Volume 45, Issue 1

The study is an empirical, text-based analysis of Latinate elements of the English lexicon, taken as representing a more formal, literate level of language use than words of its native Germanic stock, and hence as diagnostic of linguistic register across the variables of age and text type (narrative versus expository genres, spoken versus written discourse). An innovative procedure was devised for automatic coding by tagging all the open class vocabulary items for Latinate/Germanic origin in 192 texts produced by 16 native English speakers in four different age groups (9-year-old grade-school pupils, 12-year-old junior-high students, 16-year-old high-school students, and graduate-student adults. Results indicate that the Latinate-Germanic divide is a valid diagnostic of register level in English. The study reveals a statistically significant increase in the proportion of Latinate terms across all the variables considered. This ratio is across the board higher in expository than in narrative texts and written compared with spoken texts, and it rises as a function of age, with a clear cut-off point between junior high and high school. These findings, which confirm an independently established hierarchy of text types ranging from oral narratives at one extreme to written expository discussion at the other, are discussed in relation to other measures of lexical usage (e.g., word length, lexical density, and diversity), in crosslinguistic comparison with Hebrew as a typologically different language, and in terms of their implications for the study of register in later language development in general.

In this article we approach the phenomenon of the English middle voice from a functional-cognitive perspective. Assuming the distinction between representational and interpersonal layers of organization in the clause (Halliday 1985; Hengeveld 1989; McGregor 1997), we propose that the elements and relations that define the English middle are of an interpersonal nature. We argue that the characteristic relation between nonagentive subject and active VP in the middle cannot be generalized in terms of a specific process-participant relation, as has been attempted in the literature. It cannot be maintained that the subject entity is always affected by the action, nor that it brings about the action, which would obscure the difference between middle and ergative intransitive. Rather, we propose that the middle subject and finite are related to each other by what Talmy (2000) defines as a “letting” modal relation, which we characterize further as combining active and passive elements. Middles construe a subjective assessment of the subject entity, presenting it as lending itself to the action designated by the predicator, and as having properties that are actively conducive to that action. We also argue that this letting relation between subject and finite can be interpreted as the subjectification of the agentive-patientive relation between the lexical verb and the sole participant in an ergative intransitive clause. The shift towards subject and finite expressing a conduciveness judgment activates an inherent agent in the conceptual base of the predicate. This means that ergative verbs are always used transitively in middles and it explains why other transitive verbs can also occur in middles. In a language like French, which marks both ergative intransitive and middle reflexively, no further extension of middle predicates is possible. By contrast, both Dutch and, more marginally, English, which do not mark middles reflexively, also allow some intransitive and compound transitive predicates to be used in the middle voice.

Collective nouns such as committee, family , or team are conceptually (and in English also syntactically) complex in the sense that they are both singular (“one”) and plural (“more than one”): they refer to a multiplicity that is conceptualized as a unity. In this article, which focuses on Dutch collective nouns, it is argued that some collective nouns are rather “one”, whereas others are rather “more than one”. Collective nouns are shown to be different from one another in member level accessibility. Whereas all collective nouns have both a conceptual collection level (“one”) and a conceptual member level (“more than one”), the latter is not always conceptually profiled (i.e., focused on) to the same extent. A gradient is sketched in which collective nouns such as bemanning (‘crew’) (member level highly accessible) and vereniging (‘association’) (member level scarcely accessible) form the extremes. Arguments in favor of the conceptual phenomenon of variable member level accessibility derive from an analysis of property distribution, from corpus research on verbal and pronominal singular-plural variation, and from a psycholinguistic eye-tracking experiment.

This article compares and contrasts cophonology theory and indexed constraint theory, the dominant current proposals to morphologically conditioned phonology. In cophonology theory, morphologically conditioned phonology is captured by associating each morphological construction or lexical class with its own phonological grammar, or cophonology. All constraints within a given cophonology are purely phonological; no constraint directly refers to morphological context. By contrast, indexed constraint theory assumes a single fixed constraint ranking for the entire language, and captures morphologically conditioned phonology by indexing individual constraints to specific morphological contexts. The article raises three arguments in favor of cophonology theory: greater formal parsimony, the ability to handle free variation, and more accurate predictions about the scope of morphologically conditioned phonological effects. It also evaluates and rejects the primary argument for indexed constraint theory, i.e., Grammar Dependence, the claim that indexed constraint theory is more restrictive in the degree of language-internal diversity allowed. Cophonology theory and indexed constraint theory are equivalent in the range of language-internal diversity they allow; it is argued that the upper limit on language-internal diversity should not be a matter for formal grammar, but instead requires extra-grammatical explanation in terms of the factors influencing language change and variation.

Romance languages divide into three classes, as far as perfective auxiliation is concerned: as well as languages showing a binary contrast (e.g., French) and languages showing no contrast (e.g., Spanish), several varieties exist in which auxiliation displays three-way choices. Previous research on Romance auxiliaries has failed to recognize this empirical fact due to its focus on auxiliaries as morpho-lexical items, rather than on auxiliation as a syntactic phenomenon. Building on the approach to Romance auxiliation of Perlmutter (1989), this article proposes an analysis of triple auxiliation systems, as well as of systems which display variation in auxiliation, either free or sensitive to verb person. The rise of these mixed systems, like all other recorded changes in Romance auxiliation, is interpreted as one of the manifestations of the retreat of Proto-Romance active/inactive alignment and of the shift back to a more consistent accusative/nominative orientation.

John T. Jensen: Principles of Generative Phonology. An Introduction . Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004. 324pp. Hardback ISBN 1588115135; Paperback ISBN 1588115623. (T. A. Hall) Fred Genesee, Johanne Paradis, and Martha B. Crago: Dual Language Development and Disorders: A Handbook on Bilingualism and Second Language Learning . Baltimore, MD: Brookes, 2004. 256 pp. Paperback ISBN 1-55766-686-5. (Enkeleida Kapia) Terry Crowley: Bislama Reference Grammar . Oceanic Linguistics Special Publication 31. Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2004. 205 pp. Paperback ISBN 0-8248-2880-1. (Gunter Senft)

The editors of Linguistics would like to express thanks to the following colleagues who, though not members of the consulting editorial board, have nonetheless given generously of their time in evaluating manuscripts submitted for volume 44 of the journal.