Word-order change and grammaticalization in the history of Chinese By Chaofen Sun (review)

BOOK NOTICES 237 Word-order change and grammaticalization in the history of Chinese. By Chaofen Sun. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. Pp. xiii, 207. $39.95. Studying Chinese grammar is difficult—the average Chinese may try to tell you 'Chinese has no grammar '—because of its very spare morphology. One of the first things one can grasp at is structure particles . This revised-for-publication PhD dissertation is an attempt to study how some of the major structural particles in Chinese, especially ba3, bei4 (the darlings of Chinese syntax studies), Ie, and de became grammaticalized from various full verb forms. Sun's examples are taken mainly from texts determined by the author to be vernacular rather than representative of the frozen written style of various historical periods , buthe also gives made-up sentences frommodern Mandarin. S's discovery of different historical origins for the 'suffixal le' (from the verb lai 'to come') and 'perfect Ie' (from liao 'to complete'), in particular, is interesting and noteworthy. Although ba3 and bei4 seem to have been dissected and expounded on ad infinitum by linguists, S presents a reasonably full historical picture of their evolution and expansion. I was a little disappointed to find no discussion of how the written forms of de often merge in modern Chinese. And S does not address the issue of the nominalizing de at all, which admittedly would have greatly lengthened and complicated his work. S's writing is concentrated and demanding for the reader. I found myself taking time out after practically each sentence in places to either guess the characters suggested by the romanization or to figure out how the examples fit in with the theoretical descriptions . This took a great deal of effort; any reader not prepared to invest this kind of energy will probably not get much from this book and will find it tedious in the extreme. (S really should be taken to task for omitting tone marks in the Pinyin romanization and for often not providing Chinese characters. These would be an enormous convenience to readers, and they are not at all technically difficult with current Chinese input systems. And there are a few typos.) But once I was able to fit everything together in my head, I was generally impressed with S's presentation . S offers a solid useful study as far as he goes. The nagging feeling one gets when reading works like this is that there is much more going on in Chinese syntax than meets the eye; Chinese grammatical processes are highly word order and context dependent, and just dealing with the grammatical trappings you can easily see, such as particles, isn't going to give you the whole picture. Nevertheless, S makes a worthy contribution toward increasing ourunderstanding of some of those more easily seen things which is an undeniably important, though not the only, part ofthe foundation ofChinese syntax. [Karen Steffen Chung, National Taiwan University.] Stylistics: A practical coursebook. By Laura Wright and Jonathan Hope. London & New York: Routledge, 1996. Pp. xvii, 237. This serves as an introduction to the techniques of stylistic analysis as well as to basic descriptive grammar, with readings from both twentieth-century fiction and nonfiction. The book is divided into five chapters, progressing in complexity in the first four chapters from Ch. 1, "The noun phrase' (1-44), Ch. 2, 'The verb phrase' (45-88), Ch. 3, "The clause' (89-161), to Ch. 4, 'Text structure' (163-201); the final chapter focuses on vocabulary and word choice (203-33). Each chapter is divided into subtopics with definitions, examples, and explanations, often followed by a task for the student, the solution, and a verdict (comments about the solution). This format gives the student hands-on experience and helps to ensure understanding of each topic before moving on to the next. Overall, this book is easy to understand, with little use ofjargon or technical terms. Each topic is introduced with a definition that presumes no prior linguistic knowledge. Where a linguistic term is used, it is defined as simply as needed for the topic. For example, in discussing English tenses the authors state there are only two morphological tenses, then they define 'morphological' as...