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578LANGUAGE, VOLUME 70, NUMBER 3 (1994) REFERENCES Adams, Marianne. 1987. From Old French to the theory of pro-drop. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 5.1-32. Kroch, Anthony. 1989. Reflexes of grammar in patterns of language change. Journal of Language Variation and Change 1.199-244. Lightfoot, David. 1979. Principles of diachronic syntax. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. -----. 1993. Why UG needs a learning theory: Triggering verb movement. Historical linguistics: Problems and perspectives, ed. by Charles Jones, 190-214. London: Longman. Priestly, L. 1955. Reprise constructions in French. Archivum Linguisticum 7.1-28. Rizzi, Luigi. 1990. Relativized minimality. (Linguistic Inquiry monograph 16.) Cambridge , MA: MIT Press. -----, and Ian Roberts. 1989. Complex inversion in French. Probus 1.1-30. Roberts, Ian. 1993. A formal account of grammaticalization in the history of Romance futures. Folia Lingüistica Histórica 13.219-58. Vance, Barbara. 1989. Null subjects and syntactic change in medieval French. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University dissertation. Warner, Anthony. 1993. English auxiliaries: Structure and history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Department of Linguistics[Received 21 February 1994.] University of Maryland College Park, MD 20742 [dwKaumdd.umd.edu] English in language shift: The history, structure, and sociolinguistics of South African Indian English. By Rajend Mesthrie. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Pp. xx, 252. Reviewed by Timothy C. Frazer, Western Illinois University For more than a decade, scholars have shown increasing interest in the 'New Englishes' of the former British Empire and elsewhere (cf. Bailey & Görlach 1982, Kachru 1983, Schmied 1991). One of these varieties, South African Indian English (SAIE), is especially interesting because its development is so recent and can be reliably documented. Also, Mesthrie believes that the development of SAIE further illuminates the study of creóles and of second language acquisition . He provides a wealth of data on this variety: 199 SAIE sentences appear throughout the text, and additional information is summarized in 59 tables. Ch. 1, 'Historical background: The shaping of a new English' (1-33), documents the arrival of Indian indentured servants in South Africa from the 1850s onward. Using census data, M demonstrates that as recently as 1936 only a minority of South African Indians spoke English, while the remainder used Indian languages—primarily Tamil, Telegu, Bhojpuri, and Gujurati (Hindi)—in the home. Other public records suggest that English remained an L2 until 'at least the 1950s (and even later in rural areas)' (31). Ch. 2, 'Variation in SAlE: A first glimpse' (34-70), describes M's interview sample (which appears to be a good sample of the South African Indian population ) and surveys the structure of SAIE itself. Because South African Indians' REVIEWS579 English usage varies considerably with social factors, especially education and occupation, M encounters difficulties in describing SAIE as a single variety. Following Piatt's treatment of Singapore English (1975), M divides the stylistic range of SAIE into pre-basilect, basilect, mesolect, and acrolect. M is at some pains to show that SAIE is not identical with Indian English; indeed, the history of Indian immigration to South Africa indicates that few of the indentured servants would have known English, and that immigration laws made later contact with Indian English difficult, although not impossible. Indian English and SAIE do share some features, like a syllable-timed speech rhythm, but SAIE syntax is marked by a number of other features not shared with either Indian English or standard South African English. While SAIE is marked at all lectal levels by a small set of features (including plural y'all, which appears to have evolved independently from a similar form in southern American English ), the basilect exhibits a unique set of syntactic rules. The most prominent of these features are treated in Ch. 3, 'Syntactic variation : The relative clause' (71-100), and in Ch. 4, 'Word order principles' (101-27). Ch. 3 is devoted entirely to the process of relativization. M collected a total of 557 tokens of relative clauses, about half of which are 'standard' examples like those in international English. More than a quarter of these are 'discourse-governed' conjoinings, which use simple juxtaposition, intonation, and context to identify the subordinate clauses. Thus, I'm a man who doesn't go to church at all becomes...

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