16.3499, Review: General Ling: Laury et al. (2003)

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LINGUIST List: Vol-16-3499. Thu Dec 08 2005. ISSN: 1068 - 4875.

Subject: 16.3499, Review: General Ling: Laury et al. (2003)

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1)
Date: 06-Dec-2005
From: Pramod Pandey < pkspandey at yahoo.com >
Subject: Perspectives in Linguistics: Papers in Honor of P. J. Mistry 

	
-------------------------Message 1 ---------------------------------- 
Date: Thu, 08 Dec 2005 17:58:05
From: Pramod Pandey < pkspandey at yahoo.com >
Subject: Perspectives in Linguistics: Papers in Honor of P. J. Mistry 
 

EDITORS: Laury, Ritva; McMenamin, Gerald R.; Okamoto, Shigeko; 
Samiian, Vida; Subbarao, K. V.
TITLE: Perspectives in Linguistics
SUBTITLE: Papers in Honor of P. J. Mistry
PUBLISHER: Indian Institute of Language Studies 
YEAR: 2003
Announced at http://linguistlist.org/issues/16/16-2866.html 

Pramod Pandey, Centre of Linguistics and English, Jawaharlal Nehru 
University, New Delhi, India

INTRODUCTION

The present volume is a collection of papers in honor of P. J. Mistry, 
linguist and educator. Mistry spent most of his professional life in the 
Linguistics Department of California State University, Fresno and 
played a key role in developing it. The contributions to the volume are 
from his colleagues, collaborators and students on various aspects of 
linguistic research, including linguistic theory, historical linguistics, 
historiography, applied linguistics, and forensic linguistics.

SUMMARY

The first four papers introduce the reader to Mistry's contributions to 
South Asian linguistics as a linguist and as a general bibliographer for 
South Asia for the MLA (James Gair & Barbara Lust 'Felicitations for 
P. J. Mistry', 13-14), to Gujarati linguistics (Babu Suthar 'P. J. Mistry' 1-
4), to Gujarati poetry (Jagdish Dave 'P. J. Mistry' 1-4), and to the 
growth of his department at Fresno (Fred Brengelman 'Schoolmaster 
linguists in England, 1550-1675', 25-36). These accounts of Mistry's 
contributions commonly share the view of his qualities of head and 
heart. Although the volume is not organized around topics, as is 
generally the case with festschrifts, a majority of the remaining papers 
can be classified into the following groups: core synchronic linguistics, 
historical linguistics, Discourse Analysis, language teaching, research 
methodology, and miscellaneous. 

The core-linguistics papers present analyses of structural phenomena 
in phonology, morphology and syntax. For example Sarju Devi & K. V. 
Subbarao ('Reduplication and case copying: The case of lexical 
anaphors in Manipuri and Telugu', 55-81) examine the role of 
reduplication and Case copying in the formation of lexical anaphors in 
languages from two different language families, Tibeto-Burman and 
Dravidian, in terms of universal principles, with the aim of presenting 
evidence for the mental organization of Language. Matazo Izutani 
('Ga-o conversion in Japanese desiderative constructions revisited', 
117-124) deals with the phenomenon of case marking known as ga/ o 
(Nom/Acc) conversion in Japanese. Bharati Modi ('Gender in Gujarati', 
247-260) presents an account of gender assignment and gender 
agreement in Gujarati. Yukiko Morimoto ('Markedness hierarchies and 
optimality in Bantu', 261-280) shows the phenomenon of Subject-
Object reversal in Bantu languages, found to be problematic in formal 
linguistics, to be fully accountable within the approach of Optimality 
Theory (OT). Bokyung Noh ('Event Grammar: English depictive 
prdicates are thematically dependent', 281-296) closely examines the 
phenomenon of Depictive Predication Construction (e.g., Tom sat on 
the bench drunk; Tom ate the vegetable fresh) in terms of thematic 
roles and accounts for the two types, subject (better Agent)-oriented 
and object (better Theme)-oriented, in terms of two event arguments, 
one (Agent-oriented) at the IP level and the other at the VP level. 
Golston & Thurgood (Reduplication as echo: Evidence from Bontok 
and Chumas, 81-106) explain the phenomenon of reduplication in 
Bontok and Chumash, two rich reduplicative systems, within the 
framework of OT, as a violation of *ECHO, which forbids the 
concatenation of similar groups of sounds.

There are four papers devoted to Discourse Analysis -- by James 
Cornish ('Questions of coherence: A pilot study of text relations and 
ratings in and of timed writing texts', 37- 54), Hirokuni Masuda 
('Displacement: The principle of theme organization in internalized 
discourse', 217-234), Gerald McMenamin ('A forensic analysis of 
writing style: An Indian-English case', 235-246) and Yoko Tada ('Turn-
taking by the visually impaired', 339-352). Cornish bases his study on 
the hypotheses that there are describable differences in the 
production and interpretation of coherence in texts written by a 
speaker of L1 Korean and a speaker of L1 American English, and that 
these differences can be smoothed out using the analytical technique 
and language of Rhetorical Structure Theory (RST). Masuda presents 
an analysis of Displacement - an alteration in the underlying sequence 
of an event in a physical context in a discourse situation. The 
phenomenon, with delayed theme as one of its consequences, is 
found to conform to the principles of Narrative Representation Theory 
(NRT), originating in the work of Dell Hymes, and thus provides 
supporting evidence for it. 

McMenamin's study reports a successful attempt at answering two 
research questions arising from the following situation. A New Delhi 
Company (ND) produces to a Tokyo firm (T) a letter of agreement 
having been reached between them before the death of the CEO of T. 
T failed to recognize the agreement and questioned the authenticity of 
the documents produced by ND. The research questions for the 
forensic linguist are: Could one of the two parties be excluded as the 
authorship source of the two writings? And could one of the parties be 
recognized as the source? The author shows how a stylistic analysis 
using style markers for diagnosis including markers of format, 
punctuation, spelling, word form and syntax, lead unambiguously to 
the following results: T writers are excluded, and ND writers are 
identified as the source of the material document. Tada presents an 
account of turn-taking by the visually-impaired. The paper gives a 
review of the comparative literature on language development by blind 
children and a critical discussion of the turn-taking signals and 
mechanisms in operation in conversation among the visually-impaired.

A noticeable feature of the present volume is the inclusion of papers 
on historical linguistics, as well as a paper on historiography. The 
latter by Fred Brengelman ('Schoolmaster linguists in England, 1550-
1675', 25-36) gives an account of the contributions by schoolmaster 
linguists in England, 1550-1675, who made the first serious effort ''to 
categorize the sounds of English, to make sense of (and help 
rationalize, the spelling system, to develop a pedagogical grammar, 
and to deal with all the questions raised by the effort to standardize 
written English...''. The papers on historical linguistics, like the ones on 
core synchronic linguistics, have theoretical orientation. Thus, 
Natsuko Ishida ('The gerund in Chaucer's English from the viewpoint 
of Cognitive Grammar', 107-116), through an examination of the 
gerund in Chaucer's English, shows how the framework of Cognitive 
Grammar helps explain the finding that the development of the gerund 
in English has been sensitive to the external context/ environment in 
which it appears. L. V. Khokhlova ('The distribution of analytic and 
synthetic passives in Indo-European languages of western India', 139-
158) shows that the synthetic type passive is predominant in all the 
languages of western India.

Se-Kyung Kim ('Murmur transfer in Classical Sanskrit', 159-174) offers 
an Optimality Theoretic (OT) account of a long-standing phenomenon 
of ''murmur assimilation'' in Sanskrit as a case of transfer rather than 
deletion, as is assumed in many analyses. Kim argues that the 
phenomenon of murmur transfer necessitates a two level analysis in 
the grammar, namely, the root-level and the word-level. The constraint 
ranking at the two levels is consistent following a general principle of 
grammar. At both levels, MAX(F) dominates IDENT(F). At the root 
level, IDENT(F) is not active as the inputs contain a floating feature. 
The constraint is operative at the word-level, after the position of the 
murmur feature is fixed at the root level. Ritva Laury ('Layering, 
obsolescence and renewal: Oblique cases and adpositions in Finnish', 
175- 184) investigates the grammaticalization of two adpositions in 
Finnish, and their interaction with oblique cases and demonstrates the 
crucial role of discourse in determining the path of grammatical 
development of morphosyntactic devices as a result of patterns of 
use. Fengxiang Li ('A diachronic examination of the motivations for the 
rise and development of V_V compounds in Chinese', 185-202) 
hypothesizes in a preliminary study of the development of verb 
compounding in Chinese two main motivations- linguistic and socio-
political.

The volume has three papers on language teaching, with both 
theoretical and pedagogic orientations. Kazue Kanno ('Effects on the 
acquisition of verb gapping', 125- 138) examines the acquisition of 
gapping by taking up four exemplary cases: Mandarin, with no 
gapping, German, with bidirectional gapping, English, with 
unidirectional gapping of the forward type, and Japanese, with 
unidirectional gapping of the backward type. Kanno arrives at the 
following results: a) The gapping option is easier to acquire when the 
direction is from the subset (Mandarin) to a superset; b) Languages 
allowing mirror image options , such as Japanese and English, are the 
most difficult cases. Ellen Lipp & Debbie Ockey ('Using strategy 
instruction to help ESL students understand teachr comments and 
create revision plans', 203-217) present a report of a teaching 
strategy for a course on writing, where the written comments by 
teachers are not always easy to comprehend. Students were advised 
to adopt the strategy of think aloud activities and further verbal 
interaction with the teacher, which led to considerable improvement in 
the written skills of the students. The study by Robert Russell ('L2 
Japanese syntactic Attrition', 311-326) reports the finding regarding 
the absence of any evidence of attrition of syntactic skills in Japanese 
as a second language, based on the data on particle usage, the 
number of clauses and the number of different subordinate clause 
types used.

Finally, William Rutherford ('Crossing boundaries and keeping 
priorities', 327-339) describes the turn of academic events in the 
recent development of linguistic research, where inter-disciplinary 
research is the inevitable movement among centers of academic 
inquiry. Rutherford notes that this is so not because crossing the 
boundaries is necessary for significant research today, but because 
there are no boundaries. The proliferation of research on language, in 
the author's opinion, should not be seen as centrifugal or flying apart 
but as centripetal or coming together, mainly owing to the sustained 
serious attention being paid to language as the focus of inquiry.

EVALUATION

The twenty-six papers are of almost uniformly high quality, and varied 
approaches. The variety is reflected in the fact that the volume 
needed five editors to put the papers together.

A majority of the papers focus on novel ways of handling familiar 
problems. Thus Golston & Thurgood's analysis argues for a lexical 
view of reduplication as opposed to the grammatical view as assumed 
in Alan Prince and Paul Smolensky's 1993 seminal work on OT. A 
general theme running through many of the papers is that core 
linguistic phenomena are better analyzable if the analyses include the 
dimension of language use and evolution. For instance, Matso Izutani 
argues that the recalcitrant cases of Case marking in Japanese can 
be accounted for by taking recourse to functional notions such as 
focus and exhaustive listing, and a discourse constraint banning 
multiple foci in a clause/ sentence. The point in Bharati Modi's analysis 
of gender assignment in Gujarati is that the phenomenon is 
dependent on historical, semantic (pragmatic?) and phonological 
factors. Yukiko Morimoto shows that Subject-Object Reversal in Bantu 
languages displays sensitivity to markedness hierarchies, which are a 
problem in formal approaches to grammar, but which can be 
incorporated into a formal theory of grammar, such as OT. Cornish 
successfully shows that RST ''can give us a fresh way of talking about 
the process and problems of essay evaluation of different speakers''. 
The paper by Kim makes an interesting claim regarding the 
morphological structure being determined by constraint interaction 
rather than being given in the lexicon.

Rutherford's paper is an apt conclusion for the various contributions to 
the present volume. One notices a general concern for a 'de-fenced' 
view of language that requires concerted efforts towards a better 
understanding of the central issues in the study of language. The view 
that emerges in this regard is that the existing differences in the 
approaches to linguistic analysis should not be seen as contending, 
rather as complementary. These differences may have to do with the 
issue of the theoretical goal of linguistics (explanation of linguistic 
knowledge versus explanation of linguistic texts), the nature of 
linguistic knowledge (innate and autonomous versus acquired through 
experience/ use and interactive with other domains of knowledge), the 
relevant data (Native speaker's intuition versus linguistic structures), 
the nature of explanation (Deductive-Nomological versus teleological 
and statistical), or linguistic evidence (Internal versus External , i.e. 
use, damage, change, etc.), among others.

The contributions to the volume are thus contributions to the 
discipline, a sincere tribute to a sincere linguist and humanist. 

ABOUT THE REVIEWER

Pramod Pandey is Professor of Linguistics at the Centre of Linguistics 
and English, Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi since June 2001. 
He holds graduate and research degrees in the fields of English and 
Linguistics from Pune and Hyderabad, India. He has also held post-
doctoral and visiting fellowships at various institutions in Europe and 
the USA for short durations. He has taught various courses in 
theoretical and applied linguistics. His main area of research are 
linguistic theory, phonology, and English language teaching. He is 
currently working on a book entitled, "Sounds and Their Patterns in 
the Languages of India".





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