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Reviewed by:
  • Haida syntax by John Enrico
  • Philip W. Davis
Haida syntax. By John Enrico. (Studies in the anthropology of North American Indians.) 2 vols. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2003. Pp. xiii, 1,387. ISBN 0803218222. $200 (Hb).

Not too long ago (certainly within living memory), descriptions (including dissertations) of American Indian languages with titles such as A grammar of X contained little or no information on the syntax of X. Twenty pages would be about the most one could expect. This expectation can be laid to rest with John Enrico’s massive two-volume study devoted entirely to Haida syntax.

The book is organized linearly into an introduction plus twenty chapters. In the introduction, fundamentals of the Haida clause are presented. While the presence of such terms as ‘projection’ and ‘I(nflection) node’ might lead us to expect a description crafted into a formal frame, this is not the case. In the remaining chapters, the language is set forth using a generally neutral functional-typological vocabulary. The nine chapters completing Vol. 1 include: word order, roles, and split intransitivity; a classification of sentences by their pragmatic functions; focus and its relation to negation; topic; anaphora, both within and between sentences; personal pronouns; questions and indefiniteness; further organization of the clause in terms of complements and adjuncts; and relative clauses. Vol. 2 begins with two chapters on the NP, one focusing on prehead material and one on post-head material. There are four chapters on complex expressions: finite and nonfactive clausal complements, infinitival and ablaut clauses and nominalizations, clausal adjuncts, and phrasal conjunction. The next chapter explores the notion of cause and its expression. There are two chapters on the verb, one detailing the components of the verb complex and another on aspect. This is followed by a seemingly out-of-order chapter on compound nominals. The work concludes with a chapter on language use as found in narratives.

Some of the highlights of the description include (i) reliance on the idea of ‘potency’ of the participants in an event to elucidate variations in word order (Ch. 2), (ii) ‘standpoint’ in explicating the motivation of extraposition (Ch. 4), and (iii) ‘control’ in the discussion of infinitival clauses (Ch. 14), among others.

The data on which Haida syntax relies is derived [End Page 196] from several sources. E himself was for twelve years a participant-observer in the household of one of the speakers (xii). Prior work on Haida, especially John R. Swanton’s texts, is the second source of data, and elicitation (textual and nontextual) is the third. E’s exploitation of all possible sources is to be applauded. Two desiderata would be the inclusion of conversational data in the last chapter on language use and, given the length of the book, a more elaborate index. The former would have been especially exciting since the language is a moribund American Indian language, and few linguists have had the intimate contact with their language(s) that E has. Haida is fortunate to have had a linguist so dedicated to its documentation, and we are the beneficiaries.

Philip W. Davis
Rice University
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