Macedonian (review)

This book has four sections—sociolinguistic and geolinguistic situation (4–8), phonology (8–15), morphology (15–37), and syntax (37–52)—of Contemporary Standard Macedonian, with occasional references to Macedonian dialects. A ‘revised, expanded, and updated’ (59) version of the author’s contribution to The Slavonic languages (ed. by Bernard Comrie and Greville G. Corbett, London: Routledge, 1993, 249–305), it concludes with sample texts (53–56) and references (57–58). Unlike the earlier description, however, it is not concerned with historical phenomena or lexis. The author adopts a traditional framework, with phonemes established on the basis of surface contrast and inflectional morphemes defined, following the Prague School, in terms of categories (e.g. tense) instantiated by binary features (e.g. [past]).

The book makes available a substantial amount of information, offering nonspecialists a good overview of Macedonian structure, and offering specialists a convenient and easily accessible reference to parts of the system that do not fall within the purview of their expertise. The section on phonology includes— in addition to the inventory of phonemes, their allophones, and the details of phonotactics— treatment of the orthography and of morphophonemic alternations. For those with limited or no knowledge of Macedonian, this placement of morphophonemic phenomena may be troublesome because it makes necessary anticipatory references to relevant, but not yet discussed, parts of the morphology and associated grammatical categories and, later, in the discussion of morphology, retrospective references to relevant alternations. There may also be difficulties for the nonspecialist with the details of the orthography, which are not treated together but, for each letter requiring special mention, under the phoneme which it normally represents. It should be noted that the citation of structural units is not consistent. Word-level units are cited in transliteration, but morphemes are cited sometimes in transliteration, sometimes in transcription. Although the Macedonian adaptation of Cyrillic follows the phonemic principle, generally assigning one letter to one phoneme and vice versa, the pronunciation of transliterations and Cyrillic letters, when indicated, is in phonetic, rather than phonemic, transcription when Friedman wishes to emphasize phonetic, as opposed to structural, detail.

The description of inflectional morphology and syntax is comprehensive. The former is organized by part of speech and subcategorized according to relevant grammatical categories and their morphological instantiations. Inflectional morphology is treated fully and accompanied, for each part of speech, by a useful survey of derivational morphology, giving readers a reasonable introduction to the inventory of stem-forming affixes although there is little attention to concomitant morphophonemic processes in either the affixes themselves or the lexical morphemes with which they occur. The section on syntax is organized by sentence type (i.e. declarative, nondeclarative, copular, negative, subordinating) and phenomena associated with smaller syntactic constituents (i.e. reflexivity, reciprocity, possession, quantification).

This book is particularly valuable for the information it provides in areas not generally treated in surveys, for example, derivational morphology, syntax, and the grammatical meaning associated with inflectional categories. The information in question is, of necessity, presented very briefly, but nevertheless makes F’s contribution, especially in conjunction with the information on history and lexis available in his earlier formulation, a worthy companion to the only other comprehensive description of Macedonian in English, Horace G. Lunt’s Grammar of the Macedonian literary language (Skopje: Državno Knigoizdatelstvo, 1952), which remains an important reference of Macedonian structure.