Ahtna Athabaskan dictionary Compiled and edited by James Kari (review)

BOOK NOTICES 407 in isolation, giving detailed information on the frequency of each grammatical category in each text category, as well as the frequencies ofeach lexical item in its different grammatical functions . Vol. 2 analyzes the contextualized distributions ofthe words in the LOB corpus. J&H have developed a very detailed taxonomy of grammatical categories for their analysis of the corpus (outlined in an appendix); for example, they distinguish among seven categories of wh pronouns and 26categories of nouns. In this volume they first present the frequencies of all combinations of these grammatical categories, specifying both preceding and following positions. For example, adjectives are most frequently preceded by articles (32% of the time), with prepositions being second most frequent (11% of the time). In the other position, adjectives are most frequently followed by nouns (57% of the time), with prepositions again being second most frequent (7%); adjectives are followed by a second adjective 4.4% of the time, but they are followed by a comparative adjective only 0.02% of the time. J&H present similar kinds of information for each individual word in the corpus. For all verbs, adjectives, nouns, and adverbial particles , the most frequent collocational patterns are listed; in addition, for verbs and adjectives the frequencies of the most common grammatical categories for the following word are given. For instance, the verb indicate is most frequently followed by the subordinating conjunction that; other frequent sequences are indicated in and indicate by. In their introduction J&H discuss some of the most interesting global patterns. First of all, they note a marked difference in the number of tags occurring in preceding and following positions for many words. The infinitive marker to, for example, is preceded by 62 different grammatical categories but followed by only 5 different categories. There are also marked differences in the overall frequencies of different combinations; e.g., adjective-noun sequences occur 28,609 times in the corpus, and noun-noun sequences occur 9,978 times, but there are only 192 occurrences of adverb-noun sequences. Some sequences also showed marked variation across genre categories; e.g., noun-noun sequences occur 1 1 ,507 times (per million words) in informative prose, but only 5,427 times in imaginative prose. At the beginning of sentences , articles and prepositions are the most frequent grammatical categories (11.6% and 8.6% of the time, respectively), while in sentence -final position nouns are by far the most frequent category (58% of the time). J&H acknowledge the limitations of their study, noting that syntactic bracketing in the LOB corpus and a larger corpus would permit a more thorough analysis. However, the only comparable reference tool is the analysis of American written English (based on the Brown corpus) by Francis & Kucera. This two-volume set thus provides an extremely valuable tool for researchers studying the lexical patterns that typically occur in British English prose texts. [Douglas Biber, Northern Arizona University .) Ahtna Athabaskan dictionary. Compiled and ed. by James Karl Fairbanks : Alaska Native Language Center, University of Alaska, 1990. Pp. xi, 702. The goal of producing a dictionary that can be of use to native speakers, language students, and academic specialists is one that is often aimed for but rarely attained as well as K has in the Ahtna Athabaskan dictionary. In addition to the Ahtna-to-English entries and an Enghshto -Ahtna index, the book includes a history of work on the Ahtna language, a lucid and interesting discussion of the grammar of the verbal complex, and nine useful appendices. The organization of entries, termed 'experimental ' by K, represents an ingenious solution to the problems posed for lexicographers by the Athabaskan verbal prefix system. Athabaskan verbs are composed of a stem plus derivational prefixes, with inflectional prefixes interspersed among the derivational prefixes. In Young & Morgan's extensive Navajo dictionary (1980, 1988), words are arranged according to the first letter of the leftmost prefix, and there is a separate list of stems. K has instead listed all Ahtna morphemes, roots as well as affixes, and has arranged them alphabetically. The entry for each root includes subentries for all verb themes (uninfected verbs formed from a stem and prefixes ) which are derived from that root. In these entries the prefixes...