The noun in Biblical Armenian: Origin and word-formation, with special emphasis on the Indo-European heritage By Birgit Anette Olsen (review)

REVIEWS449 properties of coordination. It is disappointing as well that J's account seems to offer no insight into cases of extraction which do exhibit an asymmetry between the two conjuncts, as in 9. (9) a. Which horse were you [watching t and hoping t would win]? b. *Which horse were you [hoping t would win and watching t]? Overall, extraction does not provide much support for J's analysis. In Ch. 7, J addresses two partially interrelated issues. The first concerns the distinction between coordination and subordination. The traditional view has been that these two relations are fundamentally different, but J's CoP analysis essentially assimilates coordination to subordination. J suggests that this move is on the right track by showing that the two phenomena have more in common than is usually thought. In many languages, for instance, conjunctions are used as subordinators as well. The second issue she addresses in this chapter concerns semantics. She gives a good overview of the major semantic problems that coordination presents and includes a particularly enlightening discussion ofthe possible contribution ofthematic roles in constraining what may be conjoined with what. No definitive conclusion is reached, but the discussion itself is interesting and worthwhile. The book itself is generally well produced, though I do have a few quibbles. First, the plural noun analyses is consistently spelled as the verb analyzes, which gets a little annoying after the third or fourth time. Second, there are some extremely long paragraphs, some going on for several pages. Breaking them up into shorter, more manageable ones could have resulted in clearer text in places. Finally, one realizes early on in this book that if the language of an example sentence is not identified, and it is not English, then it must be Norwegian. This is not an unreasonable policy, but it would have been nicer if it had been announced. Overall, I doubt that anyone will finish this book and end up totally convinced that this is the right way to analyze coordination. But I doubt even more that anyone will finish it without a heightened appreciation and respect for the complex syntactic puzzles that coordination presents. REFERENCES Goodall, Grant. 1987. Parallel structures in syntax: Coordination, causatives and restructuring. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grootveld, Marjan. 1992. On the representation of coordination. Linguistics in the Netherlands 1992, ed. by Reineke Bok-Bennema and Roeland van Hout, 61-73. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Munn, Alan. 1992. A null operator analysis of ATB gaps. Linguistic Review 9.1-26. Ross, John Robert. 1967. Constraints on variables in syntax. Cambridge, MA: MIT dissertation. van Oirsouw, Robert R. 1987. The syntax of coordination. London: Croom Helm. Wn-DER, Chris. 1994. Coordination, ATB and ellipsis. Minimalism and Kayne's assymetry hypothesis, Groninger Arbeiten zur Germanistischen Linguistik 37, ed. by Jan-Wouter Zwart, 291-329. Groningen. -----. 1995. Some properties of ellipsis in coordination. Geneva Generative Working Papers, ii/2.23—61. Department of Languages and Linguistics 136 Liberal Arts University of Texas El Paso, TX 79968-0531 The noun in Biblical Armenian: Origin and word-formation, with special emphasis on the Indo-European heritage. By Birgit Anette Olsen. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 1999. Pp. 1100. $118.00. Reviewed by John Greppin, Cleveland State University Birgit Anette Olsen has compiled an extraordinarily complete survey of the Armenian noun as it was used in the first half of the fifth century ad, the time during which the Bible was translated from Greek. Confining herself to this single ancient text does somewhat limit her, for there is more than a little Classical Armenian vocabulary that does not appear in the Bible. It 450LANGUAGE, VOLUME 76, NUMBER 2 (2000) does, however, give O the security of precise limitation. O's work is thorough; her bibliography ofWestern Armenological studies is exceptionally precise up through the mid 90s, and the major Russian and Armenian language manuals from Yerevan are also well indexed. However, her command ofjournal articles in Russian and Armenian is deficient, and there are few references (actually, I could find none) to such principal journals as Banber, Patma-banasirakan Handes, and Lraber. Indeed, native Armenian scholarship does harbor views and processes that differ from the West, and surely...