Linguistic Society of America

The Origins of Language: What Nonhuman Primates Can Tell Us by Barbara J. KingReview by: Zdenek SalzmannLanguage, Vol. 81, No. 1 (Mar., 2005), pp. 282-283Published by: Linguistic Society of AmericaStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4489877 .

Accessed: 09/12/2014 22:04

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

.

Linguistic Society of America is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Language.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Tue, 9 Dec 2014 22:04:14 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

282 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 80, NUMBER 4 (2005)

Bulgarian, and Serbo-Croatian). The introduction, by STEVEN FRANKS (1-46), discusses interface phenom- ena in South Slavic and examines how to best analyze the interaction between different components of

grammar. Franks argues that an analysis of cliticiza- tion should combine insights from derivational syn- tax with representational work in optimality theory (OT). Theoretically, the position is taken that the

proper place for OT in the grammar is at the interface between different components.

Within the group of papers on South Slavic, ZEL-

JKO BO?KOVIc (71-119) examines the mechanisms

triggering clitic placement in Serbo-Croatian. After

discussing the purely syntactic analysis and the

purely prosodic reordering mechanism, he reaches the conclusion that placement mechanisms are pho- nological in nature. In 'Where do clitics cluster?', LJILJANA PROGOVAC (249-58) writes a short reply to Boikovid's claim that second position clitic place- ment in Serbo-Croatian is phonological. She argues instead that both syntactic positions and intonation boundaries play an important role in determining where Serbo-Croatian clitics appear.

MILA DIMITROVA-VULCHANOVA (121-46) com-

pares possessive clitics in English and Bulgarian, and

argues that the difference between them is due to the nature of the clitic head: while English genitive 's is nonreferential (realizing functional categories), the

Bulgarian clitic is referential (i.e. pronominal). MAR- IJA GOLDEN and MILENA M. SHEPPARD (191-207) show that Slovenian pronominal clitics depart from

prototypical second-position clitics as found in Serbo-Croatian, providing distributional evidence from the clitic systems of both languages to support this claim.

Clitic doubling is addressed in IVANA P. SCHICK's essay on Bulgarian (259-92). Comparing Bulgarian and Macedonian, she claims that clitic pronouns act

consistently as topic markers and participate in the

interpretation of information stucture. In the last

essay on Slavic, 'On clitic sites' (293-316), OLGA

M. TOMIC argues that Macedonian has both verbal and Wackernagel clitics, unlike other European lan-

guages with only verbal clitics. Tomi6 is mostly con- cerned with deriving the positions of both types of clitics within a derivational view of syntax.

There are also essays on cliticization in Spanish, Greek, and Albanian. ARTEMIS ALEXIADOU and ELENA ANAGNOSTOPOULOU (47-70) examine Greek restric- tive relatives introduced by the complementizer pu. The crucial question addressed here is why only direct

objects are sensitive to the indefiniteness of the head. JON FRANCO (147-89), who looks at clitic doubling with respect to Spanish, takes the position that object clitics should be analyzed as agreement morphemes on the verb (on a par with subject agreement markers), rather than as phonologically dependent pronominal arguments. DALINA KALLULLI's (210-48) paper on

clitic doubling focuses on Albanian and Greek. In con- trast to Jon Franco's position, Kallulli argues that clitic doubling and object agreement, despite the simi- larities, constitute distinct phenomena, particularly because doubled DPs behave like topics. She also dis- cusses the information structure of clitic doubling and

specificity. Other topics addressed in this volume include the

difference in status between clitic pronouns and aux-

iliary clitics, and the nature of the functional features instantiated by clitics. Most of the contributions in this volume were originally presented at the fourth conference of the European Society for the Study of English, held at the Lajos Lossuth University in

Debrecen, Hungary, in 1997. ANA R. Luis, Univer-

sity of Coimbra, Portugal.]

The origins of language: What nonhu- man primates can tell us. Ed. by BAR- BARA J. KING. (School of American Research advanced seminar series.) Santa Fe, NM: School of American Re- search Press, 1999. Pp. xiv, 442. ISBN 0933452608. $24.95.

This book is the result of a weeklong advanced seminar hosted by the School of American Research in October 1996. Eleven scholars participated, ten of whom contributed papers while one acted as a discussant.

The first two chapters are by the editor. In her 'Introduction: Primatological perspectives on lan-

guage' (3-19), King briefly surveys the contempo- rary approaches to the question of language origins and considers a major flaw in some of them to be their failure to incorporate recent findings concerning nonhuman primates. She believes that the book is

especially significant because its chapters 'make a

powerful case against the fashionable position that

language is an innate biological system unique to humans' (18). In Ch. 2, 'Viewed from up close: Mon-

keys, apes, and language-origins theories' (21-54), King makes the point that the continuity/discontinu- ity dichotomy in the studies of language origins un-

duly simplifies matters. More productive would be the pursuit of such questions as: To what extent do the rudimentary syntax, use of symbols, and proto- grammatic behavior exhibited by primates in the wild differ from human language? What evidence would be sufficient to conclude that communicative behav- ior of nonhuman primates possesses some features or units comparable to those of human language?

The topics of the remaining eight chapters range from the behavior of three species of macaques to the presumed development of language during the

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Tue, 9 Dec 2014 22:04:14 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

BOOK NOTICES 283

hominid stage. The latter topic is covered by SHER- MAN WILCOX in Ch. 10, 'The invention and ritualiza- tion of language' (351-84). Wilcox proposes that there were three crucial components of language evo- lution: cognitive abilities (he lists thirteen), the pro- cess of ritualization (effected by the repetition of a behavior or activity), and visible gestures (after all, language is articulatory gesturing).

Another paper focusing on the hominid stage is ROBBINS BURLING'S 'Motivation, conventionaliza- tion, and arbitrariness in the origin of language' (Ch. 9, 307-50). He argues that motivated signs must have played an important role in the earlier stages of language. In his conclusion, Burling offers some speculations as to how language may have origi- nated. The stages he considers plausible are (here very briefly summarized): a gesture-call system among the hominoids; conventionalization of ges- tures, making them more easily comprehensible and producible; production of iconic signs for specific communicative purposes; learning of communicative signals by imitation; increasing flexibility of visual communication enhancing flexibility in audible com- munication; development of arbitrariness; use of con- trast; the growth of capacity for storing and retrieving 'words'; development of a protophonological sys- tem; and the beginnings of syntax.

SUE SAVAGE-RUMBAUGH contributes the longest chapter, 'Ape language: Between a rock and a hard place' (115-88). A large portion of this interesting paper is a dialogue between the author and Wally, a fictitious critic of animal language research (127-59). The informal exchange between the two is then followed by a discussion of ten fallacies in Wally's questions and comments (159-70). KATH- LEEN R. GIBSON and STEPHEN JESSEE discuss the rela- tionship between language evolution and the expansion of multiple neurological processing areas (189-227). In the last paper, LORRAINE MCCUNE asks whether children's transition to language may serve as a model for the development of the vocal repertoire in extant and ancestral primate species (269-306).

This is a readable and stimulating collection of contributions by anthropologists, linguists, psycholo- gists, primatologists, and related specialists concern- ing questions dealing with language origins. [ZDENEK

SALZMANN, Northern Arizona University.]

A lexical approach to Italian cliticiza- tion. By PAOLA MONACHESI. (CSLI lecture notes 84.) Stanford: CSLI Publi- cations, 1999. Pp. xiii, 247. ISBN 1575861097. $64.95.

This book, a revised version of the author's 1996 Ph.D. thesis (University of Tilburg), consists of six

chapters. After a short introduction (Ch. 1), which includes a very helpful section outlining the lexicalist

theory of head-driven phrase-structure grammar (HPSG), Monachesi discusses 'The status of Italian clitics' in Ch. 2, providing detailed empirical data about Italian monosyllabic pronominal clitics. M uses a set of well-established morphological criteria to argue that these clitics display properties that are

typical of inflectional affixes. The chapter also in- cludes a critical survey of previous phonological studies.

Ch. 3 presents 'The analysis of Italian clitics' within the theory of HPSG. The crucial claim is that clitics are treated as featural information, provided in the lex- icon, and used for the inflectional realization of cliti- cized verb forms. This chapter primarily addresses cliticization within simple tenses and offers an analy- sis of both single and multiple occurrences of pronom- inal clitics. Whereas single clitics are realized as individual affixes, clitic clusters are generated as port- manteau units.

In Ch. 4, M examines 'The clitic si' and the many interpretations it can receive in Italian (e.g. imper- sonal, middle, ergative, etc.). The distinction be- tween argument and nonargument uses are accounted for by assigning si the ability to satisfy the subcateg- orization frame of the verb or to function instead as a grammatical marker.

The bisyllabic clitic loro, on the contrary, is ana-

lyzed as a word. In Ch. 5, a distinction is drawn between monosyllabic clitics and the bisyllabic clitic loro. Distributional and phonological evidence is used to show that only the former constitute affixes, while the latter exhibit word-like behavior.

The longest chapter in the book, 'The analysis of Italian restructuring verbs' (Ch. 6), addresses the

phenomenon known in syntax as 'clitic climbing'. It

explains why both monosyllabic clitics and the clitic loro need not be an argument of the verbs they attach to. The attachment of the clitic to the modal verb, as in Lo voglio leggere 'I want to read it', is derived

through argument composition according to which modal verbs inherit the subcategorization require- ments of the embedded verb.

Finally, the book is rounded out with an appendix offering twenty pages of clitic combinations ex- tracted from the Italian Reference Corpus, as well as a bibliography, a name index, and a subject index.

Overall, this book carefully examines the inflec- tional properties of clitics and argues that monosyl- labic clitic pronouns behave like verbal affixes. Within this inflectional approach to cliticization, the term 'clitic' is regarded as a descriptive cover term, given that both monosyllabic and bisyllabic clitics are assimilated into existing categories. [ANA R.

Luis, University of Coimbra, Portugal.]

This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Tue, 9 Dec 2014 22:04:14 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions