Formal Approaches to Function in Grammar: In Honor of Eloise Jelinek (review)

Eloise Jelinek, the honoree of this festschrift, is best known for her formal treatment of phenomena that traditionally fall under the province of functionalist linguists. These include the interaction of discourse functions and grammar and the nature of information structure, among other things, which she has applied creatively to the analysis of Native American, Semitic, and Australian languages. It is only fitting, then, that her three colleagues who edited this volume should have picked as a unifying theme the extension of the sorts of analyses that Jelinek has put forward in her work, in particular the consideration of more general questions about how ‘function might be formalized’. About half of the contributions are by her fellow Arizonans, the other half from a wide spectrum of linguists, most of whom have made their mark in Native American linguistics.

The volume begins with an introduction by the editors (1–8), which sketches the formalist-functionalist divide within linguistics and comments on the growing interest among formal linguists in the discourse functions of grammatical structure—a fact for which Jelinek is attributed (correctly) a great deal of credit. The essays of Part 1, ‘The pronominal argument hypothesis’ (PAH), center around this hypothesis, which is perhaps Jelinek’s most noteworthy contribution to grammatical theory. In short, PAH posits that languages fall into two classes. Lexical argument languages (the majority) allow full lexical NPs to occur in argument position, while pronominal argument languages allow only pronouns to occur in that position. The full NPs themselves are adjoined in dislocated structures. These different analyses allow the distinct properties of what have been called ‘non-configurational’ and ‘configurational’ languages respectively to be captured in an elegant manner. Ken Hale, in ‘The significance of Eloise Jelinek’s pronominal argument hypothesis’ (11–43), shows how the PAH can provide an elegant alternative to his own head movement analysis of Navajo. Emmon Bach, in ‘Categories and pronominal arguments’ (45–49), raises the question of whether the PAH has implications for word structure differences between polysynthetic and analytic languages. Keren Rice’s chapter, ‘Doubling by agreement in Slave (Northern Athapaskan)’ (52–78), which in fact adopts an alternative to the PAH, focuses on the differences in pronominal markers between Northern Athapaskan languages, like Slave, and those of the American Southwest, like Navajo. The next chapter, ‘Quasi objects in St’át’imcets: On the (semi)-independence of agreement and case’ (80–106), by Henry Davis and Lisa Matthewson, argues that the PAH is challenged by data from St’át’imcets (Lillooet Salish), where DPs function as arguments but are not associated with agreement morphology. And Mark C. Baker, in ‘Agreement, dislocation, and partial configurationality’ (107–32), investigates (and points out problems with) one component of the PAH, namely that full arguments occur dislocated as adjuncts in pronominal argument languages.

Part 2, ‘Interfaces’, contains contributions dealing with the syntax-discourse and phonology-phonetics boundaries. Molly Diesing’s ‘Multiple multiple questions’ (135–53) treats multiple fronting in Yiddish, and Lynn Nichols’s ‘Attitude evaluation in complex NPs’ (155–64) relates the semantic properties of propositional attitudes to aspects of morphosyntactic structure. ‘Topic-focus articulation and degrees of salience in the Prague dependency tree-bank’, by Petr Sgall, Eva Hajičová, and Eva Buráňová (165–77), provides a ‘Praguean’ slant to some of the issues of interest to Jelinek. Part 2 is rounded out by chapters contributed by: Colleen M. Fitzgerald, ‘Word order and discourse genre in Tohono O’oodham’ (180–89); Joyce McDonough, ‘The prosody of interrogative and focus constructions in Navajo’ (191–206); Jane H. Hill, ‘Subject number agreement, grammaticalization, and transitivity in the Cupeño verb construction’ (207–26); Diana A...