John Benjamins Research Articles

Being touched – the transformative potential of nurturing touch practices in relation to toddlers’ learning and emotional well-being

ABSTRACTThe article investigates how nurturing touch practices, such as gentle brush massage, finger massage and body massage, are applied in 10 Danish toddlers’ early childhood education and care (ECEC) settings. Thirteen practitioners contributed to the study with written narratives on their experiences with nurturing touch practices and how they influenced their relationship with the children and the conditions for toddlers’ emotional well-being and learning at the nursery or family day care. This qualitative case study is built on a relational ontology and draws on Hundeide’s ([2007]. When empathic care is obstructed – excluding the child from the zone of intimacy. In S. Bråten (Ed.), On being moved from mirror neurons to empathy. Amsterdam: John Benjamins) concept of a zone of intimacy. The practitioners describe how nurturing touch practices can enhance their sensitivity and the intersubjective space between them and the children. The practitioners also describe how toddlers seem to become more attentive to their bodies, more relaxed and flexible. The study invites policy-makers and practitioners to broaden their focus on children’s learning and to consider how the mutual relatedness between practitioner and child influence children’s bodily, non-verbal and emotional experiences and participation.

Corpus Pragmatics and Second Language Pragmatics: A Mutualistic Entente in Theory and Practice

Ten years after the publication of the volume ‘Pragmatics and corpus linguistics: a mutualistic entente’ (Romero-Trillo, in: Romero-Trillo (ed) Pragmatics and corpus linguistics: a mutualistic entente, Mouton de Gruyter, Berlin, 2008), this article intends to delve into the mutualistic relationship between Corpus Pragmatics and Second Language (henceforth L2) Pragmatics. The underlying hypothesis is that to master an L2 a learner needs to adopt a new social, cultural and linguistic identity, and that the difficulty during the process is that the pragmatic features of the L2 do not necessarily match those of the first language (henceforth L1). This is the reason why, in the process of L2 learning, speakers may reach the state of pragmatic fossilisation, with a near-to-native grammatical and lexical competence but with a limited range of pragmatic resources (Romero-Trillo in J Pragmat 34: 769–784, 2002). Recent studies have benefited from the support of corpora to investigate L2 learners’ pragmatics as an invaluable tool to test the constructs of pragmatic theories with real data (Romero-Trillo in Corpus Pragmat 1: 1–2, 2017); Maguire and Romero-Trillo, in: Kecskes, Assimakopoulos (eds) Current issues in intercultural pragmatics, John Benjamins, Amsterdam, 2017). The present study has three objectives: (1) to describe the theoretical concepts behind the notion of L2 pragmatics with a critical survey of the current literature; (2) to describe how corpus pragmatics has an overarching function in L2 pragmatic development; and (3) to analyse some essential insights of L2 pragmatic development, with particular reference to the role of prosody. The final section will offer suggestions for future research with practical implications for both theoretical and applied linguists.

Andreas Langlotz , Creating social orientation through language: A socio-cognitive theory of situated social meaning. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2015. Pp. x, 366. Hb. $143.

Andreas Langlotz , Creating social orientation through language: A socio-cognitive theory of situated social meaning. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2015. Pp. x, 366. Hb. $143.

Behavioral and Neural Evidence on Pragmatic Processing: A Foreword to XPRAG.it

Behavioral and Neural Evidence on Pragmatic Processing: A Foreword to XPRAG.it

From Superman to Social Realism: Children's Media and Scandinavian Childhood by Helle Jensen

Reviewed by: From Superman to Social Realism: Children's Media and Scandinavian Childhood by Helle Jensen Lydia Kokkola (bio) From Superman to Social Realism: Children's Media and Scandinavian Childhood. By Helle Jensen. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Childhood studies really took off with Philippe Ariès's now classic Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life. Originally published in French in 1960, and translated into English in 1962, it provided a provocative history of family life among the French middle classes. Since then, the topic has expanded into a full-fledged research field. Despite its French origins, however, the field has been dominated by writing in English about Anglophone countries. Moreover, as David Buckingham points out in his preface to From Superman to Social Realism, discussions of children's relation to media are obsessed with the here and now, the latest gadgets and devices, and there is a great need to assume a broader historical perspective in order to distinguish between the ephemeral and the entrenched patterns of response (ix). Helle Jensen has responded to these challenges with a monograph examining three media debates that took place in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark from the end of the Second World War to the present day. This era saw television enter the private home, often transmitting American media, which carried beliefs that jarred with the political ideology that led to the establishment of the social welfare states that we know today. The volume is primarily of interest to researchers within Scandinavian studies, but also proffers a valuable antidote to the Anglocentrism and [End Page 231] neophilia of childhood studies more generally. Jensen's decision to focus on Scandinavia as a whole rather than on the individual countries of Denmark, Sweden, and Norway reflects the reality of cross-border discussion in the region. The three national languages are mutually intelligible, especially in their written form. During the first period that Jensen examines (1945 through the mid-1960s), Norway and Denmark were recovering from German occupation during the Second World War, whereas Sweden's neutrality had enabled the country's infrastructure to survive largely unscathed. Throughout this period, all three countries were transitioning from primarily agrarian economies toward the technology and service-industry economies of today. Social welfare was the cornerstone of this development, affecting everything from housing, education, and healthcare to pay and conditions in the workplace and the banning of corporal punishment. The impact on children was significant: immediately after the war, children were such an integral part of the agricultural workforce that school holidays were arranged to coincide with seasonal activities such as harvesting. Today there are strict limits on the number of hours that children can work, and they have vastly more free time. These great social upheavals provide the background for the intense debates about children's leisure time engagements that Jensen examines. Her decision to focus on what children engaged with outside the school context resonates with their departure from the labor market and exposes the fractures between political policy and citizens' behavior. During this postwar period, debates about children and media focused on the arrival on the Scandinavian market of affordable comics, particularly superhero comics such as Superman. Opposition to these stories focused on their violence, their subjugation of women, and the likelihood of children mimicking the behavior of either the villains or the superheroes. The latter, as one would expect, is key to understanding the underlying theme of all of the debates through the present day. In contrast to American debates on the suitability of material, which have been integrally tied up with the practice of banning books, Jensen shows how the Scandinavian debates have chosen a more pedagogical perspective, as critics endeavored to warn parents of the dangers of this material and promoted alternative homegrown media such as the Swedish Tuff och Tuss (33). The establishment of school libraries, particularly in Sweden, improved access to approved materials. Teachers and other key actors in the education system were also concerned that exposure to these American comics was undermining their attempts to educate their nations' children. Throughout this debate, Jensen identifies the image of the fragile child who needs to be protected from these dangerous materials...

Recent Publications on Chinese Language and Linguistics

Recent Publications on Chinese Language and Linguistics Liwei JiaoiD The Handbook of Chinese Linguistics (Blackwell, 2014) Pp. 680. ISBN 978-0470655344. $210.95 (Hb). The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Linguistics (Oxford, 2015) Pp. 792. ISBN 978-0199856336. $175 (Hb) The Routledge Encyclopedia of the Chinese Language (Routledge, 2016) Pp. 828. ISBN 978-0415539708. $450 (Hb) The Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics (Brill, 2016) Pp. 3454. ISBN 978-9004186439. $1,716 (Hb) Under the direct influence of international linguistics research trends, led notably by two major publishing houses, the Oxford University Press and Wiley-Blackwell, along with Routledge, Cambridge University Press, John Benjamins, De Gruyter and Spinger, Chinese linguistics has seen four major accomplishments in less than three years. Namely, this includes The Handbook of Chinese Linguistics (Blackwell, 2014, henceforth 'Blackwell Handbook'), The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Linguistics (Oxford, 2015, henceforth 'Oxford Handbook'), The Routledge Encyclopedia of the Chinese Language (Routledge, 2016, henceforth 'Routledge Encyclopedia') and The Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics (Brill, 2016, henceforth 'Brill Encyclopedia.'). [End Page 497] The publication of these four books and in particular their contributors should be congratulated for providing such an unprecedentedly wide scope of up-to-date accounts of the Chinese language and linguistics. These books also include a variety of perspectives, such as generative, descriptive, experimental, historical, comparative, cognitive, evolutionary, functional, sociocultural and teaching, for readers from academics to general readers. Almost every entry comes with a comprehensible introduction to the topic and a detailed bibliography. It is evident that the chapter/entry numbers, contributors and length of these four books increased significantly: 24, 55, 41, 500+ by chapter/entry number; 30, 66, 66, 364 by contributor number; 680, 792, 828, 3,454 by book page, respectively. However, the quality of the books did not improve proportionally. The Blackwell Handbook excels as a first-mover and in its in depth discussion of syntax, but is not able to present a complete picture of Chinese linguistics because half of its chapters are on syntax and morphology. The Oxford Handbook keeps a balanced account of many more topics and aspects of research fields. The Routledge Encyclopedia extends its content to beyond linguistics, but its presentation of a few topics is either too simple or too luxurious. The Brill Encyclopedia is so far the largest encyclopedia of Chinese language and linguistics published in any language. The book's scope is hard, if not impossible, to surpass. However, quality of its entries varies. A thorough comparison of the quality of these four books is infeasible since it is hard to find a topic shared by all books, but the following topics are worth exploring: tones, prosody, idioms, prominence (including negation, focus) of a part of a sentence, verbs in a broader sense, southern dialects, grammaticalization, Guangyun (广韵), language contacts and Chinese cognitive linguistics. Four similar books in less than three years may seem crowded even given the fact that the compilation of a multi-volume book on Chinese language and philology (Yuyan Wenzi Juan 语言文字卷) in the third edition of the Encyclopedia of China (Zhongguo Dabaike Quanshu中国大百科全书) and the forthcoming Cambridge Handbook of Chinese Linguistics (See the website of Yen-Hwei Lin "Selected Publication" https://liny.msu.domains/research/, accessed April 13, 2018) is in full swing. [End Page 498] Maybe what we need most in the next one or two decades is not an even larger mammoth, but annual book series such as 'advances in Chinese language and linguistics,' which is similar in format to Handbook of Advances in Culture and Psychology published by the Oxford University Press since 2011. Each volume in that series includes usually six chapters, each of which can get a length of approximately fifty pages to give a state-of-¬the-art review of real progress on a certain topic such as 'Metaphor, Cognition, Culture' in Volume 7 (2018). If the publication of comprehensive research on Chinese language and linguistics goes in this way, we will see the next peak of encyclopedias in around 2030. [End Page 499] Liwei Jiao University of Pennsylvania Liwei Jiao [jiao2@sas.upenn.edu]; Room 847, 255 S. 36th St., Philadelphia, PA 19105-6305, U.S.A. Copyright © 2018 The Journal of Chinese Linguistics...

Quantifying expressions in the history of German: Syntactic reanalysis and morphological change by Dorian Roehrs, Christopher Sapp

Reviewed by: Quantifying expressions in the history of German: Syntactic reanalysis and morphological change by Dorian Roehrs, Christopher Sapp Ulrike Demske Quantifying expressions in the history of German: Syntactic reanalysis and morphological change. By Dorian Roehrs and Christopher Sapp. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2016. Pp. 299. ISBN 9789027257130. $149 (Hb). The loss of genitive case marking in quantifying expressions throughout the history of German is widely known. While the quantified constituent bears genitive case in older stages of German [End Page 228] in cases like 1a, Modern German (MG) requires the quantifier and its dependent to agree with respect to gender, number, and case (1b). (1) a. was doch die vrsach sei / das diese vnd dergleichen historien von meniglich wenig beifals vnd glaubens gegeben werde. (16th c.)1 ‘what the reason might be for many people to give these stories little approval and belief’ b. Sie erhielten wenig Beifall/*Beifalls. ‘They got little approval.’ Despite the prominence of this change, the book under review provides the first comprehensive account of the history of quantifying expressions in German, based on an impressive corpus with data covering all of the history of German. In particular, Roehrs and Sapp (R&S) look at the development of strong and weak quantifiers and their dependent constituents, including viel ‘much/many’, wenig ‘little/few’, all ‘all’, jeder ‘each’, jemand ‘somebody’, and etwas ‘some/something’. The changes that individual quantifying expressions undergo in the history of German may affect the categorial status of the quantifying word, the form of the dependent constituent, and/or the relationship between the quantifier and its dependent. Though certain changes are shared by all quantifying expressions, other changes affect only some of them. The book’s chapters are hence dedicated to the history of individual quantifying words, including information about etymology as well as the inflectional properties of each quantifier. As regards dependent constituents, a basic distinction is drawn for each quantifier between the cardinal and the proportional constructions, allowing for the generalization that genitive marking in quantifying expressions is restricted to proportional constructions in MG, while in older stages of German dependents of quantifying words may be marked for genitive in cardinal constructions as well; see 1 above. Ch. 1, ‘Introduction’, highlights some of the differences between the quantifying expressions under investigation, from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective. R&S argue that these morphosyntactic differences can be captured in a straightforward way when we assume that quantifiers appear in different positions in the functional structure above NP, as a result of different types of reanalysis. In particular, R&S propose four possible stages in the development of quantifying words, illustrated here with the weak quantifier viel ‘much/many’ and the strong quantifier all ‘all’. All quantifiers share the reanalysis from head to specifier (Card >> Spec -CardP), which is unexpected considering current theories of grammaticalization, such as that of van Gelderen 2004. Following Kiparsky (2011), R&S assume that this instance of what they call ‘degrammaticalization’—because of the addition of inflection—is driven by analogy. (2) The in-depth examination of quantifying words in the history of German starts with Ch. 2, ‘Simplex quantifying word: viel’. Due to the wealth of available data, it is the most comprehensive study of a quantifier in the book and provides the setting for the discussion of the other quantifiers. R&S report that the quantifying word viel itself undergoes a number of inflectional changes, which they interpret as a categorial change from a semi-lexical noun in Old High German (OHG) to a quantifying particle in Middle High German (MHG) to a quantifying adjective in MG. They further show that the cardinal and proportional constructions developed differently. While in OHG the dependent constituents were all marked for genitive, only the proportional construction still allows genitive marking in MG. This development is taken to indicate that only the dependent in the cardinal construction is integrated into the matrix DP due to its smaller structural size (N/A vs. DP), resulting in concord. This analysis also accounts for the word-order [End Page 229] change observed for nominal and adjectival dependents, which tended to appear before the quantifier in OHG but...

Word order change in acquisition and language contact: Essays in honour of Ans van Kemenade ed. by Bettelou Los, Pieter de Haan

Reviewed by: Word order change in acquisition and language contact: Essays in honour of Ans van Kemenade ed. by Bettelou Los, Pieter de Haan George Walkden Word order change in acquisition and language contact: Essays in honour of Ans van Kemenade. Ed. by Bettelou Los and Pieter de Haan. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2017. Pp. ix, 376. ISBN 9789027257260. $158 (Hb). This book is a festschrift for Ans van Kemenade, a leading Dutch linguist and a pioneer in applying the tools of generative syntax to the study of language change. The contributions to this volume are written by colleagues, collaborators, and former students and reflect her research interests and contributions to the field: in particular, syntactic change, information structure, word order, comparative Germanic linguistics, language contact, and the history of English. After a brief introduction by the editors, the book is divided into five parts, of which Part I deals with grammar change and information structure. Roland Hinterhölzl’s chapter outlines [End Page 985] a scenario for the loss of OV word order in an antisymmetric, cartographic, phase-based framework. His claim is that the data presented by Taylor and Pintzuk (2015) can be understood without recourse to the double base hypothesis if specifically prosodic conditions are taken into account as well as information structure. Marit Westergaard looks at violations of V2 in northern Norwegian wh-questions, finding that certain V2 violations are robustly accepted in judgment tasks but almost never produced; she argues that this kind of discrepancy can have important implications when drawing inferences about grammaticality from historical corpora. The chapter by Theresa Biberauer and Ian Roberts looks at the dwindling domain of conditional inversion in English, concluding that a mesoparameter becomes a microparameter becomes a nanoparameter, though the basic operation of conditional inversion remains identical throughout. Biberauer’s solo chapter, rounding off this part of the book, deals with optional V2 in embedded wh-clauses in modern spoken Afrikaans. Her proposal is that this is linked to Afrikaans’s special clause-peripheral polarity marker nie, which leads to the innovation of an extra layer of structure in all clauses. Parts II and III both deal with verb-second: Part II is about the first position, while Part III addresses what exactly it is that comes second. Gea Dreschler’s chapter looks at subject positions in Old English, in particular the prediction that late (VP-internal) subjects in passive clauses should be discourse-new. Roughly, the prediction is borne out: discourse-familiar subjects are very rarely fronted. Ch. 7, by Erwin Komen, also addresses subject positions, looking at whether subjects in different positions allow deletion under coordination and what subject-verb relations obtain. The hypothesis is that the decline in these subject properties prefigures the loss of the subject position, and the evidence partially bears this out. The chapter by Ann Taylor and Susan Pintzuk is about split coordination in earlier English (e.g. the king came and his company), tracking the possibility of separating the two conjuncts. Taylor and Pintzuk argue for a movement-based analysis that coexists with an ellipsis-based analysis and is lost by the end of the Early Modern period. Part III opens with a chapter by Monique Tangelder and Bettelou Los on meter and verb position in Beowulf, suggesting that the non-V2 structures found in poetry are relics of an earlier stage of the language’s syntax, and drawing corroborating evidence from the poem’s first 500 lines. Ch. 10, by Gertjan Postma, posits a connection between the rise and fall of the passive auxiliary weorthan and the rise and fall of strict V2 in the history of English, and models this as a ‘failed change’ in the sense of Postma 2010. Marianne Starren’s chapter rounds off this section by contrasting German, Dutch, and English narrative-structuring patterns. She shows that Dutch seems to pattern with German rather than English in its use of temporal linkers to begin utterances, as well as avoidance of inanimate subjects in narrative. Part IV contains three...

Focus-related operations at the right edge in Spanish: Subjects and ellipsis by Iván Ortega-Santos

Reviewed by: Focus-related operations at the right edge in Spanish: Subjects and ellipsis by Iván Ortega-Santos Timothy Gupton Focus-related operations at the right edge in Spanish: Subjects and ellipsis. By Iván Ortega-Santos. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2016. Pp. 204. ISBN 9789027258069. $143 (Hb). Ch. 1 of Iván Ortega-Santos’s book begins with a justification of syntactic inquiry into information structure in general and focalization processes in Spanish in particular. The fact that focalization phenomena incorporate multiple linguistic domains vis-à-vis alterations to word order, prosody, semantics, and pragmatics makes it a compelling challenge for any theoretical account of human language. O-S establishes the goals of the book: to motivate an analysis of subjects that appear at the rightmost edge of the sentence in Spanish. He suggests that right-edge subjects come to appear in this position as the result of three independent processes: (i) movement of a focused phrase to the leftmost clause edge (i.e. the left periphery) followed by topicalization movement of the remnant Tense Projection (TP), (ii) rightward movement, and (iii) absence of movement (i.e. in-situ position) for subjects of select unaccusative predicates. O-S notes that although the data set examined in the book consists primarily of intuition-based grammaticality judgments from Northern Iberian Spanish and Chilean Spanish, he also discusses experimentally gathered data and corpus data. This is largely reflective of the theoretical orientation of this work, which is formal syntactic analysis situated within Chomsky’s (1995 et seq.) minimalist program and the associated advances of multiple spell-out and phase theory (see e.g. Chomsky 1998, Uriagereka 1999). Although the author briefly sketches out the theoretical assumptions associated with the analysis undertaken in this work in a clear and concise manner, the intended audience [End Page 225] of this book is professional linguists and researchers. Not surprisingly, it is assumed that the reader already has a working knowledge of many of the theoretical tools employed in current generative syntactic theorizing. Ch. 1 concludes with a summary description of the three chapters that follow. Ch. 2 is in large part a literature review establishing the theoretical assumptions of the syntactic analysis proposed in subsequent chapters. O-S first examines neutral focus associated with sentence-level stress (1; sentence stress underlined) and then examines narrow focus (2; small capitals indicate marked prosodic stress).1 (1) [Context: What happened?] (2) [Context: Who bought a book yesterday?] He dedicates the subsequent section to an examination of focus-fronting processes, including important notes on two related, but discursively different, phenomena: verum focus and mirative focus. He provides a convenient summary of the features that have been proposed to encode these types of focus. In the following subsection, he examines focus fronting, as in 3 (from p. 25, ex. 19). (3) [Context: Little Jorge is looking at a toy car and motorcycle.] O-S defends a syntactic treatment of focus fronting (based primarily on Rizzi’s (1997) observation that focus is quantificational), addressing the well-known objection that postulating [+Focus] as a lexical feature violates Chomsky’s (1995:Ch. 4) inclusiveness condition (see e.g. Zubizarreta 1998, Szendrői 2004). He concludes that the positing of syntactic movement to a FocP position is justified in light of the Chomsky/Uriagereka conjecture that complex surface semantics have corresponding movement operations. Next, he examines well-known subject-verb ‘inversion effects’ resulting from wh-movement and focus fronting, making particular use of Gallego’s (2007) phase-sliding proposal for Romance. Given the special properties that it attributes to T (namely phasal status), O-S notes that this possibility raises doubts about the universality of Chomsky’s (1982) extended projection principle (EPP). In the next two sections, he examines the EPP in Spanish, considering challenges it poses for the availability of Spec, TP (Contreras 1991), as well as the suggestion that null-subject languages have an inactive or perhaps parameterized EPP (e.g. Alexiadou & Anagnostopoulou 1998, Chomsky 2013). O-S concludes, in the vein of Lasnik (1989, 2003), that the EPP is active in Spanish based on null expletive data. In the remainder of the chapter, he examines...

Formal studies in Slovenian syntax: In honor of Janez Orešnik ed. by Franc Lanko Marušič, Rok Žaucer

Reviewed by: Formal studies in Slovenian syntax: In honor of Janez Orešnik ed. by Franc Lanko Marušič, Rok Žaucer Catherine Rudin Formal studies in Slovenian syntax: In honor of Janez Orešnik. Ed. by Franc Lanko Marušič and Rok Žaucer. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2016. Pp. vi, 335. ISBN 9789027257192. $158 (Hb). The publication of this book is a major event in Slavic linguistics. A glance at the table of contents engenders high expectations: the contributors are a who’s who of Slovenian generative linguistics, and the topics encompass the hot issues in Slavic syntax. And reading the articles does not disappoint. It is gratifying to see so much excellent work on one ‘minor’ Slavic language: a sign of the current vitality of generative Slavic linguistics as a whole. Inevitably, some chapters are more elegantly written than others, but overall the book is a pleasure to read. The editors are to be congratulated for making this fine collection of papers available. One quibble is that the volume’s Slovenian syntax title is not quite accurate: one or two of the chapters have little to do with Slovenian, and some focus as much or more on semantics as on syntax. All of the papers are strongly grounded in formal theory (of one sort or another), but they vary considerably in their emphasis on Slovenian as opposed to theoretical or crosslinguistic viewpoints. Nonetheless, the book is unusually cohesive for a festschrift. A useful introduction by the editors explores contributions of Slovenian studies to formal syntax. Janez Orešnik, the volume’s honoree, was among the first to encourage the study of generative grammar in Slovenia and to apply it to the Slovenian language. Thanks in part to his influence, Slovenian has had an impact on the development of syntactic theory in several areas. These include the ‘orphan accusative’ construction, which gives evidence that definite pronouns are all animate, even when null; arguments for monoclausal vs. biclausal analyses of feel like constructions; double applicatives, which show datives can merge either high or low (or both); studies of verbal prefixation/resultative secondary predication; the adjectival definite article -ta and evidence for the structure of AP; arguments both for and against Bošković’s NP/DP hypothesis; and closest conjunct agreement. Work in the volume bears on some of these issues, among many others. The contributions are ordered alphabetically by author’s name rather than grouped thematically. This obscures some common threads. Grouping by topic might have highlighted and encouraged comparison among various approaches to clitics (papers by Bošković, Dobnik & Cooper, Franks, Stegovec, and parts of Marušič & Žaucer), for instance. Another group of papers share a strong semantic orientation (Dobnik & Cooper, Mitrović, Rivero & Milojević Sheppard). Browne, Marušič & Žaucer, and Živanović present novel data from Slovenian and share a diachronic focus. Hladnik, Mitrović, and Mišmaš share a concern for clause structure and the left periphery of CP. However, the papers do not all fit easily into such categories. I have chosen in the remainder of this review to follow the editors’ lead, briefly summarizing each paper in the order in which it appears in the volume. Željko Bošković (‘On second position clitics crosslinguistically’) continues his project of relating various phenomena to the (non)existence of a DP projection in a given language, here claiming that second-position clitic systems are available only in ‘NP’ languages. Arguments come from Australian languages, Comanche, and several Slavic languages, among others (but oddly for this volume, there are only a few sentences about Slovenian). A proposed explanation of the 2P/NP correlation is based on the nonbranching structure of clitics, the status of pronouns as D in DP languages but NP in NP languages, and a condition *Stranded D, or more generally *Stranded Functional Head. The account is complex, sometimes less than clear (Bošković considers alternative versions of parts of the account), and dependent on numerous theory-internal assumptions. Nonetheless, it is a significant contribution: if correct it has implications for other phenomena crosslinguistically, including P-stranding and which functional categories license ellipsis. [End Page 220] Wayles Browne, in ‘Participles come back to Slovenian’, discusses...

Creole studies: Phylogenetic approaches ed. by Peter Bakker et al.

Reviewed by: Creole studies: Phylogenetic approaches ed. by Peter Bakker et al. John McWhorter Creole studies: Phylogenetic approaches. Ed. by Peter Bakker, Finn Borchsenius, Carsten Levisen, and Eeva Sippola. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2017. Pp. 414. ISBN 978902721249. $143 (Hb). Creole studies has a well-deserved reputation, well known even to linguists with no special interest in the area, of being highly contentious. Many are aware that the main disagreement in our time is no longer over whether universals (Bickerton 1981) or substrate contributions (Holm 1988) were most important in creole genesis—a major debate in the 1980s into the 1990s—but over whether creoles constitute a type of language at all. Influential publications by Mufwene (2001, 2008), DeGraff (2001a), and more recently Aboh (2015) argue that creolization is simply a kind of language hybridization, qualitatively indistinct from that which produced Romanian or Yiddish, especially considering that second language acquisition, while clearly important in creole genesis, is hardly irrelevant to the histories of perhaps most languages. The idea is that the classification of creoles as a kind of language, born from a radical break in transmission such as pidginization, has been an impressionistic reification, informed by racism and colonialism, and unmoored from the procedures of modern science. The work chronicled in Creole studies: Phylogenetic approaches serves as a counterpoint to this tempting reconception of creole studies and language contact. While other studies have attempted to demonstrate that creoles are unique in combining certain features (McWhorter 2011, 2018, Daval-Markussen 2013), this book evidences a computational phylogenetic approach to the question, in line with an approach increasingly de rigueur in linguistic work overall. Presenting the work of a project overseen by Peter Bakker at Aarhus University, this volume now stands as a key statement in the debate over the nature of creole languages. Claims that creoles are not a kind of language will henceforth qualify as incomplete without engagement with the works in this book. The phylogenetic approach tabulates a set of features in a range of languages and then represents the data in diagrams generated by programs such as SplitsTree (Huson & Bryant 2006), graphically revealing clusterings between languages. According to the commonly asserted idea that creoles are not a kind of language, creole languages should not cluster together in diagrams like these. This computational approach, presumably, should show creoles distributed randomly amid other languages, with the folly in the supposed essentialization of creoles duly and conclusively revealed. But this is not the case, and this volume collects a now imposing amount of evidence in illustration. After three introductory chapters summarizing the general project outlined in the book, creole genesis theories past and present, and the phylogenetic approach, Ch. 4 and Ch. 6 neatly communicate, through various experiments published previously, the weight of evidence in support of the claim that creoles do constitute a structural type of language. Bakker, Daval-Markussen, Parkvall, and Plag (2011) began with the data in Holm & Patrick 2007, comparing ninety-seven features from eighteen creoles. They winnowed that set of features down to sixty-nine, eliminating those not shared by two thirds of the creoles. Phylogenetic analysis shows that in these features, regardless of their lexical base, creoles cluster quite clearly compared to other languages—that is, that there are indeed features typical of creole languages (123). It is reasonable to wonder whether the 'creole' features in question are simply those of analytic languages in general. However, in Ch. 4, Peter Bakker, Eeva Sippola, and Finn Borchsenius find the same result when creoles are compared only with analytic languages (72). Parkvall (2008) compared forty-three complexity-gradient structures from The world atlas of language structures (Haspelmath et al. 2005) in order to avoid possible bias in proceeding from a source like Holm & Patrick 2007, which is focused on features common in creoles. Parkvall's study compared, on the [End Page 710] basis of these features, 188 creoles and older languages, and the creoles clustered similarly. This supports the claim that creoles display less grammatical complexity than older languages, presumably due to their ancestry in broken transmission and pidgins (123). Further chapters strengthen the...

Maps and Mapping in Children's Literature: Landscapes, Seascapes and Cityscapes by Nina Goga and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer

Reviewed by: Maps and Mapping in Children's Literature: Landscapes, Seascapes and Cityscapes by Nina Goga and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer Anne V. Cirella-Urrutia (bio) Maps and Mapping in Children's Literature: Landscapes, Seascapes and Cityscapes. By Nina Goga and Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2017. This volume addresses the purposes and diversity of maps in children's literature and how the analysis of maps as a specific kind of illustration is intimately connected with picture theory, picture book research, and cognitive studies. The thirteen essays draw on different theoretical frameworks including geography and developmental psychology, maps and geographic literacy, ecocriticism, historiography, materialist cartographies, social anthropology, island studies, genre studies, and nonsense geography. Hence the editors engage the reader with an interdisciplinary methodology representing a wide spectrum of diverse genres with a selection of children's works from Germany, Italy, England, Norway, Denmark, the United States, and Russia. Part 1, "About Mapping: Learning to Orientate Oneself," examines how maps and mapping in children's literature contribute to children's abilities to orient themselves in various spaces and how they learn from maps. Lynn Liben discusses the use of maps during reading and their impact on the cognitive and emotional consequences of the independent or shared reading experience. Nikola von Merveldt looks at the importance of maps in late eighteenth-century Germany. Considering the pedagogy of cartophobia initiated by French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau, she studies the philanthropic movement in Joachim Heinrich Campes's geographical writings. Travel literature was regarded as the only appropriate kind of literature for philanthropic children to grow on. Janet Grafton uses ecocriticism and critical nostalgia to show how personal geography and physical geography inform each other in L. M. Montgomery's Jane of Lantern Hill (1937) and Dorothy Canfield Fisher's Understood Betsy (1916). In both narratives, the setting is not merely a backdrop, but rather a place for the female protagonists to engage with the land and to build their skills, thus attesting to each author's intrinsic sense of cartography. Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer and Jörg Meibauer's cognitive methodology centers on the use of "metaphorical maps" (the Gall map tradition) in Sara Fanelli's My Map Book (1995) and Peter Sís's The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain (2007). Most important to both authors is the function of these maps of places that are shaped like humans or animals, and the type of picture books that implement them. Part 2, "Literary Shaping of Real Cityscapes," deals with the idea of how maps contribute to the portrayal of real cityscapes in picture books and children's novels. Corina Löwe analyzes Andreas Steinhöfel's Rico, Oskar und die Tierferschatten (The Spaghetti Detectives, 2008), in [End Page 223] which young readers may follow the protagonist's route in an urban space. Anna Katrina Gutierrez examines the intertextual links with music, poetry, and literature established by a map of New York City in two young adult novels co-authored by Rachel Cohn and David Levithan: Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist (2006) and Dash and Lili's Book of Dares (2010). Anna Juan Cantavella elaborates on Jacques Mullender's "degree zero of cartography" (129) in the act of walking as "map-building" of Prague and New York (139) in two picture books by Czech-born American children's author Sís: The Three Golden Keys (1994) and Madlenka (2000). Marnie Campagnaro concludes this section with a close reading of Bruno Munari's innovative picture book Nella Nebbia de Milano (The Circus in the Mist, 1968). She provides an overview of Munari's creativity and emphasizes the relationship linking a landscape to the child's sensory receptiveness that is created by Munari's use of pierced and perforated paper to suggest the fog. Part 3, "Fictional Seascapes and Landscapes," sheds light on maps that depict fantasy seascapes and landscapes and stresses two seminal aspects of children's literature: the impact of genre and the significance of underlying ideological issues on the understanding of maps and related spaces. Olga Holownia traces common features of nonsense geography in representations of seascapes and soundscapes in Walter Moers's The 13½ Lives of...

Recent Publications on Chinese Language and Linguistics

RECENT PUBLICATIONS ON CHINESE LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTICS The Handbook of Chinese Linguistics (Blackwell, 2014) Pp. 680. ISBN 978-0470655344. $210.95 (Hb). The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Linguistics (Oxford, 2015) Pp. 792. ISBN 978-0199856336. $175 (Hb) The Routledge Encyclopedia of the Chinese Language (Routledge, 2016) Pp. 828. ISBN 978-0415539708. $450 (Hb) The Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics (Brill, 2016) Pp. 3454. ISBN 978-9004186439. $1,716 (Hb) Reported by Liwei Jiao1 University of Pennsylvania Under the direct influence of international linguistics research trends, led notably by two major publishing houses, the Oxford University Press and Wiley-Blackwell, along with Routledge, Cambridge University Press, John Benjamins, De Gruyter and Spinger, Chinese linguistics has seen four major accomplishments in less than three years. Namely, this includes The Handbook of Chinese Linguistics (Blackwell, 2014, henceforth ‘Blackwell Handbook’), The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Linguistics (Oxford, 2015, henceforth ‘Oxford Handbook’), The Routledge Encyclopedia of the Chinese Language (Routledge, 2016, henceforth ‘Routledge Encyclopedia’) and The Encyclopedia of Chinese Language and Linguistics (Brill, 2016, henceforth ‘Brill Encyclopedia.’). The publication of these four books and in particular their contributors should be congratulated for providing such an unprecedentedly wide scope of up-to-date accounts of the Chinese language and linguistics. These books also include a variety of perspectives, such as generative, descriptive, experimental, historical, comparative, cognitive, evolutionary, functional, sociocultural and teaching, for readers from academics to general readers. Almost every entry comes with a comprehensible introduction to the topic and a detailed bibliography. Liwei Jiao [jiao2@sas.upenn.edu]; 255 S. 36th St. Room 847, Philadelphia, PA 19105-6305, U.S.A. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4051-3981 ...

Empirical validation of a novel operationalization of the expression of emotion: A case of synchronization of relative pitch height and evaluative language across elements of discourse structure in a narrator with Broca’s aphasia

Empirical validation of a novel operationalization of the expression of emotion: A case of synchronization of relative pitch height and evaluative language across elements of discourse structure in a narrator with Broca’s aphasia

Neurocognitive sequela of non-canonical sentence comprehension in chronic agrammatic aphasia: eye movement and fMRI correlates of behavioral recovery

Neurocognitive sequela of non-canonical sentence comprehension in chronic agrammatic aphasia: eye movement and fMRI correlates of behavioral recovery

Formal studies in Slovenian syntax: In honor of Janez Orešnik ed. by Franc Lanko Marušič and Rok Žaucer

Reviewed by: Formal studies in Slovenian syntax: In honor of Janez Orešnik ed. by Franc Lanko Marušič and Rok Žaucer Vrinda Subhalaxmi Chidambaram Franc Lanko Marušič and Rok Žaucer, eds. Formal studies in Slovenian syntax: In honor of Janez Orešnik. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2016. 335 pp. [Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics Today, 236.] Linguistics is a prism: any given language in its entirety can be refracted through it to reveal an astounding spectrum of properties. And these properties may prove to be unique or universal, but our understanding of how this prism must work is enhanced by every finding. Few have understood this better than Janez Orešnik, to whom this volume is dedicated, and whose work largely focused on Slovenian and Icelandic. He explored many facets of these languages: diachronic development as well as synchronic phenomena, from Icelandic epenthesis to Slovenian verbal aspect. Professor Orešnik's work is far-reaching in its scope and widely influential. This volume is a fitting tribute for a scholar with broad interests whose work has influenced and inspired several generations of linguists. The first paper of the volume, "On Second Position Clitics Cross-Linguistically" by Željko Bošković, exemplifies the intentions of Marušič and Žaucer (as stated in their introduction) in that it is both informed by and a contribution to the study of Slovenian syntax but that it also draws from a much wider body of knowledge, illustrating clearly the integration of Slavic (and Slovenian) linguistics into the broader scheme of general linguistics. In this paper, Bošković examines one of the many generalizations related to the NP/DP parametric division (Bošković 2008, 2012), namely that only NP languages can accommodate second-position clitic systems. Central to his argument, of course, is the nature of the difference between NP and DP languages. DP languages are defined as those that contain a definite article, which are characterized by three basic properties: (1) they are unique (i.e., morphologically distinct from demonstratives and other determiners), (2) they occur maximally once per traditional NP, and (3) they confer a definiteness interpretation onto their complement NP. This precise definition forms the basis of exclusion of many languages that were previously analyzed as having definite articles, casting them instead as NP languages. For example, this exclusion extends to colloquial Slovenian, which has been argued (notably by Marušič and Žaucer (2014)) to contain a definite determiner ta. According to the definition [End Page 143] given here, ta violates both the morphological uniqueness condition and the single-instance-per-NP condition and thus does not qualify as a definite article. An NP language is distinguished from a DP language by two related features: (1) while it may have an indefinite article, it must not have a definite article (as defined by the conditions above), and (2) bare NPs can be interpreted as definite. This paper is an investigation of the intersection of the DP/NP parameter and another parameter, namely, the second-position clitic parameter, which Bošković sets up as dichotomous between languages that have second-position clitics and those that do not. He readily admits that the latter category is diverse, but he focuses in on languages that have verb-adjacent clitics. The reader must then keep in mind that the analysis that is given, while capable of handling the data from these two language types (2nd position and V-adja-cent), may not extend to all clitic types cross-linguistically. Bošković offers diachronic evidence from Greek to support the generalization that only NP languages accommodate second position clitics. In Homeric Greek, an NP language, clitics occurred overwhelmingly in the second position. But by the time Koine was being spoken, by which time a definite article had emerged, there was no longer a system of 2nd position clitics. Perhaps even more compelling is the variation between two dialects of Ossetic, Iron and Digor. The dialects differ in part due to the presence of a definite article in one (Digor) and its absence in the other (Iron). This correlates with another difference: Iron displays 2nd position clitics while Digor does not.1 In the subsequent sections of the paper...

Adapting CAT for Basque: both sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic factors matter.

Adapting CAT for Basque: both sociolinguistic and psycholinguistic factors matter.

Review of:] Rolandas Mikulskas. 2017. Copular constructions in Lithuanian

Rolandas Mikulskas. 2017. Copular constructions in Lithuanian. (Valency, Argument Realization and Grammatical Relations in Baltic, 4). Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
 This book by Rolandas Mikulskas is an in-detail analysis of copular constructions (henceforth: CCS) in one Baltic language, Lithuanian. It is a typologically aware, cognitive-linguistic approach to a specific construction, or rather a set of interconnected constructions, with a synchronic emphasis as opposed to the more diachronically-oriented tradition of Lithuanian syntax.

Book Review: Advances in Spanish as a Heritage Language. (2016). Diego Pascual y Cabo (Ed.) Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins Publishing.

Book Review: Advances in Spanish as a Heritage Language. (2016). Diego Pascual y Cabo (Ed.) Amsterdam, The Netherlands: John Benjamins Publishing.

Review of:] Anna Kibort & Nijolė Maskaliūnienė (ed.). 2016. Passive Constructions in Lithuanian: Selected Works of Emma Geniušienė

Anna Kibort & Nijolė Maskaliūnienė (ed.). 2016. Passive Constructions in Lithuanian: Selected Works of Emma Geniušienė. (Studies in Language Companion Series, 179). Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins Company.
 This volume, a collection of newly translated works by Emma Geniušienė, including her 1973 dissertation, contains some of the first and most extensive examinations of passive constructions in Lithuanian. Variuos functions of Lithuanian passive constructions have been widely examined, and these translations make these studies of passives available to a much wider audience.