continuum.

Following the main text, the book concludes with notes, references and an index.

The discussion in this work of phonological neutralization is very clear, thorough, engaging and informative. The book is worthwhile not only for those working on positional neutralization but also, as a phonological-phonetic venture to those interested in the phonetics-phonology interface.