Noun Phrase Structure in the Languages of Europe (review)

This book represents the seventh volume in the EUROTYP series of nine volumes reporting the results of the European research project ‘Typology of languages in Europe’. As the title indicates, the volume presents twelve papers, including an introductory section, that examine typological issues related to noun phrases in the European languages. The collection is divided into four parts, an introductory section and three parts dedicated to particular aspects of noun phrases. Also included are indices of subjects, languages, and authors, as well as two tables of contents and a list of contributors.

In the introductory section, ‘Noun phrase structure: An und für sich, in time and in space’, Frans Plank provides the background for the EUROTYP research and in particular the objectives of the typological research that is undertaken by the contributors in the volume. Part 2 of the collection focuses on nominal inflection and contains four related papers. Aleksandr E. Kibrik’s offering, ‘Nominal inflection galore: Daghestanian, with side glances at Europe and the world’, discusses the case system of Daghestanian languages as well as other formal systems of nominal inflection. Edith Moravcsik presents the morphological properties of nominal inflection in Hungarian in ‘Inflectional morphology in the Hungarian noun phrase: A typological assessment’. Moravcsik also provides a number of typological generalizations related to the nominal system of European languages. In a second paper, Frans Plank presents ‘The selective elaboration of nominal or pronominal inflection’. Investigating a large amount of crosslinguistic data, the author presents the surprising fact that nominal inflection is elaborated more than pronominal inflection in a number of languages. He also shows that the complexity of number, pronominal distance, and person correlate with each other in the languages under investigation. In the final offering of this part, Greville G. Corbett investigates ‘Types of typology, illustrated from gender systems’. The paper is devoted to the issues of gender assignment and most importantly gender resolution, that is, the rules that determine agreement in situations where there can be more than one type of gender feature that can be potentially assigned to the target element.

Part 3 of the collection is called ‘On (over-)determination’ and explores issues related to the properties of the determiner systems in the languages involved. The first paper in this part is again a contribution by Frans Plank and is entitled ‘Double articulation’. It investigates crosslinguistic cases of noun phrases that exhibit definiteness ‘spreading’ phenomena, that is, multiple occurrences of definiteness markers in the same noun phrase. In ‘Non-compositional definiteness marking in Hungarian noun phrases’, Edith Moravcsik also investigates over-marking as well as undermarking of nominal properties within the same noun phrase with reference to the expression of definiteness in the Hungarian noun phrase. David Gil, in ‘English goes Asian: Number and (in)definiteness in the Singlish noun phrase’, explores the relation between determiner-type elements and the interpretation of number in the noun phrase of the variety of English spoken in Singapore. In the final paper of this part, ‘A woman of sin, a man of duty, and a hell of a mess: Non-determiner genitives in Swedish’, Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm explores the distribution of three different types of genitives in Swedish, showing that their behavior indicates that they belong to different classes.

The last part of the volume, ‘On amplification’, is devoted to complex noun phrases formed by modified, possessed, nominalized, and coordinated noun phrases. The first paper, ‘The interaction between numerals and nouns’, by James R. Hurford, provides a descriptive survey of the distribution of noun-modifying cardinal numerals based on data mainly from European languages but also from other areas. In the next two contributions, Maria Koptjevskaja-Tamm describes the typological properties of ‘Possessive noun phrases in the languages of Europe’ and ‘Action nominal constructions in the languages of Europe’. The final paper of the collection, ‘Noun phrase conjunction: The coordinative and the...