Lexical Anaphors and Pronouns in Selected South Asian Languages: A Principled Typology (review)

A collection of fourteen articles on anaphors and pronouns in languages from four different language families, this book should provide a valuable resource for anyone interested in comparative linguistics of South Asian languages or typological research into anaphors and pronouns, especially since all fourteen articles have been prepared using a uniform framework. The languages covered are Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, Telugu, Bangla, Gujarati, Hindi/Urdu, Kashmiri, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi, Sinhala, Mizo, and Juang. The volume finds its origin in a workshop on anaphora held in 1995 in Delhi.

The main interest of one of the editors, Barbara Lust, is not descriptive linguistics but rather Universal Grammar and first language acquisition, and the analysis throughout the book is very much geared toward that aspect, leading to a presentation and choice of material that is less usable for other goals. This is unfortunate because much of the data is here presented for the first time, for instance that on the Austro-Asiatic language Juang.

The theoretical background is ‘Binding Theory’, and all descriptions are geared toward testing three Binding Principles—simple definitions of the terms ‘anaphor’ and ‘pronominal’ and referring expressions. Needless to say, the combination of this background and a stringent outline made it difficult for the authors to present the actual language data. This in turn led to the addition of an extra section (B) to the outline—one in which the authors were able to present the unmarked language data, in contrast with Section A, where they were forced to work with expressions that are marked or even only marginally acceptable to native speakers. After reading all articles, the conclusion can only be that the Binding Principles are at most marginally relevant to the study of anaphors and pronouns.

The materials accompanying the text are of the highest quality. A full index quickly points out where a topic is described for each language, facilitating comparison. The common glossary makes it easy to understand the articles even if the particular theory behind the book is not the reader’s. The introduction does an excellent job of introducing that theory, and the particular outline that is used to prepare each article is given in full in an appendix. Minor disappointments are the lack of a uniform transcription—each language is transcribed using the transcription most usual for that language—and the fact that some of the English is less than clear. A major disappointment is that not all descriptions are complete—in some cases the authors of an article mention three possible forms but only present two in their tables.

This is possibly the first work providing a detailed cross-language description of anaphors and pronouns, and it should make new proposals and conclusions possible—but authors of such proposals will have to check other primary sources, too, to make sure that they work with a complete set of data.

Finally, the book is well-produced, but really too expensive.