Yir-Yoront lexicon: Sketch and dictionary of an Australian language By Barry Alpher (review)

BOOK NOTICES Yir-Yoront lexicon: Sketch and dictionary of an Australian language. By Barry Alpher. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1991. Pp. xi, 795. DM 298.00. Alpher's Ph.D. dissertation on the phonology and grammar of Yir-Yoront—with the engaging title Son ofergative (Cornell, 1973)—is the most thorough and respected description of a language from the Cape York Peninsula, North Queensland. The first hundred pages of the present volume recapitulate the main points of the thesis, as improved and revised during five more field trips between 1974 and 1988. The phonemic inventory is typical for an Australian language, with six stops and nasals (including two apical and two laminai series), three laterals, two rhotics, and two semivowels. There are six vowels (the standard five plus schwa) and a glottal stop. While other languages of the Cape York Peninsula have undergone initial dropping, Yir-Yoront has truncated the ends of words. What were case endings may have dropped, having left a trace through assimilation and the like. Thus, forms of the noun 'blood' have developed as follows: absolutive kamu > kam, ergative kamu-nggu > kumu, and dative kamu-gu > kumu (II). The morphophonemic rules, which ran to 88 pages in the original thesis , are here condensed into nine pages. Nouns and interrogatives follow an absolutive -ergative system of inflection, while pronouns show a nominative-accusative pattern. Singular pronouns have distinct accusative and dative forms, but these fall together for nonsingulars . The ablative case also covers 'aversive' function (e.g. ? was afraid of the dog'), something that is often accorded a separate case form in Australian languages (29). Nonsingular pronouns have a Distributive Plural form, e.g. ngunnguwl 'you(pl.) and 1, acting separately', created from the regular plural (ngopol 'you(pl.) and G) by lenition, ablaut, and reduplication (37). Adjectives function like common nouns in inflection and in syntactic properties, but A is able to put forward five structural and semantic criteria to define a subclass of Adjectives, a most perspicuous and useful analysis. Like other languages of its area, Yir-Yoront has a set of generic nouns which often occur in an NP with a specific noun; A discusses about 20 of them (72-77). He has a detailed and insightful analysis of the kinship system (189-203) and of the way kin terms are grouped together on the basis of a common sign language correspondent, the latter also referring to a body part—e.g. 'shin' for various sibling terms and father's father ; 'arm' for father, father's sister, and male's child. He also gives 45 words (ten ofthem verbs) in the respect register which is used with, or in speaking about, or in the presence of certain relatives and states the one-to-many correspondences between respect style and ordinary language words (103-7). All this is a preliminary to the dictionary (125-694), which is certainly the fullest and most informative dictionary produced for any Australian language. A simply provides all of the information anyone could possibly require: form, alternative forms, any irregular inflections , word class, transitivity and conjugation class for verbs, the appropriate generic term for nouns, all the different senses (written in clear English), and a number of well-chosen examples , mostly taken from texts. (One hopes that A will also be publishing a volume of texts.) There are also most useful notes on etymology, and cognates in other Australian languages. The 'index' is an adequate finder list of English words (695-787). There are always points of analysis with which one disagrees and some etymologies that could be improved (e.g., I'd prefer to relate YirYoront pirri 'emu' (45 1 ) to Dyirbal kapirri rather than, as Alpher does, to Guugu Yimidhirr purriwi ). But these are minor matters, and insignificant given the strength of this work. Certain types of words are not generally used in academic reviews, among them 'magnificent'. But this dictionary simply is a magnificent achievement . [R. M.W. Dixon. Australian National University.] Linguistic perspectives on the Romance languages. Ed. by William J. Ashby, Marianne Mithun, Giorgio Perissinotto, and Eduardo Raposo. (Current issues in linguistic theory, 103.) Amsterdam & Philadelphia : John Benjamins, 1993. Pp. xxii, 404. 593 ...