Volume 45, Issue 4

“Radical” templatic phonology is a template-based approach to segmental phonological representation. The central hypothesis is that the segmental phonological structure of words is represented as language-specific phonotactic templates, in the sense used in the developmental literature. Template-based organization of the early lexicon has been identified in children acquiring several different languages. It is the result of a usage-based abstracting or “induction” process based on both babbling practice (phonetic production) and input experience with specific adult phonological patterns. The resulting templates thus constitute patterns that reconcile (or “adapt”) the model provided by target words with the child's own phonetic repertoire of syllables or word shapes — typically extending or building on the forms initially “selected” for first word production, in which adult and child forms show a close match. In adult phonology segment categories — natural classes, or features — are best defined in terms of their occurrence in positions in the templates in individual languages, not as independent universal categories. After reviewing the status of segment categories and their phonetic basis in contemporary phonological theory we present crosslinguistic evidence of pervasive variation in both phonetic realization and phonological distribution patterns, evidence that supports the template construct.

In previous studies, various syntactic/semantic factors (person hierarchy, animacy, topicality, etc.) have been discussed as relevant to linguistic phenomena known as syntactic direction and nominal obviation. This article develops and motivates a uniform analysis of the direct/inverse and obviation marking (DIO-marking), based on the (extended) theory of linguistic empathy. Drawing on data from four languages that belong to different families (Cree, Navajo, Jinghpaw, and Japanese), I discuss that the empathy-based approach (i) provides a uniform analysis of DIO-systems in different languages, as well as the yaru/kureru opposition in Japanese, which have been believed to be controlled by different sets of syntactic/semantic factors, and (ii) dispenses with construction-specific rules/constraints such as the person constraint, the possessive constraint, and the ban on multiple proximates within a clause. I also demonstrate that the empathy-based account allows us to model similarities/contrasts among DIO-systems in a comprehensive way, reducing crosslinguistic differences into two planes: (i) the plane of E-marking: how and to what extent empathy relations are encoded, and (ii) the plane of E-ranking: what factors affect (more) empathy relations.

This article presents some data from Vietnamese that provide significant empirical support for the theoretical claims articulated in Klein (1998, 2006): first, that finiteness should be understood as a composite of tense and assertion, and that assertion may be realized independently of tense marking; second, that the assertion operator so realized has only partial scope over elements of the clause, so that fronted elements may evade this scopal influence. Vietnamese is of special interest because — as claimed here — it expresses assertion independently of Tense or Aspect: in this regard Vietnamese contrasts with most Indo-European languages, as well as with other isolating East Asian languages. The formal analysis of these data involves two further theoretical claims. The first is that assertion is syntactically projected in a comparatively low functional projection, immediately above vP: this claim is thus opposed to recent proposals that would place these type of functional category higher (on the left periphery of the clause). The second claim developed here is that in Vietnamese the displacement of certain underspecified constituents is explained by their requirement to come within — alternatively, to evade — the scope of this assertion operator. That is, syntactic movement may be driven by considerations other than purely formal feature checking.

Bernhard Hurch, editor: Studies on Reduplication. Empirical Approaches to Language Typology 28. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2005. xi + 640 pp. ISBN 978-3-11-018119-7. ( Haritini Kallergi ) Barbara Dancygier and Eve Sweetser: Mental Spaces in Grammar: Conditional Constructions. Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 108. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 295 pp. ISBN 0-521-84468-1. ( William Van Belle and Ingrid Van Canegem-Ardijns ) Alexandra Y. Aikhenvald and Robert M. W. Dixon: Serial Verb Constructions — A Cross-Linguistic Typology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2006. xxiv + 369 pp. Hardback ISBN 0199279152. USD 110.00. ( Gunter Senft ) Anderson, Gregory D. S. (2006): Auxiliary Verb Constructions. Oxford Studies in Typology and Linguistic Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. xviii + 473 pp. ISBN 0-19-928031-2. ( Andreas Jäger )