Explorations in Indian sociolinguistics Ed. by Rajendra Singh, Probal Dasgupta, and Jayant K. Lele (review)

902 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 73, NUMBER 4 (1997) ticular semantics/pragmatics. A crucial question arises from this approach: Should the notion of a lexical item be generalized over complex elements or should lexical projection rules stay the same as in standard accounts but the grammatical structures be made more diverse? The papers by Farrell Ackerman ('Inversion in Polish', 1-24) and Mark Gawron ('Distance in construction grammar', 91-109) present evidence in favor of extending the notion of a lexical item over complex predicates and lexicallymotivated 'distance' constructions. Thus, according to Ackerman's analysis, the inversion predicate is a specific type of a construction (in the constructiongrammar sense) which entails certain semantics of its main argument paired with the dative case marking of that argument. In a similar vein, George Lakoff ('Reflections on metaphor and grammar', 133-43) identifies several ways in which metaphors, also viewed as constructions, have an effect on the grammar of English. Knud Lambrecht's paper, 'The pragmatics of case: On the relationship between semantic, grammatical , and pragmatic roles in English and French' (144-90), has a double objective—presenting arguments for a framework which recognizes the systematic links among semantic roles, grammatical relations, and elements of information structure (topic, focus) and using this approach to analyze the so-called sentence-focus constructions. In a sentence -focus construction, the entire proposition is the focus, which in English is marked by the pitch accent on the main argument and no accent on the verb, e.g., The balloon broke. L examines differences between English and spoken French in encoding information structure and shows that a unified account of superficially different phenomena is possible inasmuch as semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic factors are attributed equal relevance in a linguistic representation Fillmore's long-standing interest in Japanese is honored by several papers. Toshio Ohori ('Remarks on suspended clauses', 201-18) presents evidence that Japanese clauses with a linkage marker not followed by another clause should be distinguished from medial clauses and recognized as a separate construction. Such clauses are important for theories of grammaticalization; while conversion from a lexical item to a grammatical element is recognized as grammaticalization, the rise in functionality of an existing grammatical marker is a less known phenomenon . The paper relies crucially on typological features of Japanese as a verb-final language. Likewise , Seiko Yamaguchi Fujii ('Mental-space builders : Observations from Japanese and English conditionals', 73-90) demonstrates that the medialfinal verb contrast found in Japanese accounts for some of the differences between biclausal conditionals in Japanese and monoclausal ones in English; some other differences can be attributed to the absence of articles in Japanese. The papers by Susan Ervin-Tripp, ?e? Nakamura , and Jiansheng Guo ('Shifting face from Asia to Europe') and by Charles N. Li ('Ancestor-descendant and cultural-linguistic relativity') emphasize the importance of cultural pragmatics in the analysis of both lexical and grammatical items. Li's paper presents a concise analysis of the basic deictic expressions in Mandarin. The theory ofdeixis is also discussed by Jan-Ola Ostman ('Recasting the deictic foundation, using physics and Finnish'). Although several ofthe papers are lamentably programmatic , the book represents an overview of important issues in linguistic theory as well as a good summary of the effect that Fillmore has had on linguistics throughout his distinguished career. This last aspect of the book is particularly evident from George Lakoffs succinct summary of Fillmore's influence on the field: '[He] loves to ask implicit questions ', and 'once the question is posed, an answer is possible' (136). [Maria Polinsky, University of California, San Diego.] Explorations in Indian sociolinguistics. Ed. by Rajendra Singh, Probal DasGUFTA , and Jayant K. Lele. (Language and development 2.) New Delhi: Sage, 1995. Pp. 258. $23.95. This is the second volume in the series Language and development, which focuses on the sociolinguistics ofpostcolonial South Asia. Following an editors' introduction are revisions of eleven previously published and presented papers criticizing uses of variable rules and studies of language contact, conversational strategies, and language planning and development. In Ch. 1, Rajendra Singh and Alan Ford argue that uses of variable rules are redundant when variable phenomena can be characterized by invariant rules. In Ch. 2, Singh...