Napoli, Donna Jo

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Swarthmore College Works Linguistics Faculty Works Linguistics 9-1-1993 Review Of "But, Only, Just: Focusing Adverbial Change In Modern English, 1500-1900" By T. Nevalainen 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. (1993). "Review Of "But, Only, Just: Focusing Adverbial Change In Modern English, 1500-1900" By T. Nevalainen". Language. Volume 69, Issue 3. 631-632. DOI: 10.2307/416728 https://works.swarthmore.edu/fac-linguistics/134   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. 69, No. 3 (Sep., 1993), pp. 631-632Published by:  Linguistic Society of AmericaStable URL:  http://www.jstor.org/stable/416728Accessed: 21-07-2015 13:55 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 13:55:45 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsBOOK NOTICES many of the words; its goal is to find words that build CD structures, and then complete the structures by adding other words to them. The goal is not to capture every nuance of meaning, but merely to extract the most prominent in- formation. FERRET builds CD structures by in- stantiating 'scripts' (canonical events or facts). This implies that FERRET contains consider- able real-world knowledge, which is encoded in the scripts and the lexicon. So far FERRET is much like Gerald De Jong's earlier FRUMP system. But FERRET has the ability to extend itself in two ways. First, on encountering an unfamiliar word, it can look in the online version of Webster's Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary and attempt to under- stand part of the definition. This is often enough to enable it to choose a suitable script. Second, FERRET can build new scripts by generalizing, specializing, or combining existing ones. To do this, it uses a genetic algorithm (a simulation of Darwininan evolution) and relies on the user to evaluate whether the right texts have been re- trieved. Just like living organisms, scripts have progeny (the scripts that are derived from them), and the progeny either survive or get killed off depending on whether the human user says the right texts are being retrieved. The performance of FERRET so far has been promising but imperfect; the main limitation is the small repertoire of scripts. Admittedly, FERRET was tested on rather difficult data- a set of texts about astronomy and some texts from the Dow Jones News Service. On more monotonous data, such as medical records, it could have performed much better. And even with its present limitations, FERRET has the potential to far outperform the simple keyword searches that are presently used to retrieve texts. [MICHAEL A. COVINGTON, University of Georgia.] But, only, just: Focusing adverbial change in Modern English, 1500- 1900. By TERTTU NEVALAINEN. (Memoires de la Societe Neophilo- logique de Helsinki.) Helsinki: So- ciete Neophilologique, 1991. Pp. xiii, 314. This is a study of only and its so-called syn- onyms. Nevalainen claims cognitive synonymy for this small class of words, and they are given the rubric of exclusive focusing adverbs. The book is organized into three parts. Part 1 ('Lin- guistic background of the study', 1-88), which comprises two chapters, discusses how one can describe the class synchronically. This discus- sion is among the best I have seen anywhere. In Ch. 2 ('Linguistic properties of the focusing adverbial category', 31-88) N outlines ways in which these words can be used to emphasize the truth value of the proposition they are as- sociated with. N points out that these adverbs focus on a scale and typically react to the scale. For example, only excludes 'any values higher than the focus value', while even 'marks the focus contextually as an extreme on a scale' (59). N shows that scalarity is purely evaluative and is, accordingly, affected by context. N also discusses whether or not these items are inher- ently scalar (some clearly seem to be), giving attention to the well-known distinction between scalar (or quantitative) and nonscalar (or qual- itative) interpretations for a given lexical item in this class, as exemplified in contrasts such as: (i) Brigitte Bardot is only pretty ('not beautiful'). (ii) Brigitte Bardot is only pretty ('not in- telligent'). If homophony is at play here, one might call the scalar interpretation an intensifier and the non- scalar interpretation an exclusive focusing ad- verbial. N notes that the morphosyntactic category of these lexical items is a controversial issue, ar- guing convincingly that they are best classified as adverbs. Part 2 ('Reconstructing the dia- chronic paradigm', 89-162), which is also com- prised of two chapters, zeros in on the syntactic and semantic differences among the members of the class, despite their cognitive synonymy, distinguishing between central and marginal members of the paradigm. The more marginal members are semantically more substantive and can be modified, but the more central ones have been grammaticalized into the strict (although to varying degrees) function of giving exclusive focus. While the entire class can focus on NPs, only some of them can focus on verbals. N pre- sents data from Old English briefly and then considers data more extensively from Middle English and on up through Present-day English, including a discussion of contextual inter- changeability among only, but, and merely. In Ch. 4 ('The chronology of exclusive focusing adverbials', 123-62) N looks at fourteen specific 631 This content downloaded from 130.58.65.20 on Tue, 21 Jul 2015 13:55:45 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and ConditionsLANGUAGE, VOLUME 69, NUMBER 3 (1993) members of the class-one, but, alone, only, alonelyllonelylall, purely, simply, barely, sin- gly/singularly, solely, merely, exclusively, just, and uniquely-with respect to their etymology, the process of grammaticalization, their main functional properties in relation to focus and scope, and their syntax. Part 3 ('Variation analysis of the process of change', 163-265), which consists of five chap- ters, examines the predictability of the process of semantic change and its limitations. N looks at both extralinguistic and linguistic factors that affect change, arguing that three general ten- dencies characterize the process of semantic change for these adverbs: gradualness, flexible functional differentiation, and faster renewal of the inherently scalar prototypes than of the non- scalar ones. N points out that many factors of the paradigm are quite stable diachronically, in- cluding syntactic features as well as overall dis- tributions of scope and focus properties. This book is a contribution to diachronic lin- guistics, particularly to the issue of methodol- ogy for such studies. It is also of interest to anyone studying exclusive adverbs, in English or in other languages-where the semantic par- allels among languages are obvious, but even the syntactic ones may be strong, as between English and the Romance languages. [DONNA Jo NAPOLI, Swarthmore College.] Diphthong dynamics: A cross-linguis- tic perceptual analysis of temporal patterns in Dutch, English, and Ger- man. By WILLEM J. M. PEETERS. Kampen, Netherlands: Mondiss, 1991. Pp. 365. Paper f 45.00. Peeters' monograph Diphthong dynamics in- vestigates the hypothesis that differences in ar- ticulatory movements in the time domain characterize diphthongs across languages. The monograph is P's University of Utrecht disser- tation. In six chapters P presents his hy- potheses, extensively reviews the literature, describes the methods and results of his exper- iments, and draws some implications from his work. The first chapter presents P's position. He re- jects the view that diphthongs should be char- acterized by steady-state vowels as initial and final targets with a glide serving as a transition between the two. Instead, he proposes that diphthongs are characterized by a planned ar- ticulatory movement in the time domain and that this trajectory may contain language-spe- cific and distinctive temporal patterns (24). Ch. 2 surveys phonetic studies of diphthongs, sep- arating work done before and after 1950. This date serves as a boundary between primarily mechanical vs. electronic instrumentation. The chapter includes descriptions of early instru- ments used for phonetics research and is inter- esting not only for the details of studies of diphthongs but also for the history of phonetics that it contains. The discussion of pre-1950 work focuses as much on experimental techniques as on findings. Ch. 3 deals with experimental method; Chs. 4 and 5 present results of listening tests; and the final chapter summarizes the findings and offers some speculations about the perceptual pro- cesses responsible for diphthong identification. Since the work is a dissertation, it contains a wealth of detail about methods and results. The experiment used synthesized diphthongs of the same overall duration but with different portions devoted to the onset steady-state vowel, the glide, and the offset steady-state vowel. The diphthongs /ai/ and /au/, the diph- thongal long vowels /e(i)/ and /o(u)/, and the vowels in hiatus position were synthesized and presented to listeners in paired preference judg- ments in order to find the 'best diphthong' in each language. The listeners were speakers of Standard Dutch, English, northern German, and southern Standard German from Austria, termed Middle Bavarian. In addition, East Fri- sian listeners were tested. The listening tests supported P's hypothesis in that listeners from various language groups prefer different time domain patterns within diphthongs. Listeners from the standard lan- guages were most sensitive to diphthong glide durations. English listeners selected long com- plex vowels with longer onsets than Dutch lis- teners; listeners from the German dialects preferred monophthongs with the formant val- ues of the offsets. East Frisian listeners did not agree on a 'best diphthong'. This may have been a function of the language, as P suggests, or it may show inconsistent influence of neighboring standard languages. Even though the overall finding of different temporal preferences is supported, no one study resolves all the issues of phonetic categories, particularly crosslinguistically. P used the same spectral values for all diphthongs-although, as 632 This content downloaded from 130.58.65.20 on Tue, 21 Jul 2015 13:55:45 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Review Of  But, Only, Just: Focusing Adverbial Change In Modern English, 1500-1900  By T. Nevalainen

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Review Of But, Only, Just: Focusing Adverbial Change In Modern English, 1500-1900 By T. Nevalainen

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