Colloquium on Spanish and Luso-Brazilian Linguistics Edited by James P. Lantolf et al. (review)

BOOK NOTICES 235 terpreted to include any linguistic expression of time reference, whether lexicalized (adverbials) or grammaticalized (tense in the narrower sense), although concern is primarily with the latter. Vannebo's detailed pre-theoretical account of the functions of the Norwegian tenses is followed by a formal description generating tenses (and also adverbials) from semantic primes. Part I gives a general account of deixis and time reference, methodology, and an outline of the forms to be discussed. Part II, the body of the book, enumerates, with copious exemplification (both textual and made-up), the functions of the Norwegian tenses: Present, Preterit, Perfect , Pluperfect, Future, Future Perfect (Second Future), Conditional, and Conditional Perfect (Second Conditional). In discussing their functions , V notes both time reference and other parameters, such as modal or stylistically conditioned factors. In addition to its value as a detailed account of Norwegian tense, Vs discussion also feeds directly into work on tense in English, given the close parallelism of tense uses in the two languages—even down to points of detail (e.g. the use of the Perfect in Jeg har bodd her i Trondheim ifem àr ? have lived here in T. for five years.') In the more formal account in Part III, especially Chap. 8, V analyses Norwegian tenses in terms of three time points—time ofutterance (tu), time of event (th), and time of focus (tf)— and binary relations 'before', 'after', and 'simultaneous '. Time of focus is needed in particular to distinguish between Preterit (th simultaneous tf & tf before tu) and Perfect (th before tf & tf simultaneous t„). This attempt to analyse the Perfect purely in terms of time reference leads to the questionable conclusion that the relation of Perfect to Present is the same as that of Pluperfect to Preterit, despite the evidence that Pluperfect neutralizes the preterit/perfect distinction relative to a past time point. Despite such specific lapses, Vs book is an important contribution to the literature on tense in European languages. [Bernard Comrie, USC] Colloquium on Spanish and Luso-Brazilian Linguistics. Edited by James P. LANTOLFet al. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 1979. Pp. 159. These nine papers are selected from the twenty-one presented at the 1976 Colloquium on Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian Linguistics at SUNY Oswego, the third such colloquium to be held. According to the introduction, papers were presented on a variety of topics, but only a reduced number of topics were included in this volume. Mentioned as represented, but absent from this collection, are the areas of language acquisition and language change. The papers all address problems in the fields of Spanish and Portuguese linguistic research which have (or could have) an impact on general theoretical issues. However, the focus of most of the papers is not to use Spanish data to illustrate a particular theoretical proposal, but to use previous proposals to show how the Spanish and Portuguese data are illuminated by the model. The reader should not expect any breakthrough proposals here; however, most of the papers add some new light to standard problems in Spanish and Portuguese. There are three papers in phonology, ofwhich Karen Kvavik's is probably the most innovative . Her research on intonation in Spanish, using a Melodic Analyzer, is the most detailed and interesting I have encountered. In this paper she tries to relate complex intonations with emphasis , assertion, and certain affective speech functions. Jeffery Elman's paper is another in a long series of treatments of stress assignment within a generative framework. After experimenting with borrowings and nonsense words, Elman argues that synchronic stress assignment in Spanish is not governed by a single rule, but results from a complex set of processes by which a native speaker assigns a word to a particular stress class. Robert Hammond's paper on the velar nasal in Cuban speech consists mainly of tables of frequencies of surface manifestations of syllable - and word-final nasals. It is plagued by the inclusion ofdata with no statistical significance, and no real analysis is given in terms of competing constraints on the variable rules in question. The five papers on syntax and semantics are limited in scope to two topics: the clitic pronouns and the copulas. The two papers...