The function of word order in Turkish grammar By Eser Emine Erguvanli (review)

BOOK NOTICES 221 stantial French/English summaries. [Gary Bevington, Northeastern Illinois University.] Studies in the nominal sentence in Egyptian and Coptic. By J[ohn] B. Callender. (University of California publications in Near Eastern studies, 24.) Berkeley & Los Angeles : University of California Press, 1984. Pp. ix, 221. $21.00. Languages of long ago are of interest to the layman as matters of pure curiosity, and to the linguist as a testing-ground for synchronic and diachronic theory. Unfortunately the data on such languages are, forthe most part, accessible only to specialists. In the case of Egyptian, the writing systems are restricted mainly to consonants , imposing a severe limitation on their interpretabiUty. AU this means that studies which do not require speciaUst knowledge ofthe writing systems, and which deal with manageable chunks of Egyptian grammar, are particularly welcome. Slightly more than halfofCaUender's volume deals with Coptic, the successor to epigraphic Egyptian. C presents what is essentiaUy a catalog of forms and functions through time, specificaUy for 'sentences in which the predicate (nominal) was a noun' (p. 2). The property of specificity turns out to be very important. (Here, an important source not mentioned by Callender is D. Bickerton, The roots of language , Karoma, 1981.) What a wealth of data and examples C presents! He is less successful in explaining the occurrences and developments of the various constructions—partly for lack of a consistent and sophisticated theoretical basis, and perhaps more because the topic is still not adequately handled by any theory. The book is marred by surprising unevenness in production. The programmed offset text with justified margins has too many annoying cases of run-on letters and words—or the opposite, large white spaces. Typos abound (e.g., p. 8, Unes 4-7, incomplete sentence with conclusion dropped; p. 10, Une 15, 'between' is missing; p. 25, Une 5 up, 'Table 3', not 'Table 4'; p. 41, Une 2, 'contrastive', not 'contractive' stress). There is also ajarring overkiU in Cs level ofapproach; e.g., a full page (119) is used to present a tree diagram of 'John is a man,' and an appendix is included tojustify the use of'subject' and 'predicate ' as technical terms. AnomaUes occur; the use of 'congruence' for 'agreement' in some places but not others; complete lack of reference to the important work of C. T. Hodge on Egyptian; and omission of the oft-cited Junge 1978 from the bibliography (which does contain Junge 1976, 1976b—one suspects haste here, as perhaps elsewhere in the text). One hopes that the examples and glosses are more accurate than the narrative text. In short, this book is a promising, if flawed, beginning in an area of great interest, both in terms of the languages (Egyptian, Coptic) and the topics (basically non-verbal and copular sentences ). The lucid discussion ofthe complex history of Egyptian/Coptic varieties, mainly in the copious notes, is a much appreciated fringe benefit . [M. Lionel Bender, Southern Illinois University.] The function of word order in Turkish grammar. By Eser Emine ErguVANLi . (University of California publications in linguistics, 106.) Berkeley & Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984. Pp. xii, 179. $15.00. Turkish is often cited as an example of a canonical SOV language. Yet in a study of adult spoken Turkish by D. Slobin (cited by E, p. 2), only 48% of utterances showed SOV order; indeed , only 56% showed verb-final order, while 6% actually showed verb-initial order. How is the alleged SOV nature of Turkish to be reconcUed with these findings? In E's detailed analysis of word order in Turkish, she does not abandon over-aU basic verb-final structure, but investigates in detail the various factors—in particular pragmatic factors (topic/comment structure)—that determine variations from verb-finality. The core of E's exposition is formed by Chs. 1-2, which examine word order in simplex sentences . Ch. 1 establishes that the position of constituents before the verb is determined by two main principles: the topic of the sentence appears clause-initially, while the focus (essential new information) appears in immediate preverbal position. In Ch. 2, E demonstrates that the position after the verb is reserved for background information. Ch. 3 examines...