Simple Clauses Research Articles

Do complement clauses with first- or third-person perspective support false-belief reasoning? A training study with English-speaking 3-year-olds.

To investigate whether acquisition of the perspective-marking grammar of complement-clause constructions supports progression in children's false-belief reasoning, we conducted a training study with 76 English-speaking 3-year-olds from the North-West of England (age range: 3;0-3;10 years, 50% female, 80% White). Children were randomly assigned to one of three maximally comparable training conditions, and in a 4-week eight-session program, all children participated in the same training activities with mental-state contrasts. Depending on condition, activities were mediated linguistically with either simple clauses, first-person complements, or third-person complements. The study addressed critical confounds in previous training studies by avoiding the use of complement clauses in false-belief tests and controlling individual differences in memory, executive functioning, general language, and pretest proficiency with complement clauses. The results yielded strong support for the hypothesis of a causal influence of complement-clause exposure on false-belief progression, as children trained with first-person complements advanced significantly more in false-belief reasoning from pretest to posttest than children trained with simple clauses. Examining the roles of first- and third-person complements, a direct comparison between progression in the two complement-clause conditions showed no significant difference, but only children trained with first-person complements progressed significantly more than children in the control condition trained with simple clauses. Follow-up analyses suggested that first- and third-person complements each support false-belief progression at different stages of development. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

The Animal Signs in Determining Good and Bad Days in the Ala Ayuning Dewasa on Balinese Caka Calendar

Time determines the good and bad day to start doing something in Balinese society. This study aims to analyze the sign system in the Ala Ayuning Dewasa on the Balinese Caka Calendar. Data is taken from the Balinese Caka Calendar 2023. There are two types of data in this study, namely written and oral data. Written data is in the form of animal name terms and their meanings. Oral data is a description of the relationship between signifiers and signifieds. Written data were collected through observation assisted by note-taking techniques. Researchers observed the sign system in the Ala Ayuning Dewasa on the Balinese Caka Calendar and noted it in the sheets provided. Oral data were obtained from three informants who wrestled with the Ala Ayuning Dewasa on the Balinese Caka Calendar through interviews. The results showed that (1) signifiers were formed from a combination of times called wewaran, wuku, and penanggal/pangelong, (2) there were 20 animal terms consisting of 9 forms of noun phrases, and 11 simple clauses, (3) signifiers and signifieds have a connotation relationship, (4) signifieds are complex which means that one signified can have the meaning of good das, bad day, good and bad days, even one signifier can have up to 5 meanings. This research is a sound guide for Hindus in Bali to discover the meaning of the relationship between animal signifiers and their signifieds in the Ala Ayuning Dewasa on the Balinese Caka Calendar.

Prosodically determined coordinator placement in Yorùbá

In this paper, we look at the properties of the clausal coordinator sì in Yorùbá. We will show that despite its unusual surface position in the middle field of the second conjunct, the element should still be treated as a proper coordinator and not, as sometimes claimed, as an adverb. We then go on to fully describe the distribution of sì in simple clauses as well as in complex constructions involving focus movement, adverbial or relative clauses. Based on these configurations, we argue that a search for a uniform syntactic position of sì is bound to be unsuccessful. Rather, we claim that the uniform underlying factor in all of these constructions is that sì always right-attaches to the first phonological phrase of the second conjunct clause irrespective of syntactic constituents or islands. We provide evidence for this claim from various phonological processes such as (i) phonological fusion, (ii) the association of floating tones, (iii) assimilation, (iv) tonal OCP-effects, and (v) allomorphy. The present study thus not only solves a curious language-specific puzzle in Yorùbá but also provides a convincing case of prosodically driven clitic displacement to a position after the first phonological/prosodic phrase. In doing so, it falls nicely into emerging typologies of clitic placement patterns in the world’s languages.

A scoping review of transcription-less practices for analysis of aphasic discourse and implications for future research.

It is important to capture a comprehensive language profile from speakers with aphasia. One way to do this is to evaluate spoken discourse, which is language beyond a single simple clause used for a specific purpose. While the historical trend in aphasiology has been to capture performance during isolated language tasks, such as confrontation naming, there is a demonstrated need and benefit to collecting language information from tasks that resemble everyday communication. As a result, there has been an increase in discourse analysis research over time. However, despite clinicians' and researchers' desire to analyse spoken discourse, they are faced with critical barriers that inhibit implementation. To use scoping review methodology to identify transcription-less tools developed to analyse discourse from individuals with aphasia. The review addressed the following question: 'What transcription-less tools and analysis procedures are available to assess discourse in people with aphasia?' and included several sub-questions to further characterise the type of discourse and tool being used, participants on whom the tool was used to rate discourse abilities, tool users (raters), and psychometric properties. The scoping review was conducted between the months of October 2022 and January 2023, concluding 30 January 2023, on PubMed/NCBI, Academic Search Complete and Linguistics and Language Behavior Abstracts. Major inclusion parameters included peer-reviewed papers written in English; that the tool was used to analyse discourse elicited by individuals with acquired aphasia; and that the tool was not a part of a standardised battery or assessment. Perceptual discourse analysis was defined as any analysis which primarily relied on listener impressions and did not numerically quantify specific language behaviours. 'Transcription-less' analysis was defined as any discourse analysis which did not require a written record of the discourse sample in order to be completed. A total of 396 abstracts were screened and 39 full articles were reviewed, yielding 21 papers that were included in the review. An overview of the state of transcription-less tools for aphasic discourse analysis is provided, and next steps are identified to facilitate increased implementation of discourse analysis in clinical and research settings. Transcription-less tools have many benefits for analysing multiple levels (e.g., linguistic, propositional, macrostructural, pragmatic) of discourse, but require more research to establish sound psychometric properties and to explore the implementation of these tools in clinical settings. What is already known on this subject Individuals with aphasia prioritise treatment outcomes at the discourse level such as being able to engage in conversations with friends and family about important topics and participating in social and leisure activities. However, discourse is rarely used as a treatment outcome measure in clinical practice due to multiple barriers. When speech-language pathologists do assess discourse, they often make perceptual judgements without transcribing the discourse sample. Transcription-less analysis procedures may improve clinical implementation of discourse assessment, which would better match treatment outcome measurement to clients' desired outcomes. However, little is known about the current state of transcription-less discourse analysis, blocking progress. What this paper adds to existing knowledge This study provides an overview of currently available transcription-less discourse analysis procedures that are not part of published standardised aphasia assessments. Transcription-less measures are available to evaluate discourse at all levels (i.e., lexical, propositional, macro-structural/planning, and pragmatic) and most measures include items that assess discourse abilities across multiple levels. Additionally, there are transcription-less measures available for both structured (e.g., picture scene description) and spontaneous (e.g., conversation) discourse tasks. However, current transcription-less procedures are lacking psychometric data including information about validity and reliability. What are the potential or actual clinical implications of this work? Transcription-less analysis methods may provide an avenue for increased implementation of discourse measurement into clinical practice. Further research is needed to determine the clinical utility of transcription-less discourse analysis to better monitor clients' desired treatment outcomes.

Longitudinal Grammaticality Judgments of Tense Marking in Complex Questions in Children With and Without Specific Language Impairment, Ages 5-18 Years.

Identification of children with specific language impairment (SLI) can be difficult even though their language can lag that of age peers throughout childhood. A clinical grammar marker featuring tense marking in simple clauses is valid and reliable for young children but is limited by ceiling effects around the age of 8 years. This study evaluated a new, more grammatically challenging complex sentence task in children affected or unaffected with SLI in longitudinal data, ages 5-18 years. Four hundred eighty-three children (213 unaffected, 270 affected) between 5 and 18 years of age participated, following a rolling recruitment longitudinal design encompassing a total of 4,148 observations. The new experimental grammaticality judgment task followed linguistic concepts of syntactic sites for finiteness and movement within complex clauses. Growth modeling methods evaluated group differences over time for four different outcomes; three were hypothesized to evaluate optional omissions of overt finiteness forms in authorized sentence sites, and one evaluated an overt error of tense marking. As in earlier studies of younger children, growth models for the SLI group were consistently lower than the unaffected group, although the growth trajectories across groups did not differ. The results replicated across four item types defined by omissions with minor differences for an item with an overt error of tense marking. Covariates of child nonverbal IQ, mother's education, and child sex did not significantly moderate these effects. The outcomes support the task as having potential screening value for identification of children with SLI and are consistent with linguistic interpretations of task demands.

Grammatical cues to subjecthood are redundant in a majority of simple clauses across languages

Grammatical cues are sometimes redundant with word meanings in natural language. For instance, English word order rules constrain the word order of a sentence like “The dog chewed the bone” even though the status of “dog” as subject and “bone” as object can be inferred from world knowledge and plausibility. Quantifying how often this redundancy occurs, and how the level of redundancy varies across typologically diverse languages, can shed light on the function and evolution of grammar. To that end, we performed a behavioral experiment in English and Russian and a cross-linguistic computational analysis measuring the redundancy of grammatical cues in transitive clauses extracted from corpus text. English and Russian speakers (n = 484) were presented with subjects, verbs, and objects (in random order and with morphological markings removed) extracted from naturally occurring sentences and were asked to identify which noun is the subject of the action. Accuracy was high in both languages (∼89% in English, ∼87% in Russian). Next, we trained a neural network machine classifier on a similar task: predicting which nominal in a subject-verb-object triad is the subject. Across 30 languages from eight language families, performance was consistently high: a median accuracy of 87%, comparable to the accuracy observed in the human experiments. The conclusion is that grammatical cues such as word order are necessary to convey subjecthood and objecthood in a minority of naturally occurring transitive clauses; nevertheless, they can (a) provide an important source of redundancy and (b) are crucial for conveying intended meaning that cannot be inferred from the words alone, including descriptions of human interactions, where roles are often reversible (e.g., Ray helped Lu/Lu helped Ray), and expressing non-prototypical meanings (e.g., “The bone chewed the dog.”).

Putting Complement Clauses into Context: Testing the Effects of Story Context, False-Belief Understanding, and Syntactic form on Children's and Adults' Comprehension and Production of Complement Clauses.

A key factor that affects whether and at what age children can demonstrate an understanding of false belief and complement-clause constructions is the type of task used (whether it is implicit/indirect or explicit/direct). In the current study, we investigate, in an implicit/indirect way, whether children understand that a story character's belief can be true or false, and whether this understanding affects children's choice of linguistic structure to describe the character's belief or to explain the character's belief-based action. We also measured children's understanding of false belief in explicit false-belief tasks. English- and German-speaking young 4- and 5-year-olds as well as English- and German-speaking adult controls heard complement-clause constructions in a story context where the belief mentioned in the complement clause (e.g., "He thinks that she's not feeling well") turned out to be false, true, or was left open. After hearing the test question ("Why does he not play with her?"), all age groups were most likely to repeat the whole complement-clause construction when the belief turned out to be false. That is, they tended to explicitly refer to the character's perspective and say "He thinks…" When the belief turned out to be true, participants often reverted to a simple clause ("She's not feeling well"). Furthermore, children with better short-term memory were more likely to repeat the whole complement-clause construction. However, children's performance in explicit false-belief tasks showed no relation to their performance in our novel, more implicit/indirect, task. Whether or not the complement clause was introduced by a that complementizer only had a small effect on the German adults' responses, where leaving out the complementizer also changes the word order of the complement clause. Overall, our results suggest that task characteristics and individual differences in short-term memory affect children's ability to demonstrate false-belief understanding and to express this understanding linguistically.

Grammar Sketch of Tawang Monpa

Tawang Monpa, also known as Dakpa, is an East Bodish language spoken in Arunachal Pradesh in India, and in Trashigang in Bhutan. This article is a brief description of the main grammatical features of the language. In the section about nouns and the noun phrase the use of the case markers and a topic marker will be discussed in detail, in addition to other features related to the noun phrase. In the section about verbs and the verb phrase negation and various adverbial suffixes will be discussed in detail, as well as a set of tense, aspect, modality, evidentiality suffixes. Pronouns, adjectives, adverbs and deictic expression will also be described, in addition to sections about the structure of the simple clause and clause combination.

From reciprocity to competition

Abstract Korean has a reciprocal pronoun that under certain conditions takes on an innovative function as a marker of competition. This meaning emerges when the marker is used in reported speech containing a predicate expressing volition, intention, or speaker-orientation. In such contexts, the marker is reanalysed as co-referential with competing subsets of subject referents. The final stage is the extension of the competition marker to simple clauses and predicates. The empirical part of this research is based on a survey with 23 native speakers. The shift from a reciprocal pronoun to a competition marker will be analysed as an instance of subjectification. The innovative use as a competition marker has led to additional distributional differences between the simple use of the marker and its reduplicated form. The situation in Korean is comparable to that in Japanese, Bulgarian, and Karachay-Balkar, and mirrors the polysemy pattern found in Tuvaluan. This is the first typological study of the relevant domain in Korean, and will be a valuable addition to the list of available studies on reciprocity and subjectification.

Subordination in Western Tamang

This article examines the clause combining in Western Tamang of Nuwakot district in Nepal. The significance of language as spoken in a particular community of Nepal reflects in the diversity as being accommodated in the national policy of language by the language commission of Nepal. Western Tamang is a major dialect of Tamang, a Tibeto-Burman language spoken in Nepal. The main goal of this study has been to analyze the forms and functions of clause combining in Western Tamang. This article describes the process of clause combining from both formal and functional perspectives. The data for this study have been taken from the Western Tamang dialect spoken in Rasuwa and Trishuli based on functional-typological grammar of T. Givón (2001).However; simple clauses are discussed in terms of subordination and coordination to some extent. Subordination involves five kinds of clauses: serial verb construction, complement clauses, adverbial clauses, relative clauses and converbal clauses. In subordination, Western Tamang uses non-finite form of the verb as a major strategy for clause combining. In coordination, except for conjunction and adversative conjunction, it uses coordinators borrowed from Nepali. It uses simple juxtaposition, an asyndeton coordination for conjunction. Clause combining as a morpho-syntactic phenomenon in Western Tamang reveals typologically interesting characteristics which needs from a broad typological perspective. The morpho-syntactic analysis of clause combining in the Western Tamang would contribute to understanding new phenomenon in Western Tamang and other related languages. This study may provide the basic foundation for the further study of the morpho-syntactic aspects in dialect. It is useful to local community for preparing materials for multilingual education in the dialect as well. Despite differences perceived among the Tamang speaking people in terms of language variations, the basics in their language are similar. The beauty and property of language can be seen in diversity.

Framing events in the logic of verbal modification

I ask what a small set of modification data requires of clausal event semantics. Classic Davidsonian semantics posits that modifiers like "in the hallway" express properties of events, and expects that iterations of such modifiers will simply contribute additional conjuncts at logical form. The data I consider challenges this view, and others cast in the Davidsonian spirit, at least so long as we hope to preserve an important and plausible semantic principle, Role Exhaustion (Williams 2015). As I show, preserving the principle and accounting for the facts can be accomplished by adopting two independently-motivated sets of claims: first, that verbs introduce existential closure over their event argument, and modifiers take verb meanings as semantic arguments (Champollion 2015); second, that simple clauses have two layers of event description, "framing" and "framed" (Schein 2016). In the end, I sketch two possible extensions of the approach, towards the interpretation of temporal modification and negative perceptual reports.

TIME SUBORDINATORS AND TIME RELATIONS IN ENGLISH AND ALBANIAN

Language in general is a complex apparatus of the human beings through which we express our innerfeelings, thoughts and ideas. This study was initiated due to the importance of language in general. However, toknow a language does not only mean to know its vocabulary, but how to link the words, the word order in a clauseas well as the order of clauses in a sentence, their role and their relations to each other. The relationship of theclauses in a sentence is especially important concerning complex sentences, in which the clauses are not of the samelevel but show a dependency. So, precisely the adverbial clauses of time are the ones that are highly complicated andcreate confusion. For this reason, most of the people try to avoid them, and use simple clauses instead, nevertheless,this somehow loses the meaning and originality of the idea. This means that although complex, adverbial clauses oftime are crucial in explaining our ideas and thoughts. Based on the great number of the adverbial clauses of time, onthe meanings that they convey as well as on the manner how the meaning is expressed, this study will concentrate ona contrastive analysis of the adverbial clauses of time in English and Albanian. It will focus on the time relations thattime subordinators of time express in both languages. The methodology that is used in this paper is mainlydescriptive and comparative. The paper is based on the analysis of Jack London’s novel White Fang which wastranslated into Albanian under the title Dhëmbi i Bardhë by Bujar Doko. A comparison of the adverbial clauses oftime in both languages is done in order to find their differences and commonalities. Afterwards, a detaileddescription of the data extracted from the comparison is carried out, which will play a major role in proving thehypothesis and coming to a conclusion. The general hypothesis of this study is that most of the adverbial clauses oftime as well as their subordinators will be equivalent in both English and Albanian. The results of the analysis showthat adverbial clauses of time do have a similar structure as well as correspondence in English and Albanian: theoverall structure of both English and Albanian adverbial clauses of time is the same; the subordinators in bothlanguages correspond to their counterparts in expressing time relations, being a fixed time, duration, simultaneity,anteriority or posteriority; both types of clauses are movable, which means that they can take the initial, medial andfinal position in a sentence; and the use of commas is the same as well. There is also a similarity in the word orderof the time clauses. Another similar feature of the adverbial clauses of time in both English and Albanian is that theyare expressed by finite and non-finite clauses.

FromSer Focalizadorand Contrast to the Presuppositional [Verb+Ser+X] Construction in Spanish

AbstractThis study uses a corpus of conversational speech to describe a structure in Spanish previously known asSer Focalizador(‘Focalizing Be’, hereafter [Verb+Ser+X]). In this structure, the verbser‘to be’ appears after the main verb of the clause. Its function has traditionally been described as indicating what comes after in the sentence as the marked focus. However, by examining how the [Verb+Ser+X] is used in talk-in-interaction it is found that a more particular construction has the function of marking counter-argumentation – i.e., canceling some background inference (presupposition or implicature) – by making the second member of a contrastive pair more clearly contrastive, and establishing a structural distinction which has the pragmatic and contextualeffectof contrast. I call this particular construction presupposition canceling [(NEGclause)(pero ’but’)Verb+Ser+X]. The description provided here is also founded on identifying the linguistic contexts that favor the use of the [Verb+Ser+X], by treating it as a variant of the simple clause with a complement whereserwas absent in the verbal phrase, but could have been present. The analysis of variation provides evidence for the presuppositional [Verb+Ser+X] to be variably conditioned by a propositional X, and by the co-occurrence of previous negation and of the adversative conjunctionpero‘but’. The analysis also offers an operationalization of contrast in conversational data, as well as a definition of the variable context for a pragmatic construction such as the [Verb+Ser+X].

GRAMMATICAL INTRICACY AND LEXICAL DENSITY OF READING TEXTS OF ENGLISH TEXTBOOK FOR SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL GRADE XII

ABSTRACTThis study deals with the grammatical intricacy and lexical density of reading texts of English textbook for senior high school students grade XII. The objectives of this study are to investigate the level of grammatical intricacy (GI), and lexical density (LD) of the reading texts of English Textbook. This study was conducted by using descriptive qualitative and content analysis design. The data of this study were simple clauses, clauses complexes, sentences, lexical items and content carrying lexical items (nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs) of the English reading texts of Look Ahead 3, English textbook for senior high school grade XII published by Erlangga 2007. The result of the analysis showed that: (1).The level of grammatical intricacy of four out of six reading texts is high (3.53, 2.3, 2.71, and 2.25) and the other two texts are medium (2) and low (1.83). (2).The level of lexical density of four out of six reading texts are low (42.67%, 45.93%, 48.47%, and 36.99%) and the other two texts are high (58.36, and 55.40%). Keywords: grammatical intricacy; lexical density; reading texts

Akan grammatical relations revisited

Morphological case languages do not necessarily depend on word order to determine their grammatical relations. However, structural case languages depend largely on word order to determine the various grammatical relations. For most configurational languages, the agent/experiencer usually precedes the patient/theme in a simple clause (in the active voice). In the passive voice, the patient/theme occupies the subject position while the agent becomes an object of a preposition (oblique) or omitted as evident in English. Akan, a Kwa language of the Niger-Congo family, being a nominative-accusative language, allows the agent/experiencer to precede the patient/theme in the active construction. In the passive- like construction, however, unlike a language like English, an impersonal pronounoccupies the subject position while the patient or theme remains at the object position. This implies that agents/experiencers do not occur at the oblique position in Akan; neither dopatients/ themes occur at the subject position. Certain verbs (symmetrical verbs), however, may allow the experiencer and the theme arguments to switch positions in the active construction without affecting the meaning of the sentence in the language. This paper seeks to highlight these marked grammatical relations in Akan within the framework of Lexical Functional Grammar (LFG).

Clefting and nominal predication: Two focus-marking constructions in Movima

Abstract Movima (isolate, Bolivia) has two focus constructions that superficially look very similar. One is a simple clause with a noun in predicate position and a verb placed inside the argument phrase. Its pragmatically marked status stems from the inversion of the prototypical association of lexical and pragmatic categories. In the other construction, the predicative noun is additionally preceded by a free pronoun. This construction is a cleft, the pronoun and noun together constituting an equational matrix clause. The two constructions also differ in function: the simple clause with a nominal predicate is a simple predication, while the cleft is a specificational sentence.

A metafunctional approach to word order in Persian language

Within the framework of the systematic functional grammar (SFG), Matthiessen (2004) has provided an analysis of the word/element order according to which word/element order in a clause is decided by experiential, interpersonal and textual metafunctions. In this study which has been conducted aiming at the description and analysis of the word/element order in a simple Persian clause, we have sought to describe and analyze the sequence of the main elements in a Persian active simple declarative clause within Matthiessen (2004)’s metafunctional model. In fact, through evidence from Persian language, i.e. samples derived from Persian texts and also other Persian researchers’ works, we have sought to demonstrate how the three experiential, interpersonal and textual metafunctions are involved in determining the order of the main elements in an active simple declarative clause in Persian. The results of this study show that the “basic” order of the main elements in a Persian simple clause and specifically single-Complement clause is in line with both experiential and interpersonal metafunctions and any type of the movement of the aforementioned elements in an active simple declarative clause in Persian language is explained with the help of the mechanisms of textual metafunction.

The Introductive Baka/Bāki in Rural Palestinian Arabic

Abstract The article explores the structure and use of the existential verb baka in Rural Palestinian Arabic for the introduction of orientation sections and fragments in narrative discourse. In clause-initial position the existential verb presents a non-inflecting form, either the 3MSG perfect baka or the MSG active participle bāki. We argue that the noninflectability of baka and bāki is indicative of their syntactic detached-ness from the following unit and is explained by their discourse-disjunctive function. We show that the existential baka/bāki serves to introduce both narrative-initial and narrative-embedded orientation. It may initiate utterances containing simple nominals or whole clauses. The distribution of the specific patterns is determined, inter alia, by the genre of the narrative told. Finally, we propose that the preference of the participle bāki over baka in folktales and in less committed instances of personal narratives may be related to the evidential function of the active participle in the dialects under examination.

The “Kühner-Stegmann” of 1914 and the “Oxford Latin Syntax” of 2015 and 2021: Comparing Two Examples of a Latin syntax of Different Times and Different Approaches

Comparing the grammars of so-called dead languages is particularly fascinating. The article compares two syntactic accounts from completely different time periods — a traditional and still well-known one from the 19th century and a modern one that has currently been published: the syntactic part of the “Ausführliche Grammatik der Lateinischen Sprache” by Raphael Kühner from 1878 and 1879, and the “Oxford Latin Syntax” by Harm Pinkster from 2015 and 2021. First, the general concepts are introduced: Karl Ferdinand Becker’s theory of the three syntactic relations (2.1), S. H. A. Herling’s theory of the equivalence of sentence parts and subordinate clauses (2.2), as well as the modern functional approaches of the theory of the simple clause (3.1) and the complex sentence (3.2). Six differences between the two Latin syntactic concepts are discussed. Three common aspects are taken into consideration, namely the corpus-based approach, the restriction to a single language, and the purely descriptive method as opposed to a normative or more formal approach. Among the results, it is concluded that both grammatical systems of the Latin syntax are legitimate and both should be used to address questions concerning Latin syntax.

Burhan SönmezLabyrinth by Ümit Hussein

lips, leaving everything else to the imagination . Similarly, the story focuses on the lovers’ passion, evoking in a few sentences the entire life of a once-famous man now defeated, tormented, unrecognizable to his close friends, and a stranger to himself. Alice-Catherine Carls University of Tennessee at Martin Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers Ed. Elissa Washuta & Theresa Warburton. Seattle. University of Washington Press. 2019. 266 pages. THE BEST ASPECT of Shapes of Native Nonfiction: Collected Essays by Contemporary Writers is its intrinsic anthological quality. This anthology of indigenous writers features one or multiple pieces from twenty-seven Canadian and US authors, a veritable feast of First Nations and Native American writers that readers may otherwise never have discovered. This is not a collection of instantly recognizable literary rock star names—Joseph Boyden, Joy Harjo, David Treuer, Louise Erdrich, Sherman Alexie, Linda LeGarde, Natalie Diaz, and the newest addition to the canon of bright Native writers, Tommy Orange, are conspicuously absent—which leaves this fan of Native literature curious. Still, this book serves up plenty of new discoveries. Consider Stephen Graham Jones’s essay, “Letter to a Just-Starting-out Indian Writer —and Maybe to Myself.” This essay could serve as a summary for this book’s intent and of expectations of indigenous literature overall. This piece asks heavy questions: What topics should we expect to find in an anthology of Native writers? How should we expect them to write? The publishing industry will package Native writers as “exotic,” Jones warns. He Books in Review Burhan Sönmez Labyrinth Trans. Ümit Hussein. New York. Other Press. 2019. 192 pages. COMPACT, thought-provoking, and gently exquisite, Labyrinth, the fourth novel by Turkish author Burhan Sönmez, quietly establishes him as one of Europe’s great contemporary authors. From page one, we are drawn into the immediacy of the main character, Boratin, a youngish jazz musician who has lost his memory following a suicidal leap into Istanbul’s Bosphorus strait. Moved home from the hospital, we follow his studied reimmersion with once-familiar objects and with the family, friends, and social mores that have formed the trappings of his life until then. Largely shut out from this previously ingrained reality, Boratin progresses through clouds of impressions, reflection, reasoning, and evaluation, seizing each new-old thing he meets—propelling the narrative with an etched clarity that sends out sparks at every turn. The effect of the book’s simple clauses, infused with a continual stream of sensual description, is hypnotic. Sönmez has a knack for finding just the right offhand detail to throw a scene or stream of thought into perfect philosophical relief—akin perhaps to Don DeLillo’s prose, yet tempered here with a sort of European humility. In place of DeLillo’s hard irony, a brilliantly earned sensuality restores a sense of narrative wholeness in how we experience this novel’s unfolding: They had heard that in the beginning was the Word, now they can hear from the book dealer’s voice that in the end too there will only be the Word. Life is comprehending the word. And when the book dealer’s slow-moving lips eventually say that death too consists of words, the young pair raise their heads and BURHAN SÖNMEZ 100 WLT WINTER 2020 also instructs: “Don’t let people shame you about not being an expert on your own culture,” and “You don’t have to be able to define what an Indian is in order to write ‘Indian.’ Putting a definition on us, that’s playing their game.” These authors ask when exactly is it okay to stop talking about the fact that their people suffered genocide at the hands of whites for hundreds of years and that Western corporations continue to desecrate the land and rights of indigenous people today from Canada to Chile. They talk about trying to hold onto their traditions yet simultaneously progress. They are not writing for the acceptance of a white audience but for all the judging of and by each other and the lack of identity they sometimes feel as individuals. Deborah A. Miranda’s “Tuolume” is a grueling, haunting personal narrative...