Die Pur-Mundart des Waldjurakischen: Grammatikalischer Abriss aufgrund der Materialien von T. V. Lehtisalo By Jänos Pusztay (review)

222 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 62, NUMBER 1 (1986) clauses, (b) constituents within a clause, and (c) constituents across clause boundaries. Ch. 4 deals with word order and stress, and Ch. 5 with adverbs, while Ch. 6 presents general conclusions . Incidentally, the brief conclusions at the end of each main section throughout the book make following the main Une of argument very easy. There are some specific points in E's analysis with which one could take issue. For instance, she notes that, whüe indefinite NP's are in general not permitted in topic position, an exception is made for animates, as in Bir kadm bize do¿ru kojuyor ? woman is running toward us' (15). Unfortunately, the discussion of this particular phenomenon is not entirely clear: on p. 40, E argues that the relevant feature is animacy rather than humanness, but on p. 172 it is stated to be humanness. The rule must be comph'cated, in any event, to exclude even human subjects of passive clauses (164), and one of the examples cited on p. 15 as ungrammatical has an animate subject (*Bir tavuk tencerede pijiyor ? chicken is cooking in the pot.') On some points, E's over-aU analysis might have benefited from a Utile more formaUsm, as a means ofimproving the rigorousness ofthe analysis; thus it remains unclear to what extent initial or preverbal position is a sufficient (as opposed to necessary) condition for a constituent to be assigned topic or focus status. But over-aU, this monograph, by virtue of its detailed consideration of the interaction of syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, is clearly a major contribution to our understanding of word order in Turkish, and to our more general understanding of the interaction ofword order and pragmatics in language. [Bernard COMRIE, USC] Die Pur-Mundart des Waldjurakischen : Grammatikalischer Abriss aufgrund der Materialien von T. V. Lehtisalo. By Jänos Pusztay. (Studia Uralo-Altaica, 23.) Szeged: Universitas Szegediensis de Attila József nominata, 1984. Pp. 161. Of the two dialect groups of Yurak Samoyed (Nenets)—Tundra Yurak and Forest Yurak— the latter is both the more archaic (and thus the more important for comparative UraUc Unguistics ) and the less famiUar. Pusztay presents a grammatical sketch of the Pur dialect of Forest Nenets, based on the materials gathered by Lehtisalo in November 1914. L's materials are organized as a dictionary, although the entries contain enough morphological forms of each entry to permit a partial description of the dialect 's morphology, including morphophonemics —Yurak dialects invariably have complex morphophonemic alternations. Only 58 complete sentences are noted by L, aU of which are Usted by P (137-40). P's grammatical sketch is intended as one of a series of sketches of individual dialects of UraUc languages: this series, Dialectologica Urálica, was proposed at the 5th Congress of Finno-Ugrists in Turku (1980). For UraUc languages spoken in the Soviet Union, the aim is that Soviet scholars wiU base their monographs on their own fieldwork, whüe non-Soviet scholars wiU use the UraUc materials gathered by linguists and ethnographers in the 19th and early 20th centuries. P's monograph is thus essentially a systematization of L's materials from a grammatical, rather than lexicographic, standpoint. L's detailed phonetic transcription is given a phonological analysis (26, 29-31), and there are detailed statements on phonotactic possibilities (31-57). Vowel and consonant alternations are Usted, and theirrelation to different stem classes is discussed (26-9, 57-67). Because of the nature ofL's materials, many morphological forms are not attested. But Pis able to assign the nouns included in L's materials to their etymological stem classes (57-65), and to extract the principles governing many nominal morphological forms (number, case, possession; 68-88) and the basic morphology of the verb (89-103), including both finite and non-finite forms. Other topics treated underinflectional morphology are pronouns, adverbs, postpositions, numerals, and interjections; there is also a detailed section on derivational morphology (11 1-33). Given the nature of the materials, information on syntax is necessarily restricted. The book closes with indexes of suffixes (including a reverse alphabetic index) and morphological tables. Because of lack of access to native speakers...