Talking Trojan: Speech and community in the Iliad By Hilary Mackie (review)

408 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 2 (1998) In 'Extractions from verb-second clauses in German ' (45-88) Marga Reis argues that what has been analyzed as extraction from embedded V2 clauses in German cannot be fully explained in terms ofextraction . In particular she shows that those constructions show restrictions beyond the ones generally assumed to hold for extraction. She then analyzes the constructions as parentheticals. Franz-Josef d'Avis' paper, 'On wA-islands in German' (89-120), discusses restrictions on extractions from embedded questions that set apart German from English. German allows non-wA-phrases to be extracted under certain circumstances, whereas whphrases cannot be extracted from embedded whclauses . D'Avis applies several theories of wh-extraction to the German data and ascribes the different movement possibilities to different potential landing sites for wA-movement versus topicalization. Sigrid Beck, in 'Negative islands and reconstruction ' (121-44), explains a certain set of negative island phenomena as a result of an LF constraint which says that negative quantifiers block LF movement. She shows how the constraint interacts with reconstruction and thus rules out readings which are in fact not available. In 'Kinds of extraction from noun phrases' (145-78) Jürgen Pafel investigates extraction from noun phrases in German. The candidates for this kind of extraction come in two groups distinguished by their sensitivity to constraints on extraction. Pafel analyzes the first class of phenomena, those sensitive to the constraints, as extraction from within the noun phrase. In the case of the second class, which is not limited by the restriction, the extracted element originates in a DP-adjunction structure in which the element to be extracted is not included in the maximal projection in question. Daniel Buring and Katharina Hartmann argue for a movement analysis (in particular right adjunction ) for extraposition in 'AU right!' (179-212). They argue that the movement analysis is superior to analyses that consider extraposed constituents to be base generated. They show that rightward movement is necessary to account for a number of properties of extraposition, in particular binding facts. Another paper supporting a movement analysis of extraposition is 'On extraposition and successive cyclicity' (213-44) by Gereon Muller. Müller shows that two properties of extraposition which seem to pose problems for a movement account can be accommodated into a movement analysis. He analyzes extraposition as successive-cyclic rightward movement, restricted by the principle of unambiguous binding. 'Downright down to the right' (245-72) by Hubert Haider doesn't analyze extraposition as a result of movement. Haider rather argues that the extraposed material is embedded. He reviews the nonelliptic comparative construction which patterns with extraposition structures and concludes that an adjunction structure or base generated structure cannot account for the facts satisfactorily. Yet another analysis for extraposition is presented in 'Rightward movement as leftward deletion' (273-309) by Chris Wilder. He compares extraposition with right node raising and analyzes both constructions in terms of leftward movement and leftward deletion. Wilder uses the difference between PF and LF deletion in order to derive the desired results. The volume not only sheds light on the treatment of extraposition and extraction but also presents a variety of approaches and allows a direct comparison ofdifferent analyses forrelated phenomena. [Martin Kappus, SUNY at Stony Brook.] Talking Trojan: Speech and community in the Iliad. By Hilary Mackie. (Greek studies: Interdisciplinary approaches.) Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1996. Pp. ix, 198. Cloth $52.50, paper $21.95. The publisher is marketing Mackie's book to both classicists and linguists, a pair of audiences whose principal concerns have in recent decades grown so far apart that there are few scholars—sadly few, in my opinion—who would even wish to belong to both. M is a classicist, and Talking Trojan is most assuredly aimed in the first place at other classicists, not linguists, but it deserves a notice in this journal as an important and engagingly written discussion of language and national or cultural identity. The book is philological to the core, so it is doubtful whether a linguist who knows no Ancient Greek could successfully read through it (even though M has carefully glossed every example, indeed every Greek word), and someone who has...