Review of: Aspect in Mandarin Chinese: A Corpus-Based Study

The authors of this study pursue two goals. Citing examples from a large corpus of texts rather than relying primarily on native-speaker intuitions, they provide a fine-grained account of how aspect operates on both the lexical and sentential levels in contemporary Mandarin Chinese. Based on this description, they propose a number of refinements to currently existing general theories of aspect. The accompanying discussion revisits such important issues as the difference between aspect and Aktionsart, situation aspect vs. viewpoint aspect, contextual levels of analysis, and the notion of time vs. space in definitions of event boundedness

Review of: The Languages of Native North America

Mithun estimates that at least 300 distinct languages may have been spoken in North America on the eve of European contact. Of these, many disappeared without being adequately recorded or were not recorded at all. Of those that remained long enough to be documented in some appreciable detail, Goddard (I996: 3) lists I20 as already extinct by the mid I990s, and 72 as spoken by only a handful of elderly speakers. Of the remaining languages, 91 are no longer being learned naturally by children, and only 46 are still currently spoken by appreciable numbers of people of all ages. To this Mithun adds precise detail as to the exact number of speakers still extant, though unfortunately even her numbers are now probably a bit optimistic in some cases. This ongoing, catastrophic loss of so much of the continent\u27s linguistic diversity makes Mithun\u27s book all the more important as a record of what is being lost and as a possible inspiration to today\u27s linguists to take up the synchronic description of the remaining languages

Review of: A Grammar of Kwaza

This fundamental account of Kwaza, an unclassified language spoken by twenty five people in a remote area of Brazil’s state of Rondoˆnia, makes a superb addition in every way. Based primarily on the author’s extensive fieldwork from 1995 to 2002, it contains a thorough analysis of all aspects of the phonology, morphology, and syntax. It also provides useful commentary on varied aspects of the speakers’ culture and history, likewise hitherto barely remarked upon in any publication. Before the author’s work, documentation of this critically endangered language was limited to three brief word lists compiled in 1938, 1943, and 1984—data the author carefully takes into account. Kwaza is the speakers’ self-designation. In previous literature, the language was usually referred to as Koaia

Review of: Gender in Indo-European

This book takes a fresh look at the development of gender in Early and Late Proto-Indo-European. Matasovic reduces the diachronic picture to a few basic facts, while also making informed comparisons with non-Indo-European (IE) languages. Early Proto-IE appears to reveal a binary noun-class opposition between a common gender and a neuter gender, with the feminine arising only late

Review of: Classifiers: A Typology of Noun Categorization

This book offers a multifaceted, cross-linguistic survey of all types of grammatical devices used to categorize nouns. It represents an ambitious expansion beyond earlier studies dealing with individual aspects of this phenomenon, notably Corbett\u27s (I99I) landmark monograph on noun classes (genders), Dixon\u27s important essay (I982) distinguishing noun classes from classifiers, and Greenberg\u27s (I972) seminal paper on numeral classifiers. Aikhenvald\u27s Classifiers exceeds them all in the number of languages it examines and in its breadth of typological inquiry. The book is intended to inspire and guide more linguists into conducting fieldwork on undescribed or under-described languages by providing \u27a framework within which fieldworkers and typologists will be able to work, and which can be amended and adjusted as new data and new insights emerge

A Response to Campbell

The Dene–Yeniseian (DY) hypothesis argues that Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit (NaDene) is related to the Siberian family Yeniseian, which consists of Ket and several extinct relatives. The strongest evidence comes from the verb-internal tense–mood system, action nominal (gerund, infinitive) morphology, and sound correspondences based on cognates in basic vocabulary. Shared words for ‘conifer needles’, ‘conifer pitch’, ‘rump, leg’, ‘liver’, and others reveal that phonemic tones arose separately in Yeniseian and Athabaskan from an earlier distinction involving coda glottalization, the original glottal articulation surviving in Tlingit and Eyak. Proponents of the DY hypothesis regard such evidence as indicative of genealogical affinity

Review of: Handbook of Amazonian Languages

This thick book is the first supplement to the Handbook of Amazonian languages (henceforward, HAL) to appear in nearly a decade. Building upon the best tradition of missionary-inspired descriptive linguistic work fostered in connection with Summer Institute of Linguistics (SIL) activities, editors Desmond Derbyshire and Geoffrey Pullum launched HAL during the mid1980s as a means of attracting scholarly attention to one of the world\u27s most persistently ignored linguistic areas. With the appearance of Vol. 4, HAL coverage of the Amazon now increases to three typological studies, four historical-comparative analyses, and ten grammatical descriptions of languages belonging to eight different genetic groupings. Unfortunately, this tally barely begins to approach exhaustive coverage of the region, since the rain forests of South America are home to at least 300 languages divided among about 20 families and two dozen isolates. Nevertheless, given the spate of new publications on Amazonian languages over the past decade, many by linguists with SIL affiliation or who were inspired by exposure to earlier volumes of HAL, the series has clearly achieved the goal of drawing the serious attention of a growing number of linguists to the Amazon

Review of: Circum-Baltic Languages Vol. 1: Past and Present, and Circum-Baltic Languages Vol. 2: Grammar and Typology

These twin volumes grew out of a six-year research program entitled \u27Language typology around the Baltic Sea\u27, sponsored by the Faculty of Humanities at Stockholm University and directed by one of the editors (Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm). They seek to unite the broad sweep characteristic of typological inquiries with the finer-grained detail typical of language contact studies. While K-T concedes that Circum-Baltic (CB) languages are not a true Sprachbund, she emphasizes that the contact situation in northeastern Europe has never been assessed holistically because the languages spoken there have traditionally been the domain of separate disciplines founded on genetic lines. Many facets of the historical interaction between the CB Germanic, Baltic, Slavic, and Finnic languages have therefore never received the attention they deserve

Review of: Evidentials: Turkic, Iranian and Neighbouring Languages

This collection represents an important contribution to the study of evidentials. It contains many descriptive advances and showcases the plurality of current views on evidentiality-something apparent even in the diverse terminology used by the individual contributors. Most important, the volume proposes new topics for future investigation, thereby offering much of real value to typologists, language contact specialists, and anyone interested in processes of grammatical chang