The Sango language and its lexicon By Christina Thornell (review)

BOOK NOTICES 211 tion-states in general. Vol. 2 (937-2171) focuses on aspects of linguistic contact within Europe. Some articles deal with the sociology of language within a particular country, especially in the case of newer or smaller states where work on the position of linguistic minorities may not be plentiful or where there is relatively little internal diversity. The majority, however, discuss the consequences of individual binary situations, for example Regina Hessky's article on contact between German and Hungarian (1723-31). Sixteen superb colored linguistic maps with accompanying explanations (1973-2067), and numerous pie-charts and diagrams, assist in the presentation of the facts. The coverage of European language contact situations is quite broad, if a little conservative. Little is said about the newer immigrant languages (for instance Turkish and Arabic) which now play such an important part, numerically and socially, in the linguistic economy of many European nations. However , sections are devoted to Yiddish and Romani, two languages which, because of their diasporic histories and concomitant lack of a visible hegemonic territorial base, are still often overlooked in similar surveys. Birgit Igla's article on Romani (1961-71), with its combination of descriptive and sociolinguistic information, is especially valuable. Although some of the material (for example the table ofcontents and the introduction to the linguistic atlas) is trilingual, articles written in one language are not provided with summaries in other languages. However, titles of bibliographical items in less widely-known European languages are sometimes also translated into the language of the relevant article . Most bibliographies at the end of articles do not contain items dated after 1993, the apparent cut-off point. The quality of proofreading is uniformly high. This important collection will remain a source of reference for years to come. The various sections of Vol. 1 would especially lend themselves to translation into a single language andpublication as separate books. [Anthony P. Grant, University of St Andrews .] The Sango language and its lexicon. By Christina Thornell. (Travaux de l'Institut de Linguistique de Lund, 32.) Lund: Lund University Press, 1997. Pp. 195. A revised Lund doctoral dissertation, ThorneH's book draws upon the author's knowledge of the language acquired through eleven years' work in the Central African Republic as a Baptist missionary. The book has three main sections and a conclusion (177-86) which touches on both general and more specifically semantic themes. The first part of the book (13-66) presents information on general characteristics of newly evolved languages such as Sango, and goes on to discuss the ethnic background and sociolinguistic settings in which Sango is used or in which it alternates with French. T further discusses the methodologies used in gathering examples ofdifferent genres in the taperecorded data which formed the corpus for the present study. The secondpart (67-105) provides ahelpful sketch of the main typological (phonological, grammatical, and, to a slight extent, lexical) and sociolinguistic features of Sango. This is well executed, although there is little new to report here as the field has been well covered in other works, for instance those by Helma Paseh and William Samarin. I found the discussion of the lexicon (93-105) a little disappointing. Records from the earlier part of this century show that quite a number of very common words deriving from Ngbandi, the main lexifierofSango, were replaced in the course oftime by words fromBantu languages, especially Lingala, although the impact of Bantu languages on Sango was not overwhelming. This topic touches on the development of the language and certainly deserved further examination. The third part (106-76) is the best, and the book's original contribution to knowledge. It presents a tightly-focused semantic study, based on a corpus of over 52,000 running words, which relates to lexical considerations of verbs of motion (some 44, including a few French loans, out of an admittedly incomplete list of 54 spatial verbs) and additionally to the 20 most common, basic, nonmotion verbs in Sango, including the copula and some verbs of cognition. A lexical-functional perspective is applied to the contents of these semantic fields, and the material is analyzed cross-linguistically with reference to other Ubangian languages as well...