VOLUME 74, NUMBER 1 MARCH 1998

Articles:    
The role of diffusion in the genesis of Hawaiian creole Sarah Julianne Roberts  1
Sociolinguistic discontinuity in minority language communities Raymond Mougeon & Terry Nadasdi  40
Dependencies between grammatical systems Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald & R. M. W. Dixon  56
Sound and meaning in Shakespeare's sonnets Michael Shapiro  81
   
Discussion Notes:
Evaluating behavioral and neuroimaging data on past tense processing M. S. Seidenberg & J. H. Hoeffner  104
Response to Seidenberg & Hoeffner J. J. Jaeger, R. D. VanValin Jr., & A. H. Lockwood  123
   
Review Article:
The polysynthesis parameter J-.P. Koenig & K. Michelson 129
     
Reviews:
Geis: Speech acts and conversational interaction P. Tiersma  137
Hagège: L'enfant aux deux langues H. S. Straight  139
Hornstein: Logical form: From GB to minimalism D. L. Everett  142
Kuroda: Japanese syntax and semantics H. Hoji  146
Nuckolls: Sounds like life: Sound-symbolic grammar performance, and cognition in Pastaza Quechua J. Brody  152
Odden: The phonology and morphology of Kimatuumbi L. M. Hyman  154
Russell: An introduction to the Celtic languages J. F. Eska  162
Crocker: Computational psycholinguistics: An interdisciplinary approach to the study of language D. Estival  164
Dürr et al. (eds.): Language and culture in Native North America S. Wichmann  167
Lappin (ed.): The handbook of contemporary semantic theory L. Obrst  171
Posner: The Romance languages E. Pulgram  175
Vikner: Verb movement and expletive subjects in the Germanic languages A. van Kemenade  178
Wierzbicka: Semantics: Primes and universals B. Peeters  180
Besnier: Literacy, emotion, and authority: Reading and writing on a Polynesian atoll J. Collins  183
Downing & Noonan (eds.): Word order in discourse J. K. Gundel  185
Howe: The personal pronouns in the Germanic languages: A study of personal pronoun morphology and change in the Germanic languages from the first records to the present day J. T. Katz  189
     
Book notices in this issue
D'Introno et al.: Fonética y fonología actual del español S. L. Hartman  193
Görlach: More Englishes: New studies in varieties of English 1988-1994 M. Aceto  193
Hajicová; et al.: Prague linguistic circle papers. New series, vols. 1 & 2 Z. Salzmann  194
Hickey & Williams (eds.): Language, education & Society in a changing world A. De Houwer  195
Hussey: The English language: Structure and development M. Krygier  196
Jakobi & Kümmerle (comps.): The Nubian languages: An annotated bibliography D. Aichele  196
Lørup & Moen (eds.): Fredrik Otto Lindeman: Studies in comparative Indo-European linguistics J. F. Eska  197
Menn et al. (eds.): Non-fluent aphasia in a multilingual world S. K. Shaw 197
Moser: Xenismen: Die Nachahmung fremder Sprachen R. Tatje  198
Muthmann: Phonologisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache M. Jessen  199
O'Meara: Delaware-English/English-Delaware dictionary M. Picard  199
Parodi et al. (eds.): Aspects of romance linguistics: Selected papers from the Linguistic Symposium on Romance Languages XXIV R. S. Gess  200
Szpyra: Three tiers in Polish and English phonology J. L. Fidelholtz  201
Wardhaugh: Understanding English grammar: A linguistic approach C. Rudin  202
Auroux: La philosophie du langage R. L. Tuttle  203
Bayer: Directionality and logical form R. P. Moorcroft  203
Chin & Pisoni: Alcohol and speech T. Roberts  204
Cole et al. (eds.): Linguistics and computation D. Estival  205
Coulmas: The Blackwell encyclopedia of writing systems W. Bright  206
Dauses: Systemcharakter und Relativität der Sprache D. Aichele  206
Doniach & Kahane (eds.): The Oxford English-Hebrew dictionary A. S. Kaye  207
Eid (ed.): Perspectives on Arabic linguistics VIII A. S. Kaye  208
Frantz & Russell: Blackfoot dictionary of stems, roots, and affixes (2nd edn.) A. P. Grant  209
Harris: Signs of writing C. Shelvador  209
Hudson et al.: Developing prototypic measures of cross-cultural pragmatics B. Peeters 210
Koschmieder: Les rapports temporels fondamentaux et leur expression linguistique G. H. Toops  210
Kronenfeld: Plastic glasses and church fathers: Semantic extension from the ethnoscience tradition  Z. Salzmann 212
Mahota: Russian motion verbs for intermediate students H. Serdjuk 212
McManness: Lexical categories in Spanish: The determiner G. Ayres  213
Newton (ed.): Luxembourg and Lëtzebuergesch: Language and communication at the crossroads of Europe P. A. Mather 213
Stein (ed.): Criolisches Wörterbuch van der Voort (ed.):Vestindisk Glossarium A. P. Grant  214
Owens (ed.): Arabs and Arabic in the Lake Chad region A. P. Grant  215
Palek (ed.): Item order in natural languages: Proceedings of LP '94 Z. Salzmann  216
Palmer (ed.): Grammar and meaning: Essays in honour of Sir John Lyons L. Obrst  216
Palmer: Grammatical roles and relations R. M. W. Dixon  217
Parker: Datos de la lengua I&ntildeapari A. Y. Aikhenvald  218
Piesarskas & Svecevicius: Lithuanian dictionary: English-Lithuanian, Lithuanian-English dictionary (2nd edn.) W. R. Schmalstieg  218
Pishwa & Maroldt (eds.): The development of morphological systematicity: A cross-linguistic perspective A. Carstairs-McCarthy  219
Port & van Gelder (eds.): Mind as motion: Explorations in the dynamics of cognition W. J. Turkel 219
Giacalone Ramat & Crocco Galèas (eds.): From pragmatics to syntax: Modality in second language acquisition A. Housen  220
Rischel: Minor Mlabri: A hunter-gatherer language of northern Indochina G. Thurgood 221
Room: An alphabetical guide to the language of name studies
Lawson (comp.): More names and naming: An annotated bibliography E. Battistella  221
Schäffner & Kelly-Holmes (eds.): Cultural functions of translation Z. Salzmann 222
Schneider (ed.): Focus on the USA M. J. Gordon  222
Schwyter: Old English legal language:The lexical field of theft H. Peters 223
Stroomer: A grammar of Boraana Oromo (Kenya) G. T. Childs  224
Wanner (ed.): Lexical functions in lexicography and natural language processing Z. Salzmann  224
Townsend & Janda: Common and comparative Slavic: Phonology and inflection with special attention to Russian, Polish, Czech, Serbo-Croatian, Bulgarian W. R. Schmalsteig  225
Wårvik et al. (eds.): Organization in discourse: Proceedings from the Turku conference A. Erringer  226
Weigand & Hundsnurscher (eds.): Lexical structures and language use L. Obrst  226
Yip: Interlanguage and learnability: From Chinese to English J. S. Grumet  227
Zhao: Distributional criteria for verbal valency in Chinese L. Cseresnyési 228
Koerner: Professing linguistic historiography I. H. Tóth 229
Caspers: Pitch movements under time pressure: Effects of speech rate on the melodic marking of accents and boundaries in Dutch G. T. Childs 230
Crystal (ed.): Dictionary of linguistics and phonetics (4th edn.) F. Ingemann  230
Dalrymple et al. (eds.): Formal issues in lexical-functional grammar K. Honeyford 231
Drinka: The sigmatic aorist in Indo-European: Evidence for the space-time hypothesis E. R. Luján 232
Melby: The possibility of language: A discussion of the nature of language, with implications for human and machine translation P. ten Hacken  232
Mills (ed.): Language and gender Interdisciplinary perspectives C. Tschichold  233
Green: Old Irish verbs and vocabulary J. F. Eska  234
Puppel (ed.): The biology of language K. Honeyford  234
Queffélec et al. (eds.): Le français au Maghreb S. Lawson-Sako  235
Schaechter: Yiddish II (Yidish tsvey): An intermediate and advanced textbook R. Nieuweboer  235
Stammerjohann (ed.): Lexicon grammaticorum: Who's who in the history of world linguistics A. P. Grant  236
Sun: Word-order change and grammaticalization in the history of Chinese K. S. Chung  237
Wright & Hope: Stylistics: A practical coursebook L. Burley  237
Aijmer et al. (eds.): Languages in contrast: Papers from a symposium on text-based cross-linguistic studies G. Anderman  238
Bussmann: Routledge dictionary of language and linguistics (2nd edn.) R. Waltereit  239
   
Publications received 240


Abstracts:

The role of diffusion in the genesis of Hawaiian creole
Sarah Julianne Roberts
Stanford University

The historical diffusion of lexical and grammatical features from one pidgin to another has been well documented for the Pacific region, particularly by Barker (1993) who argued that items were spread individually in the early nineteenth century via an ad hoc foreigner talk register. Noting the profound similarities between Hawai'i Creole English (HCE) and the Caribbean English creoles (CECs) which led Bickerton (1981) to propose the language bioprogram hypothesis, Goodman (1985) suggested a stronger model of diffusion, one which involved the transmission of structurally complex pidgin or creole from the Caribbean to Hawai'i. Holm (1986) and Dillard (1995) have endorsed Goodman's hypothesis. This study drawing on the wealth of pidgin/creole data spanning the two previous centuries, finds little support for Goodman's proposal. Textual evidence shows that the nineteenth-century pidgin of Hawai'i lacked not only the structure of later HCE but also displayed far stronger links with neighboring Pacific pidgins Englishes than the CECs. Furthermore the creole TMA system and for - complementation patterns are revealed to have developed late and primarily (though not entirely) within the population of native -born speakers, as predicted by the bioprogram. However, while the pace of creolization was fairly rapid in Hawai'i, HCE did not form entirely within a generation.

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Sociolinguistic discontinuity in minority language communities Raymond Mougeon
York University
Terry Nadasdi
University of Alberta

We discuss the Labovian view of the speech community against the backdrop of data from research on variation in minority languages. While members of the same speech community normally share the same set of norms for social and stylistic constraints on variation and normally share a common grammar, a number of researchers have noted that some speech communities include subgroups of speakers that are unlike the rest of the community in that they observe different rules or constraints on variable usage. We provide an overview of the main types of discontinuities in variable usage which have been attested both in majority and minority languages and discuss twelve cases of discontinuity which have been documented in the speech of Franco-Ontarian adolescents residing in minority Francophone communities. We also attempt to account for the existence of these discontinuities and consider their implications for the concept of the speech community.

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Dependencies between grammatical systems
Alexandra Y. Aikhenwald and R.M.W. Dixon
Australian National University

In some languages there are dependencies between grammatical systems, e.g. there may be fewer tense choices in negative than in positive polarity. We examine the direction of dependencies between eight types of grammatical systems, and establish a dependency hierarchy. Polarity is at the top of the hierarchy - the choices available in another system may depend on polarity but the possibility of positive/negative specification never depends on any of the other systems considered here. Next come some systems associated with the predicate (or perhaps with the clause as a whole): tense, aspect and evidentiality. next come systems associated with the predicate arguments - person, reference classification (covering gender/noun class, classifiers, and human/nonhuman or animate/inanimate); then number. And finally case, which marks the function of a predicate argument. The rationale for this hierarchy is considered. An appendix adds systems of definiteness to the discussion.

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Sound and meaning in Shakespeare's sonnets
Michael Shapiro
Brown University

Shakespeare's verse is studded with alliteration and paranomasia. The more fundamental question of a patterned relationship between sound and meaning in his Sonnets has not been answered, partly because no method of uncovering such correspondences was available. However, once groups of sounds, specifically sonorants and obstruent sequences are examined as the locus of the sound-meaning nexus, it emerges that Shakespeare consistently aligns these sequences with relational meanings defined by the dyad of freedom and constraint. The coherence between sound and sense is thus shown to be iconic.

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Evaluating behavioral and neuroimaging data on past tense processing Mark S. Seidenberg
University of Southern California
James H. Hoeffner
University of Memphis

Jaeger, Lockwood, Kemmerer, Van Valin, Murphy and Khalak ( Language 72.3) reported an experimental study that provided reaction time and PET neuroimaging data said to support Pinker's (1991) theory of inflectional morphology in which rule-governed forms and exceptions are processed by separate mechanisms. The results were also taken as evidence against connectionist accounts in which a single processing generates both types of forms. We provide a critical analysis of the study that yields three main conclusions: first, Jaeger et al.'s data do not provide strong evidence that rule-governed forms and exceptions are processed in separate brain regions. Second there are problems with the design of the study that contaminate critical comparisons between conditions. The results therefore afford alternative interpretations related to experiment-specific factors rather than the regular-irregular distinction. third, the dissociations between rule-governed forms and exceptions observed in studies such as Jaeger et al.'s can be accommodated by the connectionist theory. We conclude by offering suggestions for future research that would overcome the major limitations of this study and provide more decisive evidence bearing on the issues.

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Comments and questions to: Martin U. Kappus (mkappus@semlab2.sbs.sunysb.edu) - 5/3/98