Word Order Change Research Articles

SENTENTIAL NEGATION IN RUSSIAN SIGN LANGUAGE

In this paper, a description of sentential negation makers in Russian Sign Language (RSL) is provided. Two types of these markers exist. The first one is a negative sign – a manual negator. The second type is markers that are expressed by facial expressions, and head movements – non-manual negation. Moreover, this observation of sentential negation presents the frequency of manual negators, and the distribution of non-manual negation. The data also shows that in negative constructions the basic word order changes. In addition, I offer an analysis that deals with this phenomenon.

Reduced structure in Malagasy headlines

Abstract This paper examines the register associated with headlines in Malagasy. While in many languages headlines appear to have reduced structure as evidenced by the absence of certain grammatical markers (determiners, copulas, tense), Malagasy headlines show a change in word order from VOS to SVO. It is argued that like English, Malagasy headlines involve a truncated syntactic structure and that the absence of certain functional projections accounts for the change in word order.

On the Word Order of Ditransitive Constructions in Northwestern Chinese

Many studies (e.g., Ren 2004, Xu 2013, Zhou 2016) noticed the oddity of the SOV order of Northwestern Chinese in the context of Chinese as an SVO language, while much less attention has been given to word order in ditransitive constructions in Northwestern Chinese. This article examines the word order of ditransitive constructions in Northwestern Chinese dialects. In general, different ditransitive constructions belong to or are close to different language patterns (either the Chinese pattern or Altaic/Tibetan pattern). DOC and DDC-I in some SVO dialects represent the Chinese pattern. DatC-I and DDC-II have one additional feature that represents the Altaic/Tibetan pattern; i.e., the R is in front of the V. DDC-III and DatC-II, which exist only in the preferred SOV dialects, are closer to the Altaic/Tibetan pattern because the dative marker is postpositional. DatC-III, appearing in SOV dialects, completely turns to the Altaic/Tibetan pattern since the T also moves in front of the V. After the examination above, two typological features emerge. First, in some dialects, the R and T fall on different sides of the V, which is typologically rare. Second, the R is in front of the V, which is different from the placement in Mandarin Chinese. Both features are induced by language contact with Altaic/Tibetan languages in the same area. During language contact, some constructions in recipient languages change faster than others. For example, Wang and Dede (2016) demonstrated that the negative markers in the Xining, an SVO dialect, have little freedom of movement, and they must appear adjacent to the verb they modify; and the noun of a place of destination is located before the verb in SVO Northwestern Chinese. Both are different from Mandarin Chinese. This reveals that even if the basic word order of some Northwestern Chinese dialects is still SVO, the effect of language contact exists in a somewhat unremarkable manner, leading to gradual changes in word order. Take DatC-I as an example. One may not notice that DatC-I relates to language contact, since Mandarin Chinese seems to have the same kind of construction (i.e., the benefactive construction). However, after close observation, we find that DatC-I is the most common and natural construction for expressing a giving event, whereas the benefactive construction in Mandarin Chinese does not apply only to giving events. Therefore, DatC-I is a true ditransitive construction, whereas its formal counterpart in Mandarin Chinese is not. If these “quiet” changes are noticed, one can better grasp the complete picture of language change.

A pragmatic account of scrambling and topicalization in Japanese

The purpose of this study is to explore the interactions between word orders and particles in Japanese transitive sentences in terms of information structure. To this end, a series of corpus analyses within the framework of the Givónian approach were conducted. Based on the present corpus analyses, I propose that scrambling is chosen when the scrambled object is anaphorically prominent but cataphorically non-prominent, and that topicalization is selected when the direct object is anaphorically and cataphorically prominent. Additionally, I arrive at the conclusion that word order permutations in Japanese are applied to intermediately accessible referents. In other words, word order changes are neither used with highly accessible referents, nor completely new information.

Learning word order at birth: A NIRS study

In language, the relative order of words in sentences carries important grammatical functions. However, the developmental origins and the neural correlates of the ability to track word order are to date poorly understood. The current study therefore investigates the origins of infants’ ability to learn about the sequential order of words, using near-infrared spectroscopy (NIRS) with newborn infants. We have conducted two experiments: one in which a word order change was implemented in 4-word sequences recorded with a list intonation (as if each word was a separate item in a list; list prosody condition, Experiment 1) and one in which the same 4-word sequences were recorded with a well-formed utterance-level prosodic contour (utterance prosody condition, Experiment 2). We found that newborns could detect the violation of the word order in the list prosody condition, but not in the utterance prosody condition. These results suggest that while newborns are already sensitive to word order in linguistic sequences, prosody appears to be a stronger cue than word order for the identification of linguistic units at birth.

Against information structure heads: A relational analysis of German scrambling

This article argues against cascades of information-structural functional heads in the German middle field as an explanation for scrambling movements. Instead, we argue, some instances of scrambling correlate with sentence-level semantic effects, whereas other word order changes are affected by prosody and do not have any interpretative effects. An alternative architecture for scrambling is developed, which takes into account the clear empirical differences between these different subtypes of what is summarily called ‘scrambling’. In this architecture, syntax underspecifies word order and is ignorant of information structure. The apparent interaction of word order, semantic interpretations and discourse is explained by an interface architecture that licenses word orders on the basis of their syntactic, semantic and prosodic (but not information structural) properties.

ДИАХРОНИЧЕСКОЕ СРАВНЕНИЕ СОДЕРЖАНИЯ КОНЦЕПТА «ТОЛЕРАНТНОСТЬ» В РУССКОМ ЯЗЫКОВОМ СОЗНАНИИ

The article presents language material for a seminar or a special class on semantics and stylistics of set units for students of philology trained to be teachers of English. The opening part provides information on theoretical issues through a review of works by Russian philologists about Irwin Shaw’s novels. The practical part examines the contexts of the author’s usage of set expressions of the modern English language with the component “time”. The contexts were extracted from four most famous novels of the author (The Young Lions (1948), Rich Man, Poor Man (1969), Nightwork (1975), Bread Upon Waters (1981)), a total of 2062 pages. The contexts under study (about forty) are divided into groups according to the stylistic type of occasional (author’s) transformations of set expressions. The following stylistics methods are considered: the insertion of an additional component, the replacement of a component, the repetition of a component, and the inversion or the change of word order. The component insertion clarifies the manifestation degree for the characteristic presented by the meaning of a set expression. The component replacement intensifies or weakens the meaning of the whole expression. The repetition of a component increases the impressiveness. The change of word order inside a set expression gives colorfulness and extra sense. The final part of the article notes the peculiarities of the author’s style in the usage of the set expressions described. It is con­cluded that all the examined transformations of set expressions with the component “time” can be characterized by the systemic nature of lexical changes. One can find them in texts by numerous writers as well as in everyday speech. The creativity and the author’s “specialty” are minimized. Factual material and conclusions of this small research may be applied in teaching such a separate aspect of semantics as the use of set expressions in modern English.

РОЛЬ ПОРЯДКА СЛОВ ДЛЯ ИДЕНТИФИКАЦИИ ПОДЛЕЖАЩЕГО В ЭРГАТИВНЫХ ЯЗЫКАХ ДАГЕСТАНА

The article introduces an attempt to establish suitable principles of defi ning subject as one of the main parts of sentence for ergative languages of Dagestan. The problems of syntactic division of sentence and peculiarities of its members in Dagestani languages are still examined only in general. Even the question of the number of principal sentence members is still under discussion. Only semantic or pure formal features are traditionally used as the criteria for distinguishing between sentence members. Within Dagestani languages studies there are no special researches devoted to this question. To distinguish the predicative of sentence the authors suggest using three levels of the language: syntactical, semantic and pragmatic ones. However, the article gives priority to syntactical features as members of the sentence are syntactical category, and their specifi cs should be found in peculiarities of combination of words while forming a sentence. Formal criteria are also very important, but apart from morphology, syntax is interested not in forms of words separately but in their combination with each other. In some sentence constructions it is exactly the word order that is the only criteria of the subject as a principle member of sentence. Subject as syntactic element is characterized by defi nite relationships with other parts of sentence; therefore word order is suggested to be the fi rst identifi ed feature of subject which holds the fi rst left position in a sentence. In every language there are some means which express syntactical connections between words within a sentence, which help ‘recognize’ members of sentence. These are morphological (structural), semantic and syntactical means. In ergative languages these means play different roles for different structures of sentence. For absolute sentence constructions, morphological means of expressing connections between words in a sentence are rather important. Correlation is a morphological means of connection, as it is used through forms of words. For ergative sentence constructions, semantic means of expressing syntactical connections are also very important. In this case, the semantic factor is the key one in defi ning members of sentence. Subject in this case is defi ned by means of comparison of semantic contents of the sentence (only its meaning), as functional homonymy of ergative and absolutive cases prevents distinguishing between subject and object of sentence. As for ergativoid (bi-absolutive) constructions, their criterion is a pure syntactical means of expressing syntactical connections, i.e. the word order. For other types of constructions word order is not the main criteria for distinguishing members of sentence, however, any change of word order infl uences the meaning of the sentence. In ergative and absolutive constructions syntactical connections and functions of certain words during the change of word order, in contrast to ergativoid construction, do not change but the sentence as a whole obtains a rather new shade of meaning. Thus, the word order in Dagestani ergative languages plays a very important role for the structure and contents of sentence.

Smoothing derivational asymmetries in English

AbstractThis paper examines the correlation between word order and affixation as put forward in Greenberg’s Universal 27 (1966) for the case of English derivational morphology. A change in word order from OV to VO took place in the Old English period. I hypothesize that the change in syntax is reflected to a certain degree in the derivational morphology of Present Day English. Data from thePenn-Parsed Corpora of Historical Englishreveal a change in the ratio of prefix and suffix types that hint at a possible syntactic impact on morphology. However, these data of affix types are the first findings of ongoing research that only give us a preliminary view of a possible underlying mechanism. Provided that a correlation does not account for the cause, compounds as a carrier of syntactic information to the word level are discussed as an explanation.

The word order change of adverb in Chinese and its typological meaning

The word order change of adverb in Chinese and its typological meaning

Head-to-Modifier Reanalysis: The Rise of the Adjectival QuantifierVieland the Loss of Genitive Case Assignment

The quantifiervielchanges from exhibiting properties of a head in Old High German to exhibiting properties of a modifier in Modern German. This is accompanied by changes in word order vis-à-vis its quantified constituent and the loss of the ability to assign genitive case to some of the quantified constituents. Assuming that quantifying expressions may have various syntactic representations, we argue thatvieldevelops from a quantifying noun to a particle in Card0to an adjectival quantifier in Spec, CardP, and that this structural change in the position ofvielcan account in part for the morphosyntactic properties of the quantified element. The development ofvielfrom a quantifying noun to a quantifying particle—a case of head-to-head reanalysis—is typical of grammaticalization. However, the change from a particle to an adjectival quantifier represents head-to-specifier reanalysis, which we relate to degrammaticalization due to analogy with other inflected elements of the DP. The change in word order and case properties of the quantified constituent represents a third type of reanalysis, whereby an embedded nominal undergoes downward reanalysis. Depending on the structural size—that is, whether a DP-layer is present or not—the dependent nominal either integrates into the matrix nominal agreeing withvielor, if too large, it takes up a new embedded position as a complement of the matrix head noun, retaining genitive. We demonstrate that in each case, the morphological change lags behind the syntactic reanalysis.*

A corpus-based analysis of scrambling in Japanese in terms of anaphoric and cataphoric co-referencing

In Japanese, word order changes do not affect the grammatical relations between constituents, allowing both SOV and OSV word order. Although it has been assumed that the choice of word order is determined by information structure, it is unclear how OSV is related to information structure. In order to shed light on this issue, this article investigates the usage of OSV under the framework of the Givónian approach, using a corpus-based method. First, the study demonstrates that the object is informationally older than the subject in OSV while there is a reverse relationship between the object and the subject in SOV. Second, the study reveals that the referents of the subject both in SOV and OSV tend to be carried over to the following sentences. Consequently, I conclude that OSV correlates with the ‘topic shift’ from the referent of the scrambled object to that of the subject. Therefore, OACCSV is selected when the writer intends to start a new discourse and continues writing about the referent of the subject after OACCSV appears.

New perspectives on Chinese syntax by Waltraud Paul

Reviewed by: New perspectives on Chinese syntax by Waltraud Paul1 Jinglian Li and Fanjun Meng New perspectives on Chinese syntax. By Waltraud Paul. (Trends in linguistics, studies and monographs 271.) Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2015. Pp. xvi, 357. ISBN 9783110338683. $154 (Hb). Mandarin Chinese, as an isolating language, presents considerable challenges to the syntactic study of word-order typology, the inventory of lexical categories, sentence-peripheral elements like topic, sentence-final particles (SFPs), and so on. Waltraud Paul’s book New perspectives on Chinese syntax boldly takes on these controversial and recalcitrant issues and aims to reaccommodate them into a broader linguistic landscape. In short, P has managed to reconcile some noisy facts in Chinese and has cogently falsified some pervasive, long-term conceptions in Chinese syntax. The book is organized into eight chapters. The first chapter sets the stage for the book and provides a synopsis of the subsequent chapters. In Ch. 2, word order in Chinese is submitted to typological scrutiny from a historical perspective. Chinese is argued to have undergone two major word-order changes: OV > VO > OV (see Li & Thompson 1974). Specifically, pre-Archaic Chinese originated as an SOV language and then changed to SVO between the tenth and the third centuries bc, further followed by a shift back to SOV, which is still in progress in Modern Mandarin. P argues against this and, based on the Shang inscriptions (see Djamouri 1988), shows that even in pre-Archaic Chinese, the dominant word order is SVO instead of SOV. The so-called SOV in pre-Archaic Chinese, involving focalization of the object and object pronouns in negated sentences, turns out to be de facto the head-complement configuration, thus consistent with the SVO order. The core evidence for Li and Thompson’s (1974) hypothesis of SOV order in Modern Chinese is [End Page 1006] the bǎ-construction. P succeeds in reconciling the bǎ-construction with the head-complement configuration. She assumes bǎ to be a higher functional head subcategorizing a vP or AspP as complement, rather than a preposition. Importantly, P further postulates that the object of V moves to [Spec, bǎP] and bǎ head-moves to the higher v (leaving aside many details). Consequently, the complement of bǎ is now to its right in Modern Mandarin, a compliant VO order. Hence, Chinese is systematically an SVO language. The following three chapters concern a number of lexical categories in Chinese. It has been claimed that Chinese, an isolating language, lacks these categories. Ch. 3 probes the properties of prepositions and argues that prepositions form an independent category distinct from verbs, rather than the alleged categorially dual V/P hybrid (see Huang et al. 2009). The evidence P provides is as follows. First, a preposition is distinct from a verb in terms of syntactic distribution. Prepositions are incompatible with adverbs and negation, contra typical verbs, regardless of whether there is a homophonous verbal counterpart. Second, prepositions cannot function as predicates. Verbs and prepositions that are homophonous display different selectional restrictions, and only the former is compatible with aspectual affixes, which argues against the conflation of the two. Third, no preposition stranding is allowed, even in the Shang inscriptions, whereas verbs do license null complements. Finally, diachronically, not all prepositions have verbal origins. For instance, exclusive prepositions such as zì ‘from’ and yú ‘at, to’ are attested in the Shang inscriptions; there is no evidence to suggest that they are deverbal. The argument for the preposition as an independent syntactic category is further supported by the observation that PPs pattern with NPs, rather than VPs, given that PPs also show adjunct/argument asymmetry, akin to NPs. In a similar vein, Ch. 4 primarily argues for postpositions as an independent adpositional category. P first argues against the conflation of postpositions with nouns. Unlike nouns, the postposition requires an overt complement (e.g. *(zhuōzi) shàng ‘on the table’), and no intervention is allowed between them. The existence of deverbal postpositions (e.g. lái ‘during, over’, qǐ ‘starting from’) substantially undermines the nominal analysis of postpositions. The postposition is also distributionally different from the preposition. In contrast with prepositions, argumental spatial postpositions can be the subjects...

New Perspectives on Chinese Syntax by Waltraud Paul

Reviewed by: New Perspectives on Chinese Syntax by Waltraud Paul Jingxia Lin New Perspectives on Chinese Syntax (Trends in Linguistics. Studies and Monographs 271). By Waltraud Paul. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2015. Pp. xvi, 357. ISBN 978-3-11-033877-3. $154 (hardcover). [Corrigendum] New Perspectives on Chinese Syntax by Waltraud Paul (2015) is a theory-oriented discussion of Chinese syntax after Huang, Li, and Li (2009). Even though the book does not provide a full coverage of Chinese syntax as expected of descriptive or reference grammars, it explores in depth the most controversial issues with a new analysis in the generative approach. While each chapter tackles different topics in Chinese syntax, the chapters form a coherent whole to accomplish the major goal of the book, which is to deconstruct typological generalizations, particularly the concept “cross-categorial harmony”, as part of grammar. Cross-categorial harmony in this book refers to “the observation that in many languages the order between a head and its complement is the same across different categories.” (p.2) The book is organized into eight chapters. I will review each chapter and then comment on the book as a whole. Chapter 1 is a preface-like short introduction to the book. It sets out with a list of questions in Chinese syntax that will be addressed in the book, and then states the position of the whole book: while the concept of cross-categorial harmony has become important since Greenberg (1963), it is based on a statistical observation and thus cannot be a principle of grammar. Chapters 2 – 7 dwell on one topic of Chinese syntax in each chapter. Among them, Chapters 2-4 involve joint work and discussion with two other linguists, Redouane Djamouri and John Whitman. These chapters are very readable thanks in part to two helpful features: each chapter is skillfully balanced at 40-50 pages, and the key ideas of each [End Page 451] chapter and most of the sections are easily accessible to readers via the summaries and interim summaries thoughtfully provided by the author. Chapter 2 is devoted to the debate of VO vs. OV word order in Chinese, with the aim of invalidating Li and Thompson’ (1974) claim that Chinese has undergone major word order change in its history. This chapter argues that VO has been the main order from the earliest attested history of Chinese (oracle bone inscriptions) to Modern Mandarin. Section 2.1 demonstrates that in oracle bone inscriptions, there are only two cases of OV order: focalization of the object and object pronouns in negated sentences, but even for these two cases, the underlying head-complement configurations are consistent with the VO order. Section 2.2 centers on Modern Mandarin. It firstly shows that the extended verbal projection (e.g., AuxP and AspP) displays head-complement order in accordance with VO, and then provides an extensive discussion of the bǎ construction. It argues that bǎ is not a preposition, but rather a higher head that takes as complement the verbal projection on the right side. In other words, the bǎ construction is also in a head-complement order. Chapters 3 - 5 discuss three lexical categories that have triggered heated debates in the literature: prepositions, postpositions, and adjectives. In these chapters, the author points out that the three categories all exist in Chinese, and thus challenges the typological generalization that isolating languages have less lexical categories than inflected languages. Chapter 3 argues for prepositions as a distinct category. After providing a list of words that are exclusively prepositions and a list of prepositions that have a homophonous verbal counterpart in Section 3.1, the chapter presents further evidence in the next three sections to show that prepositions form a distinct lexical category: prepositions are incompatible with adverbs or negation, and they cannot function as predicates or occur without their objects (i.e. they disallow preposition stranding). The chapter then turns to a diachronic study regarding verb-to-preposition reanalysis. It finds that zì ‘from’ and yú ‘at, to’ have been prepositions since the very first attested material (oracle bone inscriptions), i.e. not all prepositions were reanalyzed from verbs. The chapter thus states that the category preposition must...

Easy tools to get to grips with linguistic variation in the manuscripts of <i>Njáls saga</i>.

The project The Variance of Njals saga examines variation in the sixty-three medieval and post-medieval manuscripts of Njals saga from a linguistic, philological, and literary perspective. This saga is the most extensive of the Icelandic family sagas and is thought to have been composed around 1280. The following article describes methods used in the project to identify synchronic variation at a linguistic level in the fourteenth century manuscripts of the saga, and aspects of an analysis of the stemmatic relationship between manuscripts. In both fields the development of computer-based approaches has advanced notably in the last few years. However, affordable solutions customised for end-users are still lacking. The project therefore focuses on easy tools that can be applied in a short-term project with limited financial and human resources. The manuscripts are transcribed according to the conventions of MENOTA (Medieval Nordic Text Archive) in TEI-XML; a segmentation allowing for an identification of corresponding contents is added; linguistic features relevant for an examination of variation are tagged; and structures relevant for a comparison are displayed for further analysis with the help of XSLT-style sheets. The article discusses challenges that lie in the peculiarities of medieval writing (non-standardised orthography, abbreviations) and tries to outline practicable solutions. Initial results of comparisons of manuscripts based on this approach show variation not only in the semantic domain (substitution of words), but also in the syntactic domain (change of word order, usage of different syntactical constructions).

A Similarity Detection Method Based on Distance Matrix Model with Row-Column Order penalty Factor

Paper detection involves multiple disciplines, and making a comprehensive and correct evaluation of academic misconduct is quite a complex and sensitive issue. There are some problems in the existing main detection models, such as incomplete segmentation preprocessing specification, impact of the semantic orders on detection, near-synonym evaluation, slow paper backtrack and so on. This paper presents a sentence-level paper similarity comparison model with segmentation preprocessing based on special identifier. This model integrates the characteristics of vector detection, hamming distance and the longest common substring and carries out detection specific to near-synonyms, word deletion and changes in word order by redefining distance matrix and adding ordinal measures, making sentence similarity detection in terms of semantics and backbone word segmentation more effective. Compared with the traditional paper similarity retrieval, the present method adopts modular-2 arithmetic with low computation. Paper detection method with reliability and high efficiency is of great academic significance in word segmentation, similarity detection and document summarization.

Dative shift in a language without dative? The (allative) case of Finnish

Abstract Dative shift is a two-fold process that affects both the morphological coding and the order of T and R arguments of a three-participant construction, as in the teacher gave a book to the student vs. the teacher gave the student a book. Across languages, dative shift tends to express similar functions including differences in animacy, definiteness, semantic role of arguments, affectedness of recipient and permanence of transfer. This is understandable, since dative shift increases the formal transitivity of the affected clauses, and all the expressed functions are somehow related to transitivity. The goal of this paper is to study whether, and to what extent, mere changes in word order suffice to express the functions of dative shift. The examined language is Finnish, which suits very well for this purpose due to its relatively free word order and inherently different coding of Theme and Recipient. It can be hypothesized that mere word order changes readily express features related to definiteness and animacy, while they are less capable of expressing features such as affectedness of the recipient.

Word Order Change in Mandarin Chinese from the Perspective of Syntactic Typology and Universals - A Case Study of the Ba + Gei Structure

In this paper, I first compare features in Mandarin that are related to head directionality with those listed in Greenberg (1966) and Dryer (1992) and examine the hypothesis by Tai (1973) and Li & Thompson (1974) that Mandarin is drifting from an SVO to an SOV language. Then, I study the under-studied ba + gei structure in Mandarin, which reflects the possibility of an emerging split case-marking system, i.e., Nominative-Accusative marking in the usually perfective ba + gei structure and zero-marking elsewhere. Data from Korean, Japanese, and Russian further supports the possible reanalysis in the creation of a case-marking system in the ba + gei structure, which is more of a feature of an SOV language.

Paper Similarity Detection Method Based on Distance Matrix Model with Row-Column Order Penalty Factor

Paper similarity detection depends on grammatical and semantic analysis, word segmentation, similarity detection, document summarization and other technologies, involving multiple disciplines. However, there are some problems in the existing main detection models, such as incomplete segmentation preprocessing specification, impact of the semantic orders on detection, near-synonym evaluation, difficulties in paper backtrack and etc. Therefore, this paper presents a two-step segmentation model of special identifier and Sharpley value specific to above problems, which can improve segmentation accuracy. In the aspect of similarity comparison, a distance matrix model with row-column order penalty factor is proposed, which recognizes new words through search engine exponent. This model integrates the characteristics of vector detection, hamming distance and the longest common substring and carries out detection specific to near-synonyms, word deletion and changes in word order by redefining distance matrix and adding ordinal measures, making sentence similarity detection in terms of semantics and backbone word segmentation more effective. Compared with the traditional paper similarity retrieval, the present method has advantages in accuracy of word segmentation, low computation, reliability and high efficiency, which is of great academic significance in word segmentation, similarity detection and document summarization.

Phrasal verbs: The English verb-particle construction and its history by Stefan Thim (review)

Reviewed by: Phrasal verbs: The English verb-particle construction and its history by Stefan Thim Laurel J. Brinton Phrasal verbs: The English verb-particle construction and its history. By Stefan Thim. (Topics in English linguistics 78.) Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton, 2012. Pp. xiv, 302. ISBN 9783110257021. $140 (Hb). Is the phrasal verb a distinctly English feature that arose at a certain stage in the history of the language and belongs to the colloquial register? In this insightful work, Stefan Thim debunks these ‘myths’. The book is a critical examination of the literature, both synchronic and diachronic, on the topic of the phrasal verb (PV) in English (e.g. carry out, use up, get by). It is not an empirical study of the phenomenon (though T summarizes several short studies of PVs that he has undertaken). The book’s major contribution to an understanding of the history of the PV is T’s contention that a Germanic system of preverbs led to both prefixed verbs and verb-particle combinations [End Page 664] (phrasal or particle verbs) and that it was large-scale changes in word order, not movement of the particle, that led ‘towards almost exceptionless postposition of the particles’ (5). After a brief introductory chapter, Ch. 2 (10–73) sets the groundwork for the diachronic study that follows. It discusses the PV in present-day English and other Germanic languages. T begins by proposing an elegant—although perhaps ultimately somewhat simplified—three-way semantic distinction (or cline) between ‘compositional’ PVs, where the particle may be either directional or aspectual in meaning, and ‘noncompositional’ PVs. T argues that although aspectual particles do not express spatial meaning, the resulting PVs are semantically transparent. He insists on the importance of including compositional forms in any discussion of PVs because they provide ‘the diachronic input to the development of aspectual and idiomatic meanings’ (21) and are the only forms that exhibit all of the syntactic behaviors characteristic of PVs. In a comparative section, T argues that PVs of the three semantic types occur in the present-day Germanic languages, though differing positions of the particles are connected to the basic word order of each language; the ‘striking’ similarities ‘point to their shared historical origins’ (46). T places PVs within the realm of word formation, not phraseology, considering them cases of ‘periphrastic word formation’ belonging to the class of complex predicates. That is, PVs are not free syntactic combinations of verbs and particles but are compounds (of verb plus spatial particle) or derivations (of verb plus aspectual particle); noncompositional PVs are ‘lexicalized complex construction[s]’ (65). Further justification for the concept of ‘periphrastic word formation’ and greater consideration of the literature on collocations might have been useful here. Ch. 3 (74–116) provides the core diachronic argument of the book. T begins with arguments for the existence of preverbs in non-Indo-European and Indo-European languages. Preverbs result from the decategorialization of adverbs in preverb position. In an object-verb language such as Germanic, univerbation of some preverb plus verb syntagms yields prefixed verbs, resulting in a synchronic layering of older prefixed verbs and newer preverb-verb combinations. (In other cases, adverbs may be decategorialized as adpositions, a topic not pursued here.) A densely argued discussion of the complexities of Old English word order—one of the ‘most hotly contested area[s] of English historical syntax’ (90)—ensues; it makes for a rather difficult reading for the uninitiated. T argues that preverbs become postpositions because of the general change from OV to VO order, consisting of movement of the verb in the following sequence (see figure 3-2). 1. original order: O prt V v (prt = particle, v = finite verb, V = nonfinite verb) clause brace: v O prt V exbraciation: v V O prt / extraposition of object: v V prt O The patterns of particle verb placement identified by Risto Hiltunen (1983) in his groundbreaking work thus find explanation. In conclusion, ‘what appears to be a positional change of the particle (from “pre” to “postposition”, etc.) on closer inspection turns out to be a set of positional changes of the elements of the verb phrase and of the postpositional trends observable in objects’ (103...