Book reviews

Book reviews of the following works: René Bannerjea: Eskimos in Europe: How they got there and what happened to them afterwards. Bíró Family Nyomdaipari és Kereskedelmi Vállalat, London & Budapest, 2004, 470 pp. ; Jenő Kiss - Ferenc Pusztai (Hrsg.): Magyar nyelvtörténet [Ungarische Sprachgeschichte]}. Osiris Kiadó, Budapest, 2003, 950 pp. ; Mária Ladányi - Csilla Dér - Helga Hattyár (eds): "...még onnét is eljutni túlra''. Nyelvészeti és irodalmi tanulmányok Horváth Katalin tiszteletére ["...getting even beyond that..."]. Linguistic and literary studies in honor of Katalin Horváth]. Tinta Könyvkiadó, Budapest, 2004, 499 pp. ; Yuri Alekseevich Tambovtsev: Tipologija funktsionirovanija fonem v zvukovoj tsepochke indoevropejskih, paleoaziatskih, uralo-altaiskih i drugih jazykov mira: kompaktnost' podgrupp, grupp, semej i drugih jazykovyh taksonov [A typology of the functioning of phonemes in sound sequences in Indo-European, Paleo-Asiatic, Ural-Altaic and other languages of the world: The compactness of subgroups, groups, families and other language taxons]}. Sibirskij Nezavysimyj Institut, Novosibirsk, 2003, 143 pp

How Subjective Is the Subject?

This article re-examines the issue of grammatical relations in Mandarin Chinese in light of the results of recent large-scale typological research on grammatical relations (henceforth GRs) worldwide. Specifically, it discusses three syntactic operations and constructions that are cross-linguistically relevant to the definition of grammatical relations, namely relativisation, reflexivisation, and quantifier float. The study adopts a strictly language-internal typological approach and avails itself of natural linguistic data or sentences sanity-checked by native speakers. The aim of this paper is twofold: first, it explores the hypothesis that, in line with various other languages, GRs in Mandarin Chinese are construction-specific. Second, it proposes an alternative approach capable of explaining the conflicting evidence often pointed out in the literature on GRs and subjecthood in Mandarin Chinese

Accounting for Variation in Language

In this paper, variation is defined as a type having more than one subtype. Using twelve examples from linguistics, two kinds of accounts are identified: eliminating variants and motivating them. Eliminating variants means a subtype is promoted to a type. Motivating variation in turn involves acknowledging the existence of the variants and explaining their existence either by reference to their differing meanings or by identifying the different contexts they occur in. The general applicability of these two ways of dealing with variation is shown by examples from other fields of study and from everyday life

A semantic analysis of associative plurals

The paper presents a general framework for the semantic analysis of nominal plural expressions and assigns a place among them to a lesser-known construction: associative plurals. Six parameters are proposed for identifying the meaning differences among nominal plural expressions. Within this framework, associative plurals are characterized as ranked group plurals that form a single paradigm with first and second person plural pronouns and inclusory (=sylleptic) constructions, all of which are shown to be governed by similar preferences regarding the semantic composition of the group

Book reviews

Moravcsik E, Bárány A. Book reviews. Acta Linguistica Hungarica. 2014;61(2):225-243