Table of Contents
Volume 74
Number 2 (June 1998)

Articles:
Identificational focus versus information focus	Katalin É. Kiss	245
The mechanisms of denial	Bart Geurts	274
How children's relatives solve a problem for minimalism	Dana McDaniel, Cecile McKee, & Judy B. Bernstein	308
Resumptive restrictive relatives: A crosslinguistic perspective	Margarita Suñer	335
Reviews:
Maas: Verfolgung und Auswanderung deutschprachiger Sprachforscher, 1933-1945	E. Pulgram	365
Schütze: The empirical base of linguistics: Grammaticality judgments and linguistic methodology	B. Wald	366
Stillman: The new philosophy and universal languages in seventeenth-century England: Bacon, Hobbes, and Wilkins	J. L. Subbiondo	370
Casad (ed.): Cognitive linguistics in the redwoods: The expansion of a new paradigm in linguistics	M. E. Winters	372
Ladefoged & Maddieson: The sounds of the world's languages	G. S. Nathan	374
Taylor & Taylor: Writing and literacy in Chinese, Korean and Japanese	M. S. Erbaugh	376
Coulmas (ed.): The handbook of sociolinguistics	S. Ash	379
Ewers: The origin of American Black English: Be-forms in the HOODOO texts	R. R. Butters	384
Herman: Dramatic discourse: Dialogue as interaction in plays	A. W. He	384
Cassidy & Hall (eds.): Dictionary of American Regional English: Volumes I-III	E. Johnson	386
Bloom et al. (eds.): Language and space	R. W. Langacker	389
Dalton-Puffer: The French influence on Middle English morphology: A corpus-based study of derivation	I. Plag	392
Loveday: Language contact in Japan: A sociolinguistic history	J. Stanlaw	395
Bailey: Nineteenth-century English	J. P. Levinson	398
Book Notices :
Chametzky: A theory of phrase markers and the extended base	R. Zhang	401
den Dikken & Hengeveld (eds.): Linguistics in the Netherlands 1995	K. Ferret	401
Tao: Units in Mandarin conversation: Prosody, discourse and grammar	L. P. Elliott	402
Frajzyngier: Grammaticalization of the complex sentence: A case study in Chadic	F. de Haan	403
Hertzberg: Norsk grammatikk: Debatt i historisk lys	B. O. Brogaard-Pedersen	403
Jahr (ed.): Nordisk og nedertysk: Språkkontakt og språkutvikling i Norden i seinmelomalderen	R. M. Millar	404
Kasper (ed.): Pragmatics of Chinese as native and target language	S. McGinnis	405
Kim-Renaud (ed.): Theoretical issues in Korean linguistics	V. LoCastro	405
Lippi-Green: Language ideology and language change in early modern German: A sociolinguistic study of the consonantal system of Nuremberg	L. Forester	407
Lutz & Pafel (eds.): On extraction and extraposition in German	M. Kappus	407
Mackie: Talking Trojan: Speech and community in the Iliad	J. T. Katz	408
Milroy & Muysken (eds.): One speaker, two languages	C. Rudin	409
Rischel & Basbøll (eds.): Aspects of Danish prosody	P. Prieto i Vives	410
Whaley: Introduction to typology: The unity and diversity of language	M. Bentley	411
Wilss: Knowledge and skills in translator behaviour	R. Early	411
Allsopp (ed.): Dictionary of Caribbean English usage	M. Aceto	412
Bærentzen (ed.): Aspekte der Sprachbeschreibung: Akten des 29. linguistischen Kolloquiums, Aarhus 1994	F. Serzisko	413
Brockhaus: Final devoicing in the phonology of German	M. Pierce	413
Clark: Using language	B. Nerlich & D. D. Clarke	414
Coates: Women talk	T. C. Frazer	416
Cowart: Experimental syntax: Applying objective methods to sentence judgments	F. Keller	416
Davies: Linguistic variation and language attitudes in Mannheim-Neckarau	M. Pierce	417
Engh: Verb i passiv fulgt av perfektum parcitisipp: Bruk og historie	B. O. Brogaard-Pedersen	418
Grossmann: Opposizioni direzionali e prefissazione: Analisi morfologica e semantica dei verbi egressivi prefissati con des- e es- in catalano	L. Comajoan	418
Harsch-Niemeyer (ed.): Beiträge zur Methodengeschichte der neueren Philologien: Zum 125 jährigen Bestehen des Max Niemeyer Verlages; Max Niemeyer Verlag: Gesamtverzeichnis 1950-1995	J. M. Jeep	419
Herring (ed.): Computer-mediated communication: Linguistic, social and cross-cultural perspectives	H. Bortfeld	420
Herslund (ed.): Information structure	P. G. Meyer	421
Hudson: Sociolinguistics (2nd edn.)	N. C. Dorian	421
Humbert: Phonological segments: Their structure and behaviour	A. Thériault	422
Jahr & Skare (eds.): Nordnorske dialekter	B. O. Brogaard-Pedersen	423
Juffs: Learnability and the lexicon: Theories and second language acquisition research	B. Hancin-Bhatt	423
Juillard: Sociolinguistique urbaine: La vie des langues à Ziguinchor (Sénégal)	F. McLaughlin	424
Kniffka: Elements of culture-contrastive linguistics	P. G. Meyer	425
Lakoff: Moral politics: What conservatives know that liberals don't	M. Higgins	425
Leech et al. (eds.): Spoken English on computer: Transcription, mark-up and application	V. Hopwood	426
Li: Tungusic vowel harmony	S. Berbeco	426
Newell & Poligon (comps.): Batad Ifugao dictionary with ethnographic notes	P. W. Davis	427
Philippaki-Warburton et al. (eds.): Themes in Greek linguistics: Papers from the First International Conference on Greek Linguistics	M. Janse	428
Riahi-Belkaoui: The linguistic shaping of accounting	N. Ostler	428
Sajavaara & Fairweather (eds.): Approaches to second language acquisition	S. Gottwald & M. Thomas	429
Sleeman: Licensing empty nouns in French	A. Lobeck	430
Sommerfeldt & Schreiber: Wörterbuch der Valenz etymologisch verwandter Wörter	V. Jung	431
Stanze: Die Orthographischen Regelbücher des Deutschen	D. Baron	431
Tedlock & Mannheim (eds.): The dialogic emergence of culture	N. Ostler	432
Trabant (ed.): Origins of language	A. Carstairs-McCarthy	433
Salmon: Language and society in early modern England: Selected essays, 1981-1994	R. W. Bailey	433
Bayley & Preston (eds.): Second language acquisition and linguistic variation	S. M. Burt	434
Hovdhaugen (ed.): . . . and the Word was God: Missionary linguistics and missionary grammar	P. T. Daniels	435
Crowley et al.: The design of language: An introduction to descriptive linguistics	M. J. Elson	436
O'Grady: Categories and case: The sentence structure of Korean	D. B. Gerdts	436
Hall: The Kensington rune-stone: Authentic and important	S. O. Glosecki	437
Clark: Vocabulario popoluca de Sayula: Veracruz, México	D. Holt	438
Kenny: Language loss and the crisis of cognition: Between socio- and psycholinguistics	J. M. Lipski	440
Jelinek et al. (eds.): Athabaskan language studies: Essays in honor of Robert W. Young	J. M. Lipski	441
Veenstra: Serial verbs in Saramaccan: Predication and creole genesis	J. M. Lipski	442
Rijksbaron: The syntax and semantics of the verb in Ancient Greek: An introduction (2nd edn.)	S. Matthews	443
Wakker: Conditions and conditionals: An investigation of Ancient Greek	S. Matthews	444
Nystrand et al.: Opening dialogue: Understanding the dynamics of language and learning in the English classroom	L. H. MacNeilley	444
Silva et al. (eds.): A dictionary of South African English on historical principles	M. L. Murphy	445
Ninio & Snow: Pragmatic development	M. R. Perkins	446
Cannon & Kaye: The Arabic contributions to the English language: An historical dictionary	M. R. L. Petruck	446
Labelle & Leclére (eds.): Lexiques-grammaires comparés en français: Actes du colloque international de Montréal	A. Polguére	448
Fowler: Linguistic criticism (2nd edn.)	Z. Salzmann	448
Balhar et al.: Ceskc jazykovc atlas [The Czech linguistic atlas]	Z. Salzmann	449
Yule: The study of language (2nd edn.)	Z. Salzmann	449
Palmer: Toward a theory of cultural linguistics	Z. Salzmann	450
Cole & Kisseberth (eds.): Perspectives in phonology	D. C. Walker	450
Denning & Leben: English vocabulary elements	D. C. Walker	451
Shyldkrot & Kupferman (eds.): Tendences récentes en linguistique française et générale	D. C. Walker	452
Perkéylé: AIDS counselling: Institutional interaction and clinical practice	E. L. Barton	452
Clark: Western lore and language: A dictionary for enthusiasts of the American West	E. Battistella	453
Gneuss: English language scholarship: A survey and bibliography from the beginnings to the end of the nineteenth century	E. Battistella	454
Kamhi et al. (eds.): Communication development and disorders in African American children: Research, assessment and intervention	E. Battistella	455
Key: Male/female language: With a comprehensive bibliography (2nd edn.)	E. Battistella	456
Wolfram & Schilling-Estes: Hoi toide on the outer banks: The story of the Ocracoke Brogue	E. Battistella	457
Johnson: Lexical change and variation in the southeastern United States: 1930-1990	T. C. Frazer	458
Robinson: The story of writing	K. Fudeman	458
Alsina: The role of argument structure in grammar: Evidence from Romance	L. Gunkel	459
Sperber: Explaining culture: A naturalistic approach	D. Nettle	460
Motsch (ed.): Ebenen der Textstruktur: Sprachliche und kommunikative Prinzipien	I. Piller	460
Verdonk & Weber (eds.): Twentieth-century fiction: From text to context	T. M. Shaw	461
Loprieno: Ancient Egyptian: A linguistic introduction	R. Tuttle	462
The Editor's Department		464
Publications Received		469

Identificational focus versus information focus
Katalin É. Kiss
Linguistic Institute of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences

This article argues that identificational focus, which expresses exhaustive identification and occupies the specifier of a functional projection, must be distinguished in language description from information focus, which conveys new information and involves no syntactic reordering. The properties of the two types of focus are established on the basis of Hungarian and English material. It is argued that the cleft constituent is the realization of identificational focus in English. Only-phrases are analyzed as identificational foci carrying an evaluative presupposition. The feature specifications shown to be subject to parametric variation: the focus operators of various languages are specified for the positive value of either or both of the features [+exhaustive] and [+ contrastive].

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The mechanisms of denial
Bart Geurts
University of Osnabrück and Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics

Normally, the negation of a sentence serves to reverse the assertion that S would have made, and does not affect other types of information S would have conveyed, such as presuppositions, implicatures, and so on. Occasionally, however, it seems as if negation is directed precisely at presuppositions, implicature, or even at purely formal aspects of a sentence (such as intonation, pronunciation, and so on). The following are cases in point: Mary didn't visit the pizzeria in the Vatican, because there is no pizzeria in the Vatican./I'm not tipsy: I'm drunk./He didn't call the POlice, he called the poLICE. I call such sentences DENIALS, and I argue against the unitarian approach advocated by Horn and van der Sandt, among others, according to which denial is a homogeneous phenomenon that calls for a unified analysis. According to the alternative theory proposed here, there are several mechanisms of denial, but each of these is needed for independent reasons, and therefore no ad hoc mechanisms are necessary.

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How children's relatives solve a problem for minimalism Dana McDaniel
University of Southern Maine
Cecile McKee
University of Arizona
Judy B. Bernstein
University of Southern Maine

Current work in syntax reexamines basic properties of movement. Under the minimalist assumptions of Chomsky (1995), movement is prohibited unless forced by grammatical considerations. From a set of comparable derivations, the one involving the least amount of moved material should therefore block other derivations. Within this framework, any cases of optional movement are problematic. We addressed this issue with experiments on stranding and pied-piping relative clauses in 115 English learners, aged 3;5 to 11;11, and an adult control group. All subjects participated in an elicited production experiment and a grammaticality judgement experiment. Our findings suggest that pied-piping is possible in young children's grammar only when stranding is ruled out, as predicted by minimalism. We claim that the children's responses represent the 'natural' grammar while adults' responses reflect a prescriptive artifact. We also found a discrepancy in all groups between production and judgements of the genitive pied-piping construction. We account for this finding with Kayne's (1994) analysis of relative clauses.

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Resumptive restrictive relatives: A crosslinguistic perspective
Margarita Suñer
Cornell University

One of the aims of linguistic theory is to account for language variation. This article contributes to that objective by examining resumptive relative clauses crosslinguistically. The major claims are (1) the core-grammar distinction between conventional and resumptive restrictive relative clauses is due to the feature composition of the relative complementizer; (2) the prohibition against pied-piping that some languages adhere to correlates with the lack of lexical relative pronouns; (3) particular grammars need to accommodate language-specific properties such as preferences for which elements may, must, or cannot acquire a phonological matrix; and (4) resumptive pronouns which appear in the absence of an island are inserted at LF for other than interpretive reasons.

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