Recently published: Books for review in LT

Tue Sep 28 07:52:26 UTC 2010

Recently Published and of Typological Interest / ix 2010

New publications of potential typological interest are periodically  
advertised on the lingtyp list.  Apart from directly commissioning  
reviews, LT solicits offers from lingtypists to review books – those  
listed here or whichever others you’d like to add on your own  
understanding of the attribute “typologically relevant”.  (And do  
construe its scope liberally!)  For purposes of book reviewing in LT,  
what matters is that REVIEWS are done from a distinctively typological  
angle, from whatever angles the books reviewed are done.  Prospective  
reviewers so intentioned please get in touch.

Drop me a line with bibliographical particulars if you want to make  
sure your own relevant publications will be included in the next  
listing.   The most effective indication of the existence of a new  
relevant book is the receipt of a review copy;  do remind your  
publisher to send one to:

LINGUISTIC TYPOLOGY,

Sprachwissenschaft,

Universität Konstanz,

78457 Konstanz, Germany.

Regrettably, many previously listed titles have remained unreviewed in  
LT.  However, typological publications can have long shelf-lives, and  
you’re welcome to make your pick and review now what has been listed  
before and is not past the sell-by date.

Do feel free to also offer to review grammars for LT (again, from a  
distinctively typological angle).  Some are included in our listings  
here, but eventually GRAMMAR WATCH on the ALT website should pick up  
again where we left off a while ago.

Frans Plank

frans.plank at uni-konstanz.de

Aikhenvald, Alexandra Y. 2010. Imperatives and commands. Oxford:  
Oxford University Press.

[This is the first cross-linguistic study of imperatives, and commands  
of other kinds, across the world's languages. It makes a significant  
and original contribution to the understanding of their morphological,  
syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic characteristics. The author  
discusses the role imperatives and commands play in human cognition  
and how they are deployed in different cultures, and in doing so  
offers fresh insights on patterns of human interaction and communcation.

Alexandra Aikhenvald examines the ways of framing commands, or command  
strategies, in languages that do not have special imperative forms.  
She analyses the grammatical and semantic properties of positive and  
negative imperatives and shows how these correlate with categories  
such as tense, information source, and politeness. She looks at the  
relation of command pragmatics to cultural practices, assessing, for  
example, the basis for Margaret Mead's assumption that the harsher the  
people the more frequently they use imperatives. Professor Aikhenvald  
covers a wide range of language families, including many relatively  
neglected examples from North America, Amazonia, and New Guinea. The  
book is accompanied by illustrations of some conventional command  
signs.  [OUP]]

Amberber, Mengistu, Brett Baker, & Mark Harvey (eds.). 2010. Complex  
predicates: Cross-linguistic perspectives on event structure.  
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Baerman, Matthew, Greville G. Corbett, & Dunstan Brown (eds.). 2010.  
Defective paradigms: Missing forms and what they tell us. Oxford:  
Oxford University Press.

Bowers, John. 2010. Arguments as relations. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

[In Arguments as Relations, John Bowers proposes a radically new  
approach to argument structure that has the potential to unify data  
from a wide range of different language types in terms of a simple and  
universal syntactic structure. In many ways, Bowers’s theory is the  
natural extension of three leading ideas in the literature: the  
minimalist approach to Case theory (particularly Chomsky’s idea that  
Case is assigned under the Agree function relation); the idea of  
introducing arguments in specifiers of functional categories rather  
than in projections of lexical categories; and the neo-Davidsonian  
approach to argument structure represented in the work of Parsons and  
others. Bowers pulls together these strands in the literature and  
shapes them into a unified theory.  These ideas, together with certain  
basic assumptions — notably the idea that the initial order of merge  
of the three basic argument categories of Agent, Theme, and Affectee  
is just the opposite of what has been almost universally assumed in  
the literature — lead Bowers to a fundamental rethinking of argument  
structure. He proposes that every argument is merged as the specifier  
of a particular type of light verb category and that these functional  
argument categories merge in bottom-to-top fashion in accordance with  
a fixed Universal Order of Merge (UOM). In the hierarchical structures  
that result from these operations, Affectee arguments will be highest,  
Theme arguments next highest, and Agent arguments lowest — exactly  
the opposite of the usual assumption.  [MIT Press]]

Bybee, Joan. 2010. Language, usage and cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge  
University Press.

Cinque, Guglielmo. 2010. The syntax of adjectives: A comparative  
study. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

[In The Syntax of Adjectives, Guglielmo Cinque offers cross-linguistic  
evidence that adjectives have two sources. Arguing against the  
standard view, and reconsidering his own earlier analysis, Cinque  
proposes that adjectives enter the nominal phase either as  
“adverbial” modifiers to the noun or as predicates of reduced  
relative clauses. Some of his evidence comes from a systematic  
comparison between Romance and Germanic languages. These two language  
families differ with respect to the canonical position taken by  
adjectives, which is prenominal in Germanic and both pre- and  
postnominal in Romance. Cinque shows that a simple N(oun)-raising  
analysis encounters a number of problems, the primary one of which is  
its inability to express a fundamental generalization governing the  
interpretation of pre- and postnominal adjectives in the two language  
families. Cinque argues that N-raising as such should be abandoned in  
favor of XP-raising — a conclusion also supported by evidence from  
other language families.  After developing this framework for  
analyzing the syntax of adjectives, Cinque applies it to the syntax of  
English and Italian adjectives. An appendix offers a brief discussion  
of other languages that appear to distinguish overtly between the two  
sources of adjectives.  [MIT Press]]

Diewald, Gabriele & Elena Smirnova. 2010. Evidentiality in German:  
Linguistic realization and regularities in grammaticalization. Berlin:  
De Gruyter Mouton.

Gildea, Spike & Francesc Queixalós (eds.). 2010. Ergativity in  
Amazonia. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Godard, Danièle (ed.). 2010. Fundamental issues in the Romance  
languages. Stanford: CSLI Publications.

Guillaume, Antoine. 2008. A grammar of Cavineña (MGL 44). Berlin: De  
Gruyter Mouton.

Hasko, Victoria & Renee Perelmutter (eds.). 2010. New approaches to  
Slavic verbs of motion. Amsterdam: Benjamins.

Hinrichs, Uwe, with Petra Himstedt-Vaid (eds.). 2010. Handbuch der  
Eurolinguistik. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz.

Hogeweg, Lotte, Helen de Hoop and Andrej Malchukov (eds.) 2009. Cross- 
linguistic semantics of tense, aspect, and modality. Amsterdam:  
Benjamins.

Luraghi, Silvia & Vit Bubenik (eds.). 2010. Continuum companion to  
historical linguistics. London: Continuum.

Maisak, Timur & Ekaterina Rakhilina (eds.). 2007. Glagoly dviženija v  
vode: Leksičeskaja tipologija. Moskva: Indrik.

Nordström, Jackie. 2010. Modality and subordinators. Amsterdam:  
Benjamins.

Operstein, Natalie. 2010. Consonant structure and prevocalization.  
Amsterdam: Benjamins.

[The monograph provides the first systematic synchronic and diachronic  
study of Consonant Prevocalization and proposes a new interpretation  
of the intrasegmental structure of consonants. The proposed model  
makes strong predictions that are automatically relevant to  
phonological theory at both the diachronic and synchronic levels, and  
also to the phonetics of articulatory evolution. It also clearly  
demonstrates that a wide generalization of the notion of consonant  
prevocalization provides a uniform account for many well-known  
processes generally considered independent – from asynchronous  
palatalization in Polish to intrusive [r] in nonrhotic English, to  
vowel epentheses in Avestan, and to pre-/s/ vowel prothesis in Welsh  
and Western Romance. Consonant Prevocalization has not played a  
significant role in the development of modern phonological theory to  
date, and this work is the first to highlight its broad theoretical  
significance. It develops important theoretical insights, with a  
wealth of supporting data and a rich bibliography. The book will be of  
great interest to phonologists, phoneticians, typologists, and  
historical linguists.  [Author]]

Palancar, Enrique L. 2009. Gramática y Textos del Hñöñhö: Otomí  
de San Ildefonso Tultepec, Querétaro. Mexico City: Plaza y Valdés.  
[Volumen I: Gramática, ISBN 978-607-402-146-2, 630 pp.], [Volumen II:  
Textos, ISBN 978-607-402-147-9, 150 pp. + CD].

Pericliev, Vladimir. 2010. Machine-aided linguistic discovery: An  
introduction and some examples. London: Equinox.

Quick, Phil. 2007. A grammar of the Pendau language of Central  
Sulawesi, Indonesia (Pacific Linguistics 590). Canberra: Australian  
National University.

Song, Jae Jung (ed.). 2010. The Oxford handbook of linguistic  
typology. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Urdze, Aina Mārĩte. 2010. Ideophone in Europa: Die Grammatik der  
lettischen Geräuschverben (Diversitas Linguarum 27). Bochum:  
Universitätsverlag Dr. N. Brockmeyer.

[This is just one book, despite the two titles.  [FP]]

Zúñiga, Fernando & Seppo Kittilä (eds.). 2010. Benefactives and  
malefactives: Typological perspectives and case studies. Amsterdam:  
Benjamins.
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