Ket Prosodic Phonology (review)

Ket Prosodic Phonology (review) Stefan Georg Language, Volume 78, Number 3, September 2002, pp. 600-601 (Review) Published by Linguistic Society of America DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/lan.2002.0156 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/19417 [ Access provided at 6 Oct 2020 01:55 GMT from Auckland University of Technology ] 600 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 78, NUMBER 3 (2002) The structure of evidential categories in Wanka Quechua. By RICK FLOYD. (Publications in linguistics 131.) Dallas: SIL/The University of Texas at Arlington, 1999. Pp. x, 206. $29.00. This is a carefully written, closely argued examination of the use of the three evidential markers in Wanka Quechua, spoken in and around the city of Huancayo, Peru. While the fact is not mentioned anywhere in the book, it is a revised version of the author’s 1993 PhD dissertation, a Spanish translation of which has already appeared (La estructura categorial de los evidenciales en el quechua wanka, Lima, Peru: Ministerio de Educación and Instituto Lingüı́stico de Verano, 1997). This book is an extremely important contribution both to studies of evidentiality and to studies of Quechuan languages. The analysis is based in a Langacker-style cognitive grammar framework, but it is clearly written with necessary theoretical concepts being explained, and an understanding of that framework is not required to follow the argumentation. The discussion and explanation is firmly grounded in an extensive use of illustrative sentences, primarily extracted from a corpus of conversations. The book begins with an introductory chapter (1–11) giving an overview, a general discussion of evidentiality, and a brief introduction to Wanka Quechua. Following this is a chapter examining more closely the notion of evidentiality from a crosslinguistic point of view, looking at the relationship of information source and validation, and dealing with the formal and grammatical aspects of the evidential markers in Wanka Quechua (13–39). Ch. 3 (41–55) explains the theoretical underpinnings of the study, including the necessary concepts from cognitive grammar and how these relate to deictic notions and in particular to evidential categories. Ch. 4 (57–92) deals with the direct evidential marker -m(i). It examines the prototypical use of this marker to indicate direct experience and the relationship between this information source and ideas of speaker certainty. I was particularly impressed here with the in-depth discussion of what constitutes direct evidence for a variety of different predicate types. This chapter also discusses the notions of control and intention and how these interact with various values of person, tense, and clause type (e.g. interrogative) to expand the use of the evidential beyond its prototype. The semantics of the conjecture evidential -chr(a) are taken up in the following chapter (93–122). This marker prototypically encodes that the utterance to which it is attached is an inference, but it has a number of extensions, including into the validational domain of lack of commitment on the part of the speaker. It also extends to being used in interrogative constructions and to show irony and mild exhortation. The final evidential marker, the reportative -sh(i), is examined in Ch. 6 (123–59). While the prototypical use of this marker is to indicate that an utterance is hearsay, it is also used in folktales, riddles, and ‘challenges’, where an addressee is encouraged to participate in an activity with the speaker. The chapter concludes with a very clear and convincing argument for why, despite some earlier descriptions, the reportative should not be considered as encoding any validational notion. The final chapter (161–94) examines the interaction of the evidentials and the categories of person and tense, based on the notions of directness and proximity. It includes a particularly interesting examination of the frequency of co-occurrence of the evidentials with tense values and with person values in a corpus of fifteen conversations, together with proposed explanations for these correlations. This work will be extremely useful in a number of areas. It provides a model for other work on similar markers found in other Quechua languages; while any grammar of any variety of Quechua makes reference to the cognate morphemes, it is often unclear from the descriptions precisely how and when these markers are used. Future studies will be able to compare the use of the evidentials with their use in Wanka Quechua. The book is also very useful more broadly, being one of the few extensive studies of the entire evidential system of a language which we have available to us; thus this work is naturally of use to anyone working with evidentials, either in a particular language or crosslinguistically. [TIMOTHY JOWAN CURNOW, La Trobe University.] Ket prosodic phonology. By EDWARD J. VAJDA. (Languages of the world 15.) Munich: Lincom Europa, 2000. Pp. 22. The last remnant of the once more widespread Yenisseyan language family, which in turn remains unrelatable to any other language or family, Ket continues to be one of the great riddles of Eurasian linguistics. Spoken by ca. 500 individuals on the lower reaches of the river Yenissej in Northern Siberia, its overall typological makeup distinguishes it as possibly the most unusual of Siberian languages; apart from areally very unusual morphological features it shows an intricate system of phonological tones, the subject of this work. In 22 pages, this book gives a concise overview of the problem of the Ket tonal system, acknowledging its discovery by Heinrich Werner in the 1960s and defending Werner’s views against other approaches which tried to describe Ket as a language without anything in the way of phonemic tone. BOOK NOTICES Working with taped recordings from all Ket dialects, the author offers a very detailed and adequate phonetic description of the articulatory basis of the four tones which are found with Ket monosyllabic words—1: high-rising, 2: rising-pharyngealized, 3: rising-falling, and 4: falling; he convincingly argues that, though the syllabic nuclei of these tones do differ in length, vocalic quantity is to be viewed as a secondary epiphenomenon of tone (Sections 1.1.–1.4.). Sections 4.1.–4.3. are devoted to the prosodic behavior of disyllabic structures, adding two more units to the system—5: a disyllabic contour with higher pitch on the first syllable, and 6: its mirror image. Both these entities are described as allotones of the (monosyllabic) tones 1 and 3 respectively. Ket, thus, has a wordtone system, much like many Tibeto-Burman languages of the Himalayas, where the tone-bearing unit is the phonological word rather than the syllable (details of prosodic processes found in the domain of the phonological phrase are discussed in Section 5). While not everything is entirely new in the sections discussed so far (but certainly presented in a much more convincing and lucid way here than anywhere else in the Ketological literature), Sections 2 and 3 present the field with a real step forward. Here, Vajda shows that any consequent and thorough acknowledgment of prosodic facts leads quite directly to a rather far-reaching reassessment of the segmental phonemeinventory of the language as well. Thus, both the distribution of voiced vs. voiceless plosives, as well as that of plain vs. palatalized consonants—traditionally mostly given the status of seperate phonemes—is convincingly shown to be allophonic when tones are brought into the picture. Similarly, V convincingly shows that only 7 vowel phonemes (rather than 11, let alone as much as 56, as in some earlier descriptions) suffice to explain the surface variation of Ket vowels; again, this is only possible if prosodic/tonal observations are fully allowed to inform the analysis. This is a very valuable, and clearly written, contribution to Ket/Yenisseyan studies; however, general phonologists, as well as students and specialists of other prosodically complex languages will equally profit from consulting it. [STEFAN GEORG, Leiden University.] Limiting the arbitrary: Linguistic naturalism and its opposites in Plato’s Cratylus and modern theories of language. By JOHN E. JOSEPH. (Studies in the history of the language sciences 96.) Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2000. Pp. viii, 224. The volume is an in-depth discussion of the question of linguistic naturalism, or naturalness, in Plato’s 601 dialogue Cratylus and a number of theories in Western linguistic tradition. In the ‘Introduction’ (1–10) the author introduces the problem of linguistic (un)naturalness and provides a brief survey of the readings of the Cratylus. The main body of the volume is divided into two parts, each consisting of three chapters. Part 1 (11–89) is concerned with Plato’s work and Part 2 (91–200), with a continuation of the linguistic-philosophical discussion which he initiated in the work of such philosophers, writers, and linguists as Aristotle, Epicurus, Varro, Dante, René Descartes, John Locke, Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Nikolai Trubetzkoy, Roman Jakobson, Ferdinand de Saussure, George Orwell, Joseph Greenberg, Steven Pinker, or Noam Chomsky, to name only the major figures. Each chapter of Part 1 is devoted to a portion of the Cratylus. Plato’s philosophical-linguistic divagations on (the lack of) linguistic arbitrariness are approached from the perspective of the opposition between nature and convention (Ch. 1), the problem of truth inherent in or absent from words (Ch. 2), and the problem of imitation and essence in naming (Ch. 3). Joseph carefully weaves his analytical thread through successive excerpts from Plato’s work, citing the original at length in his own translation. The analysis is painstakingly meticulous, and the problem is considered against a larger background of the philosophical tradition of ancient Greece. The first chapter of the second part of the volume, Ch. 4, offers a bird’s-eye view of the history of linguistic naturalism from Aristotle virtually to the present day. A claim is made that debates on certain problematic issues such as the arbitrariness of linguistic signs are indicative of the more basic problem of naturalness. Ch. 5 is concerned with the distinction between the natural and the standard, special attention being paid to the ideas of Dante, Saussure, Orwell, and Chomsky, all of which are said to be fictions. Finally, Ch. 6 looks at the issue of linguistic naturalism by discussing Jakobson’s and Trubetzkoy’s reaction to and rejection of Saussure’s notion of arbitrariness. An overview is presented of the proposed alternative, based on the concept of a ‘mark’, and of its continuation in the form of the theory of language universals, Chomsky’s ‘core’ and ‘periphery’, iconicity studies, and optimality theory. Despite covering a wide range of topics and an enormous timespan, the book is coherent thanks to the main theme, namely the treatment of (un)naturalness in language and linguistics, a problem sometimes hidden under other concepts. The whole of Western linguistic thought since antiquity is viewed as a continuum, various aspects of which have been emphasized under various names at various moments. An index of names and terms helps readers orient themselves in this immensely informative and