Napoli, Donna Jo

English

Works

Swarthmore College Works Linguistics Faculty Works Linguistics 9-1-1994 Review Of "Linguistic Perspectives On The Romance Languages" Edited By W. J. Ashby, M. Mithun, G. Perissinotto, And E. Raposo 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. (1994). "Review Of "Linguistic Perspectives On The Romance Languages" Edited By W. J. Ashby, M. Mithun, G. Perissinotto, And E. Raposo". Language. Volume 70, Issue 3. 593-594. DOI: 10.2307/416498 https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-linguistics/140   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. 70, No. 3 (Sep., 1994), pp. 593-594Published by:  Linguistic Society of AmericaStable URL:  http://www.jstor.org/stable/416498Accessed: 22-07-2015 17:35 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 Wed, 22 Jul 2015 17:35:06 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsBOOK NOTICES Yir-Yoront lexicon: Sketch and dic- tionary of an Australian language. By BARRY ALPHER. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1991. Pp. xi, 795. DM 298.00. Alpher's Ph.D. dissertation on the phonology and grammar of Yir-Yoront-with the engaging title San of ,crgative (Cornell, 1973)-is the most thorough and respected description of a lan- guage from the Cape York Peninsula, North Queensland. The first hundred pages of the present volume recapitulate the main points of the thesis, as improved and revised during five more field trips between 1974 and 1988. The phonemic inventory is typical for an Aus- tralian language, with six stops and nasals (in- cluding two apical and two laminal series), three laterals, two rhotics, and two semivowels. There are six vowels (the standard five plus schwa) and a glottal stop. While other languages of the Cape York Peninsula have undergone ini- tial dropping, Yir-Yoront has truncated the ends of words. What were case endings may have dropped, having left a trace through assimilation and the like. Thus, forms of the noun 'blood' have developed as follows: absolutive kaimn > ka111, ergative kiamn-ngga > kurmn, and dative kamtau-ga > klmin (II). The morphophonemic rules, which ran to 88 pages in the original the- sis, are here condensed into nine pages. Nouns and interrogatives follow an absolu- tive-ergative system of inflection, while pro- nouns show a nominative-accusative pattern. Singular pronouns have distinct accusative and dative forms, but these fall together for nonsin- gulars. The ablative case also covers 'aversive' function (e.g. 'I was afraid oF TrHE DOG'), some- thing that is often accorded a separate case form in Australian languages (29). Nonsingular pro- nouns have a Distributive Plural form, e.g. a,gunnguwll 'you(pl.) and I, acting separately', created from the regular plural (ngapol 'you(pl.) and I') by lenition, ablaut, and reduplication (37). Adjectives function like common nouns in inflection and in syntactic properties, but A is able to put forward five structural and semantic criteria to define a subclass of Adjectives, a most perspicuous and useful analysis. Like other languages of its area, Yir-Yoront has a set of generic nouns which often occur in an NP with a specific noun; A discusses about 20 of them (72-77). He has a detailed and insightful analysis of the kinship system (189-203) and of the way kin terms are grouped together on the basis of a common sign language correspondent, the latter also referring to a body part-e.g. shin' for various sibling terms and father's fa- ther; 'arm' for father, father's sister, and male's child. He also gives 45 words (ten of them verbs) in the respect register which is used with, or in speaking about, or in the presence of certain relatives and states the one-to-many correspon- dences between respect style and ordinary lan- guage words (103-7). All this is a preliminary to the dictionary (125-694), which is certainly the fullest and most informative dictionary produced for any Australian language. A simply provides all of the information anyone could possibly require: form, alternative forms, any irregular inflec- tions, word class, transitivity and conjugation class for verbs, the appropriate generic term for nouns, all the different senses (written in clear English), and a number of well-chosen exam- ples, mostly taken from texts. (One hopes that A will also be publishing a volume of texts.) There are also most useful notes on etymology, and cognates in other Australian languages. The 'index' is an adequate finder list of English words (695-787). There are always points of analysis with which one disagrees and some etymologies that could be improved (e.g., I'd prefer to relate Yir- Yoront pirri 'emu' (451) to Dyirbal kapi-rri rather than, as Alpher does, to Guugu Yimidhirr par- ri\\i). But these are minor matters, and insignifi- cant given the strength of this work. Certain types of words are not generally used in aca- demic reviews, among them 'magnificent'. But this dictionary simply is a magnificent achieve- ment. (R.M.W. DIXON, Australli(an National Unil 'ersity.] Linguistic perspectives on the Romance languages. Ed. by WILLIAM J. ASHBY, MARIANNE MITHUN, GIOR- GIO PERISSINOTTO, and EDUARDO RAPOSO. (Current issues in linguistic theory, 103.) Amsterdam & Phila- delphia: John Benjamins, 1993. Pp. xxii, 404. 593 This content downloaded from 130.58.65.20 on Wed, 22 Jul 2015 17:35:06 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsLANGUAGE, VOLUME 70, NUMBER 3 (1994) This book contains twenty-six articles origi- nally presented at the XXI Linguistic Sympo- sium on Romance Languages in 1991. LSRL is an annual conference that welcomes papers on all aspects of Romance languages in any theo- retical framework, with the goal of providing a forum for quality work in Romance. It is widely accepted as doing just that, and the conference attracts both well-established and new scholars. LSRL XXI was no exception: we have papers here by three keynote speakers, YAKOV MAL- KIEL ('The centers of gravity in nineteenth-cen- tury Romance linguistics', 3-18), CARMEN SILVA-CORVALAN ('On the permeability of grammars: Evidence from Spanish and English contact', 19-44), and OSWALD DUCROT ('Ope- rateurs argumentatifs et analyse de textes', 45-64), as well as by other renowned scholars, including ANDREA CALABRESE ('Palatalization processes in the history of Romance languages: A theoretical study', 65-84), BERNARD TRANEL ('Moraic theory and French liaison', 97-112), EDWARD TUTTLE ('Closed communities and nasal enhancement in northern Italy', 139-48), JURGEN KLAUSENBURGER ('On the evolution of Latin verbal inflection into Romance: Change in parameter setting?', 165-76), GRANT GOODALL ('Spec of IP and spec of CP in Spanish wh-ques- tions', 199-210), PAOLA BENTIVoGLIO ('Full NPs in spoken Spanish: A discourse profile', 211-24), JULIA HERSCHENSOHN ('A postfunc- tionalist perspective on French psych unaccusa- tives', 237-48), and DIETER WANNER ('Multiple clitic linearization principles', 281-302). While the above list is only partial, it is repre- sentative of the papers in the volume, of which fully seventeen concern syntax, semantics, or discourse structure. Nine papers are on French, eight on Spanish, one on a comparison of French and Spanish, and only a few on other Romance languages-a disappointing range for LSRL. There are no general themes running through the book (which we wouldn't expect, given the goals of this conference), yet several papers intersect. First, Calabrese's paper ar- gues that palatalization involves a medial step in which we have double articulation, and he focuses attention on the feature of coronality. PILAR PRIETO ('The PA effect of coronals on vowels in Romance', 85-96) again looks at coro- nality, but explores how coronals influence the fronting of vowels. Second, Tranel's paper exposes problems for moraic theory in accounting for liaison. Then MICHAELI. MAZZOLA ('French rhythm and French segments', 113-26) argues that the reso- lution of underlying stress clashes creates the environment for the operation of deletion rules, including the deletion of liaison segments. And, finally, DAAN DE JONG ('Sociophonological as- pects of Montreal French liaison', 127-38) dis- tinguishes four different types of liaison in Montreal French. Third, HAIKE JACOBS ('The phonology of en- clisis and proclisis in Gallo-Romance and Old French', 149-64) gives an analysis of cliticiza- tion as being within the prosodic word. Then JULIE AUGER ('More evidence for verbal agree- ment-marking in colloquial French', 177-98) looks at so-called subject pronominal clitics and argues they are affixal agreement markers. MARIETTE CHAMPAC;NE ('From Old French to Modern French: The evolution of the inflec- tional system', 259-70) deals extensively with clitics in arguing that diachronic changes in clitic placement (including clitic climbing) are the re- sult of changes in the nature of verbal inflection. And, finally, Wanner's paper points out thorny problems for clitic ordering, arguing that descriptive adequacy requires that we admit multiple clitic classes and ad-hoc, learned linearization principles. Still other areas covered include issues of movement (negative fronting, extraction from NPs, and wH-movement, all three papers being on Spanish) and definiteness (one paper on Spanish and another on Brazilian Portuguese). This is a rich and interesting volume, if limited in the languages covered and variable in the quality of the papers. [DONNA Jo NAPOLI, Swarthinore College.l The English language: A historical in- troduction. By CHARLES BARBER. (Cambridge approaches to linguis- tics.) Cambridge: Cambridge Uni- versity Press, 1993. Pp. xii, 299. Cloth $49.95, paper $15.95. This book, though barely larger than pocket size, is a remarkably complete survey of the de- velopment and present state of the English lan- guage. As the titles of the book and of the series to which it belongs indicate, it is at the elemen- tary level, suitable for British sixth formers and American college freshmen who are interested in learning something about their language with- out undertaking a course of study in technical linguistics. The style is straightforward and 594 This content downloaded from 130.58.65.20 on Wed, 22 Jul 2015 17:35:06 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Review Of  Linguistic Perspectives On The Romance Languages  Edited By W. J. Ashby, M. Mithun, G. Perissinotto, And E. Raposo

https://works.swarthmore.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1139&amp;context=fac-linguistics

Review Of Linguistic Perspectives On The Romance Languages Edited By W. J. Ashby, M. Mithun, G. Perissinotto, And E. Raposo

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

Works