I English Language TERESA FANEGO, INGRID TIEKEN-BOON VAN OSTADE, JEROEN VAN DE WEIJER, MARGA VAN GENT-PETTER, WIM VAN DER WURFF, BEÀTA GYURIS, JULIE COLEMAN, CAROLE A. HOUGH, LIESELOTTE ANDERWALD, ANDREA SAND, SABINE PRECHTER AND CLARA CALVO This chapter has twelve sections: 1. General; 2. History of English Linguistics; 3. Phonetics and Phonology; 4. Morphology; 5. Syntax; 6. Semantics; 7. Lexicography, Lexicology and Lexical Semantics; 8. Onomastics; 9. Dialectology and Sociolinguistics; 10. New Englishes and Creolistics; 11. Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis; 12. Stylistics. Section 1 is by Teresa Fanego; section 2 is by Ingrid Tieken-Boon van Ostade; section 3 is by Jeroen van de Weijer; sections 4 and 5 are by Marga van Gent-Petter and Wim van der Wurff; section 6 is by Beàta Gyuris; section 7 is by Julie Coleman; section 8 is by Carole A. Hough; section 9 is by Lieselotte Anderwald; section 10 is by Andrea Sand; section 11 is by Sabine Prechter; section 12 is by Clara Calvo. 1. General The number of publications in cognitive linguistics has reached the point that keeping up with them all is no longer a realistic objective. Ronald W. Langacker’s Grammar and Conceptualization is therefore a welcome addition to the existing bibliography, as it aims to provide an accessible collection of representative and significant writings showing the continued development of the theory and further illustrating its application to diverse problems. The volume brings together twelve articles (not all easily accessible) published by Langacker himself between 1992 and 1999. All have been adapted to make this a cohesive work, the revisions ranging from slight adjustments to almost complete rewriting. The result is a volume which is meant to be readable as an integral whole, though at the same time each individual chapter can be read and understood as a self-contained entity. The first three chapters are introductory, providing a basic description of the framework, discussion of its methodology, and illustrations of its application to some © The English Association PAGE 1 OF 123 2 ENGLISH LANGUAGE representative descriptive problems, like the meaning and uses of the preposition of. The next two chapters are extensive treatments of theoretical issues like the nature and implications of a usage-based approach, and the status and characterization of constituency. The six chapters that follow offer detailed descriptions of particular grammatical phenomena, among them the parallelism between perception and conception, generic and habitual expressions, pronominal anaphora, grammaticization and raising constructions. Chapter 10, on grammaticization, documents a common path of grammaticization involving subjectification and the attenuation of an agent’s control, as in constructions with be going to, have, English modals, get-passives and Spanish estar ‘be’. The chapter refines Langacker’s earlier characterizations of subjectification, as expounded, among other places, in his seminal article in Cognitive Linguistics 1 [1990]. With Akio Kamio and Ken-ichi Takami, eds., Function and Structure, we move from cognitive to functional linguistics. The volume is a collection of thirteen papers in honour of Susumu Kuno, the founder of a specific stream of functionalism ultimately inspired by Prague School linguists but linked, unlike some other functional schools, with the American formalist approach of generative grammar. Seven of the contributions in this collection are on functional syntax and six on other topics, while the data discussed come from languages such as English, Italian, French, Russian, Korean and Japanese. The papers on English include ‘A Comparison of Postposed Subjects in English and Italian’ by Gregory Ward, who discusses the pragmatics of existential (there’s a problem) and presentational (there arrived a man) there-sentences and compares them with Italian sentences involving existential ci (c’è un segreto istruttorio ‘there’s a secret inquest’) and subject postposing (era salita tua sorella sull’autobus ‘your sister got on the bus’). English presentational there-sentences and the two Italian constructions are sensitive to the discourse status of the postposed constituent, which must be new information, whereas existential there-sentences are constrained to represent entities that are hearer-new, i.e. not already familiar to the hearer. In ‘A Functional Constraint on Extraposition from NP’, Ken-ichi Takami shows that the acceptability of a wide range of sentences involving extraposition from NP depends on the functional constraint known as the More/Less Important Information Condition: extraposition is only possible if it crosses elements conveying unimportant information, as in John drove a car in London with a sunroof, as opposed to the unacceptable *John drove a car carefully with a sunroof. Also concerned with English are ‘A Context-Based Account of English Passives with Indefinite Subjects’ by Aiko Utsugi; ‘Specific NP in Scope’, by Becky Kennedy, who examines sentences like Bill didn’t see a misprint, where the second NP may receive a specific interpretation (i.e. ‘there’s a misprint that Bill didn’t see’, versus the non-specific ‘Bill saw no misprints’); and ‘Some Referential Properties of it and that’ by Akio Kamio and Margaret Thomas, who account for some of the contrasts in use between it and that by arguing that it refers broadly to information already known and already entered into the speaker’s central store of knowledge, while that points narrowly to incoming information that may be either novel or familiar, and is in some sense more peripherally located in the speaker’s knowledge. Loraine K. Obler and Kris Gjerlow, Language and the Brain is a concise and accessible introduction to the linguistic and neuro-anatomical underpinnings of language. The first three chapters discuss, respectively, the nature of PAGE 2 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 3 neurolinguistics, the brain structures that play a role in storing and processing language, and the techniques (among others, the Wada test, tachistoscopic presentation, dichotic listening, cortical stimulation and so-called imaging techniques) that are used to study brain organization for language. Chapters 4–10 focus on the special populations from whom neurolinguists derive knowledge of language organization, such as aphasics, right-brain-damaged patients, patients suffering from various forms of dementia, individuals with disturbances of reading (dyslexics) and writing (dysgraphics), and bilinguals. Obler and Gjerlow point out that while the right hemisphere, unlike the left hemisphere, does not appear to have much responsibility in normal individuals for core linguistic processes such as phonology, morphology, and syntax, it contributes importantly to a set of paralinguistic phenomena: intonation, some aspects of lexical selection, and a host of pragmatic abilities are impaired with right-hemisphere damage. The last two chapters of the volume discuss language organization and the future of neurolinguistic study. Major areas of interest for neurolinguistics are the study of the neurophysiological aspects of brain processing for language, the investigation of the way language relates to other cognitive abilities, and the study of specific linguistic structures peculiar to one or several but not all languages that may break down in agrammatism (= a symptom of aphasia whereby bound and free morphemes are omitted in speech production and writing). In connection with this, recent crosslanguage analyses have demonstrated that in languages whose inflectional systems carry substantial meaning (like German, where articles carry information about the number, gender, case and definiteness of the nouns that follow them) these meaningheavy functors or affixes are more likely to survive in processing if speakers of that language suffer brain damage. A useful glossary of terms from linguistics, neurology, and other related fields and a section with suggestions for further reading complete this excellent introduction to neurolinguistics. Alan Davies, An Introduction to Applied Linguistics: From Practice to Theory is the foundation volume for the new Edinburgh Textbooks series in Applied Linguistics. Intended for first-time students of applied linguistics and for all those generally interested in the relationship between linguistics and applied linguistics, Davies strives to demonstrate that language teaching and learning are not, as is sometimes believed, the only proper concern of applied linguists. The volume is organized as a collection of case studies illustrating the variety of language problems which applied linguistics confronts. Among the aspects discussed are, apart from language learning and teaching, language-programme evaluation, literacy acquisition in the second language (L2), the writing of pedagogical grammars, language and gender, clinical linguistics, forensic linguistics, stylistics, lexicography and several others. Also included are a glossary and a useful exercise section. Simon Kirby, Function, Selection, and Innateness: The Emergence of Language Universals is an important and highly original work that explores issues at the core of modern linguistics and cognitive science. Why are all languages alike in some ways and different in others? Why do languages change and how does that change give rise to language variation? How did the human capacity for language evolve and how far is it an innate ability? Kirby looks at these problems taking as his starting point two apparently opposed approaches—the functionalist and the innatist—to explaining universal properties of language. The functionalist tradition PAGE 3 OF 123 4 ENGLISH LANGUAGE in linguistics argues that the constraints on variation from language to language are due to the communicative use of language. Thus, the fact that in many languages derivational affixes come before inflectional affixes (witness the position of -ation and -s in the English plural noun computations) is interpreted by functionalists in terms of iconicity: the formal closeness of an affix to its stem iconically reflects its conceptual closeness—the degree to which the semantics of the affix affects solely the meaning of the word. In its turn, the formal, or innatist, approach claims that language universals can be explained by an innate (and therefore universally shared) language faculty in humans. An innate language acquisition device (LAD), in combination with the primary linguistic data, is sufficient to explain how languages are acquired, constraints on cross-linguistic variation resulting from the structure of the LAD itself. The novelty of Kirby’s book is that he tries to show that the communicative and the formal aspects of language have crucial and complementary roles and that each must have its place in a complete view of universals. He points out that although the innatist line of reasoning has many virtues—for example, it is explicit about the mechanism through which universals emerge—it fails to tackle the puzzle of ‘fit’ (i.e. the adaptation of universal constraints of variation to the functions of language). As a consequence, in an extreme innatist view the order of derivational and inflectional affixes referred to above would be seen as part of the biological endowment of the language learner, but no explanation would be provided for the fact that this universal appears to be designed with iconicity in mind, so one would have to assume that it was simply coincidence that the formal constraint happened to be iconic to conceptual closeness. On the other hand, the functional approach highlights the fact that universals fit pressures imposed by language use, but this on its own fails to make explicit the mechanisms that bring such a state of affairs about, leaving the real puzzle, the puzzle of fit, unexplained. The issue, as Kirby puts it, is that ‘given a set of observed constraints on crosslinguistic variation, and a corresponding pattern of functional preference, an explanation of this fit will solve the problem: how does the latter give rise to the former?’ (p. 20); in other words, how do functional pressures grammaticalize, and become innate properties governing human language and its acquisition? The six chapters which make up the book constitute a brilliant and convincing attempt to answer this question. Linguists of all theoretical persuasions will surely agree with Kirby’s central claims as expounded at the end of the volume, such as that ‘functional pressures influence linguistic selection, which operates locally in the cycle of acquisition and use, to give rise, globally, to observable language universals, over a historical timescale’ (p. 141) and that ‘adaptation by linguistic selection operates within constraints imposed by Universal Grammar’ (p. 142). To sum up, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in language universals, linguistic typology and grammatical theory in general. Also concerned with the eternally fascinating problem of how children acquire their first language, but otherwise very different from Kirby’s book, is Stephen Crain and Diane Lillo-Martin, An Introduction to Linguistic Theory and Language Acquisition. The volume is written within the framework of Chomsky’s version of Universal Grammar (UG) and is directed towards general introductory linguistics courses, as well as courses in language acquisition and the psychology of language. In the introductory part I the authors present several basic facts about language acquisition that serve as a database ‘to test the adequacy of alternative theories of PAGE 4 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 5 language and mind’ (p. viii); in practice, the one alternative theory examined is behaviorism, as espoused by the late American psychologist B.F. Skinner. After concluding that the behaviorist theory is too simple to account for the complexities of linguistic knowledge, they proceed to an examination of Chomsky’s theory of UG. Parts II and III describe in some depth constituent structure and transformational syntax, the core components of UG, and apply them to the study of child language. As the data used in these two parts mainly come from English, part IV tries to circumvent the problem of focusing too narrowly on just one natural language by comparing the course of acquisition by children learning English with that taken by children learning languages quite unlike English. The language selected for illustration is the visual-gestural language used by deaf people in the United States, American Sign Language (ASL). This is argued to be a language with a different structure from English and, in some respects, ‘more like Chinese than like English’ (p. 276). Yet despite their profound differences, which include the ‘modality’ or channel used to convey each of these two languages (vocal-auditory in the case of English; manual-visual in the case of ASL), English and ASL are argued to share a common core of principles, which are acquired in much the same way and are thus likely candidates for linguistic universals. In passing, one may note that visual-gestural languages, including ASL, have recently received considerable attention from members of the cognitive linguistic community, who are aware of their importance for understanding the cognitive basis of grammatical structure. None of their contributions to this topic, however, are mentioned by Crain and LilloMartin. Finally, another claim they make is that children are biologically endowed with semantic knowledge, just as they are biologically endowed with syntactic knowledge. Hence the last and fifth part of the volume is devoted to semantics and the philosophy of language, including topics such as compositionality (how the meaning of a sentence or higher-level expression is formed from the meanings of its constituent parts) and intensional semantics. As in earlier chapters, the technical discussion of these issues is complemented by discussion of empirical investigations into how children acquire knowledge of the principles of the semantic component of UG. On the whole, this new title in the Blackwell Textbooks in Linguistics series serves the introductory purposes for which it was designed and will prove useful for students approaching the problem of language acquisition from an orthodox generative perspective. In this reviewer’s opinion, a shortcoming of this book is the simplistic outlook that pervades a number of its statements, such as this one on p. ix: ‘Prior to Chomsky, linguists concentrated much of their efforts on describing the easily observable properties of language: the sound system, the vocabulary, and how some words are derived from others. Linguists in this tradition rarely looked at patterns of sentence structure, which can be very abstract.’ María Teresa Cabré, Terminology: Theory, Methods and Applications, is a translation and adaptation of her La terminologia: la teoria, els mètodes, les aplicacions (Barcelona: Emúries [1992]), originally published in Catalan. The book is a useful and comprehensive treatment of terminology, the discipline concerned with the study and compilation of specialized terms. Its seven chapters deal, among other things, with the relation between terminology and cognitive science, communication studies, documentation and computer science, lexicology and lexicography. Also explored (chapter 6) is the important role played by terminology in the standardization, or ‘normalization’, of technical vocabulary as a way to PAGE 5 OF 123 6 ENGLISH LANGUAGE combat the diversity of names and thus ensure communicative precision among specialists. Terminology is also crucial for language services and language planning in general (chapter 7). In societies with standardization plans for their native language, language services directed at changing the status of a language are indispensable, and this involves a growing demand for professionals devoted to dealing with issues such as the adaptation of the language’s resources to technological innovations. Faber et al., eds., English Teacher Education in Europe: New Trends and Developments is the first title of a new series on Foreign Language Teaching in Europe. Pamela Faber, Wolf Gewehr, Manuel Jiménez Raya and Antony J. Peck are the editors of the series as well as of its initial volume, which has been produced with the financial assistance of the European Socrates and Youth Bureau and is intended ‘for teacher trainers, student teachers, researchers, or anyone involved in foreign/second language education’ (p. 9). The book is divided into five parts and fourteen chapters, concerned (rather loosely) with new education demands in FL teacher training, issues in language teacher education, current research into teacher education, the role of reflection in language teacher education, and the teaching of English in European primary schools. The problems discussed are therefore representative of those that the educational authorities of most European countries are currently facing and will continue to face in the future. Unfortunately, the quality of the individual contributions varies, and the book is very poorly edited, to the point that the reader is at a loss to know which is its right title: whether that used on the front cover (English Teacher Education in Europe: New Trends and Developments) or the one employed in the introduction (p. 9), namely European Perspectives for Language Teacher Education. The latter is probably the correct one as the volume is not exclusively concerned with the teaching of English. We close this section with a study dealing with English Literature and the Other Languages. The editors, Ton Hoenselaars and Marius Buning have brought together thirty contributions, especially commissioned for the volume, exploring the phenomenon of English literature and multilingualism from the Reformation to the present day. Among the aspects examined are the complex role of Latin in sixteenthand seventeenth-century literature; the interaction between English and a range of British language varieties including Welsh, Irish, Scots and the Lancashire and Dorset dialects; English-language literature in post-colonial countries; Chicano literature, with its popular blend of Spanish and English; the phenomenon of selftranslation, as illustrated by writers like Nabokov, who wrote in Russian and English, and Samuel Beckett, who wrote in both French and English; the use of foreign language in the Eumaeus episode in Joyce’s Ulysses, and various others. Also included is a very useful and comprehensive bibliography compiled by Ton Hoenselaars containing items that directly address the theme of the volume and an afterword by N.F. Blake. With this compilation Hoenselaars and Buning ‘hope to extend and pursue the issues raised by Blake’ (p. xvi) in his now classic NonStandard Language in English Literature [1981]. Blake’s work, however, is clearly more linguistically oriented, while it seems to me that quite a few of the essays in the volume under review are likely to prove of interest primarily to the literary critic. Even with this qualification, English Literature and the Other Languages is a welcome addition to the existing studies on the language of literature. PAGE 6 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 7 2. History of English Linguistics Not only for those with an interest in phonetics but for anyone who ever took a course in phonetics, Beverley Collins and Inger Mees, The Real Professor Higgins: The Life and Career of Daniel Jones is a fascinating book to read. It analyses in great detail Jones’s contributions to three major fields—the teaching of English (and any other language) as a foreign language, the development of articulatory phonetics, and his pioneering research on tone languages—all of this combined in a man endowed with a ‘talent for management and organisation’ (p. 411). It sets down Jones, the founder of the first department of phonetics of University College London as someone who loved music, playing chess and reading detectives, who was a typographical perfectionist, and who was reluctant ‘to read widely in his subject and [refused] to be influenced by more than a few of those authors that he did get round to reading’ (p. 427). The book provides a chronological analysis of Jones’s impressive output (his most productive year was 1911, with as many as ‘v’ publications); it traces the early history of the word ‘phoneme’ (first used in a lecture to the Philological Society in 1917 on Tswana); it analyses the differences between various editions of his books, for example, An Outline of English Phonetics (chapter 8); it identifies the influence of theosophy on his work, and it demonstrates his interest in linguistic historiography. The authors deal with a number of puzzles concerning Jones, such as the identity of Shaw’s Professor Higgins, the question of why he did not discuss in full his views on Cardinal Vowels theory before 1923, and the real publication date of the Outline (1919 instead of 1918). Moreover, they set straight current views on Jones which have tended to underrate his contributions to intonation theory and which accuse him of posthumously imposing prescriptive views on language. One of the additional interests in the book is its mass of illustrations, including, apart from family and other pictures, an example of his lecture notes, architect’s drawings for the Institute of Phonetics which he planned to set up, a list of staff members of the phonetics department of UCL for the year 1933/ 4 (which includes a high proportion of women), examples of examination papers (‘Write a short account of the “glottal stop” and its use in English’), and a copy of a letter written to one of his African informants, Jomo Kenyatta, future prime minister of Kenya. Though, according to the authors, there is at present no comprehensive history of phonetics, the book would deserve to be set reading for any student with an interest in the subject. It provides essential information about a variety of aspects relating to the subject of phonetics and its history, explaining the origin of ear training and the concept of ‘nonsense words’, the introduction of the term ‘RP’, the interest on the part of Jones and his friends in the Simplified Spelling Society, and the reason for the enormous popularity of his vacation courses on phonetics. Jones may not have been ‘a true innovator’ or ‘a great theoretician’ (p. 452); he was nonetheless an outstanding authority on pronunciation, a reputation which lasted well beyond his death in 1967, witness the reprints of his English Pronunciation Dictionary which continued to appear down to 1990. Another worthwhile study that appeared this year is Astrid Göbels, Die Tradition der Universalgrammatik im England des 17. und 18. Jahrhunderts, which provides a detailed analysis of the concept of universal or philosophical grammar during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Göbels not only deals with those authors who are traditionally associated with universal grammar—Francis Bacon (1605, 1620), PAGE 7 OF 123 8 ENGLISH LANGUAGE John Wilkins (1668), and John Wallis (1653) for the seventeenth century and James Harris (1751), Joseph Priestley (1761), and Lord Monboddo for the eighteenth— though she observes that their work has never previously been studied in full; she also analyses other grammarians and linguists of the period, including authors such as Archibald Lane (1700), James Greenwood (1711), William Loughton (1734), Benjamin Martin (1748), Robert Lowth (1762), William Ward (1765), James Beattie (1783), and Charles Coote (1788). There are two topics she is particularly interested in: to determine how authors were influenced by their predecessors, and what principles of description they applied in their work. Though the focus of analysis is on British authors, they are studied in their European context, with special emphasis on developments taking place in France and Germany around that time. One of the results of Göbels’s analysis is that she found no fundamental difference between school grammars and philosophical grammars in their approach to questions of universal grammar. To give one example: Lowth, though a practical grammar and written for use ‘even of the lowest class’, distinguishes between system and usage when trying to account for linguistic inaccuracies. Furthermore, he argues that no universal grammar can be studied without having recourse to a living language. Ward is interesting in that he presents his Essay on Grammar in two parts, the first a so-called ‘Speculative’ grammar and the second a ‘Practical’ one. As such his work illustrates the beginning of a more scholarly approach to the subject. While during the seventeenth century universal grammar was closely linked to the concept of a universal language, Göbels notes that in the eighteenth century the term ‘universal’ acquires a different meaning, resulting in modified lists of parts of speech and in the definition of language as a means of communication (p. 314). By the nineteenth century universal grammar was no longer an issue. Göbels’s book is thoroughly researched, and its publication fills a long-standing need in linguistic historiography. It is all the more valuable precisely because it does not limit itself to an analysis of the ‘icons’ of philosophical grammar alone. Eighteenth-century grammarians are also the subject of two articles by Emma Vorlat published this year. The first is called ‘Robert Baker’s Dependance on Vaugelas’ (BGS 9[1999] 1–19). One of the questions that can now at last be answered as a result of Vorlat’s detailed analysis is why, as late as 1770, Baker still calls for the foundation of an English Academy long after the subject had lost general interest: in matters of doubtful usage, Vaugelas could turn to the Académie Française for a final verdict, which was something Baker could not do. Vorlat’s second article, ‘On the Originality of Lindley Murray’s Prescriptive Canon’, appeared in a Festschrift for Xavier Dekeyser, who retired this year from his chair in Language and Linguistics at the University of Antwerp (in Tops, Devriendt and Geukens, eds., Thinking English Grammar pp. 319–29). Vorlat analyses the nature of Murray’s prescriptiveness against the practice of his predecessors, confirming Murray’s own assertion, made at the outset of his work, that his English Grammar [1795] was no more than a ‘compilation’, ‘a careful selection’ of views and opinions current at the time. The volume also contains an article by Lieve Jooken, called ‘Two Concepts of “Grammaticalisation” in Eighteenth-Century British Language Theory’ (pp. 283–96), in which Jooken identifies two approaches in eighteenthcentury linguistics that are said to anticipate the concept of grammaticalization, one found in the work of Adam Smith based on the notion that language originated in holistic signs, the other, exemplified in Browne’s Hermes Unmasked [1795] and PAGE 8 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 9 following Horne Tooke, holding that all word classes ultimately derived from nouns and verbs. Two female grammarians are discussed by Robin D. Smith in ‘Language for Everyone. Eighteenth-Century Female Grammarians, Elstob, Fisher and Beyond’ (in Cram, Linn and Nowak, eds., History of Linguistics pp. 205–13): both of them are concerned with making the subject of their books—the grammar of Old English in the case of Elizabeth Elstob, and of English in that of Anne Fisher— accessible to a readership consisting of women. 3. Phonetics and Phonology One topic that is one of the English language’s claims to fame is the phenomenon of ‘intrusive r’ (as in idea[r] of, draw[r]ing), most common in varieties of English which have lost [r] in the course of their history. To the list of intrusive consonants we can now add ‘intrusive l’ (as in draw[l]ing), as described by B. Gick (‘A GestureBased Account of Intrusive Consonants in English’, Phonology 16[1999] 29–54), which reviews earlier accounts and proposes a phonetic analysis of this phenomenon in US dialects. Intrusive r is also one of the main topics in Heinz Giegerich, Lexical Strata in English, which aims at resuscitating the Lexical Phonology framework on the basis of data from English and German. Giegerich discusses various aspects of r sandhi that should play a role in its analysis, such as the question whether the vowels before r sandhi form a natural class or not, and the question of a parallelism between this process and other hiatus-breaking processes. Giegerich also deals with a number of other well-known phonological phenomena in English, such as trisyllabic shortening, the history and present state of which is also the topic of an article by Aditi Lahiri and Paula Fikkert (‘Trisyllabic Shortening in English: Past and Present’, English Language and Linguistics 3[1999] 229–68). A number of papers deal with the realization and reduction of auxiliaries in English. Different studies deal with different auxiliaries and from different angles. A functional account of the realization of don’t is offered by Joan Bybee and Joanne Scheibman (‘The Effect of Usage on Degrees of Constituency: The Reduction of Don’t in English’, Linguistics 37[1999] 575–96), where they provide evidence for the frequent assumption that such forms are reduced most often in contexts in which they occur most often (for instance, after ‘I’ and before certain verbs, such as know). A completely different viewpoint is taken by Richard Ogden (‘A Declarative Account of Strong and Weak Auxiliaries in English’, Phonology 16[1999] 55–92), which provides a highly technical, Declarative Phonology-based account of the fact that auxiliaries occur with full vowels in some contexts and with reduced vowels in others. The prosody of English is a subject of great interest. A book-length study is Michael Hammond, The Phonology of English: A Prosodic Optimality-Theoretic Approach. On the basis of excellent database research, Hammond discusses the constituency of English syllables, and the role of feet and accent placement in an Optimality framework, explaining the concepts very well. This book is a model in its wide exemplification, and makes it impossible for anyone still to argue that they don’t know what the facts are, in this case mostly of American-based dialects. One of the leading figures in the field, Erik Fudge (‘Words and Feet’, JL 35[1999] 273– 96), argues in favour of the position that categories such as prosodic words, feet and PAGE 9 OF 123 10 ENGLISH LANGUAGE syllables form not one hierarchy in English, but two: words and feet must belong to both. Within prosody, the English stress system is treated from an acquisitional point of view by Elan Dresher (‘Charting the Learning Path: Cues to Parameter Setting’, LingI 30[1999] 27–67), who seeks to establish quite precisely what are the cueing data necessary for learning the stress system of English (or any other language). Heaviness of syllables plays a role here, which is the topic of investigation by Sam Rosenthall and Harry van der Hulst (‘Weight-by-Position by Position’, NL&LT 17[1999] 499–540), who argue that such syllable weight, and in particular the fact that closed syllables count as heavy in some languages but not in others, is best analysed as the interaction of a number of constraints, as in Optimality Theory. The same focus on the right edge of the syllable appears in Glyne Piggott (‘At the Right Edge of Words’, TLR 16[1999] 143–85), who proposes to incorporate the concept of ‘licensing’ as distinct from syllabification to deal with the same heaviness issue. A number of papers deal with the effect of stress on vowel length, i.e. accentual lengthening. Among these are Alice Turk and Laurence White (‘Structural Influences on Accentual Lengthening in English’, JPhon 27[1999] 171– 206) and Tina Cambier-Langeveld and Alice Turk (‘A Cross-Linguistic Study of Accentual Lengthening: Dutch vs. English’, JPhon 27[1999] 255–80). The latter study suggests that the two languages are more similar than hitherto assumed. Another cross-linguistic study, finally, comparing stress placement in Singapore English and British English, was done by Low Ee Ling and Esther Grabe (‘A Contrastive Study of Prosody and Lexical Stress Placement in Singapore English and British English’, L&S 42[1999] 39–56), which refutes earlier claims as to stress differences between the two varieties; rather, these are prominence differences which serve to indicate intonational boundaries in different ways. Although English is not as rich in voicing assimilation phenomena as other languages, the evidence that exists plays a role in theoretical discussions. Gregory Iverson and Joseph Salmons (‘Glottal Spreading Bias in Germanic’, LingB 178[1999] 135–51) review the English data (coming from plural formation but also pairs like describe-description) and its relevance for the valency of the [voice] feature and, among other things, the representation of s plus stop clusters. Building on their earlier work, they argue for using the feature [spread glottis] instead of [voice]. Linda Lombardi (‘Positional Faithfulness and Voicing Assimilation in Optimality Theory’, NL&LT 17[1999] 267–302) argues that laryngeal features such as [voice] are faithful (i.e. preserved in the ‘derivation’ from input to output) depending on the position of the segment in the syllable structure that they are marked on. She argues for a privative [voice] feature, on the basis of voicing assimilation patterns in a large number of languages. As far as textbooks are concerned, Philip Carr, English Phonetics and Phonology: An Introduction might be mentioned. This is a standard introductory text which deals fairly briefly with the most important traditional topics, from phoneme theory to syllable structure and from stress to the description of some varieties of English, with exercises. It was especially written with an audience of a wide range of beginning students in mind, and seems to be suited excellently for that purpose. A rather more voluminous affair is the textbook by Iggy Roca and Wyn Johnson, A Course in Phonology. This is much more comprehensive and in-depth, and leads the student through the phonology by asking numerous questions, highlighted in the text. English phonology plays a key role, for instance, in its treatment of the Great PAGE 10 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 11 Vowel Shift and in its discussion of English stress. Finally, the first textbook on Optimality Theory as a framework on its own was written by René Kager. This is going to be, like the theory itself, extremely influential, written with advanced students in mind and with a host of exercises. Students at an advanced level might also be served by a superb anthology of the most influential articles and selections from books that have been written on general (and generative) phonology in the past thirty-odd years, collected in John Goldsmith, ed., Phonological Theory: The Essential Readings. Not only is this a handy collection, especially since some of the leading articles were not published in the most accessible journals or collections, but it also traces the history of ideas in phonological theory throughout this period. 4. Morphology We have seen one work this year which is aimed at beginning morphologists. Richard Coates, Word Structure, a welcome addition to the series of Routledge Language Workbooks, guides the readers in their first explorations of word structure, showing them how to take words apart and what to do with the pieces. Basic morphological terminology is explained with the use of examples from English and other languages, exercises (with a key) are provided, and a guide to further reading is given. Altogether, the book offers a simple but reliable and accessible introduction to the field. One of its uses could be as preliminary reading to a course on morphology, but at lower levels it could also be worked through in class. For prospective writers of further morphology textbooks, Joel Nevis and John Stonham have written on ‘Learning Morphology: What Makes a Good Textbook?’ (Language 75[1999] 801–9). This is basically a review of Francis Katamba’s textbook Morphology [1993], but the authors also use it to present some reflections on the question they ask in their title. Their verdict on Katamba’s work is largely positive (as was ours in YWES 74[1995] 20), though they inevitably note some points at which it does not live up to their ideal. More advanced theoretical issues receive a great deal of attention this year. In particular, the interaction between syntax and morphology continues to fascinate linguists. Peter Ackema’s view, expounded in his Issues in Morphosyntax, is that morphological operations take place below the zero bar-level (and are therefore not ‘syntactic’) but are governed by the same general principles as operation above this level (making them ‘syntactic’ after all). He assumes a word structure template in which X0 consists of a specifier and X–1, which accommodates the head of the word, X–2, and any complement that there may be. In the chapters of the body of the work, a detailed demonstration is given of how this works in practice for phenomena such as noun incorporation (which is analysed as a type of compounding), periphrastic participial constructions (with special attention being paid to auxiliary selection in the perfect, including the historical shift from be to have in English he is/has departed, etc.), lexical integrity (i.e. the ban on movement out of words, and islandhood), and mismatches between morphosyntax and morphophonology (due to their being autonomous levels of structure). A somewhat similar approach is taken in Alex Alsina’s ‘Where’s the Mirror Principle?’ (LingRev 16[1999] 1–42). The author accepts the correctness of the Mirror Principle, but argues against the syntactic derivation of words (since the behaviour of complex words is completely PAGE 11 OF 123 12 ENGLISH LANGUAGE identical to that of simplex words); instead, he argues that words are built in the lexicon, and that affix entries include some syntactic information (relating especially to thematic roles and argument structure). A different view can be found in the article ‘Leftward Movement in Morphology’ (MITWPL 34[1999] 35–66), where Thomas Roeper argues that word-formation can be syntactic. He presents pairs of rightward and leftward nominal incorporation, for example, setup/upset, startup/upstart, hangover/overhang, passover/overpass. Roeper claims that the Spec–Head–Complement stucture applies to leftward nominals, as in outbreak of disease. Rightward-incorporated nominals are argued to be rebracketed and fail to ccommand a PP, which has been a requirement for complement licensing since R. Kayne [1994]. A more historiographically slanted contribution is Piotr Ruszkiewicz’s ‘Morphological and Syntactic Categories in the Theory of Generative Grammar’ (SAP 34[1999] 227–65). It contains a review of the place that morphology has occupied in generative grammar, from Chomsky’s Syntactic Structures [1957], through the various landmarks of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, to the recent present, documenting the shifting relation between syntax and morphology throughout. Further contributions on morphology–syntax interactions can be found in Lunella Mereu, ed., Boundaries of Morphology and Syntax. We review some of the chapters in the following section (since they are more centrally concerned with syntactic matters); from the section on morphological phenomena and their boundaries, we mention here the following (though without further comment, since they do not deal with English data at any length): ‘On the Verbal Morphology of Some Alpine Dialects’ by Paola Beninca; ‘Compounding: Morphology and/or Syntax?’ by Antonietta Bisetto and Sergio Scalise; ‘The Effect of Noun Incorporation on Argument Structure’ by Marianne Mithun and Greville Corbett; ‘Lexical-Functional Morphology and the Structure of the Lexicon’ by Christoph Schwarze; ‘Somali as a Polysynthetic Language’ by Marco Svolacchia and Annarita Puglielli; ‘Dutch Verbal Prefixes’ by Johan van der Auwera; and ‘The Irrealis in the Polish Language’ by Maria Zaleska. A few articles address other general topics in morphology. Jerry Fodor and Ernie Lepore write about ‘Impossible Words?’ in LingI 30[1999] 445–53. They take issue with arguments, as advanced in work by Hale and Keyser and others, whereby a sentence such as It cowed a calf (intended meaning: ‘A cow had a calf’) is claimed to be impossible due to the lowering of the subject that this verb to cow would necessitate. Fodor and Lepore point out all kinds of problems that such accounts raise. However, Ken Hale and Samuel Jay Keyser provide ‘A Response to Fodor and Lepore, “Impossible Words?”’ (LingI 30[1999] 453–66), in which they explain (and update) their position and reasoning, and reject the charges. Friedrich Ungerer writes about ‘Diagrammatic Iconicity in Word-Formation’ (in Nänny and Fischer, eds., Form Miming Meaning: Iconicity in Language and Literature pp. 307–24). Ungerer explores the degrees of iconicity (especially isomorphism between form and content, and iconic motivation) found in compounding, derivation, blends and acronyms. He argues, for example, that compounds can lack isomorphism (as in newspaper, which lacks a neat relation with news and paper), but that there are strategies for restoring it (such as the shortening of newspaper to paper). The conclusion drawn from the explorations is that compounding and derivation do not interfere with iconicity as much as blending and acronyms, which may be somewhat PAGE 12 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 13 marginal phenomena for this very reason. Working in the relational network system of Word Grammar (WG), Richard Hudson and Jasper Holmes argue in ‘Re-cycling in the Encyclopedia’ (UCWPL 11[1999] 349–79), on the basis of words like cycle and bicycle, that lexical and encyclopedic properties cannot be separated. They discuss the principle of ‘re-cycling’, which means ‘that concepts are “re-cycled” rather than duplicated’, and ‘that wherever possible meanings of a word should be recycled in definitions of other words’. Next, we turn to issues in inflection. In their article ‘Inflectional Morphology and Word Grammar’ (Lingua 107[1999] 163–87), Chet Creider and Richard Hudson discuss examples from Swahili, English, Welsh and Cree, showing that WG can accommodate for all these typologically different languages. The article ends with a comparison of WG to other morphological theories, such as distributive morphology. Greville Corbett writes about ‘Prototypical Inflection: Implications for Typology’ (in Booij and van Marle, eds., Yearbook of Morphology 1998 pp. 1–22 ), showing that the category of number is not as straightforwardly inflectional as is often thought. Using data from various languages, he argues for attaching greater importance to the notion of obligatoriness as a criterion for inflectional status. Another category often considered straightforwardly inflectional is tense, but in ‘The Status of Tense within Inflection’ (in Booij and van Marle, eds. pp. 23–44), Marianne Mithun presents some facts that may cast doubt on this. She shows that the status of tense may differ according to the weight attached to the different criteria for inflectional status, and argues that tense may shift over time from representing inherent inflection to representing contextual inflection. Specific topics in English verbal inflection are investigated in four papers. Elisabeth Godfrey and Sali Tagliamonte present ‘Another Piece for the Verbal -s Story: Evidence from Devon in Southwest England’ (LVC 11[1999] 87–121). They use their Devon data (in particular its conditioning factors, which include a version of the Northern subject rule) to argue for AAVE verbal -s originating in British dialects rather than representing a creole innovation. Wolfgang Viereck’s ‘Dialectal English Verb Morphology: Some Observations’ (in Tops, Devriendt and Geukens, eds. [1999] pp. 130–41) presents a brief discussion of the situation of -Ø and -s endings in the present-tense forms of English dialects, their history, the relevance of habitual aspect for the selection of these forms, and the connection with unstressed periphrastic do. The chapter contains three maps indicating geographical spread of particular usages. Joachim Grzega offers ‘A New View on Why, How and How Far -ing Prevailed over -ind’ (Views 8[1999] 34–43). He argues, following others, that the ending [-in] derives from [-ind], and derives the spread of -ing from the desire by London scribes to achieve supraregional importance by eschewing the use of regionally variable <-and>, <-end> and <-ind> spellings and choosing <-ing>, and the subsequent influence of London spelling practices. Moving back in time even further, John Anderson presents ‘A Core Morphology for Old English Verbs’ (ELL 2[1998] 199–222). It consists of a detailed word-and-paradigm characterization of OE verbal inflection, in which syncretism is minimized, no zero morphs are used, and no rule ordering is present; category realignment rules relate the morphosyntax to the expression-oriented system of categories. An issue in English nominal inflection forms the topic of John Newman’s paper on ‘The Spread of the s-Plural in Middle English (1150–1420): A Corpus Study’ (SAP 34[1999] 73–89). After noting that there is little factual information on this PAGE 13 OF 123 14 ENGLISH LANGUAGE change to be found in the literature, he presents data on the history of the plural of fifty high-frequency nouns (representing all major OE noun classes); what stands out is the early adoption of -s in the North and the East Midlands. On the same topic, but more theoretical in approach, is Choong-Yon Park’s paper, ‘A Cognitive Approach to the Middle English Plural Change’ (Heng 8[1999] 117–46), in which various aspects of the change are highlighted (such as the probable acquisition patterns, the process of morphologization, and level switch). Next to plurals, genitives also receive some attention. In Janez Oresnik’s ‘Naturalness: The English s-Genitive and of-Phrase’ (SAP 34[1999] 191–200), the competition between these forms in PDE is explained by naturalness considerations, whereby what is natural in encoding (i.e. of) goes with what is less natural in terms of semantic complexity (i.e. inanimate possessors). Various other tendencies in the use of the two options receive an explanation along the same lines. The surprisingly high frequency of genitive -s in one specific text type is investigated in Ewa Dabrowska’s ‘How Metaphor Affects Grammatical Coding: The Saxon Genitive in Computer Manuals’ (ELL 2[1998] 121–7). The abundance of phrases like the programme’s specifications in such texts is linked to the frequent attribution of human characteristics to computers and their parts (as is evident from the use of phrases such as your server should try to … and the host asks for … ). A historical view of genitives is offered by Cynthia Allen, in ‘Genitives and the Creolization Question’ (ELL 2[1998] 129–35). The key question addressed is whether the genitive as a category has ever been in danger of disappearing, as might be expected if there was any form of creolization in ME. Allen presents northern ME data which show that, overall, -s is preserved well, though some nouns that were endingless in OE remain so and a few others join them. She attributes the more recent endingless genitives in northern English to later developments, and points out that even in these varieties, phrases like … and John’s too keep the -s. While on nominal inflection, we also mention Hanna Rutkowska’s ‘Pronouns in the Cely Letters’ (SAP 34[1999] 147–69), which offers a descriptive outline, also paying attention to spelling variation, of the pronouns in the letters. Some of the findings are that the ye/you distinction turns out still to be robust, that the dominant relative pronoun is that, and that reflexive pronouns in their modern forms are on the rise in this period. Derivational matters are addressed in Andrew Spencer’s ‘Transpositions and Argument Structure’ (in Booij and van Marle, eds. [1999] pp. 73–101), who analyses shifts from N to A, V to participle, nominalizations, and action nominals by appealing to the insertion of semantic function roles. In ‘Mixed Nominalizations, Short Verb Movement and Object Shift in English’ (NELS 28[1999] 143–57), Heidi Harley and Rolf Noyer formulate a model distinguishing between verbal clauses and nominalizations, arguing that verbal clauses have Functional Projections, whereas nominalizations do not. They show that there are also mixed nominalizations, i.e. gerundives, mainly found with verb–particle constructions, such as writing-up. They provide an account in the framework of distributed morphology, arguing against a lexicalist analysis. More on nominalizations can be found in ‘Nominalizations in a Calculus of Lexical Semantic Representations’ by Rochelle Lieber and Harald Baayen (in Booij and van Marle, eds. [1999] pp. 175–97). They analyse inheritance in nouns ending in -ing, -(at)ion, -ment, -al, -er, and -ery, making use of Jackendovian Lexical Conceptual Structures for the affixes in question. In ‘Electric/Electrical and Classic/Classical: Variation between the PAGE 14 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 15 Suffixes -ic and -ical’ (ES 80[1999] 343–70), Mark Kaunisto examines the etymological background of -ic and -ical words and existing theories with respect to their use. He focuses on PDE adjective pairs, analysing in detail the two pairs mentioned in the title as they occur in the 1993 issues of the Daily Telegraph and Sunday Telegraph. Kaunisto basically has to conclude that there are no systematic features to be detected which may provide a general account of the differences between -ic and -ical, since adjectives allowing both endings seem to be largely synonymous. More rewarding to read about is the novel take on the two modern suffixes -ful (as in handful and eyeful) and -type (as in cowboy-type boots and Dalitype paintings) found in Christiane Dalton-Puffer’s ‘Screenfuls of Classifier Things: Noun Classes and Derivation in English’ (Views 8[1999] 7–21). Careful analysis shows that the former does not produce full-blooded nouns, and may in fact be a (quantitative) noun classifier, of the sort that is well attested cross-linguistically. The suffix -type might then be a qualitative classifier, making part of the English derivational system similar to a classifier system. Vowel-initial suffixes like -al, ous, -ity (as compared with -ness, -ment, -less, and -ful) are studied in Renate Raffelsiefen’s ‘Phonological Constraints on English Word Formation’ (in Booij and van Marle, eds. [1999] pp. 225–87). Rather than appealing to a distinction in level of attachment, she derives the stress shift and segmental adjustments caused by these suffixes (in native forms) to phonological principles. The suffix -er is examined in three contributions. Mary Ellen Ryder’s ‘Bankers and Blue-Chippers: An Account of -er Formations in Present-Day English’ (ELL 3[1999] 269–97) begins by discussing previous formal analyses and concludes that these can only account for verb-based -er nominals. She proposes a cognitive model of analysis that accounts for both verb-based and non-verb-based -er nominals. In constructing her model, she makes use of cross-linguistic correlations among syntactic and semantic class and pragmatic functions. Göran Kjellmer’s ‘Goner’ (ES 80[1999] 479–82) belies its title in presenting an interesting analysis of -er attached to the past participle gone. Kjellmer claims that the past-participle base of this particular word is unique (and indeed, the appendix in Ryder’s article does not include any -er combinations with past participles as base). Kjellmer lists some examples from the British National Corpus, showing goner to be an informal word. On the basis of examples showing that it only occurs as a predicative complement, but never as a(n in)definite subject or object, it is concluded that the base past participle should be analysed as an adjective, so that it will fit in a larger group of adjectives, which allow -er affixation to turn them into predicative nominals. The article ‘Swift, -er and Nominalization, or: Is Everything Relative?’ by Gottfried Graustein (in Tops, Devriendt and Geukens, eds. [1999] pp. 51–77) represents a preliminary survey of -er nominalizations formed or used by Jonathan Swift, which are a typical feature of his style. These include unusual formations such as abhorrer and scorner that appear to be alternative expressions for a relative clause. In his Morphological Productivity: Structural Constraints in English Derivation, Ingo Plag argues that ‘one should opt for a sign-based output-oriented model of derivational morphology’, rather than a theory that separates meaning from form. His book consists of seven chapters apart from the introduction and conclusion. It contains two appendices, one on twentieth-century neologisms (as recorded in the OED) and another containing hapax legomena (from the Cobuild Corpus). Furthermore, the book has three indexes, one on authors, another on subjects, and a PAGE 15 OF 123 16 ENGLISH LANGUAGE third on affixes. Chapter 2 defines the notion of productivity and suggests how it can be measured. Chapter 3 gives a number of structural restrictions on productive morphological processes. Chapter 4 deals with the question which suffixes can or cannot be combined with which words. Chapters 5 to 7 discuss three different rivalling verb-deriving morphological processes, -ize, -ify and -ate. By analysing large numbers of neologisms, Plag provides answers to the following two questions: What are the structural and phonological properties of these suffixes? How do they relate to each other? He concludes that form and meaning interact, and that it is the specific properties of individual processes, rather than general morphological mechanisms, that to a large extent determine which combinations are allowed and disallowed. In a separate article, ‘Morphological Productivity across Speech and Writing’ (ELL 3[1999] 209–28), Ingo Plag, together with Christiane Dalton-Puffer and Harald Baayen, investigates the relation between derivational morphology and register variation. On the basis of three types of discourse in the British National Corpus, they show that different suffixes differ in productivity both within and across registers. They offer a functional explanation for the high productivity of abstract nouns in written language, which holds that the two important functions for derivational morphology are a reference function for notions already introduced and a labelling function for new entities or events. Affixes which are not nominalizing turn out to be difficult to account for in a systematic way. The order of morphemes comes in for close investigation in two papers that we have seen. Thomas Berg considers ‘The (In)compatibility of Morpheme Orders and Lexical Categories and its Historical Implications’ (ELL 2[1998] 245–62). The problem addressed is the existence of the noun income and the adjective incoming but the ill-formedness of the verb *to income. Diachronic evidence shows that particle-V combinations have a short lifespan, which Berg explains by the lack of cohesiveness of such forms, and attendant processing effects. A different ordering phenomenon is addressed in Sadayuki Okada’s ‘On the Conjoinability of Affixal Morphemes in English’ (Word 50[1999] 339–63), which concerns forms like possible mono- and tri-syllabic versus impossible *im- and exports. The factors governing the acceptibility of such combinations are found to be stress and the presence of morpheme and syllable boundaries. The locus of N–N combinations is explored by Laurie Bauer in his contribution ‘When is a Sequence of Two Nouns a Compound in English?’ (ELL 2[1998] 65–86). After examining various criteria to decide between phrasehood and wordhood (such as listedness, stress patterns, syntactic accessibility of the first noun, and coordination possibilities), he concludes that N–N combinations cannot be reliably classed as being either syntactic or morphological objects, but form a category of their own. In his article ‘Compounding by Adjunction and its Empirical Consequences’ (LangS 21[1999] 407–22), Koenraad Kuiper argues for syntactic formation of compounds within a generative framework. He lists the differences between compounding and derivation and suggests that compounds are generated in the syntax by adjunction at X0-level. He concludes that phrasal compounds and synthetic compounds do not exist. Peter Erdmann’s article ‘Compound Verbs in English: Are They Pseudo?’ (in Tops, Devriendt and Geukens, eds. [1999] pp. 239– 52) argues that although compound verbs are generally derived from compound nouns or adjectives by conversion or back-formation, a minority can be argued to be primary in the sense that no derivational source has been uncovered so far, many of PAGE 16 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 17 them arising apparently by analogy from other compound verbs. This means that compound verbs may arise in four ways: by back-formation or conversion from nonverbal compound sources, by analogy with derived or non-derived compound verbs, and by primary compounding. The special phenomenon of backslang (in which we hear doog instead of good, ecaf instead of face, etc.) is investigated in Fabrice Antoine’s ‘Verlan français, backslang anglais, etc.’ (CdL 74[1999] 171–83). Some historical background is provided, rules of transposition are formulated, and a comparison is made with Pig Latin (which has agfay for fag, atfler for flat, etc.). To round off this section, we lump together some brief discussions of Old English words. David Howlett compares the three forms of ‘Old English ondgierwan, ongierwan, and ungierwan’ (Anglia 116[1998] 223–6). Alfred Bammesberger analyses afigaen/afigen in ‘Das altenglische Glossenwort afigaen/afigen’ (Anglia 116[1998] 492–7). Bammesberger has two further articles: ‘In what Sense was Grendel an angeng(e)a?’ (N&Q 244[1999] 173–6), which compares various analyses of the morphological make-up and meaning of the noun angeng(e)a, and ‘Beowulf, line 60a, OE sendeþ’ (N&Q 244[1999] 428–30), where he proposes that sendeþ or sændeþ is a metathesized form of OE snædeþ (= eats, takes a meal). 5. Syntax (a) Modern English This year we will begin our section on modern syntax with the discussion of several introductory books. First, we note a second edition of R.L. Trask, Language: The Basics. The book has been changed in several respects (with a new chapter here, a new section there, some updating throughout, and the addition of a glossary), but it remains a well-written introduction to selected areas of language study for complete novices, with chapters on the uniqueness of language, grammar, meaning, variation, change, language in use, mind and brain, children, and attitudes. As we have come to expect from this author, the discussion is packed with titbits of interesting information and a lot of appealing good sense, making this book one of the best broad, non-technical and non-academic introductions on the market. One rung higher up the ladder from laypersons to linguistic professionals (we hope the metaphor is appropriate and has correct spatial orientation), there is Stuart C. Poole, An Introduction to Linguistics, with twelve chapters, in which all major aspects of linguistics are discussed. Each chapter ends with a brief summary, followed by relevant exercises. Conveniently for teachers, and for students using the book for self-study, the book is provided with a guide to the exercises. Chapter 1 discusses the general significance of language. Chapters 2 to 7 introduce the various linguistic fields of lexis, semantics, phonetics, phonology, morphology and syntax, respectively. Chapters 8 to 12 are interesting assets to the book, since they contain introductions to regional and social variation, historical linguistics, and comparisons of the languages of western Europe and of different writing systems. A helpful feature of this book is that, apart from an index, it also contains a glossary of important linguistic terms. Each chapter has a funny subtitle, as for instance chapter 6, ‘Morphology, or Why are the Finns People of Few Words?’ and chapter 7, ‘Syntax, or How Does my Wife and her Beauty Like You?’. The chapters on PAGE 17 OF 123 18 ENGLISH LANGUAGE morphology and syntax are very short and only introduce basic, theory-independent terminology, although the name of Noam Chomsky and his transformational approach to sentence analysis are briefly mentioned. Throughout the book various languages are used to illustrate theoretical points. We feel that this book will be useful for a very basic course in linguistics, because it gives a wide overview of the various fields within the discipline in less than 200 pages of running text and it is quite accessible for first-year students. Another new general textbook is Andrew Radford, Martin Atkinson, David Britain, Harald Clahsen and Andrew Spenser, Linguistics: An Introduction. This is again one rung higher up the ladder, since it presupposes some prior linguistic knowledge and, with over 400 pages of running text, is considerably thicker than Trask’s and Poole’s books. The introduction presents the basic assumptions adopted and terminology used, including the innateness hypothesis of language. It also introduces the fields of developmental, psycho-, neuro-, and sociolinguistics. The remainder of the book is divided into three parts (‘Sounds’, ‘Words’ and ‘Sentences’), each of which contains several chapters. For each of the three main topics, reference is made to the different areas mentioned in the introduction. Each chapter ends with exercises in grey blocks, which are referenced in the text when the student is expected to be able to tackle the assignment in question. Keys are not provided, but suggestions for further reading end each of the three parts. ‘Words’ discusses not only inflectional and derivational morphology and word-formation but also the semantics of words, children’s acquisition of words, lexical processing, disorders and variation. Similarly, ‘Sentences’ does not only give basic syntactic terminology but provides tests for constituent structure, and goes into some detail when explaining about syntactic checking theory, empty categories, movement, and logical form. The final chapters provide accounts of child language acquisition, sentence processing and syntactic disorders. Empirical data, figures and results are provided in support of the theoretical framework adopted in this textbook. We recommend it as a suitable and up-to-date introduction to generative linguistics, because it incorporates all of the major recent developments in the field. Several more textbooks that we will discuss here focus on syntax. Like the textbook by Radford et al., Stephen Crain and Diane Lillo-Martin, An Introduction to Linguistic Theory and Language Acquisition adopts the innateness hypothesis of language. The book is divided into five parts: part I is an introduction to language acquisition and the theory of UG; part II explains all about phrase structure and children’s knowledge thereof; part III discusses and illustrates syntactic operations, like (wh-) movement, and principles, like principle C of the binding theory; part IV introduces American Sign Language (ASL), and argues that UG also underlies the structure of ASL (making this book very much one of the later 1990s); part V, finally, deals with truth-conditional semantics and children’s understanding thereof. Last year we discussed the book Investigations in Universal Grammar (YWES 79[2000] 22–3), co-authored by Stephen Crain and Rosalind Thornton (who, incidentally, continue their cooperation in this year’s ‘Levels of Representation in Child Grammar’ (LingRev 16[1999] 81–123), where they show that children obey principles of UG in acquiring crossover, wanna and that-trace). As is to be expected, the book by Crain and Lillo-Martin advocates similar views on child language acquisition and is also based on research conducted within the generative framework, in particular the modularity hypothesis of language acquisition. It is, of PAGE 18 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 19 course, more introductory, and we think it could well be used in introductory syntax classes, because the language acquisition component provides concrete evidence of the proposed methods of analysis. However, although the book is full of examples and explanations, and contains clear accounts of the points made, it does not provide any exercises or assignments for students, entailing some additional work for the teacher who decides to use it in class. We have seen three other generative textbooks. Liliane Haegeman and Jacqueline Gueron have written English Grammar: A Generative Perspective. The introduction says the book was originally intended for undergraduate (foreign) students of English, but we think that in spite of (or perhaps because of) its very thorough and clear presentation of the history and the present state of generative grammar, it may have outgrown the original idea of being a textbook for undergraduates, and will in fact be very suitable for postgraduate programmes as well. With six large chapters, the book is thick and contains a lot of information, possibly too much to work through in just one or two terms of an undergraduate programme. Structurally, each chapter contains running text on the topics announced in the title and subheadings, followed by a section with exercises, which are provided with brief captions, informing the reader about the topic of each exercise. Finally, each chapter has relevant bibliographical notes. Contentwise, the first chapter presents generative theory in a nutshell, focusing exclusively on English sentence structure, and dealing with phrase and word level, lexical and functional projections, grammatical functions and case. The other chapters also involve linguistic data from other languages and go into more detail about various syntactic phenomena, such as movement and locality as instantiated in passivization and raising (chapter 2); developments in the analysis of the clause, including the rise of functional categories and the different categories that can function as subject (chapter 3); aspects of the syntax of noun phrases dealing with pronouns, anaphors, referring expressions and empty categories and relating the developments of the analysis in the DP system (chapter 4); LF phenomena (chapter 5); and comparative issues (chapter 6). The book may well be used for self-study or as a reference book on generative linguistics. There is a second edition of Jamal Ouhalla, Introducing Transformational Grammar, which now has the subtitle From Principles and Parameters to Minimalism. It has been considerably expanded, with new chapters and an entire new part on minimalism, and thus continues to offer a fast-paced but rewarding introduction to the main concepts, principles and mechanisms of contemporary generative syntax. Among the issues dealt with in its twenty chapters are, apart from the usual fare, topics such as null objects, incorporation, clitics, the construct state, gerundives, and object shift. In presenting the material, the author manages to make it fully accessible to speakers of English while still maintaining a perspective that is firmly cross-linguistic. Another second edition is Robert Borsley, Syntactic Theory: A Unified Approach. This book too has undergone some overall updating, but the general approach is still the same: after a few introductory chapters on basic issues in syntactic analysis, the main topics studied in generative syntax (such as anaphora, grammatical functions, passive, raising, control, wh-dependencies, and islands) are presented and analysed within the principles-and-parameters framework and also within the Phrase Structure Grammar framework (HPSG, to be precise). Discussion of minimalism is limited to the final chapter, which is perhaps as well, since the PAGE 19 OF 123 20 ENGLISH LANGUAGE book contains a great deal of material (including the notations used in two different research traditions) for the student to take in as it is. One of the beneficial results of looking at syntactic phenomena from two different perspectives is that the weaknesses and handwaving practices of both approaches stand out more clearly; Borsley’s own fine attention to practical detail provides students with an admirable model in this respect. As the title suggests, English Syntax: From Word to Discourse by Lynn M. Berk adopts a discourse-related, functional approach to the analysis of English grammar. The textbook is written as an introductory MA-level course for linguistics majors, TESOL students and English majors, and does not presume knowledge of any theoretical background. It consists of five chapters preceded by a general introduction. Together these amount to almost 300 pages of running text. The sections in chapter 1 discuss the basic sentence structure of subject and predicate, the semantic roles of subject and object, and the various types of verbs with their complement structures. Chapter 2 is concerned with the noun phrase and its component parts. Chapter 3 deals with tense, aspect, voice, mood and modality of the verb phrase, and with the distinction between lexical verbs, auxiliaries and modal verbs. Chapter 4 is devoted to modification, discussing both adjectival and adverbial constructions. Chapter 5, finally, discusses different syntactic classes and functions of clauses. Throughout the book, new terms are printed in bold face and included in the glossary at the end. Each chapter ends with a summary. The various components of sentence structure are graphically indicated by nesting boxes, rather than tree diagrams. In comparison with the textbooks discussed above, we think this book will also be suitable for introductory classes, because its structure is very clear and the theory presented is less abstract and therefore also less demanding on the part of the student. Berk’s book provides a natural transition to a work that must be considered a landmark in the description of English grammar: Douglas Biber, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad, and Edward Finegan, Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. In its 1,200 pages (the end product of over half a decade of teamwork), the reader can find a fully corpus-based descriptive account of all areas of English grammar, with notes and comments providing information on frequencies and also giving functional interpretations of the patterns found. The corpus on which the work is based has some 40 million words, spread over various registers (the main ones being conversation, fiction, news, and academic prose). There are chapters on basic grammatical patterns (conveniently, the overall grammatical framework and terminology of the Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language are adopted), noun phrases, verbs, tense, mood and aspect, adjectives and adverbs, complex noun phrases, complement clauses, word order, stance, lexical expressions, and the grammar of conversation. Each of these chapters is chock-full with information not only about the structural patterns (which have of course been described before) but also about their use and distribution (much of which has not been documented with any degree of precision before), making this an impressive work that will be of great service both to advanced foreign learners of English and to anyone else interested in the grammatical patterns of the language and their use. A more specialized work on English grammar is Markku Filppula, The Grammar of Irish English: Language in Hibernian Style. It offers a description of the grammatical patterns of Irish English, based on interview data obtained from PAGE 20 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 21 some thirty informants (predominantly of the NORM type) and various other sources, in each case followed by thorough discussion of the origins of the pattern (where Irish-language influence is shown to have often played a major role). The topics dealt with include the definite article (Do they keep the goats?), reflexive pronouns (Could yourself imagine they would?), ways to express the perfect (Your are after ruinin’ me; I have it forgot), auxiliary do (They does be lonesome by night), word order in indirect questions (Do you think is it done?), negative polarity items (Anybody won’t know), resumptive pronouns in relative clauses, subordinating and (’Twas in harvest time and the weather bad), various prepositional usages, and focusing devices (It’s looking for more land a lot of them are; Danced all night we did). In its comprehensiveness and level of discussion, this work easily transcends the inventories of peculiarities of Irish English that can be found here and there, and it will no doubt become a standard reference. There are several other general items in the field of grammar and syntax. One of these is Keith Brown and Jim Miller, eds., The Concise Encyclopedia of Grammatical Categories. It contains some ninety articles (ranging from five to ten pages) on all kinds of topics that could conceivably be called categories, such as adjectives, adverbs, anaphora, apposition, aspect, aspectual types, auxiliaries, binding, counterfactuals, head marking, honorifics, mood and modality, relative clauses, serial verbs, and many, many more, all written by experts in the respective fields. Most of the articles are from the Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics [1994], but there are some new ones as well. Although their accessibility inevitably varies, some spot-testing suggests that the articles for the greater part provide a great deal of useful and relevant information in a brief space. Further in-depth discussion of one grammatical category can be found in Bobert de Beaugrande’s ‘Sentence First, Verdict Afterwards: On the Remarkable Career of the “Sentence”’ (Word 50[1999] 1–31). Beaugrande describes the various ways the term ‘sentence’ has been used, defined and conceptualized in theory and pedagogy, considering in turn structural, formal, thematic, intonational, rhetorical, and social approaches, and concluding that an integrative view of the sentence is called for. Narrowing the focus somewhat, we come to Masayoshi Shibatani and Theodora Bynon, eds., Approaches to Language Typology; we forgot to tell you about its original hardback publication in 1995, but its appearance in paperback this year permits us to put this omission right. The book contains articles by proponents of the major schools of typology, resulting in a convenient survey, as indeed the editors promise us in the preface. They also contribute the first chapter (‘Approaches to Language Typology: A Conspectus’), which contains some discussion of the history of typology, followed by a survey of the types of work done and methods adopted. The body of the book contains eight substantial chapters; understandably enough, none of them is primarily about English, so we just list them with minimal comment. There is Paolo Ramat on ‘Typological Comparison: Towards a Historical Perspective’, which gives further detail about the history of the field, but also surveys the present as well as future prospects; Petr Sgall on ‘Prague School Typology’, containing historical, substantive and comparative notes; William Croft on ‘Syntactic Typology’, dealing with Greenbergian work and its offshoots, and providing good discussion of modern concepts, problems, data, methods and explanations; Joseph Greenberg on ‘The Diachronic Typological Approach to Language’, which considers the connections between diachrony and typology; PAGE 21 OF 123 22 ENGLISH LANGUAGE Gilbert Lazard on ‘Typological Research on Actancy: The Paris RIVALC Group’, dealing with this research group’s approach to variation to argument–predicate relations; Vladimir Nedjalkov and Viktor Litvinov on ‘The St Petersburg/Leningrad Typology Group’, paying special attention to matters of methodology in the group’s work; Hansjakob Seiler on ‘Cognitive-Conceptual Structure and Linguistic Encoding: Language Universals and Typology in the UNITYP Framework’, which uses the topic of possession as an example to describe and motivate UNITYP’s approach; and Naoki Fukui on ‘The Principles-and-Parameters Approach: A Comparative Syntax of English and Japanese’, illustrating current generative typological work with scrambling, expletives, multiple subjects and Wh in situ. Now zooming in on a specific topic that has many ramifications for grammatical organization, we discuss three books that can be taken together under the heading of argument projection. One of them is a collection of papers that we missed in our discussion last year, Miriam Butt and Wilhelm Geuder, eds., The Projection of Arguments: Lexical and Compositional Factors [1998]. The introduction by the editors is followed by nine papers on different aspects of the main topic. The two main points made in the volume are, first, that a bi-unique thematic role (or Θ-role) analysis of argument projection is inadequate and calls for alternatives; secondly, it is claimed that the projection of arguments is not simply a lexical property of the verb, but that it is dependent on compositional semantics and syntax at the clause level. Therefore, the editors advocate an event-semantics approach to argument projection, which should account more accurately for argument variability and ‘affectedness’ effects as witnessed in spray/load alternations, causative alternations and other complex predicates. The first paper, ‘Event Structure in Argument Linking’ by William Croft, provides an overview of the major current theories of argument linking, which are compared to Croft’s own proposal. Like the ‘standard’ approaches, Croft’s theory uses the notion of event structure, but whereas other theories make use of thematic roles and hierarchies, he adopts the notion of force– dynamic relations among participants. The syntactic argument structure is related to the so-called verbal profile, involving backgrounding and highlighting of information by different verb forms. Finally, there are four (universal) linking rules, which indicate the ranking of the participants in a force–dynamic chain. Language variation is accounted for by assuming that the linking rules only apply to force– dynamic events. Other event types require construal (i.e. by conceptualization) in order to apply the linking rules, and construal follows language-specific conventions. Croft illustrates his theory with predominantly English examples of alternation structures, resultatives and aspectually delimited events. In her paper ‘Deconstructing the Lexicon’, Gillian Catriona Ramchand also argues against a thematic approach to argument linking. She proposes an alternative view, in which aspectual information is linked with particular syntactic positions. Ramchand compares English and Scottish Gaelic with respect to aspectual factors. On the basis of Gaelic examples, Ramchand argues that the lexicon is not an autonomous presyntactic module of grammar, but interacts with syntax and semantics in matters of argument projection. The next paper, ‘Building Verb Meanings’ by Malka Rappaport Hovav and Beth Levin, notes that English verbs that belong to certain classes, such as sweep, whistle and run, show great variability in complementation structure, both with respect to the number and the type of arguments they take. Rappaport Hovav and Levin propose a theory of possible variation of argument PAGE 22 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 23 structure within the lexicon, arguing that this property is correlated with the semantic class of a verb. They show that result verbs like break do not allow as wide a variety in argument structures as manner verbs, such as sweep. They argue that the simpler the basic event structure of a verb is, the more variety that verb will display. In their theory ‘multiple meanings usually arise from the association of a single constant with more than one lexical semantic template’ (p. 107). Variability is monotonic in nature, as represented in the condition of Template Augmentation. In terms of Aktionsart, activities generally allow more instances of template augmentation than achievements or accomplishments, hence the former show more variability in argument structure. In their paper ‘Delimiting Events in Syntax’, Elizabeth Ritter and Sarah Thomas Rosen discuss problems similar to those treated by Rappaport Hovav and Levin, but their analysis is purely syntactic and makes use of functional projections (FPs). Like Ramchand, they argue that particular event and aspectual roles (i.e. event initiator and event delimiter) are to be represented by syntactic Specifier positions of particular FPs. They focus on verbs of manner of movement (e.g. walk, dance) and the property these verbs have of taking an object only in the presence of a directional PP. They account for the difference between verbs like run, which allows various argument structures, and walk, the argument structure of which is very restricted, in terms of the concept strong and weak. Strong verbs have a fixed interpretation, specified semantic selection and fixed event classification, adicity and case properties. For weak verbs the first two properties are contextually determined and unspecified, the other properties are variable. Although it is lexically determined whether a verb is weak or strong, weak verbs receive their interpretation in the syntactic configuration.The last five papers of the collection do not involve English-language data as a basis for their analyses, so we merely mention the authors and the titles. K.P. Mohanan and Tara Mohanan co-author ‘Strong and Weak Projection: Lexical Reflexives and Reciprocals’, supporting their arguments with examples from Kannada, Hebrew and Malay; Eloïse Jelinek has a paper on ‘Voice and Transitivity as Functional Projections in Yaqui’; Veerle van Geenhoven writes ‘On the Argument Structure of Some Noun Incorporating Verbs in West Greenlandic’; Paul Kiparsky uses Finnish examples in his ‘Partitive Case and Aspect’; and finally, Ad Neeleman and Tanya Reinhart discuss ‘Scrambling and the PF-Interface’, on the basis of data from Dutch. The book contains a subject index and a name index. Beatrice Primus provides an entirely different way of analysing the projection of arguments in her Case and Thematic Roles: Ergative, Accusative and Active. She presents a cross-linguistic study of the mapping of semantic roles (e.g. agent and patient) onto morphosyntactic cases and structural relations. Primus defends the autonomy hypothesis of formal case concepts as opposed to views that hold that case is derived from phrase structure or from syntactic or semantic functions. Instead she argues that differences between ergative and active languages are determined by a morphosyntactic parameter, which is based on the mapping between formal cases and thematic roles. Primus adopts the so-called Generalized Hierarchy Approach to account for case and agreement phenomena, but also for structural position of arguments. Important hierarchies that play a role in the course of the book are the Case Hierarchy, the Thematic Hierarchy, the Topic Hierarchy and the Structural Hierarchy. A Hierarchy Rule Schema is defined and applies to all different types of hierarchy relations. Chapter 1 gives a general introduction to the book. Chapter 2 PAGE 23 OF 123 24 ENGLISH LANGUAGE discusses case relations, arguing that ‘cases form hierarchically organized systems [which are] mirrored in their allomorphism and subcategorization behaviour’. Chapters 3 and 4 deal with thematic relations (based on the Proto-Roles of David Dowty [1991]) and lead to the formulation of a Universal Principle of Morphosyntactic Coding of Thematic Information. Chapters 5, 6 and 7 are concerned with structural relations, predicate agreement rules, and passive and antipassive respectively. Chapter 8 summarizes the book. The final conclusion is that case coding happens in the lexicon while argument placement is determined by structural factors, among which thematic dependency is the most important. Apart from some English examples given to illustrate the thematic role hierarchy in chapters 3 and 4, the data all come from accusative, ergative and active languages with a clear morphosyntactic reflex of case and thematic roles, for example, German, Hungarian, Dyirbal, Hindi, Yucatec, Laz, and Guarani. Nevertheless, the wide range of languages discussed and compared should make this book of interest to any educated linguist. The main argument of Ad Neeleman and Fred Weerman’s Flexible Syntax: A Theory of Case and Arguments also goes against what the authors call rigid theories of syntax, such as GB theory and minimalism, which assume that ‘each grammatical relation is established in a unique structural relation’ (p. xi). Instead, Neeleman and Weerman argue that grammatical relations are ‘structurally undetermined in that they can hold between elements in different configurations’ (p. 1). Chapter 1 introduces the main claims and argumentation of the proposed flexible syntax. As is done in the minimalist framework, Neeleman and Weerman assume a syntax with only two interfaces, the LF interface, related to meaning, and the PF interface, related to actual spell-out. In their modular theory of flexible syntax, Θ-theory operates at LF and case theory operates at both LF and PF levels. At LF, the relations between syntactic arguments and semantic functions are licensed by functional markers on the argument itself or on the predicate that it is the subject of. At PF, word order is accounted for in such a way that unspecified (i.e. morphologically empty) case features must be licensed in fixed positions, whereas specified (i.e. morphologically realized) case features do not require licensing at this interface. Neeleman and Weerman further propose that syntactic operations may feed Θtheory. They argue that all movement is A-bar movement, A-movement no longer existing since Θ-positions always carry case. In accounting for SVO and SOV order languages that have no overt case-marking, such as English and Dutch respectively, they propose that there is no universal ordering of heads and complements, but that the ordering of arguments is subject to linearization conditions such as directionality of head government, rather than derived by checking of weak or strong features. Chapters 2 to 6 work out various aspects of the theory of flexible syntax in detail, mainly on the basis of English and Dutch evidence. They discuss issues concerning the OV/VO parameter and morphological case at the PF level, prepositional complements, and raising to subject and head marking of arguments at the level of LF. In chapter 7 the proposals of flexible syntax are compared to those of the minimalist programme. Altogether, the book presents a well-worked-out generative alternative to the minimalist approach to sentence structure. One obvious advantage of the framework developed is that the presence of morphological features actually makes a difference to the analysis of syntactic structure. PAGE 24 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 25 With respect to verbal argument structure, last year’s Leuvense Bijdragen also contains some interesting contributions in the field. In ‘Agnates, Verb Classes and the Meaning of Construals: The Case of Ditransitivity in English’ (LB 87[1998] 281–313), Kristin Davidse discusses ditransitives in English from a cognitive perspective. The first part of her paper is theoretical and methodological, discussing relations between different structures, while the second part digs deeper into ditransitive constructions in English, interpreting their semantics and (sub)classifying their verbs. This paper is followed by Ann Laffut’s ‘Agnation as a Heuristic Tool: An Application to the “Locative Alternation”’ (LB 87[1998] 315– 36), which suggests that paradigmatic variation can be used as a tool to determine the semantics of a construction and to classify verbs. Laffut argues for a classification of ‘locative alternation’ verbs in terms of the main features of ‘applicativeness’ and ‘dispersiveness’, instrument and locatum, identifying and attributive causal relations. The acquisition of argument structure is studied in an article by Patricia Brooks and Michael Tomasello, ‘How Children Constrain their Argument Structure Constructions’ (Language 75[1999] 720–38). The authors report on an experiment in which children were supplied with data such as it was getting meeked, which turned out to pre-empt—at least for children aged 4/5 years and older—forms such as it was meeking; a model of syntactic development is proposed to explain this. Sydney M. Lamb, Pathways of the Brain: The Neurocognitive Basis of Language, takes a novel view of language and how it is processed. He challenges the explanatory power of analytical linguistics with respect to how human language really works, i.e. the actual processes in the brain. In his opinion, all analytical approaches to linguistics, whether they be generative, functional or even cognitive in nature, are no more than descriptive models of language. Lamb argues for a neuro-cognitive approach to language analysis, focusing on relational networks. His method of research is one of successive approximations, so that throughout the book later analyses are presented as improvements of earlier ones. Chapters 1 to 4 briefly discuss the various levels of analytical linguistics. Chapter 5 introduces the mechanics of relational networks, which are worked out in more detail and applied to the various linguistic levels and their interfaces in chapters 6 to 14. Chapter 6 is especially interesting from our perspective, since it deals explicitly with syntax. In this chapter, Lamb give examples from English, showing how syntactic rules and options can be represented in relational network notation. Chapter 15 is a challenge for any analytical linguist, because it deals with ‘linguistic illusions’. Chapters 16 to 18 provide arguments in favour of the relational network approach, based on requirements of the operational, developmental and neurological plausibility of the theory. These chapters discuss the various locations in the brain and their functions, and the workings of neurons, nections and the language cortex. The appendix contains a convenient outline of the major points. The book also provides an index of (technical) terms. The collection of articles contained in Angelika Redder and Jochen Rehbein, eds., Grammatik und mentale Prozesse, is also concerned with the relations between grammar and the underlying mental processes. The book is divided into four parts. The first part contains two articles on the structural representation of comprehension and perception processes. Part II has three articles discussing the mental dimensions of the structural units in linguistics. Part III consists of three articles that consider PAGE 25 OF 123 26 ENGLISH LANGUAGE grammatical forms as reflections of discursive processing. Finally, part IV contains four articles discussing the relation between mental structures and the forms in which these are expressed. Most of the articles are concerned with German data; only one article, ‘Modalverben in der Kognitiven Linguistik’ by Günter Radden, contains material from English. It discusses the grammaticalization of English modals and provides a metaphoric explanation for their evolution. In a somewhat similar manner, A.L. Sexton discusses ‘Grammaticalization in American Sign Language’ (LangS 21[1999] 105–41). The article includes a short introduction to ASL and the background assumptions of a cognitive/functional approach. Sexton records three different stages in grammaticalization and goes into more detail about verbal inflection, concluding that ASL is very regular in adhering to crosslinguistically valid patterns of grammaticalization, which seems to confirm its status as a natural language. Issues in the teaching of English grammar are addressed in two papers in Tops, Devriendt and Geukens, eds., Thinking English Grammar: To Honour Xavier Dekeyser, Professor Emeritus. In ‘Oddities, “Normal” English, Academic English and our Students’ (pp. 445–55), Guy A.J. Tops offers a personal view on the problem of what kind of English should be taught to students of English as a second or foreign language. They are usually taught some form of academic English and are thus guided by many prescriptive rules of the type ‘must should not be used in pasttime contexts’ or ‘non-restrictive relative clauses should not be introduced by that’. Such prescriptions are frequently at odds with descriptive facts, especially if nonacademic styles are taken into account. A further point is that academic style is characterized by impersonality, long and always complete sentences, passives, nominalizations, etc., which does not make for good, interesting, gripping writing. In ‘Some Observations on the Present Perfect Puzzle in Pedagogical Grammars of English’ (pp. 472–84), Wim van der Wurff tackles the question why pedagogical grammars—and these include works which sternly condemn the use of invented examples—apparently feel the need to explicitly warn students of English as a foreign or second language off sentences such as *Alice has finished her dissertation yesterday in view of the fact that the present perfect/simple past distinction in English is effortlessly acquired by first language learners, in spite of the absence of negative evidence. Van der Wurff adduces evidence from three different domains— first- and second-language acquisition and (synchronic and diachronic) crosslinguistic data—to conclude that the inclusion of such starred sentences in learners’ grammars is in fact unnecessary: in each of these domains, there is a crucial role for positive evidence in the form of sentences with a perfect in a state-up-to-the-present context and sentences with a past tense and a past time adverbial. In SAP 34[1999] 267–89, Yonglin Yang presents ‘A Functional-Stratificational Analysis of whatClauses for Pedagogical Grammar’. Both interrogative and relative what-clauses are analysed, using X-bar theory and a Hallidayan functional framework. The author shows how sentences like We eat what we can and can what we cannot can be analysed using the steps of formal identification, functional decomposition, structural decomposition, and semantic reinterpretation. Next, we move on to discuss corpus work, mainly papers concerning corpora under construction. In their paper ‘Facilitating a Description of Intercultural Conversations: The Hong Kong Corpus of Conversational English’ (ICAME 23[1999] 5–20), Winnie Cheng and Martin Warren motivate the need for more PAGE 26 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 27 corpus material to provide accurate descriptions of Hong Kong English in which this variety can be compared to other varieties of English. They define the concept of ‘conversation’, discuss the methodology of data collection, and describe the contents and applications of the HKCCE. Another corpus is discussed in Arja Nurmi’s ‘The Corpus of Early English Correspondence Sampler (CEECS)’ (ICAME 23[1999] 53–64). The author relates how and when the CEECS was compiled, and how it is encoded. The motivation for the publication of this sampler is to give a preview of the full corpus, which is to be published at a later stage. It includes an appendix with a list of the letter collections included in the CEECS. Manfred Markus’s ‘Getting to Grips with Chips and Early Middle English Text Variants: Sampling Ancrene Riwle and Hali Meidenhad’ (ICAME 23[1999] 35–51), is concerned with the problem of compiling different versions of OE and ME texts and how to tag these texts in order to use them in computer-aided corpora analyses. Some of the problems/questions discussed are how to represent a manuscript as a computer text, how to use italics, pointed brackets and footnotes, and how to encode specific characters and signs. Finally, the author wonders whether it is always necessary to tag every grapheme, phoneme and morpheme. It is concluded that all this depends on the aims of the user. One of the possibilities opened up by tagging is to combine syntactic with phonological information; this is done in Jürgen Esser’s ‘Syntactic and Prosodic Closure in On-Line Speech Production’ (Anglia 116[1999] 476–91). He presents a study of the syntactic and prosodic status of tone boundaries in the London–Lund Corpus, coming to the conclusion that the interplay between syntax and intonation is much more complex than the prosodic bootstrapping hypothesis predicts. Moving on to work in which specific theoretical frameworks are developed, we first note Michael Böttner, Relationele Grammatik, which argues for the use of relation algebra (as developed by Boole, de Morgan, Peirce, and Schröder) for the analysis of natural language semantics. Unlike the more familiar model of predicate logic, this theory only employs constants and operations, and no variables. Böttner shows in some detail how the theory would deal with some major facts of German and English. The framework of cognitive linguistics gets a useful collection of articles in Theo Janssen and Gisela Redeker, eds., Foundations, Scope, and Methodology. It begins with a contribution by Ronald Langacker, ‘Assessing the Cognitive Linguistic Enterprise’, which describes the place of cognitive linguistics vis-à-vis functionalism, and then sketches its main concepts and ideas, looking more closely at the categories of subject and object. William Croft writes about ‘Some Contributions of Typology to Cognitive Linguistics, and Vice Versa’, showing that facts of grammaticalization and change can shed light on semantic relativity and arguing for the primary importance of grammatical constructions. This is followed by Gilles Fauconnier’s ‘Methods and Generalizations’, which argues for linguistics being part of the study of cognition in general and shows what this would entail in concrete terms, employing the concept of Mental Space Blending. This same concept is used to good advantage in Eve Sweetser’s ‘Compositionality and Blending: Semantic Composition in a Cognitively Realistic Framework’, which investigates English adjective–noun sequences of the type the usual suspect. More concerned with issues in the larger picture is Dirk Geeraerts’s ‘Idealist and Empiricist Tendencies in Cognitive Semantics’, which appropriately takes the form of a philosophical dialogue. Peter Harder argues for ‘Partial Autonomy: Ontology PAGE 27 OF 123 28 ENGLISH LANGUAGE and Methodology in Cognitive Linguistics’, noting the tendency towards continuism in cognitive linguistic work but proposing that some phenomena, such as syntax, should be regarded as being partially autonomous. However, in the final contribution, ‘Grounding, Mapping, and Acts of Meaning’, Chris Sinha argues at length against autonomy and also against compositionality of linguistic meaning. In a separate cognitive contribution, Timothy C. Clausner and William Croft argue for the addition of the notion of ‘image schemas’ to the familiar set of notions, in their article ‘Domains and Image Schemas’ (CogLing 10[1999] 1–31). The familiar notions comprise those of concepts, domains, construals and category structures involving prototypes. Image schemas are assumed to be a subtype of a domain. Using example sentences from English, Clausner and Croft explain how image schemas function like domains which may contain both locational and configurational concepts. As in earlier years, the syntactic theory which has received most attention is generative grammar, in particular the minimalist framework. This framework is set in the context of its immediate and more distant generative forebears by Kyle Johnson and Ian Roberts in their introduction to the volume Beyond Principles and Parameters (pp. 1–11). They describe the shift from construction-based analyses to module-and-principle-based ones, and the more recent decomposition of both modules and principles. A book-length explanation and exploration of the minimalist framework can be found in Howard Lasnik, Minimalist Analysis, which consists of eight chapters, the first of which is an introduction, while the other seven are papers that Lasnik has read at conferences and/or published in journals. In the introductory chapter, Lasnik warns the reader that minimalist theory as such does not yet exist, but that researchers are on the right track, developing increasingly minimalist analyses. He shows that many minimalist ideas were already present in the Principles and Parameters approach of GB-theory and sometimes even stem from early generative theory dating back to the late 1950s. New elements in the Minimalist Program (Chomsky [1995]) are that movement only applies to formal features, that lexical material may be moved along by pied-piping, and that semantic features may be left behind. Chapter 2, ‘On the Subject of Infinitives’, written with Mamoru Saito, deals with Exceptional Case Marking (ECM) constructions and argues that lexical subjects of infinitives are overtly raised to the object position of the higher verb [Spec,AgrO]. Some evidence points towards raising at S-structure, in spite of the fact that S-structure is assumed to play no role in minimalist analysis. Other phenomena seem to require raising at LF. This conflict is resolved in the analyses of the subsequent chapters. Chapter 3 discusses different types of subjects, such as ECM-subjects, expletives with their associates, and PRO subjects of control constructions. Lasnik gives two licensing options for case, inherent (partitive case) or structural case, and argues that both are licensed via raising to a [Spec,Agr] position. Chapter 4 discusses expletive there-constructions in more detail. Lasnik argues against Chomsky’s principle of greed, and instead formulates a similar principle of ‘enlightened self-interest’ (ESI). By ESI, features may move to satisfy requirements either of their own, or of their target position. It is argued that the associate of existential there is case-licensed for partitive case in [Spec,AgrO]. Chapter 5 deals with verbal morphology. Lasnik proposes to combine a lexicalist view with a structuralist view, in the sense that he argues for a lexicalist account of the various auxiliary verb forms, whereas he defends the transformational view of PAGE 28 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 29 Affix Hopping for the various forms of English main verbs. The proposal is supported by VP-ellipsis facts that involve auxiliaries in the second conjunct. Chapter 6 dives deeper into the problem of LF versus S-structure movement. It is shown that only for agreement effects, movement seems to be overt, whereas for all other effects (e.g. scope, binding, negative polarity item licensing) no movement seems to take place. It is concluded that only formal features trigger movement, and that there is no pied-piping of other features. These other features, such as referential and quantificational properties (related to binding and scope phenomena), remain in the lower position. Chapters 7 and 8 work this proposal out in more detail, focusing on ellipsis and anaphora. It is argued that certain examples of VP-ellipsis support the view that even objects in English raise to [Spec, AgrO]. It is furthermore argued that binding relations may not change under covert movement, but that they do change under overt movement of the relevant NP. On the whole, the argumentation in the book is clear and honest. Lasnik dares to raise questions that are left unanswered, with the intention of inspiring others to take up the challenge of analysing language with minimalist tools. Some further thoughts by him on how to do this can be found in his article ‘On Feature Strength: Three Minimalist Approaches to Overt Movement’ (LingI 30[1999] 197–217). Here, Lasnik uses facts of pseudo-gapping (If you don’t believe me, you will the weatherman) and sluicing (I wonder who) to investigate the nature of feature strength in the Minimalist Program. His proposal is that a derivation with a strong feature requires either movement or ellipsis. The topic of chains, control and binding continues to spark debate. Michael Brody argues against claims made by Hornstein [1998] in an article in Syntax 1. In his ‘Relating Syntactic Elements: Remarks on Norbert Hornstein’s “Movement and Chains”’ (Syntax 2[1999] 210–26), Brody begins by discussing Hornstein’s arguments against the existence of chains. Brody focuses on the arguments based on Quantifier Raising and Obligatory Control. He points out various problematic issues and concludes that syntactic treatment of chains is redundant, because quasisemantic mechanisms have the same effect and multiple lexical insertion can explain the multiple occurrence of certain elements in a chain. In another piece, Norbert Hornstein offers his recent thought on ‘Movement and Control’ (LingI 30[1999] 69–96). He offers a minimalist reanalysis of control, in which it shares properties with raising; this removes the need for a separate control module (but necessitates the assumption of movement from one theta-position to another). M. Rita Manzini and Anna Roussou also present ‘A Minimalist Theory of A-Movement and Control’ (UCWPL 11[1999] 403–40). They argue for a deviation from the standard minimalist theory (Chomsky [1995]) by having DPs merge in the position where they surface, from where they attract a predicate. Thus, control is analysed as a special case in which one DP attracts more than one predicate. Arbitrary control is analysed as ‘the attraction of a predicate by an operator in C’. The same approach is argued to be advantageous for the analysis of A-movement as well. A problem in the analysis of sentences like John strikes Bill as being a genius is addressed in Cedric Boeckx’s ‘Conflicting C-Command Requirements’ (SL 53[1999] 227–50). He points out that raising of John appears to violate Shortest Move (or Closest Attract), and suggests that raising is possible because Bill is the complement of an empty preposition which is not reanalysed with the verb. Ellen Woolford writes ‘More on the Anaphor Agreement Effect’ (LingI 30[1999] 257–87), developing an account for the fact that languages with (some form of) subject–verb agreement do not allow PAGE 29 OF 123 30 ENGLISH LANGUAGE agreement and anaphors to co-occur (as in *They think that each other are nice) while languages without, do; she also extends the analysis to languages with and without object agreement. Ayumi Matsuo has studied ‘Reciprocity and Binding in Early Child Grammar’ (LingI 30[1999] 310–17), attributing children’s problems with the item each other to their treating the word other in this phrase as a threeplace relation, which it is in its non-reciprocal uses. Binding (and other matters) in pseudo-clefts form the topic of ‘Pseudocleft Connectedness: Implications for the LF Interface Level’ by Caroline Heycock and Anthony Kroch (LingI 30[1999] 365–97). They note that pseudo-clefts pattern like simple sentences with respect to binding, negative polarity items, and other phenomena (as in What Mary was proud of was herself; What he didn’t buy was any good novels), and use this fact to argue that the level of LF has further derivational steps than is standardly assumed. In their paper ‘Antecedent-Contained Deletion [ACD] as Deletion’ (LIN 16[1999] 203–16), Guido Vanden Wyngaerd and Jan-Wouter Zwart illustrate that the minimalist bottom-up process of merge yields a PF-account of ACDconstructions, which is to be preferred to an LF reconstruction account. With the PF account they are able to avoid the problem of infinite regress in terms of Quantifier Raising or other types of movement. They describe ellipsis as an extreme method of de-accenting and thus also avoid the problem of vehicle change, i.e. reconstructing ‘sloppy’ identity-binding relations for the ‘empty’ pronoun in the ACDconstruction. A different approach to ACD-constructions is pursued in a paper by Jun Abe, ‘A Generalized Rightward Movement Analysis of Antecedent Contained Deletion’ (JL 35[1999] 451–87). The paper argues against the LF object shift analysis of the infinite regress problem of ACD. The proposal in the present paper is that any type of rightward movement is allowed to solve the problem of infinite regress. Abe argues that rightward movement fits in a minimalist approach, although this movement is not for feature-checking reasons, but for reasons of Full Interpretation, providing the null VP with content. Another paper in defence of the Minimalist Program is by Masanori Nakamura. In ‘Global Issues’ (NELS 28[1999] 301–18), a cross-linguistic argument is presented showing that although the Shortest Derivation Condition may not be part of grammar, other global conditions, such as the Minimal Link Condition, are. John Framples and Sam Gutmann propose a fully cyclic minimalist theory of syntactic derivations in ‘Cyclic Computation: A Computationally Efficient Minimalist Syntax’ (Syntax 2[1999] 1–27). In their view a cycle includes the processes of ‘select’ and ‘satisfy’, whereby lexical items are introduced in the syntactic structure, merge with their arguments and have their features checked, preferably by overt movement. Section 5 elaborates on the feature-checking system for structural case and agreement, and presents a case study of the workings of the Chain condition, the Extended Projection Principle and expletive constructions. The linguistic data used are from English and Icelandic. In the same issue (Syntax 2[1999] 38–64), Charles D. Yong presents a cross-linguistic study of ‘Unordered Merge and its Linearization’. He argues that linearization arises from hierarchical displacement or morphological fusion of the members of a merger. The article focuses on the definiteness effect. The proposed theory explains why languages such as Arabic, Hebrew, and Romance do not have a definiteness effect, which is unexpected under previous analyses. Susanne Bejar and Diane Massam give another cross-linguistic account, of ‘Multiple Case Checking’ (Syntax 2[1999] 65–79). Using data from PAGE 30 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 31 English, Hungarian, Norwegian, Icelandic and Niuean, they discuss both inherent and structural case and argue that both case assignment and case checking should be used. While on tree configurations, we also mention Ad Neeleman and Hans van de Koot, ‘The Configurational Matrix’ (UCWPL 11[1999] 473–519); they propose a theory of syntactic percolation whereby all kinds of information can percolate up and down the tree. This theory is to explain why grammatical relations are obligatory, unique and sensitive to c-command. That old generative favourite, wh-movement, has not lost its attraction. Zeljko Boškovic uses the minimalist approach in dealing with various types of whconstruction, ‘either’ movement and quantifier raising in English, French and German. In his article ‘LF Movement and the Minimalist Program’ (NELS 28[1999] 43–57), he argues that LF movement is more local than overt movement. The argument is based on the Move F system of minimalism. Working also within a minimalist framework, Brian Abayani proposes an explanation for the difference in extraction possibilities in complement versus non-complement distinction in his article ‘Generalized Pied-Piping and Island Effects’ (NELS 28[1999] 1–14), using English and Japanese examples. In a pre-minimalist paper, John Frampton addresses ‘The Fine Structure of wh-Movement and the Proper Formulation of the ECP’ (LingRev 16[1999] 43–61), presenting a Barriers-style analysis of wh-extraction facts and proposing that the Empty Category Principle operates both at S-structure (where violations are weak) and LF (where violations are strong). Another paper written well before 1999 is Rita Manzini’s ‘Locality Theory: Competing Models of Weak Islands’ (LingRev 16[1999] 63–79), in which the author argues against Rizzi’s notion of referential indices and also shows that relativized minimality is equivalent to rigid minimality if every XP can be associated with at most one A-bar position. Kazuko Hiramatsu presents a critical note on the nature of grammaticality judgements in his paper ‘What Syntactic Satiation Can Tell us about Islands’ (PRMCLS 35[1999] 141–51). It is argued that certain constructions, in particular wh- and subject island violations, show satiation effects, in that they are judged less ungrammatical after they have been repeated to the informant or linguist himself over time. Hiramatsu urges linguists in general to rethink some of the assumptions about the stability of judgements, but emphasizes also that the main differences between subject and adjunct islands, as well as extraction of arguments versus adjuncts, are still observable. In her paper ‘Possessive wh-Expressions and Reconstruction’ (NELS 28[1999] 409–23), Yael Sharvit argues that functional dependencies allow an account for the semantics of pied-piping without syntactic reconstruction. However, she admits that some mechanism of meaning retrieval is always operative. Wh-pronouns in P-stranding contexts are studied in Paul Law’s ‘A Unified Analysis of P-stranding in Romance and Germanic’ (NELS 28[1999] 219– 34). Law proposes an analysis of P-stranding by which D incorporates into P to license P-stranding. This provides a unified analysis for the relatively free occurrence of P-stranding in English and Scandinavian, the rather restricted occurrence of P-stranding in Dutch and German, and the complete ban on Pstranding in Romance languages. We note, incidentally, that something has gone wrong with Law’s German and Dutch, since in his example 3 the sequences wo … für and waar … op (‘where for’ and ‘where on’, respectively) are incorrectly asterisked, while was … für and wat … op (‘what for’ and ‘what on’) are incorrectly presented as being grammatical. Reconstruction facts such as *How proud of PAGE 31 OF 123 32 ENGLISH LANGUAGE Barbarai do you think shei said that John would be are analysed in James McCawley’s posthumously published ‘Why Surface Syntactic Structure Reflects Logical Structure as Much as it Does, but Only That Much’ (Language 75[1999] 34–62). It is argued that deep structure scope is the same as logical structure scope; a principle of cyclicity has the effect that surface structure scope is the same as logical scope in most cases; exceptions like Few professors seem to have given hard exams are also taken care of. Further scopal matters are investigated by Susumu Kuno, Ken-ichi Takami, and Yuru Wu in ‘Quantifier Scope in English, Chinese, and Japanese’ (Language 75[1999] 63–111). The authors note problems in earlier analyses of sentences like Every man loves a woman, and provide a new analysis based on various interacting principles, the variation in which accounts for idiolectial variation in scope readings. Satoshi Oku presents some ‘Notes on Quantifier/WH Interaction’ (LingI 30[1999] 143–7) in sentences like What did every student buy?, where what can have scope over kinds/properties as well as individuals. Danny Fox considers the scope of Quantifier Phrases in ‘Reconstruction, Binding Theory, and the Interpretation of Chains’ (LingI 30[1999] 157–96), arguing that condition C applies only at LF. Ken Safir has looked at ‘Vehicle Change and Reconstruction in A-bar-Chains’ (LingI 30[1999] 587–620 and argues in favour of vehicle change in A-bar chains to explain anti-reconstruction effects. Scope and adverbs can be found in Thomas Ernst’s ‘The Scopal Basis of Adverb Licensing’ (NELS 28[1999] 127–42), where it is assumed that the scope requirements of adverbs are encoded as lexical properties and that the verification of these at LF licenses an adverb. Ernst distinguishes three main groups of adverbs: (1) participant adjuncts, realized as PPs (e.g. with a shoe, on the edge); (2) functional adjuncts (e.g. not, even, occasionally); and (3) predicational adjuncts (e.g. frankly, luckily, loudly). Each has its own more detailed subdivisions. The scopal properties relate to a hierarchy of Fact/Event objects, which correspond to syntactic positions. We also mention here Benjamin Shaer’s ‘Adverbials, Functional Structure and Restrictiveness’ (NELS 28[1999] 391–47), which argues for a modular approach to the analysis of adverb placement. Shaer wants to integrate lexical properties with syntactic and semantic principles. He shows that adverbs have a kind of argument structure since they require a certain linguistic environment, which varies per adverb type. He proposes to adopt the notion of ‘coercion’ allowing reading of adverbs to be determined by the situation expressed in the larger context. The book we discuss next deals with the morphosyntactic interface. Bernard Wolfgang Rohrbacher, Morphology-Driven Syntax: A Theory of V to I Raising and pro-Drop is, like Lasnik’s Minimalist Analysis, inspired by the Principles and Parameters theory of syntax. However, Rohrbacher does not agree that abstract morphological features are sufficient to account for movement; instead he defends the claim ‘that all syntactic parameters are set exclusively on the basis of the concrete (i.e. phonetically perceptible) content of functional categories’ (p. 7). In chapter 2 Rohrbacher provides a wide range of data with respect to the distribution of V to I raising over the various Germanic languages. He argues that there are three different types of Germanic languages: (1) OV-languages like Dutch and German, for which V to I raising cannot be detected, assuming that VP and IP projections are left-headed; (2) VO-languages like Yiddish and Icelandic, which can be argued on the basis of negation and adverb placement to have overt V to I raising; and (3) VOPAGE 32 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 33 languages like English, Mainland Scandinavian and Faroese, which do not have V to I raising. The first part of chapter 3 discusses previous proposals on the topic of V to I movement, showing correlations with properties of negation, case marking and number agreement. The second part of this chapter reveals Rohrbacher’s own proposal: ‘V to I raising occurs in exactly those languages which distinctively mark the person features [1st] and [2nd] in either the singular or the plural of at least one tense’ (p. 93). It is concluded that V to I raising languages have verbal stems and AGR-affixes listed in the lexicon, whereas V in situ languages only have their verbal stems, but no AGR-affixes listed in the lexicon. As a consequence, V to I languages project an AgrP at D-structure, whereas V in situ languages do not. Moreover, V to I languages check their AGR-features at S-structure, whereas V in situ languages postpone this checking until LF, while at the same time the (non-distinctive) features, if any, are spelled out at PF. The final section of chapter 3 deals with residual V to I raising in Faroese. Chapter 4 is entirely devoted to the history of Germanic syntax, arguing that earlier stages of English and Mainland Scandinavian did have distinctive marking of [1st] and [2nd] person features, and consequently also V to I raising. Some attention is also paid here to the different developments of the modal systems in English and the Scandinavian languages. In chapter 5 the theory is extended to Romance languages, among which French is particularly interesting, since it shows evidence of V to I raising, but arguably has no full person paradigm. It is argued that obligatory subject clitics have taken up the AGR-function and form a full paradigm that correlates with V to I. A nice piece of support for the theory is that V to I also appears to correlate with referential pro-drop phenomena. The chapter contains an explanation for the fact that this is not true for Icelandic. This language only allows expletive pro, since referential properties need to be identified by case. Assuming that nominative case is assigned in Comp, while agreement is contained in AgrS, referential pro cannot be licensed. The final chapter of the book recaptures the main conclusions. We feel this work is a worthy contribution to the linguistic tradition that wishes to make the relation between morphology and syntax more tangible and transparent. More on interface matters is found in Anna-Maria Di Sciullo and Carol L. Tenny’s ‘Modification, Event Structure and the Word/Phrase Asymmetry’ (NELS 28[1999] 374–89). They propose that morphological and syntactic structure differ in the availability of complements, these being permitted in syntax, not in morphological structure. Five types of modification are discussed, for two of which only syntactic examples can be found. These two are: ‘bounding by measuring argument’ and ‘measure modification’. The other three functions, shared by both syntactic and morphological structure, are: iterative modification (by re- or again); bounding by adding a temporal end-point; and bounding by adding an end-state predicate. An article discussing another interface is J.-Marc Autier’s ‘When Syntax Overrules Semantics’ (NELS 28[1999] 33–42), which joins the debate among semanticists and (generative) syntacticians about the autonomy of syntax. Authier argues, on the basis of the French demonstrative ce, for an integrated model of grammar in which each module, including both semantics and syntax, is subject to similar economy conditions. In his ‘Structural Conditions on Chains and Binding’ (NELS 28[1999] 341–56), Eric Reuland seems to give another example of Authier’s proposal, since he argues for a semantic variant of merge. He proposes that variable PAGE 33 OF 123 34 ENGLISH LANGUAGE binding (of pronouns and quantifiers) takes place in the interpretative component via λ-abstraction and conversion. Several contributions look in detail at minor constructions and use them to make general points. Paul Kay and Charles Fillmore write about ‘Grammatical Constructions and Linguistic Generalizations: The what’s X doing Y Construction’ (Language 75[1999] 1–33). They explore the construction’s properties (showing that it encodes incongruity, and providing a formal representation of it) and argue that it and other constructions are best handled in terms of Construction Grammar, a constraint-based theory which makes available an inheritance hierarchy of constructions. Peter Culicover and Ray Jackendoff describe ‘The View from the Periphery: The English Comparative Correlative’ (LingI 30[1999] 543–71), providing detailed discussion of the binding, extraction and other properties of this construction (as in The more you eat, the fatter you get), and showing that it has a mismatch between syntax and semantics; still, the authors point out, it is acquired effortlessly by children. Peter Culicover, Syntactic Nuts: Hard Cases, Syntactic Theory, and Language Acquisition, is all about such peripheral and limited phenomena, including constructions with neither, either, and both; the syntax of notwithstanding; the no matter construction; sluice stranding (as in I couldn’t figure out who about/*after); do-support; infinitival relatives; and parasitic gaps. As Culicover shows, these constructions all have several idiosyncratic properties; he proposes a mechanism of acquisition whereby a conservative attentive learner can acquire them in the same way as more ‘core’ properties of languages. A processing metric à la John Hawkins is invoked to account for a number of regularities. We now turn to the noun phrase. The article ‘Schematicity Inside the Noun Phrase’ by Frank Brisard (in Tops, Devriendt and Geukens, eds. [1999] pp. 159–78), presents a detailed Langacker-type analysis of the noun phrase. He concludes that there is a ‘cataphoric relationship between a schema and its elaboration [which] can give rise to a number of fairly well-definable functional properties associated with such [i.e. general and slightly more specific] nouns’. In the area of child language research, Eli Kaiser has investigated children’s use of definite and indefinite articles in the Childes database and reports on this in ‘The Significance of Real-World Knowledge: Adults’ and Children’s Use of Articles’ (PRMCLS 35[1999] 187–202). Kaiser shows that even children as old as 9 differ from adults in their use of articles and argues that 9-year-olds are not lacking in linguistic knowledge, but that children’s assumptions about the real world are different from those of adults. Another paper with acquisition data is ‘Scope and the Structure of Bare Nominals: Evidence from Child Language’(Linguistics 37[1999] 927–60) by Ana PérezLeroux and Thomas Roeper. They analyse the word home, which is acquired easily by children, as being not a DP but a minimal nominal projection with an internal pro-argument. Bare nominals also occupy Judy Bernstein, Wayne Cowart and Dana McDaniel in ‘Bare Singular Effects in Genitive Constructions’ (LingI 30[1999] 493–502). They note the surprising contrast between [Two women’s] keys fell on the floor and *[Two women’s] key fell on the floor, attributing the difference to the ungrammaticality of bare count singulars in general. Martin Haspelmath has a go at ‘Explaining Article-Possessor Complementarity: Economic Motivation in Noun Phrase Syntax’ (Language 75[1999] 227–43). He attributes the ungrammaticality of combinations like *the my book and *John’s the book to the fact that possessed NPs are likely to be definite anyway, and explores the cross-linguistic data and diachrony PAGE 34 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 35 of the complementarity (finding that it arises only when a demonstrative grammaticalizes into a definite article). Simi Karimi and Anne Lobeck show in their article ‘Specificity Effects in English and Persian’ (NELS 28[1999] 175–86) how specificity effects can be accounted for by a theory of N-raising to the functional positions of DET and NUM. In his article ‘The Semantics of Lexical Underspecification’ (FoL 32[1998] 323–47), James Pustejovsky develops a system that accounts for cases of complex type nominal polysemy, which can also be extended to certain transitive verbs. The paper discusses how semantically underspecified lexical items receive their particular interpretation through syntactic composition. Crucial use is made of lexical semantic concepts, described in terms of argument structure, event structure, and ‘qualia’, i.e. specific roles, namely formal, telic, constitutive and agentive roles. On the basis of English and German examples, Winfried Lechner proposes in ‘Phrasal Comparatives and DP-Structure’ (NELS 28[1999] 237–52) that DPs with a phrasal comparative should be analysed as involving ‘Than-Phrase Raising’, adjoining the Than-Phrase to the left of IP, and a right-branching comparative DP. The example used for analysis is Mary knows [DPD0[DegP[AP[APyounger] [NPauthors]] Deg0 [than-XPthan Peter]]]. The analysis evokes some questions, especially with respect to the relation between the AP and NP under AP, the left branch of DegreePhrase . The paper fails to say something about the ambiguity of the comparative DP (Peter) as subject or object of the verb (know). An NP-related item is studied in Sadayuki Okada’s ‘On the Function and Distribution of the Modifiers Respective and Respectively’ (Linguistics 37[1999] 871–903); after reviewing earlier analyses and presenting a great amount of data on these two forms, their semantic function and syntactic distribution, Okada suggests that many of the differences between them derive from their different categorial nature. Another NP-related contribution is Hye-Kyung Kang’s ‘Quantifier Spreading by English and Korean Children’ (UCWPL 11[1999] 381–402). The author argues for a two-way analysis of quantifier spreading, cognitively and linguistically, and explains the disappearance of spreading phenomena with age as caused by the maturation of the linguistic system, arguing that children first analyse quantifiers as modifiers, reanalysing them once the functional category of DP has been acquired. An entire book is devoted to adjectives. In Adjective Intensification—Learners versus Native Speakers: A Corpus Study of Argumentative Writing, Gunter Lorenz investigates in detail combinations like bitterly cold, very good, really great and totally worthless. After chapters on the composition of his learner corpus, intensification as a grammatical category, the methodology used, the use of adjectives as intensifiers, and the semantic mechanisms involved in intensification, detailed data are presented on the types, categories, functions, stylistic correlates and frequencies of adjective intensifiers in data from German learners compared with native speakers. One of the major findings is that the learners overuse intensifiers, and in fact appear to overuse adjectives in general. Lorenz relates this to learners’ propensity to information overcharge, where—crudely speaking—a sentence is felt not to be satisfactory unless it contains a couple of adjectives (with intensifiers, if possible). In his article ‘Pronoun Positioning’ (Lingua 109[1999] 155–81), David Basilico confirms the hypothesis that English pronouns must appear in a derived position. It is argued that this explains why unaccented English pronouns cannot occur PAGE 35 OF 123 36 ENGLISH LANGUAGE postverbally in locative inversion constructions, in post-particle position of verb + particle constructions, or as the second NP in double-object constructions. Basilico concludes that unaccented pronouns must check a topic feature in a Functional Projection. Karin Golde is also concerned with pronouns, but emphatic ones, in her paper ‘Evidence for Two Types of English Intensive NPs’ (PRMCLS 35[1999] 99– 108). She argues that intensive NPs (i.e. NP + emphatic reflexive pronoun) must meet two general conditions, namely they have to be prominent and unexpected. It is concluded that these conditions can be met in a literal sense, or at a metalinguistic level. Hilda Koopman writes about ‘The Internal and External Distribution of Pronominal NPs’ (in Johnson and Roberts, eds. [1999] pp. 91–132), giving an analysis of Welsh, Scandinavian and English pronouns, whereby they have the general structure [DP Spec [NumP Spec Num NP]]; N can move to Num, Num to D, NP to SpecNumP, NP to SpecDP, and NumP to SpecDP. An investigation of pronominal constructions in an oral-based corpus study, where the pronouns are coreferent with singular antecedents and refer to indeterminate sex, is reported in Michael Newman’s ‘What Can Pronouns Tell Us? A Case Study of English Epicenes’ (SLang 22[1998] 353–89). It turns out that they is used in 60 per cent of the tokens and he in 25 per cent. It is argued that there are three semantic factors corresponding with this variation; these are ‘perceived sex stereotypes associated with the referent, notional number, and […] degree of individuation’. In ‘The SelfPronouns in a Cross-Linguistic Perspective’ (in Tops, Devriendt and Geukens, eds. [1999] pp. 368–81), André Hantson sets up a grammaticalization cline, and shows that in languages having SE/SICH pronouns these pronouns tend to have their reflexive sense weakened in favour of passive, reciprocal and other meanings, leading at times to the development of special emphatic forms Subjects are also well represented in this year’s crop. Robin Fawcett writes ‘On the Subject of the Subject in English: Two Positions on its Meaning (and on How to Test for it)’ (FuL 6[1999] 243–73), comparing ‘Sydney Grammar’ and ‘Cardiff Grammar’ (two versions of Hallidayan functional grammar) with respect to the status of the subject in the clause and the tests that can be used to identify it. John P. Broderick investigates ‘Wallace Chafe’s Light Subject Constraint in Conversational Discourse in the Immediate Mode of Consciousness’ (Word 50[1999] 143–54), finding that data taken from talk about the speaker’s immediate context confirms Chafe’s suggestion that subjects are usually pronominal and represent old information. Further confirmation can be found in a paper by Hartwell S. Francis, Michelle L. Gregory and Laura A. Michaelis, ‘Are Lexical Subjects Deviant?’ (PRMCLS 35[1999] 85–97). The results of a study of the Switchboard Corpus of English Telephone Conversations indicate that 91 per cent of the subjects are pronominal, and 9 per cent are lexical. The authors’ explanation for this is based on K. Lambrecht’s (1994) Principle of Separation of Reference and Role. For the small class of lexical subjects, they claim that their morphosyntactic properties are related to the Gricean maxim of Quantity. Magnus Levin deals with the issue that grammatically singular subjects may combine with plural agreement on the verb when their semantics allows a collective reading. His article ‘Concord with Collective Nouns Revisited’ (ICAME 23[1999] 21–33), based on data from various corpora (LOB, FLOB, Brown, Frown), shows that there is diachronic change in these matters. Some examples even show mixed use of agreement in one and the same sentence, although in different clauses. The PAGE 36 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 37 conclusions are that ‘there seems to be a slight increase in singular verbal concord in BrE press texts, whereas plural personal pronouns remain as viable alternatives to singular personal pronouns in both BrE and AmE’ and ‘the influence of syntactic boundaries on concord with personal pronouns is stronger in AmE than in BrE’. The variable agreement seen in There are/is only two people here is the topic of Carson Schütze’s ‘English Expletive Constructions are not Infected’ (LingI 30[1999] 467– 84), which criticizes M. Sobin’s 1997 account of this phenomenon in terms of virus theory and argues that both options are generated by the grammar of English. In another paper on agreement, Richard Hudson discusses ‘Subject–Verb Agreement in English’ (ELL 3[1999] 173–207). He denies that there is subject–verb agreement for person and number in Standard English tensed constructions. He argues that person is irrelevant to all verbs except be, and that number is also irrelevant for all past tense and the modals. Yet the author proposes to introduce a new feature, ‘agreement-number’, which is argued to explain not only morphological number agreement, but also allows occasional mismatches (which are assumed not to be semantic in nature) and agreement with non-nominal subjects and existential there. Finally, it is claimed that this theory carries over to other varieties of English. GuiSun Moon proposes ‘A Licensing Condition on English Pleonastics’ (Heng 8[1999] 1–17), by which existential there-clauses and pleonastic it-clauses are given a uniform analysis, both being in case-marked non-theta positions. There is more on the subject it in Gunther Kaltenböck’s ‘Which it is it? Some Remarks on Anticipatory it’ (Views 8[1999] 48–71), where anticipatory it is compared with referring it and prop it, and argued to occupy a place on a gradient in between these two. Liliane Haegeman and Tabea Ihsane provide a description of the contexts in which embedded finite clauses allow omission of their subject. In their paper ‘Subject Ellipsis in Embedded Clauses in English’ (ELL 3[1999] 117–45), they provide much data from published diaries and propose that pronoun ellipsis is licensed in specific registers (e.g. diary-style) by a specifier–head relation in which the head carries agreement features. Vidal Valmala Elguea also writes on the topic of pronoun ellipsis, in his article ‘VP-Fragments and the pro-Drop Parameter’ (PRMCLS 35[1999] 323–37). He shows that English allows pro-drop in certain contexts, in particular in VP-fragments, and formulates a strong version of the prodrop parameter: ‘pro will be able to appear in any position (in any language) if it is identified and no string features require checking by an overt DP’. In her paper ‘Locality and Inert Case’ (NELS 28[1999] 267–81), Martha McGinnis argues that movement to subject position is constrained by the structural locality condition of c-command. In a cross-linguistic study, she shows that generally, the highest argument moves to subject position, unless it is assigned ‘inert case’, which makes it invisible for movement. Inert case occurs with certain psychverbs which do not allow passivization, for example, His name escapes me. That all subjects, even those in simple clauses, actually harbour a control relation is argued by Mamoru Saito and Keiko Murasugi in ‘Subject Predication within IP and DP’ (in Johnson and Roberts, eds. [1999] pp. 167–88). They propose that both nominalizations and their corresponding full clauses have PRO as a subject inside NP/VP, the shared structure being [DP/IP the barbarians(‘) D/I [NP/VP PRO [N’/ V’destruction /destroyed (of) the city ]]] . This would explain why VP-preposing is possible (NP-preposing being ruled out by independent principles). PAGE 37 OF 123 38 ENGLISH LANGUAGE From noun phrases and subjects, we move on to verbs and verbal groups, first considering this year’s work in tense, mood and aspect. In her paper ‘The Temporal Structure of Discourse: The Syntax and Semantics of Temporal then’ (NLLT 17[1999] 123–60), Ellen Thompson argues that the behaviour of tense in discourse does not differ from the behaviour of tense within the sentence. Thus, the function of then is the same in these different positions: linking times of independent sentences or linking times of main clause and temporal adjunct. Thompson concludes that clause-final then is adjoined to VP and induces a co-temporal interpretation of the events in the linked clauses; and that clause-medial and clauseinitial then are adjoined to IP and link the reference time of their clause with the reference time of the previous clause, resulting in an ordered reading of events. In ‘Remarks on Salkie and Reed’s (1997) “Pragmatic Hypothesis” of Tense in Reported Speech’ (ELL 3[1999] 83–116), Renaat Declerck points out various problems for R. Salkie and J. Reed’s argumentation for their ‘pragmatic hypothesis’ with respect to the English tense system. Instead, he proposes a more semantically based analysis and supports this with appropriate examples. In another contribution, Declerck analyses the temporal structure of before in ‘A Brief Look at Tense and Time in Adverbial before-Clauses’ (in Tops, Devriendt, and Geukens, eds. [1999] pp. 209–25). He discusses the various relations between the head clause and beforeclauses of different types, i.e. factual, non-factual and counterfactual. The same volume also contains an article on the cross-linguistic use of (verbs equivalent to) English do (see below). Elena Anagnostopoulou, Sabine Iatridou and Roumyana Izvorski compare English, Modern Greek and Bulgarian with respect to the meaning and use of the perfect. In their article ‘On the Morpho-Syntax of the Perfect and How it Relates to its Meaning’ (NELS 28[1999] 15–32), they distinguish four types of perfect, depending on factors of (non)progressivity and (un)boundedness. They show that different languages have different uses for the perfect aspect. Ilse Depraetere contributes an article to ‘Resultativeness and the Indefinite Progressive Perfect’ (in Tops, Devriendt, and Geukens, eds. [1999] pp. 227–38), arguing that resultativeness is inherent in the semantics of the perfect and depends on the specific context being telic or atelic. Steve Nicolle has a paper on ‘Be going to and will: A Monosemous Account’ (ELL 2[1998] 223–43), in which the meaning of going to is claimed to be ‘future relative to some temporal reference point’ and the meaning of will is ‘potential’. Interpretations like volition (for will) and prior intention (for going to) are argued to be due to pragmatics or synchronic retention. In the one contribution devoted to mood that we have seen, John Myhill presents ‘A Study of Imperative Usage in Biblical Hebrew and English’ (SLang 22[1999] 391–446). He shows the results of a corpus-based study and concludes that the use of imperatives is conditioned by completely different factors in each of the two languages. English imperatives have a social and interactive function, whereas Hebrew imperatives are more semantic and structural in nature. Myhill suggests that theories of speech acts should take into account the specific cultural and contextual backgrounds. In a book-length study, Fumio Miyahara writes about Aspect as an English Grammatical Category: Groundwork for the Aspect Theory. The work presents an attempt to compare English aspect (the progressive being viewed as imperfective, and the simple form as perfective) with the Russian aspect system, based on a PAGE 38 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 39 modified Reichenbachian analysis. The two systems are argued to be basically similar. The book does not really advance contemporary debates on aspect, since the bulk of it is formed by six articles written by the author in the 1970s and apparently not revised to any substantial degree; thus the reader is asked to consider as evidence things such as letters written by B. Trnka and C. Kirchner to R.W. Zandvoort, while Bernard Comrie’s excellent pair of books on tense and aspect is not mentioned. A more up-to-date contribution is Elizabeth Cowper’s ‘Grammatical Aspect in English’ (LingRev 16[1999] 205–26). She argues that event sentences but not stative sentences include an event-place e, which is independent of the specific verb and its transitivity, the object case-marking, and telicity. Anne Rochette looks at ‘The Selection Properties of Aspectual Verbs’ (in Johnson and Roberts, eds. [1999] pp. 145–65), proposing that raising begin (The noise began to annoy him) and transitive begin (John began the letter) involve raising from a verbal and nominal process complement respectively. In both cases, the surface subject is selected by the embedded predicate (i.e. to annoy him and the letter, respectively). Do and don’t each receive one article. In ‘Periphrastic “do”: Typological Prolegomena’ (in Tops, Devriendt, and Geukens, eds. [1999] pp. 457–70), Johan van der Auwera presents an impressive number of cross-linguistic data on the various periphrastic uses of do, and concludes with a number of recommendations for future research: expand the world-wide database, both synchronically and diachronically; plot the various uses found on a universal semantic map, representing ‘the synchronic multiple uses and meanings of a certain marker as stages of semantic developments’. Van der Auwera finally notes that the recent awareness of contact-instigated or contact-supported areal convergence in typological work justifies a new look at the possible influence of adjacent West Germanic and Celtic languages on the development of English do. Joan Bybee and Joanne Scheibmann write about ‘The Effect of Usage on Degrees of Constituency: The Reduction of don’t in English’ (Linguistics 37[1999] 575–96). Their data show that don’t is reduced most (to a flap consonant and nasalized schwa, or just a nasalized schwa) in phrases where it is most frequent (for example the expression I don’t know); the authors also propose that subject and auxiliary can form one constituent. Other negative matters are addressed in ‘Negative Polarity Idioms in Modern English’ (ICAME 23[1999] 65–115), where Ignacio M. Palacio Martínez considers the nature of Negative Polarity idioms (NPIDs). Based on data with 550 examples from dictionaries and grammar books, the NPIDs are analysed for type of negation, syntactic pattern, meaning and (social) register. The article contains five appendices in which NPIDs are classified according to semantic subcategories. The categories depend on different factors, such as whether they contain a passive structure, a comparative structure, a proverb, or are organized in parallelistic constructions. Positive polarity (as in items like rather) occupies Guido vanden Wyngaerd in ‘Positively Polar’ (SL 53[1999] 209–26), where he argues for degrees of positive polarity, corresponding to degrees of strength in negation; the concept of monotone decreasing plays an important role in the analysis. Several contributions investigate the properties of specific (classes of) verbs, often focusing on alternations in their complement structure. Stella Markantonatou has written ‘Syntactic Optionality and Lexical Semantics: The Case of English Manner of Motion Verbs’ (in Mereu, ed. [1999] pp. 271–90), in which she addresses PAGE 39 OF 123 40 ENGLISH LANGUAGE the optional locative PP with verbs like dance, walk, jump, march, etc., arguing that these are semantic arguments (and not adjuncts) to the verb and presenting a detailed analysis of the lexical semantics and semantics-syntax mapping. Thomas Murray and Beth Lee Simon investigate ‘Want + Past Participle in American English’ (AS 74[1999] 140–64), i.e. the construction The cat wants fed. They find relatively scarce attestation, which is concentrated in the North Midland area; e-mail queries and classroom and telephone surveys reveal that the pattern has no social or stylistic constraints, but is used only by a minority of people (none of them black). Its users all also accept The cat needs fed and reject The cat wants feeding. Within the framework of Word Grammar (WG), Jasper Holmes provides an analysis of the causative/indicative alternation (e.g. break) in ‘The Syntax and Semantics of Causative Verbs’ (UCWPL 11[1999] 323–48). He also discusses verbs with only partial alternations, such as grow, collect and cut. Holmes makes use of a relational network framework, which includes relationships like (break)-ee, (break)-er, result, aspect, sense, form, subject, object, and (de)causative. The way these various relationships are visually represented seems to resemble the representation of the neurological networks in Lamb, discussed above, which suggests that the WG approach to linguistics may have some compatibility with a neuro-cognitive approach. Unfortunately, the WG approach is sometimes difficult to interpret because of the many abbreviations used. Anne-Marie Simon-Vandenbergen presents a contrastive corpus investigation into the valency of Dutch vinden and English find in ‘The Semantics of English find in Contrast with Dutch vinden’ (in Tops, Devriendt, and Geukens, eds. [1999] pp. 409–24). She distinguishes six different uses of find and compares these to their Dutch equivalents. She concludes that ‘the overall frequency of vinden is much higher than that of find [and that] the three main structural patterns have different relative frequencies in the two languages’. Complementation patterns in general also get their fair share of attention. In ‘Objecthood: An Event Structure Perspective’ (PRMCLS 35[1999] 223–47), Beth Levin notes that the notion of object is not easily defined cross-linguistically. She proposes that two distinct structures can give rise to objects: a complex, causative event structure, and a simple event structure. She gives examples from English and divides transitive verbs into core (CTV) and non-core transitive verbs (NCTV). She shows that English NCTV may not be transitive in other languages, but argues that all TVs cross-linguistically have a unified characterization in terms of event structure. CTVs are identified as verbs with causative event structure and NCTVs as verbs with a simple event structure. In ‘English Sentence Analysis and the Concept of Adject’ (in Tops, Devriendt and Geukens, eds. [1999] pp. 197–208), Niels Davidsen-Nielsen examines the case for simplifying the traditional grammatical labels ‘indirect object’, ‘subject complement’, ‘object complement’ and ‘obligatory adverbial’ to ‘adject’. What unifies the four traditional functions is that they all instantiate some secondary predicate. The advantage of the ‘adject’ analysis is that it eliminates the problem of separating adverbials from indirect objects, subject complements and object complements. It is interesting to note that DavidsenNielsen’s unification of all these functions into one has several analogues in generative literature (not mentioned by Davidsen-Nielsen), in which they are similarly argued to represent a secondary predicate, either as a Small Clause complement or in terms of Edwin Williams’s Predication Theory. Other secondary PAGE 40 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 41 predicates are studied by Annabel Cormack and Neil Smith in their paper ‘Why are Depictives Different from Resultatives?’ (UCWPL 11[1999] 251–84). They propose a uniform analysis of depictives, resultatives, and serial verbs, arguing that these constructions should be analysed as complex predicates, semantically headed by a two-place asymmetric conjunction operator. They distinguish single-event and multiple-event structures, and discuss parametric differences, the notion of ‘nil roles’ and iconicity. The linguistic data are taken from English, Dutch, Nupe and Korean. T.R. Rapoport writes about depictive predicates in ‘Structure, Aspect, and the Predicate’ (Language 75[1999] 653–77), analysing them as parallel structures in terms of Aspectual Structure and comparing them with resultatives. In ‘Presenting Grammatical Information: The Case of Transitivity in Four Recent Learners’ Dictionaries’ (in Tops, Devriendt and Geukens, eds. [1999] pp. 345–58), Chris Braecke discusses the problem of which format is most useful to students when presenting the argument structures of verbs in learners’ dictionaries—a quest which inevitably boils down to finding the best compromise between completeness and clearness. The problem is compounded by the fact that notions such as ‘object’ or ‘transitive’ are no longer obviously familiar, even to students studying English at an advanced level. The author concludes that such learners will probably benefit more from their dictionaries if the latter refrain from attempting to offer a functional analysis, and are instead happy to offer a complete formal description of a syntactic pattern. Within the Hallidayan framework, Christian Matthiesen writes ‘The System of Transitivity: An Exploratory Study of Text-Based Profiles’ (FuL 6[1999] 1–52). Using a corpus of c.15,000 words representing twelve text types, he has investigated the frequency of the systemic options in the system of transitivity and gives a detailed report of his findings, concentrating on process type and circumstantiation. Elena V. Paducheva investigates how the semantic make-up of a word can be used to predict morphological and syntactic combinability restrictions in ‘Thematic Roles and the Quest for Semantic Invariants of Lexical Derivations’ (FoL 32[1999] 349– 63). The focus of the article is on Russian (with some comparisons with English) and includes discussions of the relations between semantic roles and deep cases, and of diathetic shifts, in which direct objects may alternate with PPs, and instruments may shift to subject function. Paducheva argues that deep case has three semantic constituents: compositional semantic role, communicative rank of participant, and the ontological taxonomic characteristics of the object. A special type of alternation is addressed in Seizi Iwata’s ‘Thematic Parallels and Non-Parallels: Contributions of Field-Specific Properties’ (SL 53[1999] 68–101), which studies the use of spread, between, and over in temporal, possessional and identificational fields, arguing that the properties of the specific field constrain the parallelism in the uses of one and the same item. Further discussion of alternations in complement patterns can be found in Anja Wanner, Verbklassifizierung und Aspektuelle Alternationen im Englischen, a generative study of alternations like She screamed/She screamed herself hoarse (resultatives) and The leaves dried/They dried the leaves (causative). The book has chapters on the semantic-aspectual classification of verbs, the syntactic classification of verbs (in terms of argument structure), linking (via the thematic hierarchy, using an Optimality type of approach), aspectual alternations, and semantic verb classes (focusing on psych-verbs and verbs of movement). English verb + particle constructions, in particular their word orders, are examined by Stefan T. Gries in ‘Particle Movement: A Cognitive and Functional PAGE 41 OF 123 42 ENGLISH LANGUAGE Approach’ (CogLing 10[1999] 105–45). Gries argues that the variation in verb + particle word orders is influenced not only by syntactic factors, but also by semantic, pragmatic and phonological factors. He formulates two interacting hypotheses: the consciousness hypothesis, which describes the constructions in terms of degree of consciousness that is involved in processing the direct object, and the processing hypothesis, which helps to explain the distribution in terms of processing requirements on the part of the speaker. In ‘Syntactic Symbiosis’ (PRMCLS 35[1999] 293–308), Háj Ross investigates to what degree various [verb + preposition] and [verb + particle] constructions are symbiotic, either in a literal or symbolic sense. Another interesting article on verb + particle/preposition and how to use generative analysis of these constructions in machine translation is Frieda Steurs’s ‘The Implementation of a Grammatical Framework in a Machine Translation Environment, LANTMARK: The Case of English Particle Verbs’ (in Tops, Devriendt and Geukens, eds. [1999] pp. 425–43). With respect to homonymy, the conclusion of the paper is an optimistic one: if the LANTMARK lexicographer makes sure that all lexical elements of a text are coded in the system, then few or no interpretation problems are expected. Other analyses of these constructions are given in Collins and Lee, eds., The Clause in English, the separate chapters of which are discussed below. There are several items dealing with adverbs and adverbials. Tuomas Huumo writes about ‘Space as Time: Temporalization and other Special Functions of Locational-Setting Adverbials’ (Linguistics 37[1999] 389–430), focusing on the scope of space–time adverbials in sentences like In France the president hunts hares in Britain and In London, they played chess on Mondays. John Hawkins turns to the position of PPs in ‘The Relative Order of Prepositional Phrases in English: Going beyond Manner–Place–Time’ (LVC 11[1999] 231–66). Examination of c.500 pages of written English leads him to reject the MPT rule and the Complement First Rule; instead he argues that the main factors determining the order of prepositional phrases are the Principle of Early Immediate Constituents, lexical dependency (as in account for versus wait for) and lexical matching. All of these derive from processing constraints. Salvador Valera writes ‘On Subject-Orientation in English-ly Adverbs’ (ELL 2[1998] 263–82). He explores the position of such adverbs (as in Resolutely, he set to work/He set to work resolutely/He resolutely set to work), distinguishes several subtypes, and identifies factors favouring subject orientation. His conclusion is that subject orientation is a lexical semantic issue, not a syntactic one. This may also be the best place to mention Bruce Fraser’s study of ‘The Particle so in English’ (Rask 9/10[1999] 397–413). Fraser explores the various uses of so, distinguishing some six meanings (denotative, anaphoric, emphatic, discourse-oriented, combined, idiomatic) and discussing the possibility of unifying them. This year an entire collection of papers has been devoted to the clause, Peter Collins and David Lee, eds., The Clause in English: In Honour of Rodney Huddleston. The contributions are mainly syntactic in nature, although one or two papers investigate interface phenomena related to morphology and semantics. Whereas the title may suggest that all articles will deal with different types of clauses, the following discussion will show that it allows a broad interpretation, so that all kinds of clause internal phenomena may be discussed, including the use of a single word. PAGE 42 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 43 The first chapter is by Keith Allan and deals with ‘The Semantics of English Quantifiers’, discussing the compositional semantics of number, countability, and quantification. Allan’s account links meaning with morphological form, in particular the forms of singular and plural. In ‘Language, Linear Precedence and Parentheticals’, Noel Burton Roberts focuses on the nature of parentheticals and considers the central roles played by Immediate Dominance (ID) and Linear Precedence (LP) relationships. He argues for a representational approach of parentheticals, which he analyses as non-restrictive relative clauses. He concludes that there is a clear LP and ID relation between the parenthetical clause and its host. In ‘The English Modifier well’, Ray Cattell is concerned with the semantic and syntactic categories of expressions consisting of well + passive participle. He shows with various examples that under a qualitative reading well can mean both ‘effectively’ and ‘favourably’, and that under a quantitative reading it involves a sense of ‘degree’. Cattel suggests that all instances of well + passive participle are predicatives. He concludes that there is a continuum of ‘“passive participle” interpretations, running from more to less “adjectival”’. Peter Collins focuses on the deictic expressions here and there in combination with be, come, go + NP in his chapter ‘The Deictic Presentation Construction in English’. Collins argues that here and there ‘are only interpretable relative to the context in which the sentence is uttered’, and that the function of the entire construction is purely pragmatic, drawing the attention of the addressee towards a particular entity. In the ten pages following, Bernard Comrie discusses ‘Relative Clauses: Structure and Typology on the Periphery of Standard English’. This chapter shows, with examples from Standard English, that relative that should in some instances be analysed as a subordinator (cf. Seppänen’s article (Lingua 109[1999] 15–34) discussed below). Comrie argues that his analysis can also be extended to other varieties of English. In ‘Postnominal Modifiers in the English Noun Phrase’, Peter. H. Fries focuses on the distinction between modifier and complement in NPs. He discusses the syntactic behaviour of adjuncts in the sense of A. Radford [1988] and concludes that the evidence for a distinction between complements and adjuncts is not conclusive. Sidney Greenbaum and Gerald Nelson’s contribution to the collection is a discussion of ‘Elliptical Clauses in Spoken and Written English’. The investigation excludes elliptical phrases and fragments of clauses, but includes non-finite and verbless clauses. Greenbaum and Nelson made use of a subcorpus of spoken and written English texts from the British component of the International Corpus of English. They investigated type and location of clausal ellipsis and conclude that there is a considerable difference between speech and writing. They found that ‘independent ellipsis [mainly of verb and complement] is characteristic of speech’, whereas ‘coordination ellipsis [mainly of subject and auxiliary] is favoured in writing’. Hisashi Higuchi writes ‘On the Nature of I believe Jack to arrive tomorrow’, discussing the peculiar restrictions on NP-to-VP type complement verbs like believe. It shows that the restrictions are related to aspectual and semantic factors; for instance, the complements in question cannot be events, but may be states. Examples show that eventive complements are allowed only when they involve perfective have, either in the main clause or in the complement clause. In ‘Intransitive Prepositions: Are they Viable?’, David Lee questions the traditional classification of certain words as adverbs and/or prepositions. He argues against the generative assumption that native speakers access syntactic rules based on the PAGE 43 OF 123 44 ENGLISH LANGUAGE projection from lexical categories. He provides counter-examples for either a preposition or an adverb analysis for words like aboard, abroad, away, downstairs, here, there, when, and where. Instead, he proposes a schematic model with a category dimension [Verb + PP], a functional dimension [Predicate + Complement] and a semantic dimension [Process + Locative]. Lee concludes that the ‘X-words’ lack the category dimension, but can be characterized by the other two dimensions. In ‘Sentences, Clauses, Statements and Propositions’, John Lyons explains his view that clauses rather than sentences are the basic units of syntax. He discusses the various illocutionary functions a (simple) sentence can have. He claims that the expressive power of one language may be greater than that of another, i.e. he does not believe in universal intertranslatability of natural languages. James McCawley discusses the effect of sentential adverbs on the positions of tensed auxiliaries and negation in the chapter ‘Some Interactions between Tense and Negation in English’. He shows that adverbs like actually, really, and still force stranding of not while the auxiliary undergoes inversion in interrogative constructions. In the absence of such an adverb, the complex of auxiliary and n’t is inverted. He relates this behaviour to the scope properties of the adverb, which can have scope either over the entire S or over V′ (i.e. leaving Tense outside its scope). In ‘The English Accusative-andInfinitive Construction: A Categorial Analysis’, John Payne proposes a new solution to the problems raised by constructions of the type NPacc-to-VP as complements to verbs like believe or prove. Syntactically, the sentences are represented by forward and backward functional composition, involving the notions of rightward and leftward ‘wrap’ and ‘infixation’. Payne explores a non-standard analysis, namely infixing the object as functor into its transitive verb-phrase argument. He discusses the consequences for heavy NP shift, coordination, extraction, and passivization. The chapter following this is ‘On the Boundaries of Syntax: Non-Syntagmatic Relations’ by Peter Peterson. He distinguishes syntagmatic relations from nonsyntagmatic ones. Whereas the former refer to familiar structural relations between constituents, the latter refer to juxtaposed parts of a sentence that are not hierarchically related. Examples of these are parentheticals and peripherals. Peterson proposes to represent the juxtaposed phrase at a lower level in a bracketing structure, or by a dotted line in a tree diagram. He investigates the constraints on the position of parentheticals, and extends his analysis to include juxtaposed clauses, Right Node Raising constructions, and apposition as juxtaposed to their host. In ‘Gerund Participles and Head-Complement Inflection Conditions’, Geoffrey Pullum and Arnold Zwicky discuss R. Ross’s [1972] and J. Milsark’s [1988] Double -ing Constraint, which basically reflects the general rule that two occurrences of V + ing may not be contiguous in a surface string. They show that there are many exceptions to this generalization, and revise the original constraint, restricting it to apply only to gerund participles in a head–complement relationship. Lesley Stirling looks at ‘Isolated if-Clauses in Australian English’, showing that although if-clauses are usually conditionals accompanied by a main clause, there are various instances of ifclauses functioning independently as directives or optatives. Two corpora of Australian English were analysed for this type of sentence. It is concluded that isolated if-clauses are on their way to become independent main clauses and should be reanalysed as such. The final chapter of the book is by Lynn Wales. ‘Functional and Structural: The Practicalities of Clause Knowledge in Language Education’ reviews the role of structural knowledge in language processing from a functionalist PAGE 44 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 45 perspective. Wales discusses various types of grammatical model and their use for language education. It is argued that the structural analysis of the clause is invaluable for language education, while at the same time one cannot do without discourse analysis. Therefore, it is concluded that language education should involve a fusion of functional and structural approaches to clause analysis. The topic of coordination is more popular than usual this year. In ‘Determiner Sharing’ (MITWPL 33[1999] 241–77), Vivian Lin concentrates on sentences involving determiner sharing in conjunction structures. She shows that this phenomenon is always accompanied by gapping of the verb, and provides a unified analysis for these sentences and sentences with binding constructions, wide-scope modal constructions and conjunctive or-sentences. She argues that all involve coordination below T, i.e. below Tense. Miklós Gáspár writes about ‘Coordination in Optimality Theory’ (NJL 22[1999] 157–81), and uses violable ranked constraints to analyse coordination in Norwegian, English and Hungarian; some cases of unbalanced coordination ( of the he-and-me type) are also explored. Another type of unbalanced coordination is investigated in Taylor Roberts’s ‘Unbalanced Coordination and Resumptive Pronouns’ (MITWPL 33[1999] 323–41), which analyses example sentences from Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. Roberts shows that in this older stage of English, the resumptive pronoun was used much more frequently than in PDE, where the resumptive pronoun has become an empty category. Roberts notes that Swift’s grammar shows unbalanced coordination with respect to wh-movement and resumptive pronouns. He concludes that the Unbalanced Coordination Theory—which was originally proposed for partial agreement phenomena—is better suited than the Minimal Linking Condition or Optimality Theory to account for the phenomena under discussion. In NLLT 17[1999] 339–70, Bernard Schwarz writes ‘On the Syntax of either … or’. He argues for the left-bracket thesis of either … or constructions, which holds that ‘either overtly marks the left edge of the disjunction whose coordinator is or’. Schwarz shows that unbalanced disjunctions can be analysed with the reduction theory as hosting silent material at the left edges of their second disjunctors, e.g., John either [VPate rice] or [VPate beans] and John either [IPate rice] or [IPJohn ate beans]. In Syntax 2[1999] 141–59, Ljiljana Progovac discusses ‘Events and Economy of Coordination’. She argues that ‘the multiplicity of events is encoded syntactically … by an increased number of conjunction markers’. She shows that the conjunction and is reinforced by the correlative both and that this has a semantic effect on the event structure. The analysis is extended to VP-modification, and it is argued that these constructions contain an empty conjunction head. Data are taken from English, French, Italian and Serbo-Croatian. In ‘On Apposition’ (ELL 3[1999] 59–81), Juan Carlos Acuña-Fariña focuses on paradigmatic appositions and argues (as Burton Roberts does for parentheticals, see above) that these should be analysed as examples of non-restrictive modification, making use of the notion of Local Domain in relation to scope features of the nominal apposition. Acuña-Fariña notes that intonation boundaries are crucial for nominal apposition in Local Domains in order to establish a predicative relationship between the head noun and the apposition. An interesting comparison is made in Diane Massam’s ‘Thing is Constructions: The Thing Is, is What’s the Right Analysis?’ (ELL 3[1999] 335–52). The paper examines thing is-constructions and compares them to pseudo-clefts, discussing similarities and differences. The PAGE 45 OF 123 46 ENGLISH LANGUAGE analysis proposed has the central claim that the constructions under discussion contain a ‘Θ-role by recognition’, or appositive nouns, so that the wh-word becomes optional. The final conclusion is that English be tends to be used as a focus marker in spoken language. The area of complement clauses is explored in Claudia Felser, Verbal Complement Clauses: A Minimalist Study of Direct Perception Constructions, which investigates the relation between the semantic properties of different complement types to perception verbs—a direct and indirect perception reading— and their syntactic realizations. She focuses on bare infinitival and participial complements to non-agentive perception verbs, such as see or hear. Both complement types are associated with a direct perception reading. It is argued, within a minimalist framework, that ‘the semantic properties of perceptual reports can largely be derived from their syntactic structure and from lexical properties of perception verbs’ (p. 5). Most analyses are based on English-language facts, but chapter 5 takes a cross-linguistic (i.e. West Germanic and Romance) perspective. Chapter 2 provides an overview of the syntactic and semantic properties of nonfinite complements to perception verbs in English, and concludes that the only difference between bare infinitival and participial complements is aspectual, not structural. It is argued that participial constructions are ‘ambiguous between a reduced relative clause, a controlled adjunct clause, and a “true”, i.e. clausal, perception complement’ (p. 248). Chapter 3 contains a critical evaluation of previous analyses of verbal small clauses, leading to an alternative proposal. It is argued that both complement types should be analysed as maximal projections of Aspect Phrases, differing only with respect to the feature [progressive]. In chapter 4 the Event Control Hypothesis is introduced. According to this hypothesis, ‘perception verbs are lexically specified as event control verbs’ (p. 6). These event control verbs are compared to subject and object control verbs, such as promise and persuade. It is shown that direct perception complements involve stage-level predicates, and it is argued that only stage-level predicates contain an event position. The event position of non-finite complements to perception verbs is an empty position (E-PRO) in SpecAspP, controlled by the event argument of the higher clause. Event Control accounts for temporal simultaneity of matrix and embedded event. It also accounts for the constraint against passivization of bare infinitival complements to perception verbs, because by passivization the appropriate controller for E-PRO is lost. Chapter 6 summarizes the central ideas and conclusions of the book. We feel that this study is very accessible and comes to original applications of earlier ideas, by combining them in a creative way. Some further issues in clausal complementation are also addressed this year. Hidekazu Tanaka argues for raising to object in ‘Raised Objects and Superiority’ (LingI 30[1999] 317–25), citing extraction asymmetries as evidence and suggesting that raising takes place to SpecAspP. The question whether PRO exists or not is addressed in Walter Petrovitz’s ‘The Syntactic Representation of Understood Subjects’ (Word 50[1999] 47–56). On the basis of facts involving modal dare and for to, his conclusion is that PRO has no formal status. English exceptional casemarking (ECM) constructions are compared with Korean inalienable possession constructions (IPCs) in Sungeun Cho’s ‘A New Analysis of Korean Inalienable Possession Constructions’ (NELS 28[1999] 79–93). The paper shows that IPCs in Korean allow a recursion of accusative-case NPs, and it concludes that IPCs and PAGE 46 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 47 ECM should be analysed in the same way. Complements of adjectives form the topic of Idan Landau’s ‘Psych-Adjectives and Semantic Selection’ (LingRev 16[1999] 333–58). It is noted that psych-adjectives allow only a subject gap in the complement clause (as in She was happy to assist him) while non-psych-adjectives require a subject or object gap (as in The tumour is ready for the doctor to operate on [*it]). An explanation is developed and the derivation of both sentence types is discussed in detail. This may also be a good place to mention Aimo Seppänen’s ‘Extraposition in English Revisited’ (NM 100[1999] 51–66), in which various types of subject and object extraposition are explored, and also an indirect object type (he never gave it a thought that …), and a preposition complement type (You can rely on it that …). Seppänen discusses in detail the properties of extraposition, its obligatory or optional nature (concluding that it is always optional, apparent obligatoriness being due to other factors), and the status of the extraposed element. Of course, relative clauses have not been forgotten this year. In the article ‘WHvs TH- Relativisation as a Stylistic Diagnostic: Reporting on a Real-Time Study of Language Change’ (LB 87[1999] 47–57), Nadine van den Eynden Morpeth demonstrates that there is a stylistic correlation between the use of th/wh-relatives and the degree of sophistication of register. It is shown that the more stylistically complex the language, the more use of wh-relatives is attested, not only in BrE, but also in other varieties, such as Scots and AmE. Van den Eynden Morpeth reports a real-time study of language change of relativization patterns in standard BrE over the past ten years. It is suggested that the system has undergone some significant changes, because the British popular and quality press show a shift towards each other in the use of wh/th-relatives. On a similar topic, Nadine Van den Eynden Morpeth presents a brief but lucid account of the longstanding competition between th- and wh-relative pronouns in ‘Jack Sprat that and the Humble wh-relatives: Reconstructing Social Contexts by Means of Commercial CD-ROMS’ (in Tops, Devriendt and Geukens, eds. [1999] pp. 113–27). Synthesizing the results of sociolinguistic gender studies that suggest that women are more class-conscious and therefore more inclined towards the linguistic norm than men, information from eighteenth-century grammarians who show that the wh-pronoun was the prescribed form in that period, and Keenan and Comrie’s Accessibility Hierarchy according to which some NP positions are more accessible to relativization than others, Van den Eynden Morpeth constructs three hypotheses about the effect of stylistic register, gender and processing constraints on relativizing strategies, and tests them using a corpus of literary texts (seventeenth- to early twentieth-century) taken from a commercial CD-ROM; the merits and shortfalls of such corpora are discussed in full. The results show that stylistic register played a key role in the selection of th-/ wh-. Aimo Seppänen and Christopher Hall also pay attention to relative clauses, focusing on relative adverbs in ‘Remarks on English Relative Adverbs’ (LB 87[1999] 171–85). They investigate whether the schematic representation of relative adverbs by R. Quirk et al. [1985] is adequate. On the basis of example sentences, they argue that the gaps left for the restrictive relative use of how and restrictive and non-restrictive relative use of why and how should also be filled. They show that all relative adverbs may occur with these functions, but that the frequency of a (non)restrictive use of why and how is significantly lower then that of the adverbs where and when. In another article, Aimo Seppänen considers ‘Dialectal Variation in English Relativization’ (Lingua 109[1999] 15–34). Here, he argues that dialectal PAGE 47 OF 123 48 ENGLISH LANGUAGE conjunctions like that, at, as and what should be treated and interpreted as the relative pronouns who and which, and not as conjunctions. One of the points supporting this analysis is that these dialectal relative pronouns have genitive variants in some dialects. Further variation is noted in Robert Bayley’s ‘Relativization Strategies in Mexican-American English’ (AS 74[1999] 115–39). After discussion of previous research on relative pronouns and the language situation of Mexican Americans, he presents data showing that THAT is most common (possibly due to substrate influence) and that there is little use of ZERO, especially among adults. Roumyana Izvorski provides an analysis for wh-clauses that are interpreted as indefinites in her article ‘Non-Indicative wh-Complements of Possessive and Existential Predicates’ (NELS 28[1999] 159–73). Izvorski mainly discusses examples from Hebrew, Spanish and German, remarking that these constructions are not common in English, although similar constructions do occur in embedded contexts. Real (indirect) questions are distinguished from these free relative wh-clauses. There are also some items dealing with adverbial clauses. In ‘On Adverbial Clauses and their Status with Concepts of Hypotaxis, Subordination and Clause Embedding’ (SN 70[1999] 129–37), Carsten Breul discusses Michael Halliday’s [1985/94] categorization of adverbial clauses as either paratactic or hypotactic. Breul proposes to treat certain adverbial clauses that Halliday would consider hypotactic as embedded clauses. He concludes that there is a distinction between embedded and hypotactic adverbial clauses, based on the distinction between disjunct and adjunct adverbial clauses. The word because is analysed in William McGregor’s ‘How Many Types of Internal Conjunction?’ (FuL 6[1999] 139–51). He examines sentences like John is waiting there, because I saw him and proposes the recognition of various subtypes, using his framework of Semiotic Grammar. Bernd Kortmann studies adverbial subordinators in ‘Iconicity, Typology and Cognition’ (in Nänny and Fischer, eds. [1999] pp. 375–92). He identifies six core adverbial relations (including temporal simultaneity, temporal anteriority, similarity, and condition) which have maximally lexicalized subordinators and also the highest number of subordinators, and uses these facts to explore issues of cognition. We now come to passives. Ronald Carter and Michael McCarthy have examined the get-passive on the basis of the CANCODE corpus. In their article ‘The English get-Passive in Spoken Discourse: Description and Implications for an Interpersonal Grammar’ (ELL 3[1999] 41–58), they use these data to evaluate the terms that may serve as a basis for the development of an interpersonal grammar of English. It is argued that for this purpose, probabilistic grammars are to be preferred to deterministic ones. In ‘Passives without Argument Incorporation’ (NELS 28[1999] 203–17), Murat Kural discusses problems for the standard theory of passivization, which holds that the external Θ-role is assigned to the passive morpheme -en, which at the same time absorbs accusative case. His proposal is that the passive morpheme should be analysed as a predicative (PASS) having the by-phrase in its specifier and a VP complement. In Kurals’s analysis, PASS is a control predicate, and the byphrase functions a the controller of PRO in SpecVP. Accusative Case is blocked by the derived subject, in a way similar to the arguments of object alternation verbs like load and spray. The internal argument still checks the case features in SpecAccP, but moves on to subject position to satisfy the Empty Category Principle. Grant PAGE 48 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 49 Goodall also addresses ‘Accusative Case in Passives’ (Linguistics 37[1999] 1–12); on the basis of sentences like We were explained the problem, and data from Chinese, he argues that accusative case is available in passives, and that movement may be forced by other principles (the extended projection principle and a preference for nominatives). Sentences like There are many books put on the table are analysed in Paul Law’s ‘On the Passive Existential Construction’ (SL 53[1999] 183–208), which suggests—on the basis of facts involving wh-movement, binding, and temporal adverbials—that these structures contain a DP with a reduced relative clause. In ‘On the Status of Implicit Arguments in Middles’ (JL 35[1999] 527–53), Seizi Iwata proposes to represent middles by way of a Jackendovian conceptual structure (Ray Jackendoff [1983, 1990]), in which the implicit argument has an important role to play. The paper argues against the view that middles do not have implicit arguments, but should be analysed in terms of genericity and modality. Various examples with middles and negation and middles and conditionals are given, which constitute an argument against the genericity requirement. Other examples show that not all middles involve modality. More middles can be found in Thomas Stroik’s ‘Middles and Reflexivity’ (LingI 30[1999] 119–31). Stroik argues that middles project all their arguments syntactically, with the external argument taking the form of a for-phrase. A different view is expressed by T.R. Rapoport in ‘The Middle, Agents, and for-Phrases’ (LingI 30[1999] 147–55), where it is argued that middles are not inherently agentive (as witness the ungrammaticality of *These books don’t sell for the average shopkeeper); agentivity derives from the specific verb used. We also slip in here the one contribution on the syntax of nominalizations that we have seen this year, Shelia Kennison’s ‘Processing Agentive by-Phrases in Complex Event and Nonevent Nominals’ (LingI 30[1999] 502–8). The author presents data from processing tests showing that by-phrases in event nominals are arguments, while in non-event nominals they are adjuncts, confirming the predictions following from Jane Grimshaw’s analysis of nominalizations. We have seen a few pieces on clefts. André Meinunger argues for a topicalization analysis of it-clefts in ‘A Monoclausal Structure for (Pseudo-)Cleft Sentences’ (NELS 28[1999] 283–98). He argues that it-clefts are derived from simplex sentences, using the focus position for the emphasized phrase. Thus, all preceding material ends up in CP of the Topic Phrase, the finite form of BE is in the head Top0 and the focused phrase is in SpecFocP. In this way, sentences like It is John that Mary loves are derived from Who(m)i Mary loves is Johni. A similar topic is discussed by Kristin Davidse in ‘Are There Sentences that Can be Analyzed as there-Clefts?’ (in Tops, Devriendt and Geukens, eds. [1999] pp. 179–95). Following Huddleston [1984], Davidse teases out the relationship between clefts and their noncleft counterparts, and between it- and there-clefts. She analyses both it- and thereclefts as involving not one (as in Halliday [1967] or Huddleston [1984]) but two relational configurations. The first is the Value-Variable relation between focal NP and secondary clause and the second is the relational process coded by the matrix clause, i.e. it + be + NP and there + be + NP, which express ‘exclusive identification’ and ‘quantitative instantiation’, respectively. Katalin Kiss views ‘The English Cleft Construction as a Focus Phrase’ (in Mereu, ed. [1999] pp. 217–29). She reviews the properties of it-clefts and previous analyses of them, and proposes PAGE 49 OF 123 50 ENGLISH LANGUAGE that the cleft constituent moves from CP to Spec FocusP in a structure IP-FocusPCP. Finally, we review two studies trying to establish relations between language use and syntax. Elisabet Engdahl has written ‘Inserting Pragmatics into the Grammar’ (in Mereu, ed. [1999] pp. 175–94); she explores how, among others, the notion of focus (new information) in English can be accounted for in grammatical terms, finding that Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, with the use of its CONTEXT feature, provides a promising model for this. How syntactic iconicity can be exploited is shown in Elgbieta Tabakowska’s ‘Linguistic Expression of Perceptual Relationships: Iconicity as a Principle of Text Organization (a Case Study)’ (in Nänny and Fischer, eds. [1999] pp. 409–22). In a description of the imperial chapel at Aachen in a historical work, experiential iconicity is argued to be used for pushing a specific interpretation of a historical process. (b) Early Syntax We first discuss two textbooks on the history of English. Jeremy Smith, Essentials of Early English is a handbook for beginning students. After an introduction providing a broad outline of the external and internal history of the language, and a chapter explaining the basic terms and concepts of linguistic analysis, there are chapters on OE, ME and EModE in which selected linguistic features of these periods are clearly discussed. This is usefully followed by a set of some ten illustrative texts for each period (of around one page each), accompanied by a translation and/or notes. The book contains a generous annotated bibliography, an OE glossary, and index. For any course in which the entire history of the language has to be dealt with in a nutshell, this work will be a good choice. If students point out that the late Modern period does not receive any attention in Smith’s book (or other ones of this type), the answer can of course be that English had more or less reached its present-day form by 1750. While this answer is satisfactory enough for an introductory course, closer scrutiny reveals numerous differences between PDE and its recent forebears, and scholarly materials on these recent stages are in fact now becoming available in greater quantities. Thus, this year saw the publication of the coursebook by Manfred Görlach, English in Nineteenth-Century England: An Introduction. Through chapters on regional and social varieties, spelling and pronunciation, inflection, syntax, lexis, text types and style, followed by 120 pages of texts of various types, the student is made aware of the many subtle and not-sosubtle differences between PDE and English as it was spoken and written 100–200 years ago.The author draws extensively on his own already considerable work on this period (and the period just before it, as well as a myriad of other topics in the history of English) and also on volume IV of Romaine, ed. The Cambridge History of the English Language [1998], especially its groundbreaking chapters on syntax by Denison and phonetics–phonology by McMahon (see YWES 79[2000] 56–7). Included in Görlach’s book are also eighty-two exercises; some of these could be addressed in a short paper, but others might require a couple of years of Ph.D. research—this is definitely no work for the intellectually challenged or lazy. Turning from textbooks to general topics in syntactic change, we see continued activity in the field of grammaticalization theory. Ian Roberts and Anna Roussou contribute ‘A Formal Approach to Grammaticalization’ (Linguistics 37[1999] 1011–41), in which grammaticalization is viewed as consisting in reanalysis of PAGE 50 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 51 lexical material to functional material, involving structural simplification triggered by the process of parameter setting. Data are drawn from the history of the English modals, subject agreement, and the negative cycle. This article can be fruitfully read in conjunction with Martin Haspelmath’s ‘Does Grammaticalization Need Reanalysis?’ (SLang 22[1998] 315–51), which challenges the view that grammaticalization is equivalent to abrupt diachronic reanalysis and provides criteria for distinguishing between grammaticalization and reanalysis. It is argued on the one hand that grammaticalization is a gradual process by which ‘lexical items are turned into grammatical items and loose structures into tight structures’, and on the other that the main locus of reanalysis is language acquisition, so that language change originates in synchronic variation and leads to recategorialization. Haspelmath concludes that grammaticalization is mainly a process of word-class change at the lexical level, rather than a shift in syntactic structure. In a further contribution, Martin Haspelmath addresses the question, ‘Why is Grammaticalization Irreversible?’ (Linguistics 37[1999] 1043–68). After discussing some earlier explanations, he compares grammaticalization to inflation: speakers are sometimes extravagant and use novel ways of saying things; these novel ways will always involve lexical material, since functional items cannot be manipulated by speakers; when the novel methods become routinized, we have grammaticalization. In another general item, Olga Fischer presents some interesting ideas ‘On the Role Played by Iconicity in Grammaticalisation Processes’ (in Nänny and Fischer, eds. [1999] pp. 345–74). Her basic premise is that grammaticalization, starting in semantic shift, is not the driving force behind change, and she shows in detail how it is rather syntactic and iconic factors that drove changes such as those involving have to and the infinitival marker to. David Lightfoot’s latest book, The Development of Language: Acquisition, Change, and Evolution, also deals with general issues in the theory of change. In it, he firmly relates diachronic developments to issues in language acquisition (making use of a cue-based model of learning) and shows how such a view of change can provide informative accounts of various specific syntactic changes in English and other languages. After an introduction, there are chapters on the study of language change in the nineteenth century, on grammars and language acquisition, on gradualism and catastrophes, on the loss of case, on cue-based acquisition and change in grammars, on equilibrium and small changes, on historicism, and on the evolution of the language faculty, concluding with some thoughts on the science of history. As in his earlier works, one of Lightfoot’s concerns throughout is the nature of (his own and others’) explanations for historical change, making this book indeed, as Mark Hale tells us on the cover, ‘required reading for anyone with interests in this area’. Next, we come to studies of the various elements of the clause, beginning with the subject. Two authors write about the subject of impersonals. In ‘A Lexical Approach to the History of the Quasi-Impersonal Subject “it”’ (ES 80[1999] 318–42), Hyeree Kim shows that OE impersonal verbs have gradually developed through (E)ME to PDE verbs with non-referential it as their subject. Distinguishing five classes of impersonal verbs in OE, Kim argues that the acquisition or loss of expletive it in these verbs depends on the presence or absence of two particular lexical properties: (1) the ability of the verb to take nominative-cause constructions; and (2) the ability of the verb to take clausal complements. Kim explains the presence of expletive it PAGE 51 OF 123 52 ENGLISH LANGUAGE by assuming that it began to be used to fill the subject slot during that period in history when the English language began to require a lexically filled subject position for all sentences. Hanna Pishwa also looks at the embedding of impersonals in the overall grammatical system in ‘The Case of the “Impersonal” Construction in Old English’ (FLH 20[1999] 129–51). After reviewing the main facts and earlier analyses of impersonals, experiencers, and subjects, she attributes the loss of constructions like him scamede to their systemic isolation, comparing the situation in English with that in Finnish, in which the construction flourishes. As usual, verbs and verbal groups have inspired contributions of various types. Debra Ziegeler looks at ‘Agentivity and the History of the English Progressive’ (in TPS 97[1999] 51–102), posing the question: is the agentivity of the progressive in PDE a feature of its historical source construction, or a later development? After reviewing the PDE data and earlier analyses of the progressive’s origin, she argues for its source lying in a combination of copula and present participle functioning as a nominal, the agentivity of the construction being a later development. She traces in detail this and other developments, including the rise and later fall of middle uses as in the play is acting. Rafaß Molencki has investigated a neglected pattern in the verbal group, and presents ‘A History of the English Perfect Infinitive’ (SAP 34[1999] 91–121). He documents carefully its somewhat peripheral existence in OE, its use from early ME onwards in counterfactual contexts (which persisted into the EModE period but may have declined because of prescriptive strictures), and its fifteenth-century rise and subsequent spread in exceptional case-marking structures like I know myself to have been the occasion of … The early history of the auxiliary do is the focus of Andrew Garrett’s contribution ‘On the Origin of Auxiliary do’ (ELL 2[1998] 283–330). His proposal is that do initially marked habitual aspect (as it still does in south-west England and in Irish English), a usage that may have come into existence through reanalysis of sequences like did answer from earlier [Vlexical + N] (‘produce an answer’) to [Vaux + V] (‘used to answer’), as a result of the loss of the infinitive marker (which, in south-west England, took place in the thirteenth century). The reinterpretation as a periphrastic auxiliary may have been influenced by instances of do in ellipsis contexts. A later stage in the history of do is studied in Bjørg Bækken’s ‘Periphrastic do in Early Modern English’ (FLH 20[1999] 107–28). The paper provides full data on do’s occurrence in affirmative declarative clauses with an initial non-subject and clauses with an initial negative adverbial. It turns out, among other things, that do is somewhat more prominent in inverted clauses (where it may be a method of achieving both verb-second and subject-verb order) than in non-inverted ones, and that its presence sometimes appears to have the function of adding weight to an intransitive verb with a heavy subject. At various points in his article Bækken refers to the ‘unsettled’ state of the language in this period, and uses this notion to try and explain various tendencies found in the data. Shana Poplock and Sali Tagliamonte have examined ‘The Grammaticization of going to in (African American) English’ (LVC 11[1999] 315–42). They present data from three diaspora varieties of AAVE (in Canada and the Dominican Republic) and two white varieties (a rural and an urban one in Canada), finding that they show similar use of going to (though the AAVE varieties are somewhat more conservative). The authors conclude from this that going to in all varieties has a common origin, and they consider the historical record in order to find out what exactly this origin has been. Another angle on this semi-auxiliary is found in Monika PAGE 52 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 53 Pawlowska’s contribution ‘A Parallel Development in the History and Acquisition of be going to’ (SAP 34[1999] 201–10), in which it is shown that, both in diachrony and in acquisition, going to first has the meaning of intention and only later acquires that of prediction (i.e. it follows the familiar path from deontic to epistemic meaning). The author also identifies some transitional steps in this development. In ‘The Relation between Tense and Aspect: The Emergence of the T-system’ (UCWPL 11[1999] 521–43), Fuyo Osawa also suggests a correlation between firstlanguage acquisition and historical development of languages. He argues that the Tense projection is acquired later than the Aspect projection, cross-linguistically, and discusses historical data from various languages, including OE, in which he sees a parallel development. There is an interesting piece on ‘The History of dare and the Status of Unidirectionality’ by Frank Beths (Linguistics 37[1999] 1069–1110), in which the author shows that dare grammaticalized in the ME period, just like the other modals did, but that after c.1400 its main verb uses gradually (and very ununidirectionally) came to be reinforced so that, for example, it developed a fuller argument structure, as in we dared him (to show it to us). Modals and passives are examined in Louis Goossens’s ‘Passivization as a Turning Point’ (in Tops, Devriendt and Geukens, eds. [1999] pp. 253–61). The author argues that the property of passives to turn actions into process-like predications created one of the pathways in which OE magan ‘can, may’ acquired a subject-external locus of potency, and shifted from internal to external possibility. Negation in earlier English yields two articles. Michiko Ogura writes ‘On the Use of Negative na and ne in the Regius Psalter’ (Neophil 83[1999] 133–43). She presents full data on all glosses to Latin neg + V patterns, finding a fair amount of na in the Regius Psalter (besides various other patterns, all of which she discusses in detail). In George Jack’s ‘Negative Contraction in Old English Verse’ (published posthumously in RES 50[1999] 133–54), it is shown on the basis of various examples from OE verse that negative contraction is not so much constrained by syntactic conditions as by phonological conditions: contractions occur in unstressed positions, while non-contracted negation occurs when expressions of negation are strongly marked. The conclusion is that conditions of reduced stress were the origin of the contracted forms in OE verse, which we think is a welcome insight. On the history of individual verbs and verb classes, we have seen Claire Gronemeyer’s contribution ‘On Deriving Complex Polysemy: The Grammaticalization of get’ (ELL 3[1999] 1–39) and Maarten Lemmens’s study of ergative verbs of the suffocate type, ‘The Experiential Basis of Lexical and Constructional Flexibility: A Diachronic and Synchronic Study’ (LB 87[1999] 79– 113). Gronemeyer presents a decompositional analysis of the verb get into [ingressive ‘be’ + preposition]. This analysis allows an accurate account of the polysemic character of get, showing by diachronic data how the different senses of possession, obligation, causation, inchoative, passive, permission and ingressive are derived by reanalysis. Lemmens, who adopts a cognitive framework, presents a wealth of data from various corpora and the OED, tracing the development of ergativization as a historical process. The focus of the article is on the dynamic interaction of lexical and constructional meanings, ending with a discussion of the development of distinct prototypes. We have not spotted any historical studies of NP objects and other non-finite complements, but we saw two on prepositions and prepositional phrases. Hubert PAGE 53 OF 123 54 ENGLISH LANGUAGE Cuyckens’s ‘Historical Evidence in Prepositional Semantics: The Case of English by’ (in Tops, Devriendt and Geukens, eds. [1999] pp. 15–32) focuses on the uneasy relationship between the concept of synchronic family resemblance networks and historical reality. Within cognitive linguistics, such networks and schemata are often interpreted as reflecting a historical pathway of change from spatial meanings to temporal and abstract meanings. Cuyckens’s investigation of the pathway from ‘proximity’-by via ‘path along a course’-by and ‘means’-by to ‘passive’-by reveals that important transitional meanings are not always synchronically present. He concludes that these transitions in meaning are only detectable when the history of prepositional use is taken into account. In the same volume (pp. 79–88), we read ‘Temporal Relations Expressed by Old English Prepositional Phrases’, by Ruta Nagucka: she considers various prepositional phrases with a temporal meaning, arguing that these are indispensable for pragmatic reasons, although structurally they may seem to be redundant. We next turn to subordinate clauses. Relatives have inspired two articles. One is Lilo Moessner’s ‘The Negative Relative Marker but: A Case of Syntactic Borrowing’ (in Tops, Devriendt and Geukens, eds. [1999] pp. 65–77), where she argues that the use of but as a ‘negative relative marker’ in sentences like there’s not a nose among twenty but can smell him that’s stinking (King Lear II:iv.69f) is a syntactic loan from the French relative construction with qui/que. Her argument is based on a comparison of Malory’s Tale of Sankgreall with its French original. The construction is similar to an earlier use of but as a conjunction, ‘except that, unless’, which is well attested from OE onwards; the relative use in Malory, however, with a subject or object gap (the quotation from King Lear is an example of the former), is new. In the same collection (pp. 89–98), Patricia Poussa’s contribution on ‘The Flemings in Norman Norfolk: Their Possible Influence on Relative Pronoun Development’ presents a fascinating although tortuously complicated hypothesis about foreign (substrate and superstrate) influence on the form of the relative pronoun in various varieties, building on historical events and typological insights. Non-finite complementation is studied in Bettelou Los’s ‘The Rise of the toInfinitive as Verb Complement’ (ELL 2[1998] 1–36). This article presents a careful account of the to-infinitive in OE and ME, based on an extensive collection of data. One of the main points arising from the material is that the to-infinitive patterns with (and eventually replaces) subjunctive that-clauses rather than bare infinitive clauses. Teresa Fanego continues her careful exploration of gerunds in ‘Developments in Argument Linking in Early Modern English Gerund Phrases’ (ELL 2[1998] 87– 119), which deals with their internal syntax. A full account of findings in the relevant portions of the Helsinki Corpus is given, paying attention not only to the expression of arguments (as in the older John’s reading of the book, the newer John reading the book and various mixed types), but also to their structural status and matters such as stylistic factors and the possible influence of absolute participles. There are several items dealing with word order issues. In his ‘Anglo-Saxon Attitudes to Kuhn’s Laws’ (RES 50[1999] 287–303), Peter Orton wonders whether OE poets and scribes were aware of Kuhn’s ‘law of clause openings’ and his ‘law of particles’ for common Germanic, both based on metrical stress. Orton concludes that there is no evidence to suggest such an awareness, after showing various breaches of mainly the second of Kuhn’s laws. Orton explains the fact that Kuhn’s laws are generally applicable to OE verse by suggesting that these laws reflect PAGE 54 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 55 ancient patterns of word order in Common Germanic, rather than metrical conventions.The OE ordering of main verb and modal verb (specifically in subordinate clauses) has been examined by Masayuki Ohkado, who writes ‘On MV/ VM Order in Old English’ (FLH 20[1999] 79–106). He finds that the main tendency is for the order main verb–modal to occur when there is no object NP or PP in the clause, and modal–main verb when there is (perhaps due to rightward movement of the VP). Another trend is for monosyllabic main verbs to trigger VM order. In ‘Objects and Verbs in Modern Icelandic and Fifteenth-Century English: A Word Order Parallel and its Causes’ (Lingua 109[1999] 237–65), Wim van der Wurff argues for a diachronic explanation of synchronic facts. He notes a parallel between Modern Icelandic and a historical stage of English, in that both languages, which are basically VO, show OV-orders in the same syntactic contexts (for instance, relative clauses and clauses with an auxiliary and a negative object). The facts are explained within the framework of modern generative theory. Finally, there is an entire book on word order in EModE: Javier Pérez-Guerra, Historical English Syntax: A Statistical Corpus-Based Study on the Organisation of Early Modern English Sentences. It deals with the thematic organization of declarative clauses in the late ME and EModE material of the Helsinki corpus, using the LOB corpus for comparative purposes. The theme of a clause is defined as being the subject or the material preceding it; separate chapters deal with the subject as unmarked theme (showing an increase in NP themes), there-clauses (showing a decrease in the number of ‘appearance’ cases, and an increase in the use of be), subject extraposition (which shows a slight increase in frequency), it-clefts (which show a widening of structural options), and clauses with topicalization, left dislocation (which declines) and inversion. Full data are given on the frequency of the various subtypes of each construction and their thematic properties, making this welcome addition to the field of EModE studies a veritable mine of information. 6. Semantics One of the highlights of 1999 in the field of natural language semantics is Peter Bosch and Rob van der Sandt, eds., Focus: Linguistic, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives. Focusing in natural languages is seen by the editors as ‘a means of structuring a series of utterances’ and ‘a way of partitioning information’ (p. ix), which contributes to the processing of linguistic information in an effective way. The chapters in the volume, by the most influential researchers in the field, are divided into three topic areas. Part I, ‘Surface Realization of Focus’, concentrates on how the observable, intonational properties of focused constituents contribute to the syntactic structure of sentences and the structure of the discourse they are part of. Carlos Gussenhoven investigates the question of focus projection, that is, the ability of a pitch accent on a word to mark a larger constituent as focused, and argues that it is restricted to a sequence of an argument and its predicate. Joachim Jacobs’s chapter is concerned with how a constituent’s interpretation is constrained by the meaning of constituents with which it combines, while Kees van Deemter proposes a theory of contrastive accents based on the logical notion of contrariety. In part II, ‘Semantic Interpretation of Focus Phenomena’, we find Mats Rooth’s chapter on the relation between the topic/focus division, and the presupposition/assertion PAGE 55 OF 123 56 ENGLISH LANGUAGE dichotomy, and several other studies which discuss the interaction of focus and quantification. Barbara H. Partee’s contribution reconsiders data where focus is responsible for determining the quantificational domain from a new perspective. Regine Eckardt argues that nominal quantifiers can associate with focus in the same way that adverbial ones do, Daniel Büring applies the analysis of focus in alternative semantics to the analysis of topics, while Gerhard Jäger argues against considering weak quantifiers as syntactically or semantically ambiguous. In part III, ‘The Function of Focus in Discourse’, Nicholas Asher investigates VP ellipsis in a theory which combines the semantics of focus and that of discourse structure. Bart Geurts and Rob van der Sandt, as well as Kjell Johan Sæbø, discuss issues related to domain restriction in discourse, while Henriëtte de Swart gives an analysis of phrase and clausal time adverbials in a framework which lacks reference times. Jeanette K. Gundel’s contribution, providing an overview of various approaches to focus phenomena, completes the section. An excellent monograph on the meaning and use of generic sentences, based on the author’s doctoral dissertation, is Ariel Cohen, Think Generic! The central and most innovative idea of the book is that ‘a generic sentence is not evaluated in isolation but with respect to a set of alternative properties’ (p. 2). Thus, in this framework, a sentence like Mammals bear live young is not about all mammals or the majority of mammals or the prototypical ones, as in most of the previous theories, but those mammals for which one of the alternative properties of procreation could apply, that is, adult fertile females. According to Cohen, generic sentences express probability judgements instead of explicit or implicit quantification. This claim is supported, for example, by the fact that the sentence Bulgarians are good weightlifters is a good generic statement, in spite of the fact that only a very small proportion of Bulgarians are weightlifters. The statement expresses that a Bulgarian weightlifter is more likely to be a good one than any arbitrarily chosen one. This definition of genericity can explain why generics have a law-like flavour, why they require a regular distribution of events along the time axis when they are used temporally, why a generic statement can be false even if the vast majority of individuals do satisfy the given property (for example, prime numbers are odd), and why the truth-value judgements of generics vary across speakers. Since the notion of alternatives plays a central role in the theory proposed in the book, it includes a chapter which investigates how they are determined. The author also provides a unified account of the meaning of generic sentences and of sentences containing frequency adverbs in order to explain why the former can often be rephrased in terms of the latter. He links the semantics of generic sentences to rules of default reasoning, and proposes that generics should be considered as expressions of default rules. On the whole, this book is an important contribution to semantic theory, which is further enhanced by its pleasant and readable style. Elsevier Science have launched a fascinating new series under the name Current Research in the Semantics/Pragmatics Interface (CRiSPI), the first three volumes of which appeared in 1999. The first in the series, Ken Turner, ed., The Semantics/ Pragmatics Interface from Different Points of View, brings together outstanding researchers from both domains, who have been asked to define or illustrate what constitutes the interface between the two disciplines. The volume opens with the editor’s impressive survey of the most important streams of thought in semantics and pragmatics in recent decades. In this review I will restrict myself to the PAGE 56 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 57 contributions most commendable from the point of view of semantic research. Nicholas Asher proposes a means of integrating H.P. Grice’s and P.F. Strawson’s insights about conversation into a formal, dynamic account of discourse meaning, Segmented Discourse Representation Theory, which incorporates data on discourse structure into a dynamic account of meaning. Kent Bach’s contribution discusses the history of the semantics/pragmatics distinction in linguistics and articulates his view, which entails that semantics deals with information encoded by linguistic expressions, while ‘pragmatics is concerned with whatever information is relevant, over and above the linguistic properties of the sentence, to understanding its utterance’ (p. 74). Robyn Carston discusses the semantics/pragmatics distinction within relevance theory, where the two disciplines can be said to correspond to a distinction between two types of cognitive processes employed in the understanding of sentences, namely decoding and inference. Brendan S. Gillon investigates the properties of English indefinite plural noun phrases, while Michael Hand proposes an analysis of the meaning of any in Game-Theoretical Semantics. K.M. Jaszczolt’s paper investigates the division of labour between syntax and semantics and proposes a default semantics in which semantic representation is established with the help of intentions in communication. Andrew Kehler and Gregory Ward put forth an analysis of the identifier so and the event anaphor do so. Manfred Krifka argues against treating expressions like at most, at least, exactly n, and between n and m as determiners, as it is traditionally done in the literature, and in favour of classifying them as indefinites, which acquire their quantificational force in indirect ways. Jaroslav Peregrin challenges the Carnapian way of defining syntax as the theory of relations between expressions, semantics as the theory of the relations between expressions and things, and pragmatics as the theory of the relations between expressions and speakers, and argues instead for a Davidsonian view of partitioning language into syntax (proper), which determines which expressions come into the language, semantics, which is concerned with the ‘principal’, ‘core’, ‘invariant’ part of the way the expressions are employed, and pragmatics, dealing with the ‘remaining’, and ‘peripheral’ aspects of the way they are employed. The second book in the CRiSPI series, K.M. Jaszczolt, Beliefs and Intentions: Semantic Defaults and Propositional Attitude Ascriptions is an important contribution to the discussion about the semantics/pragmatics interface and the boundary between the two disciplines. The central aim of the book is to articulate the programme of Default Semantics, situated between approaches advocating semantic ambiguity and those proposing underspecification. The central claim of this theory is that ‘Conversation relies on default interpretations, the hearer arrives at such a default interpretation without going through the stage of choosing between understandings of a “semantically ambiguous” sentence’ (p. xi). The workings of the theory are illustrated with the help of sentences reporting on propositional attitudes and belief reports. Jaszczolt argues that there is no ambiguity involved in the interpretation of referring terms in belief reports and expressions of belief, due to the interaction between the semantic representation of the sentence and the communicative intentions, the most central of which is the intention to refer. This idea is manifested in her default de re principle. Naturally, default interpretations can be overridden in appropriate cases when other communicative intentions dominate. The theory of Default Semantics is formalized in the book with the help PAGE 57 OF 123 58 ENGLISH LANGUAGE of Discourse Representation Theory, a theory which allows for the incorporation of pragmatic information into the semantic analysis. The third member of the series is Bart Geurts, Presuppositions and Pronouns, which deals with the so-called ‘projection problem’ for presuppositions. The projection problem consists in the fact that presuppositions are normally but not always inherited by the sentences where they occur. For example, the sentence It is possible that Fred thought the matter over, and that he regrets that he cheated at the exam implies that Fred cheated at the exam (due to the fact that factive verbs such as regret trigger the presupposition that the complement clause is true), but the structurally analogous sentence It is possible that Fred cheated at the exam, and that he regrets that he cheated at the exam does not. Geurts’s aim is to account for the above and related phenomena in the framework of the ‘binding theory’ of presupposition projection, first proposed in R. van der Sandt’s article in JoS 9[1992]. The binding theory is a ‘version of Discourse Representation Theory (DRT), whose main tenet is that presuppositions are entities that want to be bound in the same sense in which anaphors want to be bound’ (p. xii), thus, the binding theory intends to become a unified theory of both anaphora and presupposition. The book consists of seven chapters, the first of which characterizes the notion of presupposition. The second chapter outlines the version of the binding theory proposed by van der Sandt and discusses how it should be altered to account for a wider range of phenomena. The next chapter is an attempt to refute the ‘rival’ theory of presupposition projection, the ‘accommodation theory’, first articulated by I. Heim (Proceedings of the West Coast Conference on Formal Linguistics 2[1983]), while chapter 4 discriminates the dynamic theories of meaning, which the accommodation theory is based on, from DRT, and points out some of the major faults of dynamic semantic theories in general. Geurts believes that the interpretation of modals and attitude verbs is also tied up with presuppositions, so the next two chapters integrate the above phenomena into the version of binding theory mentioned above, while the last chapter presents a presuppositional analysis of names. Christopher Lyons, Definiteness is a particularly outstanding volume in the Cambridge Textbooks in Linguistics series, particularly because it not only reviews an amazing amount of data from a large number of languages, but also aspires to give a more or less complete overview of existing theoretical approaches to the issue of definiteness, which come from syntax, semantics and pragmatics, while at the same time presenting his own view. Chapter 1 investigates the possible defining characteristics of definiteness, concluding that it involves either identifiability or inclusiveness. The author proposes a distinction between simple definites, which correspond to English noun phrases, where the definiteness feature is signalled by at most one of the articles the, a, sm (unstressed some), and complex definites (demonstratives, proper nouns, possessives, personal pronouns, etc.). The next two chapters present an overview of how various languages express the definite/ indefinite distinction. Chapter 4 connects this distinction to some familiar semantic distinctions such as identifiable and inclusive, situational and anaphoric, specific and non-specific, generic and non-generic, chapter 5 relates the notion of definiteness to other grammatical phenomena, while chapter 6 investigates the socalled definiteness effects and some of the explanations given for these in the literature. Chapter 7 presents an impressive survey of important syntactic, semantic PAGE 58 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 59 and pragmatic theories of definiteness, at the end of which it is concluded that the attempt to find a unified characterization of definiteness in terms of semantic or pragmatic principles is misguided. Lyons proposes instead that definiteness is a grammatical category, not completely definable in semantic or pragmatic terms, but representing the grammaticalization of some category of meaning. It is against this background that he presents his own, syntactic, account of definiteness. He argues that the category of definiteness is itself a functional head, and can be identified with the well-known functional projection D. Moreover, he proposes that the category of definiteness should be assimilated with the category of person. The book closes with a discussion of the diachronic aspects of definiteness. On the whole, Lyons’s work is an excellent textbook and reference book on definiteness in natural languages, although it sometimes misses the balance between theoretical accuracy, pedagogical virtues and limitations of space. The reviewer of the semantics section definitely cannot ignore those works produced by philosophers which investigate questions central to the study of the semantics of natural languages, especially when there are as many of them as in 1999, even though their methods and conclusions sometimes differ from those arrived at by people working with particular languages, and their results are not always easily applicable to the study of natural languages. The first among these works is already a classic: Gareth Evans and John McDowell, eds., Truth and Meaning, first published in hardback in 1976, but never in a paperback version before this year. The essays—‘Meaning and Truth Theory’ by J.A. Foster; ‘Reply to Foster’ by Donald Davidson; ‘Truth Conditions, Bivalence and Verificationism’ by John McDowell; ‘What is a Theory of Meaning? (II)’ by Michael Dummett; ‘Two Theories of Meaning’ by Brian Loar; ‘Truth Definitions and Actual Languages’ by Christopher Peacocke; ‘On Understanding the Structure of One’s Language’ by P.F. Strawson; ‘Semantic Structure and Logical Form’ by Gareth Evans; ‘LanguageMastery and the Sorites Paradox’ by Crispin Wright; ‘Existence and Tense’ by Michael Woods; ‘States of Affairs’ by Barry Taylor; ‘The De Re ‘Must’: A Note on the Logical Form of Essentialist Claims’ by David Wiggins; and ‘Is There a Problem about Substitutional Quantification?’ by Saul Kripke—are all concerned with what a semantic theory should look like and most of them have since become essential readings in any philosophy of language course. We can therefore only welcome the fact that the collection is now available in an affordable format for students of philosophy and of language. The second book not to be missed is the collection of essays by Robert S. Stalnaker, Context and Content. In these essays he elucidates his view that the philosophy of language can be approached only through the philosophy of thought, due to the fact that speech is an expression of thought and that ‘the utterances and inscriptions produced in using language derive their content from beliefs and intentions of the speakers who produce them’ (p. 2), which is opposed to the accepted wisdom in analytic philosophy. The essays in the book are grouped into four sections, ‘Representing Contexts’, ‘Attributing Attitudes’, ‘Externalism and Form’ and ‘Content’. A reader interested in natural language semantics should particularly look at the first section, since the essays included here, most of them written already in the 1970s, set the agenda for semantic research for the decades to come. The approach to the projection problem for presuppositions presented in ‘Pragmatic Presuppositions’ underlies many present-day theories on the PAGE 59 OF 123 60 ENGLISH LANGUAGE phenomenon, semanticists working on conditionals cannot disregard Stalnaker’s insights presented in ‘Indicative Conditionals’, while the essay entitled ‘Assertion’ proposes a way to incorporate information related to the context into semantic representations of sentences by a mechanism called diagonalization. The ideas presented here have, since their original publication, found their way into semantic applications, and the essay has become one of the most important sources for the dynamic theories of meaning. Paul Horwich, Meaning [1998], contains the exposition of the use theory of meaning, the central idea of which stems from Wittgenstein, according to whom the meaning of a word derives from its use. The three principal claims of the theory, according to the author, are that meanings are concepts, that the overall use of each word stems from its possession of a basic acceptance property (which specifies the circumstances in which certain specified sentences containing the word are accepted), and that two words express the same concept by virtue of having the same basic acceptance property. The book appeared together with the second edition of the author’s earlier work Truth, which elucidates the ‘minimalist’ conception of truth, the central idea behind which is that each proposition specifies its own condition for being true. Horwich argues here that the concept of truth is entirely captured by the above triviality, and thus ‘in fact nothing could be more mundane and less puzzling than the concept of truth’ (p. ix). The remarkable clarity and ease of presentation in both works make them ideal reading for students of philosophy and of the philosophy of language. The last book to be mentioned here, Jean Pierre Malrieu, Evaluative Semantics: Cognition, Language and Ideology, reports on research at the crossroads of linguistics, cognitive science and sociology. Malrieu’s aim is to develop a method which enables one to estimate the consistency of a text with an ideology. Consistency here does not refer to logical consistency, but to the consistency between the evaluations conveyed by the text and the values of the ideology. Malrieu proposes a discourse representational formalism based on the idea of semantic networks, where the ideological consistency of discourse is connected to the stability of evaluations associated with the parts of the discourse in a dynamic semantic network. He applies his model to the analysis of a text by Shakespeare to show how the notion of consistency can solve disambiguation problems facing a natural-language processing system. He argues that whenever ambiguity arises, the correct interpretation in the context is usually the one with the highest level of evaluative consistency. Among the journal articles which appeared in 1999 we find significant contributions to some of the favourite topics of semanticists in the past few years. One of these is the interpretation of generic sentences, which have traditionally been assumed to involve universal quantification in appropriately chosen possible worlds or statements about prototypical members of a category. Regine Eckardt, in ‘Normal Objects, Normal Worlds, and the Meaning of Generic Sentences’ (JoS 16[1999] 237–78), argues instead that generics express quantification about normal exemplars in a category. The choice of normal examples can vary according to the type of the property with respect to which it is evaluated, and thus different generic sentences can rely on different choices of the normal members of the category. Opposed to this, Kathrin Koslicki’s ‘Genericity and Logical Form’ (M&Lang 14[1999] 441– 67), proposes a uniform analysis of generics, which involves a higher-order PAGE 60 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 61 predication at the highest level. Ariel Cohen, in ‘Generics, Frequency Adverbs and Probability’ (Ling&P 22[1999] 221–53), proposes that the similarities between the behaviour of generics and probability judgements can be explained by saying that both of these constructions express probability judgements, interpreted as expressions of hypothetical relative frequency. Another topic which has generated significant discussion in recent years is the semantics of polarity items. The contributions to this issue include Kai von Fintel’s ‘NPI Licensing, Strawson Entailment, and Context Dependency’ (JoS 16[1999] 97– 148), where the author extends the classical Fauconnier–Ladusaw account of negative polarity licensing, according to which negative polarity items (NPIs) are licensed in the scope of downward entailing operators, to environments like only, adversative attitude predicates, superlatives and antecedents of conditionals, which also license NPIs. In ‘Positively Polar’ (SL 53[1999] 209–26), Guido vanden Wyngaerd argues that indefinite NPs with the determiner a should be considered Positive Polarity Items of the weakest type. Anastasia Giannakidou proposes in ‘Affective Dependencies’ (Ling&P 22[1999] 367–421) that polarity items restricted to affective contexts (of which negative contexts form a proper subpart) are sensitive to the (non)veridicality of the context. The problems of aspect, temporal interpretation and the structure of eventualities described by natural-language sentences continue to be a fascinating research area within semantics. Susan Rothstein’s ‘Fine-Grained Structure in the Eventuality Domain: The Semantics of Predicative Adjective Phrases and be’ (NLS 7[1999] 347–420) is among the several thought-provoking contributions to this field, proposing a new account of copular be in be + AP configurations. She claims that the denotation of be is a function from denotations of APs, which are temporally non-locatable states, to denotations of VPs, which are temporally locatable entities, that is, eventualities. In ‘Activities: States or Events?’ (Ling&P 22[1999] 479–508) Carlota S. Smith investigates whether the semantic category of Activities (included among the four semantic categories proposed by Z. Vendler in the Philosophical Review [1957]) should be related to the general concept of event or state. Sandro Zucchi’s ‘Incomplete Events, Intensionality and Imperfective Aspect’ (NLS 7[1999] 179–215) evaluates two powerful theories of the progressive aspect in the light of new data from Slavic languages, and proposes ways of repairing them to account for the data. Henriëtte de Swart and Arie Molendijk, in ‘Negation and the Temporal Structure of Narrative Discourse’ (JoS 16[1999] 1–42), propose that the temporal role of negative sentences in narrative discourses in English and French can best be captured by claiming that they refer to negative states of affairs (thus introducing a stative discourse referent), which can behave as events due to the process of coercion. Still on the issue of temporality, Renate Musan’s ‘Temporal Interpretation and Information Status of Noun Phrases’ (Ling&P 22[1999] 621–61), argues that the temporal interpretation of noun phrases ‘can best be captured by a distinction between individuals in their whole temporal extendedness and stages of individuals’ (p. 658). Focusing phenomena are discussed in Roger Schwarzchild’s ‘GIVENness, AVOIDF and Other Constraints in the Placement of Accent’ (NLS 7[1999] 141–77), which investigates the relation between accent placement and the interpretation of discourse. The semantics of focus is inseparably tied up since M. Rooth’s Association with Focus [1985] with the concept of alternatives. Ariel Cohen’s ‘How PAGE 61 OF 123 62 ENGLISH LANGUAGE Are Alternatives Computed?’ (JoS 16[1999] 43–65) investigates the alternatives associated with focused phrases, and argues that the reason why they do not seem to be derivable from the alternatives introduced by their component parts is that they are induced by the presuppositions of the focused expression in context. Two papers deal with the interpretation of ellipsis, more particularly, with the sloppy identity readings of elided VPs. A sloppy identity reading arises, for example, when the second sentence in the discourse Susan loves her cat. Jane does too is interpreted as saying that Jane loves her own cat. According to the traditional analysis (I. Sag [1976], E. Williams [1977]), such interpretations are made possible because the pronouns in the elided VPs are considered bound variables. Satoshi Tomioka, in ‘A Sloppy Identity Puzzle’ (NLS 7[1999] 217–41), challenges this view, and proposes that the pronouns in the elided VPs should be interpreted as Etype pronouns. Daniel Hardt, however, in ‘Dynamic Interpretation of Verb Phrase Ellipsis’ (Ling&P 22[1999] 185–219), accounts for the sloppy identity readings in terms of a dynamic logic. He claims that sloppy identity readings of VP ellipsis may arise because the context where the elided VP is interpreted is different from the context where the antecedent VP is interpreted. Maria Bittner, in ‘Concealed Causatives’ (NLS 7[1999] 1–78), argues that in concealed causatives like John [shot] [the robber dead] the causal relation cannot be connected to any overt word or morpheme, only the two arguments of the relation are expressed syntactically. A type mismatch between the basic meanings of two sister nodes leads to a type-raising operation, which then introduces the causal relation itself. Pauline Jacobson’s ‘Towards a Variable-Free Semantics’ (Ling&P 22[1999] 117–84) proposes a way to account for pronominal binding in terms of a semantic theory which does not make essential use of variables and where surface structures directly receive semantic interpretations. Her account also dispenses with the level of LF, indices in the syntax and traces. Further work worth considering includes Lisa Mattheson’s proposal for accounting for the wide-scope reading of indefinites (‘On the Interpretation of Wide-Scope Indefinites’, NLS 7[1999] 79–134), Yael Sharvit’s semantic approach to ‘Connectivity [effects] in Specificational Sentences’ (NLS 7[1999] 299–339), her new analysis of ‘Functional Relative Clauses’ (Ling&P 22[1999] 447–78), and two interesting works on the semantics of interrogatives, ‘A Flexible Approach to Exhaustivity in Questions’ (NLS 7[1999] 249–98) by Sigrid Beck and Hotze Rullmann, and ‘Interrogative Quantifiers within Scope’ (Ling&P 22[1999] 255– 310) by Jürgen Pafel, which investigates the (pair-)list or distributive readings of wh-interrogatives, attested in examples such as Who does everyone like? 7. Lexicography, Lexicology and Lexical Semantics Three books published this year provide fascinating accounts of groups of dictionaries so far given only brief consideration in historical accounts of the English lexicographical tradition. These are Maurizio Gotti, The Language of Thieves and Vagabonds: Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Canting Lexicography in England, Werner Hüllen, English Dictionaries 800–1700: The Topical Tradition, and A.P. Cowie, English Dictionaries for Foreign Learners: A History. Gotti provides a historical and literary background to the canting texts that PAGE 62 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 63 he covers, which begin with Robert Copland’s Highway to the Spital-House [1535– 6] and end with Francis Grose’s Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue [1785]. Some mainstream dictionaries listing cant terms are also included, such as Coles’s English Dictionary [1676] and the more specialized Ladies Dictionary [1694]. This is the first time that the canting dictionary tradition has received serious scholarly attention, and Gotti’s book is an invaluable overview of its development. His interest lies particularly in the etymology and morphology of canting terms, and his final chapter demonstrates that the changing nature of canting dictionaries is in line with the development of the term cant during the period covered. For example, rather than dismissing non-canting terms as ‘padding’ (p. 67) as earlier scholars have, Gotti considers why B.E. included them in his New Dictionary of the Terms Ancient and Modern of the Canting Crew [c.1698]. Grose, who is sometimes regarded with unmerited reverence, is found lacking in comparison with the high standards of contemporary lexicography. My only reservation is that Gotti tends to take his sources at face value, and to accept their claims and opinions uncritically. Several of the earliest cant lists are arranged by meaning, like the lists that Hüllen discusses. His texts ‘in the full semiotic sense of the term’ (p. 22) served encyclopedic, pedagogical and didactic functions from the first. Hüllen covers Ælfric’s glossary and other Old English glosses, wordbooks for learning Latin and French, didactic dialogues of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and treatises on terminology. He provides extended descriptions of John Withal’s Shorte Dictionarie for Yonge Beginners [1553], James Howell’s Lexicon Tetraglotton [1660], and John Wilkins’s Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language and Tables [1668]. These are complemented by a consideration of multilingual dictionaries and nomenclators published in the rest of Europe. Comenius is considered as belonging to this European tradition, which linked dictionaries with philosophy and pedagogy. Wilkins, for example, sought to restore linguistic perfection by laying the groundwork for a universal language. Howell’s classification demonstrates the influence of classical and medieval philosophy on his world-view. Withal’s work demonstrates his practical experience of teaching language according to the ordering of reality in the minds of the learners. Like the medieval glossaries, it allows us ‘a glimpse into the … classroom’ (p. 55). Hüllen notes that the onomasiological glossaries and dictionaries fused the functions of teaching vocabulary and knowledge: ‘the order in which the new words and their meanings were arranged acted as the principle for teaching and learning’ (p. 24). He also published a briefer treatment of the same subject this year, in ‘Onomasiological Dictionaries (900–1700): Their Tradition and their Linguistic Status’ (Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science 3[1999] 89–104). A.P. Cowie, English Dictionaries for Foreign Learners: A History is an account of the development of monolingual English dictionaries for foreign learners from the 1920s onwards. It focuses on advanced-level works, and notes that the preference for monolingual learners’ dictionaries was an expression of contemporary language-teaching methodology. Cowie pays particular attention to the work of Michael West, Harold E. Palmer and A.S. Hornby, and provides a brief biographical sketch for each. The monolingual learners’ dictionary was largely a product of the vocabulary control movement, which sought to reduce the effort involved in learning a foreign language by identifying the 1,000 to 1,500 most important words, whether by objective measures of frequency, or by subjective PAGE 63 OF 123 64 ENGLISH LANGUAGE approaches. These controlled vocabularies alone were used for the definitions in the New Method English Dictionary [1935] among others. The 1920s also saw the beginning of large-scale analysis of phraseology, which was also to have a major influence on the development of the EFL dictionary. Cowie identifies the second edition of the (Oxford) Advanced Learners’ Dictionary as the first, and the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English as the last of the ‘second generation of learners’ dictionaries’ (p. 82), which cater for users’ receptive and productive needs. From the mid-1970s onwards, computers have played an increasingly important role in the production of learners’ dictionaries. The extent of computer usage and the growing market for learners’ dictionaries characterize Cowie’s third generation, including the second edition of the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English and the Collins Cobuild English Language Dictionary. Dictionaries produced in the 1990s are characterized by their user-friendliness and emphasis on decoding: they exhibit a combination of the skills of computational and corpus linguists with those of practising lexicographers. Martin Stark, Encyclopedic Learners’ Dictionaries: A Study of their Design Features from the User Perspective examines the Longman Dictionary of English Language and Culture and the Oxford Advanced Learner’s Encyclopedic Dictionary. Stark sees their simultaneous production, in 1992, as a recognition of the ‘the fact that linguistic and cultural information are often inseparable’ (p. 1). He considers that the encyclopedic learners’ dictionaries are a hybrid between the encyclopedic dictionary and the learners’ dictionary, and looks at the specific works on which these are based. Having defined what encyclopedic dictionaries are, Spark assesses, by means of a questionnaire-based survey, whether or not they are actually useful. With only forty informants, Stark acknowledges that it is difficult to see any clear trends, but he does demonstrate that his informants generally welcomed the inclusion of encyclopedic information. Some types of entry were more useful than others: biographical and historical information was rated particularly highly. The informants’ comments give rise to a number of suggestions regarding future encyclopedic learners’ dictionaries, which would fulfil their users’ general as well as second-language encyclopedic requirements. Herbst and Popp, eds., The Perfect Learners’ Dictionary, is the product of a symposium held in Erlangen-Nürnberg in 1997. ‘Learners’ Dictionaries in a Historical and Theoretical Perspective’ is Anthony P. Cowie’s analysis of EFL monolingual learners’ dictionaries, the earliest of which he dates to the mid-1930s. He notes that the earliest dictionaries provide help to the writer rather than the reader. In the same volume, Flor Aarts discusses the syntactic information in a number of contemporary learners’ dictionaries, including the Oxford Advanced Learners’ Dictionary, the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, the Collins Cobuild English Dictionary and the Cambridge International Dictionary of English. Using the same dictionaries, Michael Klotz looks at word complementation, Henri Béjoint at compound nouns, Brigitta Mittmann at collocations, Paul Bogaards at access structures, and Gabriele Stein at exemplification. In the same volume David Heath’s ‘The Treatment of International Varieties’ considers how far dictionaries for EFL learners should build on their inclusion of encyclopedic information to provide information about national variation in spelling, pronunciation, grammar and vocabulary. Gisela Böhner’s ‘Classroom Experience with the New Dictionaries’ (in Herbst and Popp eds. [1999]) looks at dictionary use among EFL learners; ‘Lexical Reference Books: What are PAGE 64 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 65 the Issues?’ (IJL 12[1999] 5–12) is a consideration, by Reinhard Hartmann, of pedagogical lexicography. Burkhard Dammann considers ‘Teachers’ Demands on Learners’ Dictionaries’ (in Herbst and Popp, eds. [1999]). Phil Scholfield’s ‘Dictionary Use in Reception’ (IJL 12[1999] 13–34) is an analysis of the stages involved in dictionary use by a non-native speaker of English. In ‘Dictionary Use in Production’ (IJL 12[1999] 35–53), Michael Rundell looks at dictionary use in speaking and writing, as opposed to understanding, English. In ‘Supply-Side and Demand-Side Lexical Semantics’ (in Viegas, ed., Breadth and Depth of Semantic Lexicons [1999]), Sergei Nirenburg and Victor Raskin consider two approaches to lexical semantics which differ in their history, their motivations and their results. Hilary Nesi’s ‘A User’s Guide to Electronic Dictionaries for Language Learners’ (IJL 12[1999] 55–66) reviews the whole range of electronic dictionaries now available. Robert F. Ilson (in Herbst and Popp, eds. [1999]) compares the explanation of meaning in learners’ dictionaries with that of American college dictionaries. Don R. McCreary and Fredric T. Dolezal also consider the usefulness of American college dictionaries to ESL learners, in ‘A Study of Dictionary Use by ESL Students in an American University’ (IJL 12[1999] 107–45). Turki A. Diab and Jihad M. Hamdan’s paper, ‘Interacting with Words and Dictionaries: The Case of Jordanian EFL learners’ (IJL 12[1999] 281–305) concludes that monolingual dictionaries are more useful than bilingual, and that it is meaning and pronunciation that are most frequently sought. Kerstin Popp (in Herbst and Popp, eds. [1999]) looks at the treatment of polysemy and homonymy, of suffixation and of suffixes in learners’ dictionaries, while Tvrtko PrŽiŽ examines ‘The Treatment of Affixes in the ‘Big Four’ EFL Dictionaries (IJL 12[1999] 263–79). Joan C. Beal, English Pronunciation in the Eighteenth Century: Thomas Spence’s Grand Repository of the English Language is an account of a work published in 1775 by a working-class radical from Newcastle. His experience as a teacher confirmed Spence’s conviction that a reformed alphabet was essential if the lower classes were to achieve sufficient education to be politically aware. As well as the Grand Repository itself, Spence published a variety of pedagogical and political texts in traditional orthography and in his own phonetic alphabet. This alphabet was not only a route towards social reform, but also acted as a guide to ‘correct’ pronunciation, which would also contribute towards a widening of opportunities for the poor. Beal argues that the eighteenth century is commonly under-covered in histories of English, and that phonology is particularly neglected. There is, however, plenty of evidence available regarding eighteenth-century pronunciation. Beal argues that pronouncing dictionaries can make a valuable addition to information gathered from other sources, particularly as regards lexical diffusion. Spence, moreover, provides insights into the sociolinguistic situation in late eighteenth-century Britain in that, although he proscribes particular pronunciations, he still remarks upon their occurrence. Comparison of Spence’s treatment of ME and later /a/ with that of three contemporary pronouncing dictionaries shows the gradual evolution of the sound change as it moved northwards. Beal argues that the neglect of northern grammarians and orthoepists is unjust, and that Newcastle’s production of grammars in the eighteenth century was second only to London’s: a phenomenon that deserves recognition and examination. Marja Smolenaars provides an overview of early dictionaries of English in her article ‘As Good Not To Read as Not To Understand: Seventeenth-Century English Dictionaries’ (Antiquarian Book Monthly 9[1999] 9– PAGE 65 OF 123 66 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 12). John Considine looks for personal touches in the OED in ‘Reading the Traces of James Murray in the Oxford English Dictionary’ (Verbatim 24:ii[1999] 1–5). In ‘Balance and Bias in Dictionaries’ (ER 9:iv[1999] 13–15), Lynda Mugglestone considers prescriptiveness in the OED, and its treatment of race and gender. Sabine Prechter’s ‘Women’s Rights—Children’s Games: Sexism in Learners’ Dictionaries of English’ (Multilingua 18[1999] 47–68) asks whether feminist linguistics has had any effect on the contents of learners’ dictionaries, and concludes that it has not. Dieter Götz’s ‘On Some Differences between English and German (with Respect to Lexicography)’ (in Herbst and Popp, eds. [1999]) is an interesting account of divergent lexicographic traditions. E.G. Stanley writes a lengthy review of The New Oxford Dictionary of English, in consideration of its claim to the description ‘new’, in ‘A New “New” English Dictionary from Oxford’ (N&Q 46[1999] 75–83). Boyan A. Onyshkevych discusses the ‘Categorization of Types and Application of Lexical Rules’ (in Viegas, ed. [1999]), and outlines the choices that system developers would have to make in designing practical natural-language-processing applications. In the same volume, Antonio Sanfilippo’s ‘Word Disambiguation by Lexical Underspecification’ looks for an alternative to lexical rules in the semantic and syntactic properties of lexical entries. In ‘Integrating Machine Readable Dictionary and Thesaurus for Conceptual Context Representation of Word Sense’ Jen Nan Chen and Jason S. Chang discuss the avoidance of unnecessarily fine sense disambiguation. Bonnie J. Dorr and Doug Jones’s ‘Acquisition of Semantic Lexicons’, considers how the acquisition of computational-semantic lexicons can be mechanized. Michael Johnston and Federica Busa describe their compositional treatment of compound constructions in ‘Qualia Structure and the Compositional Interpretation of Compounds’. Jill Burstein, Susanne Wolff and Chi Lu discuss the application of lexical semantic techniques in automatic scoring of short-answer and essay-based examinations in ‘Using Lexical Semantic Techniques to Classify FreeResponses’: they find agreement with human markers’ scores to be as high as 95 per cent. In ‘Semantics via Conceptual and Lexical Relations’, Christiane Fellbaum considers the insights into the structure of the lexicon that can be gained through its representation in terms of conceptual-semantic and lexical relations, with particular reference to lexical gaps. Sol Saporta also has a brief look at lexical gaps, in ‘Widows, Orphans, and ? — Semantic Holes’ (Verbatim 24:iii[1999] 21–2). Odie Geiger and Lawrence M. Ward’s ‘Metaphor and the Mental Lexicon’ (Brain & Language 68[1999] 192–8) demonstrates that literal and figurative meanings both play a part in lexical retrieval. In ‘Metaphors and Dictionaries: The Morass of Meaning, or How to Get Two Ideas for One’ (IJL 12[1999] 195–208), however, Geart van der Meer argues that language learners do not benefit from the practice of listing figurative senses first where they are more frequent than the literal. Rosamund Moon’s ‘Needles and Haystacks, Idioms and Corpora: Gaining Insights into Idioms, Using Corpus Analysis’ (in Herbst and Popp, eds. [1999]) considers how far corpora are useful for rare idioms. Tom McArthur, Living Words: Language, Lexicography and the Knowledge Revolution is a collection of papers published between 1986 and 1998. They cover unmotivated neologism, the importance of rhyme, rhythm and alliteration in the patterning of speech, and prejudice in dictionaries and historical accounts of language. ‘The Vocabulary-Control Movement’ looks at the efforts of pioneers such PAGE 66 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 67 as Isaac Pitman and C.K. Ogden to organize English vocabulary according to frequency and utility. ‘The Usage Industry’ is an overview of usage guides from Robert Cawdrey’s Table Alphabeticall to contemporary guides, and considers the risks that modern publishers take in producing these works. McArthur sets out his own approach to the problem of usage in ‘Problems of Purism and Usage in Editing English Today’ and ‘The Pedigree of Plain English’. The chapters on ‘Thematic Lexicography’ and ‘Reference Materials and their Formats’ provide an insider’s view of the process of creating a meaning-based lexicon. The papers are united by their historical perspective, their interest in the development and definition of Standard English, and their readability. Diarmaid Ó Muirithe, The Words We Use 3 is a collection of entries, in no particular order, from his Irish Times column. The articles are often in response to correspondents’ queries about meaning and etymology. Although there is a table of contents, there is no index, so the volume could only ever be used for dipping into. In ‘The Widow’s Mund in Æthelberht 75 and 76’ (JEGP 98[1999] 1–16), Carole Hough reinterprets mund as referring not to the guardianship of widows, but to widows’ protection of their own dependants. Fred C. Robinson demonstrates, in ‘A Sub-Sense of OE fyrn(-)’ (NM 100[1999] 471–5), that fyrn- ‘ancient, of old’, can also mean ‘from an age before our present Christian age’, as well as ‘from the evil pagan days before conversion’. In ‘The Battle of Maldon line 91 and the Origins of Call: A Reconsideration’ (NM 100[1999] 143–54), Richard Dance argues that call is an Old Norse loan, and not, as has been argued, its OE cognate. Alfred Bammesberger’s ‘In What Sense was Grendel an Angeng(e)a?’ (N&Q 46[1999] 173–6) chooses the interpretation ‘attacker’ over the traditional ‘solitary walker’. Daniel Paul O’Donnell challenges the traditional distinction between two poetic adverbs in ‘Hædre and hædre gehogode (Solomon & Saturn, line 62b, and Resignation, line 63a)’ (N&Q 46[1999] 312–15). James W. Marchand’s ‘Quoniam, Wife of Bath’s Prologue D.608’ (NM 100[1999] 43–9) is an examination of the various punning and euphemistic uses of quoniam to support its interpretation in Chaucer. John Considine argues, in ‘Pendugum: John Skelton and the Case of the Anachronistic Penguin’ (NM 100[1999] 187–9), that pendugum cannot mean ‘penguin’, either in its current sense, or with the obsolete meaning ‘great auk’. He understands the term as meaning ‘an ineffectual or garrulous man’. ‘A SixteenthCentury Description of Vernacular Word-Formation’ (in Carls and Lucko, eds., Form, Function and Variation in English: Studies in Honour of Klaus Hansen) is Gabriele Stein’s analysis of Palsgrave’s treatment of word-formation in his Lesclarcissement de la langue francoyse. Leofranc Holford-Strevens looks at Shakespeare’s use of Jew as a term of endearment in ‘Most Lovely Jew’ (N&Q 46[1999] 212–13). Roland Hall predates OED first citations for twenty words and phrases in ‘Unnoticed Words and Senses from Sir Kenelm Digby’ (N&Q 46[1999] 21–2). In ‘Extollager’ (N&Q 46[1999] 72–4), John Edwards argues for the inclusion of this term in the OED with reference to the artist Samuel Palmer and his circle, and explores its possible meanings. E.G. Stanley predates OED’s 1963 citation for folkfest with an 1847 use of Volks’ feste in ‘Not Folk Fest but Volksfest for OED’ (N&Q 46[1999] 478). William S. Haubrich’s ‘Menckenisms’ (Verbatim 24:iv[1999] 20–6) is an account of H.L. Mencken’s use of ‘odd, idiosyncratic, and quaint’ (p. 20) terms, several of which did not seem idiosyncratic to this British reader. PAGE 67 OF 123 68 ENGLISH LANGUAGE It is difficult to assess Julie Coleman’s Love, Sex, and Marriage: A Historical Thesaurus dispassionately, because it is my own, but I can describe it as another byproduct of the Glasgow Historical Thesaurus Project. In the introduction I provide an overview of the tradition from which the volume developed, and outline some of the uses to which a historical thesaurus can be put. The thesaurus, which makes up the bulk of the book, is based on information contained within the OED, the MED, and Clark-Hall and Bosworth and Toller’s dictionaries of OE. The use of corpora, of specialized dictionaries, and of personal observation supplemented this material. The commentary provided with the classification is usually brief, but some sections are more expansive, including those on metaphors for love, on terms of endearment, on the censorship of sexual vocabulary in the OED, and on the animal and food terms and personal names that appear in these fields. K.J.H. Berland looks at a manuscript list of French sexual terms compiled by a Virginian landowner in ‘William Byrd’s Sexual Lexicography’ (ECLife 23[1999] 1–11). Gloria George’s ‘Sexual Orientation and the Oxford Dictionary of Slang’ (English Today 15:iii[1999] 52–7) is a review, but also a wider consideration of slang terms for sexual orientation. In ‘Assing Around’ (Verbatim 24. i[1999] 6–9), Jessy Randall and Wendy Woloson look at the history and use of ass, particularly in American slang. Hugh Rawson’s ‘Bowdlerism in the Barnyard’ (Verbatim 24:i[1999] 1–7) considers the avoidance of cock, ass, bull, bitch and cony, while John Morris and Sol Saporta discuss the interpretation of niggardly as a racial slur (Verbatim 24:iv[1999] 11–13). M. Lynne Murphy’s ‘Racing for Definitions in South Africa’ (Verbatim 24:ii[1999] 10–13) is a consideration of racial labels under and after apartheid. Mat Coward’s ‘Horribile Dictu’ (Verbatim 24:iv[1999] 10) is an account of the spread of African-American to inappropriate contexts. Klaus-Dieter Barnickel’s ‘Political Correctness in Learners’ Dictionaries’ (in Herbst and Popp, eds. [1999]) comments on EFL dictionaries’ treatment of contentious terms. Mat Coward’s ‘Bona Palare: The Language of Round the Horne’ (Verbatim 24:ii[1999] 14–16) is an account of the use of gay argot in the popular 1960s radio show. In another consideration of the effect of the media on language, Michael Adams writes about ‘Slayer Slang’ (Verbatim 24:iii[1999] 1–4; 24:iv[1999] 1–6). Paul J. Sampson’s ‘Airspeak’ (Verbatim 24:i[1999] 8–9) is a brief account of the jargon used by aviators, while David Galef discusses ‘How to Speak Like a Corporation’ (Verbatim 24:i[1999] 15–17), and William H. Dougherty looks at medical euphemisms (Verbatim 24:i[1999] 23–5). M.A. Buchanan considers ‘Identity and Language in the SM Scene’ (Verbatim 24:iii[1999] 5–8). In ‘Literary Dialect and Earlier African American English’ (in Carls and Lucko, eds. [1999]), Günter Weise looks at the representation of non-standard speech in literature, and argues that it is a useful source of information for linguists. Valerie Collins’s ‘Byte Bonding, Bit-bangers, and BLOBS’ (Verbatim 24:ii[1999] 25–8) is a discussion of word-formation in technical and especially computer terminology. She looks particularly at blending, compounding, metaphor and wordplay. Leonhard Lipka’s ‘Blairites, Teletubbies, Spice Girls and Wheelie Bins: Neologisms, the Word of the Year, and the Nomination-Function of “Words”’ (in Carls and Lucko, eds. [1999]), is a discussion of regional and situational variation in neologisms. Dietmar Schneider’s ‘“Euro-This, Euro-That and Now Euro-Money” (The Guardian 1996): Computer-Assisted Studies of British Newspaper Language’ (in Carls and Lucko, eds. [1999]) comments on the strong reactions prompted by PAGE 68 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 69 individual words. In ‘Lexical Evolution and Learners’ Dictionaries’ (in Herbst and Popp, eds. [1999]), John Ayto assesses the provision of information about recent lexical developments in EFL dictionaries. In ‘Hans Marchand’s Theory of Word-Formation: Genesis and Development’ (in Carls and Lucko, eds. [1999]), Dieter Kastovsky considers the assumptions underlying Marchand’s theory, particularly with reference to motivation. He outlines Marchand’s background, and details his contact with and response to the works of, for example, C. Bally and R.B. Lees. Andreas Fischer asks ‘What, if Anything, is Phonological Iconicity?’ (in Nänny and Fischer, eds. [1999]) in his consideration of auditory, articulatory and associative iconicity. In ‘Shifting the Data: Maximizers in Elicited and in Observed Data as Examples of “Source Conflict”’ (in Carls and Lucko, eds. [1999]), Wolfram Bublitz examines the maximizers entirely and completely, using the London Lund and Lancaster Oslo Bergen Corpora. He argues for a movement away from ‘sentence-related and intuition-driven descriptions’ in descriptive grammar (p. 113). Brendan S. Gillon considers ‘The Lexical Semantics of English Count and Mass Nouns’ (in Viegas, ed. [1999]), and presents a syntactic and semantic theory of English common noun phrases. Horst Weinstock discusses ‘Historical and Comparative Aspects of English Numerals between Twenty-One and Ninety-Nine’ (in Carls and Lucko, eds. [1999]), in an attempt to balance the attention that ‘the low ranks of numerals’ (p. 65) have previously been given. In ‘The British National Spoken Corpus Thing and That Sort of Thing: The Interesting Thing about “Thing”’ (in Carls and Lucko, eds. [1999]), Katie Wales describes the various uses of the commonest noun in the corpus. In ‘On Blue Moons, and Others’ (Verbatim 24:ii[1999] 18–21), Nick Humez discusses terms derived from moon, including, among others, mooncalf, moonblind, moonshine. In a later version, he considers terms for money (Verbatim 24:iv[1999] 14–17) It would be a shame not to make general reference to The Vocabula Review (www.vocabula.com) though difficult to be specific. It is occasionally well informed and consistently prescriptive. Verbatim, too, has a regular column for ‘crimes against decent usage’ (p. 9) called ‘Horribile Dictu’, and written by Mat Coward (Verbatim 24:iii[1999] 9–10). Graham Seal, The Lingo: Listening to Australian English, is an exploration of the Australian vernacular as ‘a significant indicator of national identity’ (p. vii). Written for a non-specialist audience, it looks at terms grouped by meaning (‘Natives, New Chums and Septics’), register (‘Lags, Larrikins and Lairs’) and period (‘Fighting Words’). ‘The Anatomy of Lingo’ discusses why people use the Australian vernacular, and the final chapter considers the future of ‘the lingo’ under pressure from American English and globalization. The volume is an enjoyable and diverting read, but a more detailed index would have been a useful addition for a linguist looking for illustrative examples. More academic in tone is Rosemarie Gläser’s ‘Indigenous Idioms and Phrases in Australian and New Zealand English’ (in Carls and Lucko, eds. [1999]). She presents semantically linked groups of terms, and concludes that ‘these set expressions are closely linked with their unique cultural setting’ (p. 167). In his paper, ‘Compounding in Indian English’ (in Carls and Lucko, eds. [1999]), Uwe Carls notes that, although Indian English makes extensive use of compounding, and has preferences for particular models and types of compound, it creates new compounds largely according to existing models and PAGE 69 OF 123 70 ENGLISH LANGUAGE types. In the same volume, Edgar W. Schneider’s ‘Notes on Singaporean English’ provides a historical background and lexicographic overview of Singaporean English, and considers its origins in British and American English. Manfred Görlach’s ‘Morphological Problems of Integration: English Loanwords Ending in -er and -ing in Selected European Languages’ (in Carls and Lucko, eds. [1999]) notes that, because of its influence and prestige, modern loanwords from English tend to be less well integrated into the borrowing language. In ‘Recent Dictionaries of Anglicisms’ (IJL 12:ii[1999] 147–54), Görlach looks at the treatment of English loans in dictionaries of German, Danish, Norwegian, Spanish, Polish, Croatian and Russian. In ‘Ausgepowerte Lerner and Other Guests: Some Remarks on Recent Influences of English on German’ (in Carls and Lucko, eds. [1999]), Ursula Schaefer looks at ‘loan-meanings/loan translations’ and ‘pseudoloans’ (p. 127). Martin Nuttal’s ‘It’s all Double Janglish to Me!’ (Verbatim 24:iii[1999] 15–17) is a brief discussion of English words in Japanese. 8. Onomastics The proceedings of the Eighteenth International Congress of Onomastic Sciences, held in Trier in 1993, have finally made their way into print in a series of six volumes under the general editorship of Dieter Kremer. Contributors from many parts of the world include leading English authorities such as Margaret Gelling (‘Personal Names in English Place-Names’) and John Field (‘English Field-Names Formed from Personal Names’). A summary only is given of John Insley’s paper on ‘Tarleton and Related Problems’, which is published in full in NB 87[1999] 71–80 under the revised title ‘Tarleton’. He identifies problems with the traditional derivation of the Lancashire place-names Tarleton and Tarlscough from an ON personal name, and proposes instead a pre-Celtic IE river name formed from the root *ter-/*tor- ‘quick, strong’ and the l-suffix. The September issue of Names is a Festschrift in honour of W.F.H. (Bill) Nicolaisen, who himself contributes the opening paper, ‘An Onomastic Autobiography, or, In the Beginning Was the Name’ (Names 47[1999] 179–90). The remaining fourteen articles, by well-known scholars from both sides of the Atlantic, cover a wide range of onomastic topics, including ‘Trans-Atlantic Street Names’ (a comparison of naming patterns in London and New York City) by John Algeo (Names 47[1999] 205–14), ‘Numbers in Placenames’ by Frank R. Hamlin (Names 47[1999] 233–42), ‘A Medley in the Spectrum: Color Names’ by Kelsie B. Harder (Names 47[1999] 243–48), ‘The Trumpeters of Bemersyde: a Scottish Placename Reconsidered’ by Carole Hough (Names 47[1999] 257–68), and ‘The Transfer of Scottish Placenames to Canada’ by Alan Rayburn (Names 47[1999] 313–23). The first in a supplementary series of publications aimed at making good the sparse treatment of minor names in early volumes of the English Place-Name Survey is Richard Coates, The Place-Names of West Thorney. This is a fine study of an island parish in West Sussex, with sections on topographical and habitative names, field names, street names and maritime names. Particularly interesting are the theoretical issues addressed relating to the processes of naming in self-contained places. PAGE 70 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 71 JEPNS presents a very mixed bag this year. Philip Tallon (JEPNS 31[1999] 31– 54) attempts to answer the question ‘What was a Caldecote?’ by suggesting that this ubiquitous place-name formation designates a place of exile established as a result of one of Athelstan’s laws (which, however, refers to banishment from a district where offences have been perpetrated, rather than to banishment to a particular place). The argument is a thin one, and it is in any case difficult to see how a law which, on Tallon’s own reading, would have been ‘virtually impossible to implement in practice’ and probably in operation for less than four years, could have given rise to such a large number of place-names. Keith Bailey addresses a related topic in ‘Place-Names in -cot: The Buckinghamshire Evidence’, examining the full range of place-names from this element within a single county (JEPNS 31[1999] 77–90). He demonstrates that they represent secondary, but not necessarily insignificant, settlements, and that there is no apparent correlation with underlying physical conditions or soil type. The same author presents a useful review of placenames containing the element gÅ (German gau, Dutch go) in England and on the Continent in ‘Some Observations on gÅ-, gau and go’ (JEPNS 31 [1999] 63–76). Aliki Pantos finds that ‘Meeting-Places in Wilvaston Hundred, Cheshire’ tend to be associated with boundaries or with mounds (JEPNS 31[1999] 91–112). The ‘Two Lincolnshire Coastal Names’ discussed by A.E.B. Owen are Leger Ness and Wilgrip Haven (31[1999] 55–62). For the first, he suggests a derivation from ON leir-nes ‘clay headland’, while he retracts his previous identification of the second with Theddlethorpe Haven in favour of the Woldgrift Drain. In ‘cisel, grÅot, stÁn and the Four U’s’ (JEPNS 31[1999] 19–30) Ann Cole continues her investigations of topographical place-name elements, suggesting that while all three terms refer to rock fragments, the Anglo-Saxons regarded cisel as Ubiquitous and Useless, grÅot as Underlying and Useless, and stÁn as Utilitarian. Andrew Breeze attempts to reinstate Phillimore’s derivation of ‘The Name of Ganarew, Near Monmouth’ from the Welsh saint’s name Gwynwarwy (JEPNS 31[1999] 113–14), and Richard Coates presents an interesting though inconclusive discussion of ‘A North-West Devon Anomaly: Hartland’, suggesting an interpretation as ‘estate towards Lundy’ on the basis that Harty may have been an earlier name for the island of Lundy (JEPNS 31[1999] 9–18). Joan Turville-Petre suggests that the paired place-name types ‘Overhall and Netherhall’ may be connected with an early system of taxation (JEPNS 31[1999] 115–17). A number of place-name articles appear in other journals. Andrew Breeze’s discussion of ‘The Celtic Names of Cabus, Cuerden, and Wilpshire in Lancashire’ is unfortunately marred by his failure to consult E. Ekwall, The Place-Names of Lancashire (Manchester UP [1922]), where several of the points he makes are anticipated (THSLC 148 [1999 for 1998] 191–6). Donald A. Bullough examines ‘The Place-Name Hexham and its Interpretation’, supporting a derivation from OE hægstald ‘young (royal?) warrior’, but rejecting the possibility that the young warrior in question may have been St Wilfrid (N&Q 46[1999] 422–7). Richard Coates contributes a detailed analysis of ‘Box in English Place-Names’, demonstrating a striking correlation with Roman-period activity (ES 80[1999] 2– 45), and he also undertakes a thoroughgoing re-examination of the meanings of OE wÓc both as a lexical item and as a place-name element in ‘New Light from Old Wicks: The Progeny of Latin vicus’ (Nomina 22[1999] 75–116). PAGE 71 OF 123 72 ENGLISH LANGUAGE Historical spellings of the place-names Friskney in Lincolnshire and Freshwater on the Isle of Wight are used by Klaus Dietz as evidence of an unattested OE *fresc ‘fresh’ coexisting with the attested form fersc in ‘Die Ortsnamen Freshwater, Friskney und die Etymologie von neuenglisch fresh “frisch”’ (BN 34[1999] 159–71) (German with English abstract). He is thus able to argue that ModE fresh developed directly from the OE etymon without having been influenced by OFr freis, fresche. Gillian Fellows-Jensen presents some preliminary findings of her ongoing study of Scandinavian settlement in East Anglia in ‘Scandinavian Settlement Names in East Anglia: Some Problems’ (Nomina 22[1999] 45–60). In the same journal, Mary Higham discusses the evidential value of ‘Names on the Edge: Hills and Boundaries’, taking as her starting-point the medieval chase of Burton-in-Lonsdale in north-west England (Nomina 22[1999] 61–74). Carole Hough draws attention to the occurrence of ‘ME pilchere in Two Nottinghamshire Place-Names’, one of which provides a unique example of the term used as a common noun rather than as a surname (N&Q 46[1999] 6–7). The same author suggests that ‘ME flokere in Flooker’s Brook’ may have the attested meaning ‘shepherd’ rather than the putative meaning ‘fluke-fisher’ put forward in the English Place-Name Survey for Cheshire (N&Q 46[1999] 183–5). She also proposes a simplex bird name related to the compound OE ceaffinc ‘chaffinch’ as the first element of ‘Cheveley and Chaff Hall: A Reconsideration of OE ceaf in Place-Names’ (NMS 43[1999] 21–32). Gillis Kristensson proposes an OE *sengde ‘singed place’ as the etymon of ‘The Place-Name Seend (Wiltshire)’ (in I hast hälsar, Festskrift till Göran Hallberg på 60-årsdagen den 7 oktoberr 1999 [1999] pp. 134–6), and also makes a good case for an OE *Tendedhrycg ‘lighted ridge’ as the origin of ‘The Place-Name Tandridge (Surrey)’ (N&Q 46[1999] 316–17). Anthony R. Rowley argues that ‘The Origins of the Name of Craven’ in Yorkshire lie not in Welsh craf ‘garlic’ but in a pre-IE root *carra ‘stone’ (BN 34[1999] 25–45) (German with English abstract). Karl Inge Sandred revisits the topic of his doctoral dissertation in an authoritative piece on ‘English stead and Scandinavian stad “edge, verge”’ written in Swedish with an English summary (NB 87[1999] 47–55). An English version is forthcoming in the proceedings of the Twentieth International Congress of Onomastic Sciences, held in Santiago de Compostela in September 1999. A further contribution to the ongoing debate concerning the linguistic prehistory of Europe is made by Theo Vennemann in his ‘Remarks on Some British Place Names’ (in Carr, Herbert and Zhang, eds., Interdigitations: Essays for Irmengard Rauch 25–62). In support of his theory of a once Vasconic Europe, he proposes Vasconic roots for a number of place- and river-names, with particular reference to Arundel, Thames, Bedford, Bideford, Bedhampton, Solent, Scilly, Tay, Taw, and the Pit-names of northern Scotland. Missed last year was a piece by Victor Watts on ‘The Place-Names of Weardale’ (The Bonny Moor Hen [Journal of the Weardale Field Study Society] 10[1998] 32– 9). Della Hooke’s third collection of pre-Conquest charter bounds, Warwickshire Anglo-Saxon Charter Bounds, follows the same format as the previous two (also published by Boydell): Worcestershire Anglo-Saxon Charter-Bounds [1990] and Pre-Conquest Charter Bounds of Devon and Cornwall [1994]. It presents a handlist of extant Warwickshire charters in chronological order from the eighth to the PAGE 72 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 73 eleventh centuries, with a close discussion of topographical detail. The full text of each boundary clause is given in full, followed by a translation and notes, and the proposed solutions are illustrated by diagrams showing the estate boundaries. For the first time, the glossary of OE terms also serves as an index to the texts: this is a distinct improvement on previous volumes, where occurrences of individual terms cannot be traced from the glossaries. Analysis of the boundary clauses is informed by extensive fieldwork and local knowledge, and illustrations include photographs of landscape features as well as a reproduction of an eleventh-century charter of Æthelred II. Unfortunately the accuracy of the texts themselves—‘freshly transcribed and checked against the surviving manuscripts’ according to the introduction—may be open to doubt. The fact that the transcription facing Æthelred’s charter contains two errors in the first line of the boundary clause (Ærest for Æryst, ælranan for ælrenan) does not inspire confidence. Field-name evidence is used to good effect in a multidisciplinary investigation of early and late medieval landscape and settlement patterns at Shapwick, Somerset by Michael Aston and Christopher Gerrard in ‘“Unique, Traditional and Charming”: The Shapwick Project, Somerset’ (Antiquaries Journal 79[1999] 1–58). In the field of anthroponymy, John Insley supports an Anglo-Saxon origin for ‘Old English Odda’ (N&Q 46[1999] 6–7), and also identifies an Old English personal name Rçt in a York gospel book (‘A Postscript to Ratley’, NB 87[1999] 141). In ‘Eobanus und Dadanus’, Norbert Wagner argues that the name of St Boniface’s companion Eoba is a shortened form of OE *Eo(h)berht or *Eo(h)bald, the first element being OE eoh ‘horse’ (BN 34[1999] 145–50) (German with English abstract). David Postles discusses the role of bynames as social and cultural markers, focusing mainly on sexually informed nickname bynames, in ‘“Oneself as Another” and Middle English Nickname Bynames’ (Nomina 22[1999] 117–32). P.M. Stell presents a detailed analysis of the use of forenames in medieval Yorkshire during the Edwardian and Ricardian periods, supported by statistical tables in ‘Forenames in Thirteenth- and Fourteenth-Century Yorkshire: A Study Based on a Biographical Database Generated by Computer’ (Medieval Prosopography 20[1999] 95–128). Male forenames are shown to have been highly concentrated and dominated by a small group of Continental Germanic names, while women’s forenames appear to have been more strongly influenced by saints’ names. Also of interest is the difference in status between the sexes reflected in the use of diminutive names for women, including widows, but not for men. Excellent short accounts of the current state of knowledge on onomastic topics are included in Michael Lapidge, John Blair, Simon Keynes and Donald Scragg, eds., The Blackwell Encyclopaedia of Anglo-Saxon England. Entries on ‘Habitation Names’, ‘-ingas, -inga Names’, ‘Place-Names, OE’, ‘River Names’ and ‘Topographical Names’ are contributed by B. Cox, on ‘By-Names’, ‘Personal Names, Scandinavian’ and ‘Place-Names, Scandinavian’ by Gillian Fellows-Jensen, on ‘Personal Names, Celtic’ and ‘Place-Names, Celtic’ by O.J. Padel, on ‘Charter Bounds’ by Joy Jenkyns and on ‘Personal Names, Old English’ by R.I. Page. Equally succinct and authoritative are John Insley’s contributions on ‘GrimstonHybrids’, ‘Gumeningas’ and ‘Gyrwe’ to Heinrich Beck, Dieter Geuenich, Heiko Steuer and Dieter Timpe, eds., Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde. No EPNS volume was published this year. PAGE 73 OF 123 74 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 9. Dialectology and Sociolinguistics This year stands out in having a host of studies concentrating on accents and dialects in Great Britain. Most notable here is Paul Foulkes and Gerard Docherty, eds., Urban Voices: Accent Studies in the British Isles, a collection of specially commissioned chapters, which, first, serves as a valuable reference resource thanks to its parallel introductory sections, and, second, provides excellent background reading on a host of different methodological and theoretical issues. The book is accompanied by a cassette (also on CD) featuring recordings of all accents discussed in the text, which is helpful for anyone not intimately acquainted with these British accents. Probably one of the most striking points to emerge from this collection is the extremely rapid spread of /t/-glottalization, which is found almost everywhere today and which easily carries the trophy of being the most studied topic this year. The individual contributions are discussed in the regional sections below. Good introductory (and very basic) overviews of a number of accents are provided in a textbook on phonetics, Philip Carr, English Phonetics and Phonology: An Introduction. In chapter 11 (‘Variation in English Accents’), Carr discusses such basic principles as systemic vs. realizational differences and lexical distributional differences in terms that are accessible even to students who do not intend to continue with linguistics. An appendix (‘An Outline of Some Accents of English’) presents vowel and consonant differences of General Australian English, London English, New York City English, Scottish Standard English and Tyneside English (RP and General American are discussed throughout the book). This choice is an interesting cross-section of the English-speaking world, and the comparative treatment makes this short chapter an ideal introduction to more detailed—and technical—investigations of these dialects. Starting with English English, moving from south to north, Ann Williams and Paul Kerswill contribute an overview of their several projects in ‘Dialect Levelling: Change and Continuity in Milton Keynes, Reading and Hull’ (in Foulkes and Docherty, eds. [1999] pp. 141–62). Williams and Kerswill directly relate dialect/ accent levelling to changing demographic patterns, especially to geographical and social mobility and the concomitant breakdown of close-knit networks. Hull with its strong local ties is relatively unaffected, except that working-class teenagers show /t/ -glottaling and th-fronting, although they have no direct contact with south-eastern speakers. The authors suggest the possibility of language spreading through ‘language missionaries’, speakers who have lived elsewhere and return with new features. Laura Tollfree looks at ‘South East London English: Discrete vs. Continuous Modelling of Consonantal Reduction’ (in Foulkes and Docherty eds. [1999] pp. 163–84). The /l/-sounds of sixty-two working-class and middle-class speakers from five south-east London suburbs are investigated, giving gradations from clear to dark and from consonantal to vocoid realizations that are accounted for in the continuous model of articulatory phonology, which can provide phonetic motivation for the surface realizations. Ulrike Altendorf tries a delimitation of the wider south-eastern accent in ‘Estuary English: Is English Going Cockney?’ (MSpr 93[1999] 2–11), where she finds that on the continuum from RP via Estuary English to Cockney, all accents show l-vocalization and /t/-glottaling, at least to some degree, but only Cockney has significant th-fronting and intervocalic /t/-glottaling. Still on the south-east, Peter Trudgill, in one of the highlights of the Foulkes and Docherty PAGE 74 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 75 collection ([1999] pp. 124–40), summarizes developments in ‘Norwich: Endogenous and Exogenous Linguistic Change’ also giving a fascinating personal account of his first encounter with William Labov. His thorough list of Norwich phonemes is compared with rural East Anglian, with earlier dialect studies, and with other nonstandard English dialects, which, incidentally, provides an excellent overview of current developments in the British Isles. In an additional twist, Trudgill argues that diphthong and triphthong smoothing as well as /t/-glottaling probably spread from the Norwich area outwards, rather than from London! Anne Grete Mathisen’s ‘Sandwell, West Midlands: Ambiguous Perspectives on Gender Patterns and Models of Change’ (in Foulkes and Docherty, eds. [1999] pp. 107–23) could have benefited from both Trudgill’s and Milroy’s contributions in the same collection; she shows surprise at the fact that /t/-glottaling in Sandwell is led by middle-class women although it is not a prestige variant. Especially in this case, the Milroys’ concept that supraregional (rather than standard) variants are favoured by females would have been particularly appropriate, especially in connection with the fact that, in Trudgill’s words, /t/-glottaling ‘is one of the most dramatic, wide-spread and rapid changes to have occurred in British English in recent times’ (p. 136). Going towards the more northern areas, Mark Newbrook reports on ‘West Wirral: Norms, Self-Reports and Usage’ (in Foulkes and Docherty eds. [1999] pp. 90–106). In an idiosyncratic system, Newbrook measures variables on a Cheshire–Liverpool continuum as well as a dialect–RP continuum (i.e. also indicating style-shifting). Although it is not intuitively clear how the percentages are arrived at, West Wirral is clearly becoming less like surrounding Cheshire and more like neighbouring Merseyside. Still in the same volume, Jana Stoddart, Clive Upton and J.D.A. Widdowson examine the ‘Sheffield Dialect in the 1990s: Revisiting the Concept of NORMs’ (Foulkes and Docherty, eds. [1999] pp. 72–89), claiming that even in the SED (Survey of English Dialects, conducted in the 1950s) informants were not exclusively NORMs (non-mobile, older, rural males); some were mobile, younger, urban and female. This is illustrated by survey data from Sheffield, which is compared to more recent data. Relatively few differences from the SED material were discovered, which in their view speaks for the original choice of the SED informant. (Although it has to be said that one speaker could hardly have been representative of the whole city.) Dominic Watt and Lesley Milroy discuss ‘Patterns of Variation and Change in Three Newcastle Vowels: is this Dialect Levelling?’ (in Foulkes and Docherty eds. [1999] pp. 25–46), based on thirty-two speakers from their project Phonological Variation and Change in Contemporary Spoken British English (PVC). The three vowels of face, goat and nurse are not in a rotatory movement (as Labov would have predicted) but instead the variants of the larger area are spreading, while the localized variant is disappearing. Generally, there are dramatic gender differences, such that females prefer the unmarked mainstream (supraregional) variant, whereas males prefer the strongly localized variants. Gerard J. Docherty and Paul Foulkes, finally, investigate ‘Derby and Newcastle: Instrumental Phonetics and Variationist Studies’ (Foulkes and Docherty, eds. [1999] pp. 47–71). Based on the same PVC project as Watt and Milroy (see above), they discuss the use of instrumental phonetics for variationist studies. Applied to /t/gapping, they seem to find the missing link between actuation and change: /t/ before a pause displays unexpected phonetic characteristics (voicing perseveres and friction is extended). These subtle differences are not easily audible; they are PAGE 75 OF 123 76 ENGLISH LANGUAGE speaker innovations that have not caught on yet, constituting the beginning of an Scurve. Another contribution based on data from the PVC project is James Milroy’s ‘Toward a Speaker-Based Account of Language Change’ (in Jahr, ed., Language Change: Advances in Historical Sociolinguistics [1999] pp. 21–36). On the basis of data on /t/-glottaling in Tyneside, Milroy deals with the transition problem, arguing against the traditional distinction of regular sound change and linguistic borrowing. /t/-glottaling, clearly an instance of dialect borrowing for Tyneside, nevertheless shows ‘regular trajectories of change at both the social and intralinguistic levels and is therefore a regular change’ (p. 34). A more traditionally dialectological study on English English dialects is provided by Verena Krus-Bühler’s dissertation Strukturen des Wortschwunds in Lincolnshire: Real-time und Apparent-time (Structures of Lexical Attrition in Lincolnshire: Real Time and Apparent Time) [1999], unfortunately only available to a German-reading audience. Krus-Bühler takes sixty-eight words that the SED has shown to be characteristic of Lincolnshire, goes back to the SED locations and investigates whether these words are still in use or known. Not surprisingly, she finds that most dialect words have disappeared quite rapidly over the last two generations (especially because of cultural changes); also not surprisingly, men still tend to use dialect words more often than women. The only chance of survival for dialect words seems to lie in their entering youth slang, as the continuing use of to boke ‘to retch’ shows. Terttu Nevalainen reports from the relatively new field of historical sociolinguistics and her historical corpus CEEC (Corpus of Early English Correspondence) in ‘Making the Best Use of “Bad” Data: Evidence for Sociolinguistic Variation in Early Modern English’ (NM 100[1999] 499–533). The letters of one woman from the 1540s and 1550s are compared to those of males in her circle. Nevalainen shows that for two vernacular changes (the substitution of you for ye, and -s for -th), women take the lead; the change from multiple to single negation as well as the use of which for the which seems to be led by males, possibly because women did not have access to the literary standard in the sixteenth century. Slightly more recent historical sociolinguistics is the subject of Manfred Görlach, English in Nineteenth-Century England: An Introduction, a textbook intended for classroom use. Chapter 2 in particular, on ‘Regional and Social Varieties’, may serve as a brief introduction to the literary use of dialect, the negative image of Cockney, and ‘vulgarisms’ as social indicators. Exercises in the text are a good starting-point for more detailed investigations, and the host of historical texts that make up almost half the volume underline the problems that, as Görlach points out, historical sociolinguistics has to face. However, much of the interesting discussion and conflicting viewpoints are hidden in the form of exercises and points of discussion, so that the reader is left wondering about the ‘correct’ answers which the author must have had in mind. Another strong area of research this year is the study of dialect grammar. Elizabeth Godfrey and Sali Tagliamonte provide a study on a morphological phenomenon in ‘Another Piece for the Verbal -s Story: Evidence from Devon in Southwest England’ (LVC 11[1999] 87–121). Although south-western dialects are generally known to permit -s with all persons, detailed statistical analyses reveal that—very unexpectedly—the type of subject (noun vs. pronoun) constrains the choice, revealing patterns much like those generally thought to exist only in northern PAGE 76 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 77 England, Scotland and Ireland (summarized in the Northern Subject Rule). Moving to the north of England, Juhani Klemola investigates ‘Still Sat in your Car? PseudoPassives with sat and stood and the History of Non-Standard Varieties of English English’ (Sociolinguistica 13[1999] 129–40). Klemola argues that this Northern construction is a relatively recent innovation; it arose when the old dialect participle sitten was replaced by sat, which was then overgeneralized and replaced the (phonetically identical) ing-form as well. Dialect grammar is also the subject of several monographs this year. Still dealing with the north of England is Graham Shorrocks’s second volume on the Greater Manchester area, A Grammar of the Dialect of the Bolton Area, part 2: Morphology and Syntax (the first part, dealing with phonology, was out last year (YWES 79[2000] 85–6) This second part is much less voluminous than the first, not because the Bolton dialect is less distinctive than its accent, but for methodological reasons. Instead of giving a complete dialect grammar, Shorrocks wisely concentrates on those features that are different from Standard English. His main hypothesis that English dialects do vary significantly at the grammatical level is borne out by a host of features, ranging from the clitic definite article t’, noun morphology (e.g. irregular plurals, thou vs. ye, her for she, zero relatives etc.) and verb morphology (different set of irregular verbs, modal mun, the presence of I amn’t) via the use of the negator noan as well as multiple negation to a whole set of different prepositions, and of course many other features. Shorrocks’s extremely thorough description is always corroborated by a wealth of carefully transcribed (and glossed) examples. The nature of this work makes it most useful as a reference work for dialectologists on these grammatical aspects. In the mosaic work of comparative dialectology this study will certainly feature as one of the most reliable little stones. Two more noteworthy monographs on the subject of dialect grammar have appeared, namely Markku Filppula, The Grammar of Irish English: Language in Hibernian Style and Martina Häcker, Adverbial Clauses in Scots, which at the same time move us to the topic of the ‘Celtic Englishes’, a term that is establishing itself more and more. Filppula discusses several Hiberno-English (HE) (Irish English) constructions that clearly distinguish it from Standard English. Six chapters investigate in particular the HE use of the definite article, ‘unbound’ reflexive pronouns; the tense/aspect system (in particular perfects and periphrastic do) and plural concord (but not singular concord); questions, responses and negation; resumptive pronouns, subordinating and, and the use of only and but as conjunctions; use of the prepositions on, in, with and of; and focusing devices (although this is not an exhaustive list of Irish English grammatical features, and some phenomena would have benefited from a more thorough discussion in the context of this book). Based on corpus evidence from twenty-four NORMs (for the term see above) from four areas of Southern Ireland, Filppula argues for substratal influence from Irish Gaelic for most of these phenomena, which would clearly establish Hiberno-English as a contact vernacular. Even where British English dialects show similar constructions, statistical evidence as well as dialect continua inside Ireland argue for influence from Irish Gaelic. Throughout, comparisons with Irish Gaelic constructions, earlier dialectal evidence as well as EModE parallels (or not) and the comparison with British English dialects help strengthen Filppula’s case. Especially helpful are parallels in other ‘Celtic Englishes’, such as Hebridean English and Welsh English. It is particularly striking that many constructions do not PAGE 77 OF 123 78 ENGLISH LANGUAGE appear in Welsh English (nor, indeed, in Celtic Welsh), which proves Filppula’s point ex negativo. Häcker, Adverbial Clauses in Scots on the other hand takes a diametrically opposed view. This thorough study of the adverbial subordinators of Scots, based on a representative corpus of spoken and written dialect narratives, shows that the Scots system is autonomous and consistent in itself. Comparisons with Standard English show—not surprisingly—qualitative as well as quantitative differences. In particular, there are differences in the inventories, differences in the clause structures and distributional differences. Häcker also compares Scots with those other European languages (as well as historical varieties) that can reasonably be suspected to have influenced Scots, putting Scots in a much wider perspective and linking it with general typological trends. In this context it is interesting to note that Gaelic seems to have had hardly any influence, at least on the adverbial constructions of Scots, which makes this study further evidence against regarding Scots a ‘Celtic’ variety of English. Moving now to accent studies dealing with Scotland: Deborah Chirrey presents ‘Edinburgh: Descriptive Material’ (in Foulkes and Docherty, eds. [1999] pp. 223– 9), which is the basis for the chapter that follows, James M. Scobbie, Nigel Hewlett and Alice E. Turk’s ‘Standard English in Edinburgh and Glasgow: The Scottish Vowel Length Rule Revealed’ (Foulkes and Docherty eds. [1999] pp. 230–45). The authors take issue with ‘Aitken’s Law’ (as the Scottish Vowel Length Rule (SVLR) is also known): a reanalysis of previous studies shows that the morphological pattern of the SVLR affects only /i/, /u/ and /ai/ in Scottish Standard English, rather than all vowels. As RP has increasing influence in Edinburgh, the middle classes especially can be expected to move further away from the SVLR towards more Anglo-English models. Jane Stuart-Smith discusses voice quality in ‘Glasgow: Accent and Voice Quality’ (Foulkes and Docherty, eds. [1999] pp. 203–22), which is impressionistically distinctive and often stereotyped, although little studied so far. A perceptual analysis of thirty-two speakers indicates clear differences of age, gender and social background, such that working-class male speech is produced with a more open jaw, raised and backed tongue body and supralaryngeal laxness, whereas middle-class voice quality can be defined by the absence of these settings. Moving back to Ireland, Kevin McCafferty deals with an otherwise little-studied town in Northern Ireland in ‘(London)Derry: Between Ulster and Local Speech– Class, Ethnicity and Language Change’ (in Foulkes and Docherty, eds. [1999] pp. 246–64). In Londonderry, which used to be one of the most segregated towns in Northern Ireland, perhaps contrary to expectations the Protestants are not oriented towards British English, nor the Catholics towards Southern Irish, and the differentiation is not greatest in the working class, as McCafferty’s study of fiftynine teenagers and forty-eight adults shows. Instead, Protestants are changing towards more widespread Northern Irish patterns, especially in the middle class, whereas Catholics tend to maintain more local forms. Dublin English is represented by two studies from Raymond Hickey this year. Hickey describes the accent in ‘Dublin English: Current Changes and their Motivation’ (Foulkes and Docherty, eds. [1999] pp. 265–81), where he detects the ‘Dublin Vowel Shift’, affecting long vowels: diphthongs are retracted, low back vowels are raised. As the data only goes back as far as 1994, many observations unfortunately remain speculative. In ‘Developments and Change in Dublin English’ (in Jahr, ed. [1999] pp. 209–43), Hickey investigates these changes in more detail. He claims that they originated in PAGE 78 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 79 the educated class and ‘serve the function of increasing the distance between popular and middle class speech’ (p. 209). Thus, the socially higher classes for example maintain rhoticism and support shifts that move away both from rural and Dublin popular speech. Turning to Wales now, Inger M. Mees and Beverley Collins report from a longitudinal study that began in 1976(!) in ‘Cardiff: a Real-Time Study of Glottalization’ (in Foulkes and Docherty, eds. [1999] pp. 185–202). /t/glottalization, hardly known in most other Welsh accents, is on the increase in middle-class Cardiff speech (much in common with neighbouring English dialects). Whether working-class speech is also infiltrated depends on the attitudes of the speaker: girls with higher social ambitions pattern with the middle class, and glottalization seems to have acquired the status of representing ‘sophisticated and fashionable speech’. Several studies on dialect recognition of Welsh English have appeared this year. In ‘“Welshness” and “Englishness” as Attitudinal Dimensions of English Language Varieties in Wales’ (in Preston, ed., Handbook of Perceptual Dialectology [1999] pp. 333–43) Nikolas Coupland, Angie Williams and Peter Garrett report on the first part of a study in which secondary school teachers in Wales had to label the main dialect regions on a map of Wales as well as evaluate them on a seven-point semantic scale. ‘Welshness’ emerged as the strongest factor, and, interestingly, the pattern of the (Celtic) Welsh heartland is mirrored by the evaluation of the Welsh English dialects as well. The same authors (but in a different order: Williams, Garrett and Coupland) present a complementary study in ‘Dialect Recognition’ (in Preston, ed. [1999] pp. 345–58), where they investigate young adults’ recognition of English varieties in Wales. Snippets from dialect speakers of their own age group from all seven dialect areas had to be labelled; overall, there was surprisingly low recognition, especially in comparison with their teachers. Although this might be caused by the the fact that teenagers had fewer experiences of dialect speakers, some recurrent mismatches may be due to affective factors, as for example a very likeable speaker was ‘actively appropriated into the in-group’. This point is expanded in Garrett, Coupland and Williams’s ‘Evaluating Dialect in Discourse: Teachers’ and Teenagers’ Responses to Young English Speakers in Wales’ (LSoc 28[1999] 321–54). Sophisticated statistical analyses, in particular multidimensional scaling and cluster analysis, offer support for the hypothesis that factors such as ‘social attractiveness’ indeed play a major role in the evaluation of speakers. Moving across the ocean now for studies on American English. One study of last year must be mentioned that somehow slipped through the reviewer’s otherwise infallible filing system, namely Thomas E. Murray’s ‘More on drug/dragged and snuck/sneaked’ (JEngL 26[1998] 209–21). A convenience sample of Midwesterners shows that the non-standard preterite forms enjoy a high level of acceptance without regional, dialectal or informal affiliations. Although snuck in particular is still disparaged by stylebooks, it is fully acceptable today, with only slight sociolinguistic significance. Similar in some respects is a study the same author did with Beth Lee Simon this year, ‘Want + Past Participle in American English’ (AS 74[1999] 140–64), also on a not-quite-standard grammatical feature (e.g. the baby wants picked up). This construction is found in particular in the North Midland area, and again it is ‘sociolinguistically transparent’, i.e. unmarked for any of the classical sociolinguistic variables. Intriguingly, it is at the same time used and not used, PAGE 79 OF 123 80 ENGLISH LANGUAGE judged as correct and incorrect, in the same places. It is only accepted by speakers who also accept need with the past participle (the car needs washed), and the authors propose a possible Scotch-Irish origin, leaving much detail open to debate, however. Bonnie McElhinny presents ‘More on the Third Dialect of English: Linguistic Constraints on the Use of Three Phonological Variables in Pittsburgh’ (LVC 11[1999] 171–95)—the Third Dialect being dialects affected by neither the Northern Cities Shift nor the Southern Shift, which makes it a rather heterogeneous category. McElhinny investigates in particular /i/- and /u/-laxing before /l/, which she neatly links to /l/-vocalization: long vowels are laxed before /l/ because l vocalizes (or is it the other way around?): /l/ comes to occupy the ‘glide slot’ in the syllable nucleus, and the resultant shortening automatically leads to laxing in English. Studies on dialect perception are well represented this year, mainly due to Dennis Preston, ed., Handbook of Perceptual Dialectology, but also to a special edition of JLSP (JLSP 18:i[1999]) dedicated to ‘Attitudes, Perception, and Linguistic Features’, and edited by Lesley Milroy, Dennis R. Preston and John Edwards. Individual studies are discussed below. Laura C. Hartley provides ‘A View From the West: Perceptions of U.S. Dialects by Oregon Residents’ (in Preston, ed. [1999] pp. 315–32). Hartley’s informants had to perform the typical tasks of drawing maps, labelling accent areas, and saying ‘how different’ individual accents were. Hartley finds that in western states, ‘a multiplicity and therefore awareness of distinctive dialects is not as prevalent as in eastern and southern states’ (p. 323). Only California is perceived as distinct, which points to a lack of solidarity that Oregonians obviously feel towards their southern neighbours. Donald M. Lance deals with mental maps in ‘Regional Variation in Subjective Dialect Divisions in the United States’ (Preston, ed. [1999] pp. 283–314), claiming these are determined by where one grew up. Although these differences do not usually cause problems in everyday interactions, academics should be more aware of possible mismatches. Finally, Dennis R. Preston himself gives ‘A Language Attitude Approach to the Perception of Regional Variety’ (Preston, ed. [1999] pp. 359–73). Just as ten years ago, informants still perceive the South as the most salient (‘least correct’) dialect region, whereas the North (home) is perceived as ‘most correct’. All ‘friendly’ attributes are associated with the South more, which is generally evaluated much more positively than ten years ago. Preston proposes the notion of ‘symbolic linguistic capital’ which can be spent in different ways, but not at the same time. For example, Michiganders seem to spend it on correctness/standardness; this means they have to borrow from stigmatized speech communities in order to achieve a more casual, interpersonal style. Also from Michigan comes Nancy Niedzielski’s ‘The Effect of Social Information on the Perception of Sociolinguistic Variables’ (JLSP 18[1999] 62–85). A Detroit speaker (with raised vowels, due to the Northern Cities Chain Shift (NCCS)) was variably presented as a Detroiter and as a Canadian. Informants (also from Detroit) were asked to match her vowels. Especially for the stereotypical Canadian diphthong /aw/, listeners only perceived the actual raising when they thought the speaker was from Canada. Strikingly, also for the other vowels taking part in the NCCS, informants who thought they listened to a fellow Detroiter consistently assigned more standard vowels instead of the raised or laxed vowels that were actually produced. PAGE 80 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 81 Moving from the North to the South: again, the South is the area studied most this year. Beth Lee Simon and Thomas E. Murray discuss ‘How Suite It Is’ (JEngL 27[1999] 27–39); the authors find an extraordinary lexical specialization in the South and South Midland US where suite is pronounced /sut/ instead of /swi:t/ only when it refers to a set of furniture. Although this use cuts across all age groups, educational levels, socioeconomic classes, races, genders and styles, it is perceived as indicative of lower class from the outside. Lawrence M. Davis moves our attention ‘From Confederate Overalls to Designer Jeans’ (JEngL 27[1999] 115–26). Davis compares data from Alabama from LAGS (the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States), collected in the 1970s and 1980s, with data from Virginia to South Carolina from the older LAMSAS (Linguistic Atlas of the Mid- and South Atlantic States), collected in the 1930s and 1940s. Although Davis chose terms that are not affected by urbanization, he found only half as many southern terms in the Alabama material. General terms (e.g. midwife for granny woman) have taken over, no doubt due to the time difference between these two linguistic atlases. On a grammatical theme, Michael Montgomery and Margaret Mishoe investigate ‘“He bes took up with a Yankee girl and moved up there to New York”: The Verb bes in the Carolinas and its History’ (AS 74[1999] 240–81), where bes is used as a finite verb in in-group vernacular style by a group of white speakers. Whereas bes in AAVE denotes habituality, for these speakers bes is simply the inflected (concord) form of be. The authors trace ‘invariant’ be to general English folk-speech input, whereas bes seems to be an innovation in Carolina. Natalie Schilling-Estes and Walt Wolfram deal with a rather sad topic in ‘Alternative Models of Dialect Death: Dissipation vs. Concentration’ (Language 75[1999] 486–521), arguing controversially that language (and dialect) death does not necessarily entail dissipation (=dilution). The example of the dialect of Smith Island, Maryland, shows that this dialect is on the contrary becoming more concentrated, and change is accelerating as the dialect is becoming extinct through loss of speakers. A comparison with Ocracoke (North Carolina) in particular shows that even unusual patterning in the variation can be explained as having social meaning—moribund varieties are perhaps not so different from healthy varieties of language after all. An important meta-topic is introduced by Guy Bailey and Jan Tillery in ‘The Rutledge Effect: The Impact of Interviewers on Survey Results in Linguistics’ (AS 74[1999] 389–402), going back to Michael Montgomery’s study of multiple modals in LAGS from last year (YWES 79[2000] 88). A detailed investigation of the original interviews shows that rather than a correlation of the use of multiple modals with the interviewer’s sex, as Montgomery proposed, this correlation is due to one interviewer, Barbara Rutledge (hence the new term), who directly elicited multiple modals, whereas her colleagues relied more on conversational evidence. Obviously, this also skews the regional distribution of this feature, and leads to the more general caution that especially where features are very rare, individual interviewers might have an extraordinary impact on regional survey results. The English of Native American tribes features in several publications this year. Bridget L. Anderson discusses ‘Source-Language Transfer and Vowel Accommodation in the Patterning of Cherokee English /ai/ and /oi/’ (AS 74[1999] 339–68) in the language of the Snowbird Cherokees of Graham County, North Carolina, one of the most conservative and traditional groups of Cherokees. What PAGE 81 OF 123 82 ENGLISH LANGUAGE looks like accommodation to Anglo-English (monophthongization of /ai/) is better interpreted as phonological transfer from the ancestral language. This also explains the parallel monophthongization of /oi/ which is not part of Anglo-English dialects. The little-known Native American tribe of the Lumbee Indians is the subject of several other studies. Walt Wolfram and Clare Dannenberg give an interesting introduction to this ethnic group in ‘Dialect Identity in a Tri-Ethnic Context: The Case of Lumbee American Indian English’ (EWW 20[1999] 179–216). The Lumbee Indians in Robeson County, North Carolina have a number of dialect features, such as perfective be (I’m been here), that are only found in very few other, historically isolated dialect areas. Other features are shared with their European and African American neighbours (for example finite bes: She bes here), where often Lumbee Indian dialect takes an intermediate position between the two other ethnic groups. The same mixture is true for phonology and the lexicon; Lumbee Indians have few unique features, but through the combination of old features and further internal developments they have created a ‘dialect niche’ that is distinctive and, to them, immediately recognizable. Walt Wolfram and Jason Sellers report in more detail on the ‘Ethnolinguistic Marking of Past be in Lumbee Vernacular English’ (JEngL 27[1999] 94–114), where the minority option of levelling to were (in addition to was) occurs. A VARBRUL analysis reveals that the third person plural favours was, whereas negatives favour weren’t. Wolfram and Sellers conclude that werelevelling is probably an imported feature, as Lumbee English shares this with isolated areas like the Outer Banks Islands, whereas was-levelling typically arises spontaneously. Clare Dannenberg investigates the present tense paradigm of be for the three ethnic groups in ‘Grammatical and Phonological Manifestations of Null Copula in a Tri-Ethnic Contact Situation’ (JEngL 27[1999] 356–70) and finds, surprisingly, that whereas for many phenomena Lumbee Indians occupy an intermediate position between Anglo Americans and African Americans, for null copula they pattern with the Anglo group. Copula absence is also the subject of Patricia Cukor-Avila in ‘Stativity and Copula Absence in AAVE’ (JEngL 27[1999] 341–55), at the same time moving us to AAVE. Cukor-Avila takes issue with the constraint hierarchy for copula absence that is often cited as the main argument for (or against) a creole origin of AAVE. Cukor-Avila shows in her data from Springville, Texas, that when the heterogeneous category of adjectives is split into statives vs. non-statives (vs. participial) adjectives, pre-Second World War speakers group the non-stative adjectives with the statives, but post-Second World War speakers group them with participial adjectives. Not only does this call for a reinterpretation of earlier hierarchies, it also shows that the system itself may be in flux and the hierarchy changing. Sali Tagliamonte and Jennifer Smith investigate ‘Analogical Leveling in Samaná English: The Case of was and were’ (JEngL 27[1999] 8–26). In Samaná, an enclave of ex-slaves in the Dominican Republic, was is used for were everywhere, particularly with they and NP subjects. A comparison with US and British studies shows that instead of ethnicity or geographical isolation, it is sociocultural isolation that correlates with the highest rates of was-levelling. Another study on a grammatical theme (well, two, actually) is Wolfgang Viereck’s ‘African American English: Verbal -s and be2 in Hyatt’s Earlier and Later Corpus’ (in Jahr, ed. [1999] pp. 245–59). Hyatt investigated hoodoo practices from 1936 to 1942 as well as in the 1970s, and recorded his interviews (more or less faithfully). As Viereck’s paper PAGE 82 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 83 consists mostly of direct quotations, there is unfortunately only little room for his claim that there is no evidence that would support a divergence hypothesis. Thomas Purnell, William Idsardi and John Baugh deal with ‘Perceptual and Phonetic Experiments on American English Dialect Identification’ (in JLSP 18[1999] 10– 30). The tri-dialectal Baugh used AAVE, Chicano English and Standard American English on the telephone to secure a housing appointment. Subsequent tests find that even one word (‘hello’) is sufficient to correctly identify the (ethnic) dialect of the speaker in most cases, although acoustic analyses are not conclusive (yet). These experiments may be a first step of proving that racial discrimination may be involved even if the hearer does not see the speaker, as minute acoustic cues might be sufficient. One of the most important contributions to the study of AAVE this year comes from John R. Rickford. Rickford has collected much of his writing over the last twenty-five years and published this, sometimes in a slightly revised form, as African American Vernacular English: Features, Evolution, Educational Implications. As all chapters have appeared as articles before, they will not be reviewed in detail here. It has to be said however that this valuable collection provides a stimulating insight into the structure of AAVE, in particular in contrast to other dialects of English and, of course, a good collection of arguments for the creole origin of AAVE, as Rickford is one of the main proponents of this theory. That this is not only a discussion of interest to academics is shown in the third part where educational implications are discussed. Of course, the Oakland School Board controversy features here as well. Finally, the English of Mexican Americans in Texas and California is the subject of Robert Bayley’s ‘Relativization Strategies in Mexican-American English’ (AS 74[1999] 115–39), where he finds that as the most frequent relativizer. Bayley argues that the high rates of that are due to the fact that the use of that does not violate any norm of English and at the same time corresponds closely to the Spanish substrate. Briefly moving north across the border, only a few studies on Canadian English have been published this year. One of them is Sandra Clarke on ‘The Search for Origins: Habitual Aspect and Newfoundland Vernacular English [NVE]’ (JEngL 27[1999] 328–40). Clarke shows that in the process of settlement, linguistic output can become quite different from the input. Although the two main original dialects of Newfoundland settlers (the south-west of England and Southern Ireland) have periphrastic do, this feature does not occur in NVE; habituality is usually expressed by -s (I gets sick) or by bees. Clarke reasons that this is due to considerable variation in the source dialects, where the habitual meaning was only one among a range. The language of women has featured in the various regional sections already. A special issue of LSoc (LSoc 28:ii[1999]), ‘The Community of Practice: Theories and Methodologies in Language and Gender’, is devoted to this topic this year. Janet Holmes and Miriam Meyerhoff introduce the relatively new concept of the ‘Community of Practice’ (CofP) in their introductory essay, ‘The Community of Practice: Theories and Methodologies in Language and Gender Research’ (LSoc 28[1999] 173–83), usefully distinguishing it from the ‘speech community’, ‘social networks’ and ‘social identity’ theory used so far in sociolinguistics. The CofP concept emphasizes the active construction of membership. Victoria L. Bergvall in ‘Toward a Comprehensive Theory of Language and Gender’ (LSoc 28[1999] 273– 93) emphasizes the advantages of the CofP approach for gender studies, as gender PAGE 83 OF 123 84 ENGLISH LANGUAGE can be viewed as something that is actively constructed, rather than as an independent variable. However, Bergvall also notes critically that the CofP approach has to be augmented by an investigation of the dominant ideology of gender and the innateness of gender. Of particular interest to researchers of English sociolinguistics is the contribution by Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell-Ginet on ‘New Generalizations and Explanations in Language and Gender Research’ (LSoc 28[1999] 185–201), where the authors investigate the CofP of groups of highschool girls, arguing that a search for more general gender patterns must take account of individual practices, in particular of seeming ‘exceptions’ and marginal members in order to be fully explanatory, rather than simply state correlations. Mary Bucholtz gives a good example of an actual application of the CofP approach to a marginal member in ‘“Why Be Normal?”: Language and Identity Practices in a Community of Nerd Girls’ (LSoc 28[1999] 203–23). She investigates the linguistic (and non-linguistic) behaviour of a marginal group of ‘nerd girls’ and shows how these girls create their gender identities in contrast to the dominant stereotypes, employing (among other things) language to constitute their alternative identities. Briefly looking at studies on the fringes of traditional sociolinguistics now, Michele Knobel has published Everyday Literacies: Students, Discourse, and Social Practice. She investigates the language behaviour of four adolescents. Particularly striking is the mismatch between these youngsters’ language performance in school and their private discourses. This is a personal and in this respect interesting account of very different children, but in linguistic terms rather unilluminating (although the setting may have been interesting and very fruitful for an investigation of dialect switching). On a more serious level is Guus Extra and Ludo Verhoeven, eds., Bilingualism and Migration. This is an interesting collection of new approaches to bilingualism (by, among others, Carol Myers-Scotton and Suzanne Romaine), especially in connection with the European Union. However, the contributions are not taking account of dialectal variation, although some of the approaches were presented last year in Peter Auer, ed., Code-Switching in Conversation [1998] (YWES 79[2000] 86), and thus this collection is of only indirect interest to sociolinguistics. Of particular interest to educators must be the third edition of James Milroy and Lesley Milroy, Authority in Language: Investigating Standard English [1999] (first edition 1987, second edition 1991), which is still one of the most basic investigations into the ideology behind standardization, dealing in particular with (historical and present-day) prescriptive attitudes and their practical applications, which all too often pave the way for discrimination against non-standard speakers. The third edition carries many revisions and updates (although many ‘recent’ developments still refer to the 1980s), and in particularly a new chapter (chapter 9, pp. 150–60) comparing British and US standard ideology, which relates the different manifestations to different historical developments. 10. New Englishes and Creolistics The title of Marko Modiano’s article, ‘International English in the Global Village’ (EnT 15:ii[1999] 22–8), already hints at the main concerns of the contributions dealing with (New) Englishes in general: the role of English in economic and PAGE 84 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 85 political globalization and the question of linguistic standards in an international context. Modiano proposes a centripetal model of international English, parallel to B. Kachru’s three concentric circles, in which the inner circle stands for proficiency in international English, both in L1 and L2 speakers, the next layer represents native and foreign language competence not equipped to communicate internationally (for example because of a strong regional accent or other dialectal features), while the outer layer comprises all learners of English. He claims that in a global context the concept that speakers of the major L1-varieties ‘own’ the English language must be replaced by the introduction of EIL as a legitimate variety which is also used for teaching purposes world-wide to facilitate communication among all speakers of English. Various aspects of Modiano’s model are discussed—sometimes very critically—in a feedback section (EnT 15:ii[1999] 28–34) with invited comments from Michael Toolan, Augustin Simo-Bobda, Loreto Todd, Alan S. Kaye, François Chevillet and Prayag D. Tripathi. Modiano, in turn, replies to these comments by explaining his view on ‘Standard English(es) and Educational Practices for the World’s Lingua Franca’ (EnT 15:iv[1999] 3–13), elaborating his ‘common core’ concept for EIL which requires the selection of those features most commonly used by speakers of English world-wide rather than relying on either standard BrE or AmE as a teaching model, as advocated by John Honey and others. The question of standards is also the topic of WEn’s ‘Symposium on Standards, Codification and World Englishes’ edited by Susan Kaur Gill and Anne Pakir (WEn 18[1999] 159– 274). While most contributions deal with Standard English in specific countries and will be discussed below, Alan Davies provides us with an overview of the current debate about Standard English in his comments on ‘Standard English: Discordant Voices’ (WEn 18[1999] 171–86), concluding that a variety of Standard English is a necessity, but whichever variety is chosen depends on the speech community concerned. Samuel Ahulu’s discussion of ‘The Evaluation of Errors and 21stCentury Structure and Usage’ (EnT 15:iii[1999] 33–9) can be regarded as an illustration of some of Modiano’s proposals, because he focuses on the fine line between ‘acceptable in an international (or local) context’ and ‘not grammatically acceptable in any context’ in an actual teaching situation. The ideological side of the use of English in a global context is examined by David Cooke in ‘Contending Discourses and Ideologies: English and Agency’ (L&C 19[1999] 415–24), in which he analyses the use of English in economic and political contexts by those groups discussed in Modiano’s article. Like Marko Modiano, David Crystal is concerned with teaching models in an international context. His reflections on ‘The Future of Englishes’ (EnT 15:ii[1999] 10–20) begin with a discussion of Tom McArthur, The English Languages [1998] (see YWES 79[2000] 2–3) and proceed to introduce two new teaching standards, World Standard Printed English (WSPE) and World Standard Spoken English (WSSE). According to Crystal, WSPE is already used in international written communication while WSSE is still developing in international organizations and similar contexts. He therefore urges ELT institutions such as the British Council to take this development into account, but hesitates to abandon RP completely as a teaching standard. While it is almost universally accepted by scholars in the field that British RP cannot realistically remain the standard for English teaching and usage world-wide, the debate about which standard(s) to implement will certainly continue for a number of years. PAGE 85 OF 123 86 ENGLISH LANGUAGE Moving on to the discussion of specific Englishes, we shall begin with the southern hemisphere. Arthur Delbridge provides a detailed description of the history of ‘Standard Australian English’ (WEn 18[1999] 259–70), focusing on the different steps towards codification (i.e. broadcasting, dictionaries or teaching materials) and the accompanying changes in language attitudes. The bulk of publications on the region, however, are concerned with NZE. A fairly comprehensive collection, Allan Bell and Koenraad Kuiper, eds., New Zealand English, intended to represent the scope of current research on this variety, is published in the Varieties of English Around the World series. It contains two contributions on the development of NZE pronunciation, both drawing on the work of Elizabeth Gordon and the research group at Canterbury University. Nicola Woods presents further findings on ‘New Zealand English Across the Generations: An Analysis of Selected Vowel and Consonant Variables’ in the speech of a family from the Otago region and Margaret Batterham provides more information on regional variation concerning ‘The Apparent Merger of the Front Centering Diphthongs—EAR and AIR—in New Zealand English’. On the synchronic side, Paul Warren and David Britain review the relatively sparse previous research on ‘Intonation and Prosody in New Zealand English’ to establish unique NZE patterns, while W. Scott Allan and Donna Starks aim at positioning NZE pronunciation with regard to AusE and SAE in ‘“No-One Sounds Like Us?”: A Comparison of New Zealand and Other Southern Hemisphere Englishes’. They show that these three varieties have many features in common and differ considerably from RP and other UK dialects. Two contributions deal with NZE morphosyntax. Heidi Quinn discusses ‘Variation in New Zealand English Syntax and Morphology’ with a strong emphasis on the verb phrase, heavily relying on previous research by Laurie Bauer and Marianne Hundt (see YWES 79[2000] 96–7). David Britain used the Wellington corpora of spoken and written NZE for his study ‘As far as Analysing Grammatical Variation and Change in New Zealand English with Very Few Tokens <Is Concerned/Ø>’, an in-depth analysis of the variables governing the omission of the verbal coda in as far as-constructions. Tony Deverson’s contribution on ‘Handling New Zealand English Lexis’ is concerned with the classification of New Zealandisms, while Laurie Bauer traces ‘The Dialectal Origins of New Zealand English’, identifying the various British sources for NZE lexemes. Another aspect of the NZE lexicon is discussed in Bernadette Vine’s study of ‘Americanisms in the New Zealand English Lexicon’ (WEn 18[1999] 13–22), which compares speakers’ usage and language attitudes. The volume edited by Bell and Kuiper also contains two chapters on the different varieties of NZE spoken by Pakeha, i.e. Anglos, and Maori. Allan Bell contributes ‘Maori and Pakeha English: A Case Study’, in which he reviews previous research on the linguistic features of Maori speech, followed by a comparison of those phonological, morphological and discourse features suspected to be typical of Maori Vernacular English in the speech of one Maori man and one Pakeha man. Although the database was deliberately kept small, the results corroborate other studies by consistently showing higher frequencies of suspected features in the Maori sample. Maria Stubbe and Janet Holmes in turn investigate the specific ways of ‘Talking Maori or Pakeha in English: Signalling Identity in Discourse’, concentrating on the pragmatic devices, such as tags, borrowing, narrative structure or humour, used by Maori speakers to assert their ethnicity without speaking the Maori language itself. PAGE 86 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 87 Finally, Donn Bayard offers insights on ‘The Cultural Cringe Revisited: Changes through Time in Kiwi Attitudes toward Accents’, presenting surprising data from two accent evaluation studies conducted in 1986 and 1996–7. Unlike some media reports on the growing New Zealand (linguistic) self-confidence, Bayard’s work shows that New Zealanders still rate RP the most prestigious standard, while North American and Australian voices score highest with regard to mateship and solidarity—a role elsewhere fulfilled by local non-standard varieties. These results are also supported by a smaller study conducted by George Ray and Christopher Zahn on ‘Language Attitudes and Speech Behaviour: New Zealand English and Standard American English’ (JLSP 18[1999] 310–19) in which NZE and AmE speakers scored similarly with regard to social attractiveness and dynamism. Donn Bayard also investigates ‘Getting in a Flap or Turning off the Tap in Dunedin?: Stylistic Variation in New Zealand English Intervocalic (-t-)’ (EWW 20[1999] 125–55), combining data from Janet Holmes’s analysis of informal data from the Wellington Corpus of Spoken English with that from the formal register Dunedin survey to provide a full-scale analysis of the ‘tap vs flap’-realization of intervocalic /t/ in NZE. A continuing interest in NZE sound changes is mirrored by two publications based on the recordings of New Zealanders born in the late nineteenth century which are analysed at the University of Canterbury. Margaret Maclagan, Elizabeth Gordon and Gillian Lewis study ‘Women and Sound Change: Conservative and Innovative Behaviour by the Same Speakers’ (LVC 11[1999] 19– 41), following up Labov’s claim that young female speakers from the second highest social class are innovative with regard to non-stigmatized features while conservative with regard to stigmatized features by looking at the pronunciation of three non-stigmatized and two stigmatized vowels. Their findings are not completely in line with Labov’s claim and lead the authors to conclude that the overall speech behaviour of individuals rather than group averages for single variables needs to be considered. Prompted by the results of Trudgill’s follow-up study in Norwich, which showed that a pronunciation dismissed as idiosyncratic in the original survey turned out to be early evidence for a subsequent sound change, Elizabeth Gordon and Peter Trudgill proceed to unveil ‘Shades of Things to Come: Embryonic Variants in New Zealand English Sound Changes’ (EWW 20[1999] 111–24), discovering that features like the EAR/AIR-merger which have become frequent in today’s NZE are already observable in these historical recordings. Laurie Bauer is also concerned with diachronic phonology, elaborating ‘On the Origins of the New Zealand English Accent’ (EWW 20[1999] 287–307). As in the case of the NZE lexicon (see above), he traces the individual sources of different features, showing that the NZE accent is based on a mixed input from dialects across Britain, although features from southern England predominate. As was the case for the treatment of the New Englishes in general, many publications dealing with English in Asia focus on questions of standards and standardization. Susan Butler presents ‘A View on Standards in South-East Asia’ (WEn 18[1999] 187–98) from the perspective of a dictionary editor. Based on data from workshops held in Manila, Bangkok and Singapore, she reports differences in the acceptability judgements of local items and exogenous norms. Anne Pakir’s contribution on ‘Standards? Dictionaries and their Development in Second Language Learning’ (WEn 18[1999] 199–214) also stresses the importance of computer-readable corpora in the compilation of dictionaries suited to cover the PAGE 87 OF 123 88 ENGLISH LANGUAGE lexical innovations in Asian varieties like Singapore English, from which most of her examples are drawn. Susan Kaur Gill is concerned with ‘Standards and Emerging Linguistic Realities in the Malaysian Workplace’ (WEn 18[1999] 215– 31). After discussing the development of Malaysian English and its stratification in sociolects, the author reports the results of an acceptability judgement experiment in which high executives ranked recordings of lower-level managers speaking Malaysian English. It was found that only speakers of the acrolect, with mild Malay accents and almost no syntactic variation, were considered acceptable for business presentations. With regard to ‘The Functions and Status of English in Hong Kong: A Post-1997 Update’ (EWW 20[1999] 67–110), David Li presents a follow-up to a 1982 study within J. Fishman’s paradigm of assigning languages to different domains. While many changes have taken place since the handover, and Putonghua and Cantonese are gaining ground in spoken and written domains, English still carries enough social prestige and symbolic value to render the label ‘auxiliary language’ inadequate for today’s Hong Kong English. And finally, two publications deal with specific features of Singapore English. Bao Zhiming and Lionel Wee look at ‘The Passive in Singapore English’ (WEn 18[1999] 1–12), focusing on substrate influence from Malay (for the kena-passive) and Chinese (for the give-passive), and Low Ee Ling and Esther Grabe present ‘A Contrastive Study of Prosody and Lexical Stress Placement in Singapore English and British English’ (L&S 42[1999] 57–82), convincingly arguing that it is not the placement but the realization of lexical stress and other prosodic features that differs between these two varieties. With regard to English in Africa, we notice an increase in publications as compared to the last few years, especially with regard to West Africa. Jean-Paul Kouega reflects on ‘Forty Years of Bilingualism in Cameroon’ (EnT 15:iv[1999] 38–43), evaluating the official language policy and its implementation. Kouega comes to the conclusion that despite the efforts to promote French–English bilingualism, only very few speakers are fluent in both official languages, and he calls for a change in linguistic policy in education, public service and the media. Augustin Simo Bobda and Beban Sammy Chumbow provide a detailed generative analysis of ‘The Trilateral Process in Cameroon English Phonology: Underlying Representations and Phonological Processes in Non-Native Englishes’ (EWW 20[1999] 35–65), linking deviation from RP to the underlying form and the application of different phonological rules. While V.U. Longe investigates the lexicon of ‘Student Slang from Benin, Nigeria’ (EWW 20[1999] 237–49) based on spoken data recorded on campus and written texts collected from student magazines, Adeyeye Samson Dare is interested in the sociocultural problems in the relationship of ‘English and the Culture of the Yoruba’ (EnT 15:i[1999] 17–22), addressing communicative units such as greetings, politeness or kinship terms. A pilot study of language use and preferences by Liberians presently residing in the US leads Bernard L. Ngovo to predict ‘The Dominance of English among Liberian Children’ (EnT 15:iv[1999] 44–8) and thus the demise of the sixteen indigenous languages among the educated elite in Liberia. Turning our attention to East Africa, we welcome a well-researched study on Kenyan English idioms by Paul Skandera who wonders ‘What Do We Really Know about Kenyan English? A Pilot Study in Research Methodology’ (EWW 20[1999] 217–36). After carefully reviewing all previous research on Kenyan English, Skandera proceeds to show that a combination of corpus analysis, elicitation tests PAGE 88 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 89 and native speaker introspection reveals that many features previously regarded as typical of Kenyan English cannot be confirmed after careful analysis. Finally, for the southern part of the continent, Vivian de Klerk seeks to define the linguistic status and future prospects of ‘Black South African English: Where To from Here?’ (WEn 18[1999] 311–24). More specific aspects of the role of English in multilingual South Africa are covered in Athalie Crawford’s ‘“We Can’t All Understand the Whites’ Language”: An Analysis of Monolingual Health Services in a Multilingual Society’ (IJSL 136[1999] 27–45) and Eve Bertelsen’s ‘Free to Shop: New Black Advertising in South Africa’ (IJSL 136[1999] 47–62). Moving on to the Caribbean, we notice a wealth of publications dealing with the various creoles as opposed to only one single contribution on the standard varieties spoken in the region. But with regard to research on the linguistic situation in Jamaica, 1999 can be considered a vintage year. It is impossible for me to review Andrea Sand, Linguistic Variation in Jamaica: A Corpus-Based Study of Radio and Newspaper Usage like any other book on the subject since it is my own. Instead, I will restrict myself to a description of its scope. The study is based on a corpus of radio and newspaper texts compiled with a view to their inclusion in the Jamaican subcorpus of the International Corpus of English. After two introductory chapters describing the material and methods applied, as well as various theoretical models for the relationship between creoles and standard languages, the corpus is analysed both qualitatively and quantitatively with regard to its lexical and morphosyntactic features. The final chapter is devoted to code-switching and style-shifting in the corpus material. Several claims made in previous research about certain features, such as the overuse of the past perfect, could not be substantiated, and others, such as the occurrence of progressives without the copula, are indeed common in Jamaican English, but restricted to informal speech styles. These results are once again proof that text type and degree of formality need to be examined closely in analyses of New Englishes. The mesolectal spectrum of the Jamaican speech continuum is examined closely in Peter Patrick, Urban Jamaican Creole: Variation in the Mesolect. Patrick’s study uses typical sociolinguistic methods such as the interview, language attitude questionnaires and tests, and is based on a sample of fifteen speakers from two different age groups from Veeton, a relatively middle-class Kingston suburb. It contains a detailed introduction on the methodology used and the speech community under analysis. The variables studied are palatal glides in words like car, consonant cluster simplification, and preverbal PAST-markers vs. PAST-inflections which are all discussed in great detail. A separate chapter is devoted to social variation, different speech styles and language attitudes. Although quite different with regards to the methods used and the data covered, these two studies on English in Jamaica show some similar results, and both authors conclude that the notion of the creole continuum is substantiated by their research and that the linguistic variation encountered is ‘organized’ by a number of social and grammatical constraints. They also share the view that the creole continuum does not necessarily lead to the decreolization and disappearance of creole, as predicted by R.A. Hall in 1962. Similar counter-evidence is provided by Michael Aceto, who is ‘Looking beyond Decreolization as an Explanatory Model of Language Change in Creole-Speaking Communities’ (JPCL 14[1999] 93–119) with material from the Bastimentos Creole spoken in Panama. PAGE 89 OF 123 90 ENGLISH LANGUAGE The basilectal end of the Jamaican continuum is discussed in Darlene LaCharité and Jean Wellington’s contribution on the ‘Passive in Jamaican Creole: Phonetically Empty but Syntactically Active’ (JPCL 14[1999] 259–83), in which they provide an analysis of the passive construction within the framework of Government and Binding, proposing a passive-morpheme realized as zero for Jamaican Creole (JC). Alicia Bedford Wassink is concerned with ‘Historic Low Prestige and Seeds of Change: Attitudes toward Jamaican Creole’ (LSoc 28[1999] 57–92). She conducted fifty-one structured interviews in the semi-rural community of Gordon Town to shed light on the speakers’ beliefs about the linguistic features of JC and their attitudes towards them, comparing them to research done in similar settings. Her results show ambivalent attitudes towards JC, which is viewed mostly favourably from an emotional point of view, but not regarded as appropriate for certain social contexts. This marks an enormous gain of prestige for a variety formerly considered ‘broken English’. A different approach to a Caribbean creole is taken in Laurie A. Greene, A Grammar of Belizean Creole, which is based on Compilations from Two Existing United States Dialects, namely the ones spoken in the expatriate communities in New York and New Orleans. Greene defends her selection of expatriates as informants by pointing out that this particular situation lends itself to frequent assertions of ethnic identity through linguistic usage. Her analysis covers phonology, morphology, syntax, lexicon and typical speech styles (proverbs, gossip, quarrelling songs, etc.) of Belizean Creole (BC), based on several hours of phonetically transcribed conversations and supplemented by references to similar features in related Caribbean creoles. The appendix contains an alphabetical glossary and a selection of thirteen texts including a Standard English translation. While Greene does not provide a detailed analysis of each feature, her study is the first comprehensive treatment of BC and will be very useful for anyone seeking information on this particular creole. William H. Ham examines ‘Tone Sandhi in Saramaccan: A Case of Substrate Transfer?’ (JPCL 14[1999] 45–91), comparing tone features and the syntax–phonology interface of Saramaccan, the only Atlantic creole with distinctive tone, and Anlo, a dialect of Ewe. The results of this detailed analysis are discussed with regard to their significance in the creole genesis debate and Ham concludes that Saramaccan appears to have taken over a simplified, unmarked version of tone from its West African substrate language(s). John McWhorter has found ‘Skeletons in the Closet: Anomalies in the Behavior of the Saramaccan Copula’ (in Rickford and Romaine, eds., Creole Genesis, Attitudes and Discourse [1999] pp. 121–43), providing counterarguments against the popular assumption that the Saramaccan copula da/dε is derived from a West African locative. With regard to the Anglophone pidgins and creoles spoken in Africa, we welcome the publication of Magnus Huber, Ghanaian Pidgin English in its West African Context: A Sociohistorical and Structural Analysis. Huber offers a comprehensive treatment of the diachronic and synchronic aspects of this relatively unknown West African pidgin. The development of Ghanaian Pidgin English (GhaPE) is treated in the context of the socio-historical background of African–European contact on the African Gold Coast and the genesis of related West African pidgins, such as Krio and Nigerian Pidgin, in a thorough and well-documented fashion. The detailed description of GhaPE phonology and morphosyntax, supplemented by a CD PAGE 90 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 91 containing the soundtracks for all of the 265 examples used in this chapter, may be called pioneering, and will more than compensate readers for the somewhat sketchy and anecdotal treatment of the present sociolinguistic situation of GhaPE. The CD also contains pictures and maps illustrating the diachronic part of the book, as well as four longer recordings of different varieties of GhaPE. Huber’s book thus provides a solid introduction to GhaPE for teaching and research purposes. The West African pidgins related to GhaPE are also treated in John Victor Singler’s study ‘On the Marking of Temporal Sequencing in Vernacular Liberian English’ (in Rickford and Romaine, eds. [1999] pp. 337–52) in which he concentrates on the functions of the TMA-marker feni/finish. A number of publications deal with shared features in the Atlantic creoles, most notably the two volumes resulting from the Third Westminster Creolistics Workshop held in 1996. Philip Baker and Adrienne Bruyn, eds., St Kitts and the Atlantic Creoles: The Texts of Samuel Augustus Mathews in Perspective, is a collection of eleven texts (songs, dialogues and a collection of proverbs) written in the English-based creole of St Kitts in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The texts are translated and annotated and accompanied by a large range of papers commenting on their socio-historical background (by Victoria Borg O’Flaherty, Bridget Brereton, and Mikael Parkvall), orthography (by Neville Shrimpton), their individual linguistic features (by Norval Smith, Derek Bickerton, Sali Tagliamonte and Anand Syea) and their reliability as early evidence of restructured English in the Caribbean (by Chris Corcoran and Salikoko Mufwene, and Philip Baker and Lise Winer). While Corcoran and Mufwene argue convincingly that Mathews may have exaggerated certain basilectal features in his writing, the texts nevertheless represent an important milestone for any research on the history of the Atlantic creoles (AC). On the one hand, they represent the largest amount of data known from a single author in any early creole of the West Indies; on the other, they provide more information on a variety that has not been well researched previously, but which was spoken on the island from where most of the Caribbean was settled. Thus, the discussion of Mathews’s texts is complemented by a number of contributions dealing with the origin and diffusion of features in the AC (by Adrienne Bruyn, Philip Baker, Magnus Huber, Vincent Cooper, and Hans den Besten and Hein van der Voort). Since a French-based creole also developed on St Kitts, two contributions on Antillean French Creole round off this most interesting volume, which can be regarded as prime example of thoroughly researched scientific editing. The second volume, Magnus Huber and Mikael Parkvall, eds., Spreading the Word: The Issue of Diffusion among the Atlantic Creoles, contains papers specifically addressing the ongoing discussion about a possible Afrogenesis of the AC and the Portuguese influence on their development. Two introductory papers provide the backdrop for the debate. John McWhorter’s ‘A Creole by Any Other Name: Streamlining the Terminology’ discusses taxonomic problems between creoles and other contact languages, and Mikael Parkvall’s contribution on ‘Feature Selection and Genetic Relationships among Atlantic Creoles’ offers a panoramic view of the common features of these languages and their implications for a common family tree. The contributions dealing with the question of Afrogenesis can be summarized as follows: while Michael Aceto and Dudley Nylander remain uncommitted with regard the central issue of the origin of all AC, only agreeing on PAGE 91 OF 123 92 ENGLISH LANGUAGE a local origin of Krio, the papers by Magnus Huber (‘Atlantic English Creoles and the Lower Guinea Coast: A Case against Afrogenesis’) and John McWhorter (‘The Afrogenesis Hypothesis of Plantation Creole Origin’) prototypically represent the two opposite sides in the discussion. The intensity of the Afrogenesis debate in current creolistics can be gleaned from the transcription of the closing discussion of the workshop, which also illustrates that while both sides have put forward their evidence, they have not yet succeeded in establishing either hypothesis as the generally accepted model for the genesis of the AC. The second part of the book is concerned with the Portuguese influence on the AC, mostly found in the lexicon. A number of theories have been brought forward to account for these Portuguese lexemes, but remain mostly speculation. The papers addressing this problem— Jacques Arends, ‘The Origin of the Portuguese Elements in the Surinam Creoles’; John Ladhams, ‘The Pernambuco Connection: An Examination of the Nature and Origin of the Portuguese Elements in the Surinam Creoles’; William Jennings, ‘The Role of Cayenne in the Pernambuco-Surinam Hypothesis’; and Norval Smith ‘Pernambuco to Surinam, 1654–65: The Jewish Slave Controversy’—are supplemented by an overview of contact languages in Brazil by Hildo Honório do Couto and a detailed account of the features of Brazilian Vernacular Portuguese in comparison to West African Portuguese Creoles by Heliana Ribeiro de Mello. While Arends, Ladhams and Jennings conclude on the basis of the available evidence that the Portuguese elements in the Surinam (and other Atlantic) creoles cannot be traced to the Portuguese pidgin or creole spoken by the slaves coming from Brazil with their Jewish owners in the seventeenth century, Smith argues that this is the only adequate explanation for their existence. The volume brings together the most important views on two central issues in creolistics today and thus will serve as ready reference for anyone teaching or doing research in the field. Two further articles also offer a comparative analysis of AC. While John Holm et al. examine ‘Copula Patterns in Atlantic and Non-Atlantic Creoles’ (in Rickford and Romaine, eds. [1999] pp. 97–119), finding that, contrary to other creoles, AC require copula marking before NPs, Geneviève Escure looks at the ‘Pragmaticization of Past in Creoles’ (AS 74[1999] 165–202), especially in Belizean Creole and other Central American English-based creoles, describing language change in progress for these creole continua as the basilectal PAST markers are semantically and grammatically bleached and become intensifying discourse markers. Moving on to the Pacific, we notice a number of publications dealing with Hawaiian Creole English (HCE) in Rickford and Romaine, eds., Creole Genesis, already mentioned a few times above. On the question of creole origins, Derek Bickerton uses mainly Hawaiian evidence in his discussion of ‘Pidgins and Language Mixture’, and Sarah Julianne Roberts examines ‘The TMA System of Hawaiian Creole English and Diffusion’, arguing against John Holm’s theory of diffusion from AC. With regard to language attitudes, Joseph E. Grimes explains ‘Reactions to Bu: Basilect Meets Mesolect in Hawai’i’ in the case of a popular TV character, and Suzanne Romaine reports on ‘Changing Attitudes to Hawai’i Creole English: Fo’ Find One Good Job, You Gotta Know how fo’ Talk Like One Haole’. Both contributions illustrate the ambiguous attitudes towards HCE because of conflicting values, such as overt and covert prestige, a desire for economic success, or pressure in the education system. Other Pacific varieties covered in the book are PAGE 92 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 93 Maritime Polynesian Jargon, presented by Emmanuel Drechsel as a precursor to the pidgin English varieties in the area, and Australian Creole and Aboriginal English, which are compared with regard to language attitudes by Diana Eades and Jeff Siegel. Another Australian variety is the topic of Peter Mühlhäusler’s contribution to Antor and Cope, eds., Intercultural Encounters: Studies in English Literatures, in which he reports on the progress ‘Towards a Dictionary of South Australian Pidgin (SAPE)’, a Pacific pidgin spoken by the Nunga people of southern Australia in the nineteenth century. Another lesser-known historical variety is presented in Daniel Long’s ‘Evidence of an English Contact Language in the Nineteenth-Century Bonin (Ogasawara) Islands’ (EWW 20[1999] 251–86), an archipelago with a history similar to that of Pitcairn. Although the evidence is rather scarce, the language contact between Polynesian languages like Hawaiian, Japanese and English calls for further research. On the better-known Pacific pidgins, we find Jeff Siegel’s analysis of ‘Transfer Constraints and Substrate Influence in Melanesian Pidgin’ (JPCL 14[1999] 1–44), as spoken on the plantations in Queensland and Samoa. Siegel’s detailed article seeks to explain the absence of four key substrate features in Melanesian pidgin on the basis of linguistic factors such as salience, transparency or frequency. It appears that reinforcement of structural similarity and frequency is responsible for the retention of substrate features. A study in Bislama pragmatics was done by Miriam Meyerhoff, who reports on ‘Sorry in the Pacific: Defining Communities, Defining Practices’ (LSoc 28[1999] 225–38), identifying different functions of apologies and gender differences in their usage. Finally, Suzanne Romaine traces ‘The Grammaticalization of the Proximative in Tok Pisin’ (Language 75[1999] 322–46), comparing the development of two competing constructions to express the immediate future, namely the general Pacific form klostu (‘near’) and the specific Tok Pisin form laik (‘want, desire’), and concluding that these follow universal grammaticalization chains. Finally, moving on to the creole features of AAVE, Salikoko S. Mufwene defends his classification of AAVE and Gullah as independent, non-creole varieties on the basis of the Labovian principle of ‘Accountability in the Descriptions of Creoles’ (in Rickford and Romaine, eds. [1999] pp. 157–86). Michael Montgomery examines AAVE in the diaspora, namely in the form of ‘Eighteenth-Century Sierra Leone English: Another Exported Variety of African American English’ (EWW 20[1999] 1–34), based on a corpus of letters and petitions of African Americans who came to Sierra Leone via Nova Scotia in 1792. His analysis of these early documents neither proves nor disproves the creolist hypothesis concerning the origins of AAVE. Another expatriate variety of AAVE is the subject of Sali Tagliamonte and Jennifer Smith’s contribution on ‘Analogical Leveling in Samaná English: The Case of was and were’ (JEngL 27[1999] 8–26) in which they show that Samaná English exhibits an advanced state in the development of was as a general preterite form of be, only showing variation in the second person. The authors attribute this to the almost complete absence of pressure from Standard English norms in the expatriate setting. PAGE 93 OF 123 94 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 11. Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis This year’s list of publications in English pragmatics and discourse analysis shows an impressive variety of topics, which makes it very difficult to make out one or two single foci. Wolfram Bublitz, Uta Lenk, and Eija Ventola, eds., Coherence in Spoken and Written Discourse: How to Create It and How to Describe It, selected papers from the International Workshop on Coherence, Augsburg, 24–27 April 1997 [1999], is a collection of works on coherence from very diverse fields. In his article ‘Learning to Cohere: Causal Links in Native vs. Non-Native Argumentative Writing’, Gunter Lorenz uses a ‘contrastive rhetoric’ approach to the construction of coherence in writing, which is based on a four-partite corpus of argumentative essays, contrasting German and British English usage. His main question is whether causal marking positively correlates with mature argumentative style, and he sees as problematic the frequent strategy of teachers who try ‘to get adolescents to write like professional journalists—in a foreign language’ (p. 71). Lorenz argues for interlanguage English as a potential model for the use of English instead of what he sees as a claim for a monopoly expressed by native speakers. For this, he sees it as an indispensable strategy for teachers to provide their students with a thorough explanation of the differences of their interlanguage use and the language use of native English speakers. The main concept of Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen in her contribution, ‘Coherent Voicing: On Prosody in Conversational Reported Speech’, is footing, a term which she defines as the alignment of speakers in a given conversation. Her focus is on the effect prosody shifts have on footing, and the results of her study show that participants use the prosodic and paralinguistic details of ‘voicing’ as additional cues when explicit cues about reported speech are missing or misleading, thus solving the problem of ‘inexplicitness’. In ‘It Takes Two to Cohere: The Collaborative Dimension of Topical Coherence in Conversation’, Ronald Geluykens takes a conversation analysis perspective on coherence. His approach is a bottom-up one: he studies verbal behaviour and then draws conclusions about the potential strategies for solving coherence problems. Geluykens sees coherence as a collaboratively achieved feature and, excluding social variables in hearer and speaker, focuses on questions, for which he sees three main functions: they can be used for managing the topic flow by proposing, offering, or eliciting new topics. Andreas H. Jucker, Gerd Fritz and Franz Lebsanft, eds., Historical Dialogue Analysis, contains the papers presented at a conference which was held under the same title at Justus Liebig University, Giessen, in 1997 with the aim of bringing together ‘the most eminent scholars specializing in historical dialogue analysis in German, English and the Romance languages’ (p. vii). Of the fifteen chapters, onethird deal with issues in English. Thomas Honegger’s ‘On the Fringes of Interaction: The Dawn-Song as a “Linguistic Routine” of Parting’ discusses similarities and differences between dawn song passages in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde and Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Starting with a presentation of the basic structure of the dawn song as an originally lyrical form, he then presents an analysis of its function as a conventional element of courtly love to smooth the pain of parting in a formalized manner which is meant to reduce the risk of face-loss for the participants. In ‘Refugiate in a Strange Countrey: Learning English through Dialogues in the Sixteenth Century’, Richard J. Watts presents two manuals for language learning, PAGE 94 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 95 Familiar Dialogues and A very profitable boke, focusing on aspects such as the expected target group, the learning and teaching context of the time, and also the relevance of learning and teaching habits for a potential analysis of English socioculture of the sixteenth century. Irma Taavitsainen discusses a very particular type of ESP in a historical context in ‘Dialogues in Late Medieval and Early Modern English Medical Writing’. She places medical dialogues written between 1375 and 1750 in the context of the scholastic and dialectic tradition of late medieval scientific writing as well as the tradition of mimetic dialogues for didactic purposes, with the targeted audience varying from professionals to laypersons. Jonathan Culpeper and Merja Kytö transfer the interest pragmaticists have taken in hedges in Modern English to Early Modern English. In ‘Modifying Pragmatic Force: Hedges in Early Modern English Dialogues’, they study results they draw from analyses of their own corpus of texts of various types from 1550 to 1750, which they are currently putting together. After a discussion of various approaches to hedge research, they present their own—functional—focus by listing four main areas in which hedges are present, namely information, face, discourse, and style. In a comparison with T. Nikula [1996], who used a contemporary spoken corpus, they find that in their data hedges are much less frequent in general and that explicit hedges are more frequent, a finding which they attribute to the higher degree of formality and/or constructedness of their data. Anne Herlyn’s ‘So he says to her, he says, “Well,” he says …: Multiple Dialogue Introducers from a Historical Perspective’ deals with a frequent phenomenon in Middle English narratives, multiple dialogue introducers of the type He/she answered and said, in a comparative analysis of three Middle English romances and present-day English spontaneous oral narratives of the late 1980s and early 1990s. In her discussion of their function, she focuses on what she calls ‘talk units’ and rejects the assumption that say is only inserted for syntactic reasons—to make the addition of a direct object possible. Her suggestion is that the second verbum dicendi creates ‘syntactic cohesion between the dialogue introducer and the quotation’ (p. 323). In Monika Fludernik’s framework, which she adopts, the fact that these multiple dialogue introducers are frequent in both Middle English written narratives and Modern English oral narratives is seen as proof of the more oral tradition of which the Middle English texts are part. Tops, Devriendt and Geukens, eds., Thinking English Grammar, includes two articles that deal with issues in English pragmatics. Whereas Norman F. Blake’s ‘Pragmatic Markers in the Wife of Bath’s Prologue’ deals with the variety of treatments of pragmatic markers in different manuscripts of a text, i.e. a topic within the field of historical pragmatics, Katja Pelsmaekers concentrates on ‘Directness and (Im)politeness: The Use of Imperatives in Business Letters’. Her analysis of a corpus of a hundred British business letters shows that imperatives only occur in about one-tenth of the main clauses in these letters, with the positive subjectless second person imperative being the most productive type, and over 75 per cent being modified by please. There are eight different pragmatic functions to be found for the imperative forms, namely requests, invitations, offers, warnings, enclosures, selfintroductions, apologies, and thanks. As to the politeness value of imperatives, Pelsmaekers states that ‘the highly selective use and the fairly consistent syntactic and text-structural delay strategies’ (p. 277) make imperatives a choice within the pragmatic aims of business letters. PAGE 95 OF 123 96 ENGLISH LANGUAGE Minna Palander-Collin, Grammaticalization and Social Embedding: I THINK and METHINKS in Middle and Early Modern English, studies I think and methinks as devices to express the writer’s point of view, i.e. focusing on evidentiality. Palander-Collin’s diachronic study is based on the diachronic part of the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts and the pilot version of the Corpus of Early English Correspondence. She traces these impersonal constructions, which were fairly frequent in Old English and then either disappeared or acquired a nominative person subject in English, placing particular emphasis on the wide range of uses of I think and methinks as pragmatic markers. In the field of Developmental Pragmatics, two articles focusing on English issues in English appear in Annabel Greenhill, Heather Littlefield, and Cheryl Tano, eds., Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development, Judith Becker Bryant’s ‘Perspectives on Pragmatic Socialization’ is a report on a maternal input experiment with English-speaking mothers of preschoolers from Australia (Sydney) and the US (Tampa, Florida), who were asked to discuss ten responses the researcher had classified as common in mothers’ verbal interaction with their children. The results showed a gradual move from direct to indirect input as the children became more competent pragmatically. The findings on ‘Bilingual Children’s Repairs of Communication Breakdowns’ by Liane Comeau, Morton J. Mendelson and Fred Genesee suggest that young children are sensitive to the level of linguistic proficiency of their partners in interaction—but do bilingual children also realize that it is language that causes communication breakdowns when interacting with a partner who is only proficient in one of their languages? The authors studied 3- and 5-year-old bilingual children and found out that, even though young bilingual children are able to identify language as the source of a communication breakdown and to repair the breakdown by using translation as a repair strategy, they often fail to do so. In ‘Formalizing Organizational Meaning’ (D&S 10[1999] 49–65), Rick Iedema looks at how interactive closure as the decisive feature of formality is achieved in the course of ongoing social practice. In his analysis, he refers to J. Irvine [1979], who mentions four dimensions of formality: (a) increased code structuring, (b) code consistency, (c) invoking positional identities, and (d) emergence of central situational focus. As an example, Iedema uses the project for the renovation of a mental hospital in south Sydney. Architect and stakeholders come together at a meeting with high formal objective: the drawing up of a Project Definition Plan (PDP), with all its different steps, from bringing the different viewpoints together to the actual writing of the report. He distinguishes three main areas in which formalization takes place: semantic phenomena, as shown in a preference for the description of mental/inward-directed processes or outward-directed processes; the question of indirectness vs. directness; and the appearance of interactional shadow play vs. factual and impersonal style. His conclusion is that ‘formal closure is dynamically achieved in bureaucratic interaction’ (p. 62). The field of second-language competence is the topic of various journal articles, among them Adeyeye Samson Dare’s ‘English and the Culture of the Yoruba’ (ET 57[1999] 17–22). He analyses the transfer of socioculturally and thus also sociolinguistically difficult categories onto pragmatic phenomena, also in secondlanguage acquisition, using greetings, address terms, and kinship terms for a detailed illustration. Greeting rules in Yoruba are much more formalized and PAGE 96 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 97 detailed than in English, and Nigerian English tends to adopt categories from Yoruba. Dare uses the system of address terms used for God and deities to illustrate the complex system of T and V (i.e. informal vs. formal) address terms in Yoruba. He states that he has a clear preference for a foreign or second-language teaching approach which does not force the student to apply a mental and cognitive grid which is not rooted in his own enculturation, and points out that he sees it as unnecessary to wipe out the Yoruba sociocultural context in order to make students express themselves in ‘impeccable British English’. In their article ‘Successful Turn-Bidding in English Conversation’ (IJCL 4[1999] 1–27), He Anping and Graeme Kennedy suggest that cultural differences are not solely responsible for the fact that non-native speakers of English find the turn-bidding rules of English very difficult to learn. In their analysis of a London–Lund subcorpus they concentrate on the following questions: frequency of Successful Turn-Bidding (STB) in different speech domains, linguistic features and environments associated with STB, correlation with domains/familiarity/status and gender. Their results show that STB is a frequent phenomenon with uneven distribution among the domains, but with clear rules: higher frequency in less formal settings, no significant gender differences, linguistic devices from different language levels such as prosody, lexicon/word-choice, amplitude/clarity, syntax, and pragmatics, which are frequently used in combination. Another recurring topic is the emancipatory power of discourse structures. In their article ‘Just Say No? The Use of Conversation Analysis in Developing a Feminist Perspective on Sexual Refusal’ (D&S 10[1999] 293–316), Celia Kitzinger and Hannah Frith see Conversation Analysis (CA) as an instrument for feminism. Conversation training programmes in the framework of rape prevention programmes are seen as lacking efficiency and starting from the wrong end of the problem. The authors say that in this particular domain, men refuse to acknowledge strategies which in other domains are seen as perfectly acceptable refusals—‘the root of the problem is not that men do not understand sexual refusals, but that they do not like them’ (p. 310). Kitzinger and Frith reject the idea of the responsibility of particular personality traits which are frequent in many young women, such as low self-esteem, lack of perseverance, lack of assertiveness—in general, ‘internalization of traditionally feminine gender role stereotypes’ (p. 297). Their studies show the variety of strategies used and accepted as negations and refusals, and also the degree to which young women are aware of the particular difficulty of sexual refusals. Stuart Tannock’s ‘Working with Insults: Discourse and Difference in an Inner-City Youth Organization’ (D&S 10[1999] 317–50) focuses on Community-Based Organizations (CBOs) and their communicative structures. CBOs have chosen to adopt a different approach to heterogeneity both in social and linguistic terms by trying to ‘develop more egalitarian structures, embrace diversity, and explore alternative, non-professionalist discursive forms’ (p. 318). Tannock’s article is meant as both an illustration of ‘discursive practices found in CBOs’ and ‘the challenges faced by these organizations as they attempt to build communities based on difference’ (p. 319). The author addresses various issues—gendering, age/ generation variation, ritual language use/insult, and race indexing—and claims that ‘many CBOs are attempting to move away from asymmetrical, homogenizing, professionalist discourse forms in order to accommodate and address the diverse talents, interests, and needs of a socially and linguistically heterogeneous PAGE 97 OF 123 98 ENGLISH LANGUAGE population’ (p. 340). Sean Zdenek’s ‘Rising Up from the MUD: Inscribing Gender in Software Design’ (D&S 10[1999] 379–409) deals with the topic of gendering and is a clear criticism of the liberatory approach (to new media). Zdenek sees language as correlating with social class and other social phenomena and sees a processoriented construction of gender in ‘non-humans’, such as chatterbots (i.e. virtual robots), in a way which resembles gendering in humans. Adrian Blackledge’s ‘Language, Literacy and Social Justice: The Experiences of Bangladeshi Women in Birmingham, UK’ (JMMD 20[1999] 179–93) focuses on power relations between majority and minority groups in society as reflected in linguistic structure, and the function of language as social gatekeeper. He describes a four-year research project with Bangladeshi families in Birmingham during which the mothers of eighteen 6year-old Bangladeshi children were interviewed about literacy and for which additional interviews were carried out with the children’s teachers. The traditional stereotypical view of minority family structures as less efficient in teaching has to be rejected: ‘Literacy is a socioculturally constructed activity which varies because of different configurations that families take in different social and cultural settings (C. Delgado-Gaitan, 1990)’. Language learning is also at the centre of Maria Eleftheriadou and Richard Badger’s ‘Some Aspects of Repair in Native and NonNative Speaker Conversations in English’ (ITL Review of Applied Linguistics [1999] 253–75). They raise a number of points. First they note that there is a need for more naturalistic forms of data collection; secondly, that the current theory of the distribution of labour in repairs is too stereotyped because there is no clear pattern for the distribution of initiation and completion of repairs; and thirdly, that there is a need for a new view of the native/non-native speaker distinction because there is no clear role distribution pattern. According to their findings based on an empirical study in student flats with native and non-native speakers, the only element which supported the traditional, simplistic view of the distribution of labour between native and non-native speakers was the fact that in conversations involving nonnative speakers’ vocabulary problems were slightly more frequent. Two Pragmatics articles, one on a contemporary issue and the other historical, focus on pragmatics in British socioculture. In ‘The Organisation of Knowledge in British University Tutorial Discourse: Issues, Pedagogic Discourse Strategies and Disciplinary Identity’ (Pragmatics 9[1999] 535–65), Bethan Benwell makes a claim for the existence of so-called Pedagogic Discourse Strategies, ‘a finite series of rhetorical relations’ that serve as links between topic or information hierarchies in spoken tutorial discourse. She sees as the two main defining criteria the fact that tutorial discourse is predominantly ideational in its function and that (formal) teaching situations tend to rely more on surface realization than casual conversations. As point of departure for her analysis, Benwell chooses RST (role of subjective judgement). Her results show a probable ‘relationship between the epistemological properties of a discipline and the way knowledge is generated within subject tutorials’ (p. 561), and that the description of the tutorial as a genre per se is based on pedagogic discourse strategies as one decisive criterion. The historical article forms part of a Pragmatics issue on politeness. Richard J. Watts’s ‘Language and Politeness in Early Eighteenth Century Britain’ (Pragmatics 9[1999] 5–20) starts out from Defoe’s 1698 Essay on Projects, a first sketch of a proposal for an English language academy. Watts’s definition of politeness is that of the art of ‘refining’ the English language, keeping its ‘purity’. He sees politeness also as a PAGE 98 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 99 more holistic concept, the ‘harmonious correspondence between the body and the mind/soul’ (p. 7), with various seemingly contradictory aspects—politeness as the ideal combination of a person’s internal and external self-image, the ability to please others, the external attribute of a good individual, socially acquired ‘polishedness’ (p. 8). Irony and figurative language are the central topic of a number of works. In ‘Obligatory Processing of Literal and Nonliteral Meanings in Verbal Irony’ (JoP 31[1999] 1579–99), Shelly Dews and Ellen Winner support the assumption that some part of the literal meaning of ironic utterances is processed automatically together with the intended meaning. Their focus is on ironic criticism, positive utterances which are meant to convey a negative view of a situation. The authors’ work is based on two experiments with college students, native speakers of (American) English. Experiment 1 was carried out to test whether the literal meanings of literal utterances are indeed automatically processed, and experiment 2 to discriminate between the multiple meaning and the three-stage models, i.e. to test whether the non-literal meanings of ironic utterances are obligatorily processed. All their findings support the multiple meaning model. Rachel Giora’s ‘On the Priority of Salient Meanings: Studies of Literal and Figurative Language’ (JoP 31[1999] 919–29) argues in favour of salient—i.e. the more popular, more prototypical, more frequently used, more familiar, just learned—meanings. According to her, context does not inhibit the activation of salient meanings—her approach is that of the graded salience hypothesis: ‘processing a familiar metaphor should activate its literal meaning in a context biasing the metaphor towards its metaphoric meaning, as well as in a context biasing it towards its literal meaning’ (p. 921). In another article, ‘On Understanding Familiar and Less-Familiar Figurative Language’ (JoP 31[1999] 1601–18), Rachel Giora and Ofer Fein use the graded salience hypothesis for an analysis of familiar and non-familiar figurative items. According to this hypothesis, familiar metaphors are interpreted by activating both their metaphoric and literal meaning—familiar idioms should lead to an activation of both their idiomatic and literal interpretations, regardless of context; less familiar idioms are more likely to activate a literal interpretation outside of context. The literal interpretation of an idiom is seen as functional in the interpretation of an idiom. For their article ‘Tag Questions and Common Ground Effects in the Perception of Verbal Irony’ (JoP 31[1999] 1685–1700), Roger J. Kreuz, Max A. Kassler, Lori Coppenrath, and Bonnie McLain Allen tested the roles of common ground and tag questions in the perception of irony in different experiments. After a first experiment which was meant to ensure that ‘common ground had been successfully manipulated in the experimental materials’ (p. 1688), participants were asked to read texts containing ironic statements, and the researchers then tested the degree of perceived irony, the appropriateness of the irony, or the participants’ memory for ironic vs. literal statements. Whereas other areas did not seem to be touched, common ground was shown to be important in the rating of the appropriateness of ironic utterances. Rebecca Clift’s ‘Irony in Conversation’ (LSoc 28[1999] 523–53) sees E. Goffman’s concept of framing as a useful approach to verbal irony. She defines irony as a situation in which ‘conversational expectations of what constitutes a next turn are fulfilled on the level of form, but undermined on the level of content’ (p. 523) and in which obvious shifts of footing make the frame visible. Thus irony is seen as an instance of double perspective. After an analysis of both the traditional, oppositional PAGE 99 OF 123 100 ENGLISH LANGUAGE model and more modern approaches to irony and sarcasm, such as the ‘echoic’, the ‘pretence’, and the ‘theatre’ models, she explains the advantages of the framing model, which avoids the ‘theoretical fixes’ the others need to allow for and which also covers the non-verbal element of irony very well. Clift considers the framing approach to irony particularly useful in that it allows for the presence of two dimensions of meaning, an ‘outside’ and an ‘inside’ one. In Morton Ann Gernsbacher and Rachel R.W. Robertson’s ‘The Role of Suppression in Figurative Language Comprehension’ (JoP 31[1999] 1619–30), suppression—functioning on various levels, from lexical access to general comprehension skill—is seen as a mechanism that attenuates ‘the interference caused by the activation of extraneous, unnecessary, or inappropriate information’ (p. 1619). Metaphors are central in Sam Glucksberg and Matthew S. McGlone’s ‘When Love is Not a Journey: What Metaphors Mean’ (JoP 31[1999] 1541–58). The authors are interested in how people understand ordinary conversational metaphors. According to the Gricean maxims, only relevant and informant properties of the metaphor vehicle should be attributed to the metaphor topic. Property-matching does not seem to be the most likely process, but rather property attribution—understanding a metaphor requires knowledge about the topic and about the metaphor vehicle. Glucksberg and McGlone argue in favour of attributive categories as fundamental elements in the functioning of nominal metaphors. They reject the ‘maximally rich view’ proposed by George Lakoff and his associates, according to which the understanding of metaphors functions through systematic mappings between the concept domains of the topic and the metaphor vehicle. Idioms, as another type of figurative language, also form an interesting topic in pragmatics. In ‘Swimming against the Current: Do Idioms Reflect Conceptual Structure?’ (JoP 31[1999] 1559–78), Boaz Keysar and Bridget Martin Bly show that idioms cannot be used to prove the existence of conceptual structures that exist independently of language. In their experiments they show that individuals who learn the meaning of an idiom try to map this meaning on to linguistic elements in the idiom and are thus biased in their judgement of idiom transparency by the meaning they have learnt. Debra A. Titone and Cynthia M. Connine’s ‘On the Compositional and Noncompositional Nature of Idiomatic Expressions’ (JoP 31[1999] 1655–74) presents two approaches to idioms. Early views stress the noncompositional approach, in which idioms are seen as equivalent to long words that behave as lexical entries. However, there are certain problematic features about this approach since it does not account for the general agreement among speakers about the limits of syntactic flexibility for a given idiom. In addition, studies on idiom understanding show that idiomatic word sequences are literally analysed and also that literal word meanings are activated in the process. These problems show that the non-compositional approach is not sufficient, hence the necessity of the compositional approach. The problem with the compositional approach, however, is that, like words, idioms have recognition points (idiomatic keys). Thus the authors opt for a combinatory approach in which idioms are processed simultaneously as non-compositional and compositional word sequences. A number of papers are concerned with specific text types or genres. In ‘A Linguistic Look at Riddles’ (JoP 31[1999] 95–125), John M. Dienhart writes about cultural differences in the definition of ‘riddle’, which he sees as a genuinely interactive form. He focuses on the conundrum or ‘punning riddle’. After a PAGE 100 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 101 reference to Freud’s essay on jokes, he quotes Koestler’s notion of ‘bisociation’, considering the very essence of conundrums to lie in the existence of linguistic triggers: ‘punch lines’, ‘phonetic forms linking the semantics of two disparate worlds’ (p. 95). Dienhart sees the ‘similarity factor’ as the crucial variable on which a so-called ‘similarity cline’ is based. The two extremes of this cline are total identity and absolute dissimilarity of form. In between, he sees five stages or levels: polysemy, homonymy, homophony, paraphony and hahaphony, a term coined by Dienhart to refer to an ‘“artificial” type of (near) homophony whereby similarity of sound is produced by means of a kind of pseudo-morphemic analysis’ (p. 109). Dienhart adds two more types: combinations and riddles that are for the eye as well as the ear. In ‘“I Just Want to Make Love to You”: Seductive Strategies in Blues Lyrics’ (JoP 31[1999] 525–34), Elisabeth D. Kuhn provides an analysis of blues lyrics with the help of speech-act theory. Her focus is on blues songs with projected directive intent—songs in which the male singer tries to get the female addressee to make love to him. Kuhn’s results often show a textbook-adequate use of face-saving strategies. As potential future foci of research she sees issues such as the genderspecific use of such strategies, in particular the question how female singers address a potential or desired male partner. In her article ‘Question–Response Argumentation in Talk Shows’ (JoP 31[1999] 975–99), Cornelia Ilie questions as a central feature of talk shows the element of ‘infotainment’, a genre seen as an example of semi-institutional discourse type. This genre, which displays features of both casual conversation and institutional discourse, can be accounted for with an analysis of question–response strategies. Ilie sees a structure of mixed question strategies and concentrates on non-standard questions, i.e. questions that are not primarily answer-eliciting or information-eliciting. Her results show that ‘there are no discrete categories of questions and responses and that they should be seen as different values on a continuum’ (p. 997). In ‘Deliberate Dispute and the Construction of Oppositional Stance’ (Pragmatics 9[1999] 231–48), Karen L. Adams uses material from televized events (US political debates from the 1980s and the 1990s as well as a political commentary show) and gang graffiti from Phoenix to describe strategies for constructing opposition with the help of notions such as intertextuality and indexicality. According to her findings, the most common strategies are specification of membership, directed and unmitigated stance, and floor control. In addition, in some cases non-established strategies are used for various purposes, for example, for emphasizing the authenticity of the message, or the participants tried to re-establish conventional frames after these had been violated. Roberta Piazza’s ‘Dramatic Discourse Approached from a Conversational Analysis Perspective: Catherine Hayes’ Skirmishes and Other Contemporary Plays’ (JoP 31[1999] 1001–23) looks at conversational repairs in four plays by C. Hayes, M. Norman, S. Shepard, and H. Pinter—whether they are self-initiated or otherinitiated; self-performed or other-performed—and uses them to illustrate that these different types of repair showed different mechanisms to reflect the author’s assumptions about real-life discourse. Finally, Mary Ellen Ryder, ‘Smoke and Mirrors: Event Patterns in the Discourse Structure of a Romance Novel’ (JoP 31[1999] 1067–80) analyses a paradox in popular romance novels. On the one hand, the main character of these novels usually is the one to initiate the central series of actions; on the other hand, the ideal romance heroine is supposed to be passive. As Ryder sums it up: ‘It’s all done with smoke and mirrors.’ PAGE 101 OF 123 102 ENGLISH LANGUAGE Marcelo Dascal and Hugh Tyrwhitt-Drake have chosen not to focus on genre- or text-specific application, but on more theoretical questions. As point of departure for his ‘Introduction: Some Questions about Misunderstanding’ (JoP 31[1999] 753– 62), Dascal uses what he calls the ‘folk-theory’ of misunderstandings, which makes use of the following criteria or parameters: production vs. reception, the linguistic level where the misunderstanding occurs, the kind of norm which is violated, and the question whether the phenomenon occurs voluntarily or involuntarily. The following aspects must be addressed in a theory of misunderstandings: the frequency with which misunderstandings occur, the frequency with which they are detected, the management of misunderstandings, the causes and types of misunderstandings, the logic of misunderstandings, the value of misunderstandings, and in particular the need for a certain amount of self-criticism on the part of communication scientists as to their methods and goals. Dascal then goes on to discuss the problematic position of meta-communication, not only for the analysis of misunderstandings by defining the rhetorical situation in which it exists. Hugh Tyrwhitt-Drake, ‘Resisting the Discourse of Critical Discourse Analysis: Reopening a Hong Kong Case Study’ (JoP 31[1999] 1081–8) provides a critical analysis of J. Flowerdew’s [1997] study of a question-and-answer session between Chris Patten and Hong Kong citizens in 1992, based on the concepts of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). He draws the conclusion that due to the methodological shortcomings of CDA and what he sees as a majority view among discourse analysts, namely their claim to moral authority, linguists ‘need above all to keep a critical eye’ on CDA. Bruce Fraser tries to give an innovative answer to the question ‘What are Discourse Markers?’ (JoP 31[1999] 931–52). After summarizing prior discourse marker research, he situates his own findings within a grammaticalpragmatic perspective and sees discourse markers as a pragmatic class of lexical elements, mainly drawn from syntactic categories such as conjunctions, adverbs, and prepositional phrases, which have a procedural core meaning and a contextdefined specific meaning and which signal a relationship between the segment they introduce and the preceding segment. According to his definition, there are two types of discourse markers: those relating aspects of the explicit messages conveyed by the second segment with aspects of the explicit or implicit message conveyed by the first segment, and those that relate the topic of the second to that of the first segment. In his ‘Remarks on Salkie and Reed’s (1997) “Pragmatic Hypothesis” of Tense in Reported Speech’ (ELL 3[1999] 83–116), Renaat Declerck presents findings and arguments against Salkie and Reed’s Pragmatic Hypothesis in indirect reported speech and in favour of his own Dual Past Tense hypothesis. Declerck’s is a theory of temporal domains, of sets of times related by tense forms, ‘established by an absolute tense form and expanded by one or more relative tense forms’ (p. 91), and also one of ‘shift of temporal perspective’ (p. 92). Salkie and Reed, on the other hand, focus on the choice between a past and a present context and claim that in reported speech all tenses maintain their ‘normal’ meaning, and that any special features require a pragmatic explanation. Declerck claims that their basic pragmatic principle is a misinterpretation of his principle of Unmarked Temporal Interpretation for embedded clauses, and rejects Salkie and Reed’s principle of ‘reducing the pragmatic possibility of the reported speaker to zero’ as ‘both unacceptable and unworkable’ (p. 90). PAGE 102 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 103 Gabriele Klewitz and Elisabeth Couper-Kuhlen, in ‘Quote–Unquote: The Role of Prosody in the Contextualization of Reported Speech Sequences’ (Pragmatics 9[1999] 459–85), focus on the way ‘prosodic changes can function like quotation marks in written texts’ (p. 459). Theirs is a global, not a local, concept of prosodic marking, involving ‘departures from norms or expectations holding for pitch configuration, loudness and timing at the level of the intonation phrase or beyond’ (p. 462). They do not claim a one-to-one correspondence between prosodic marking and written quotation marks, but see an interesting typological similarity—prosodic changes are to be seen in the framework of ‘flagging’ rather than as ‘framing’ devices. In ‘Words as Gestures’ (JoP 31[1999] 953–72), Richard W. Janney claims that words and gestures interact constantly on various levels: words and physical gestures in face-to-face interaction, words and vocal gestures in telephone interaction, while in written language subtler devices have a similar function. He also claims that already, from language acquisition on, there is a constant interplay between words and gestures, and that the impact of gestural use of language lies in its suggestive power. Dana Cohen’s ‘Towards a Unified Account of Intensive Reflexives’ (JoP 31[1999] 1041–52) discusses logophors, so-called long-distance reflexives, i.e. reflexives that refer to an item in a different sentence, beyond any local domain, or with no linguistic antecedent. Cohen argues in favour of a unified analysis of intensive reflexives, which takes into consideration the range of interpretations brought about by the intensive reflexive without addressing the polysemy problem, and she also sees the need for a more comprehensive framework of analysis, possibly based on Relevance Theory. Becky Kennedy’s ‘Focus Constituency’ (JoP 31[1999] 1203–30) deals with focus projection, i.e. ‘the process by which the accented constituent within a sentence projects its focus marking to a broader domain’ (p. 1203), providing ample discussion of prior studies of the issue. Kennedy is concerned only with ‘focus projection from an accented subject to a subject–verb string or to the sentence level’ (p. 1228) in subject–verb and subject–verb–object structures, leaving adjuncts out of discussion. According to her findings, the crucial element that determines whether an argument can participate in predicate complex formation depends on event view. In ‘Discussion—On Negotiating Bodies and Ecolinguistics: A Response to Coupland et al. [1998]’ (JoP 31[1999] 1231–36), Michael Lloyd refers to an article entitled ‘Negotiating Sun Use’, in which Coupland et al. analyse a corpus of beach interviews on sun use and health in Wales and New Zealand. He criticizes the fact that direct embodiment of speakers, which takes place during the interviews, is not taken into consideration and that, in spite of the title of the original article, there is too little focus on the actual issue of negotiation. 12. Stylistics The most valuable addition to the field of language and literature this year is undoubtedly Paul Werth, Text Worlds: Representing Conceptual Space in Discourse, which has now seen the light of day thanks to Mick Short’s efforts to put into final shape a manuscript Paul Werth could not see through the press before his PAGE 103 OF 123 104 ENGLISH LANGUAGE untimely death. Although readers of this section are surely acquainted with his last ideas since they have been made available in articles and papers delivered at conferences, this book represents a significant addition to the existing material and will no doubt increase the number of stylistics-oriented analyses which make use of his ideas. In this posthumous book, Werth presents his multi-level model designed to account for the ways in which text-processing works. His model is based on the conviction of a need to build bridges between cognitive linguistics and discourse studies, something Werth achieves through the powerful notion of ‘text worlds’, mental constructs by means of which a reader articulates information relating to a text. Nevertheless, the value of Text Worlds goes beyond the framework of the analysis it presents because it makes a significant contribution to the discussion of central topics in current linguistics, such as coherence, presupposition, reference, opacity, negation, deixis, modality, tense, aspect, and metaphor. Werth has something illuminating to add to what has already been said on these topics, challenging firmly entrenched dogmas—such as the usefulness of presupposition to account for meaning in isolated utterances. Since it is impossible to do justice here to a book such as this, readers are directed to two comprehensive reviews of its contents and significance by Catherine Emmott (L&L 9[1999] 371–6) and Laura Hidalgo (Estudios Ingleses de la Universidad Complutense 8[1999] 321–6). Werth’s legacy to the study of language is rich and varied, but his work will no doubt be remembered whenever linguists acknowledge the need for a model which is cognitive and experiential but also anchored in discourse and contextually based. The cross-fertilization between cognitive linguistics and the analysis of literary texts is also behind ‘Metaphor and Beyond: New Cognitive Developments’, a special issue of Poetics Today edited by Monika Fludernik, Donald C. Freeman and Margaret H. Freeman. The issue opens with a substantial introduction by the editors, ‘Metaphor and Beyond: An Introduction’ (PoT 20[1999] 383–96), which contains an overview of the changes and shifts in focus which metaphor theory underwent in the twentieth century together with a brief sketch of the conceptual integration theory and the crucial notion of ‘blending’ developed by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner. The editors also point out that one of the outcomes of cognitive approaches to metaphor is that literary language and everyday language are shown to have a great deal in common. The volume includes essays about theoretical issues, and papers offering practical text analysis. Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier’s ‘A Mechanism of Creativity’ (pp. 397–418) explains how new meanings can be created out of old ones through conceptual integration. Philip Eubanks, in ‘The Story of Conceptual Metaphor: What Motivates Metaphoric Mappings?’ (pp. 419–42) shows that when speakers use metaphors their ideological commitments are expressed through ‘licensing stories’. Donald C. Freeman’s ‘“The Rack Dislimns”: Schema and Metaphorical Pattern in Antony and Cleopatra’ (pp. 443–60) provides a unified account of the imagery in this Shakespearean tragedy through an amalgam of the container, links and path image schemas. Masako K. Hiraga’s ‘“Blending” and an Interpretation of Haiku: A Cognitive Approach’ (pp. 461–82) argues for the advantages of using the notion of ‘blending’ in short but grammatically complex poetic texts such as haiku. Ingrid Piller, in ‘Extended Metaphor in Automobile Fan Discourse’ (pp. 483–98), shows that extended metaphors are not only found in literary discourse but also in commercial discourse. Gerard Steen’s ‘Analyzing Metaphor in Literature: With Examples from PAGE 104 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 105 William Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”’ (pp. 499–522) makes use of a conceptual taxonomy of metaphor to analyse the first two lines of Wordsworth’s well-known poem. The last essay in this special issue, Vimala Herman’s ‘Deictic Projection and Conceptual Blending in Epistolarity’ (pp. 523–42) combines mental space projection and conceptual blending in a study of deictic scenarios in the epistolary genre. Max Nänny and Olga Fischer have edited Form Miming Meaning: Iconicity in Language and Literature, a 400-page volume containing essays which open, among other things, a new door for the field of stylistics. The interdisciplinary study of the iconic dimensions of literary texts is still virgin territory and this volume has contributed significantly to putting it on the map. In their introduction, nicely entitled ‘Iconicity as a Creative Force in Language Use’, the editors discuss the evidence of folk etymology and children’s onomatopoeic naming, and trace iconic elements in language, pace structural linguistics. They suggest that iconicity is not just a remnant of a primeval stage of language but a resource available when expressivity demands it. They also discuss a typology of iconicity which distinguishes between imagic and diagrammatic iconicity, which in turn can be of two types, structural and semantic, and relate them to both literary and non-literary uses of the language. While imagic and semantic iconicity play an important role in literature, structural iconicity is a ubiquitous business in everyday syntax. I have found this section of the introduction vital for an understanding of the issues discussed in the book. The contributions explore iconicity from many and varied positions: some are interested in the relations between iconicity and the primary code (i.e. the code of grammar), others in how iconic models undergo conventionalization, how iconicity illuminates aspects of human cognition, and how form can be used to add a further dimension to meaning. The structure of the book does not differentiate between the use of iconicity in literary texts and in everyday language because, as the editors make clear, one of the purposes of this volume is to stress the all-pervasiveness of iconic phenomena in language and to promote an interdisciplinary approach to the subject. Therefore, the different levels of language provide the spine along which sections on general issues (part I), ‘Sound and Rhythm’ (part II), ‘Letters, Typography and Graphic Design’ (part III), ‘WordFormation’ (part IV) and ‘Syntax and Discourse’ (part V) are ‘vertebrated’. The more purely linguistic contributions have been discussed in the appropriate sections above; here we will concentrate on the papers of more immediate concern to stylistics. In part I the reader finds Ivan Fónagy’s ‘Why Iconicity?’, which accounts for the pervasive presence of iconicity in all natural languages showing features (concentrating on the phonetic level) shared by all alike. This is followed by John Haiman’s ‘Action, Speech, and Grammar: The Sublimation Trajectory’, which studies the linguistic expression of self-abasement in The Brothers Karamazov. Ralf Norrman uses Kurt’s Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five and Shakespeare’s Macbeth to discuss dual opposites and symmetry in ‘Creating the World in Our Image: A New Theory of Love of Symmetry and Iconicist Desire’. John J. White’s ‘On Semiotic Interplay: Forms of Creative Interaction Between Iconicity and Indexicality in Twentieth-Century Literature’ examines the relation between iconicity and indexicality in relation to Man Friday’s footprint in Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, the hoofmarks of the horse which Brother William of Baskerville decodes in Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose to Adso de Melk’s perplexity and PAGE 105 OF 123 106 ENGLISH LANGUAGE other more complex iconic elements in Vladimir Nabokov’s ‘Signs and Symbols’, in the Futurist poem by F.T. Marinetti, Le Soir, and in David Hare’s 1988 film Paris by Night. Simon J. Alderson looks at iconicity through a historical lens in ‘Iconicity in Literature: Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Prose Writing’, discussing iconicity in relation to literary criticism. Part II opens with Andreas Fischer’s ‘What, if Anything, is Phonological Iconicity?’, which offers an analysis of auditory, articulatory and associative iconicity and relates it to Peirce’s three forms of iconicity: the image, the diagram, and the metaphor. Hans Heinrich Meier, in ‘Imagination by Ideophones’, discusses the iconic dimension of ideophones, and Walter Bernhart, in ‘Iconicity and Beyond in “Lullaby for Jumbo”: Semiotic Functions of Poetic Rhythm’, analyses kinetic processes in poetic rhythm with reference to a poem by Edith Sitwell. Part III starts off with Max Nänny’s ‘Alphabetic Letters as Icons in Literary Texts’, which establishes three categories of letter icon (transparent, translucent and subliminal) and includes an exciting analysis of capital O in Shakespeare, Dryden, Pope, Keats, T.S. Eliot, Pound and Lawrence. Michael Webster, in ‘“Singing is Silence”: Being and Nothing in the Visual Poetry of e.e. cummings’, studies how this American poet created meanings of presence and absence by iconic means. Matthias Bauer, ‘Iconicity and Divine Likeness: George Herbert’s “Coloss. 3.3”’, argues that Herbert takes iconicity to its limits, showing that he is more conscious of poetic form than Donne or Crashaw. Peter Halter’s ‘Iconic Rendering of Motion and Process in the Poetry of William Carlos Williams’ shows the relation between iconicity, perception of space and the disposition of lines of verse in stanzas. Andreas Fischer, in ‘Graphological Iconicity in Print Advertising: A Typology’, offers a series of examples in which advertising violates the conventions of writing and typesetting to create added meaning, and finally Eva Lia Wyss, in ‘Iconicity in the Digital World: An Opportunity to Create a Personal Image?’, explores the opportunity internet and e-mail users have to create iconic meaning with ASCII characters. Part IV contains a paper by Ingrid Piller on ‘Iconicity in Brand Names’. She argues that connotational, as opposed to denotational, meaning is more effective in the naming of consumer products, and explores the use of foreign names, particular registers of English and the syntax of brand names in commercial ‘branding’. Part V has one, more literary, contribution by Wolfgang G. Müller, ‘The Iconic Use of Syntax in British and American Fiction’, which provides a pioneering study of the iconic dimension of syntactic phenomena such as ellipsis and parataxis in several novels by Raymond Chandler, Dickens, Richardson, Conrad and Wilkie Collins. Interest in concepts such as language and society, register and the nature of standard versus non-standard varieties of language is remarkably high this year. We find four important additions, in the shape of two textbooks and two collections of essays, to the now rapidly increasing literature in this area. Linda Thomas and Shân Wareing, Language, Society and Power: An Introduction, is an extremely userfriendly introduction to language and society and includes an illuminating chapter on the Standard English debate. Lance St John Butler, Registering the Difference: Reading Literature through Register, constitutes a book-length approach to register in literary texts. Tony Bex and Richard J. Watts have edited a collection on Standard English: The Widening Debate, which has its non-standard counterpart in Irma Taavitsainen, Gunnel Melchers and Päivi Pahta, eds., Writing in Nonstandard English. PAGE 106 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 107 Thomas and Wareing, Language, Society and Power is, in the words of its editors, a ‘foundation text’. Assuming no prior knowledge of linguistics, this coursebook takes the student through a series of chapters by different authors on language, thought and representation (Ishtla Singh), language and politics (Jason Jones and Shân Wareing), language and the media (Joanna Thornborrow), language and gender (Shân Wareing), language and ethnicity (Ishtla Singh), language and age (Jean Stilwell Peccei), language and class (Jason Jones), language and identity (Joanna Thornborrow), and Standard English and attitudes to language (Linda Thomas). These chapters, which can be read independently, are preceded by a handy introductory chapter on what language is and how it works (Shân Wareing). Students of language and linguistics, students of literature and students of English as a Foreign Language will no doubt find this book extremely useful; it is written in a clear and informative style but does not oversimplify concepts nor recoil from explaining complex socio-political issues. Teachers and lecturers are likely to find it useful too, because the contents have been structured in clearly labelled sections, which enable the reader to locate information quickly if need be. Activities designed to engage the reader’s attention and stimulate thinking about language are spread throughout the text, and suggestions for further reading are provided at the end of each chapter. All this makes this coursebook an excellent teaching and learning tool. In Butler, Registering the Difference Butler brings about a marriage of convenience between stylistics and literary theory (notably Kristeva’s intertextuality and Bakhtinian heteroglossia) in the only instance of a pedagogical stylistics volume published this year. Butler’s main aim is to strip the linguistic notion of register from its unnecessary apparel to make it a user-friendly tool for the discussion of literary texts. One of the book’s great assets is the variety of authors discussed, ranging from Marlowe, Donne, Milton, Swift, Pope, Johnson, Scott, Thackeray, Gibbon, and Stevenson to Evelyn Waugh, P.G. Wodehouse, Jean Rhys, T.S. Eliot, Dorothy Parker, Tolkien, Anthony Powell, Iris Murdoch, John Fowles, Harold Pinter, Ian Banks, Scottish poet Tom Leonard and Portuguese poet David Mourão-Ferreira. The book is neatly structured in three parts—‘Reading for Register’ (chapters 1–3), ‘The Ways Register Works’ (chapters 4–7) and ‘Case Studies’ (chapters 8–10)— which correspond to three distinct endeavours: the first section introduces and deals with register as a concept, the second presents its analytical possibilities and the third contains three practical applications to fiction and poetry. The pedagogical virtues of this book are evident after a mere glance at the table of contents, since most chapters bear self-revealing titles: chapter 1, ‘Noticing a Difference’, explores the term ‘register’ and assesses its value for literary analysis; chapter 2, ‘The History (and the Hijacking) of Register’, traces the evolution of the concept and its appropriation by linguists (Butler does not object to the Hallidayan articulation of register into field, tenor and mode for linguistic purposes, but claims that this degree of delicacy is unnecessary for certain types of stylistic analysis); chapter 3, ‘Two Big Distinctions: Written/Spoken and Formal/Informal’, is dedicated to a discussion of these two dichotomies supplemented by a third one, ‘Romance versus Germanic’; chapter 4, ‘Registers of Culture and Power’, presents literature as the site in which registers clash and where a culture conducts its self-analysis; chapter 5, ‘Literary Register’, deals with the paradox lying underneath the denial of the existence of a ‘literary language’, and the recognition of the existence of literary registers, in order to suggest that reading for register implies listening to the polyphony of registers PAGE 107 OF 123 108 ENGLISH LANGUAGE often present in a given literary text; chapter 6 is devoted to ‘Register and Genre’, and here Butler maps out the points held in common by these two complex and overlapping terms, both of which operate as mediators between texts and their contexts concluding that for the purpose of analysing literary texts the distinction between the two is of limited use; chapter 7, ‘Translating Register’, suggests that although translation is often doomed to failure, translators will be more successful if they pay attention to register; chapter 8, ‘“Pestling the Unalterable Whey of Words”: Samuel Beckett’s Attempt at Unstyle’, explores Beckett’s rich exploitation of different registers in his early novels and his failed attempt to do away with register in his later fiction; chapter 9, ‘Register and Dialect: Thomas Hardy’s Voices’, shows that dialects are profitably used in literary texts because not all dialects display all kinds of registers, so the particular association which certain dialects have with certain registers enables Hardy to evoke rustic innocence through the use of the Wessex dialect; and finally chapter 10, ‘“Singing, Each to Each”: Sounding like Poetry’, suggests that poems ‘sound poetic’ mostly because they are read as poetry and that most poems rely on a mixture of both poetic and non-poetic registers. Butler’s discussion of literary register in chapter 4 could have benefited from taking into account all the existing literature on ‘literariness’; also a subject index, to go along its author index, would have been a useful addition to a book written with a pedagogical aim in mind. Readers of this book may well wonder why drama is absent from the case studies, relegating plays, as is so often the case, to the Cinderella of stylistics. Nevertheless, this is a stimulating book, full of food for thought and clever insights into the myriad literary texts either analysed in full or mentioned in passing. It is also clearly and engagingly written, and is bound to be deemed very useful not only by school teachers, university lecturers, and native and non-native students of English but also by scholars doing research at the interface of language and literature. Bex and Watts, eds., Standard English, is a valuable collection of essays by diverse hands dealing with multiple aspects of the notion of a language standard from viewpoints which range from the political and the ideological to the linguistic and pedagogical. As Bex and Watts explain in their introduction, it was born out of a wish to bring together several voices on the debate on Standard English (SE) triggered by the implementation of the National Curriculum and the scanty attention bestowed on the opinions of professional linguists and teachers by the government and the popular press. The demand for Spanish to be treated on an equal footing with English in at least some of the states in the USA, and the publication of John Honey’s controversial book Language Is Power: The Story of Standard English and its Enemies were also among the reasons that led the editors to commission the chapters in this book, whose most immediate conclusion is perhaps that there is no widespread agreement as to what SE is or how it should be studied. On the whole, one of the most important issues raised by Standard English is that we need to know more about the differences between spoken and written English and this idea, which pervades most, if not all, of the contributions, greatly enhances the appeal of this book for readers of this section. Standard English is divided into three well-defined sections. Part I, entitled ‘Perspectives on the History and Ideology of “Standard English”’, explores the notion of SE from a historical perspective and the reasons why such a notion is still a powerful force today. Many of the chapters in this section deal with ideological implications of SE; some of them even question its existence. PAGE 108 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 109 James Milroy, in ‘The Consequences of Standardisation in Descriptive Linguistics’, deals with the effects that the standardization process and the ideological implications of the acceptance of a standard have had on linguistic descriptive and theorizing practices and how in turn linguists, sometimes indirectly, have perpetuated what he calls the ‘standard language ideology’. Richard J. Watts, in ‘The Social Construction of Standard English: Grammar Writers as a “Discourse Community”’, examines the discourse of early eighteenth-century English grammars with the help of the notion of ‘discourse communities’ to show how notions of ‘correct’ and ‘proper’ English came into existence at a time in which mercantilism and imperialism demanded the construction of a ‘national’ language. Hayley Davis, in ‘Typography, Lexicography and the Development of the Idea of “Standard English”’ adopts a historiographical approach and reviews the various ways in which the concept of a ‘standard’ has been applied to language, particularly in relation to lexis since the seventeenth century and the compilation of the OED in the mid-nineteenth century, providing also some clues as to the cultural elements which propel language standardization. The section closes with Tony Bex’s ‘Representations of English in Twentieth-Century Britain: Fowler, Gowers and Partridge’, which takes as point of departure the unclear definition of SE in the 1988 Kingman Report and then concentrates on how the three figures mentioned in his title, who have not contributed significantly to the academic debate on what constitutes SE, came to be invested with ‘authority’ in matters of ‘good’, prescriptive English in the eyes of ‘ordinary’ members of the public and why they have earned the respect they command. Part II, entitled ‘Perspectives on the Spoken Language’, is of a descriptive nature. Most of its contributors acknowledge the existence of SE and engage in its description from a linguistic angle, leaving aside issues of prescriptiveness. The section opens with Peter Trudgill’s ‘Standard English: What It Isn’t’, a characterization rather than a definition, as its author warns the reader, of SE. Trudgill approaches the task from a negative as well as a positive angle, since he believes that SE can be accounted for by describing what it is not as well as what it is. For him, SE is not a language, nor an accent, nor a style, nor a register, nor a set of prescriptive rules; SE is one variety of English among many, a dialect which happens to be unusual in some ways. Trudgill ends his chapter with a brief description of the grammatical idiosyncrasies of SE. The second chapter in this section, Jenny Cheshire’s ‘Spoken Standard English’, stems from the awareness that we still know very little about the syntactic structure of spoken English, an awareness partly brought about by the assumption behind the National Curriculum that it is possible to teach SE. Cheshire analyses the reason why linguists have failed to produce a grammar of speech and then gives a brief outline of some of the grammatical structures typical of spontaneous, informal spoken English. The section closes with a chapter by Ronald Carter, ‘Standard Grammars, Spoken Grammars: Some Educational Implications’, which is likewise concerned with the grammatical features which characterize spoken English, but in its discoursal dimension. Carter also discusses the linguistic, cultural and pedagogical implications of teaching SE in schools, drawing a distinction between acquiring a command of written SE and becoming a speaker of SE. Finally, part III, ‘Perspectives from Outside the UK’, takes the debate both across the Atlantic and across the Channel. Lesley Milroy’s ‘Standard English and Language Ideology in Britain and the United States’ peers into the differences in attitude towards SE PAGE 109 OF 123 110 ENGLISH LANGUAGE shown by laypeople in the USA and the British Isles, suggesting that the term SE means something different on each side of the Atlantic, since class and race discrimination issues weigh differently in the two cultures. Laura C. Hartley and Dennis R. Preston, in ‘The Names of US English: Valley Girl, Cowboy, Yankee, Normal, Nasal and Ignorant’, look at folk evaluations of US English and show that the Civil War divide that separated the South from the rest of the country is still in operation. Bent Preisler, in ‘Functions and Forms of English in a European EFL Country’, shows that the picture of SE is incomplete if one does not take into account the views of the non-native English-speaking world. Preisler’s discussion is backed with evidence from research carried out on the use of English in everyday life in Denmark, which shows that in an EFL country the discussion of SE revolves around the dichotomy correct/incorrect rather than good/bad or prestigious/ stigmatized. The book ends with an ‘epilogue’, in which Tony Crowley, with a title which owes something to Lewis Carroll’s sense of wordplay, ‘Curiouser and Curiouser: Falling Standards in the Standard English Debate’, assesses the contributions to the volume and provides a succinct state of the art, noting that it is crucial to elucidate whether the term ‘standard’ is to be read as ‘degree of uniformity’ or ‘level of excellence’ and whether ‘English’ refers to written English, spoken English or both. Reading this collection of essays has proved to be an extraordinarily stimulating experience since it not only examines SE from ideological, historical, educational and linguistic angles in very insightful ways but it also offers a good balance between theoretical discussion and practical, hands-on linguistic analysis. It will no doubt become a vade mecum for those working on issues of language and society (including ideology and culture) in the future. Taavitsainen, Melchers and Pahta, eds., Writing in Nonstandard English, is a solid attempt to discuss non-standard varieties of the language both in literary and non-literary texts, showing their multidimensional nature through a range of approaches from mainstream linguistics, sociolinguistics and dialectology. Nonstandard varieties are studied at all levels of linguistic analysis, from phonetics and phonology to discourse and register. Irma Taavitsainen and Gunnel Melchers open their introduction to this collection with a discussion of what SE is in order to highlight the difficulties of defining both standard and non-standard. It recommends regarding language variation as a continuum, as a cline of language use. They then relate the concept of ‘standard’ to educational policies, offer both a synchronic and a diachronic view of the process of standardization, discuss the relation of nonstandard varieties to dialect and dialectology, compare the implication of nonstandard varieties for the study of both literary and non-literary texts and round off their introduction with an examination of the difficulties encountered in the representation of non-standard English at all levels of language. Of all the papers in the collection approximately half of them deal with literary texts. Patricia Poussa, undertakes a systematic analysis of East Anglian dialect in ‘Dickens as Sociolinguist: Dialect in David Copperfield’, showing that Q.D. Leavis was mistaken in her appraisal of Dickens’s use of dialect in this novel as artificial. John M. Kirk, in ‘Contemporary Irish Writing and a Model of Speech Realism’, argues for the need to assess whether the non-standard language in poems written by contemporary Irish writers is effective and realistic when compared with external evaluating evidence from spoken language. Marion Fields, in ‘Dialect and Accent in Jim Carthwright’s Play Road as Seen through Erving Goffman’s Theory on PAGE 110 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 111 Footing’, takes as a point of departure the fact that in contemporary drama nonstandard English has lost is comic potential and has acquired instead some political functions, which she then studies in a play set in a small industrial town in Lancashire. Thomas Lavelle provides a corpus-based study of ‘The Representation of Nonstandard Syntax in John Dos Passos’ USA Trilogy’ and concludes that, contrary to expectation, there are few characters which use non-standard dialects, the use of non-standard English being simply a means of distinguishing between educated and non-educated characters. Laura Wright, in ‘Doing the Unexpected: Syntax and Style in Raymond Chandler’s Fiction’, questions the existence of a standard literary English and suggests that ‘non-standard’ elements in literary texts should be more accurately regarded as ‘marked’, after which she produces an intriguing analysis of some passages in Chandler’s short stories which he later reworked into his novels. Armed with Stanley Fish and Linda Hutcheon’s work on irony, Bo Pettersson shows in ‘Who Is “Sivilizing” Who(m)?: Huckleberry Finn— A Multidimensional Approach’ that, in order to signal good morals, Twain prefers simple syntax to non-standard English. Norman F. Blake focuses on the period when standards where starting to become fixed in order to discuss ‘Nonstandard Language in Early Varieties of English’, drawing his examples from Chaucer’s The Reeve’s Tale and Shakespeare’s King John. Irma Taavitsainen and Saara Nevanlinna show how non-standard features can create a comic effect and convey a moral lesson in a sixteenth-century medical treatise in ‘“Pills to Purge Melancholy”: Nonstandard Elements in A Dialogue Against the Feuer Pestilence’. Jonathan Culpeper and Merja Kytö combine data from the depositions of the Lancaster witches in 1612 with Thomas Deloney’s Elizabethan narrative Jack of Newburie in ‘Investigating Nonstandard Language in a Corpus of Early Modern English Dialogue: Methodological Considerations and Problems’, where they suggest that nonstandard elements are often filtered out when authors transcribe dialogue into written form. In ‘Cognitive Loanwords in Chaucer; Is Suprastandard Nonstandard?’, Päivi Koivisto-Alanko looks at the vocabulary of cognition in Chaucer’s translation of Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae. Gerald Porter examines English representations of Lowland Scots in a popular genre, the seventeenth-century broadside, in ‘The Ideology of Misrepresentation: Scots in English Broadsides’. Finally, Loreto Todd’s ‘The Medium for the Message’ considers the use of non-standard English as literary language in the work of African and Caribbean writers who ‘transmute’ English to make it flexible enough to carry their world experience. Although not dealing with literary texts, two other papers in this collection contain stylistic insights: Matti Rissanen, in ‘Language of Law and the Development of Standard English’, examines the role played by the language of official documents such as the statutory texts in the development of the Southern English Standard and David C. Minugh, in ‘What Aileth Thee, to Print So Curiously? Archaic Forms and Contemporary Newspaper Language’, calls attention to what he labels ‘linguistic ghosts’, lingering linguistic features which cling to the language centuries after they have been discontinued in the standard language. As a whole, this volume offers an excellent range of research on non-standard English and is very successful in its application to literary texts. The analysis of dialogue and discourse has produced an outstanding book this year. Lynne Magnusson, Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters is a first-rate study of EModE texts, which combines the PAGE 111 OF 123 112 ENGLISH LANGUAGE critical practice of new historicism with the powerful descriptive tools provided by discourse analysis and linguistic pragmatics. Availing herself of Brown and Levinson’s politeness theory, Magnusson explores Elizabethan family letters from Sidney’s household, Burghley’s state letters, Shakespearean plays (including Henry VIII, King Lear, Much Ado About Nothing and Othello) and some of his sonnets in order to develop a rhetoric of social exchange in which both vertical and horizontal relations find their articulation in discourse. This novel approach shows how the power relations implicit in social activities such as service or friendship are rooted in verbal negotiation. Magnusson’s analysis of letters is so rich and fruitful because she also takes into consideration the practice advocated by Elizabethan epistolary handbooks (including those by Erasmus and Angel Day). Her analysis of Shakespearean plays next to Elizabethan public and private letters also reveals how Shakespeare’s language is grounded in everyday Elizabethan rhetorical activity. Shakespeare and Social Dialogue is divided into three sections, entitled ‘The Rhetoric of Politeness’, ‘Eloquent Relations in Letters’ and ‘A Prosaics of Conversation’. In the first of these, Magnusson includes a politeness theory analysis of dramatic character in Henry VIII and an exploration of language and service in letters and in Shakespeare’s sonnets. Part II is dedicated to three interrelated studies: an exploration of how the epistolary manuals by Erasmus and Day contribute to the dissemination of both vertical and horizontal social interactions; an analysis of the intricacies of Elizabethan negative politeness in courtly and administrative letters to Sir William Cecil and Queen Elizabeth; and a study of how two Elizabethan letterwriting manuals illuminate social stratification and merchant discourse as displayed in verbal encounters in Love’s Labour’s Lost, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merchant of Venice and Timon of Athens. Finally, in part III, Magnusson tackles the analysis of three Shakespearean plays and studies the pragmatics of repair in Lear and Much Ado before undertaking a reading of language as symbolic capital in Othello. Shakespeare and Social Dialogue is an important contribution to the field of stylistics because it opens up new ways of discussing dramatic character, offering a study of the linguistic performance of Shakespeare’s characters in which a character is not seen as an autonomous subject but rather as the locus in which social interactions and power relations are enacted. Although not centrally concerned with stylistic analysis, three other books have been published this year which may be helpful for stylistics courses and stimulate research in language and literature. Adam Jaworski and Nikolas Coupland, The Discourse Reader is a handy volume which brings together influential texts on the study of discourse. It contains an introduction followed by six sections on meaning and context, methods and resources for analysing discourse, sequence and structure, negotiating social relations, identity and subjectivity, and finally, power, ideology and control. The volume includes well-known texts by Jakobson, Austin, Grice, Sacks, Labov, Goffman, Bakhtin, Foucault, and Bourdieu, together with other texts which are more difficult to get hold of . Students, and particularly graduate students doing research in related areas, are bound to find it extremely useful—if they are not acquainted with these texts they had better be—but teachers will also find that it is a convenient teaching tool to keep within easy reach. James Paul Gee, An Introduction to Discourse Analysis: Theory and Method, does not provide a comprehensive account of the field, but it has the advantage of offering a very personal view. As with all personal choices, it will please some and annoy others, but it must be PAGE 112 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 113 acknowledged that the author himself warns the reader about the fact that he is offering an introduction to one approach to Discourse Analysis and that it is not his theory or model but something constructed freely out of the work of others. His contribution offers a vision of discourse analysis in which talk about cognition, linguistic interaction, and society and its institutions are each offered a space. The book is rounded off with a chapter giving examples of practical discourse analysis. It is doubtful whether many lecturers will adopt this personal view as a textbook, but it is certainly worth a look for all those working in the field of discourse analysis. For very different reasons, Nigel Wheale, Writing and Society: Literacy, Print and Politics in Britain 1590–1660, may turn out to be of interest to students of stylistics, since it examines the workings of cultural production in relation to literacy, and raises questions related to style and language in the Renaissance. Wheale discusses the growth in popular literacy during the EModE period, taking into account issues of status, gender, geographical region, patronage and censorship, differences between literary and popular culture, English policies of state formation, and the conditions surrounding the publishing industry. It will prove invaluable reading for anyone working on texts of this period from the point of view of sociolinguistics, cognitive linguistics, text-worlds, critical discourse analysis or conversational analysis. Some of the debates which enlivened theoretical discussion in the recent past have been rekindled this year. Those interested in the relevance theory debate will find Barbara MacMahon’s ‘Problems in the Integrational Account of Relevance Theory’ of interest (L&L 8[1999] 49–57); a reply to Toolan (L&L 7[1998]; see YWES 79[2000] 110), as it gives the debate the shape of a tennis match between Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory and Roy Harris’s integrational linguistics. Michael Toolan himself replies to this new move by MacMahon in ‘Integrational Linguistics, Relevance Theory and Stylistic Explanation: A Reply to MacMahon’ (L&L 8[1999] 255–68), mostly answering MacMahon’s misgivings about integrationalism. The debate about the practice of stylistics which Mackay’s article in Language and Communication triggered in 1996 (see YWES 77[1998] 119–20) continues this year with Ray Mackay’s ‘There Goes the Other Foot: A Reply to Short et al.’ (L&L 8[1999] 59–66) and Mick Short and Willie van Peer, ‘A Reply to Mackay’ (L&L 8[1999] 269–75). Mackay claims that Short et al. misrepresented his views and ignore what he really said in their reply to his article (see YWES 79[2000] 110). Short and van Peer then complain that Mackay has not engaged with the ideational content of their previous response and that he has not yet provided substantial reasons regarding why ‘objective stylistics’ should be abandoned. A refreshing, interesting debate could spring out of Trevor Eaton’s appeal for comment on his ‘Literary Semantics: An Academic Discipline. A Document for Discussion’ (JLS 28[1999] 133–6), if readers of this journal wish to pick up this gauntlet. An article which is certain to provoke response is Ronald Carter’s ‘Common Language: Corpus, Creativity and Cognition’ (L&L 8[1999] 195–216), which explores the presence of literariness in everyday spoken discourse with data drawn from the CANCODE project. Carter adds to the debate about the nature of literary language by showing how speakers reform or reinforce existing language patterns, displaying a mastery of creativeness not unlike that found in literary texts. In just the opposite key, W. John Harker’s ‘Inferential Processing and the Comprehension of PAGE 113 OF 123 114 ENGLISH LANGUAGE Literary Texts’ (JLS 28[1999] 79–91) aims to explain the ways in which literary texts are processed, arguing that inference plays a crucial role in the comprehension of literary texts, a role which is qualitatively different from that played by inference in the processing of non-literary texts. Fiction and literary narrative continues to be the more prolific area of study in stylistics. In ‘Evidentiality and Affect: A Quantitative Approach’ (L&L 8[1999] 217–40) Greg Watson offers a revised version of a model developed by D. Biber and E. Finegan for the purpose of quantifying linguistic features which are used to force a reader to get involved, implicated and engaged with a text. This model is applied to the early prose fiction of the Australian author Mudrooroo. Siobhan Chapman and Christopher Routledge claim in the opening lines of ‘The Pragmatics of Detection: Paul Auster’s City of Glass’ (L&L 8[1999] 241–53) that their article considers ‘the agreed conventions that underlie linguistic interaction’, but they soon restrict their field of vision to a study of presupposition failure in a detective novel, in which they show how the possibility fictional discourse offers of letting presupposition fail without affecting the discourse layer of author/reader questions Sperber and Wilson’s claim that relevance will always be what language users aim for. Mary Ellen Ryder, in ‘Smoke and Mirrors: Event Patterns in the Discourse Structure of a Romance Novel’ (JPrag 31[1999] 1067–80), looks into the paradox often present at the climax of popular romance novels, i.e. that the heroine, who is supposed to be passive and initiate few actions, is also the main character in an action-filled plot. Ryder shows how a bestselling romance author such as Barbara Cartland bypasses this problem in Love Me For Ever by means of manipulating transitivity structures. Deborah F. Rossen-Knill, ‘Creating and Manipulating Fictional Worlds: A Taxonomy of Dialogue in Fiction’ (JLS 28[1999] 20–45), explores how speech-act theory can explain how fictional worlds come into existence and shows how the parasitic nature of the fictional representation of speech accounts for fictional speech working simultaneously in the fictional world and the ‘real’ world. Also focusing on speech acts, Arthur C. Graesser, Chery Bowers, Brent Olde, Katherine White and Natalie K. Person study how characters in a narrative share knowledge and impart it to each other in ‘Who Knows What? Propagation of Knowledge amongst Agents in a Literary Storyworld’ (Poetics 26[1999] 143–75); James D. McCawley, in ‘Conversational Scorekeeping and the Interpretation of Narrative and Expository Prose’ (JLS 28[1999] 46–57), discusses ‘mutual knowledge’ and E. Goffman’s concept of ‘footing’ in a wide array of novels, and comments on the validity of the notion of readers of fiction as eavesdroppers. Stefan Oltean, in ‘Fictionality as a Pragmatic and Referential Category’ (JLS 28[1999] 92–104), aims to account for fictionality in literary narrative with a framework built out of pragmatics and referential semantics. Metaphor almost matches fiction in productivity, since the influence of cognitive linguistics on stylistics continues to bear fruit. Zouhair Maalej’s ‘Metaphor Making and Processing’ (JLS 28[1999] 105–23) is a study of metaphor conflating cognitive and pragmatic approaches through a series of dualities such as: imagination/ rationality, assertion/speech act, convention/intention, speaker meaning/sentence meaning; world-to-words fit/words-to-world fit and dictionary/encyclopedic knowledge. Although not dealing with English texts, another paper, also by Maalej, ‘Metaphoric Discourse in the Age of Cognitive Linguistics, with Special Reference to Tunisian Arabic’ (JLS 28[1999] 189–206), might be of interest to those working PAGE 114 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 115 on cognitive theories of metaphor. Alan Bailin, in ‘No Man is An Island: Negation, Presupposition, and the Semantics of Metaphor’ (JLS 28[1999] 58–75), questions the belief that statements must be literally false if they are to be metaphorically interpreted, and studies the interrelations between negation, presupposition, relevance and metaphor. But possibly one of the most ground-breaking articles on metaphor this year is to be found in ‘The Inflexibility of Invariance’ (L&L 8[1999] 125–42), where Peter Stockwell argues against the Invariance Hypothesis, originally proposed by George Lakoff and Mark Turner in 1989, dealing with the need to restrain certain metaphorical mappings when counter-intuitive anomalies arise. Stockwell claims that the inflexibility of invariance curtails the creative power of metaphors which go beyond the source and target domains, and proposes an alternative for invariance based on literary examples. Media and film studies have also produced some articles worthy of note. In ‘Speaking Sincerely: Public Reactions to the Death of Diana’ (L&L 8[1999] 5–33), Martin Montgomery peers into three verbal tributes offered by the British prime minister Tony Blair, Her Majesty the Queen and Earl Spencer during the week following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, and then analyses public reactions to these three speeches in order to study, with the help provided by J. Habermas’s discussion of validity claims, the language of sincerity and the vocabulary of emotion in the context of modern media. Two other articles on the late Princess of Wales and the press have appeared in Discourse Studies, a new journal which may prove to be a promising forum for research on discourse. Katie Macmillan and Derek Edwards, ‘Who Killed the Princess? Description and Blame in the British Press’ (Discourse Studies 1[1999] 151–74) examine rhetorical oppositions in newspapers’ coverage of the death of the Princess of Wales; Jackie Abell and Elizabeth H. Stokoe, in ‘“I Take Full Responsibility, I Take Some Responsibility, I’ll Take Half of it but No More Than That”: Princess Diana and the Negotiation of Blame in the “Panorama” Interview’ (Discourse Studies 1[1999] 297–320), explore speakers’ conversational managing of blame. Romy Clark’s ‘From Text to Performance: Interpretation or Traduction? Trevor Griffiths’ Fatherland, as directed by Ken Loach’ (L&L 8[1999] 99–123) studies the fracture which exists between Griffiths’s printed text (i.e. the screenplay) of Fatherland and Loach’s performance text (i.e. the actual film), showing with critical discourse analysis methodology how Loach has gone beyond legitimate interpretations of the written text. Clark attributes the differences to Loach’s conception of the role of the text, the actor–character relation, and his conception of naturalism in performance, not ignoring the circumstances surrounding the production of this film as a European co-production for both cinema and television release. An exceptionally scanty year for poetry, the only outstanding article is Richard Cauldwell who, in ‘Openings, Rhythm and Relationships: Philip Larkin Reads Mr. Bleaney’ (L&L 8[1999] 35–48), offers a comparative study of five recordings, by Larkin himself, of the opening lines of one of his poems. Larkin’s readings present differences in prominence and tone, which for Cauldwell indicate that Larkin is imagining different preceding discourse contexts for the in media res opening of his poem. Cauldwell also relates his findings to the tenant–landlady relationship in the poem, and to Larkin’s own relation to his audience as poet and social commentator. Drama continues to be one of the least favoured genres by stylistics authors. Vimala Herman, ‘Discourse and Time in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet’ (L&L PAGE 115 OF 123 116 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 8[1999] 143–61) shows how verbal resources can be deployed in different ways to create primary, secondary and tertiary time in drama, and in particular studies the differing effects of deictic and non-deictic time references in Shakespeare’s tragedy. Several articles published this year are recorded here as evidence of the healthy state of the discipline. An essay on dramatic discourse merits attention: Roger Sell’s ‘Henry V and the Strength and Weakness of Words: Shakespearian Philology, Historicist Criticism, Communicative Pragmatics’ (NM 100[1999] 535–63). Popular musical lyrics are the subject of Paul Simpson’s ‘Language, Culture and Identity: With Another Look at Accents in Pop and Rock Singing’ (Multilingua 18[1999] 343–67). Media, and newspaper language in particular, have earned the attention of G. Jacobs, ‘Self-Reference in Press Releases (JPrag 31[1999] 219–42) and Robert Alexander, ‘Framing the Female Subject: The Women’s Section and “You”’ (L&C 19[1999] 229–42). Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) provides the methodology deployed by Alexander in this article, as well as by J. Flowerdew in ‘Description and Interpretation in Critical Discourse Analysis’ (JPrag 31[1999] 1089–99). R. De Cillia, M. Reisigl and R. Wodak also adopt a CDA approach to study racism in ‘The Discursive Construction of National Identities’ (D&S 10[1999] 149–74). Finally, other articles which deserve mention are: T. Nyan, ‘Language as Ideology: Some Implications of Argumentation Theory’s Conception of Utterance Meaning’ (JLS 28[1999] 124–32); Elena Semino, Mick Short and Martin Wynne, ‘Hypothetical Words and Thoughts in Contemporary British Narratives’ (Narrative 7[1999] 307–34); J.A. Wimsatt, ‘Alliteration and Hopkins’s Sprung Rhythm’ (PoT 19[1999] 531–64); and S. Wortham and M. Locher, ‘Embedded Metapragmatics and Lying Politicians’ (L&C 19[1999] 109–25). Just to end with a promising sign of the health enjoyed by the field of stylistics at present, let me record here that the journal Language and Literature has started a literature review section compiled by Geoff Hall and entitled ‘The Year’s Work in Stylistics: 1998’ (L&L 8[1999] 277–85), which I have found quite useful. It is to be hoped that it will be an annual addition to the last issue of each year’s volume. Books Reviewed Ackema, Peter. Issues in Morphosyntax. Linguistik Aktuell 26. Benjamins. [1999] pp. viii + 313. $75 ISBN 1 5561 9910 4. Antor, Heinz, and Kevin L. Cope, eds. Intercultural Encounters–Studies in English Literatures: Essays Presented to Rüdiger Ahrens on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday. Winter. [1999] pp. xv + 608. $34.95 ISBN 3 8253 0849 9. Baker, Philip, and Adrienne Bruyn, eds. St Kitts and the Atlantic Creoles: The Texts of Samuel Augustus Mathews in Perspective. University of Westminster Press. [1999] pp. iv + 444. £20 ISBN 1 8591 9088 X. Beal, Joan C. English Pronunciation in the Eighteenth Century: Thomas Spence’s Grand Repository of the English Language. Clarendon. [1999] pp. xii + 239. £60 ISBN 0 1982 3781 2. Beck, Heinrich, Dieter Geuenich, Heiko Steuer and Dieter Timpe, eds. Reallexikon der Germanischen Altertumskunde. 2nd edn. Vol. 13. Gruyter. [1999] pp. 653. ISBN 3 1101 6315 2. PAGE 116 OF 123 ENGLISH LANGUAGE 117 Bell, Allan, and Koenraad Kuiper, eds. New Zealand English. Varieties of English Around World G25. Benjamins. [1999] pp. 366. NLG150 ISBN 9 0272 4883 4 (Europe), $75 ISBN 1 5561 9723 3 (USA). Berk, Lynn M. English Syntax: From Word to Discourse. OUP. [1999] pp. xvii + 315. pb £17.99 ISBN 0 1951 2353 0. Bex, Tony, and Richard J. Watts, eds. Standard English: The Widening Debate. Routledge. [1999] pp. xii + 312. hb £55 ISBN 0 4151 9162 9, pb £16.99 ISBN 0 4151 9163 7. Biber, Douglas, Stig Johansson, Geoffrey Leech, Susan Conrad and Edward Finegan. Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. Longman. [1999] pp. xxviii + 1204. hb £79.70 ISBN 0 5822 3725 4. Booij, Geert, and Jaap van Marle, eds. Yearbook of Morphology 1998. Kluwer. [1999] pp. 309. NLG240 ISBN 0 7923 6035 4. Borsley, Robert. Syntactic Theory: A Unified Approach. 2nd edn. Arnold. [1999] pp. xii + 276. pb £15.99 ISBN 0 3407 0610 4. Bosch, Peter, and Rob van der Sandt, eds. Focus: Linguistic, Cognitive and Computational Perspectives. CUP. [1999] pp. xviii + 368. £40 ISBN 0 5215 8305 5. Böttner, Michael. Relationelle Grammatik. Linguistische Arbeiten 402. Niemeyer. [1999] pp. ix + 199. pb DM98 ISBN 3 4843 0402 2. Bringas, Ana, Dolores González Álvarez, Javier Pérez Guerra, Esperanza Rama Martínez and Eduardo Varela Bravo, eds. ‘Woonderous Ænglissce’: SELIM Studies in Medieval English Language. Colección Congresos 14. Universidade de Vigo: Servicio de Publicacións. [1999] pp. 195. pb pta2,000 ISBN 8 4815 8121 6. Brown, Keith, and Jim Miller, eds. Concise Encyclopedia of Grammatical Categories. Elsevier. [1999] pp. xxii + 485. hb NLG 377 ISBN 0 0804 3164 X. Bublitz, Wolfram, Uta Lenk and Eija Ventola, eds. Coherence in Spoken and Written Discourse: How to Create It and How to Describe It, Selected Papers from the International Workshop on Coherence, Augsburg, 24–27 April 1997. Pragmatics and Beyond NS 63. Benjamins. [1999] pp. xiv + 300. NLG158 ISBN 9 0272 5077 4 (Europe), $79 ISBN 1 5561 9941 4 (USA). Butler, Lance St John. Registering the Difference: Reading Literature through Register. Manchester UP. [1999] pp. vi + 215. hb £35 ISBN 0 7190 5613 6, pb £9.99 ISBN 0 7190 5614 4. Butt, Miriam, and Wilhelm Geuder, eds. The Projection of Arguments: Lexical and Compositional Factors. CSLI Lecture Notes 83. CSLI. [1998] pp. viii + 363. pb $25 ISBN 1 5758 6110 0. Cabré, M. Teresa. Terminology: Theory, Methods and Applications, ed. Juan C. Sager, trans. Janet Ann DeCesaris, Terminology and Lexicography Research in Practice 1. Benjamins. [1999] pp. xii + 248. hb NLG150 ISBN 9 0272 1633 9, pb NLG60 ISBN 9 0272 1634 7. Carls, Uwe, and Peter Lucko, eds. Form, Function and Variation in English: Studies in Honour of Klaus Hansen. Lang. [1999] pp. 372. £36 ISBN 3 6313 3081 2. Carr, G.F., W. Herbert and Lihua Zhang, eds. Interdigitations: Essays for Irmengard Rauch. Lang. [1999]. Carr, Philip. English Phonetics and Phonology: An Introduction. Blackwell. [1999] pp. xviii + 169. hb £45 ISBN 0 6311 9775 3, pb £14.99 ISBN 0 6311 9776 1. PAGE 117 OF 123 118 ENGLISH LANGUAGE Coates, Richard. The Place-Names of West Thorney. EPNS Supplementary Series 1. EPNS. [1999] pp. 66. pb £7 ISBN 0 9048 8952 1. Coates, Richard. Word Structure. Language Workbooks. Routledge. [1999] pp. ix + 101. pb £9.99 ISBN 0 4152 0631 6. Cohen, Ariel. Think Generic! The Meaning and Use of Generic Sentences. CSLI Publications. [1999] pp. xiii + 208. hb£37.50 ($59.95) ISBN 1 5758 6207 7, pb £13.95 ($22.95) ISBN 1 5758 6208 5. Coleman, Julie. Love, Sex, and Marriage: A Historical Thesaurus. Rodopi. [1999] pp. xvii + 599. £78.70 ISBN 9 0420 0433 9. Collins, Beverley, and Inger M. Mees. The Real Professor Higgins: The Life and Career of Daniel Jones. MGruyter. [1999] pp. xxv + 571. $124 ISBN 3 1101 5124 3. Collins, Peter and David Lee, eds. The Clause in English: In Honour of Rodney Huddleston. Studies in Language Companion Series 45. Benjamins. [1999] pp. xxii + 327. NLG178 ISBN 9 0272 3048 X. Cowie, A.P. English Dictionaries for Foreign Learners: A History. Clarendon. [1999] pp. xiv + 232. £45 ISBN 0 1982 3506 2. Crain, Stephen, and Diane Lillo-Martin. An Introduction to Linguistic Theory and Language Acquisition. Blackwell Textbooks in Linguistics. Blackwell. [1999] pp. xi + 424. hb £60 ISBN 0 6311 9535 1, pb £17.99 ISBN 0 6311 9536 X. Cram, David, Andrew Linn and Elke Nowak, eds. History of Linguistics, vol. II: From Classical to Contemporary Linguistics. Benjamins. [1999] pp. 375. NLG190 ISBN 9 0272 4583 5 (Europe), $95 ISBN 1 5561 9214 2 (USA). Davies, Alan. An Introduction to Applied Linguistics: From Practice to Theory. Edinburgh Textbooks in Applied Linguistics 1. EdinUP. [1999] pp. xi + 178. hb £40 ISBN 0 7486 1257 2, pb £15.95 ISBN 0 7486 1258 0. Evans, Gareth, and John McDowell, eds. Truth and Meaning: Essays in Semantics. OUP. [1999] pp. xxiii + 419. pb £17.99 ISBN 0 1982 5007 X. Extra, Guus, and Ludo Verhoeven, eds. Bilingualism and Migration. Studies on Language Acquisition 14. Mouton. [1999] pp. x + 391. hb DM178 ISBN 3 1101 6369 1, pb DM58 ISBN 3 1101 6370 5. Faber, Pamela, Wolf Gewehr, Manuel Jiménez Raya and Antony J. Peck, eds. English Teacher Education in Europe: New Trends and Developments. Foreign Language Teaching in Europe. Lang. [1999] pp. 262. pb £29 ISBN 3 6313 4653 0. Felser, Claudia. 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