Parameters of morphosyntactic change Ed. by Ans van Kemenade and Nigel Vincent (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS161 commonly accepted definition of the term. And while E is certainly correct in saying that, in terms of topic marking, there is no difference between the creóle continuum and the continuum involving the Chinese dialects analyzed, there may be other traits that, taken together, characterize creóles. John McWhorter (1998) has isolated three: little or no inflection, little or no tone used to distinguish lexical items or encode grammar, and semantically transparent derivational morphology (e.g. no cases like the with in withstand.) Although most creóles may depart slightly from these traits, largely due to the nature of their respective contact situations, it is significant that creóles cluster around this prototype. Lastly, there are some minor issues to raise regarding balance of the discussion. In section 2.4. of Ch. 4, structures are discussed and illustrated excellently. However, in section 2.3.2, it is not clear why we find formal American English translations instead of casual speech for the translations of the sentences. In discussing the sociolinguistic situation of Chinese (Ch. 5), the chapter includes an overview of Chinese history which is interesting though largely unnecessary for understanding the study, and makes the chapter unwieldy. Finally, if the varieties of Chinese analyzed in the study are indeed mutually unintelligible, this begs the question about whether one is dealing here with dialect or, rather, language continuum. These drawbacks notwithstanding, what shines in this book is the methodological rigor and the certainty the reader gets that E has indeed identified a possible universal in discourse organization. REFERENCES Bailey, Beryl Loftman. 1966. Jamaican creóle syntax. London: Cambndge University Press. DeCamp, David. 1971. Toward a generative analysis of post-creole speech community. Pidginization and creolization of languages, ed. by Dell Hymes, 340-76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McWhorter, John. 1998. Identifying the creóle prototype: Vindicating a typological class. Language 74.788-818. Rickford, John. 1987. Dimensions of a creóle continuum: History, texts and linguistic analysis of Guyanese Creole. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Thomason, Sarah G., and Terrence Kaufman. 1988. Language contact, creolization, and genetic linguistics. Berkeley: University of California Press. Department of Spanish and Portuguese Indiana University Bloomington, IN 47405 [elements@indiana.edu] Parameters of morphosyntactic change. Ed. by Ans van Kemenade and Nigel Vincent . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. Pp. xi, 544. Reviewed by Stefan Frisch, University ofMichigan This volume contains a selection of articles that grew out of the Third Diachronic Generative Syntax conference (1994). The contributors attempt to develop a formal theory of the relation between syntactic and morphological change within generative syntactic theory, primarily the principles and parameters theory and recent extensions, including some discussion of the minimalist program. The volume contains fifteen chapters presenting original research, three commentary chapters, and an introduction. The articles are organized into four sections, and although the articles cover a variety of topics, a certain amount of commonality lends coherence to the collection. In particular, some of the papers provide accounts of the same phenomena or overlapping data, and all of the papers contain citations to other articles in the volume, highlighting the interconnectedness of the topics. The introduction by van Kemenade and Vincent (1-25) effectively sets the stage for the articles to follow. They point out that, since generative theory has come to the consensus that parametric differences in UG are restricted to functional categories, the study of morphosyntactic change provides another source of evidence for investigating the parametric possibilities. With this in mind, they succinctly survey current syntactic theory, with 162LANGUAGE, VOLUME 76, NUMBER 1 (2000) an eye toward differences between theories that are relevant to the examination of morphosyntactic change. VK & V also elegantly place the work within the broader field of diachronic syntactic research. Most papers in this volume discuss parametric reanalysis, following the work ofLightfoot (1979). VK & V briefly discuss Kroch's (1989) approach to synchronic and diachronic variation employing competition between grammars. Kroch's theory attempts to reconcile quantitative corpusbased research, which has always found gradual changes across several generations, with Lightfoot 's notion of parametric reanalysis. Finally, VK & V contrast the generative approach to syntactic change with that of grammaticalization theory. Grammaticalization theory is primarily concerned with viewing changes as embedded...