Deiktikon, Artikel, Nominalphrase: Zur Emergenz syntaktischer Struktur By Nikolaus P. Himmelmann (review)

BOOK NOTICES 217 from an Arab country: 'he woke up in a bad temper and he wanted a fresh air' (77). The interesting question asked of the students here focuses on stating the interlanguage generalizations of the speaker. Presumably , if one can account for this, one is in a better position to assist the native speaker ofArabic in moving up a rung on the native-speaker fluency ladder. It would have been quite useful to see this text in an IPA transcription, making the phonological interlanguage manifest. The authors have produced a valuable pedagogical tool, effectively designed to assist students master crucial applied linguistic techniques and methodology . [Alan S. Kaye, California State University, Fullerton.] The acquisition of Dutch. Ed. by Steven Gillis and Annick De Houwer. (Pragmatics and beyond new series, 52.) Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins , 1998. Pp. xvi, 437. This anthology is an invaluable reference work for those interested in child language acquisition. As Catherine Snow points out in her preface to the volume (ix-xvi), the disproportionately heavy reliance on English in the theoretical literature on child language acquisition underscores the need for crosslinguistic research and, I would add, more collections modeled on the present volume. Despite its relatively small number of native speakers, Dutch is important for the fact that it has been so well studiedby linguists working from a variety of theoretical perspectives. Further, there is a similarly rich literature on its acquisition by preschool age children reflected, for example , in the wealth of Dutch data included in the CHILDES database. What this volume provides is a thorough synthesis of what is known about the acquisition of Dutch, especially its phonetics, phonology, syntax, and lexicon. The volume consists offive major sections, a comprehensive overview followed by four 'thematic' chapters, each focusing on a particular area of structure and situating the Dutch data in the relevant theoretical literature. The overview chapter by Annick De Houwer and Steven Gillis (1-100) is descriptively oriented and summarizes the major empincal trends observable in the acquisition of the areas of Dutch structure to be dealt with in more detail in the following chapters. It also addresses empirical and methodological questions not discussed in depth in the thematic chapters, including pragmatic development , as well as the tools and resources available to elicit and organize Dutch data. In the second chapter, (101-62), Florien J. KoopMANS -VAN Beinum and Jeannette M. van der Stelt follow a source-filter sensorimotor approach to the analysis of infant phonetic development, which they divide into six stages from birth to approximately 40 weeks. They then apply this classification system to research into normalization, diagnosis, and motherinfant interaction. This chapter is followed by Paula Fikkert's chapter on phonological acquisition (163-222). Fikkert's convincing analysis of the Dutch data is strongly innatist whereby she argues that the major segmental and prosodie phenomena follow from the child's incremental setting ofparameters relevant to structures at the syllable, foot, and word levels. Frank Wuen and Maaike Verrips (223-99) adopt a similarly innatist position to account for the development of Dutch syntax. Their review of the various accounts for the acquisition of verb-final and verb-second patterns, as well as overall clause structure in Dutch, highlights the major conceptual issues, though it could have been complemented by at least some reference to the considerable literature on these topics for German. The authors also address a number of important aspects of argument structure, especially the perennial question of how to account for missing subjects in child interlanguage as well as for binding phenomena. Rounding out this volume, Loekie Elbers and Anita van Loon-Vervoorn (301-77) consider Dutch lexical acquisition and advance a two-network model of adult lexical knowledge , one experiential, the other verbal, which in adults is the result of a shift away from the former toward the latter during child development. Of special importance in their analysis is their balanced treatment ofboth adult input and child output. [Mark L. Louden, University of Texas at Austin.] Deiktikon, Artikel, Nominalphrase: Zur Emergenz syntaktischer Struktur. By Nikolaus P. Himmelmann. (Linguistische Arbeiten 362.) Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1997. Pp. xiv, 330. This study is an important contribution to...