A study of tense and aspect in Shambala (review)

BOOK NOTICES 389 but does not provide systematic coverage of the topic in question. Rather, there is considerable overlap among many of the papers, while other research areas are minimally addressed. A large number of the papers in the volume present proposals for an overall theoretical framework of the status and function of languages . For example, the first six papers, by William F. Mackey, Ulrich Ammon. Ralph W. Fasold, Hans R. Dua, Harald Haarmann, and Renate Bartsch (over 200 pages), are of this type. These papers focus primarily on theoretical models of status and function, providing relatively little empirical analysis of actual language situations. (Mackey's opening paper, however, addresses these issues succinctly, citing many previously-analyzed language situations .) Other papers present useful surveys of previous research. For example. Florian Coulmas provides a detailed discussion ofwritten language use in East Asia. John E. Joseph summarizes the parallel historical progression of popular and scientific beliefs concerning language status in Western culture, beginning with the ancient Greek philosophers. Conrad M. B. Brann distinguishes among several language types, with special attention to the Nigerian language situation. Alicja Sakaguchi surveys the function and status of international planned languages . Finally, several papers present new empirical investigations or case studies of particular language situations. These include a description of 'down-graded' varieties by Jacob L. OrnsteinGalicia (documenting the widespread use of a standardized language as a vernacular); an investigation , by Dennis R. Preston, of the differing attitudes towards and perceptions of standard United States English in two geographical regions; a historical case study of the development of Lingala as official language in Zaire, by William J. Samarin; an analysis of the status of Pitcairn-Norfolk by Donald C. Laycock; and a survey and analysis of Gooniyandi mother-in-law language by William McGregor. In summary, this volume provides both theoretical position papers and descriptive analyses ofparticular situations. Readers will come away from the book convinced of the complexity of the issues involved. (As Ammon notes in his Foreword, there is not even agreement on the use of the terms 'status' and 'function'.) The volume should be useful to those interested in the relative comparison of languages and language varieties, and it should serve to stimulate further theoretical and descriptive work in this area. [Douglas Biber. Northern Arizona University .) A study of tense and aspect in Shambala . By Ruth Mfumbwa Besha. (Language and dialect studies in East Africa, 10.) Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1989. Pp. xvii, 330. DM 138.00. This book concerns tense and aspect in Shambala , a Bantu language of the Seuta group. It follows a scheme of temporal relations which exploits the concepts of 'speech time', 'event time', and 'reference time'. Besha emphasizes a language-specific approach that takes into consideration the particular structure of a language and makes no attempt to force traditional views onto the description of such important categories as tense and aspect. The monograph is divided into seven main chapters and a conclusion . Ch. 1 briefly describes the Shambala people and gives an account of the dialect divisions , including essential phonological and grammatical differences, and external influences . Ch. 2 provides a grammatical sketch of the phonological and morphological systems and the major syntactic patterns. The focus is on the complex 'verbal group", due to its involvement with tense and aspect. The lack of a good grammar of Shambala compelled the author to emphasize the problem of describing tense/aspect using models more suited to Indo-European languages . Ch. 3, a literature review, looks at various treatments of tense and aspect at the sentence and discourse levels. B argues for a context-based account, showing that the sentence level is useful only for isolating the possible forms. In Ch. 4 B defines the concepts of tense and aspect and analyzes the relationship between the tense/aspect forms, their meaning, and the context in which they occur. Ch. 5 develops the concept of tense, using the 'adverbial test' to establish the interaction between tense and temporal adverbials. B uses question constructions to isolate past tense forms: past-tense forms may occur in wH-questions, while other tense forms are restricted to yes/no questions. Distributional constraints of the tense forms are 390 LANGUAGE...