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REVIEWS565 The Celtic languages. Edited by Donald MacAulay. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. xvii, 466. Reviewed by Nancy Stenson, University of Minnesota The ninth book in the Cambridge University Press Language Surveys series deals with the six Insular Celtic languages, with greatest attention given to the four languages surviving as community vernaculars—Irish, Scottish Gaelic, Breton, and Welsh—and shorter chapters on Cornish and Manx. The intent is to provide a descriptive overview of each modern language, a goal which is on the whole successfully achieved. The opening chapter, 'The Celtic languages: An overview', by Donald MacAulay (1-8), surveys the establishment of the Celts in their modern-day territories, their linguistic affiliations, and a few noteworthy typological features common to all the languages. Except for brief mention in the overview, Continental Celtic, or Gaulish, is not covered in this volume. The remaining chapters are 'The Irish language', by Cathair Ó Dochartaigh (11-99); 'The Manx language', by Robert L. Thomson (100-36); 'The Scottish Gaelic language', by Donald MacAulay (137-248); 'The Welsh language', by Alan R. Thomas (251-345); 'The Cornish language', by Alan R. Thomas (346-70); and 'The Breton language' by Elmar Ternes (371-452). Each chapter begins with fairly extensive, valuable sections entitled 'Historical and social perspective', covering external history of each language, areal distribution, sociolinguistic status, and dialect variation. Remaining sections are grouped under the headings 'Syntax ' (with subsections covering such topics as sentence types, word order, ellipsis, tense, aspect, and modality) 'Structure of the phrase' (constituentlevel syntax, with sections on NP, VP, and PP), 'Morphology' (inflectional and derivational), 'Sound system' (consonants, vowels, syllable structure, stress, pitch, and intonation), and 'Morphophonology' (mainly initial mutations, and a few language-specific alternations). The major strength of the volume is its presentation of comparative data for the six languages, since the grammatical information for any given language is readily available elsewhere, often in more detail. For a brief overview of the grammars, however, there is an advantage to having all six available in a single volume, with easy cross-reference, and this is what the book aims to provide. Chapters are arranged in parallel format, so that one can either read through all sections on a single language or find the six parallel sections on, say, inflected prepositions, or 'be', or vowel inventories, for immediate comparison. Some flexibility was permitted in following the chapter outlines, and this affects crosslanguage comparability in certain sections. Some departures from the common organization are justified by differences among the languages or by the lesser availability of data for Manx and Cornish, but others are harder to explain, such as the extensive reordering of the syntax sections in the Breton chapter and the complete absence of sections on ellipsis, aspect, complementation, and modality in Breton. The organizational structure itself sometimes obscures comparability. Authors clearly did not interpret all section titles uniformly, so that similar headings sometimes contain very different material, and similar 566LANGUAGE, VOLUME 70, NUMBER 3 (1994) phenomena across languages may appear in different sections. Thus, the subsection on noun morphology labelled 'Inherent classes' discusses gender in the Irish chapter and count/mass/collective distinctions in the Brittonic languages, and is omitted altogether from the Manx and Scottish Gaelic chapters, although the latter has separate sections for both gender and countability. Similarly, the syntax sections 'Parataxis and hypotaxis' all cover coordination (with and without overt conjunctions), but the Irish, Gaelic, and Breton chapters also briefly mention various forms of subordination. Ternes (Breton) and MacAulay (Gaelic) discuss the construction called 'absolute' in Breton (and introducing a nonfinite verb or verbless predicate) in this section, but the analogous construction in Irish is dealt with in the section 'Other sentential features'. The 'Verb phrases' section also produces very different results from language to language. The VP is variously identified as consisting of finite verb plus subject (Irish), auxiliary, verb, and inflection (Welsh), all major sentence constituents (Manx), and the verbal noun plus object of progressive constructions (Gaelic). Breton, the one language analyzed as SVO and thus easily describable in terms of VPs, has the longest section, covering a variety of verbal syntactic phenomena not mentioned for the other languages or covered elsewhere. Parallel structure...

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