The Slavic Languages by Roland Sussex , Paul Cubberley (review)

Abstract

SEER, Vol. 86,No. 3, July 2008 Reviews Sussex, Roland and Cubberley, Paul. The Slavic Languages. Cambridge Language Surveys. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, 2006. xix + 638 pp. Map. Tables. Figures. Appendices. Bibliography. Index. ?85.00. The authors nail their colours to themast right from the startof thisbook by declaring 'Slavic comprises 13 languages split into three groups: South Slav ic, which includes Bosnian, Serbian and Croatian. ..' (p. i), although many regard these three as variants of one language. Obviously political as well as linguistic criteria affect the choice. However, the authors take a thoroughly linguistic approach to their survey of the structure of the Slavonic languages, principally thosewith official status.They begin with an introduction detailing how they approached the study and examining the languages of the South, East and West Slavs, their variants and nomenclature, and their genetic clas sification and typology.There follow eleven chapters covering their linguistic evolution, genetic affiliation and classification, their socio-historical evolution, theirphonology, theirmorphophonology, their inflectionalmorphology, their syntactic categories and morphosyntax, their sentence structure, their word formation, their lexis, their dialects, and some socio-linguistic issues. Three appendices give abbreviations, orthography and transliteration, and resources for studying Slavonic linguistics.Although written by two leading scholars in the traditional format for linguistic studies (withnumbered examples and several levels of numbered headings), the work is accessible to the more general reader 'with some competence in descriptive linguistics' (p. 13) and is quite comprehensive despite some selectiveness. It will certainly be welcomed by scholars and students of theSlavonic languages and other linguisticians and linguistswho need an entrypoint into the Slavonic field. The first two chapters deal with the prehistory of Slavonic, its connection with Indo-European and Baltic, the phonology, morphology and syntax of Proto-Slavonic, the subdivision of Slavonic, which examines the main features of each of the three families of Slavonic languages, and the socio-historical evolution of the three families: South Slavonic (Old Church Slavonic and Church Slavonic, Bulgarian, Macedonian, Serbo-Croatian, Serbian, Croatian and Bosnian, and Slovenian), East Slavonic (Russian, Ukrainian and Belaru sian) and West Slavonic (Polish, Upper and Lower Sorbian, Kashubian and Slovincian, Polabian, Czech and Slovak). An overview is presented at the end of each chapter. The third chapter examines the development of the Proto-Slavonic vowel and consonant systems, sound combinations and suprasegmental features (stress, quantity, tone), together with the modern vowel and consonant sys tems (phonemes, phonetics) and suprasegmentals. Starting with an overview, the chapter on morphophonology deals with separate and combined vowel and consonant alternations and themorphological typology of alternations (noun, adjective and verb inflexions and word formation). There is a section on morphophonology and Slavonic orthographies. The chapter on 514 SEER, 86, 3, JULY 2008 morphology begins with an overview before coveringmorphological categories and structures,morphological word classes, inflectional categories (number, case, definiteness and deixis, gender, person, tense, aspect, voice and mood) and paradigms (nouns, the adjective and determiner declension, firstand second person pronouns and the reflexive pronoun, numerals and verbs, including athematic and auxiliary verbs). The sixth chapter covers syntactic units, syntactic roles and relations (concord, agreement, government and case) and the syntax and morphosyntax of aspect. The chapter on sentence structure begins with an overview and covers definiteness, questions, negation, imperatives, passives, conditionals, possession, coordinate and subordinate constructions, and specific construc tion types (pronouns and anaphora, reflexives, apersonal and impersonal constructions, indirect speech, participial and gerundial constructions, and ellipsis and deletion), together with word order and the Prague School's concept of functional sentence perspective. As various types of word formation (e.g. prefixation, suffixation, root combination, mixed types) are looked at in nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and other parts of speech, morphophonological features of word forma tion are also examined. The next chapter considers patterns of lexis, lexical composition and sources in the modern Slavonic languages, coexistent lexical strata (e.g. Church Slavonic and Russian inRussian, Russian and Turkish in Bulgarian), root exploitation (including lexical specialization and verbs of motion), lexical innovations, both indigenous (e.g. compounding, abbreviated words) and externally influenced (borrowing, caiques), and post-Communist lexis. The tenth chapter, after an overview, examines dialects of the main South, East and West Slavonic languages, while the final chapter...