Napoli, Donna Jo

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Swarthmore College Works Linguistics Faculty Works Linguistics 3-1-1991 Review Of "Studies In Romance Linguistics" By C. Kirschner And J. De-Cesaris Donna Jo Napoli Swarthmore College, dnapoli1@swarthmore.edu This work is brought to you for free and open access by . It has been accepted for inclusion in Linguistics Faculty Works by an authorized administrator of Works. For more information, please contact myworks@swarthmore.edu. Follow this and additional works at: https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-linguistics  Part of the Linguistics Commons Let us know how access to these works benefits you  Recommended Citation Donna Jo Napoli. (1991). "Review Of "Studies In Romance Linguistics" By C. Kirschner And J. De-Cesaris". Language. Volume 67, Issue 1. 182-183. DOI: 10.2307/415570 https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-linguistics/143   Linguistic Society of America is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Language.http://www.jstor.orgLinguistic Society of AmericaReview Author(s): Donna Jo Napoli Review by: Donna Jo Napoli Source:   Language, Vol. 67, No. 1 (Mar., 1991), pp. 182-183Published by:  Linguistic Society of AmericaStable URL:  http://www.jstor.org/stable/415570Accessed: 21-07-2015 13:53 UTCYour use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jspJSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.This content downloaded from 130.58.65.20 on Tue, 21 Jul 2015 13:53:55 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsLANGUAGE, VOLUME 67, NUMBER 1 (1991) 157); studies involving natural kinds (Chs. 8- 11, pp. 159-246); and a conclusion (Chs. 12-13, pp. 247-83). The introductory part discusses previous re- search and foreshadows K's own model of how concepts are represented. After surveying some of the work by the developmental psychologists Lev Vygotsky, Heinz Werner, Jean Piaget, Je- rome Bruner, and Susan Carey, K turns to the philosophers of science Willard V. O. Quine, Hilary Putnam, Saul Kripke, Stephen Schwartz, and John Dupre. In the end, he expounds and adopts an unpublished theory by Richard Boyd, according to which terms fall on a continuum of well-definedness, with terms for natural kinds and nominal kinds at the endpoints and artifacts falling in the middle. Whereas pure nominal kinds involve necessary-and-sufficient features, natural kinds involve superficial characteristics that contingently cluster together in virtue of an underlying 'causal homeostasis'. The second part, which reports on experi- ments dealing with nominal kinds, utilizes the 'characteristic-to-defining (c/d) paradigm' whereby children are asked to categorize ob- jects given one of two different scenarios. The + c/- d scenario depicts the characteristic, ste- reotypical features associated with an object and excludes the essential features. In the + c/ -d scenario for twin, for example, two girls look alike and live in the same house but have different ages. Conversely, in the -c/+d sce- nario two girls live apart and do not know each other, but are the same age and have the same mother. Consistent with the work of previous researchers, K found that there is a develop- mental shift: kindergartners are much more likely to categorize the +c/-d girls as twins, and to deny that the - c/ + d girls are twins, than second-graders are. Interestingly, K also found that, while all terms within a conceptual domain shift at about the same time, terms from differ- ent domains shift at different times. He takes this as evidence that the shifts result from the growth of domain-specific theories and not from the maturation of general cognitive strategies. The third part shows that children concep- tualize natural kinds differently from artifacts. It uses the 'operations paradigm', in which sce- narios portray objects that superficially seem to change into distinct kinds. For example, in one story doctors paint a horse with stripes and teach it to live in the wilds of Africa. Does it remain a horse, or does it become a zebra? Ac- cording to subject judgments, an instance of a natural kind is less likely to change category than an artifact is. This is evidence that children are not 'unrepenting phenomenalists': for nat- ural kinds, even preschoolers are not bound to perceptual input but rather have concepts that refer to abstract causal mechanisms. The concluding part consists of theoretical claims, most notably that (1) concepts are in- trinsically relational; (2) a child's concept changes qualitatively with development, but the change is continuous rather than stagelike; (3) beliefs operate upon conceptual structure, but possess a different representational format; and (4) concepts involve hierarchical networks whose nodes represent perceptual features and whose links represent causal relations. Unfortunately, these claims are not very well developed. For instance, (3) is vague, given that K never discusses what representational form beliefs might take. He does suggest that con- cepts involve hierarchical networks, but here too his claim is nebulous. Does a concept cor- respond to a cluster of nodes, to the set of belief- links attached to a node, to an entire network, or to something else? In addition to such sub- stantive problems, the expository organization is weak in the introductory and concluding parts. In contrast, the exposition of the empirical studies is admirably clear, and the findings themselves are significant. Thus, for linguists interested in concept development and concept representation, and also for philosophers of lan- guage who are interested in the causal theory of reference, this book is valuable. [PAUL SAKA, University of Arizona.] Studies in Romance linguistics. Ed. by CARL KIRSCHNER and JANET DE- CESARIS. (Current issues in linguis- tic theory, 60.) Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1989. Pp ix, 496. This volume contains twenty-six papers that were presented at the seventeenth annual Lin- guistic Symposium on Romance Languages at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, in 1987. Most articles are on Spanish (9) or French (8), although five deal with pan-Romance issues, two concern Romanian, one compares French and Italian, and one is on Italian. However, even those papers that deal primarily with a single language often enter into comparative matters. The main topic areas are syntax (12 182 This content downloaded from 130.58.65.20 on Tue, 21 Jul 2015 13:53:55 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsBOOK NOTICES papers) and phonology (8 papers); there are also three papers on morphology, one on semantics, and one on the interface of syntax and phonol- ogy. Again, even those papers that are primarily about one component of the grammar often mention the relationship of the phenomenon under study to phenomena or principles in other components. Most of these papers are syn- chronic studies, but six deal with diachronic questions. What they have in common is clarity of presentation and strong theoretical orienta- tions, with the result that the volume provides one more piece of evidence that Romance lin- guistics is, as it has been for the past several years, at the cutting edge of linguistic inquiry. Syntactic issues covered in the book include the theory of empty categories, government and barriers, and questions related to verb position. Phonological issues include syllabification, length, and stress; acoustical data are offered in two studies and explained well enough that the nonphonetician can follow the discussion. Morphological issues include inflection, the cre- ation of clitics, and the structure of compounds, and in semantics there is discussion of tense and mood interpretation. We find articles here by well-known names in Romance linguistics as well as newcomers, although the former category predominates. It is impossible to comment on each article in a brief review, but a short indication about one article in each component of the grammar may be instructive. NICOLAS RUWET, in dis- cussing weather verbs in French, pulls together a string of phenomena that have been taken to be diagnostics for unaccusative verbs, raising interesting problems in each case for the validity of the diagnostic. He concludes that the clas- sification of unaccusative verbs is a useful one and that French weather verbs are unaccusative 'in many of their most conspicuous uses' (338). HENRIETTA CEDERGREN, in an article on rhythm and length, offers data showing that, while non- distinctive vowel length in French is affected by the following context (as expected), it is also affected by the type of preceding segment: a complex syllable onset containing an obstruent and a liquid has a strong negative effect on the probability of vowel reduction. Since length and stress were related in a general way in Vulgar Latin (as argued by SANFORD SCHANE in this same volume), Cedergren's article implicitly raises the question of whether syllable onset is relevant to stress. SOLEDAD VARELA, in an anal- ysis of Spanish compounds of the V+ N type, presents data that challenge established ideas on categories, the head of a compound, and in- flection. Regardless of whether one is convinced by Varela's analysis, the very fact that such intractable data are now being approached by Romance linguists who are well equipped with modern theories promises to bring forth new issues and eventual refinements in morpholog- ical theory. And finally, KAREN ZAGONA, in an article on the relationship between morpholog- ical tense and temporal interpretation, argues that formal rules of movement in L[ogical] F[orm] (of INFL or the main verb into COMP) are responsible for the availability of future inter- pretations of certain tense morphemes. The ap- peal to movement in LF as an account of temporal interpretation opens the door for com- parable studies of similar semantic issues. On the whole, this is an excellent volume, and I recommend it to anyone interested in the struc- ture of Romance languages and linguistic the- ory. [DONNA Jo NAPOLI, Swarthmore College.] Phonologische und statistisch-dia- lektgeographische Untersuchungen an Nordelsassischen Ortsdialekten. By HEINRICH KLEINE. (Zeitschrift fur Dialektologie und Linguistik, Beiheft 63.) Stuttgart: Franz Stei- ner, 1989. Pp. xvii, 378. Paper DM 88.00. The Frankish dialects of northern Alsace have generally been studied either individually or in the context of investigations of much larger areas. One interesting feature of the region is the fact that, although the local dialects are di- alects of German, the region belongs to France, and hence the language of education, bureau- cracy, etc., is French; thus the local dialects are relatively uninfluenced by standard German. The present study investigates 40 northern Al- satian dialects as a unit, amplifying the results further by the use of statistical methods. Kleine restricts himself to phonology and morpho- phonology, on the grounds that only these can be reliably investigated by an outsider. The first chapter (1-18) contains the expected preliminaries to any dialectological work: a brief description of past work and linguistic history, the present dialect situation, goals, type of data to be collected, choice of informants, methods of data collection and codes for each locale in- vestigated. Based on previous experience in the 183 This content downloaded from 130.58.65.20 on Tue, 21 Jul 2015 13:53:55 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Review Of  Studies In Romance Linguistics  By C. Kirschner And J. De-Cesaris

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Review Of Studies In Romance Linguistics By C. Kirschner And J. De-Cesaris

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