The French influence on Middle English morphology: A corpus-based study of derivation By Christiane Dalton-Puffer (review)

392LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 2 (1998) region of acceptability associated with a given relation) as the novel contribution of their theory. However it corresponds exactly to the construct search domain, which was introduced in cognitive grammar by Hawkins (1984) and extensively motivated in Langacker 1993 on descriptive, diachronic, and typological grounds. Regier 1996 would also have been appropriate to cite. Likewise, when the editors 'suggest that nouns are used in the case of entities (be they places, objects, or other things . . .), and that prepositions are used in the case of relations' (568), I naturally feel that some reference to my own longstanding proposal to characterize them in just that way (e.g. Langacker 1987) would not have been out of place. Despite these qualifications, the book is well done and a good buy for the price. It is typographically handsome, and I noticed relatively few misprints. REFERENCES Fodor, Jerry A. 1979. The language of thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hawkins, Bruce W. 1984. The semantics ofEnglish spatial prepositions. San Diego: University ofCalifornia dissertation. Johnson, Mark. 1987. The body in the mind: The bodily basis of meaning, imagination, and reason. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, George. 1987 Women, fire, and dangerous things: What categories reveal about the mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. -----, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors we live by. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press. Langacker, Ronald W. 1987. Nouns and verbs. Language 63.53-94. -----. 1993. Grammatical traces of some 'invisible' semantic constructs Language Sciences 15.323-55. Regier, Terry. 1996. The human semantic potential: Spatial language and constrained connectionism. Cambridge , MA & London: MIT Press/Bradford. Talmy, Leonard. 1988. Force dynamics in language and cognition. Cognitive Science 12.49-100. Vandeloise, Claude. 1991. Spatial prepositions: A case study from French. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Wierzbicka, Anna. 1993. Why do we say in April, on Thursday, at Wo'clock!: In search of an explanation. Studies in Language 17.437-54. Linguistics, 0108 University of California, San Diego La Jolla, CA 92093-0108 The French influence on Middle English morphology: A corpus-based study of derivation. By Christiane Dalton-Puffer. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1996. Pp. xiii, 284. DM 158. Reviewed by Ingo Plag, Philipps-Universität Marburg The title of this book is, unfortunately, somewhat misleading. First, the book deals only with suffixation and completely excludes prefixation or conversion. Second, the scope of the book is not at all restricted to the French influence on Middle English morphology. Instead, the reader finds an impressive, comprehensive survey ofMiddle English suffixation, a most welcome contribution to the diachronic study of English word-formation and one which will certainly remain the standard reference on Middle English derivational morphology for quite some time. The book begins with a brief introduction and a review of previous research (Ch. 2, 5-18) and then turns to the discussion of methodological and theoretical problems (Chs. 3-6). Ch. 3 (19-27) introduces the Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, on which the whole investigation is based. The author used the material of the periods MEl (1150-1250), ME2 (1250-1350), and ME3 (1350-1420), which amounts to an overall corpus size of 394,720 words (i.e. tokens). Aldiough the number of tokens is rather low in comparison to modern corpora like Cobuild or the British National Corpus, it seems that Dalton-Puffer's corpus is large enough to yield interesting and significant results. D describes in exemplary fashion how she has extracted the relevant data from the corpus. REVIEWS393 In the context of the corpus-based study of Middle English morphology two central theoretical problems emerge which are discussed in Ch. 4 (29-43). First, it is not obvious which words should be considered morphologically complex. Especially with incoming foreign words it is often hard or impossible to decide whether the speakers were able to segment the borrowed items. Second, there is the notorious problem of differentiating between inflectional and derivational endings. D's discussion of these problems is generally well-informed and her decisions are reasonable. Thus she points out that Middle English was in a transitional state between stembased and word-based morphology, which is an important...