In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Degrees of explicitness: Information structure and the packaging of Bulgarian subjects and objects by John Leafgren
  • Donald L. Dyer
Degrees of explicitness: Information structure and the packaging of Bulgarian subjects and objects. By John Leafgren. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2002. Pp. viii, 247. ISBN 1588112209. $90 (Hb).

John Leafgren has been working in the fields of Bulgarian morphology and syntax for many years. In Degrees of explicitness, his first book-length publication, L gives Bulgarian, South Slavic, and Slavic linguistics, as well as general sentence-level pragmatics, a well-crafted description of the relationship that exists in Bulgarian syntagmata among semantics, pragmatics, and morphology. This book is a comprehensive examination of the link between functional and formal explicitness in the Bulgarian noun phrase, particularly as reflected in subject, direct object, or indirect object (Chs. 2–3). L’s monograph builds significantly on his earlier work in this area as well as on that of a number of Bulgarian and American linguists.

L effectively ties together in one treatise several different approaches to the analysis of word order in Bulgarian, including the Prague School’s functional sentence perspective (FSP) of the 1940s and 1950s; structuralist approaches from the 1960s and 1970s; generative treatments of the 1980s and 1990s; and formalism, prevalent in the past two decades. L calls his own analytical approach ‘clausal aboutness perspective’ (207). L successfully navigates the complex collection of characterizations of how Bulgarian speakers and writers portray substantives as informationally significant and the terminology associated with them, for example, focus, topicality, and discourse themehood (DT) (23–37).

Throughout the book we see that two primary kinds of factors affect formal explicitness in Bulgarian—semantics and pragmatics. In the broadest of terms the book’s goal is to lay out the varieties of and reasons for the use of a set of nominal sentence forms—full NPs (including the doubled type), full pronouns, clitic pronouns, and Ø. L gives lists of 14–15 factors that promote degrees of explicitness (L’s functional ‘aboutness’) in the Bulgarian subject and object in the conclusion (186–87, 198–99). The degree to which an NP contrasts with another proximate NP is critical to an understanding of the degree of explicitness that it will command and the shape of the NP that will be realized (57ff.). This also may involve temporal shifts in the narrative (69–70). L points to Grice’s ‘cooperative principle’ (be brief and only as informative as necessary) as a justification for many explicitness choices (45, 84).

In the two main analytical chapters of the book (Chs. 2 and 3), L surveys quite adequately the relevant results of major works that have examined this material before providing his own findings. Arguably the most important novel observations are L’s remarks in Ch. 3 (97–139; also 206–7) on the finer degrees of explicitness—or nonexplicitness—that may be expressed in Bulgarian objects, owing to the greater variety of available forms. Also of note is L’s mention of the different measures of explicitness in the use of first-, second-, and third-person pronominal forms (44).

L’s corpus for analysis consists of a large database provided by Krasimira Aleksova and seven literary [End Page 350] texts, as well as his own fieldwork. The volume’s bibliographic sources are a strength, and while most monographs of significance for this topic are cited, the articles listed could be more inclusive. The volume’s index is rather good, and there are virtually no grammatical miscues or spelling mistakes in the entire volume. ‘Rå Hauge, Kjetil’ should be given as ‘Hauge, Kjetil Rå’ throughout, a mistake many of us have made.

Donald L. Dyer
University of Mississippi
...

pdf

Share