Linguistics in the Netherlands 1996 ed. by Crit Cremers and Marcel den Dirken (review)

BOOK NOTICES 669 base position in order to avoid a violation ofthe ECP. Here S's privileging of representational over derivational economy conditions becomes very apparent since such an analysis would be ruled out under strict economy conditions. The argument that PRO should be disallowed as the theme subject of an experiencer verb (since after relowering it would be governed by the verb, in violation of the PRO theorem) seems somewhat weak; a sentence such as The phone bill threatens [PRO to worry Jean] seems fine, contrary to S's proposal. S has brought together a number of traditionally thorny problems for syntactic theory and has boldly tackled them in a manner which seeks to unify them under the banner of certain assumptions about representation and licensing. This book should be read by anyone interested in how interpretation facts can shed light on structure, a central and still largely unresolved issue in syntactic theory. [David Parkinson, Microsoft Corporation.] Russian learners' dictionary: 10,000 words in frequency order. By Nicholas J. Brown. London & New York: Routledge , 1996. Pp. 429. $26.95. It is clear from its title that this Russian dictionary, organized according to word frequency, is intended to serve a well-defined pedagogical purpose, i.e. the acquisition of vocabulary by an English-speaking university student of the Russian language. The dictionary is divided into three major sections: 'Introduction' (1-14), '10,000 words in frequency order' (15-306), and 'Index' (307-429) The introduction is devoted to a discussion of the compilation of the dictionary and the methodological issues associated with its compilation; it also contains a brief sketch of the type of grammatical information included in the dictionary. The second section is the body of the dictionary. Russian words are listed according to relative frequency; no numerical statistics are presented, with only a briefgeneral outline given in the introduction. The English gloss(es) of each Russian word is given along with any irregular forms in the paradigm of that word. The aspectual partners are included in verb entries though the two aspects of a verb are treated as two separate lexemes. The first 600 entries also include a short phrase/sentence in Russian to illustrate usage along with a corresponding English gloss. The index contains an alphabetical listing of the 10,000 words in the dictionary along with their English equivalent(s). The two primary sources upon which the dictionary is based are L. N. Zasorina (1977. Chastotnyi slovar' russkogo iazyka [Russian frequency dictionary ], Moscow: Russkii iazyk) and Lennart Lönngren (1993. Chastotnyi slovar' sovremennogo russkogo iazyka [Modern Russian frequency dictionary], Uppsala : Studia Slavica Upsaliensia 32). Brown openly acknowledges that he has supplemented these statistically oriented frequency lists with 'non-statistical intuition'. It would be possible to quibble over the inclusion and/or exclusion of specific lexical items, but total agreement on a number like 10,000 is quixotic . I do have one small criticism concerning the presentation of the frequency list. From item 2,000 onwards there are large blocks of words in alphabetical order. The words appearing within these blocks occur at equal frequency. These blocks are neither listed in the introduction nor graphically marked in the actual frequency list. They should be quickly identifiable in order to increase the ease of use of the dictionary. Finally, minor misspellings (items no. 4848 and 7461) seem to be unavoidable in a frequency list of this magnitude. B's dictionary undoubtedly achieves its stated aim of telling language learners which Russian words they should learn and in which order. For language learners of Russian, this dictionary can function as a useful yardstick by which they can gauge their development and 'fill in' gaps in their basic wordstock. It can be a particularly valuable resource for the language instructorfaced with the daunting task offacilitating vocabulary acquisition. [Helen Serdjuk, University of Pennsylvania.] Linguistics in the Netherlands 1996. Ed. by Crit Cremers and Marcel den Dirken . (AVT publication 13.) Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1996. Pp. ix, 268. $48.00. This book contains selected papers from the 27th annual meeting of the Linguistic Society of the Netherlands , which was held in Utrecht on January 20, 1996. The 22 papers (not 20, as mentioned...