Units in Mandarin conversation: Prosody, discourse and grammar By Hongyin Tao (review)

402 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 2 (1998) Cornelis and Arie Verhagen (49-60) question the existence of a passive in Dutch. They investigate the properties of the worden 'become' + past participle construction and suggest that its elements are fully analyzable. Jet van Dam van Isselt (61-71) proposes to extend the Polyani-Scha discourse model to account for Dutch defective sentences. Rose-Marie Déchaîne (73-88) posits a categorial-selection constraint which provides a unified analysis of all the occurrences of be in environments where be is obligatory. Herman Giesbers (89-100) looks at the process of language mixing, comparing data from spoken Petjo and literary Petjo and evaluates his results with respect to several models of language intertwining. Janet Grijzenhout (101-11) gives evidence from Modern Irish (and also from Finnish and West Atlantic languages) for the analysis of consonant alternations as involving aperture positions and sonorant voice. Helen de Hoop (113-24) compares the role of focus with the role of context in the determination of the domain of quantification of only. Rene Kager (125-38) surveys canonical root shapes in five East Australian languages, showing that they are captured by template pools. Josine Lalleman and Kulli Prosa (139-50) study the way grammatical exercises on Dutch referential er could affect L2 competence. Sergio Menuzzi (151-62) proposes to add a f-featurecompatibility requirement to Reinhart and Reuland's chain condition to account for intriguing facts concerning 1st person plural anaphora in Brazilian Portuguese . Marga Petter (163-74) discusses shifts m control for Dutch, showing that deontic modals trigger control shifts by adding the external argument m control clauses Gertian Postma (175-90) develops an interpretative theory of grammar in which lexical and quantificational submodules are in complementary distribution, in order to capture the Zerosemantics phenomenon in Dutch. Chris Reintges (191-202) shows that the minimalist framework allows for a new explanation of the morphosyntactic properties of the various Coptic stem allomorphs. Ton van der Wouden (203-14) analyzes the Dutch adverb moeilijk 'difficult' in lexical semantics, showing why such adverbs can function as negation operators only in certain environments whereas their English counterparts cannot. C. Jan-Wouter Zwart (215-26) distinguishes two types of movement yielding word order variation in Continental West Germanic verb clusters: head-movement and XPmovement . Joost Zwarts (227-38) examines the syntax of Dutch directional prepositions, distinguishing between functional directional prepositions (P[ + F]) and lexical directional prepositions (PI-F]). Overall, this book offers an excellent overview of current research in different fields of linguistics in the Netherlands. It provides a variety of theoretical approaches to language research and therefore should be of special interest not only to Dutch specialists but to general linguist, too [Karen Ferret, Université Paris III.] Units in Mandarin conversation: Prosody , discourse and grammar. By Hongyin Tao. Amsterdam & Philadelphia : John Benjamins, 1996. Pp. v, 225. In this revised version of his dissertation, Tao develops a discourse-functional approach to Mandarin grammar uniting prosodie and syntactic structure with discourse function in the identification of the units of naturally occurring conversational data. In light of the variety of the grammatical units found in the data, T argues for a reassessment ofthe application of traditional clausal analyses and classical conceptions of constituency to Mandarin spoken discourse . This clearly argued and comprehensive analysis is a much needed addition to the current published work in conversation analysis in IndoEuropean languages. Following a brief introduction in Ch 1 (1-4), Ch 2 (5-3 1 ) outlines the theoretical framework. T establishes the intonation unit (IU) as the basic unit of analysis and presents evidence for its psychological and interactional reality in conversational discourse. The remainder of the chapter focuses on the tripartite relationship between the structure of IUs, the discourse properties of information flow and identifiability , and the grammatical categories of clause, grammatical role, and degrees of transitivity. The third chapter (32-54) expands on the criteria used to segment prosodie units in discourse. Using acoustic analysis techniques, T demonstrates that Mandarin IUs. while exhibiting some universal prosodie characteristics, frequently rely for their identification on declination and nonprosodic means such as sentence final particles. Ch. 4 (55-77) outlines the variety of grammatical structures...