With this study of Maori and Chamorro, Sandra Chung and William Ladusaw make a valuable contribution to the growing literature on the formal semantic analysis of non-Indo-European languages. Their ultimate focus is on how the study of these Austronesian languages can illuminate the alternatives for semantic interpretation and their interaction with syntactic structure. Revisiting the analysis of indefiniteness in terms of restricted free variables, they claim that some varieties of indefinites are better analyzed by taking restriction and saturation to be fundamental semantic operations.
It is no surprise that a large amount of interesting contemporary work on all aspects of bi-tri-and multilingualism emanates from Spain. A portrait of the young in the new multilingual Spain provides a rich example of this work, covering many aspects, both internal and external, of a multi-faceted phenomenon. Factors taken into account include the context of acquisition linguistic input, the "critical mass" hypothesis, the role of the classroom "personal factors" learners with SLI, learners of different ages, the role of literacy and the nature of bilingual linguistic competence: Grosjean's "the bilingual is not two monolinguals in one person". From the grammatical point of view this last factor finds an almost ideal testing ground in Spain, with the availability of bilinguals speaking closely-related languages (Spanish and Catalan) and non-related languages (Basque and Spanish), a fact reflected in this book. Finally, and above all, this book is a striking example of the way attitudes to bi-and multilingualism have changed. Professor Clive Perdue, France Universite Paris 8, France
This volume is a collection of current work at the interface of linguistics and conversation analysis. The focus is on linguistic items in their action contexts: syntactic structures and lexical items in data from natural conversations in six European languages: Danish, English, Finnish, German, Italian and Swedish. Some of the studies deal with similar practices in two different languages, which enables cross-linguistic comparisons.
This volume contains 14 chapters, each reflecting a paper originally presented at the “Third International Symposium on the Languages Spoken in Europe and North and Central Asia” (‘LENCA-3’) held at Tomsk State Pedagogical University in Tomsk, a city in south-central Siberia, Russian Federation, during June 27-30, 2006. The symposium was organized to investigate a broad range of issues involving systems of coordination and subordination in complex sentences in the languages of Eurasia.
This volume presents a detailed analysis of West Germanic scrambling from the perspective of recent versions of the ‘Minimalist Program’, especially the one advanced in Chomsky’s (2001). It refutes the commonly held view that scrambled structures in West Germanic languages are the result of a phenomenon completely unrelated to North Germanic ‘Object Shift’.
