LINGUIST List 6.577

Mon 17 Apr 1995

Books: Romance Ling, Lang Contact, Semantics, Syntax

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ROMANCE LING
Lyche, Chantal (ed) FRENCH GENERATIVE PHONOLOGY: RETROSPECTIVE AND PERSPECTIVES
AFLS in association with ESRI, 1994, 287pp.
GBP12.50 + GBP1.50 postage (paper) ISBN 0 9511637 1 X
Distributed by ESRI, Department of Modern Languages, University of Salford,
Salford, M5 4WT, UK.
The field of French phonology has been subjected to fundamental changes in the
last twenty-five years following the publication of Sanford Schane's `French
Phonology and Morphology'. This volume celebrates the anniversary of this
publication and presents a number of papers read at the Phonology Workshop held
in Aix-en-Provence in September 1993 in conjunction with the annual meeting of
the Association for French Language Studies. (Contains papers by Durand/Lyche,
Azra, Basboll, Carr, de Jong, Delais, Klausenburger, Lyche, Mazzola, Montreuil,
Plenat, Scullen, van Eibergen/Belrhali.)
LANG CONTACT
Peter Bakker en Maarten Mous (eds.) MIXED LANGUAGES;
15 CASE STUDIES IN LANGUAGE INTERTWINING
IFOTT 1994. 244 pp.
Price: 35 Dutch guilders, ca. 25 US $ (banking costs extra).
ISBN 90-74698-14-X.
Orders: IFOTT, Spuistraat 210, 1012 VT Amsterdam, Netherlands.
Fax ...-31-20-5253052. E-mail: ifottalf.let.uva.nl
In the 15 papers in this book more than 20 mixed languages are
discussed from the Americas, Africa, Europe, the Middle East,
the Arctic and East Asia. The languages discussed often have
the grammatical system of one language and the lexicon of
another. Code-switching, creoles and pidgins are excluded. Of
high interest for historical linguists, creolists, code-mixing
researchers and other language contact specialists.
SEMANTICS
Rullmann, Hotze. (University of Massachusetts, Amherst); Maximality in the
 Semantics of Wh-Constructions, 238 pp. Ph.D.
 dissertation, 1995. $16 + S/H ($3 domestic, $4 foreign
 surface). GLSA, glsalinguist.umass.edu.
"This dissertation provides evidence that the notion of maximality
plays a central role in the semantics of wh-constructions, in
particular wh-questions, comparatives, and free relatives. It is
argued that the semantics of each of these constructions involves
reference to the maximal element of a certain set. A common theme of
the dissertation, introduced in Ch. 1, is the interaction between wh-
movement and negation (the negative island effect). Ch. 2 shows how
the maximality account of comparatives can account for their semantic
properties. Ch. 3 extends the maximality analysis to questions and
free relatives. In Ch. 4 I discuss scope interactions in how many-
questions. In Ch. 5 the question is discussed whether the maximality
accoun of negative islands can be extended to other weak islands."
SYNTAX
Noguchi, Tohru. (University of Massachusetts, Amherst); The Role of
 Syntactic Categories in Anaphora, Pb. xvii + 218 pp. Ph.D.
 dissertation, 1995. $16 + S/H ($3 domestic, $4 foreign
 surface). GLSA, glsalinguist.umass.edu.
The aim of this dissertation is to investigate the role syntactic categories
play in anaphoric relations. Unlike personal pronouns in English, Japanese
personal pronouns cannot be construed as bound variables. This cross-linguistic
variation is captured under the hypothesis that personal pronouns in English
exemplify what we call "D-Pronouns" (cf. Postal 1969), whereas personal
pronouns in Japanese exemplify what we call "N-Pronouns," and that binding
applies only to functional heads. Consequences of this general constraint on
binding are examined on empirical grounds such as demonstrative binding and
pronominal coreference, and the approach is further generalized into
obligatory control, inalienable possession constructions in French, certain
types of verb phrase idioms in English, etc. by arguing that control in to
DP as well as CP can be captured as binding into a functional head.