Meaning Through Language Contrast (review)

This two-volume set contains selected papers from the Second International Conference on Contrastive Semantics and Pragmatics, held in 2000 at Newnham College, University of Cambridge, and organized by the editors. The forty-two articles are grouped into ten thematic sections and represent a broad spectrum of research on contrastive semantics and pragmatics. Both volumes end in a language, name, and subject index. References and notes relating to the respective articles are placed immediately after each contribution in a reader-friendly way.

Vol. 1 opens with a short editorial preface. In the section on negation Lucia M. Tovena, in ‘Distributional restrictions on negative determiners’ (3–28), discusses restrictions in the distribution and interpretation of negative determiners in English (no), Italian (nessuno, niente), and French (aucun) and tests an existing typology of determiners against new data. João Peres, in ‘Towards a comprehensive view of negative concord’ (29–42), examines the cooccurrence of a standard negation operator and a distinguished expression in Romance languages, for example, Italian non/nessuno or Spanish no/nadie, respectively.

In the section ‘Temporality’, the contributions by Telmo Móia, ‘On temporal constructions involving counting from anchor points: Semantic and pragmatic issues’ (45–59), and Ana Teresa Alves, ‘On the semantics and pragmatics of situational anaphoric temporal locators in Portuguese and in English’ (61–74), compare specific temporal expressions in English and Portuguese. Ilinca Crăiniceanu’s ‘Remarks on the semantics of eventualities with measure phrases in English and Romanian’ (75–100) presents a comparative analysis of the aspectual interpretation of state and event descriptions, situated in the framework of discourse representation theory. Hortènsia Curell offers a corpus-based study in ‘The present perfect in English and in Catalan’ (101–15), and Frederick Kang’ethe Iraki provides a relevance-theoretic comparison of temporal morphemes in Swahili and the French passé simple and passé composé in ‘A contrastive reading of temporal-aspectual morphemes in Swahili: The case of “-li” and “-me” ’ (117–25).

Rui Marques’s paper, ‘Semantic and pragmatic constraints on mood selection’ (129–46), one of two papers on modality, examines differences in the distribution of indicative and subjunctive in complement and adverbial clauses in Romanian, Hungarian, and Modern Greek on the one hand, and Western Romance languages on the other. Alessandro Capone investigates the semantics and pragmatics of the Italian clitic lo in ‘Dilemmas and excogitations: Further considerations on modality, clitics and discourse’ (147–73).

‘Evidentiality’ includes two papers: Sergei Tatevosov’s ‘Inferred evidence: Language-specific properties and universal constraints’ (177–92), which presents a crosslinguistic study of experiential inferential markers in Bagwalal, Tatar, and Mari; and Aurelija Usonienė’s ‘Extension of meaning: Verbs of perception in English and Lithuanian’ (193–220), which is a corpus study of the extension of meaning in verbs of direct and indirect perception in the two languages.

In the section entitled ‘Perspectives on eventualities’, Márta Maleczki deals with ‘Information structure, argument structure, and typological variation’ (223–44) in Hungarian and English; Andrea Sansò’s ‘The network of demotion: Towards a unified account of passive constructions’ (245–59) considers the meaning and use of passive constructions in Spanish and Italian; Mayumi Masuko discusses ‘Valence change and the function of intransitive verbs in English and Japanese’ (261–75), and Patricia Mayes analyzes ‘The transitive/intransitive construction of events in Japanese and English discourse’ (277–91) using data obtained from cooking classes.

The final section in the first volume contains four papers discussing ‘Topics in grammar and conceptualization’: ‘Towards a universal DRT model for the interpretation of directional PPs within a reference frame’ by Didier Maillat (295–305), ‘The interaction of syntax and pragmatics: The case of Japanese “gapless...