The Čakavian dialect of Orlec on the island of Cres By H. Peter Houtzagers (review)

BOOK NOTICES 725 aspectual or temporal: 'The much discussed problem of the semantic nature of the aorist : imperfect opposition is solved: the opposition is temporal, and therefore aspectual; or aspectual and therefore temporal' (279). L believes that the opposition is aspectual, but that 'a difference in aspectuality necessarily means a difference in temporal reference, too' (137). In another attempt to carry two watermelons under one arm, L says the perfect can 'be called a past tense, although it is not a ( + past) tense in our feature system' (301). (L has afeature ( + perf) for the perfect.) Similarly, he states that 'in the perfect the time reference is non-specific' (101); 'it cannot be used to tell a story; it does not advance the plot of the narrative as the aorist does' (85). However, he is honest enough to adduce problematic examples such as Sàbudil sàm se dnes ? 5 éasa ? woke up today at 5 o'clock' (102), or the use of perfects in short sequential narratives (289); but essentially he must brush these aside. In Ch. 4, on tense and modality (the fifth and final chapter is an excellent four-page summary of conclusions), L discusses the various conditionals and the uses of Ste, adopts the traditional Bulgarian stance on the so-called reported mood, and discusses the so-called secondary perfect ofthe type xodel e and its related forms. While he correctly points out (268) that the perfect based on the aorist participle (xodil e) can be used in habitual sentences—e.g. after iesto 'often', where the aorist (xodi) cannot be used—he incorrectly goes on to state that the perfect based on the imperfect participle (xodel e) must always be modal or inferential, and cannot be a pure habitual. This is contradicted by clear examples from sources which L himself uses, e.g. Ami ie azpomnja majka mu, bre, ... uCela me E pesni da peja (Stankov 1976b:372, as cited by L) 'Well, but I sure do remember his mother, she used to teach me to sing songs.' L supports traditional views, e.g. that the imperfect is a present in the past (78) and that the perfect is distinguished from the preterit mainly by present relevance (100). He proposes boundedness as his key aspectual notion (134): the aorist and perfective are characterized by this notion (136), while the imperfect, present, and imperfective are non-bounded (150). L puts this concept to good use in a theory ofwhat he calls aspectual nesting (169-210), in which he gives the best account of imperfective aorists I have ever read, despite a small recourse to the ad-hoc (205-6). His treatment of what he calls the 'imperfective of isolated event' (e.g., Koj e pisal tova pismo? 'Who wrote this letter?'), which he admits is bounded but claims is somehow non-specific (216-32), is unconvincing. L has brought considerable effort and ingenuity to bear on a complex and intractable subject ; ifhis solutions are sometimes problematic, he has nonetheless made a valiant attempt, raised many important points, and proposed some new and useful ideas. This book is rich in data and obviously the product oflong and careful work. [Victor A. Friedman, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.] The Cakavian dialect of Orlec on the island of Cres. By H. Peter Houtzagers . (Studies in Slavic and general linguistics, 5.) Amsterdam: Rodopi , 1985. Pp. xx, 415. [Distrib. in the US by Humanities Press; $50.00.] Orlec is a village on an island in the northern Adriatic Sea offthe coast ofYugoslavia; its 200250 inhabitants speak a dialect that belongs to the Northwest division of the Cakavian subgroup of Serbo-Croatian, one of the three official languages of Yugoslavia. Houtzagers' book is a description of the phonology, inflectional morphology, and lexicon of this dialect, with a brief chapter on a few unusual syntactic features (166-71) and about thirty pages oftexts (172-201). The emphasis throughout is on the prosodie features of stress, length, and tone— both their strictly phonological behavior, and their participation in non-automatic morphophonemic alternations in the various inflectional subsystems. SC dialects which preserve phonemic contrasts in all three prosodie features are of particular interest to Slavists...