Volume 9, Issue 2

The hypothesis that inflectional affixes use a restricted set of phonemes and that these are the less marked phonemes of the language is discussed and tested on the verbal affixes in a sample of twenty-three maximally unrelated languages. The results show that the tendency for languages to use only a smaller subset of their phonemes in verbal inflection than would be predicted by chance is only a weak trend and not by any means a universal of language. In addition, the tendency to use less marked or less complex segments in affixes is also only a trend and not a universal. However, some generalizations can be made about languages that have patterned exclusions from affixes. It is argued that no one explanation covers all the facts and that multiple diachronic trends, such as phonological reduction in grammaticization and the re-use of old affixes in creating new grammaticized affixes, produce the weak tendency evidenced by the data.

This paper investigates a system of composite mood marking in the non-Pama-Nyungan languages of northern Australia, which generally mark modal meanings through combinations of prefixes and suffixes of the finite verb. The analysis focuses on the category of irrealis, which is typically marked with a specific prefix, and covers both meanings of counterfactuality (when combined with a past tense suffix) and of potentiality (when combined with non-past tense suffixes). The central problem in describing this category, as with irrealis categories more generally, is how to reconcile the feature of non-actualization found in the counterfactual uses with the feature of potentiality found in all other uses (including the counterfactual one). On the basis of the formal systematics of prefix-suffix combinations, as well as the internal semantic structure of counterfactual constructions, it is shown that non-actualization can be derived from past potentiality by general Gricean principles. In addition, this analysis suggests that some exceptional non-Pama-Nyungan systems that do not have an irrealis prefix can be diachronically related to the basic system with an irrealis prefix. The analysis proposed has implications for the more general typology of irrealis categories and for their relation with negation.

Surveying the encoding of the semantic roles of recipient, beneficiary, and recipient-beneficiary from a crosslinguistic perspective, the paper has two goals. First, by focusing on the encoding of the dual role of recipient-beneficiary, it tries to show that languages vary in the marking of this role: they either encode it the same way as they encode recipients or beneficiaries; in the case of recipient and beneficiary this variation is excluded. Second, current definitions of the label BENEFACTIVE will be scrutinized, since this notion is split in a number of languages and the terminology proposed here is empirically more appropriate in some cases.

Elena Maslova, A Grammar of Kolyma Yukaghir . (Mouton Grammar Library, 27.) Berlin:Mouton de Gruyter, 2003, xviii + 609 pages, ISBN 3-11-017527-4, EUR 148. 1. General Kolyma Yukaghir and Tundra Yukaghir are closely related languages spoken in the north-eastern part of Russia. Kolyma Yukaghir at present has about 40 speakers. The language is not entirely undescribed: Jochelson (1905) and especially Krejnovič (1979, 1982) are useful accounts of morphology and give basic phonological and syntactic information, while Nyikolajeva (2000) is a short overview of Yukaghir grammar in historical perspective. There are a number of articles by various authors focusing on particular grammatical points. Several folklore text collections have been published (Jochelson 1898, 1900; Nikolaeva (ed.) 1989, 1997; Maslova 2002). These works provide essential facts about the language. However, most of them are written in Russian or Hungarian and use terminology and representational conventions that do not always correspond to modern scholarly practice, with examples presented less than transparently, often lacking morpheme-by-morpheme glossing. Most importantly, previous descriptions have many gaps by modern standards and for the most part ignore syntax. Described incompletely, idiosyncratically, and somewhat inaccessibly, Yukaghir grammar has played little or no role in considerations of modern theoretical linguists and typologists.

Heinrich Werner, Die Diathese in den Jenissej-Sprachen aus typologischer Sicht . (Veröffentlichungen der Societas Uralo-Altaica 64.) Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2004, vii + 158 pages, ISBN 3-447-05122-1, EUR 44. The Ket verb has presented linguists with a long-standing morphological puzzle. Comrie (1982) aptly remarked that descriptions available at the time did not provide even a basic knowledge of how to conjugate finite verbs in this language. Fortunately, that situation has improved thanks in large part to a wide-ranging treatment of Ket grammar produced by Heinrich Werner (1997), author of the present monograph.

Claire Bowern Bininj Gun-wok: A Pan-dialectal Grammar of Mayali, Kunwinjku and Kune , by Nicholas Evans, and The Non-Pama-Nyungan Languages of Northern Australia: Comparative Studies of the Continent’s Most Linguistically Complex Region , edited by Nicholas Evans