Reviewed by: Yearbook of morphology 2003 ed. by Geert Booij, Jaap van Marle Alan S. Kaye Yearbook of morphology 2003. Ed. by Geert Booij and Jaap van Marle. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2003. Pp. 279. ISBN 1402012721. $117 (Hb). The work undergoing review is another in the valuable Yearbook of morphology (YM) series, begun in 1988 and emanating from Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. The YM volumes serve as testimony to the renaissance of morphology, which seems to be flourishing, to judge by the proliferation of interesting publications listed in the bibliographies of these works. Some past tomes of YM have dealt with diachronic issues, such as the development of complicated morphological systems and the interfacing of phonology and morphology (YM 1999), and the interrelationships between morphology and syntax as well as the formalisms necessary for inflectional paradigms (YM 2000). Most of this issue deals with preverbs and is edited by Geert Booij and (guest editor) Ans van Kemenade; however, there are two articles and two book reviews on other morphological subjects, edited by Booij and Jaap van Marle. My remarks focus on three of the selections plus the well-written introduction. These have been selected in accordance with my background and interests. I conclude with a listing of the remaining titles and authors. The editors affirm in their ‘Preverbs: An introduction’ (1–11) that most linguists use the term preverb as ‘a cover term for preverbal words and preverbal prefixes’ (1). One may use German zukommen ‘to approach’ as illustrative, as in Er kam auf dem Auto [End Page 511] zu ‘He approached the car’ where zu is separated from the verb. The separable preverb is, in fact, the subject of Jochen Zeller’s ‘Moved preverbs in German: Displaced or misplaced?’ (179–212). The author discusses numerous sentences involving particle movement, including the judgments of sixteen native speakers (for his awkward ‘mother tongue speakers’, 179–80). One conclusion offered is that ‘particle topicalization is possible in the Topic or the Focus of the sentence’ (208). As one might have expected, native speakers’ judgments reflect a great degree of ‘ideolectal [sic] variation’ (179). Ans van Kemenade and Bette Lou Los’s ‘Particles and prefixes in Dutch and English’ (79–117) notes a significant parallel between Dutch and English, and discusses Dutch opbellen ‘to call up’, as in Jan zegt dat hij morgen zijn moeder opbelt ‘John says that he will phone his mother tomorrow’, and Jan belt zijn moeder morgen op ‘John will phone his mother tomorrow’ (80). Another possible translation here reflects the English similarity of up and Dutch op: ‘he phoned his mother up’ and ‘he phoned up his mother’; but ‘pronouns are generally barred from the “extraposed” position’ (85). The separability of preverbs in Dutch is also mentioned in the introduction, where the authors refer to particle verbs as a productive class of separable complex verbs (SCVs) (5). These SCVs are felt to operate like single words; for example, dóorboor ‘to go on drilling’ vs. doorbóor ‘to perforate’ (6). Many of the essays in this book deal with similar interesting contrasts. Eva Schultze-Berndt’s ‘Preverbs as an open class in Northern Australian languages: Synchronic and diachronic correlates’ (145–77) notes an important contrast between the preverbs of Northern Australian (NA) languages and those of the Germanic family, viz. the latter constitutes a closed class whereas the former makes up an open one. The author also demonstrates that the most likely sources for preverbs in NA languages are spatial adverbs, as in Jaminjung jag ‘down’ (145). The remaining authors and titles are: Farrell Ackerman, ‘Aspectual contrasts and lexeme derivation in Estonian: A realization-based morphological perspective’; Monique Dufresne, Fernande Dupuis, and Mireille Tremblay, ‘Preverbs and particles in Old French’; Alice Harris, ‘Preverbs and their origins in Georgian and Udi’; Andrew MCIntyre, ‘Preverbs, argument linking and verb semantics: Germanic prefixes and particles’; Marco Baroni, ‘Distribution-driven morpheme discovery: A computational/experimental study’; Carol Fehringer, ‘Morphological “gangs”: Constraints on paradigmatic relations in analogical change’; Geert Booij, Review of...
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Dec 1, 2015
Marie-Aude Lefer + 1
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