Autolexical syntax: A theory of parallel grammatical representations By Jerrold M. Sadock (review)

REVIEWS847 of formulating a theory of the language/society relationship is fair, though her assumption that it should be predictive and explanatory in the way the laws of physics are is perhaps misplaced. Given her concern with explanation, it is strange that she pays no attention to the literature on speech accommodation theory and similar approaches within the social psychology of language, which attempt to formulate general principles to explain individual motivations for language choice in the context of community norms and values. Perhaps approaches like these might have provided a basis for unifying and integrating the varied empirical findings that are presented throughout this book. As it stands, however, we do not find any unifying thread running through this introduction. But it does offer an interesting and informative collection of chapters, each devoted to a central aspect of the language/society relationship. Its summaries of key areas and the literature associated with each provide a useful source of information for those seeking an easy, readable, not too technical introduction to sociolinguistics. REFERENCES Bell, Alan. 1984. Language style as audience design. Language in Society 13.145-204 Hymes, Dell 1 974. Foundations in sociolinguistics An ethnographic approach. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lambert, W. E. 1967. A social psychology of bilinguahsm. Journal of Social Issues 23.91-109. LePage. Robert, and A. Tabouret-Keller. 1985. Acts of identity. Cambridge: Cambodge University Press Saville-Troike, M. 1989 The ethnography of communication: An introduction. 2nd edn. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Department of Linguistics The Ohio State University 222 Oxley Hall 1712 Neil Avenue Columbus, OH 43210-1298 Autolexical syntax: A theory of parallel grammatical representations. By Jerrold M. Sadock. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991. Pp. 254. Reviewed by Mark Baker, McGiIl University Sadock's term autolexical syntax is coined on the model of the familiar term autosegmental phonology. Just as autosegmental phonology factors phonological segments into separate tiers and permits those elements to associate with one another in various ways, so S's theory factors lexical items into different kinds of information (syntactic, morphological, semantic, etc.) and then parses these informational elements semi-independently. The various representations thus arrived at can be associated with the basic lexical items in somewhat different ways, resulting in a conceptually very simple account of some otherwise quite difficult phenomena. One paradigmdefining case is cliticization, such as the English auxiliary clitic -'s found in The man's at the door. S's theory is designed to give the most minimal account of such cases: -'s is a suffix on man in the morphological parse, and it is the head V of a VP containing at the door in the syntactic parse. The same basic assumptions also cover incorporation phenomena: for example, a Greenlandic sentence like Pusi-p neqi-tor-punga (seal-GEN meat-eat- ls.s) ? eat seal's meat' can be parsed syntactically as [vp [np seal's meat] eat] and morphologically as [n seal's] [v meat-eat] without paradox, contradiction, or derivation. More generally, the kinds of phenomena that other linguists have analyzed in terms of transformational rules of movement, insertion, or deletion, deriving one level from another, S proposes to analyze as the result of different components, each of which is maximally simple, acting as filters on one another. The first chapter is an introductory one, which (together with the preface) does an excellent job of sketching out the guiding intuitions of the proposal and communicating their elegance. It also includes a brief but interesting discussion arguing in favor of having a high degree of 848LANGUAGE, VOLUME 73, NUMBER 4 (1997) redundancy in linguistic explanation that results from several simultaneous levels of description —an intriguing challenge to the methodological practices of Chomskian linguistics. The second chapter goes on to flesh out the leading ideas into an actual grammar fragment. Syntax, semantics, and morphology are treated as three extremely simple context-free phrase structure grammars. S then begins to explicate the nature of the interface among these three modules, which is where most of the explanatory work is done. This interface consists of three elements: the lexicon, which holds the analysis together by stipulating atomic associations of morphological, semantic, and syntactic information; paradigmatic constraints...