Negative sentences in the languages of Europe: A typological approach by Giuliano Bernini and Paolo Ramat (review)

BOOK NOTICES 677 ume's title seriously, offering acomparison ofatleast two settings, populations, or languages. Some of the comparisons are natural to the setting or the subject, e.g. thepapercomparing two French/Dutch language borders, in northern France and in Belgium (Roland Willemyns), but others arise from the particular interests or opportunities of the authors, e.g. the paper comparing codeswitching rationales of MexicanAmericans and Malaysians (Rodolfo Jacobson). Three papers offer typologies: Ulrich Ammon's 'Oncomparingthecentersofplurinationallanguages: The example of German', Ludwig Eichinger's 'Sociolinguistic characters: On comparing linguistic minorities ', and Manfred Görlach's "The typology of dictionaries of English-based pidgins and creóles'. The last presents auseful assessment ofthe traditional functionsofdictionaries andthe specialproblems that pidgins and creóles pose for lexicographers, linking handily with the one other paper on pidgins and cre- óles in the collection, Suzanne Romaine's 'Pidgins and creóles as literary languages: Ausbau and Abstand '. Romainecompares theemergenceintoliterary use of four languages different as to elaboration, status , and function, namely Guyanese Creole English, Hawai'i Creole English, Krio, and Tok Pisin, and, as withlexicography, literaryuseposes interestingly difficult and sometimes novel problems when the language in question is a pidgin or a creóle. Two papers deal with issues in women's use of language, Anne Pauwels's comparison of the use of new forms of titles for women in Dutch and in Australian English ('Feminist language planning and titles for women: Some crosslinguistic perspectives') and Susanne Günthner's wide-ranging survey of 'Male-female speaking practices across cultures'. Günthner draws on proliferating cross-cultural studies to demonstrate that differences once held to be more or less inherent in biological or social roles—differences in communicative styles, for example —are much more culture-specific than previously supposed, and that value judgments and social hierarchies associated with differences in female and male activities give rise to genderideologies andparticular expectations of gendered behavior. Two papers compare Japanese and German speech behavior, one in terms of conceptions of desirable communicative behavior ('Concepts of communicative virtues (CCV) in Japanese and German', by Ichiro Marui, Yoshtnori Nishdima, Kayoko Noro, Rudolf Reinelt, and Hitoshi Yamashita) and one in terms of speech-act orientation ('Referential perspective in speech acts: A comparison between German and Japanese', by Kazuma Matoba). It will be evident even from these few specifics that the volume is quite heterogeneous as to content. Furthermore, the writing styles are correspondingly diverse. I found especially valuable several papers dealing closely with bi- or multilingual European settings (Sonja Vandermeeren, 'Language attitudes on either side of the linguistic frontier: A sociolinguistic survey in the Voeren/Fouron-area and in Old Belgium North'; Georges LOdi, 'Multilingualism through migration: A comparison of internal and external migrant communities in Switzerland'; and the Willemyns paper mentioned above), but the utility of the collection will vary considerably according to the reader's interests. [Nancy C. Dorian, Bryn Mawr College.] Negative sentences in the languages of Europe: A typological approach. By Giuliano Bernini and Paolo Ramat. (Empirical approaches to language typology , 16.) Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1996. Pp. xiii, 274. This volume richly documents the languages of Europe and includes data from many lesser known dialects and European-based créoles as well. Reference to a substantial number of non-European languages is also made for comparative purposes. The first part of the volume, comprised of four chapters, is dedicated to diachronic and areal perspectives . Ch. 1 (17-22) examines thedevelopmentofdiscontinuous negation in Romance and the subsequent change to postverbal negation in some varieties. Ch. 2 (23-34) reconstructs the position of the sentential negator as preverbal (or strongly emphatic sentenceinitial ) in proto-Indo-European and traces its evolution in Romance, Celtic, Germanic, and Slavonic, concentrating on the strong tendency for negation to be reinforced by other morphemes. Ch. 3 (35-46) examines the configuration of negative sentences from a pragmatic perspective. Ch. 4 (47-81) investigates whethervarioustypesofsententialnegationinthelanguages of Europe evolved independently or spread from one or more centers in different ways and at differenttimes . A long discussion ofthe development of sentence-final negation in Afrikaans as the result of complex contact patterns is also included. The second part of the volume, comprised of six chapters, is...