Autolexical theory: Ideas and methods ed. by Eric Schiller, Elisa Steinberg, and Barbara Need (review)

REVIEWS629 differentiation. This can potentially confuse the student, who cannot at this early stage differentiate between the two varieties. For this and other reasons, Y's program relies more on the teacher. When compared with B et al.'s program, Y's program also has the disadvantage of not exploiting the engaging and pedagogically compelling visual medium (video) in this otherwise well presented program. One slight disadvantage that both works share when compared with many recent pedagogical textbooks is the absence of color. The layout of the books' pages entirely in black and white is somewhat ofa disappointment to those students who have come to expect lively colorful segments in modem language textbooks. This minor imperfection notwithstanding, these two works offer state-of-the-art attempts at teaching Arabic in an interactive communicative approach. Both programs are commendable for using authentic materials and texts, thereby creating coherent contexts in the learning process. Both programs are also meritorious for not shrinking away from die challenging and worthwhile task of integrating the colloquial and Fusha. The two programs, which are not designed for self-instruction, will be embraced by earnest learners and teachers of Arabic. Department of Linguistics, CB 295 University of Colorado Boulder, CO 80309 [maher.awad@colorado.edu] Autolexical theory: Ideas and methods. Ed. by Eric Schiller, Elisa Steinberg, and Barbara Need. (Trends in linguistics, studies and monographs, 85.) Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1995. Pp. 375. Reviewed by Willem J. de Reuse, University ofNorth Texas This is the first book-length collection of articles entirely devoted to autolexical theory (also called autolexical syntax, henceforth ALS), a modular theory of grammar originally developed and formulated by Sadock (1985, 1991). This collection has its origins in a workshop on autolexical syntax organized by the book's editors, at the Chicago Linguistic Society meetings in 1989. Since the workshop was more or less contemporary with Sadock's teaching and writing of his most extensive formulation (Sadock 1991), this collection should not be considered representative of what has evolved in the theory between 1989 and 1995, the publication date. In the introduction, Schiller provides a fairly nontechnical summary of ALS along with a concise and useful summary of the contribution of each paper, and he traces the development of the theory up to January 1995. ALS is a nonderivational theory which employs parallel grammatical representations; each grammatical representation receives its information from a module which consists of an autonomous set of rules. There are separate (morpho)phonological, morphological, syntactic, logicosemantic modules, and presumably others. The representations of each module are checked in the interface, the point where the grammatical representations come together, and interface principles constrain the extent to which the representations are allowed to mismatch. The lexical items or formatives that representations operate with are stored in the lexicon, where lexical entries list the properties (or lack thereof) that each element has regarding a particular module. Thus every lexical item or morphological formative in a particular language is listed in the lexicon with its syntactic properties, its morphological properties, its logico-semantic properties, etc. Within ALS, the primary theoretical concern has been to formulate sufficiently constrained and precise interface principles; secondary concerns have included the proper specification of the information in the lexicon and the determination of the number of modules needed. Because of the healmy multiplicity of viewpoints and formalisms in the collection, I recommend that readers unfamiliar with ALS have a close look at Sadock 1991 before tackling it. 630LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 3 (1998) First, I discuss papers by students of Sadock or by scholars who attended his classes. While the framework is assumed, they nevertheless make important and original modifications to ALS. Shobhana L. Chelliah's paper is an account of voicing assimilation in Manipuri (or Meithei), an agglutinative Tibeto-Burman language of Northeastern India. In this language, level-ordering within lexical phonology can account for the facts of voicing assimilation but cannot account for bracketing paradoxes. Chelliah shows that a phonological module that includes levels similar to those of lexical phonology can solve the problem and extends her analysis to well-known English examples of bracketing paradoxes such as ungrammaticality. Robinson H. Schneider proposes an original trimodular...