Title: 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 By Stephen Howe
Abstract: REVIEWS189 characterizations of contrastive focus that I have seen (459), but she also confuses what is already in the addressee's focus of attention with what is brought into focus as new information about the topic. Her statement that a subset of focally attended information is placed preverbally in the languages she examines is thus misleading. And Creider's (1977) suggestion that focused information precedes topical/thematic information in verb-initial languages is more consistently supported by her data than she appears to recognize. Herring and Paolillo are equivocal about the relation between focus and rheme/comment. Their study clearly shows that focus is not invariably associated with either preverbal or final position in SOV languages. However, their conclusion that 'focus cannot be considered a homogeneous category for word order purposes' is less warranted since they mistakenly conflate focus with referential newness. Despite the methodological and conceptual drawbacks, this book is well worth reading for anyone interested in the factors that influence word order in discourse. The papers provide a wealth of naturally occurring, contextualized data which readers can use to test hypotheses about pragmatic determinants of word order variation. This may be the volume's most valuable contribution. REFERENCES Creider, Chet. 1977. Functional sentence perspective in a verb-initial language. Language and linguistic problems in Africa (Proceedings of the VII conference on African linguistics), ed. by Paul Kotey and Haig Der-Houssikian, 330-43. Columbia, SC: Hornbeam. Givon, T. (ed.) 1983. Topic continuity in discourse. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Gundel, Jeanette K. 1988. Universals of topic-comment structure. In Hammond et al., 209-49. -----. 1997. On different kinds of focus. Focus: Linguistic, cognitive, and computational perspectives, ed. by Peter Bosch and Rob van der Sandt. Oxford: Oxford University Press, to appear. Hammond, M.; E. Moravcsik; and J. R. Wirth (eds.) 1988. Studies in syntactic typology. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Hetzron, Robert. 1975. The presentative movement, or why the ideal word order is V. S. O. P. Word order and word order change, ed. by C. N. Li, 347-88. Austin: University of Texas Press. Kim, Alan H. 1988. Preverbal focusing and type XXIII languages. In Hammond et al., 147-69. Prince, Ellen. 1978. A comparison of WH-clefts and it-clefts in discourse. Language 54.883-906. Linguistics Department 192 Klaeber Ct. University of Minnesota Minneapolis, MN 55455 [[email protected]] 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. By Stephen Howe. (Studia lingüistica germanica, 43.) Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1996. Pp. xxii, 390. DM 198.00. Reviewed by Joshua T. Katz, Harvard University This published version of the author's 1995 University of London doctoral dissertation, is an important and original work that historical linguists, theoretical morphologists, and Germanicists will rely on for years to come. By examining in exhaustive detail the attestations and patterns of change of an entire grammatical category (personal pronouns) in an entire language family (Germanic), Howe has provided a model 'comprehensive investigation' for others to emulate. Although certain issues do not receive the weight that I believe they deserve, this detracts little from H's achievement of opening the door for further studies of the synchronic status and diachronic morphophonology of the important, but frequently neglected, class of personal pronouns . Aside from the 'Introduction' (1-14) and a final section called 'Summary and conclusions' 190LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 1 (1998) (352-64), H's book may be viewed as consisting of two parts. In Chs. 1 ('Morphology of the personal pronouns', 15-59) and 2 ('Change in the personal pronouns', 60-104), H organizes the mass of still unpresented data around questions of general linguistic interest (e.g. How are we to view pronominal suppletion synchronically? What are typical phenomena in pronominal change?), whereas Chs. 4-18 (125-351) present the pronominal forms themselves, language by language, and treat individual problems in greater depth. ' Linking the two parts is the short but very important Ch. 3 ('Pan-Germanic', 105-24), in which H discusses two topics that are of particular interest in many of the Germanic languages (and potentially more generally as...
Publication Year: 1998
Publication Date: 1998-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 19
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