An Old Prussian grammar: the phonology and morphology of the three Catechisms By William R. Schmalstieg, and: Studies in Old Prussian: a critical review of the relevant literature in the field since 1945 By William R. Schmalstieg (review)

REVIEWS707 but Russ. kusat' obligatorily requires a direct-object NP node—which may, however , be empty, in which case its emptiness must be marked by -sja. In other words, a crucial role is played by the difference between an empty node and the absence of a node. However, Russ. pisat' 'to write' behaves like Ger. beissen, rather than like Russ. kusat'; cf. ¿enjapiset (*pisetsja) '2enja is writing.' Although all these patterns can be handled byad-hocemptynodes (e.g. forkusat' butnotforpisat')plus ageneral rule of marking derived intransitives, this seems no better, and considerably less direct, than saying that these languages all have a rule of (unspecified and/or recoverable) direct-object deletion, but that the languages (and often individual lexical items within the language) differ as to whether this derived intransitivity must be marked. Still, these reservations do not detract from the over-all positive impression made by Cranmer's study. REFERENCES Babby, L. H. 1975. A transformational analysis of transitive -sja verbs in Russian. Lingua 35.297-332. Bowers, J. ms. The theory of grammatical relations. To appear, Cornell University Press. RÛztCka, R. 1963. O transformacionnom opisanii tak nazyvaemyx bezlicnyx predlozenij ? sovremennom russkom jazyke. Voprosy Jazykoznanija 3.22-31. [Received 12 July 1977.] An Old Prussian grammar: the phonology and morphology of the three Catechisms. By William R. Schmalstieg. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1974. Pp. 385. $13.50. Studies in Old Prussian: a critical review of the relevant literature in the field since 1945. By William R. Schmalstieg. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976. Pp. 420. $14.50. Reviewed by Lew R. Micklesen, University of Washington In these two companion volumes, Schmalstieg offers Balticists and IndoEuropeanists his own analysis of Old Prussian morphophonology and a forthright critical exposition of the state of the art in OP studies. The volume published first, Old Prussian grammar (OPG), represents a grammatical analysis of the only extensive connected texts in Old Prussian—the three translations of Luther's Catechism, all dating from the middle of the 16th century and comprising about 66 pages of OP text. OPG first tackles (rather briefly) the phonology, including the critical subheadings of orthography, vowels, stress, and consonants; it then proceeds to morphology, with more or less extensive subdivisions for nouns, adjectives, numerals, adverbs, pronouns, prefixes, prepositions, conjunctions, verbs, the non-finite forms of the verb, and the periphrastic tenses. The book concludes with an exhaustive word index, footnotes, and references. The section on morphology is really the heart of the book; it covers close to 200 pages, listing every grammatical form of every word recorded in the catechisms, both in Schmalstieg's 708LANGUAGE, VOLUME 54, NUMBER 3 (1978) phonemic transcription and in the original orthography, and it includes in most cases some basic etymological information. But why do we have no discussion (or even mention) of OP syntax, and no texts or samples of texts? Is the syntax too obvious, or too confusing, or are the extant texts too meager? Are there already sufficient editions of OP texts, or will another volume provide these ? The second book, Studies in Old Prussian (SOP), is exactly what its subtitle states. This study represents an enormous amount of work and careful thought : omitting only onomastics, it runs the gamut of main topics such as the OP people, the Sudovians or Jatvingians, the OP language, the OP texts, phonology, the morphology of various parts of speech, miscellanea, and recent etymologies. Each topic is embellished by numerous subdivisions. Both books were prepared from camera-ready typescript; and different type fonts could not be utilized for headings or emphasis. To offset this disadvantage, OPG uses some spacing and indentations ; but SOP has a particularly dense format, spacing between subsections only in the first two sections. After that point, there must have been a decision to reduce the size of the book, because the bulk of it has no spaces whatsoever between numbered subsections. This is also true in the morphological sections of OPG, but here a certain amount of indentation is helpful. The problem of course, is that a densely-printed page, plus the lack of distinctive fonts, necessarily prolongs the search for cross-references when a specific page...