Grammatical Relations in Romani: The Noun Phrase (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Grammatical relations in Romani: The noun phrase ed. by Viktor Elšík, Yaron Matras Anthony P. Grant Grammatical relations in Romani: The noun phrase. Ed. by Viktor Elšík and Yaron Matras. (With an introduction by Frans Plank.) (Current issues in linguistic theory 211.) Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2000. Pp. x, 244. $86.00. The introduction (1–8) treats general themes rather than discussing the individual papers in extenso, covering a wide range of noun-phrase phenomena in Romani ranging from the nature of Romani genitive constructions in crosslinguistic perspective (Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm, 123–49) to the possibility of whether Proto-Romani was ergative like other Indic languages (a possibility strongly suggested and well-explored by Vít Bubeník, 205–28). Four of the eight papers in the main body of the collection were given at the Fourth International Conference on Romani Linguistics in Manchester in September 1998; the others are independently-produced works. Romani is indeed a fruitful area of research for students of NPs since it possesses a number of unusual features. These include a dominant possessor-possessed genitival construction in which the relation of the possessor to its possessed is expressed adjectivally and a long-recognized two-tier noun case system in which the secondary cases consist of postpositions soldered onto oblique case-markers (even though Romani is otherwise prepositional and the two features can coexist, inasmuch as certain propositions govern secondary cases). The first feature is also found in other Indic languages whereas the second is much more unusual. Two of the papers are by the first-named editor, the first being an outline of paradigmatic noun inflection (9–30) which serves to orient the reader to much of what follows in later chapters, and the second a discussion (drawing upon the widest range of dialects [End Page 436] in this collection) of the surprising degree of variation in personal pronouns (65–94). The second editor has contributed a close analysis of the structure, function, and distribution of demonstrative pronouns, drawing on a large database of material from most Romani dialect areas. Norbert Boretzky provides a useful survey of the forms and syntax of the definite article in those Romani dialects which have preserved it (31–63), although he does not mention that South Italian Romani dialects use some definite article forms which seem at least superficially to have been borrowed from Italian. Personal and demonstrative pronouns, definite articles, and the areal distribution of the feature of external possession are also covered in this volume. In fact, areal linguistics is well-covered here. Victor A. Friedman’s paper on proleptic and resumptive object pronouns (187–204) points out that in the use of such pronouns, Romani noun phrase syntax preserves some distinctive boundaries which set it off from NP syntax in neighboring Balkan languages, whereas other features of Romani syntax are more readily comparable with parallel syntactic features in Balkan languages. The less than perfect typological overlaps involving Romani dialects are also exemplified in Mily Crevels and Peter Bakker’s paper on external possession in Romani (151–85), where they show that the boundaries between the occurrence of external possession in Romani dialects and its use in coterritorial languages, though similar both in the shared presence of such features in certain dialects (for instance, varieties of Vlax Romani in contact with many Central European languages) and their shared absence in certain other dialects (for instance, Welsh Romani), do not always coincide. (Sinti dialects lack external possession although German, the language which has influenced them most strongly, has it.) The editors have chosen an especially rich focus for their collection without exhausting its possibilities. Further themes are still to be explored in greater depth (for instance, a pandialectal study of Romani adjectival comparative morphology and constructions, with due attention to instances of suppletion, would repay the effort), but a good start has been made here. Anthony P. Grant University of Sheffield, UK Copyright © 2003 Linguistic Society of America