<html><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Arabic-L: Wed 23 Apr 2008</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Moderator: Dilworth Parkinson <<a href="mailto:dilworth_parkinson@byu.edu">dilworth_parkinson@byu.edu</a>></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">[To post messages to the list, send them to <a href="mailto:arabic-l@byu.edu">arabic-l@byu.edu</a>]</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">[To unsubscribe, send message from same address you subscribed from to</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "><a href="mailto:listserv@byu.edu">listserv@byu.edu</a> with first line reading:</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; "> unsubscribe arabic-l ]</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">-------------------------Directory------------------------------------</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">1) Subject:New Book: Morphologies of Asia and Africa</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">-------------------------Messages-----------------------------------</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">1)</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Date: 23 Apr 2008</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">From:reposted from LINGUIST</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">Subject:New Book: Morphologies of Asia and Africa</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; ">EDITOR: Kaye, Alan S. <br>TITLE: Morphologies of Asia and Africa<br>PUBLISHER: Eisenbrauns<br>YEAR: 2007<br><br>Mary Paster, Department of Linguistics and Cognitive Science, Pomona College<br><br>SUMMARY<br>This book is an encyclopedic, two-volume reference comprising descriptions of a<br>wide range of Asian and African morphological systems, 46 in all. As described<br>in the Introduction by editor Alan Kaye (who tragically died of bone cancer in<br>May 2007, before the collection was published), the book aims to ''present<br>interesting facts about the word-formation strategies of the language(s) under<br>discussion in an informative and typologically relevant way.'' The selection of<br>languages is meant to be both broad and deep, but not evenly distributed across<br>language families or geographic areas. For example, Kaye points out that there<br>is a particular emphasis on Semitic and Afroasiatic languages since these were<br>areas of his own interest. The depth in certain areas comes at the acknowledged<br>expense of coverage of some more well-known languages; e.g., there is no essay<br>on Chinese or Japanese.<br><br>The individual language entries are written by experts on each particular<br>language and, in many cases, people who are well-known experts on the relevant<br>language family as a whole. The entries vary in their style, range of coverage,<br>and theoretical perspective, but all of them are descriptively oriented and have<br>large amounts of data. Most of the essays state linguistic generalizations in<br>pretheoretical terms, and most range from being almost completely non-formal to<br>mentioning points of formal theoretical interest only in passing. <br><br>The essays are organized mainly according to their genetic affiliation. Volume 1<br>deals with the Afroasiatic languages. Essays 1-10 cover the ancient Semitic<br>languages, and essays 11-18 cover modern Semitic languages. Essay 19 is on<br>Berber, essays 20-24 are on Cushitic languages, essays 25-28 are on Chadic<br>languages, and essay 29 is on Omotic. In volume 2, essays 30-37 are on<br>Indo-European languages. Essay 30 is on an Anatolian language (Hittite), essays<br>31-32 are on Indo-Iranian, 33-34 cover ancient Iranian languages, 35-36 cover<br>modern Iranian languages, and essay 37 is on Classical Armenian. Essay 38 is on<br>a Nilo-Saharan language (Kanuri), 39 is on a Niger-Congo language (Swahili), and<br>40 is on an Altaic language (Turkish). Essays 41-42 cover Caucasian languages,<br>43 is on a Malayo-Polynesian language (Indonesian), and 44-46 cover language<br>isolates (Burushaski, Ket, and Sumerian).<br><br>EVALUATION<br>Kaye's pointedly humorous introduction is a rallying cry for linguists who are<br>interested in morphology and wish to see it treated as a full-fledged component<br>of grammar worthy of study in its own right. It is also a passionate call to<br>arms for linguists of the descriptive persuasion who agree with Kaye's view that<br>''linguistics deals with languages and, in particular, should deal more with<br>exotic tongues.'' These views are carried through consistently throughout the<br>collection, with each contributor giving a very detailed description using data<br>that in many cases have never been exposed to such a wide audience. Bello Buba<br>and Jonathan Owens' essay on Glavda describes a particularly interesting<br>language that was virtually undescribed before.<br><br>This is an inspiring set of volumes. The expertise represented in its pages is<br>almost overwhelming, as are the copious quantities of data in the essays. It<br>seems, therefore, that this work is an absolute success with respect to the<br>goals set forth by the editor. It is also quite an impressive testament to the<br>editor that such a who's-who of language experts contributed to the collection.<br><br>The papers are of consistently high quality in terms of their depth of<br>description, less so in their clarity. Some (e.g., Alan Kaye on Arabic, Jeffrey<br>Heath on Moroccan) are entertaining and even flowery in parts, while most are<br>straightforward and in some cases even somewhat like an outline in their style.<br>One example is Wolf Leslau's essay on Amharic; in that case the sparse style is<br>a good thing because there is such a wealth of data (much of it quite usefully<br>organized into paradigms) that the paper takes up 51 pages even without a lot of<br>exposition.<br><br>Several of the authors helpfully attempt to contextualize the morphological<br>descriptions. Some do a particularly nice job of integrating the discussion of<br>morphology with other areas of interest in the same language, particularly<br>phonology. For example, Robert Hoberman's essay on Maltese contains a lucid<br>discussion of a 'ghost consonant' that has played a major role in analyses of<br>Maltese phonology, and Grover Hudson's contribution on Highland East Cushitic<br>languages discusses a fascinating process in Hadiyya taboo language that<br>replaces a syllable and the onset of the following syllable of a word that<br>shares its first syllable with the name of a woman's father-in-law. As Hudson<br>points out, this replacement pattern is problematic for the notion that rules of<br>this type must refer to some element of the prosodic hierarchy such as a mora,<br>syllable, or foot. <br><br>Other authors' essays raise issues of historical and dialectological interest.<br>For example, Gregory Anderson's contribution on Burushaski deals with three<br>separate dialects and makes explicit comparisons among the three. And Russell<br>Schuh's essay on Bade, for example, includes considerable discussion of<br>developments in Western Bade compared with other Bade dialects and other<br>languages in the same subgroup of West Chadic. In essays such as these, the<br>reader has a good point of reference for understanding what is of special<br>interest in the language. All of the essays contain weighty descriptions and<br>bountiful data, but some will be of more use than others for non-specialist<br>readers due to their varying efforts to situate the descriptions in some wider<br>context, whether theoretical or comparative.<br><br>Although there is much to appreciate in these volumes, it is also worth pointing<br>out a couple of attributes of the collection that may be viewed as flaws by some<br>readers. One aspect of these volumes that may disappoint is the scant coverage<br>of certain language families, most notably Niger-Congo. According to Ethnologue,<br>the Niger-Congo language family has 1,514 languages in it, while Altaic has 66<br>languages. Yet both families are represented by the same number of essays in<br>this collection (namely, one). And Afroasiatic has far fewer languages than<br>Niger-Congo (375, according to Ethnologue), but the entirety of volume 1 (29 of<br>the 46 essays) is devoted to Afroasiatic. Kaye does predict in the Introduction<br>that ''[r]eviewers will inevitably point out that this language should have been<br>included or that one was superfluous,'' but even if one accepts that the main<br>focus is on Afroasiatic with only a side helping of languages that are<br>''culturally and geographically related'' to it, the minimal coverage of<br>Niger-Congo in the context of volume 2 is still disappointing (although Ellen<br>Contini-Morava's essay on Swahili is excellent, and it is also likely to be<br>among the most interesting to those with interests in morphological theory since<br>it gives a nice overview of the controversy over the formal analysis of the<br>Swahili verb and how competing morphological models have proposed to model it).<br><br>A more significant issue is the heavy emphasis on description at the expense of<br>theoretical discussion. One of Kaye's stated goals, which this collection is<br>meant to contribute to, is a '''grand synthesis' of morphological theory and<br>Universal Grammar''. If such a synthesis is to be achieved, it seems that people<br>working on the descriptive side may need to reach a bit further towards the<br>theoretical side. In the Introduction, Kaye discusses various types of<br>morphological models falling under the general frameworks known as<br>''Item-and-Process'', ''Item-and-Arrangement'', and ''Word-and-Paradigm''. Yet the<br>individual contributions to the collection rarely make any mention of these<br>types of approaches or to which approach might work best for the language in<br>question, and few explicitly state which type of model they are assuming (Sharon<br>Rose's essay on Chaha is one notable exception). The vast majority of essays are<br>purely descriptive, making it difficult to relate the language data to problems<br>in morphological theory. I do not necessarily intend this as a criticism of the<br>contributors; in light of the almost uniform non-theoretical nature of the<br>contributions, this appears to have been a decision made by the editor and<br>passed along to the authors. But a reader interested in bridging the gap between<br>good description and theoretical relevance is likely to find that this<br>collection falls a bit short on the theory side.<br><br>Despite these shortcomings, the depth, breadth, and overall quality of this<br>collection are outstanding. _Morphologies of Asia and Africa_ is an impressive<br>achievement and will serve as a valuable and authoritative reference on the<br>languages it describes.<br><br>ABOUT THE REVIEWER<br>Mary Paster is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics and Cognitive Science at<br>Pomona College. Her research interests are in phonology and morphology,<br>primarily in African languages, and her recent work has focused on tone,<br>language description and documentation, and the phonology-morphology interface. <br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; font: normal normal normal 12px/normal Helvetica; min-height: 14px; "><br></div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">--------------------------------------------------------------------------</div><div style="margin-top: 0px; margin-right: 0px; margin-bottom: 0px; margin-left: 0px; ">End of Arabic-L: 23 Apr 2008</div></div></body></html>