LINGUIST List 7.783

Wed May 29 1996

Books: Contrastive Ling, Pacific Ling

Editor for this issue: Ljuba Veselinova <lveselinemunix.emich.edu>

Directory

1. Jose Camacho, New Books: Contrastive Ling, Pacific Ling

CONTRASTIVE LINGUISTICS

Syntactic Structures in Nominals: A Comparative Study of Spanish and
Southern Quechua Liliana Sanchez. Graduate Students in Linguistics
(GSIL) publications. University of Southern California. 1996
(gsilusc.edu, http://www.usc.edu/dept/gsil/gsil.html)

The main aim of this dissertation is to provide an analysis of the
syntax of nominal modification based on the hypothesis that there is a
group of DP-internal functional categories in addition to Gender/
Number Agreement Phrase that mediate between nouns (derived and
non-derived) and their argumental and non-argumental modifiers. The
common syntactic properties of restrictive modifiers such as
adjectives, restrictive relative clauses and prepositional phrases in
the two languages under study, Spanish and Southern Quechua, are
accounted for as properties of a functional projection Predicate
Phrase internal to DP. The common morphosyntactic properties of
argumental modifiers are accounted for as the properties of a
DP-internal Person Agreement Phrase which is required to express
subjecthood inside DP. Finally, the syntactic properties of a special
class of nominal modifiers that includes adjectives in Spanish and
quantifiers and suffixes in Southern Quechua are accounted for as
properties of two DP-internal functional projections, Mode Phrase and
Aspect Phrase, that interact with the modality and aspectuality of the
main clause. The data examined comes from Spanish and Southern
Quechua, two languages with opposite values in the Head Parameter;
Spanish is a head-initial language whereas Southern Quechua is
head-final. It also includes different stages of Bilingual Spanish,
the variety of Spanish spoken by native speakers of Southern
Quechua. The latter shows a gradual shift in the feature specification
of the functional projections proposed.


PACIFIC LINGUISTICS

DAVID BRADLEY, A dictionary of the Northern Dialect of Lisu (China and
Southeast Asia), 1944, xii, 275pp. ISBN 0 85883 423 5. A$30.30

Pacific linguistics Catalogue number C-126, Key words: Lisu,
dictionary.

Lisu, the language of 850, 000 people in China, Myanmar, India and
Thailand, is described in this Lisu-English and English-Lisu
dictionary using the orthography devised in China in the late 1950s.



DAVID BRADLEY, (ed.), Papers in South Asian Linguistics No.13: Studies
in Burmese Linguistics, 1995, xii, 205pp. Softcover. ISBN 0 85883 427
8. A$28.20

Pacific Linguistics Catalogue number A-83, Key words: Burmese/Myanmar,
Arakanese, Tavoyan, Intha, Moken, reflexive.

Three major varieties of Burmese (Arkanese, Tavoyan and Indha) are
described as well as papers on the Burmese verb, the reflexive in
Burmese, and the phonology of minority language of southern Burma,
Moken, in papers by four different authors.



M. ROSS, Studies in languages of New Britain and New Ireland. Volume
1: Austronesian languages of the North New Guinea cluster in
Northwestern New Britain. 1996, ix, 392pp. ISBN 0 85883 443 X.
A$47.00

Pacific Linguistics Catalogue number C-135. Key words: Oceanic,
Austronesian, New Britain, grammar.

This volume is the first of a set whose aim is to make available
otherwise unpublished materials on languages of New Britain and New
Ireland (Papua New Guinea). The language of this volume are all
Oceanic Austronesian and include Maleu, Kilenge, Kabana, Lusi, Kove,
Amara, Mouk, Aria, Tourai, and Lamongai. Authors are Richard Goulden,
Graham Haywood and William Thurston. There is also a discussion by
Ann Chowning of work on the historical relationships among the Oceanic
languages of New Britain.