Il dialetto lucano di Calvello By Joseph Gioscio (review)

BOOK NOTICES 719 This testimonial volume of 14 essays is dedicated to Lawrence B. Kiddle, Professor Emeritus of Romance Linguistics at the University of Michigan. Colleague and editor Pulgram, in his succinct preface, characterizes contributors (graduates ofthe Michigan Romance Linguistics program during the last 30 years) and their contributions —synchronic and diachronic in approach , focusing on Romance in general, or more sharply on Catalan, French, Italian, Rumanian , and Spanish. This equally succinct exposition will follow the alphabetic arrangement of the essays. J. Ashby, 'The elision of IM in French clitic pronouns and articles', analyses data gathered in the Touraine region, comparing his results with similarly slanted studies of québécois. C. M. Carlton, focusing on the grapheme (i) in 'How fit is Romanian "fit"?', illustrates the close correspondence between sound and symbol, and the indirectly accurate written representation of underlying morphophonemic processes. J. J. Champion examines Nahuatlisms in Spanish: the classical Náhuatl noun system, classes of nouns borrowed, and sound changes effected in adapting them to Spanish. E. A. Fong briefly describes the supine construction in Rumanian (classifying the adverbs/ adjectives at issue), characterizes the syntactic and semantic components, and skillfully formulates transformational rules for these fascinating structures. A. W. Grundstrom proposes a notational system for the transcription of such aspects of French prosody as pitch, timing, and loudness. P. Hagiwara's study of French word order demonstrates a refreshing sensitivity to the differences between spoken and written language. He convincingly weaves several threads—including stylistics, discourse analysis, and rhetoric —into an elegant reconsideration of the inversion of subject noun and verb. H. J. Izzo, 'Andalusia and America: The regional origins of New-World Spanish', summarizes key contributions to the discussion, isolates their weaknesses , and poses additional questions which must be answered before solid conclusions can be drawn. J. Klausenburger's important paper on velar inserts in Romance verbs expands on previous studies by considering Provençal and Catalan in addition to Spanish and Italian, and by including tenses other than the present. A. Malinowski examines selected language contact phenomena (principally new code-switching and morphosyntactic convergence) observed among Sephardic Jews in Istanbul, and presents provocative data. S. McCrays explores the relationship between the morphological realization of tense and the motivation provided by aspect in 'Early Romance'. J. Zang Mier sketches the political and sociolinguistic status of Catalan, contrasting it with Occitan in order to demonstrate the former's atypical behavior as a minority language. R. Morgan jr., 'Creole and language policy in the French West Indies', is a far-reaching yet informative survey which outlines general issues before tackling specific problems. G. E. Saunders begins her essay with a series of concise observations on the morphological system of Bolognese; she then leads the reader through an intricate, lucid formulation ofwholly morphological rules which account for the plural formation process. D. L. Wolfe formulates word-order rules for inner (without nomináis) and outer sentences in Spanish; special attention is given to the relative flexibility in ordering of semantic elements. Typographical errors are infrequent and undistracting ; reference lists or bibliographies follow individual essays. Over-all, the collection is solid, with top ranking going to Fong, Hagiwara, Klausenburger, and Saunders. The volume constitutes an appropriately high-quality and varied testimonial to Kiddle. [Martha E. Schaffer, Brown University.] Il dialetto lucano di Calvello. By Joseph Gioscio. Stuttgart: Steiner, 1985. Pp. 152. DM 32.00. Calvello is a small town in the province of Potenza, in the Basilicata region of Italy. It has an official census population of 3,000; but in fact, fewer than 2,000 people live there. The difference between official population and the actual number of residents results from the fact that many adults have left Calvello to find work. Gioscio describes in detail the dialect spoken in Calvello, with an introduction that lays out an economic and historical background for the town. His description is unfortunately limited mainly to phonological, morphological, and lexical properties of the dialect. However, he appends a retelling of a fable (with a translation into standard Italian), and this allows a glimpse of some of the syntactic characteristics of this highly conservative daughter of common Romance. 720 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 62, NUMBER 3...