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BOOK NOTICES 203 colonial period with words coined from native resources has resulted in some confusion. In Ch. 16, 'Trench warfare: The case of French' (175-93), the growth and subsequent decline of French and the situation of Quebec are discussed at some length. The many instances of the relationship between language and society make this work an excellent source for what in linguistic anthropology is dealt with under societal multilingualism, language plan- ning , language attitudes, linguistic variation in a plural society, and related topics. [Zdenek Salzmann, Northern Arizona University.] Studies in Middle English linguistics. Ed. by Jacek Fisiak. (Trends in linguistics : Studies and monographs 103.) Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1997. Pp. xi, 621. This volume contains 26 articles, most of them papers from the first international conference on Middle English which was held in Rydzyna, Poland, in 1994, to celebrate the 120th anniversary of the concept of Middle English. (The second conference was organized in Helsinki in 1997, and the third, in Dublin in 1999.) The contributions are fairly representative of the linguistic study of Middle English today. They are not organized thematically, but the most typical objects of enquiry are related to syntax. Tony Foster and Wim van der Wurff (135-56) look at word order m Late Middle English and maintain that the motivation for the use of the waning object-verb order shifted from syntactic in Old English to discourse -based in Middle English. Cynthia L. Allen (1-21), Olga Fischer (109-34), Lilo Moessner (335-49), Michiko Ogura (403-28), and Georg G. Pocheptsov (469-88) survey various verb constructions ; pronoun studies are presented by Helena Raumolin-Brunberg and Terttu Nevalainen (489-511) and Matti Rissanen (513-29); appositions are discussed by Saara Nevanlinna and Paivi Pahta (373-401) and exclamations, by Irma Taavitsainen (573-607). Questions of phonetics and phonology are addressed in a number ofpapers. While Herbert Pilch (439-67) surveys the phonetic system of Middle English , Piotr Gasiorowski (157-80), Christopher B. McCully (283-300), and Donka Minkova and Robert P. Stockwell (301-34) focus on stress. Betty S. Phillips (429-38), Nikolaus Ritt (531-50), and Albertas Steponavicius (561-72) examine vowel developments, and John Anderson and Derek Britton (23-58) deal with orthographic representations of vowel and consonant quantity. Middle English studies can hardly be presented extensively without reference to dialectology, here particularly observed by Richard M. Hogg (207-20) and Gillis Kristensson (271-81), or to Chaucer, a source of material for Norman F. Blake (59-78), Rafal Molencki (351-71), and Jeremy J. Smith (551-60). On a more general level, Raymond Hickey (181-205) studies the linguistic situation in Ireland c. 1200. Peter R. Kitson (221-69) challenges the date ordinarily proposed for the beginning ofMiddle English, i.e. 1100. He argues for 1200: the changes leading to the levelled inflection of Middle English had not advanced to an irrevocable stage before that. Andrei Danchev (79-108) revisits the creolization hypothesis of the 1970s and 1980s and concludes that Old English did not undergo actual creolization although features typical of creĆ³les can be detected in Middle English. Moreover, this phase of English resembles the interlanguage of second-language learners. The contributions are characteristically diachronic , illustrating the important transitional role of Middle English in the history of the language: old English developments are often taken into account, and the scope is sometimes extended to Early Modern English and beyond. Hogg actually questions the utility of defining a strict boundary between Old and Middle English. In terms of theory, the sociolinguistic , pragmatic, and other explanatory frameworks presented in several articles emphasize the usefulness of combining modern approaches and historical texts. [Janne Skaffari, University of Turku.] Lithuanian grammar. Ed. by Vytautas Ambrazas. Vilnius: Baltos Lankos, 1997. 802 pp. Rarely can one find a such thoroughly satisfying description of virtually all aspects of a language within the pages of a single book. Editor Vytautas Ambrazas, in collaboration with six other noted specialists , has achieved precisely that in compiling this new and long overdue English-language reference grammar of Lithuanian. Drawing from the three-volume Lietuviu kalbos gramatika (K. Ulvydas et al. (eds.), Vilnius, 1965-76), this team of experts...

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