Greek: A Comprehensive Grammar of the Modern Language, and: Dutch: A Comprehensive Grammar (review)

These two recent offerings in Routledge’s well-produced and reasonably priced ongoing series of grammars are a study in contrasts. While the grammar of Greek is extensive and thorough and deserves a place in any linguist’s library, the grammar of Dutch is partial at best, and will probably not be terribly interesting to most readers of this journal.

Holton et al.’s grammar truly deserves its subtitle as a comprehensive grammar. It is divided into three main parts: phonology (1–41, including a section on orthography), morphology (43–184), and syntax (185–486), followed by four small appendices, a glossary, and an index. It is a thoroughly modern descriptive grammar but accessible to nonspecialists. The sections on the phonology and morphology are excellent and thorough, covering the areas expected in a modern grammar (phonemic inventory [with only slight deviations from the IPA in transcriptions, e.g. δ for ð], the commonest phonological alternations, syllabification, suprasegmentals, full declensional and inflectional information, derivational morphology and compounding). But the part of this grammar which must be singled out for particular praise is its extensive treatment of Greek syntax. Almost two-thirds of the book is devoted to syntactic phenomena, with a section devoted to several major syntactic categories: verb phrases (187–242), noun and adjective phrases (243–349), adverbial phrases (350–69), prepositional phrases (370–408), and the clause (409–86). In each section, recent results and perspectives are brought to bear to great effect, though without distracting theoretical commitments. Thus, in addition to information on word order, use of the various cases and verb forms, and specific details on the use of various constructions, we also find sophisticated discussion of question formation (including multiple wh-questions), anaphora, clitics (including clitic doubling and clitic left dislocation), coordination, relative clauses (including comparison of που and οποíος relatives, free relatives, and correlatives), and the effects of topic and focus on word order in matrix and subordinate clauses. This last is particularly welcome since Greek allows in principle all six possible orders of subject, verb, and object, but different word orders are appropriate in different contexts—other grammars have either been silent on this fact or have left it vague as to when which order is possible.

Donaldson’s grammar of Dutch, on the other hand, is clearly meant as a supplemental aid to classroom instruction at an intermediate level and simply cannot be designated as a ‘comprehensive’ grammar in the usual sense. This is indeed the avowed intention of the book, as D states in the preface (‘[t]his . . . grammar is aimed at the tertiary and upper secondary student’ [xi]), and I have no doubt that it is effective and useful in this role (containing many points of reference for English-speaking learners of Dutch; illustrative of this are section titles such as ‘How to render English “-ing” forms in Dutch’ [196]). But as a reference grammar, it unfortunately will not satisfy the needs of a linguist, either one who knows the language or not. It consists of sixteen chapters of varying length (‘Pronunciation’ [1–6], ‘Spelling’ [7–15], ‘Punctuation’ [16–7], ‘Cases’ [18–9], ‘Articles’ [20–5], ‘Demonstratives’ [26–7], ‘Nouns’ [28–53], ‘Pronouns’ [54–86], ‘Adjectives’ [87–107], ‘Adverbs’ [108–30], ‘Verbs’ [131–224], ‘Conjunctions’ [225–45], ‘Prepositions’ [246–66], ‘Numerals’ [267–83], ‘Er’ [284–90], ‘Negation’ [291–97]), three appendices (298–321), a glossary (322–36), and an index (337–48). On the positive side, it contains extensive and useful discussions of word formation, including lists of verbs followed by prepositions in noncompositional meanings, comprehensive lists of the various classes of irregular verbs, and good discussion of the various uses of the modal verbs (as well as appendices on letter writing and common abbreviations). It is also rich in...