Le syntagme verbal en vietnamien By NguyỄn Phú Phong (review)

722LANGUAGE, VOLUME 54, NUMBER 3 (1978) There is a brief and unsatisfactory fourth chapter on ' Further issues concerning the application of rules'—dealing with, among other things, rule ordering (hopeless, because of the absence of any reference to juncture or the phrase structure related to it), and rules of phonetic realization. A half-page fifth chapter concludes the work. I wish, however, to re-emphasize that, in spite of these analytical shortcomings, Weidert's work is most valuable. My Lushai teacher and I have been able to find anything we needed in it as to what syllable structures exist, what phonological processes they undergo, and what adjacent forms trigger these. There is an index of technical terms, but not of Lushai forms cited. REFERENCES Bright, William. 1957a. Singing in Lushai. Indian Linguistics 17.24-8. ——. 1957b. Alternations in Lushai. Indian Linguistics 18.101-10. Burling, Robbins. 1957. Lushai phonemics. Indian Linguistics 17.148-55. Henderson, Eugénie J. A. 1948. Notes on the syllable structure of Lushai. BSOAS 12.712-25. Lehman, F. K. 1 975. On certain aspects of Mizo (Lushai) grammar. Paper for the 8th International Conference on Sino-Tibetan Languages and Linguistics, Berkeley. Lorrain, J. H. 1940. Dictionary of the Lushai language. Calcutta: Asiatic Society. Weidert, Alfons. 1977. Tai-Khamti phonology and vocabulary. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner. [Received 24 June 1977.] Le syntagme verbal en vietnamien. By NguyIn PhU Phong. (Centre de Recherches Linguistiques sur l'Asie Orientale, École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, Études linguistiques, 5.) The Hague & Paris: Mouton, 1976. Pp. 140. Reviewed by Nguyen D1nh-Hoà, Southern Illinois University This compact monograph on the Vietnamese verb phrase constitutes NPP's 1973 dissertation for the University of Paris VII. The book, photo-offset from a cameraready typescript, consists of an introduction, two main parts, a conclusion, and a bibliography. In his introduction, NPP gives a sketch of Vietnamese grammatical studies, then explains the purpose and methodology of his own study. Here he reviews four tendencies among earlier grammarians of the language. The traditional ones (represented by Aubaret 1867, Diguet 1892, Tru'o'ng Vïnh-Ky 1867, and Trän Trong-Kim et al. 1943) were strongly influenced by traditional French grammar. The second tendency, exemplified by Grammont & Le Quang-Trinh 1911-12, stressed the importance of environment and grammatical function. Then there was the structuralist approach used by Le Vân-Ly 1948, Emeneau 1951, and Thompson 1965. Representative of the most recent tendency is the grammar by Nguyën Kim-Thân 1963-1964. NPP states that, despite the descriptive and taxonomic nature of his own study, 'such other aspects as movement, transposition and deletion of verbal elements are not neglected' (13). He proposes to use not one but several methods—distributional analysis, immediate-constituent analysis, and also the transformational approach— in order to explicate embedding, recursiveness, ellipsis etc., each method complementing the others. NPP's unit of analysis is not the morpheme, but the word, which is investigated in detail in Chapter 1. Definitions proposed by Emeneau, Honey 1956, Thompson 1963, and Le Van-Ly REVIEWS723 are examined. NPP mentions that 'an ambitious definition which would identify the word as a unit on four different levels—graphic, syntactic, lexical and phonological' would be 'impossible' (23); but precisely such a definition is suggested by Thomas 1962. At any rate, after proposing his own neat definition of the word as 'the smallest unit that can fulfill a syntagmatic function in the utterance', NPP studies the structure of the word. He does not recognize subsyllabic morphemes, identified by Thompson as /n-/, Ia-I, /-ay/ etc. in such demonstratives as này 'this', day 'this place, here'. One-morpheme words may be monosyllabic (as are 21 3 out of 326 words used in one passage of Vietnam's Declaration of Independence of September 2, 1945), or they may be polysyllabic: thinh-linh 'suddenly', mênh-mông 'immense', or foreign loanwords such as xà-phàng 'soap' from savon or ba-do'-xuy 'overcoat' from pardessus. Polymorphemic words, however, include derived forms through reduplication (mát-mé C-x{£["·} C-x C-y 724LANGUAGE, VOLUME 54, NUMBER 3 (1978) Thus we have: (4)a. dûng-da d...