Turkish Grammar (review)

Reviewed by: The Turkish language reform: A catastrophic success by Geoffrey Lewis Mohammed Sawaie The Turkish language reform: A catastrophic success. By Geoffrey Lewis. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. 190. ISBN 0199256691. $24.95. This book consists of twelve chapters. Ch. 2 (5–26) is a treatment of Ottoman Turkish, its historical development as it extensively incorporated elements from Arabic and Persian, and the attempts of [End Page 896] various individuals to reform this language. Ch. 3 (27–39) discusses the change in the writing system from the Arabo-Persian to a modified Latin alphabet and its final imposition by Mustafa Kamal Atatürk, founder of the Turkish Republic, on all literate Turks in June 1929. Ch. 4 (40–56) discusses Atatürk’s personal involvement in language reform until 1936 and his fervent attempts to purge Turkish of foreign elements. Ch. 5 (57–74) examines the role of nationalism in adopting linguistic theories that are in line with nationalist ideologies. Hermann F. Kvergić, a Viennese linguist, advanced the theory ‘that Turkish was the first human language to take shape’ (57),which was immediately adopted by Atatürk. Such nationalistic views were perhaps behind his insistence on the purity of Turkish. Ch. 6 (75–93) discusses the contribution of three individuals, Falih Rıfkı Atay, Nurullah Ataç, and Aydın Sayılı, not only to coining vocabulary items, but also to making these coinages accessible to the public via various media. Ch. 7 (94–106) examines the prefixes and suffixes used in, or invented for, the creation of pure Turkish words. Ch. 8 (107–23) treats neologisms, some obsolete, others still current, and provides discussion of the three methods prescribed to generate indigenous Turkish lexical items, which, Lewis asserts, were often violated. A list of controversial or otherwise interesting neologisms is presented in this chapter with their dates of introduction. Ch. 9 (124–32) provides a treatment of terms coined by the Turkish Language Society for technical and specialized subjects (statistics, metallurgy, volleyball, etc.) and available in glossaries. Many such items, according to L, are ignored in recent dictionaries. Ch. 10 (133–39) is a brief treatment of the flow of primarily English, and secondarily French, words into today’s Turkish. Words like süpermarket, kalite kontrolü (Eng. quality control) are another example of foreign elements that Atatürk did not anticipate. Ch. 11 (140–52) discusses the status of New Turkish and whether language reform has impoverished the language. And, finally, Ch. 12 (153–68) examines the fate of the Language Society which had Atatürk’s support since its founding in 1932. The ups and downs of this society are delineated. L also mentions other language societies whose creation was motivated by various ideologies. L characterizes Atatürk’s movement to change the speech habits of a nation and their writing system as a form of ‘language engineering’. He grudgingly accepts the term ‘language reform’; his preference would have been ‘language revolution’. The attempt to purge Arabic and Persian grammatical features and lexical items from Turkish dates back as far as the thirteenth century (10). However, calls by individuals and private groups for purging Turkish of foreign elements began in earnest in the nineteenth century. Such efforts by Atatürk, L asserts, are not unique to Turkish; other languages underwent similar experiences at different times, for example, German, Swedish, Hungarian, Finnish, and Albanian, among others. This book documents the obstacles and the successes that the various Turkish institutions, government-sponsored as well as private, struggled with to bring Turkish to its present state. Atatürk’s efforts undoubtedly faced strong opposition, especially from religious establishments and adherents to Ottomanism. While there are brief references to such opposition, a fuller treatment would have enhanced this book considerably. Nevertheless, L’s objectives of acquainting the general reader with the Turkish language reform and providing students of Turkish with useful stimulating reading (1) are successful. Mohammed Sawaie University of Virginia Copyright © 2004 Linguistic Society of America

Reviewed by: The Turkish nominal phrase in spoken discourse by Christoph Schroeder Alan S. Kaye The Turkish nominal phrase in spoken discourse. By Christoph Schroeder. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 1999. Pp. ix, 226. This book, volume 40 in the well-known Turcologica series edited by Lars Johanson, is the revised version of the author’s 1995 doctoral dissertation. Its eight well-written chapters deal with the nominal phrase in Turkish discourse. Schroeder emphasizes that he is referring to ‘unplanned’ spoken discourse, which he defines as spontaneously evolving (5). The language described is the colloquial Turkish of Istanbul and Ankara. This corpus was meticulously gathered from tape recordings, particularly of Turkish television talk shows and radio interviews—both excellent sources of accurate data, although I am puzzled as to how he can be sure that all the speakers recorded were speaking Istanbul or Ankara dialects. After a preliminary discussion of terms and definitions, the remainder of Ch. 1 focuses on pragmatic operations such as the establishment or re-establishment of a topic (7–18). Ch. 2 is a brief sketch of Turkish grammar, clarifying for the reader some of the basic issues discussed (19–54). One may quibble with the author’s inclusion of, for example, the well-known eight-vowel system, the mention of vowel harmony, etc. (20–21), lexical classes (e.g. nouns and verbs, 22–23), or function words (23). It is interesting to note, however, that word order in Turkish is said to be ‘quite free’ even though it is often considered to be a fairly restricted SOV language (20). This point is reiterated by Jaklin Kornfilt, who notes: ‘Often (but not always), the divergences from the unmarked order have a pragmatic, discourse-oriented function, in that the position immediately preceding the verb is the focus position and the sentence-initial position is topic position’ (‘Turkish and the Turkic languages’ in Bernard Comrie, ed., The world’s major languages, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987:636). Ch. 3, one of the most innovative of the tome’s chapters, examines the use of bir ‘one’ as the indefinite article (55–94). The author considers bir as a ‘pragmatic indefinite article’ following the analysis of others; however, he convincingly corrects the perceptions of his predecessors by adding the viewpoint that ‘it is not the article alone which triggers pragmatic referentiality of a new referent. Sentence constructions and the absence of the pragmatic operation of topic establishment parallel to the introduction of the new referent also do’ (69). One sentence worthy of follow-up, which may contain an indefinite article in its English translation, is beni ağrı sok-tu ‘a bee has stung me/bees have stung me’ (77, fn. 13 [sic]), since this was the only sentence found by the author of an incorporated subject with a transitive verb taking a direct object . (The word ‘bee’ is misspelled and should be arı, and one native speaker from Istanbul I asked rejected the second aforementioned translation giving beni arılar sok-tu for ‘bees have stung me’.) Ch. 4 concerns itself with the so-called numeral classifier tane (95–109). The conclusion is that it is notyet known whether tane is a numeral classifier since ‘we do notknow enough aboutt he pragmatic function of numeral classifiers in other languages’ (109). Since this word has been borrowed from Persian (‘grain’, ‘berry’, etc.), and since it is a numeral classifier in Persian, I agree with Schroeder that it mighthave been borrowed as a lexical item and also as a classifier (98). Expressions such as bir tane adam ‘a/one man’ or üç tane çocuk ‘three children’ (98) were rejected by my native consultant since tane could not occur with human referents in the aforementioned phrases in isolation, i.e. bir adam is the most exact translation for ‘a man’. Ch. 5 deals with subject-verb plural agreement (111–25); Ch. 6 focuses on the third person singular possessive suffix (127–88); Ch. 7 covers postpredicate position (189–99); and Ch. 8 has two concluding remarks (201–7), one of which is that the plural marker -lar in sular yine kesilmiş ‘(all) the water has been cut off again’ contrasts with the lack of it...

BOOK NOTICES 221 stantial French/English summaries. [Gary Bevington, Northeastern Illinois University.] Studies in the nominal sentence in Egyptian and Coptic. By J[ohn] B. Callender. (University of California publications in Near Eastern studies, 24.) Berkeley & Los Angeles : University of California Press, 1984. Pp. ix, 221. $21.00. Languages of long ago are of interest to the layman as matters of pure curiosity, and to the linguist as a testing-ground for synchronic and diachronic theory. Unfortunately the data on such languages are, forthe most part, accessible only to specialists. In the case of Egyptian, the writing systems are restricted mainly to consonants , imposing a severe limitation on their interpretabiUty. AU this means that studies which do not require speciaUst knowledge ofthe writing systems, and which deal with manageable chunks of Egyptian grammar, are particularly welcome. Slightly more than halfofCaUender's volume deals with Coptic, the successor to epigraphic Egyptian. C presents what is essentiaUy a catalog of forms and functions through time, specificaUy for 'sentences in which the predicate (nominal) was a noun' (p. 2). The property of specificity turns out to be very important. (Here, an important source not mentioned by Callender is D. Bickerton, The roots of language , Karoma, 1981.) What a wealth of data and examples C presents! He is less successful in explaining the occurrences and developments of the various constructions—partly for lack of a consistent and sophisticated theoretical basis, and perhaps more because the topic is still not adequately handled by any theory. The book is marred by surprising unevenness in production. The programmed offset text with justified margins has too many annoying cases of run-on letters and words—or the opposite, large white spaces. Typos abound (e.g., p. 8, Unes 4-7, incomplete sentence with conclusion dropped; p. 10, Une 15, 'between' is missing; p. 25, Une 5 up, 'Table 3', not 'Table 4'; p. 41, Une 2, 'contrastive', not 'contractive' stress). There is also ajarring overkiU in Cs level ofapproach; e.g., a full page (119) is used to present a tree diagram of 'John is a man,' and an appendix is included tojustify the use of'subject' and 'predicate ' as technical terms. AnomaUes occur; the use of 'congruence' for 'agreement' in some places but not others; complete lack of reference to the important work of C. T. Hodge on Egyptian; and omission of the oft-cited Junge 1978 from the bibliography (which does contain Junge 1976, 1976b—one suspects haste here, as perhaps elsewhere in the text). One hopes that the examples and glosses are more accurate than the narrative text. In short, this book is a promising, if flawed, beginning in an area of great interest, both in terms of the languages (Egyptian, Coptic) and the topics (basically non-verbal and copular sentences ). The lucid discussion ofthe complex history of Egyptian/Coptic varieties, mainly in the copious notes, is a much appreciated fringe benefit . [M. Lionel Bender, Southern Illinois University.] The function of word order in Turkish grammar. By Eser Emine ErguVANLi . (University of California publications in linguistics, 106.) Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984. Pp. xii, 179. $15.00. Turkish is often cited as an example of a canonical SOV language. Yet in a study of adult spoken Turkish by D. Slobin (cited by E, p. 2), only 48% of utterances showed SOV order; indeed , only 56% showed verb-final order, while 6% actually showed verb-initial order. How is the alleged SOV nature of Turkish to be reconcUed with these findings? In E's detailed analysis of word order in Turkish, she does not abandon over-aU basic verb-final structure, but investigates in detail the various factors—in particular pragmatic factors (topic/comment structure)—that determine variations from verb-finality. The core of E's exposition is formed by Chs. 1-2, which examine word order in simplex sentences . Ch. 1 establishes that the position of constituents before the verb is determined by two main principles: the topic of the sentence appears clause-initially, while the focus (essential new information) appears in immediate preverbal position. In Ch. 2, E demonstrates that the position after the verb is reserved for background information. Ch. 3 examines...

The term “alignment” refers to the formal realization of the argument structure of the clause, that is, the ways in which the core arguments of the predicate are encoded by means of three main morphosyntactic devices: nominal case marking (morphological case, adpositions), verb marking systems (verbal agreement, pronominal affixes, auxiliaries, voice distinctions, etc.), and word order. The relative importance of these mechanisms of argument coding may considerably vary from language to language. In the Romance family, a major role is played by finite verb agreement and, to a lesser extent, auxiliary selection, participial agreement, voice distinctions, and word order, depending on the language/variety. Most typically, both transitive and intransitive subjects share the same formal coding (they control finite verb agreement and precede the verb in the basic word order) and are distinguished from direct objects (which do not control finite verb agreement and follow the verb in the basic word order). This arrangement of the argument structure is traditionally known as “nominative/accusative” alignment and can be easily identified as the main alignment of the Romance languages. Note that, with very few exceptions, nominal case marking is instead “neutral,” since no overt morphological distinction is made between subject and object arguments after the loss of the Latin case system. However, although the Romance languages can legitimately be associated with an accusative alignment, it must be borne in mind that, whatever the property selected, natural languages speak against an all-encompassing, holistic typology. A language “belongs” to an alignment type only insofar as it displays a significantly above-average frequency of clause structures with that kind of argument coding, but this does not exclude the existence of several grammatical domains that partake of different alignments. In the Romance family, minor patterns are attested that are not consistent with an accusative alignment. In part, they depend on robust crosslinguistic tendencies in the distribution of the different alignment types when they coexist in the same language. In part, they reflect phenomena of morphosyntactic realignment that can be traced back to the transition from Latin to Romance, when, alongside the dominant accusative alignment of the classical language, Late Latin developed an active alignment in some domains of the grammar—a development that has its roots in Classical and Early Latin. Today, the Romance languages preserve traces of this intermediate stage, but in large part, the signs of it have been replaced with novel accusative structures. In particular, at the level of the sentence, there emerges an accusative-aligned word order, with the preverbal position realizing the default “subject” position and the postverbal position instantiating the default “object” position.

Language learning

Hebrew Studies 40 (1999) 267 Reviews CLAUSE STRUCTURE AND WORD ORDER IN HEBREW AND ARABIC: AN ESSAY IN COMPARATIVE SEMITIC SYNTAX. By Ur Shlonsky. Oxford Studies in Comparative Syntax. pp. x + 289. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1997. Cloth, $75.00. In this learned and carefully-written book, Ur Shlonsky adopts the Principles and Parameters model of Generative Grammar developed by Noam Chomsky to study key components of Semitic language systems. While most of his analysis is concerned with modem Hebrew, he devotes some attention to Arabic, a language rarely studied from the generative point of view. He is interested in the internal structure of the functional layer of the languages and attempts to address two related questions: 1) what is the actual content of this layer?; and 2) what is the hierarchy of functional projections within it? The fIrst of the book's three parts is concerned with verb movement and clausal architecture. It includes a fIne discussion of the place and function of the Benoni, or participial, form in Hebrew. Shlonsky offers a revision of the theory of participles by suggesting that their scope of movement is not limited to the lower part of clauses, but rather, they are hybrid forms as verbs whose agreement features are participial but which raise to tense status. He presents an informative treatment of negation of the present tense in both Hebrew and Arabic and explains well the more complex system of Arabic which has variants for the negative particle la in the future (Ian) and perfect (lam). His analysis of Arabic clause structure and its different forms of negation leads Shlonsky to conclude that, unlike Hebrew, two distinct participles exist in Arabic, one verbal/imperfect and the other nominal. Part Two begins with a study of null subjects (subject pronouns that must be understood because they are not phonetically expressed) and attempts to explain why differences in their use exist between Hebrew and Arabic. Hebrew seems to violate the general principle which holds that the richer the morphological system of a language is, the more likely it is to allow for null subjects. Its conjugation system is highly developed and yet null subjects are not allowed in the third person in Hebrew. To complicate matters, Palestinian Arabic, which has a conjugation system almost identical to that of Hebrew, does allow for null subjects. Shlonsky offers an explanation of this situation by discussing the distinction between the third person pronoun and the first and second person pronouns in Hebrew. While the former is inherently impersonal and therefore incompatible with referential interpretation, fIrst and second person pronouns cannot be impersonal and are fully referential. Hebrew Studies 40 (1999) 268 Reviews Word order is treated in the book's second part in a chapter on subjectverb inversion. Drawing on work done previously by himself and others, Shlonsky distinguishes between triggered inversion, which is due to the presence of some preverbal element like a prepositional phrase or complement , and free inversion which requires no such trigger. In the former case, Hebrew subjects are not case-licensed in their thematic position, but when free inversion is found subjects are case-licensed. This difference is due to the fact that free inversion can only be present when the verb is intransitive and passive and, therefore, does not assign an external theta-role, that is, does not allow for a specific direct object. (Theta-role refers to the assignment ofspecific semantic content to a particular word. For example, the word "it" in the sentence "It was raining" would not occupy a theta, or thematic position.) Although he does not discuss evidence from Arabic in this section. Shlonsky does investigate the use of postverbal subjects in French and Italian. He does so in order to support his theory that postverbal subjects in Romance languages are in the Verb Phrase while clausal subjects in Hebrew occupy the highest available Specifier position within the Inflectional Phrase. The lack of attention to Arabic on this matter is unfortunate since the reader is left wondering if this phenomenon is one that is peculiar to Hebrew or is found elsewhere in the Semitic family. The third part of the book studies the pronominal...

The purpose of this article is to investigate the practice of replacing borrowings with words from Turkic dialects during the Language Reform initiated by Ataturk. The aim of the Ataturk’s Language Reform was explained as revealing the beauty of the Turkish language and achieving its significance among the world languages. To realize this aim, it was planned to eliminate Arabic and Persian words, which were seen as foreign elements, from the language and to adopt and popularize Turkish words instead. In this study, Turkic words were suggested to be used instead of foreign words during the period of language reform, and events that occurred after the language reform were discussed. Recent research conducted in the Turkish Language Society is also mentioned. As a result, a proposal was put forward to develop a common language of communication in the Turkic world.

This is the first full account of the transformation of Ottoman Turkish into modern Turkish. It is based on the author's knowledge, experience and continuing study of the language, history, and people of Turkey. That transformation of the Turkish language is probably the most thorough-going piece of linguistics engineering in history. Its prelude came in 1928, when the Arabo-Persian alphabet was outlawed and replaced by the Latin alphabet. It began in earnest in 1930 when Ataturk declared: Turkish is one of the richest of languages. It needs only to be used with discrimination. The Turkish nation, which is well able to protect its territory and its sublime independence, must also liberate its language from the yoke of foreign languages. A government-sponsored campaign was waged to replace words of Arabic or Persian origin by words collected from popular speech, or resurrected from ancient texts, or coined from native roots and suffixes. The snag - identified by the author as one element in the catastrophic aspect of the reform - was that when these sources failed to provide the needed words, the reformers simply invented them. The reform was central to the young republic's aspiration to be western and secular, but it did not please those who remained wedded to their mother tongue or to the Islamic past. The controversy is by no means over, but Ottoman Turkish is dead. Professor Lewis both acquaints the general reader with the often bizarre, sometimes tragicomic but never dull story of the reform, and provides a lively and incisive account for students of Turkish and the relations between culture, politics and language with some stimulating reading. The author draws on his own wide experience of Turkey and his personal knowledge of many of the leading actors. The general reader will not be at a disadvantage, because no Turkish word or quotation has been left untranslated. This book is important for the light it throws on twentieth-century Turkish politics and society, as much as it is for the study of linguistic change. It is not only scholarly and accessible; it is also an extremely good read.

Reviewed by: Quantitative historical linguistics: A corpus framework by Gard B. Jenset and Barbara McGillivray Dirk Geeraerts Quantitative historical linguistics: A corpus framework. By Gard B. Jenset and Barbara McGillivray. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xiii, 229. ISBN 9780198718178. $88 (Hb). The early twenty-first century has witnessed a major shift toward quantitative approaches in the methodology of linguistics. Specifically, whereas quantitative methods have long been a staple of sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic research, the past two decades have seen their expansion toward descriptive and theoretical grammar. In usage-based approaches to language in particular, like cognitive and probabilistic linguistics, a ‘quantitative turn’ has occurred that applies the statistical testing of hypotheses to data derived from text corpora. The central inspiration for Gard B. Jenset and Barbara McGillivray’s book is the observation that this turn toward quantitative corpus studies has not yet penetrated historical linguistics to the same extent as some other subfields of linguistics. It accordingly sets out to introduce ‘the framework for quantitative historical linguistics’. The seven chapters fall roughly into two parts. In Chs. 1 to 3, a general argumentation in support of quantitative historical linguistics is developed, whereas Chs. 4 to 7 deal with the implementation of the ensuing program. The discussion of ‘why’ thus leads naturally to a discussion of ‘how’. Two threads run through the first part of the text: a specification of the kind of quantitative historical linguistics that the authors intend to propagate, and an argumentation in favor of the model in question. Important features of this argumentation are a description of the actual situation in historical linguistics and a conceptual defense of the approach against potential objections. Organizationally, Ch. 1 introduces both threads, Ch. 2 develops the first thread, and Ch. 3 the second. With regard to the first thread, the first chapter introduces the authors’ notion of quantitative research in historical linguistics by means of a double contrast. On the one hand, quantitative research differs from the conventional use of evidence in historical linguistics that rests on example-based categorical judgments about the existence of specific linguistic phenomena but does not look into probabilistic, distributional data about trends of variation and change of the phenomenon in question. On the other hand, quantitative historical research needs to go beyond raw frequencies, in the sense that the multidimensional nature of language requires a multivariate statistical approach. In the second chapter, this conception is further developed in terms of the distinction between corpus-based and corpus-driven approaches. Whereas the former turn to corpora primarily for illustration and confirmation, the latter use corpus data at two stages of the empirical process: corresponding to the distinction between exploratory and confirmatory statistics, quantitative distributional evidence is initially used to generate hypotheses, and subsequently for testing them. With regard to the second thread, the text provides quantitative data (appropriately, one could say) to the effect that such a method is less entrenched in historical linguistics than other fields of linguistics. This argumentation rests on a comparison of the 2012 volume of Language with six journals with a (not necessarily unique) focus on language change, such as Diachronica, Folia Linguistica Historica, and Language Variation and Change. As an explanation for the observation that historical linguistics seems to be lagging behind, the book invokes early negative experiences with glottochronology, plus the influence of structuralist and generative theories (though this is of course a factor that is not specific to historical linguistics). At the same time, it is demonstrated how the rise of quantitative linguistics goes hand in hand with the growing availability of electronic corpus materials—a trend that obviously creates an opportunity for historical linguistics just as for the other branches of linguistics. [End Page 190] Next to the ‘the time is ripe, we shouldn’t lag behind’ argument, the plea for quantitative corpus research in historical linguistics includes a ‘nothing is wrong with it’ type of argumentation, in the form of a systematic rejection of potential objections. Section 3.7 skillfully refutes counterarguments from convenience, from redundancy, from scope limitations, from principle, and from pseudoscience. Crucially, it is argued that a quantitative approach is not incompatible with a categorial...

This is an extended review of Jonathan Owens, Arabic and the Case against Linearity in Historical Linguistics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2023) that addresses several important issues in the methodology of historical Arabic linguistics.

This article investigates the semantic features of certain Turkic words found in the folklore language of the Khorezm. The oral literary heritage of the Khorezm people, rich with diverse genres, represents an integral part of the general Turkic and Uzbek artistic and cultural heritage, reflecting the national worldview, history, and values of the people. By analyzing the lexical layers of the Khorezm folklore, particularly through historical-comparative linguistics, etymology, and dialectology, the study highlights the preservation of ancient Turkic lexemes and their original meanings within this folklore. The article explores the common morphological patterns in Turkic languages, especially suffixes like -q, -g‘, -k, and their role in word formation and semantic development. Through detailed analysis of examples from Khorezm dialects and comparative data from other Turkic languages, the research reveals deep-rooted connections among Turkic languages and contributes to understanding the historical lexical development of the Uzbek language. The study underlines the significance of Khorezm folklore as a fundamental resource for the linguistic and cultural study of Turkic heritage. Keywords: Khorezm Folklore, Turkic Lexicon, Semantic Features, Word Formation, Suffixes, Historical Linguistics, Etymology, Uzbek Language, Dialectology, Oral Literature.

Word Formation Latin (WFL; Litta et alii, 2016) is a linguistic resource providing explicitly recorded word formation relations between items in the Latin lexicon. The lexical basis of WFL comprises around 43,000 lemmas resulting from the collation of three Latin dictionaries, namely the Oxford Latin Dictionary (Glare, 1984), Georges &amp; Georges (1913-1918) and Gradenwitz (1904). The WFL data are stored in a MySQL database, where input and output lexical items are connected via Word Formation Rules (WFRs). Each WFR provides information about (a) its input and output items, (b) their Part of Speech, (c) the rule type (derivation, compounding) and (c) the affix at work when predication or suffixation processes are concerned. WFL data were included into the database of the Latin morphological analyser Lemlat (Passarotti et alii, 2017), thus enhancing its inflectional morphological analysis (lemmatisation and morphological features) with information about word formation. WFL is freely available as part of the Lemlat database (https://github.com/CIRCSE/LEMLAT3) and accessible through a graphical web application (http://wfl.marginalia.it). Such application enables users to query WFL via WFR, affix, input/output PoS and lemma. While querying a specific lemma, users are provided with its full word formation cluster, i.e. a tree graph showing the full derivation of the lemma in question, consisting of its ancestor(s) as well as its descendant(s). In case the lemma is not morphologically derived, it is considered to be the ancestor of a "morphological family", i.e. the set of lemmas morphologically derived from a common ancestor. In the tree graphs of the WFL web application, nodes are lexical items and edges are WFRs. Beside this tree-like representation of word formation based lexical relations, we are experimenting also with a kind of visualisation where those lexical items that belong to the same morphological family are cells of a word formation paradigm instead of nodes of a derivation tree. The paradigm of a specific family is then connected with those of the other families in WFL and can be compared with these in terms of shared (and not shared) cells. Such an alternative view on WFL data follows the more recent approaches to derivational morphology based on Word &amp; Paradigm models (Štekauer, 2014). We believe that a linguistic resource aiming to support studies in derivational morphology must provide access to data from both perspectives, thus enabling users to exploit the empirical lexical evidence made available in the resource either by following one single approach or by joining (and possibly comparing) the node-based and the paradigm-based one. Our contribution wants (1) to introduce WFL, by detailing both the theoretical and the practical aspects behind its building and (2) to raise a discussion with the workshop attendees about the two approaches to word formation, by showing examples of running queries on WFL in both kinds of visualisations available in the web application. Not only will this help us to refine the WFL application by understanding the needs coming from the community of the users, but it will provide the workshop attendees with enough expertise to use WFL in their research work about Latin derivational morphology. References Georges Karl E. and Georges Heinrich. 1913-1918. Ausfuhrliches Lateinisch-Deutsches Handwôrterbuch. Hahn, Hannover.<br> Glare, Peter G.W. 1982. Oxford Latin Dictionary. At the Clarendon Press, Oxford.<br> Gradenwitz, Otto. 1904. Laterculi vocum latinarum. Hirzel, Leipzig.<br> Litta, Eleonora, Marco Passarotti and Chris Culy. 2016. Formatio formosa est. Building a Word Formation Lexicon for Latin. In Proceedings of the Third Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC–it 2016), aAccademia University Press.<br> Passarotti, Marco, Marco Budassi, Eleonora Litta, and Paolo Ruffolo. 2017. “The Lemlat 3.0 Package for Morphological Analysis of Latin.” In Proceedings of the NoDaLiDa 2017 Workshop on Processing Historical Language, 24–31. Linköping University Electronic Press. <br> Štekauer, Pavol. 2014. Derivational Paradigms, in The Oxford Handbook of Derivational Morphology, Lieber, Rochelle and Štekauer, Pavol (eds.). Oxford University Press.

444LANGUAGE, VOLUME 76, NUMBER 2 (2000) REFERENCES Anttila, Raimo. 1972. Historical and comparative linguistics. New York: Macmillan. Bender, Marvin L. 1974. Omotic: A new Afro-Asiatic language family. (Southern Illinois University Museum Series 3.) Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Bendor-Samuel, John (ed.) 1989. The Niger-Congo languages. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Bennett, Patrick R., and Jan P. Sterk. 1977. South Central Niger-Congo: A reclassification. Studies in African Linguistics 8.241-73. Bimson, Kent. 1978. Comparative reconstruction of proto-Northern-Western Mande. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms. Crowley, Terry. 1996. Introduction to historical linguistics. London: Oxford University Press. Dwyer, David. 1973. The comparative tonology of Southwestern Mande nomináis. Ann Arbor: University Microfilms. ------. 1974. The historical development of Southwestern Mande consonants. Studies in African Linguistics 5.59-94. ------. 1989. Mande. In Bendor-Samuel, 44-55. Greenberg, Joseph H. 1963. The languages of Africa. The Hague: Mouton. Gudschinsky, Sarah. 1956. The ABC's of lexicostatistics (glottochronology). Word 12.175-210. Lehmann, Winfred P. 1962. Historical linguistics: An introduction. New York: Holt. Meinhof, Carl. 1906. Grundztlge einer vergleichenden Grammatik der Bantusprachen. Berlin. 2nd edn. Hamburg: Reimer, 1948. Welmers, William E. 1970. Language change and language relationships in Africa. Language Sciences 12.1-8. Westermann, Diedrich. 1927. Die westlichen Sudansprachen und ihre Beziehungen zum Bantu. Berlin: de Gruyter. Department of English Ball State University Muncie, IN 47306 [hstahlke@bsu.edu] Queerly phrased: Language, gender, and sexuality. Ed. by Anna Livia and Kira Hall. (Oxford studies in sociolinguistics.) New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. 460. Reviewed by Sara Trechter, California State University, Chico Anna Livia and Kira Hall present 25 diverse articles concerning gay and lesbian expression that are a significant contribution to the growing field of queer language studies. Like most collections in language, gender, and sexuality, there is variety in the analytic approaches of the articles. They draw on literary theory, discourse analysis, phonology, semantics, and anthropology and include data from AAVE, ASL, French, Hausa, Hindi, and Japanese. Individual authors focus on a broad range of linguistic and queer concerns. For example, Tina Neumann describes the parallel discourse structures emergent in the double identity of a deaf lesbian's ASL comingout narrative. Elizabeth Morrish draws on critical discourse analysis to tease apart the presuppositions , themes, and intertextual connections of mainstream British newspapers as they stereotypically construct homosexuals. Bruce Bagemihl offers an extended analogy for understanding the same-sex desire of transsexuals by comparing transsexual queers to languages which express sounds through surrogate phonologies, using lutes, drums, etc. Given L & H's purposeful inclusion of such diverse material, their introduction provides a theoretical link connecting the articles to linguistic performativity and performativity to queer theory. The problem they see for the investigation of queer language is that past analyses relied on either linguistic determinism or social constructionism, the former leading researchers to dismiss the existence of gay culture unless it was encoded and the latter to eschew cross-cultural generalizations because discourse is specific to time and place (10). To solve the conundrum of an essentialist definition of gay vs. the inability to make any statement about liminal language REVIEWS445 at all, L & H locate their book at the crossroads of Butler's (1990) queer theory adaptations of performativity and its linguistic roots in Austin (1975). A focus on 'what people do with words' potentially offers analyses abstract enough to accommodate disparate cultures and historical change (13). Its success depends on the extent to which individual researchers succeed in defining performative commonalities for queering language without returning to identity as definition, e.g., 'Queering language is what queers do with language'. The book divides into three sections: (1) 'Liminal lexicality'—items denoting alternative sexual identities; (2) 'Queerspeak'—discourse strategies that might be taken as gay; and (3) 'Linguistic gender-bending'—the transformation of gendered linguistic systems. Several common themes arise out of this consideration of language of the periphery. These include a tension between resistance as secrecy/silence and performed opposition with uptake of intentional irony, the linguistic restrictions on ludic responses, and adequate definitions of the object of analysis when the goal of queering is resistance to hegemonic definition. An introduction to each of the three major sections would have helped...

The present article is dedicated to the study of interlingual contacts based on the facts given by the history of the Hungarian personal suffix -as. This suffix is used in modern Serbian, Croatian, Yugoslav-Ruthenian, Slovenian and Slovak literary languages and dialects. People speaking these dialects have been living for a long time in these territories that used to be a part of the Hungarian kingdom. The history of this suffix, its functioning and its present status is demonstrated on the basis of Carpathian and Ruthenian written old and new texts. The productivity of the borrowed personal suffix -?? (-??) is considered to be a result of active interlingual contacts in the Carpathian region and also of the considerable influence of Hungarian on the language and culture in the Southern Carpathian hills. There are many words in modern Carpatho-Rusyn texts which are borrowed from Hungarian, e.g.: ???????, ??????, ??????, ??????, ??????, ????????? etc. Some of them appear in word formation paradigms of the Carpatho-Rusyn motivated words, e.g.:????????, ????????????, ????????, ???????, ??????, ??????? and so on. The result of the Carpatho-Rusyn and Hungarian language contacts on word formation level testifies to a very intensive interaction. In modern Ruthenian the same tendency is to be observed: numerous lexical borrowings from Hungarian exist side by side with borrowings of units on a more abstract level. In our case the word formation suffix ?? (-??) with a personal meaning is of Hungarian origin and it is very productive in modern Carpatho-Rusyn.

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...