Standard Basque: A Progressive Grammar (review)

Rudolf de Rijk’s untimely death in June 2003 put a sudden end to the work of one of the most brilliant figures in the area of Basque linguistics. He left behind groundbreaking contributions to Basque phonology, morphology, syntax, philology, lexicography, and history (see de Rijk 1998 for a selection), and the unanimous admiration and respect of Bascologists of different ages and theoretical persuasions. He also left behind an unfinished grammar of Basque that he had been working on since the 1980s and had nearly completed when death overcame him. Basing the grammar on materials in Dutch that he had prepared for his classes in the Department of Comparative Linguistics, University of Leiden, he managed to expand and complete twenty-seven chapters, which have become the backbone of this posthumous edition, accounting for 778 pages of the book. The remaining, unfinished six chapters, dealing with some aspects of morphology, tenseless complementation, coordination, and some derivational affixes not addressed in earlier chapters, comprise 142 pages. These unexpanded chapters are perhaps exactly that: all the relevant information one would expect to find in a full-fledged reference grammar, presented in a succinct, direct style. It is in the first twenty-seven chapters, however, that we find the wealth of meticulous description (with many previously unrecorded facts), with attention devoted not just to general patterns but to many specific lexical items, diachronic information, and argumentation that make this book such an outstanding reference grammar for the language. Previous grammars of Basque written in English (e.g., Saltarelli et al. [1988] and Hualde and Ortiz de Urbina [2003], only the first of which was available to de Rijk), share with full reference grammars of betterstudied languages (e.g., Huddleston and Pullum [2003] for English, or Bosque and Demonte’s grammar of Spanish [1999]) the characteristic of resulting from teamwork by leading experts in the different areas covered. Few other scholars would have been able to singlehandedly complete such a wide-ranging and, at the same time, in-depth description of a language like Basque, with its quite long tradition of scholarship both within and outside the Basque Country. It took de Rijk close to twenty years to all but complete his major work, and linguists should be grateful to all those who made it possible to turn the incomplete manuscripts into a coherent reference grammar.

Some uncommon features of the author’s profile as a linguist can help us better understand the descriptive approach taken in this grammar and some of the hidden theoretical assumptions that always, overtly or covertly, accompany such endeavors. He graduated from MIT in 1972 with a thesis on relativization in Basque directed by the late Kenneth Hale, and his early works mention both the latter and other teachers such as Morris Halle and Noam Chomsky. Yet his publications, although theoretically informed, hardly ever dealt with theory-internal issues, and often have, in fact, a distinctly philological outlook. His full command of Basque texts (and editions) from all ages and dialects is well reflected in the book reviewed here, which is studded with actual examples ranging from the earliest texts in the sixteenth century to contemporary sources, both literary and otherwise. Thus, in chapter 12, in the course of an excellent and detailed study of transitivity, he can adduce the change of an auxiliary introduced by the editor in the third edition of Agirre’s Garoa, a modern classic. In chapter 5, the comparison of different translations through the centuries of the New Testament expression ‘the vision from heaven’ is used to check which locative postpositions can be deleted before the adnominal suffix –ko. De Rijk further compares the use of this suffix attached to bare nominal expressions with the Latin “genitivus qualitatis” (as in mulier magnii ingenii ‘a woman of great ability’), although here a comparison with the equivalent attributive genitive of the English translation would have been equally clarifying. In the same philological vein, his work often offers information on the diachronic development...