Cheyenne major constituent order By Elena M. Leman (review)

BOOK NOTICES 489 the collection come from English and Japanese, this volume is useful to linguists who can benefit from this focus, but it is also valuable to anyone who is interested in contrasting formal and functional accounts in general. [Noriko Watanabe, University of Wisconsin, Madison.] Sociolinguistics in Japanese contexts. By Takesi Sibata (Contribution to the sociology of language 81.) Ed. by Tetsuya Kunthtro, FuMio Inoue and Daniel Long. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1999. Pp 489. The book is a collection of selected papers by Takesi Sibata, whom many regard as the most influential sociolinguist in Japan. S's work is a substantial contribution to the field of sociolinguistics at large, especially to descriptive dialectology. The majority of his work, however, is not available in English because he published in Tapanese. The editors have brought his work into English with this volume. The original publication dates of the papers range from 1952 to 1987. The book contains 24 papers grouped into five major sections. The introductory chapter by the editors describes the significance of S's work. The book also includes a complete bibliography of S's work up to 1996. The first section, "The study of sociolinguistics ' (6-87), four papers, introduces the concept of gengo seikatsu 'language life' which represents the sensitivity and detailed attention Tapanese sociolinguistics has given to the study of language as it relates to daily life. The concept stems from S's philosophy that language is the object of study, but how people use the language to live their lives is the focus of attention. ? 24 hour survey of the language life of the Tapanese' represents this type of thorough descriptive approach. The second section (91-180) is on honorifics, whose use is inevitably affected by such contextual factors as social role identities of the users and social relations between them. The five papers in the section examine honorifics in general, a polite prefix o-, acquisition of the honorific term haha 'mother', and address terms and kinship. The third section (183-273) is on language change. "The rise and fall of dialects' offers an indepth account of the sociopsychological politics of regional varieties. An historical and theoretical explication of kyootsuu-go 'Common Language' will interest a wide range of readers and will compel them to reexamine the meaning of 'Standard Tapanese'. The section also includes studies on the development of a regional common language in Hokkaido, an area with a relatively short history of major settlement by Tapanese speakers. 'Sociolect and idiolect', the fourth section (277-370), deals with how newly introduced expressions spread in a group and who the initiators, 'language bosses' in S's terms, are. The last section, 'Norms of language' (371-93), has three papers that contain general discussions of the role of language norms including phonological, grammatical, and pragmatic norms. Written for a newspaper column, the last, short article on discriminatory expressions gives S's thoughts on taboo words, that is, policing of language use. Overall, the strength ofthis volume is that, because many ofthe papers are written in plain, nontechnical language, it is readily accessible to readers outside Japanese linguistics or even outside linguistics. In addition, because S's work spans the period in which many social and linguistic changes occurred, some of the papers can be read as historical documentation of language life in Japan. [Noriko Watanabe, University of Wisconsin, Madison.] Cheyenne major constituent order. By Elena M. Leman. Dallas, TX: Summer Institute of Linguistics, 1999. Pp. 95. In this reworking ofher University ofOregon master 's thesis, Elena Leman investigates the factors that might be at work in determining word order in Cheyenne , a 'free word-order' language ofthe Algonquian family. She examines both previously collected texts (traditional narratives) and experimentally elicited data to test various hypotheses. The book is organized into six chapters plus a conclusion and appendices. The first chapter is a very brief introduction to the goals of the study, while Ch. 2 is a five-page crash course on Algonquian morphosyntax , with sections devoted to obviation, verb agreement, and basic grammatical roles. The meat of the study begins with Ch. 3, ? typological perspective '. Here L examines various proposals to explain word order...