Learnability and the lexicon: Theories and second language acquisition research By Alan Juffs (review)

BOOK NOTICES 423 lant harmony and Sanskrit retroflexion. Ch. 6, 'Laryngeal modifications' (209-39), takes a look at debuccalization in Yucatec Maya, assimilation and dissimilation in Greek, and glottalization in Salish and Klamath. Ch. 7, 'Places of articulation in consonants ' (241-59), looks at the behavior ofconsonantal place elements under OCP violation with examples from Japanese, Zoque, and Carib. Ch. 8, 'Summary and some further implications for the model' (261-68), offers a summary of the dissertation and suggests how the framework can deal with other processes. The obstruent-sonorant dichotomy over the consonant -vowel one was quite new for me. It offers a new perspective on the behavior of segments. As H clearly puts it in Ch. 8, there are many questions that need to be addressed by this proposal. It would be most interesting to see how they would be answered. [Alain Thériault, Université de Montréal.] Nordnorske dialekter. Ed. by Ernst Hákon Jahr and Olav Skare. Oslo: Novus Forlag, 1996. Pp. 260. Jahr and Skare have made a significant contribution to the field of Norwegian dialectology with this book. In traditional Norwegian dialectology, a field initiated by Amund B. Larsen, a distinction is made between Western and Eastern Norwegian. Objections were made to this classification, however, for instance that the Western and Eastern dialectal areas are not geographically coherent. In 1954 Hallfrid Christiansen proposed a new classification of the Norwegian dialects into Eastern Norwegian, Western Norwegian, 'Tr0nsk', and Northern Norwegian. There are good reasons for considering Northern Norwegian as one dialectal area. Northern Norwegian has almost complete apocope; rising rhythm in phrases of the type verb + preposition, e.g. gâ 'ut 'get/go out', and stá ??? 'get up'; lack ofdesyllabification of the light stress on enclitic syllables, e.g. tale me (h)am 'talk to him' and not tala me '«; shift between velar and palatal consonantism in inflected forms, an inflexion morpheme /an/ in neuter plural; palatalization of long dentals; disappearance of r in unbounded plurals and verbs in the present tense; and so on. But despite these features relatively little research has been done on the Northern Norwegian dialects compared to the other Norwegian dialects. The literature still contains old and misleading claims about the Northern Norwegian dialects. This volume seeks to rectify this imbalance. Two main parts may be distinguished. The book begins with an introductory part that includes J & S's overview of the Northern Norwegian dialects, geographic maps, and comments about the most important dialectal features and speech samples. The second part presents overviews of Northern Norwegian dialects and of studies carried out by the researchers who have contributed particularly to the investigation of the dialects in northern Norway. It is hard to pick outjust a few papers for special praise, but two are noticeable, full of interesting observations and engagingly presented. Alfred Jakobsen ('Dansk sprâk og nordnorske dialekter', 83-92) concentrates on the imbalance between written and spoken Norwegian dialects. When the new Norwegian dialects took form, during the linguistic crises of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, a new standardized writing system failed to appear. The paper discusses reasons for this imbalance between speech and writing, such as the absence of a cultural and political center and pressure from the legal language, which at that time was Danish. Tove Bull ('Sprâkskifte hos kninner og menn i ei nordnorsk fjordsamebygd ', 185-200) concentrates on the influence of the mother on the spoken Northern Norwegian dialects of children of bilingual marriages. The paper discusses convincingly the leading role women play as language innovators. AU in all, the editors have brought together a most interesting collection ofcontributions on different aspects of the Northern Norwegian dialects. The book is a highly recommended introduction to Norwegian dialectology and an excellent reference book for those who are already familiar with the Northern Norwegian dialects. [Berit O. Brogaard-Pedersen, State University ofNew York, Buffalo.] Learnability and the lexicon: Theories and second language acquisition research . By Alan Juffs. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1996. Pp. xi, 277. This book provides an account of the lexical knowledge available to second language (L2) learners and how this knowledge changes over time. Ambitious in its coverage, Juffs's study: (1) argues for...