Le verbe en gbaya: étude syntaxique et sémantique du syntagme verbal en gbáyá kàrá 'bòdòè (République Centrafricaine) By Paulette Roulon (review)

REVIEWS711 connected with the loss of length contrasts in certain environments. One wonders how an 'a' is to be lowered. Could it be ?'? One of S's basic premises is that o lowers to a, but this is supposedly a Balto-Slavic change. Further checking of the references given here reveals that an o-stem acc.pl. will pass through the following stages: därons > därans > däräs > därans > durons > däruns > därüs > däry. The second därans in this sequence is derived by an elaborate analogical process involving definite adjectives. The whole scheme purports to explain some puzzling instances of case syncretism in Slavic. It would seem that analogy has been at work here, but hardly in so contrived a manner. On the whole, S has done an admirable job of marshaling, summarizing, and criticizing the OP research results of the last thirty years. In his critical comments and in his own writings, he can perhaps be faulted for excessive speculation, but Old Prussian is an area that forces speculation. Both books will be indispensable to Balticists, and very stimulating to any scholar with Indo-European interests. Old Prussian is one of the few fields where such a detailed critical summary can be produced in real time. What a boon it would be, both to established scholars and to neophytes, ifevery generation could benefit from critical reviews of the substantive issues in all fields! I congratulate S on hitting upon this method of presentation. These books are not easy to read, but they are very rewarding and informative; and the reader will quickly begin to appreciate Schmalstieg's forthright discussion of the many controversial questions in Old Prussian. [Received 12 August 1977.] Le verbe en gbaya: étude syntaxique et sémantique du syntagme verbal en gbáyá kàra 'bôdoè (République Centrafricaine). By Paulette Roulon. (Bibliothèque de la SELAF, 51-52.) Paris: Société d'Études Linguistiques et Anthropologiques de France, 1975. Pp. 187. Reviewed by William J. Samarin, University of Toronto We have witnessed in France a recent eruption in field research. Most of it has been done in former French colonies—much of it, like this one, in Africa; but South America, the Pacific islands, and even Nepal have been visited by French investigators. This activity interestingly parallels the era of 'descriptive linguistics' in the United States: the effort to write grammars of 'unwritten languages' has been coupled with ethnographic work. The center for all this activity is the Paris-based Centre National de Ia Recherche Scientifique, with its teams of workers, projects, project directors, seminars, conferences, and research reports. This study by Roulon issues from the activities of the group labelled ER (presumably Équipe de Recherche) 74, which has been concerned with central Africa—Chad, Cameroon, and the Central African Republic (now Empire). Its director from the beginning, as far as I know, has been Jacqueline Thomas.1 The major publishing outlet for ER 74 is the Société d'Études 1 She is also director of the Laboratoire des Langues et Civilisations à Tradition Orale (27, rue Paul Bert, 94200 Ivry, France), which was established in 1976. According to its first research report, 'Il a pour objectif l'étude des civilisations de i'oralité par l'approche linguistique et par l'analyse de la tradition orale. Le principe fondamental garant de son homogénéité réside dans la conception de la langue, structure de Ia société, considérée dans sa fonction essentielle de communication' (Rapport d'activité, 1977, p. 8). 712LANGUAGE, VOLUME 54, NUMBER 3 (1978) Linguistiques et Anthropologiques de France. I know little of its activities, but there is reason to believe that it was founded by Thomas and her team; its first publication appeared in 1967. ER 74 has developed its own framework for the description of languages, but its essentials are those of André Martinet's neo-Praguean distributionalism. For example, the traits that define grammatical categories include: type of sentence ('énoncé'); position in a given type of sentence; possibilities of substitution, co-existence, and mutual exclusion; possibilities ofcombinations; and membership in a given type of inventory (33). Thus there are...