Comparative studies in word order variation: Adverbs, pronouns and clause structure in Romance and Germanic By Christopher Laenzlinger (review)

228 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 76, NUMBER 1 (2000) Rather, it serves as a basic reference for each of those fields, with description, a chapter summary, a set of general references and a bibliography for material refened to in the chapter. The chapters are as follows: (1)'Speech communication and the speech sciences', (2)'Basic concepts from physics and mathematics', (3)'An overview of anatomy, the speech system and speech sounds', (4) "The respiratory and laryngeal systems', (5) 'The upper airway', (6) 'The auditory system', (7) "The neural basis ofspeech', (8) 'Physiological phonetics', (9) 'Acoustic phonetics', (10) 'Speech perception', (11) "Theories of speech perception ', (12) 'Applied speech sciences', (13) 'The evolution of speech', and (14) "The embryology of the speech organs'. As one can see, this book deals with everything involved in speech from the muscles used in expiration during speech to the embryological development ofthe hard palate (including where such development can go wrong—cleft palate). If you have forgotten what the parts of a tooth are (dentin, pulp) or which muscles activate the arytenoid cartilages, you can find that in here. In addition, there are details on the measurement of speech production and acoustics (electropalatographs, tracheal punctures, spectrograms ). To keep the reader's interest there are whimsical asides on all sorts of subjects, from the relationship between the cochlea and the chambered nautilus (both incidences of logarithmic spirals) to the aging effects of our extremely mobile facial muscles on our facial skin—we wouldn't have as many facial wrinkles if we didn't smile or frown. Alarming quantities of saliva are directed into the air in animated conversations (7500 droplets per hour is estimated). For linguists this book could serve as a basic reference for everything dealing with speech anatomy and physiology, but for the more orthodox linguist odd things would require care in directing the book to, for example, undergraduate phonetics students. One place where there seemed to be a number of errors was in the introduction to IPA transcription. A number of symbols were inconect (large cap I and U rather than the official small cap symbols ?, ?), and there are some odd, or at least nonstandard, phonetic descriptions—'lingua-alveolar' for apico-alveolar, 'lingua-velar' for dorso-velar, (62-63). In keeping with the wide audience of this book this section includes the UNIBET symbols devised to be compatible with standard ASCII, although the widespread availability of Windows fonts probably makes this adaptation of IPA unnecessary for most people nowadays . The book is filled with diagrams, photographs, and charts, and at the end are a number of colored photos —the larynx during normal phonation, microscopic cross-section of a vocal fold, a real, full-color mid-sagittal section photograph (not for the faint of heart or weak of stomach), and a couple of brains. A well-known speech scientist, Kent has worked on disordered speech production, methodology of speech analysis, and theories of speech production, and has authored numerous other reference books. This book belongs on everyone's reference shelf, but linguists will need to be aware that the vocabulary as used in the broader field of speech science is somewhat different from that within linguistics proper and warn their students accordingly. The only additional cavil I would have is the extraordinarily high price for a paperback book. [Geoffrey S. Nathan, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale.] Comparative studies in word order variation: Adverbs, pronouns and clause structure in Romance and Germanic . By Christopher Laenzlinger. (Linguistik Aktuell/Linguistics today, 20.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1998. Pp. x, 371. A revision of Laenzlinger's 1996 PhD dissertation from the Université de Genève, this book is divided into three contentful chapters each addressing one of the topics in the subtitle. In the author's words, the three topics 'raise essentially the same questions: 1. What are the base positions of adverbs, pronouns and arguments in a given structure? How are they lexically inserted into these positions? 2. What are the surface positions ofthese constituents? Have they been affected by transformations? 3. How are these elements formally licensed and identified within the clause?' (9). While the questions do tie the book together , the comparative aspect of the book is largely to be...