Prepositions and complement clauses: A syntactic and semantic study of verbs governing prepositions and complement clauses in present-day English by Juhani Rudanko (review)

BOOK NOTICES 685 and dialogue begin to develop at one and one half to two years. At about four years, when the child has acquired a basic narrative competence, she enters the narrative stage of cognitive development. At this stage language has started to take over the mind: 'thought is held to be carried out in terms of inner speech . . . thought is formed by the categories and relations found in language, or the genres expressed in discourse . . . [and] language is used to articulate and manipulate thought and knowledge systems' (21). In six separate chapters (Chs. 5-10), N shows that, through their growing linguistic capacities and in collaboration with social others, children are able to construct autobiographic memories, concepts of objects and time, knowledge of categories, and knowledge of intentions of self and others. This book is a well documented and carefully presented critique of strong nativism in developmental psychology and linguistics. N does not view cognition and language as mental faculties unfolding naturally according to a genetically encoded plan but as culturally mediated constructs. At die same time, the role of innate biological factors is not ignored, but the biological imperative to language acquisition is said to be 'of a very general kind that directs the child to attend to patterns of language' (113). For linguists, the main value of the book lies perhaps not in the originality of its view on language acquisition as a process of collaborative construction of culture-specific concepts and categories through which the child becomes a member of a culture and a social group, but more in the convincing way this view is substantiated with a wealth ofinteresting data which no one interested in language acquisition can afford to ignore. [Vincent A. de Rooij, University ofAmsterdam.] Prepositions and complement clauses: A syntactic and semantic study of verbs governing prepositions and complement clauses in present-day English. By Juhani Rudanko. (SUNY series in linguistics ,) Albany: State University of New York Press, 1996. Pp. viii, 211. Paper $19.95. This book studies acategory ofverb complementation that is neglected in grammars and rarely listed in dictionaryentries: acomplementconsistingofapreposition followed by an -ing clause. Ch. 1 is a short introduction , outlining the aims and scope of the book, the theoretical framework it is based on: Noam Chomsky 's principles and parameters theory, the database (the BROWN andLOB corpora), H. Poutsma's grammar (A grammar oflate Modern Englishfor the use ofcontinental,especiallyDutch, students,Groningen: Noordhoff, 1926), as well as his unpublished dictionary and More classes ofverbs in English (ed. by Loraine I. Bridgeman, unpublished linguistics research project, Indiana University, 1965), and the structural layout ofthe book. Chs. 2-8 describe and analyze individual patterns (in in Ch. 2, to in Chs. 3-4, at in Ch. 5, oninCh. 6, with inCh. 7, ofinCh. 8). Ch. 9provides a summary and conclusion. The chapters on individual patterns provide not only lists of verbs, but also detailed semantic analyses which suggest that verbs do not select their complement patterns randomly but according to semantic similarity. Rudanko draws a major distinction between intransitive uses, which are found with all six prepositions, and transitive uses, which are restricted to to, with, and of. The restriction of transitive uses to those three prepositions is, however, unnecessarily narrow, as transitive uses of verbs selecting at followed by a sentential complement seem equally possible : "Last summer you kept me at painting all day long." R also addresses the notoriously difficult problem of accounting for variation between subject and object control with the same matrix verb. Two major factors are decisive: animacy, i.e. whether the main clause object is animate or inanimate, and optional transitivity, i.e. according to R the same verb may be used transitively or intransitively, as in "The management converted the plant to making steel" (6a) and '"The plant converted to making steel'' (6b). Example 6b requires a modification ofBach's generalization 'in object control structures the object NP must be structurally represented' (Emmon Bach, 'In defense of passive', Linguistics and Philosophy 3.297-341). This is provided by R's distinction between a strong (= the original) form and a weak form, which does allow for intransitive uses ofmatrix verbs in object control...