Non-distinct arguments in Uto-Aztecan By Ronald W. Langacker (review)

REVIEWS457 where syoozikijkiyoo is the object of the verb katta 'painted'; and Teki no nigeru o iki mo tukasazu tutgeki sita 'We pursued the enemy running away, giving them not even time to breathe', with fossilized nigeru in the object position. AU in all, therefore, it may be concluded that K's arguments in support of the Subject Raising analysis fall short of their stated goal. The book has its share oftypographical errors and omissions, of which I will list three notable examples. On p. 114, on the sixth line of the first new paragraph, the following should be inserted after the third word from the left: 'partial because the higher verb of the subject complement can be' (cf. N. McCawley 1972b:164). On p. 161, rule (d) of Inoue's interpretation rules should certainly include '11 #0', and 'Subj-conj' needs to be changed to 'Sub-conj'. Finally, on p. 186, subscript ? should be attached to sensei in 85 and to gakusya in 86. REFERENCES Akmajian, Adrian, and Chisato Kitagawa. 1976. Deep-structure binding ofpronouns and anaphoric bleeding. Lg. 52.61-77. Harada, S. I. 1970. A study of Japanese honorification. ?.?. thesis, University of Tokyo. Howard, Irwin, and Agnes Niyekawa-Howard. 1974. Recent developments in the study of the Japanese passive. Working Papers in Linguistics, University of Hawaii, 6:2.119-60. Kuno, Susumu. 1972a. Pronominalization, reflexivization, and direct discourse. Linguistic Inquiry 3.161-95. ------. 1972b. Evidence for subject raising in Japanese. Papers in Japanese Linguistics 1.24-51. ------. 1973. The structure of the Japanese language. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ------, and Etsuko Kaburaki. 1975. Empathy and syntax. Harvard studies in syntax and semantics, ed. by S. Kuno, 1.1-73. Kuroda, S.-Y. 1965. Generative grammatical studies in the Japanese language. Cambridge, MA: MIT dissertation. ------. 1973. Where epistemology, style, and grammar meet. Festschrift for Morris Halle, ed. by S. Anderson & P. Kiparsky, 377-92. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. McCawley, James D. 1972. Japanese relative clauses. The Chicago Which Hunt: Papers from the Relative Clause Festival, 205-14. Chicago: CLS. McCawley, Noriko A. 1972a. On the treatment of Japanese passives. Papers from the 8th Regional Meeting, Chicago Linguistic Society, 256-70. ------. 1972b. A study of Japanese reflexivization. Urbana: University of Illinois dissertation . McGloin, Naomi H. 1972. Some aspects of negation in Japanese. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan dissertation. Postal, Paul M. 1974. On raising. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [Received 19 July 1976.] Non-distinct arguments in Uto-Aztecan. By Ronald W. Langacker. (University of California publications in linguistics, 82.) Berkeley & Los Angeles, 1976. Pp. xiii, 241. $7.50. Reviewed by Jeffrey Heath, Australian Institute ofAboriginal Studies This is a work in historical morphosyntax, dealing with reflexive prefixes (mainly verbal), independent reflexive pronouns, unspecified-argument prefixes, and passive-impersonal constructions. In each section a mass of data is displayed, 458LANGUAGE, VOLUME 53, NUMBER 2 (1977) reconstructions are proposed, and presumed innovations in each language are set out. Langacker uses the historical findings to support several theoretical claims along the way. Within limits imposed by the choice oftopics, the striking quality ofthis work is its comprehensiveness. Where another linguist might have hinted at possible reconstructions , L insists on presenting them full-blown, reconstructing elaborate morphosyntactic structures for remote proto-languages, and attempting to account for virtually every detail in the attested languages by positing complex series of innovations. After reconstructing a morpheme or morphosyntactic structure, L is likely to apply internal reconstruction, resulting in reconstructions for still more distant pre-proto-languages. Any reconstructable morpheme of more than one syllable is likely to be decomposed into two or more primitives; this decomposition may then lead to a theoretical point. Although this attempt at comprehensiveness is laudable, it is also dangerous in a field like UA, where the proto-language is remote, the attested languages are quite diverse and numerous, and substantial previous work on historical morphosyntax is lacking. Any work on historical UA at the present stage of research, particularly a work as ambitious as this, should automatically be read with a critical eye. We should be wary of shaky correlations of morphemes between far-flung languagesin thefamily, and should watch carefullyfor laxityin historical phonology. In Chapter 2, 'Reflexive prefixes', L reconstructs for...