Substantive evidence in phonology: the evidence from Finnish and French By Royal Skousen (review)

REVIEWS445 'seem' are proposed, along with a transformation that can change the factivity and emotivity of a sentence. Such an analysis seems incongruent with the claims about semantics made in the article; and the question of whether complementizers have meaning or not is never faced. The very question that Ebneter proposes to answer, i.e. whether we should analyse 'impersonal' predicates such as possibile 'possible' as being verb phrases with sentential subjects, or as modality operators with a sentential 'nucleus', is never really laid out for us in an organized fashion. Nowhere is there a theoretical discussion of the kind of empirical data that would make us choose one analysis over the other. Still, the data examined are interesting in themselves; and the study opens up new questions about Italian not previously considered. The above discussion is by no means comprehensive, and is limited both by considerations of space and by the inevitable imposition of the reviewer's own theoretical background. Each article merits much more attention. This volume is truly to be applauded, in that it offers us diverse points of view on many serious questions that an adequate analysis of any language must eventually answer. Italian linguistics can certainly become the main forum for scholars working on Italian, if we will all give it the support which it deserves. [Received 3 August 1976.] Substantive evidence in phonology: the evidence from Finnish and French. By Royal Skousen. (Janua linguarum, series minor, 217.) The Hague: Mouton, 1975. Pp. 135./30.00. Reviewed by Axel Groundstroem, University ofStockholm As is well known, the aim oftransformational generative grammar, in describing a native speaker's tacit knowledge about his language in terms of some explicit rule system, is not merely to generate economically all the grammatical forms and no ungrammatical forms. The rule system should, in addition, correspond as nearly as possible to psychological and physiological reality. In practice, however, this aim has all too often been lost from sight.1 The starting point of Skousen's book is precisely to show how one can obtain substantive evidence that a grammatical rule is psychologically real. Such evidence, as S emphasizes, cannot be found internalto synchronic dataas such, since thereis an unlimited number ofregularities in any given set ofdata. To get substantive evidence that a rule is psychologically real, one can observe, e.g., (1) how linguistic data change historically, (2) how children predict new forms as they learn the language, and (3) how speakers adapt borrowed words or newly created words into their language. S concentrates on evidence from historical development, giving examples 1 Cf. Chomsky & Halle (1968:400): 'The entire discussion of phonology in this book suffers from a fundamental theoretical inadequacy ... The problem is that our approach to features, to rules, and to evaluation has been overly formal ... There is nothing in our account of linguistic theory to indicate that the result would be the description of a system that violates certain principles governing human languages.' 446LANGUAGE, VOLUME 53, NUMBER 2 (1977) mainly from Standard Finnish and the Finnish dialects, as well as English and French. Chapters 1-3, dealing with English and French material, are clear and convincing . Since this material is easy for any linguist to control, I will not dwell upon the questions treated here, especially as the same line of reasoning is followed in the main part of the book, presenting material from Finnish—a language far less accessible to the general linguistic public. I will concentrate, then, on Chapters 4-7, dealing with Finnish phonology. In a footnote on p. 56, S gives a rather complete list of works on Finnish phonology, citing even minor contributions. One would have expected references also, e.g., to Harms 1964, Karttunen 1970, Groundstroem 1971, 1974, Karlsson 1974, and Hammarberg 1974, especially as many of the solutions in these works are far less orthodox than, e.g., McCawley 1964 or Wiik 1967, often cited by S. Some of these were perhaps not yet published when S was preparing his manuscript. Chapter 4 deals with some very important issues in Finnish phonology, comparable in importance to the Great Vowel Shift in English. S provides quite convincing evidence that, contrary to both traditional...