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HUMANITIES 175 this shortened form with its function of expressing random rather than socially enforced politeness. A similar process of desecularization characterizes how >God be with you= transforms from pragmatically marking a blessing to organizing the discourse of interactions as a routine closing of conversation. Historical changes in these illocutions serve to facilitate conversation and interpersonal cohesion. Arnovick evalutes changes in speech acts not as progressive instances of semantic loss but as cases of linguistic evolution promoted by the pragmatic dimension of speech acts and events. Within such processes as secularization, subjectification, discursization, and pragmaticalization, the comprehensive methodology applied in these case studies persuasively broadens diachronic perspectives to those English illocutionary changes in which speakers are historical and cultural agents. This linguistic methodologyCstill in its early stagesCmay prove to quantify the history of speech acts as cultural inflections. In these correlations across the history of Englishes, both language historians and cultural theorists will find refined techniques for tracing the dynamic between language and culture within such broad socio-historical changes as transitions from orality to literacy, from institutional religions to secularism, from collective identities to ideologies of individualism. (MARY CATHERINE DAVIDSON) Keren Rice. Morpheme Order and Semantic Scope: Word Formation in the Athapaskan Verb Cambridge University Press. xiv, 454. US $64.95 The languages of the Athapaskan family, which are spoken in different regions of North America, are well known for their extremely complex verb structure. Different sources report that verbs in Athapaskan languages contain up to twenty different kinds of prefixes organized into four series. In Morpheme Order and Semantic Scope, Keren Rice takes on the very daunting task of explaining two properties of Athapaskan verbs, their global uniformity and their local variability. Global uniformity refers to the fact that, across all the languages of the family, some morphemes (i.e., constituents of the word, including prefixes, suffixes or roots) are in a fixed order relative to one another; local variability refers to the fact that other morphemes exhibit variability in their order B either across the language family, or within a single language. Rice=s proposal is that both uniformity and variability may be explained in terms of semantic scope. More specifically, when two morphemes appear in a fixed order, this is due to a unilateral semantic dependency relation, whereas variable morpheme order is due to a lack of semantic interaction, or to a variable semantic dependency relation. As a point of departure, Rice assumes that the verb word in Athapaskan 176 LETTERS IN CANADA 2000 languages corresponds to the verb phrase in more familiar languages. It is widely held that such phrases have a hierarchical structure, and that semantic dependency relations are constrained by the grammatical structure. For example, in a sentence like John thinks that he is smart, the pronoun he is lower in the structure than the name John. Consequently, he may be referentially dependent on John. However, if the order of the name and pronoun are reversed, as in He thinks that John is smart, then he is in the superior position, and a referential dependency relation is impossible. The assumption that the Athapaskan verb is in fact a word only at the most superficial level, and is otherwise to be analysed as a grammatical unit, enables Rice to develop a very elegant proposal. She then provides a detailed examination of the facts, some of which are straightforward and some more difficult to account for. The book is organized into five main sections. The first section introduces the problem and Rice=s hypothesis that meaning, and particularly semantic scope, determine the order of morphemes. Along the way she provides convincing evidence that the standard approach to the problem of Athapaskan verbs is simply untenable. The second and third sections focus on the analysis of different kinds of prefixes, first introducing the specific prefixes themselves and then demonstrating that the relative order is systematic and surprisingly regular. The last two sections explore the theoretical implications of this study and identify questions for future research. Finally, the appendices provide a convenient summary of the shared structure of verbs in the languages of the Athapaskan family as well as specific information about verbs in nineteen of languages...

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