A grammar of Tuscarora By Marianne Williams (review)

REVIEWS741 Kroeber, Alfred L. 1939. Cultural and natural areas of native North America. (UCPAAE 38.) Berkeley: University of California Press. Labov, William. 1966. The social stratification of English in New York City. Washington , DC: Center for Applied Linguistics. Sapir, Edward. 1929. Central and North American languages. Encyclopaedia Britannica , 14th ed., vol. 5, 138-41. London & New York: Encyclopaedia Britannica Co. [Reprinted in Selected writings of Edward Sapir in language, culture, and personality , ed. by David G. Mandelbaum, 169-78. Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1949.] Schmidt, Johannes. 1871. Die Verwandtschaftsverhältnisse der indogermanischen Sprachen. Weimar: Böhlau. Swadesh, Morris. 1951. Diffusional cumulation and archaic residue as historical explanations. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 7.1-21. Wissler, Clark. 1922. The American Indian: an introduction to the anthropology of the New World. 2nd ed. New York: Oxford University Press. [Received 7 July 1977.] A grammar of Tuscarora. By Marianne Williams. New York: Garland, 1976. Pp. 315. $28.00. Reviewed by Nancy Bonvillain, SUNY, Stony Brook This work is awelcome addition to the growingliterature on Iroquoian languages. Until recently, the field was represented by two major published works : Lounsbury 1953 and Chafe 1967. Since then, an increasing number of scholars have become interested in Iroquoian linguistics, many of them Lounsbury's students. At the present time, all the currently-spoken Iroquoian languages are being studied. Chafe 1970 deals with Onondaga, as does Woodbury 1975; work has been done on Mohawk by Beatty 1974, Bonvillain 1973, Postal 1963, and Roy Wright (unpublished); Foster is working with texts from Cayuga (1974) ; and Cherokee is being studied by William Cook. These and other works are especially significant at a time when there is concern that some native American languages will cease being spoken. As Williams points out, only forty-five speakers of Tuscarora remain. W's grammar is, as she states, written within the framework of generative semantics. The first chapter, 'The representation of semantic structure', orients us to Tuscarora by providing some of its major underlying semantic and structural properties. In the section on syntax, W states that Tuscarora has basic SVO word order; and she shows how the two additional syntactic sequences attested, i.e. VSO and OSV, result from Focus Fronting and are therefore derived. The constituent chosen for focus is shifted to initial position in the sentence ; thus the orders VSO and OSV can result from constituent fronting. The logically possible orders VOS, OVS, and SOV never occur in Tuscarora, which they should not according to W's rules. She adds an interesting perspective on the meaning of focus by several examples which provide the non-linguistic context in which a statement is made, showing how language is manipulated in actual usage. The first chapter also discusses noun incorporation, a process familiar to many native American languages and one which occurs with great frequency in the Iroquoian family. W discusses the conditions under which the semantic patient may be incorporated into the verb stem. The examples given as typical are: 742LANGUAGE, VOLUME 54, NUMBER 3 (1978) /wa?kheTA?NARatya?thah0/ ? bought her some bread.' /wa?kNAHsá:tya?t/? bought a house.' /yo?na?TSHÁRhA/'The door is closed.' /kaHÉHNakwahst/'The field is good.' W points out that, as in other Iroquoian languages, there are 'classifier stems' which 'may be incorporated into a verb while a different but coreferent noun occupies the external subject or object position' (59-60). An example is /nehraTASKwáhkhwa? ha? tsi:r/ 'He is a dog catcher' (literally: 'He picks up domestic animals, namely dogs.') The largest portion of the grammar deals with the Tuscarora verb. W provides a broad outline of the semantic and structural categories contained within the verb, i.e. the verb base, aspect suffixes, prepronominal prefixes, and pronominal prefixes. She discusses the categories in this order (rather than in their surface arrangement) to show the process of formation 'from underlying semantic structure toward the surface' (66). W then proceeds with a detailed description of these semantic/structural categories. Within each there are optional markers which add further specifications to the verb, allowing for an ever-expanding complexity of structure and meaning. Since the total number of markers is so large, organizational charts...