The Romance languages By Rebecca Posner (review)

REVIEWS175 to choose this well written and finely edited book for a rewarding glimpse at the state of the art in semantic theory. REFERENCES Barwise, John, and John Perry. 1983. Situations and attitudes. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Carpenter, Robert. 1992. The logic of typed feature structures: With applications to unification grammars, logic programs, and constraint resolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Church, Alonzo. 1936. An unsolvable problem of elementary number theory. American Journal of Mathematics 58.345-63. Curry, H. B., and Richard Feys. 1958. Combinatory logic, volume 1. North-Holland, Amsterdam, London, New York: Elsevier. Gabbay, Dov. 1997. Labelled deductive systems. Oxford: Oxford University Press, to appear. Groenendijk, Jeroen, and Martin Stokhof. 1991. Dynamic predicate logic. Linguistics and Philosophy 14.39-100. Heim, Irene. 1982. The semantics of definite and indefinite noun phrases. MIT dissertation. Janssen, Theo M. V. 1997. Compositionality, with an appendix by B. Partee. Handbook of logic and linguistics, ed. by J. F. A. K. van Benthem and A. ter Meulen. Amsterdam: Elsevier, to appear. Kamp, Hans. 1981. A theory of truth and semantic representation. Formal methods in the study of language: Proceedings of the third Amsterdam colloquium, ed. by J. Groenendijk, T. Janssen, and M. Stockhof, 277-322. Amsterdam: Mathematical Centre Tracts. Lambek, Joachim. 1958. The mathematics of sentence structure. American Mathematical Monthly 65.154-69. Link, Gerhardt. 1983. The logical analysis of plurals and mass terms: A lattice-theoretical approach. Meaning , use, and interpretation, ed. by R. Bäuerle et al., 302-23. Berlin: de Gruyter. Montague, Richard. 1 973. The proper treatment ofquantification in ordinary English. Approaches to natural language, ed. by K. J. J. Hintikka, J. M. E. Moravcsik, and P. Suppes. 221-42. Dordrecht: Reidel. ------ 1974. Formal philosophy: Selected papers of Richard Montague. Ed. by Richmond H. Thomason. New Haven & London. Yale University Press. Moortgat, Michael. 1988. Categorial investigations: Logical and linguistic aspects of the Lambek calculus. Dordrecht: Foris. Morrill, Glyn V. 1994. Type logical grammar: Categorial logic of signs. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Shieber, Stuart. 1986. An introduction to unification-based approaches to grammar. CSLI lecture notes 4. Stanford: CSLI. Veltman, Frank. 1997. Defaults in update semantics. Journal of Philosophical Logic, to appear. Verkuyl, Henk J. 1996. A theory of aspectuality: The interaction between temporal and atemporal structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zadrozny, Wlodek. 1994. From compositional to systematic semantics. Linguistics and Philosophy 17.329-42. The MITRE Corp. 1820 Dolley Madison Blvd. McLean, VA 22102-3481 [obrst@mitre.org] P.O. Box 16858, MS P29-99 Philadelphia, PA 19142-0858 [leo.obrst@boeing.com] The Romance languages. By Rebecca Posner. (Cambridge language surveys.) Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xxii, 376. Reviewed by Ernst Pulgram, University of Michigan The edifice of Romance philology-linguistics is vast indeed. It must accommodate more than two millennia of history and cover a domain stretching from the Black Sea to the Atlantic, reaching over into the New World from Mexico to Patagonia, include large areas of Canada, and Romance creóles strewn all over the world (see the excellent maps xviii-xxii). (Posner 176LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 1 (1998) considers creóles 'typologically un-Romance' (39), admitting them, however, to the conventional Romance family but not to what she calls the 'exclusive Romance ' 'club' ' of national and literary languages' (38-39). More often than not, 'language' in P's text refers, not to a member of the club, but to a subdiasystem, e.g. French, of the Romance super-diasystem.) P did not intend this book to be the ordinary manual of Romance languages. '[I was] aiming at a theoretical coverage of topics that I believe to be of interest to all linguists, combining both synchronic and diachronic material, drawn from a wide variety of Romance varieties, and not merely standard languages' (xiii). Since her 'choice of topics is somewhat subjective', she looks 'in rather more detail on some of them than would be possible in a general survey' (30). In the introduction (1-31), which includes a brief 'History of Romance comparative grammar' (2-7), P tries 'to give examples of how study of the Romance languages has contributed to knowledge about languages in general' (30). The core of the book is Part I, 'The...