Definiteness By Christopher Lyons (review)

Abstract

494 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 76, NUMBER 2 (2000) that performance on neuropsychological tests—and indeed, the organization of the brain—are heavily influenced by literacy and concomitant factors such as schooling. Ch. 8, 'Aphasia in users of signed languages ', by David Corina summarizes the available case studies of aphasie signers and spells out some of their theoretical implications. Ch. 9, 'How typical are the atypical aphasie populations ?', by the three editors concludes that 'language lateralization or representation' is essentially the same in most of the populations studied in the book as in the 'typical' cases. Hence, '[!language organization is much more universal than previously assumed. The current model can indeed apply to the "atypical" populations described in this volume' (312). These conclusions are somewhat surprising since several of the chapters present serious challenges for models exclusively designed to account for 'typical' cases. The overall conclusion one can draw from this volume is that the study of atypical populations is a valuable tool for the study of the typical brain precisely because many facts about atypical aphasia parallel those observed in typical aphasia. The volume also includes author and subject indices . A more sophisticated subject index would have been helpful. For example, under 'language processing ' the reader will find 26 page references but without any indication as to what aspect of processing might be discussed in those pages. Similarly, there is an entry for 'contrastive stress' but none for 'stress'. In the spirit of this volume, the list of criteria that define typicality could be continued and so could the list of future useful contributions. Female vs. male patients and patients with multiple lesions are only two possible foci that come to mind. The main interest of the book lies, above all, in the empirical scope of the material, which will make it a useful reference for researchers in language processing in normal and clinical populations. [Susanne Gahl, Harvard University.] Definiteness. By Christopher Lyons. (Cambridge textbooks in linguistics.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Pp. xx, 380. This book begins with a basic observation that noun phrases like the car, proper nouns, possessives, personal pronouns, demonstratives, and universal quantifiers refer to identifiable objects or represent the totality of conceivable objects which match the description in a given context. In other words, definiteness has something to do with the identifiability or the inclusiveness of the description. This observation provides a starting point forthe survey ofvarious manifestations of definiteness in Ch. 2: articles, lexical and morphological devices, syntactic agreement involving adpositions, pronouns, or word order. Two important facts emerge: (1) The definite article is not always in a complementary distribution with the indefinite article. (2) There is no definable correlation between the way languages encode definiteness and their common typological features. Further examination in Ch. 3 of noun phrases whose definiteness is due to something other than the use of articles shows that, although definiteness is associated with the Det(erminer) position, it cannot be said that this feature is universal. Some languages lack definiteness marking in their noun phrase structure. Chs. 4-6 contain detailed treatments of various topics connected with definiteness: the semantic and pragmatic manifestations of identifiability and their various nuances (Ch. 4); the interaction between definiteness and direct object marking, verb agreement, animacy, article and nominal feature marking, empty category, classifiers (Ch. 5); definiteness effects in existential sentences, superlatives, extraposition, and the organization of information within a discourse (Ch. 6). The foregoing survey leads Lyons to characterize definiteness as a morphosyntactic category which represents the semantic and pragmatic notions of identifiability (Ch. 7). Languages can be grouped according to how they grammaticalize definiteness: Type I exhibits no grammatical definiteness (Tapanese , Korean); Type II marks definiteness in pronominal noun phrases (Latin, Russian); Type III encodes definiteness in pronominal and full noun phrases (English, French). This chapter is a transition to the more theoretical analysis in Chs. 8-9. L argues in Ch. 8 that, although the basic DP framework has some advantage over traditional NP analysis, it cannot satisfactorily explain the syntax of definiteness either. To remedy this, L suggests that free-form articles like the be treated, as in NP analysis, as specifiers rather than heads, but specifiers of DP rather...