Dimensioni della linguistica Ed. by Maria-Elisabeth Conte, Anna Giacalone Ramat, and Paolo Ramat (review)

Abstract

BOOK NOTICES Dimension! della lingüistica. Ed. by Maria-Elisabeth Conte, Anna Giacalone Ramat, and Paolo Ramat. (Materiali Linguistici, Université di Pavia, 1.) Milano: Franco Angelí, 1990. Pp. 239. L. 28.000. This volume is the first of an interdisciplinary series entitled Materiali Linguistici, a collection of the current linguistic research of several scholars at the University of Pavia. This first collection is rather heterogeneous, but the articles can be grouped into the three general categories of historical, typological, and textual linguistics. Part 1 is concerned with historical linguistics. Anna Giacolone Ramat, in 'Clitici latini e romanzi ' (11-30), explains the syntactic changes observed in the evolution of Romance clitics from Latin as the variable application of Wackernagel 's Law regarding the distribution of clitics after stressed words. Silvia Luraghi, in 'Osservazioni sulla Legge di Wackernagel e la posizione del verbo nelle lingue indoeuropee' (31-60), examines some exceptions to Wackernagel 's Law in the position of pronominal clitics of Ancient Greek and Hittite. Gianguido Manzelli's 'Il plurale cappatico in armeno e ungherese' (61-1 18) is a re-evaluation ofthe hypothesis of a genealogical connection between Armenian and Hungarian in the origin of Armenian plural -k\ Manzelli proposes an alternative derivation for -k' from Proto-IndoEuropean *-s". Two papers in typological linguistics follow in Part 2. The article by Giuliano Bernini, 'Per una tipología delle repliche brevi' (1 19-50), is a study of yes-no questions and their replies in many Indo-European languages and Hungarian; Bernini's goal is to explore certain crosslinguistic typological parameters. Paolo Ramat, in 'Nessuno, Ulisse e Polifemo' (151-68), gives a preliminary typology based on the functional distribution of negative quantifiers (e.g. Italian nessuno 'nobody') and negators (e.g. Italian non 'not') in European languages. The remaining three articles in the collection cover several topics in pragmatics and textual linguistics. Claudia Caffi, in 'Modulazione, mitigazione, litote' (169-200), analyzes the degree of illocutionary force in conversational modulation, mitigation, and minimization. In 'Pronomi anaforici non-coreferenziali' (20116 ), Maria-Elisabeth Conte presents a ternary classification of noncoreferential pronominal anaphors on the basis of anaphorantecedent relations. Finally, Michèle Prandi's 'Una figura testuale del silenzio: La reticenza' (217-39) describes the formal and metacommunicative functions of silence in its various forms (e.g. ellipsis and reticence) and undertakes to establish a typology according to their role in literary texts. The editors have successfully brought together a collection of articles from various subfields of linguistic research that will appeal to the scholar who values a broad approach to the study of language. It is to be hoped that future volumes in the Materiali Linguistici series will bring to light more of the splendid work done by linguists at the University of Pavia. [Gerardo A. Lorenzino, City University of New York, Graduate Center.] Current research in natural language generation. Ed. by Robert Dale, Chris Mellish, and Michael Zock. (Cognitive Science Series, 4.) London: Academic Press, 1990. Pp. ix, 356. $45.00. This volume contains selected papers from the Second European NLG Workshop, held in Edinburgh in April 1989, together with some additional texts. In the words of the editors, its goal is to provide 'a snapshot of the state-ofthe -art in a number of important research themes in NLG' (3). A first section on text planning comprises four papers. Eduard Hovy's 'Unresolved issues in paragraph planning' (17-45) uses a paragraph structure planner based on Rhetorical Structure Theory as a basis for discussing problems in planning, including the theory and representation of coherence relations. Donia Scott & Clarisse de Souza's 'Getting the message across in RST-based text generation' (47-73) draws on psycholinguistic research to propose a heuristic-based model of style predicated on ease of cognitive processing. Alison Cawsey, 222 ...