BOOK NOTICES 431 arguing that these constructions also involve an empty noun but that this empty noun is present at the morphological/lexical level, where it is licensed again by partitivity. S's book is lucidly written and provides a good overview ofprevious work on ellipsis in French noun phrases (beginning with Mitsou Ronat's work from the 1970s). The account of ellipsis in DP which S proposes raises a number of interesting issues for those interested in ellipsis in general and in the phrase structure of DP more particularly. It would be interesting to investigate whether S's semantic licensing and identification strategy for pro extends to other ellipsis constructions (such as VP ellipsis and sluicing ) and to null subjects and objects in French and other languages (for example, the empty prepositional objects in French discussed by Anne ZribiHertz ). [Anne Lobeck, Western Washington University .] Wörterbuch der Valenz etymologisch verwandter Wörter. By Karl-Ernst Sommerfeldt and Herbert Schreiber. Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1996. Pp. vi, 298. This book is designed as a valence dictionary meant to give learners of German the opportunity to understand the combinatory possibilities of words they want to use. For this purpose the words are organized m word-fields These word-fields are not limited to single word classes, i.e. verb or noun or adjective fields, but contain various word classes and juxtapose words of different word classes that are derived from each other, i.e. gebären-Geburt. However , to talk of 'etymological kinship' ofthese words that are directly derived from each other, as Sommerfeldt & Schreiber do in their title, does seem odd, especially if the book is in fact directed at learners of German. But, as the introduction makes clear, the book is directed both at learners of German and at valence scholars interested in the possibility of using valence information to broaden a learner's understanding ofword use. This twofold goal in producing the book entails various problems for the design of the single word entries. The authors state in the introduction that they intend to consider pragmatic valence (i.e. contexts in which the word may be used, which also means giving register information) as well as systemic valence (grammatical possibilities of combining the word with other words and word classes). They also explain , in the last sentence of their introduction (14), that they are aware of the fact that, although the chosen examples may not always reflect normal usage in German, they exemplify the possible valence of an expression. Thus the examples at the beginning of an entry exemplify the valence scope, giving all three agents, even if the expression may sound odd in German. This seems to me a problematical decision if the dictionary is meant to improve word combination usage of learners of German. The biggest problem is the decision to include infinitives as nouns wherever grammatically possible, even if they are not used in German, because a noun not directly derived from the infinitive is used instead. Mere usage examples without realization of all agents at the end of each entry do not contain this error, but even they use infinitive-nouns unusual for everyday German usage. Although the authors do explain the abbreviations they use in their syntactic and semantic valence descriptions for each entry in a table preceding the actual dictionary, they do not explain the meaning of the words they use to give register information. They use words like pejorativ 'pejorative', salopp 'colloquial ', or vulgär 'vulgar' without explaining their hierarchical structure. Some entries do not contain register information, meaning that the word is standard usage, but this 'default' meaning may not be immediately clear to every reader. Thus true learners of German would have to check these register description terms in another dictionary before they could decide on the context in which they may use the word, unless they have been able to infer register information from the words in the context. Other problems are that the total number ofentries is too small, the word groups too limited and, unlike traditional dictionaries showing semantic affinity between words (such as the Stilwörterbuch, Vol 2 in the Duden Series or the Wehrle-Eggers...
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Dec 1, 2014
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