The dual in Slovene dialects (review)

Tjaša Jakop's The dual in Slovene dialects makes an important contribution to the detailed study of Slovene dialectology. It also goes a long way toward making this material, formerly only accessible to scholars who speak Slovene, available to a broader range of linguists. The book is a collection of all of the most recent data on the Slovene dual and functions much as an index for dual forms found in the material of the still unpublished Slovene linguistic atlas (SLA). Jakop has also plotted dual forms for most of the 406 data points found in the SLA on 26 detailed dialect maps. This book, which is an English-language adaptation of Jakop's dissertation, is clearly written and professionally translated. Her presentation is well organized and easy to follow. The Dual in Slovene Dialects is a comprehensive resource and a useful tool.

The main aim of the book is to present, by means of text, charts, and dialect maps, the ways that Slovene dialects use the dual in verbs, pronouns, nouns, adjectives, and the numeral dva/dve. As mentioned above, the primary source for this material is the SLA. The SLA, first begun in 1946, is a rich source of dialect information based on an extensive questionnaire. Forty-four questions in the SLA provide information on the dual. Jakop has also included her own field study on dual past tense forms. It is important that this material be available for study, but there are several problems with the data in the SLA. They were gathered over the course of fifty years and some of the researchers gathering them were insufficiently qualified. Jakop attempts to deal with these problems by giving priority to material gathered by professional linguists and to material that is relatively new.

The book is divided into two parts. Part 1 provides a background and history of the dual. Jakop discusses the historical development of the dual from Common Slavic to Contemporary Standard Slovene and to the modern Slovene dialects. She also outlines previous research on the dual, especially the work of Lucien Tesnière, whose research on the dual in the 1920s is the most extensive study of the Slovene dual in print. Jakop also discusses the contributions of Fran Ramovš and Tine Logar. Part 2 is a description of the dual forms as they appear in Slovene dialects in each of the categories listed above. Jakop systematically goes through verbs, nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and dva/dve, using charts and dialect forms with reference to the maps in the appendix. She follows the discussion of forms with commentaries on each word type. Part 2 concludes with general findings as well as some tables representing statistical information on the preservation of forms in various parts of speech across dialects.

The commentaries that follow the dialect forms are the most interesting part of this research. Jakop usually gives some historical explanation of the forms and a detailed description of dialect variation. She also spends some time on linguistic geography. I would have liked to see more of this type of analysis of broad tendencies or classifications of the dual forms across dialect groups and over the Slovene speech territory as a whole. However, such a task is perhaps beyond the scope of this book, which is intended as a description of what is found in the SLA. Jakop does have some far-reaching general findings on the linguistic geography of dual loss according to word type. There are many details that resist easy categorization, especially with the loss of verbal forms of the dual, but the forms from the SLA roughly confirm the hierarchy of dual loss by word type that Tesnière proposed. Jakop disagrees with Tesnière and other earlier scholars on one point: the dual, although clearly changing, is not being lost as rapidly as was predicted. My own research in northeastern Slovenia, primarily in Haloze, confirm that the dual is robust in verbal and pronominal forms, although almost completely merged with the plural in...