Wer spricht Esperanto? Kiu parolas Esperanton? By Frank Stocker (review)

BOOK NOTICES 181 with the data cited in the chapters, and a small reference section (153-54), which omits several of the references cited in the text. The book needed a stronger editor; in addition to the missing references, there are numerous errors, both typographical and grammatical. Although it is a worthwhile read for the extensive data and the prose generalizations N provides, the analysis would have benefitted a great deal from abetterunderstanding ofprevious analyses and from a more current theoretical framework using constraints. [Caroline R. Wiltshire, University of Florida.] Towards a semantics of linguistic time: Exploring some basic time concepts with special reference to English and Krio. By Johan Nordlander. Uppsala, Sweden: Swedish Science Press, 1997. Pp. viii, 196. A recent PhD dissertation from Umeâ University in Sweden, this work is divided into seven chapters with the first two presenting, respectively, an introduction to the literature (1-23) and definitions of basic concepts (25-65). The remaining five chapters present: "The supremacy of the state/non-state distinction' (67-84). 'The situational nucleus' (85-105), 'The verbal constituency' (107-33), 'Peripheral situational modification' (135-63), and the conclusion (165-67), which is really more of a summation of the previous four chapters. The theory behind the analysis is largely informed by Derek Bickerton's Language Bioprogram Hypothesis in which four distinctions are fundamental: state/process , durative/punctual, realis/irrealis, and anterior/ nonanterior. Nordlander discusses these distinctions in terms of 'dynamicity values' of the verbal nucleus (e.g., see 31-33, 39-41, 57-63, 74-75, 82-83, 102-5), i.e. stative, processive, eventive, and telic. English (both general standard British [presumably RP] and American) and Krio, an English-derived cre- óle of Sierra Leone, constitute the data corpus. Four plays and a translation of the New Testament form the basis of the Krio data. Why English and Krio were selected as sources of data is never made explicitly clear. One similarity shared by both languages is that the state/nonstate distinction represents the fundamental dichotomy in their verb systems (see Ch. 3). (Cf. work by Bickerton , among others, in which the durative/punctual distinction is viewed as the more basic.) According to N, the state/nonstate distinction is the fundamental basis 'upon which verbal marking of time in English and Krio is built' (67; see also 77, 80, 84). Unfortunately , the primacy of this dichotomy in other languages is left unexplored, so again the question arises. Why examine only English and Krio in this regard? (A few references to Swedish appear on 116-17.) However, this work does have the intended effect of using créole data and work by creolists in a formal approach to a topic which, as the author rightly points out (22), is a relatively rare occurrence in contemporary theoretical linguistics. This work is also useful in that it highlights the similarities between English and Krio in terms of syntactic/semantic categories (universals are likely at play here, but this perspective is not explored in detail), though they are often realized with different structures. For example , Krio uses the irrealis markers go, kin,fo, which correspond generally to the English modal auxiliaries will, can, should or may (154-63). The book is well written and produced, with few typographical errors. The titles of Ch. 4 m the table of contents and on page 85 do not match (see also 25, 49), but these are small matters. Whatever the specific reasons for comparing and contrasting the semantics of Krio and English, N's book is a fine examination of the semantics of the Krio verb phrase and so will be of interest to creolists and scholars of English studies as well as those interested in more theoretical topics. [Michael Aceto, University of Puerto Rico]. Wer spricht Esperanto? Kiu parolas Esperanton ? By Frank Stocker. Munich: Lincom Europa, 1996. Pp. 150. As the title indicates, the book, Wer spricht Esperanto ! (Who speaks Esperanto?) is an empirical informative work which aims to give an overall picture of the Esperanto movement and its members based on sociological analysis. It contains a detailed account of the results of a survey which Stocker (while editor of the magazine Esperanto aktuell...