Reviews

Reviews Links & Letters 1, 1994 127 are less likely to extrapose and are even less QUIRK, R., S. GREENBAUM, G. LEECH frequent. There are good reasons for this. and J. SVAR~K. (1985). A Com- The resistance to extraposition can be prehensive Grammar of the EnglkhLanexplained by obsewing that verbal predigccage. London: Longman. cates tend to be quite long and informationally heavy. This is especially clear in Bas Aarts (3) above. The subject dause in this sen- Department of English Language and tence is inf~rmationall~ not prominent ~i~~~~~~~~ (the risingsun is mentioned in the directly university college London preceding context) and hence moving it to a sentence-final position would disturb the informational balance of the sentence. The reason why ISCs depending on ver- ANDREW SPENCER. ~~~h~l~+l bal predicates are extremely rare is that Theory Oxford: Basil Blacbell, verbal predicates are usually dynamic and require an animate subject and clearly 19g0. 512 Pages. ISCs come low on what has been called the anima9 hierarchy. Spencer's book is a nearly exhaustive in- The final evaluation of &is monotroductory to morphology, with exercises graph is that, on the whole, it is a meritofrom very &fferent languages, and recomrious piece ofwork, very well-written and mendations for further reading at the end well-researched, with interesting contri- of each chapter. The book also contains butions to our knowledge of discourse a subject index, a name index and a iansyntactic processes. It is, however, disguage index, which makes looking for appointing as far as analytical content and very specific information an easy and f'st the rather narrow-minded methodologitask. In addition, the most important cal out-look are concerned terms are written in boldface the first time they appear in the text. Spencer's book pressuposes little knowledge of mor- References phology, but discusses fairly complicated issues, which can however be easily understood because of his accessible style CHOMSKY, N. (1981). Lectures on Gov- and a gradual introduction to the most mmmta&Bi&ing Dordr&t: Foris. intricate aspects of morphological theory. CHOMSKY, N. and H. Lasnik (forthcom- Morphology is a difficult subject, ing). "Principies and Pararneters with a lot of complex relations with pho- Theory". J. Jacobs, A. von Stechow, nology, syntax and semantics; it interacts W. Sternefeld and T. Vennemann with al1 the components of the grammar. (eds.). Syntax: An InternationalHand- The borderline between phonology and book of Contemporary Research. Berlin morphology, for instance, is not clear at and New York: Walter de Gruyter. all, and a particular sequence might be GIVON, T. (1979). On Understanding considered an allophone or an allomorph Grammar. New York: Academic Press. depending only on the theoretical frame- HYMES, D. (1971). "Competente and work adopted. Spencer's book reflects al1 Preformance in Linguistic Theory'. the relations morphology has with other R. Huxley and E. Ingram (eds.) Lancomponents of the grammar (except for guage Acquisition: Models and Mesemantics, which receives little attention), thodr, pp. 3-24. New York: Academic and he reviews the most important pro- Press. posals that have been made with respect LABOV,W.(~~~~). SociolinguisticPatterns. to the subject from different points of Philadelphia: University of Pennsylview, most especially within the framevania Press. work of generative grammar. Reviews Links & Letters 1, 1994 129 cally as other objects of the sentence (direct objects, indirect objects, etc.). However, morphol~gicall~ and phonologically thev have a venr close relation to their host, like many morphemes. The last part of Spencer's book addresses one of the most important questions in morphology: what is a word? One of the phenomena that makes the answer difficult is what has been called bracketing paradoxes (discussed in Ch. 10). This term refers to the cases were the bracketing imposed on a sequence according to the phonology, for instance, does not match the bracketing imposed by the morphology, the syntax or the semantics. A very familiar example of this sort is the term atomic vhvsicist. Even thou~h the 1 -I U suff~ -ist is attached to the stem physic, the adiective atomic does not refer to ~hv- I 1 -I sicist but only to the physic part (we are talkin~ about a Derson who does atomic u physics, not a physicist who is atomic). Finallv the last cha~ter of the book (Ch. 1 1) addresses the wncluchng question: given al1 the facts discussed throurrhout the book, what place in the gram&r should morphology occupy? This is a question that has not yet received a satisfactory answer and is still the subiect of much debate. Spencer's book constitutes a longneeded summary of the most significant work that has been done in theoretical morphology in the last fifty years. In spite of very minor objeaions one can make to it (like excess of emphasis on classification issues ), it is a very valuable piece of work for anybody interested in the field of morphology. Eulalia Bonet Departament de Filologia Catalana Universitat Autbnoma de Barcelona 2. Especidy in his treatment of clitics, Spencer seems too worried about the status of certain elements as clitics or morphemes. He does not consider the possiblity that these ambiguous elements might be the result of the interaction of different types of processes, in a fashion parallel to the way passives, for instance, are viewed in the generative frarnework. ANDREW RADFORD, Syntactic Theory and the Acquisition of English Syntax: The Nature of Early Child Grarnrnars of English. Oxford: Blackwell, 1990. viii + 3 1 1 pages. Syntactic Theory and the Acquisition,ofEnzsh Syntax makes an important contriution to the study of first language t. acquisition. The main goal of the book is to analyse child speech within the Princiles and Parameters framework and within a Maturational model of language acquisition. The Principies and Parameters model (Chomsk~ 1981, 1986a, 1986b, 1988), on the one hand, is a theory of language that explains crosslinguistic similarities by assuming that there is a core of universal principies (UG) common to al1 languages and a set of parameters, with a number of open values, that account for laneua~e variation. As far as the nature of " U these parameters is concerned, two major hypotheses have been put fonvard: one (Chomsky 1986a) that associates parameters with UG principies and another according to which parametric variation is connected with functional categories (Borer 1984, Chomsky 1988, Ouhaila 1991), where functional categories include the set ofelements which in traditional typology have been referred to as closed chs, that is, Determiners, Complementisers, Inflection (Tense and Agreement), Negation.. . The Maturational model of language acquisition, on the other hand, claims that the different stages that al1 children go through are constrained by inherent maturational factors. In this respect, within the Maturation Hypothesisl two different proposals have been put fonvard: one (Felix (1984) and Borer and Wexler (1987)) that claims that the availability 1. This theory of language acquisition contrasts with the Continuity Hypothesis (Hyams (1987) and Weissenborn (1990) arnong others) according to which al1 UG ~rinci~les and parameters (however not fxed) are present throughout the language acquisition process.