Nederlandse dialektatlassen Edited by E. Blancquaert and W. Pée (review)

766 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 54, NUMBER 3 (1978) negativity of the quantifiers seldom, hardly, little, and few in English, and sallen, knappast, lite, and fâ in Swedish. Details of the actual test design and additional graphs are provided in the appendices. The study is divided into three parts: (1) the English Experiment (EE), (2) the Swedish Experiment (SE), and (3) an analysis comparing the two sets of data. Of the paradigms used in the experiments, T writes: 'The criterion for negativity was use of neither in an appended tag sentence in English, and inte heller in Swedish. The use of jo or det ... ocksâ counted as positive interpretations. The method adopted in EE was a completion test. The subjects .. . were asked to complete a base-plus-tag pair of the following type: "I seldom drink tea ... does my brother." The assumption was that the subjects would make the tag sentence either negative or positive, thus giving evidence of their interpretation of the base sentence.' In the SE, a different technique was adopted to arrive at a paradigm that best approximated the English paradigm semantically. The Swedish speakers were confronted with two lines like these : (24)Jag dricker sallen te. Min bror dricker sallen te! (25)Jag dricker sallen te, och det gör ... The speakers were then asked to complete the sentence in 25 so that it preserved the meaning of the two sentences in 24. From the resulting data, T made percentage conversions and reached the following conclusions : (1) differences do exist in the relationship between individual quantifiers within the two language systems; (2) differences in negativity between related Swedish and English quantifiers do occur (negativity is defined here as the force of a specific quantifier to confer negativity on a sentence); and (3) a greater diversity occurs among Swedish quantifiers in terms of negative force than among the English counterparts. In the last chapter, T relates her own findings to those from previous studies, and although she offers no 'precise formulation of a non-discrete theory on negation', she does give some suggestions on the classification of the negative quantifier. She prefers to view negative quantifiers as arranged along a continuum according to degree of negativity, instead of divided in the discrete classes, strong and weak, proposed by Klima. T suggests that the negative quantifiers might be considered members of the 'fuzzy set'. T offers no immediate solution to the problem of defining negative quantifiers; however, this insightful study weaves several different models together, yielding a neat discussion and summary of proposed theories of negation and negative quantifiers. [Gay Bradshaw, University of California, Santa Barbara.] Nederlandse dialektatlassen. Edited by E. Blancquaert and W. Pee. Antwerp : Uitgeverij De Sikkel, 1925-77. 32 volumes. This is a series of dialect atlases of the entire Dutch-speaking area, comprising The Netherlands and the northern half of Belgium. It was initiated a half-century ago by Blancquaert at the University of Gent, according to the methods then current. This monumental project, carried out over the years by nineteen principal investigators, is now announced as complete. The project was based, from outset to finish, on a single set of 141 sentences. These were originally composed with rural Catholic Flanders in mind; this fact was occasionally to prove awkward in the mainly Protestant North. The obvious advantage gained in deciding to retain the same sentences is that everything transcribed can be compared over the entire area. The sentences are intended to elicit vocabulary items, some morphology, and a few syntactic features such as subordinate clauses. The entire area of investigation was divided, for the purposes of organization and publication , into sixteen districts of an approximately equal number of localities, the average being between 100 and 150. Simple multiplication shows that, in a geographical area ofjust over 20,000 square miles, we have a dense network of 2000 or more localities in which all 141 sentences have been transcribed. The actual publication consists, for each district, of two boxes made in the form of outsize volumes. The first contains the questionnaire, introductory matter, complete word indexes, geographical and alphabetical lists of all localities, a list of phonetic symbols, and the sentences in transcription for each BOOK...