A Way with Words: Recent Advances in Lexical Theory and Analysis

Lexis Journal in English Lexicology

Book reviews | 2011 Recensions

Electronic version URL: http://journals.openedition.org/lexis/1235 DOI: 10.4000/lexis.1235 ISSN: 1951-6215

Publisher Université Jean Moulin - Lyon 3

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Association des professeurs de langues vivantes de l’enseignement public, Les langues modernes. Bulletin mensuel de l’Association des professeurs de langues vivantes de l’enseignement public Vol. 1/2009, 103e année, 2009, 96 pages Volker Mecking

Gilles-Maurice DE SCHRYVER, A Way with Words: Recent Advances in Lexical Theory and Analysis. A Festschrift for Patrick Hanks Mehna Publishers, 2010, 384 pages Piotr Stalmaszczyk

Susanne MÜHLEISEN, Heterogeneity in Word-Formation Patterns John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2010, 245 pages Floriana Popescu

Laurel J. BRINTON, The Comment Clause in English. Syntactic Origins and Pragmatic Development Cambridge University Press, 2008, 298 pages Graham Ranger

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Volker Mecking

RÉFÉRENCE

Association des professeurs de langues vivantes de l’enseignement public Les langues modernes. Bulletin mensuel de l’Association des professeurs de langues vivantes de l’enseignement public. Vol. 1/2009, 2009. ISBN : 0023-8376, Prix : 15 €, 96 pages

1 Le présent opuscule de cette revue publiée depuis 1907, avec une interruption entre 1940 et 1944, porte sur la réhabilitation de l’enseignement et l’apprentissage du lexique, ce dernier étant souvent le parent pauvre de la didactique, soit faute d’une approche harmonisée, soit à cause de la prédominance traditionnelle de l’enseignement de la grammaire. Il réactualise cette thématique déjà traitée dans le n° 79, 3/1985 de la même revue. Le lexique, en fonction de la synchronie concernée – le français préclassique (1500-1650) en est un exemple par excellence – est soumis à une perpétuelle fluctuation beaucoup plus facile à constater par le locuteur et l’apprenant que les changements syntaxiques ou phonétiques qui s’opèrent, en règle générale, sur des périodes nettement plus longues, parfois multiséculaires. Compétence-clé dans la

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production langagière orale et écrite, le lexique est abordé ici sous des aspects pragmatiques différents.

2 Les différentes contributions s’adressent aux enseignants de langues vivantes du premier et deuxième degré, mais nous paraissent également applicables dans les filières LEA du supérieur, et visent à problématiser l’apprentissage et la construction lexicales souvent vécus de manière difficile par les apprenants, pour des raisons telles que la polysémie, la formation des mots, etc. Les sept articles réunis ici portent sur l’activité et les stratégies de compréhension, l’accès au sens, le traitement des expressions figées et des collocations, l’usage des concordanciers et les interférences linguistiques, des récits de pratique et d’expérimentation dans le domaine du FLE, les erreurs lexicales et la problématique des mots de liaison en anglais, pour finir par les nouvelles ressources en ligne favorisant l’apprentissage lexical à distance.

3 Dans le domaine des TICE, nous aurions souhaité une valorisation du Trésor de la langue française, informatisé depuis belle lurette et en accès libre (http://atilf.atilf.fr), outil convivial malgré la microstructure parfois déroutante des articles, mais incontournable, par exemple, dans le domaine des marqueurs stylistiques et surtout en ce qui concerne la qualité des définitions. L’ensemble des articles à dominante pragmatique et didactique sensibilisent l’enseignant à la complexité de l’enseignement du lexique, développe sa compétence didactique et met en relief la richesse des approches pédagogiques mises en place par les intervenants d’horizons divers qui contribuent à une véritable dynamique dans ce domaine, relégué encore trop souvent au second plan.

AUTEURS

VOLKER MECKING Volker Mecking est enseignant-chercheur, professeur en sciences du langage HDR dans le département LEA de l’Université Catholique de Lyon. Lexicologue et seiziémiste, il est également traducteur.

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Gilles-Maurice DE SCHRYVER, A Way with Words: Recent Advances in Lexical Theory and Analysis. A Festschrift for Patrick Hanks Mehna Publishers, 2010, 384 pages

Piotr Stalmaszczyk

REFERENCES

Gilles-Maurice de Schryver A Way with Words: Recent Advances in Lexical Theory and Analysis. A Festschrift for Patrick Hanks. Mehna Publishers, 2010. ISBN : 978-9970-101-01-6, Prix : 59,95 €, 384 pages

1 Patrick Hanks is a well-known lexicographer and corpus linguist, one time chief editor of English dictionaries at Oxford University Press, project manager of the first edition of the COBUILD dictionary, and chief editor of Collins English dictionaries. He is currently based at the University of the West of England (Bristol), and visiting professor at the University of Wolverhampton, and at the Charles University in Prague. The reviewed volume is a collection of 20 papers tackling different issues associated with Hanks’ research and achievements, presented on the occasion of his 70th birthday.

2 The book consists of an introduction followed by three parts devoted to ‘Theoretical Aspects and Background’ (5 contributions), ‘Computing Lexical Relations (7 chapters), and ‘Lexical Analysis and Dictionary Writing’ (7 chapters); an index of subjects and names would have been a welcome addition.

3 In the introductory chapter, ‘Getting to the Bottom of How Language Works’, Gilles- Maurice de Schryver, the editor of the volume, discusses the origins and contents of the book, and provides appropriate background to Hanks’s contribution to lexicography, corpus linguistics, and lexical theory. He describes Hanks as “a linguistic theorist and

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empirical corpus analyst, also an onomastician, but above all […] a lexicographer. He has a way with words” (p. 4). This ‘way with words’ is commented upon in most chapters which follow. In the addendum to the introduction, de Schryver lists the publications by Hanks (pp. 19-34).

4 Part One opens with ‘Defining the Definiendum’, an unfinished text by the late John Sinclair, an exemplary lexicographical analysis of one item, the word sever. Sinclair briefly discusses the core sense of the form, the selection of relevant prepositions, the colligation patterns, semantic preferences and semantic prosody and provides a corpus sample. The paper is unfinished but it provides an explicit demonstration of Sinclair’s approach to collocational analysis.

5 Yorick Wilks discusses ‘Very Large Entries and the Boundary Between Linguistic and Knowledge Structures’. The basic research question is: “How much information can lexical entries contain, and what is its role in coping with the representation of meaning projections, meanings that seem beyond the bounds of what is currently captured in a lexicon?” (p. 49), in other words, this is an inquiry into what can be done computationally with very large knowledge structures. Wilks analyzes the problem from the perspective of Preference Semantics for a natural language understanding system.

6 James Pustejovsky and Anna Rumshisky investigate the ‘Mechanisms of Sense Extension in Verbs’. The basic claim of this chapter is that the different degree of meaning extension results from a number of different formal processes operating on the predicates, such as “generalizing the type of the argument; changing the argument structure and relative prominence of arguments; and finally, abstracting the core meaning of the verb itself” (p. 67). The authors arrive at a very interesting conclusion, namely that metaphorical interpretations are structured and scalar in nature. The discussion is couched in the framework advocated over the years by Pustejovsky, and known as the Generative Lexicon.

7 Igor Mel’čuk focuses on ‘The Government Pattern in the Explanatory Combinatorial Dictionary’. He introduces the notion of (lexical) government in which the semantic actants of a lexeme are implemented on all levels of linguistic representation. Mel’čuk shows the importance of government for the Explanatory Combinatorial Dictionary, one of the core components of his Meaning-Text linguistic model. The chapter is highly technical and presupposes familiarity with Meaning-Text Theory.

8 The next chapter is by David Wiggins, a moral philosopher, metaphysician, and a philosopher of logic. His contribution deals with ‘The Paradox of Analysis and the Paradox of Synonymy’, and provides a very welcome philosophical perspective on definitions and lexical semantics. Wiggins very clearly shows how closely philosophical and lexical analyses may be connected, and how they can benefit from one another. In this context, he refers to his debt to Hanks: “What he showed me is how in English, whatever familiar verb you choose, if you set out a large and representative enough collection of contexts into which that verb will fit, then no other verb, however apparently similar in sense, will fit into all these contexts” (p. 128).

9 The second part of the book concentrates on computational lexicography and lexical relations. The chapter by Kenneth Church ‘More is More’ discusses the size of (Web) corpora, comments the controversy between the size and representativeness of corpora, with the title adequately indicating the author’s attitude: “More is more,

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despite criticism of Google-ology” (p. 135). Church also stresses the importance of search tools (including Google’s tools), and the recently changing access to data.

10 Gregory Grefenstette’s contribution deals with ‘Estimating the Number of Concepts’. The author estimates the number of multiword concepts that are used in English, probing the Web as the relevant corpus. The word ‘concept’ is understood here operationally, to mean something that is expressed using one or more words, hence the search for concepts is related to the search for words and possible combinations of words. The final estimation is that there are “about 200 million concepts that future computational lexicographers and linguists will have to find a way to model” (p. 154), though as Grefenstette himself admits, these might be “no doubt egregious approximations” (p. 144).

11 In ‘Identifying Adjectives that Predict Noun Classes’ David Guthrie and Louise Guthrie study the effect of adjectives in predicting the semantic category of the nouns they modify. They make use of several different corpora and develop appropriate techniques to automatically determine the predictive power of an adjective. The applied methodology is rather technical (especially computing the entropy of adjectives), but the results of the experiments confirm that adjectives provide “a great deal of information about the semantic class of the nouns they modify” (p. 167).

12 Alexander Geyken discusses ‘Statistical Variations of German Support Verb Constructions in Very Large Corpora’. The results of carefully planned and conducted research show very interesting – and far from obvious – correlates between statistical salience of verb-noun expressions and the size of analyzed corpora: “almost all verb- noun expressions in the dictionary are statistically salient in the 1-billion-token corpus; however, the same is not true for the 100-million-token corpus. Conversely, a considerable number of statistically salient constructions are missing in the dictionary” (p. 168).

13 Karel Pala and Pavel Rychlý offer ‘A Case Study in Word Sketches – Czech Verb vidět ‘see’’. Word sketches are short summaries of a word’s grammatical and collocational properties generated by the Sketch Engine, a tool, combining statistical techniques with rules describing grammatical relations, designed for linguists and lexicographers to explore collocations in corpora. The authors discuss errors found in such word sketches and offer some solutions for correction.

14 The next two chapters report on different aspects of Hanks’ Pattern Dictionary of English Verbs (PDEV), an ongoing project that aims to map meanings onto patterns of use. PDEV consists of three major parts: the patterns, semantic reference data (randomly selected from the BNC), and a hierarchical inventory of semantic types. Silvie Cinková, Martin Holub and Lenka Smejkalová discuss ‘The Lexical Population of Semantic Types in Hanks’s PDEV’, and report on a series of experiments conducted at the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics of the Charles University in Prague. Next, Elisabetta Jezek and Francesca Frontini in ‘From Pattern Dictionary to Patternbank’, report on planning a ‘Patternbank’ for Italian and show its importance for further investigations of the relationships between lexical sets and semantic types.

15 Contributions in the third part of the book center around lexical analysis and practical lexicography. Rosamund Moon’s paper, ‘Words that Spring to Mind: Idiom, Allusion, and Convention’, drawing on the data from the Bank of English corpus presents a study of the phraseology spring to mind. The author discusses in considerable detail the functions of this expression, also as correlated with speech acts, co-occurrence with

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idioms and other phrases, and its role in metalinguistic commentary. In conclusion she observes that “words and phrases do not necessarily mean what they are said by dictionaries to mean, just as language does not necessarily behave in the way it is supposed to behave” (p. 263). Moon’s chapter perfectly illustrates the fact that in the description of language it is patterns of usage that count.

16 The contribution by Sue Atkins is devoted to ‘The DANTE Database: Its Contribution to English Lexical Research, and in Particular to Complementing the FrameNet Data’. The Database of Analysed Texts of English (DANTE) was commissioned by Foras na Gaeilge (the body responsible for the promotion of the Irish language) for the purpose of the new English-Irish dictionary. Atkins comprehensively discusses the ways in which the DANTE database could be used to enrich other lexical bases, such as the FrameNet. After comparing the two bases, she presents the organization of valency constructions for nouns and additional material available through the DANTE base, and, in a case study of the verb observe, evaluates the possibilities of semi-automatic mapping entries between the two bases.

17 Adam Kilgarriff and Pavel Rychlý devote their contribution to ‘Semi-Automatic Dictionary Drafting’. The major aim of this project is to achieve semi-automatic implementation within corpus patterns. The authors discuss problems which link technical aspects of philosophy of language with the study of the lexicon. They stress their debt to Hanks: “In his writings, lectures and conversation, Patrick shows the fathomless potential that words and phrases have – in consort with us, their embodied human vehicles – for making, breaking, layering and enriching the sum of our experience. In his account, while the role of communication is never downplayed, we see how lexis can join song in filling out the human soul” (p. 310).

18 Whereas the contributions mentioned above offered lexicographic case studies, Paul Bogaards in ‘Lexicography: Science without Theory?’ asks questions concerning the place of theory in lexicography. Bogaards briefly traces the origins of theory of lexicography (or metalexicography), its developments, content and relations with theoretical linguistics and other disciplines. He comments on the relative independence of lexicography as a separate area of academic study, but adds that “this independence has to be found in the kind of problems that are chosen as staring point, not in there being one independent theory covering all the aspects of the subject field” (p. 318).

19 Mirosoław Bańko concentrates on an interesting chapter in local, in this case Polish, lexicography. His paper, ‘The Polish COBUILD and its Influence on Polish Lexicography’ convincingly demonstrates how one project influenced the development of lexicography in a different country, with different lexicographic traditions. He discusses the COBUILD project and its adaptation to a Polish monolingual dictionary, Inny słownik języka polskiego, an innovative general-purpose dictionary of Polish. He focuses not only on the technical details and differences with other Polish dictionaries, but also on marketing problems. Bańko also observes, in apparent contrast to some other contributors in the volume, that lexicography changes slowly, however, this remark is not concerned with the technical developments, but rather with the fact that “tradition in lexicography is not less important than innovation” (p. 330).

20 Jonathon Green’s short essay, ‘ARGOT: The Flesh Made Word’, is devoted to the place of argot in early French lexicography. And the final contribution, Michael Rundell’s ‘Defining Elegance’ is an elegant, and well-researched essay on contemporary

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lexicography combining detailed lexical analysis (of ‘elegance’, in a very broad context) with paying tribute to Patrick Hanks.

21 The reviewed book is far more than an ordinary festschrift; it not only honours a major figure in contemporary lexicography and computational linguistics, but also provides interesting examples of genuine research of very high quality. It offers diverse case studies and up to date theoretical insights.

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Susanne MÜHLEISEN, Heterogeneity in Word-Formation Patterns John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2010, 245 pages

Floriana Popescu

REFERENCES

Susanne Mühleisen Heterogeneity in Word-Formation Patterns. John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2010. ISBN: 978--90-272-0585-8, Prix: 95 €, 245 pages

1 John Benjamins Publishing Company has continued the collaboration with Professor Susanne Mühleisen, University of Bayreuth, issuing her fourth book, Heterogeneity in Word-Formation Patterns, which according to the cover notes is an “in-depth investigation” of a highly heterogeneous word-formation pattern, i.e., the –ee noun- forming suffixation.

2 Within its 245 pages, the book hides all the traditional components, i.e., the front matters, the book text proper and the back matters. The book opens with the author’s acknowledgements followed by a former list of tables and figures, and a latter of the abbreviations used herein. The evenly balanced chapters as well as the concluding section represent the essence of the study, which is completed by an elaborate and up- to-date seven-page bibliography, two impressive appendices and by the two useful indices, the name index and the subject index.

3 Mühleisen’s study covers six chapters. Chapter 1 is devoted to the rationale of the book and to its general summary. Chapter 2 reviews semantic and syntactic descriptions of the –ee nouns questioning the validity of statements in the specialist literature. Chapter 3 makes a diachronic analysis of the –ee suffixed nouns to be found in medieval use of the language of law up to the twentieth-century nonce words. Chapter 4 tackles morphology and the lexicon with word-formation placed in between. It also considers the concepts of and the literature on productivity and creativity placed against the

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word-formation background. Seen within a larger perspective, chapters 5 and 6 focus on corpora-constructing methods and procedures and on the results of the corpora research and analysis in terms of this word-formation pattern as well as in terms of its manifestations within regional varieties of English. The book ends with a concluding section expressing the author’s reflections on the general and particular implications of such an approach to any word-formation pattern whatsoever and with the display of the language material which makes the object of the current study. The working material is separated into two corpora, the former presented in the twelve-page appendix 1, Documentation of established –ee words with their citation sources and the latter tabulated in the twenty-five-page appendix 2, Quantitative analysis of 1,000 potential –ee words (Web-search, February-June 2005).

4 The reading of this volume has enabled me to concisely describe it, before producing my brief ‘critical’ commentary.

5 Chapter 1. Introduction: Polysemy, heterogeneity and ambiguity in word- formation patterns, introduces the three main perspectives underlying this research project, in addition to its prolegomena: (a) considerations on theoretical and methodological approaches, (b) a book overview and (c) discussion of the book aim and scope wider implications. Since Mühleisen states that the chapter “aims at providing a first overview of the heterogeneity” of the –ee suffixation (p. 2), she brings into discussion Katamba’s definition of this word-formation pattern and she further questions it “on account of” several examples (p. 2-5), which actually demonstrate its reduced degree of applicability. The rule-contradicting examples provided herein indicate a certain degree of diversity which is hardly possible to synthesize within the restrictive format of a rule, be it a word-formation rule. The concepts of polysemy, heterogeneity and ambiguity helpful in the analysis and interpretation of the –ee suffixation are also explored in the literature on morphology and lexical semantics. The second division delineates chapters 2 to 6, discretely considering the major structural elements of each chapter. This chapter eventually enumerates the eight features which ensure “the innovative potential in the study of this particular word-formation” (p. 17), which is specified both at a synchronic and a diachronic level, also considering its productivity, polysemy, heterogeneity and ambiguity.

6 Chapter 2. Phonological, syntactic and semantic constraints on the formation of – ee words is denser than the first and it reviews, scrutinizes and critically interprets the findings in terms of the phonological, syntactic and semantic refrains of those contributions tackling the –ee suffixation. In the discussion of the –ee derivation morphological constraints, Mühleisen considers the verbs ending in –ate and those ending in a single vowel or a diphthong, and presents the –ate truncation rule in several authors’ view (Bauer 1983, Anderson 1992, Raffelsiefen 1999, Baeskow 2002). When applying it to 88 examples of her 1,000-element corpus, the results show 60 formations which appear in their untruncated version (i.e., the deletion of the –ate verb ending in the case of the –ee derived nouns, for example, from the verb to ampu.ta.te the noun amputee was recorded, p. 22), thus invalidating the degree of generality in the application of the –ate truncation rule. The author emphasizes the fact that the selected examples do not invalidate the –ate truncation rule, they only minimize its role in the case of the rather recently created –ee nouns.

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The verbs ending in a simple vowel were hardly productive since there is no “seee or eyeeee”, no “freee” or “lieee” even if there is a “sayee” (p. 25). With verbs ending on a diphthong, the pronunciation is facilitated through the uttering of the ‘w’ or ‘y’ which act as ‘pseudo-consonantal markers’. Within the syntactic limitations of –ee formations, the author discusses the noun-noun and verb-noun derivations as well as their ambiguous reading. The more recent –ee noun-noun derivations include four types of formations (for example, the –ee noun formation which is correlated to an existing –er/-or/-ist noun without a verbal base, i.e., philantropee). The author reviews Bauer’s classification (1983) of the –ee verb- derived formations based on their properties and she also indicates the ambiguous behaviour of –ee formations which may sometimes unveil two readings (e.g. trustee is both “one who is trusted”, i.e., a direct object or “one to whom something is entrusted”, being actually an indirect object pattern, p. 37). Having structured the syntactic contributions in –ee formations, the author brings arguments to prove that fissures are observable in the scrutinized views. To present the semantic refrains, the author starts from Barker (1998), who attributes the formations in question three semantic features: sentience, lack of volitional control and episodic linking. They are methodically described and although accepted to be “the most elaborate explanation of the semantic properties of –ee word-formation” (p. 52), they are shown to still bear a flaw. This is solved by Portero Muñoz (2003) who develops a model of thematic roles to continue Barker’s argumentation of the –ee nouns. Mühleisen acknowledges Muñoz’s contribution to Barker’s argumentation, but she also criticizes Muñoz’s basis which is hardly original and “rather slim” since it does not rely on a personally-created corpus but on “scattered examples of already documented words” (p. 54). Few references are made both to the theory of Lexical Conceptual Structures (Jackendoff 1983, Jackendoff 1990) which interrelates the base semantics with the suffix semantics and to the “theory of co-indexation” which may be of use in a rationale of polysemous affixation. Mühleisen exposes her view which places –ee formation against a cognitive background wherein words may be described in terms of semantic prototypes and networks.

7 Chapter 3. The career of –ee words: A diachronic analysis from medieval legal use to nineteenth-century ironic nonce words is related to the preceding one whose synchronic perspective was ultimately proven “limited and thus unsatisfactory” (p. 61), in terms of its applicability to syntactic and semantic patterns of –ee word- formations. Mühleisen takes the diachronic perspective to be a necessity in the exploration of –ee word-formations sharing Lass’s view that “the only explanation for a linguistic is an older form” (p. 61). In her diachronic approach, Mühleisen establishes the temporal boundaries of –ee suffixation manifestations, which actually cover centuries. She argues for the separation of –ee formations into those which were active before and those which were active after the twentieth century. The author starts from etymological information, gives reasons for the corpus-selected items and points to the French roots of the –ee suffixation in English. The minute diachronic analysis outlines a six-stage periodization in the history of English –ee formations and looks at the language phenomena noticeable within each of these stages as they were reflected by these formations. The following five stages are the object of this chapter: (1) “the Anglicized law French beginnings” (2) the indirect

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object formations characteristic for the sixteenth century (3) diversity which obviously started expanding during the seventeenth century (4) regression and evolution against the eighteenth century background (5) richness of –ee formations in the nineteenth century Unlike the –er formation which is of Germanic extraction and detectable in numerous Old English examples with male person reference, at least when it behaves as an agent noun, the –ee suffixation is “French-derived and first appeared in nativized French loanwords toward the end of the Middle English period, in the fourteenth and fifteenth century” (p. 62). The first stage spans two centuries and produces a modest list comprising 16 –ee words. The major linguistic phenomena peculiar to this beginning stage are the use of unassimilated Old French words and the –ee suffixation of the English verb stems. The second evolving stage or the sixteenth century registers a growth in the word list with a sum total of 21 –ee words extracted from the OED. In terms of linguistic phenomenology, the most important transformation is the shift to indirect passive noun formations; the division also considers exceptions to this generalizing perspective. The list of the seventeenth century –ee formations indicates 47 such items. Through the linguistic perspective, this century unfolds few instances of generalization of meaning and even fewer cases of loss of the passive character. The element of novelty the author points to is the semantic extension of the –ee suffix to non-person referents. Mühleisen’s eighteenth century data together with other documentary sources she quotes (Nevalainen 1999) envisage this century as less productive (with its only 40 –ee words) in comparison with the preceding one. Linguistically, few phenomena are obvious: while direct object formations rise to 12, pointing to a slight increase comparable with 9 such items in the seventeenth century, the nouns with agent meaning reduces to 1 (from 6 in the aforementioned stage) and the number of non- person references stays constant, considering the author’s mention about the controversial character of settee which is actually bracketed in the corpus (p. 78). Nevertheless, it reflects the continuation of the –ee suffixation practice in the enrichment of the English vocabulary. The nineteenth century word list the author provides (p. 83-84) by selecting the OED entries amounts to 152 –ee examples, which underlies the resourcefulness of the –ee suffixation. In addition, the corpus indicates an incursion into varieties of English, such as Australian English and Scots English. Particularities of this stage –ee formations include their “playful, humorous or ironic character” (p. 81); their (questionable) nonce-formation status and their migration towards civil sectors of society. The final division of the chapter, Changes across centuries: Simultaneity and ambiguity systematizes the findings of “[T]he excursion into the history of the development of –ee words in English” (p. 89). It also serves as a modulator towards the next chapter announcing its structure and its perspectives, i.e., morphological productivity and creativity.

8 Chapter 4. Morphology and the lexicon: On creativity and productivity of –ee words continues with a separate approach to the sixth stage in the periodization of –ee formations, the twentieth century –ee words. Three main reasons underlie this separation: (1) an emphasis on productivity highlighting the differences in diachronic or synchronic interpretations, (2) the twentieth-century productivity allows for reference to the web-corpus analysis and (3) twentieth-century –ee formations exhibit a high number involving an abundance never noticeable before this century.

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The author identifies the relationship between morphology and the lexicon as well as two concepts necessary in the analysis of the twentieth and twenty-first century word formation patterns, i.e., productivity and creativity. This makes chapter 4 a necessary continuation of these five stages in the history of the –ee formations. Nonetheless, as language changes so do the interpretive methodology, means and procedures. The chapter theoretical background minutely describes the concept of productivity through an overview of relevant contributions (Bauer 1983, Bauer 2001, Arnoff & Anshen 1998, Lieber 1992, Kastovsky 1986a, Plag 1999). The presentation focuses on types of productivity and includes gradual, qualitative, quantitative, diachronic and synchronic productivity as well as on their possible interconnections in relation to –ee formations. For her personal interpretation of the twentieth century –ee formations in table 12 (p. 110), Mühleisen creates a multiple- source corpus from OED, Barker (1998), Bauer (1994) and others. Based on the previously established interpretive pattern, the author synthesizes her findings by advancing conclusive remarks. The linguistic phenomena peculiar to the twentieth- century –ee formations amount to four, but they may as well be completed by a generalized observation regarding the diversification of the semantic field. We share Mühleisen’s opinion that “a rather new development” within this time interval is the hybridization of –ee formations with nouns to result in compounds (such as blind datee, p. 123). Creativity, the second component discussed in this chapter, generally considers new words, distinguishes between nonce formations and neologisms and traces the evolution of a coinage from a nonce to a neologism. Within the same scope of creativity, this chapter brings into discussion the rather difficult to draw distinction between actual and possible words. All the instruments in the specialist literature critically overviewed and assumed, the author proceeds to a new phase in the uncovering of her project, the analysis of 1,000 corpus of potential new –ee words. The syntagm “potential new words” addresses the making of a corpus which, in turn, raises questions. They may be questions of data source and of word institutionalization in whatever dictionary of neologisms. Actually, the author pleads in favour of diverse data resources, preferably larger corpora (such as BNC or the British National Corpus or LOB, i.e., the London-Oslo-Bergen corpus) and “the large body of text collections” which is “the World Wide Web”. They may as well be questions regarding the selection of the search criteria. Mühleisen’s exploration of specialist literature answers these questions. Thus, the author not only brings forward definitions of useful notions such as ‘corpus’ and ‘types of texts’ but she also unfolds the steps taken in the process of searching the Web for –ee words and brings arguments in favour of a recourse to Web data for linguistic purposes (p. 127). To create an –ee formations corpus, Mühleisen devised a four-step procedure focused on: - the creation of a text set of search words (based on well-established principles) - using data from the Web (referring to the selection of search engines and to the creation of a personal corpus either through downloads or through empiric methods, such as the manual selection of the material to be downloaded) - qualitative criteria to be applied in the test (clear statements applicable in the case of each and every corpus item, such as misspellings, the belonging to a meaningful context, etc.). - the creation of quantitative categories (such as ‘rare’, ‘established’, ‘frequent’, ‘hapax legomena’, etc.) The corpus and the working principles established, the study progresses into the interpretation of syntactic and semantic patterns of neologisms. Investigating 748 –ee

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words, under the subheading of Collocation (p. 136-139), Mühleisen distinguishes four such types of ‘lexical solidarities’ (Coseriu 1967).

9 Chapter 5. A Corpus-based analysis of 1,000 potential new –ee words reveals the author’s originality in the interpretation of –ee formations. Starting from the diachronic and synchronic ambiguity of this word formation, the author divides –ee words into ‘typical’ and (rather) marginal ones. Under the subheading of Prototypical characteristics, the corpus analysis furthers on the –ee words marked as ‘frequent’ which are interpreted in terms of the features envisaged in chapter 2 (p. 142). This polarly-devised segment of the research now switches from the frequently occurring –ee words to those recorded to have had just one single occurrence i.e., the hapax legomena. The corpus analysis dealing with those two categories of words displays approximately the same elements albeit arranged in a different sequence. Thus, in the case of either group, there are an inventory of the –ee words in focus, a list of interpretive criteria (and their application to several examples) and the conclusive presentation of the findings. Due to the special nature of the hapax legomena (which may eventually evolve into neologisms), several criteria were added to provide for the thoroughness of their interpretation (i.e., the hypertext or the text type on the Web, the context or domain, the entry date – whenever mentioned as well as the criterion of “specifics” (p. 152). The presentation of the findings reaches several conclusions whose element of particular novelty lies in the recordings of the noun- derived hapax legomena (p. 162). The chapter gets closer to its end with remarks both about the nature of the –ee suffixation and about the data collecting methods which are useful in the description of the respective pattern. Through its seemingly open end, Chapter 5 suggests future research prospects (with a new follow-up study of the hapax –ee words list and their possibility of having evolved into neologisms or having preserved their condition of hapax legomena) or in other comparative studies referring to other affixations.

10 Chapter 6, -ee words in varieties of English, opens a new view towards the (already) linguistically scrutinized words, i.e., their geographical distribution. After references to the history of a few English speaking (larger or smaller communities), two observations regarding –ee words in geographical varieties of English are brought to the foreground. Two categories of such words are distinguishable when geographical varieties are taken into account, namely the locally-created –ee suffixations resulting from specific localized linguistic needs and the British-created –ee suffixations assigning new meanings in specific varieties. Examples to support either category are excerpted from Australian and American English. This last chapter three divisions shift their perspective from the diachronic to the synchronic plan, the –ee suffixations being placed against different English-speaking geographical background (such as Australia, India, New Zealand and the U.S.). Nevertheless, a bit of diachrony is of great help in the interpretation of the –ee suffixation “American-ness”. The 17 items marked as U.S.-specific in the OED wherefrom they were selected and whose birth date was either the eighteenth, the nineteenth or the twentieth century do contradict Matthews’ statement (1945) regarding the prevalence of the –ee suffixation in American English. The shift back to synchrony opens wider perspectives on the presentation and interpretation of the domain-specific Web search results first obtained in 2002, and then, as a follow-up task in 2006 (see tables 20 and 21 at page 172 and table 22 at page 173). Starting from the scholarly claim that -ee noun-forming suffixation is more active

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in American than in British English, this chapter division demonstrates with palpable results that not only –ee Americanisms do exist (and they are exclusively used in that particular variety of English) but also that some –ee formations do have a higher frequency of occurrence in British English. Enlarging the synchronic approach to the – ee suffixation in English varieties, the next division of the chapter investigates, comments and draws conclusions on the Australian English usage of this word-forming pattern. The research temporal coordinates remain the same as those of the American English explorations, namely the year 2002, the interval of the initial research and 2006, the year of the follow-up research. The data presentation follows the same pattern: a critical overview of the specialist literature and conclusive remarks stemming in the author’s personal research. The particularity of Australian English –ee formations lies in the Australians’ preference for hypocoristics. This preference shows, nevertheless, consequences for these formations within Aussie English: (a) they may be used with ambiguous meanings and (b) they may produce hypocoristics, thus losing their suffixation identity, as is the case with refo < refugee. To complete the synchronic approach to –ee suffixations in English varieties, the following division shows the results of the search on Australian, New Zealand and Indian websites (performed during the same two different intervals, in 2002 and in 2006, respectively). The commentary based on the findings displayed in table 26 (p. 180) point to the heterogeneity of the –ee formations which reveal (electronic) domain- specific meanings, domain-specific frequency of occurrence, specialist-field specific frequency of occurrence and eventually geographical-context specific meanings. The concluding section of the final chapter parallels global with local usage of English and discusses those processes which develop simultaneously between the English language that is used locally and that which is used globally.

11 Mühleisen closes the study with a brief description of her endeavour presenting both several general and several particular implications involved by an in-depth study of a particular word-formation pattern. The final book summary overtly invites to a continuation of the research practice on other word-formation patterns, by applying the same research method(s) and procedures on reliable corpora (i.e., which meet the required conditions of sampling, representativeness, definite size, machine readability and standard reference).

12 I am aware that once one has read such an impressive book, to approach it critically would hardly be a successful attempt.

13 Heterogeneity in Word-Formation Patterns is a thoroughly in-depth researched and well- argued study in the particular word-formation pattern of the –ee suffixation. Mühleisen critically tests the specialist literature related to her topic and she painstakingly writes a history of –ee words which were recorded active in the 14th century English and continue to emerge right under our own eyes.

14 The book is clearly written and an easy access to information and sample data is facilitated through tables and figures. Although typesetting errors have been spotted, they are so very few and insignificant that they can hardly affect the quality of this scholarly book.

15 This project did involve, for it has really materialized, a minute planning of the research proper, with clearly established initial and follow-up tasks and topics, with a systemic architecture of the web-based corpus, with helpful and practical interpretive

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criteria, with definitely and convincingly stated principles underlying the tailoring of such a comprehensive corpus. The lexical units or formations were extracted mainly from the Web and secondarily from traditional sources (dictionaries presented in a separate list, p. 201) as well as diverse electronic domains and they were analyzed on the basis of a thoroughly and critically investigated literature of speciality.

16 The sequence of chapters reflects the cohesiveness and the coherence of the research project presentation. After introducing generalizations on polysemy, heterogeneity and ambiguity of word-formation patterns, the author demonstrates these generalizations to be applicable to –ee word formation. Then the focal point moves to –ee words with strong arguments in favour of the author’s choices of register-specific terms which gradually enrich from medieval legal use to twenty-first century neologisms and to a parallel approach to global versus local modifications in the –ee suffixations which are noticeable in several varieties of English.

17 The book impresses both qualitatively through what has been highlighted in the foregoing and quantitatively through its remarkable balance. With an imaginary axis of symmetry between chapter 3 and chapter 4, this equilibrium is more than obvious: chapter 1/18 pages, chapter 2/40 pages, chapter 3/30 pages, chapter 4/30 pages, chapter 5/40 pages, chapter 6/23 pages.

18 It is also worthwhile emphasizing the author’s objectivity in relation to her own arguments. Thus, for only one example, although she enumerates a great deal of advantages in favour of Web-created corpora, she also considers some underlying shortcomings regarding the nature of websites or of the test types therein.

19 Even if the list of abbreviations and the footnotes as well as the parenthetical explanations do not include the mark Ad (passim used at pages from 142 to 147, 152 and 156 to 159) and although the list of OED –ee formations has no element of identification and it is not included in the list of tables and figures, this will not affect at all the scholarly character of the book.

20 I do take Susanne Mühleisen’s volume for a genuine work of art. I dearly prize this book for each and every letter within and especially for two major features: (a) it represents an impressive sample of methodical, well-organized, thorough and well-documented research and (b) it is an exemplary illustration of not only an in-depth multipurpose analysis of a word-formation pattern but also an emblematic scholarly performance which could serve those working in linguistics (be it general, theoretical, applied, corpus, historical or comparative), lexicology, word-formation and lexical semantics and those interested in improving their writing techniques.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ANDERSON Stephen R., A-Morphous Morphology, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992

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ARNOFF Mark & ANSHEN Frank., “Morphology and the lexicon: Lexicalization and productivity”, in SPENCER Andrew & ZWICKY Arnold M. (eds.), The Handbook of Morphology, Oxford, Blackwell, 1998: 237-247.

BAESKOW Heike, Abgeleitete Personenbezeichnungen im Deutschen und Englischen, Berlin, Walter de Gruyter, 2002.

BARKER Chris, “Episodic –ee in English: A thematic role constraint on new word formation”, Language 74 (4), 1998: 695-727.

BAUER Laurie, English Word-formation, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983.

BAUER Laurie, Watching English Change. An Introduction to the Study of Linguistic Change in Standard Englishes in the Twentieth Century, London, Longman, 1994.

BAUER Laurie, Morphological Productivity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001.

COSERIU Eugenio, “Lexikalische Solidaritäten”, Poetica 1, 1967: 293-303.

JACKENDOFF Ray, Semantics and Cognition, Cambridge MA, The MIT Press, 1983.

JACKENDOFF Ray, Semantic Structures, Cambridge MA, The MIT Press, 1990.

KASTOVSKY Dieter, “The problem of productivity in word formation”, Linguistics 24 (3), 1986: 585-600.

KATAMBA Francis, English Words, London, Routledge, 1994.

LASS Roger, Historical Linguistics and Language Change, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1997.

LIEBER Rochelle, Deconstructing Morphology, Chicago IL, University of Chicago Press, 1992.

MATTHEWS M. M., “The new element in American English (II)”, American Speech 20 (2), 1945: 106-110.

NEVALAINEN Terttu, “Early Modern lexis and semantics” in LASS Robert (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language, Vol. II, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1999: 1476-1776.

PLAG Ingo, Morphological Productivity. Structural Constraints in English Derivation, Berlin, Walter de Gruyter, 1999.

PORTERO MUÑOZ Carmen, “Derived nominalizations in –ee: A Role and Reference Grammar based semantic analysis”, English Language and Linguistics, 7 (1), 2003: 129-159.

RAFFELSIEFEN Renate, “Phonological constraints on English word-formation”, in BOOIJ Geert & VAN MARLE Jaap (eds.), Yearbook of Morphology 1998, Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999: 225-287.

AUTHORS

FLORIANA POPESCU Floriana Popescu is a professor of English and applied linguistics at the Faculty of Letters, “Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania, in the English department. Floriana Popescu is a professor of English and applied linguistics at the Faculty of Letters, “Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Romania, in the English department. She defended her doctoral thesis in general linguistics at University of Bucharest in 1999. She has authored 5 books and over 65 studies and articles about English and Romanian lexicology, terminology and

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translation studies. She has edited 3 books, the latest published by the Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2009. She is the editor-in-chief of the Annals of “Dunărea de Jos” University of Galaţi, Fascicle XIII. Language and Literature, published since 1978.

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Laurel J. BRINTON, The Comment Clause in English. Syntactic Origins and Pragmatic Development Cambridge University Press, 2008, 298 pages

Graham Ranger

REFERENCES

Laurel J. Brinton The Comment Clause in English. Syntactic Origins and Pragmatic Development. Cambridge University Press, 2008. ISBN : 9780521886734, Prix : £55, 298 pages

1 Laurel Brinton’s The Comment Clause in English is, as the cover notes tell us, “the first full-length diachronic treatment […] focusing on comment clauses formed with common verbs of perception and cognition in a variety of syntactic forms”. The book runs to some 280 pages, comprising eleven evenly balanced chapters, an extremely complete seventeen-page bibliography and a helpful author and subject index.

2 The book is organized into eleven chapters. Chapter One defines comment clauses relative to other linguistic categories, Chapter Two reviews the semantic and syntactic development of pragmatic markers, criticising the “matrix-clause hypothesis”. Chapter Three presents different processes of change relative to pragmatic markers and comment clauses in particular. Chapters 4-10 involve case studies of comment clauses, including examples of each of Quirk et al‘s three types, i.e. I think (pseudo matrix clause), as you say (adverbial) and what is more (relative). Chapter 11 concludes the study.

3 In the course of the following review I shall run over the material chapter by chapter before making a critical assessment of the work.

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Chapter One: Introduction

4 The first chapter, which is also the introduction, aims to provide a definition of clausal pragmatic markers or comment clauses. These involve a variety of formal structures, which may all be said to belong to the category of sentence adverbials. Quirk et al (1985) divide sentence adverbials into sentence-modifying disjuncts (e.g. frankly), or sentence- connecting conjuncts (e.g. moreover). Among the category of disjuncts Quirk et al (1985) further distinguish style disjuncts ( truthfully, generally) and content disjuncts ( really, wisely). For Quirk et al “comment clauses are both style and content disjuncts” (5 quoted from Quirk et al 1985). They form a heterogeneous syntactic class with at least three distinct types: • Comment clauses of the I think type. These are unambiguously parenthetical when non initial, but indeterminate between matrix clauses or parentheticals when initial • Adverbial comment clauses of the as you say type • Relative comment clauses of the what is more type.

5 Brinton discusses Peltola’s (1982/1983) typology of comment clauses before considering in more detail the category of parentheticals, to which comment clauses belong. These are defined by “lack of syntactic connection with the clause to which they are attached” (7). They provide “second-order reflection, commentary, or evaluation upon the anchor” (8) and consequently display greater positional mobility, lower, marked-off pitch and semantic independence.

6 There is some disagreement about the typological features of parentheticals, one important problem being that of how one should account for the non-integration of parentheticals in host clause. The transformational approach traditionally considers one category of parentheticals as former main clauses according to a derivation taking us roughly from: I think that the world is flat to I think the world is flat and lastly to The world is flat, I think (Ross 1973 refers to this as “slifting”). Another approach prefers to consider parentheticals as syntactically independent. This runs into problems, however, since a parenthetical is typically incomplete, syntactically, and cannot exist independently of its anchor. When parentheticals are in initial position it is not usually possible to determine whether they are parentheticals or matrix clauses, apart from those cases where they are followed by an interrogative, e.g. I mean, can you think of any other situation…? (12). Some linguists have argued that the absence of that alone is sufficient to indicate parenthetical status (Benveniste 1971 and Wierzbicka 2006) (13). But, as Brinton notes, that tends to be deleted for other reasons too, including register, pronominal subjects in the that clause, the choice of verb etc. It has traditionally been supposed that that-deletion (the transformation leading from I think that to I think Ø) is a historical process. However, Brinton tells us, “the history of that-deletion is complex: there appears to be no simple path from that to the zero form” (14) and indeed Aijmer 1997 “believes that zero may have been the unmarked link in speech through OE and ME” (14).

7 Comment clauses function as pragmatic markers. Although these are, as a general rule, phonologically short, apart from this feature, comment clauses appear to correspond to most of the defining criteria.

8 The introduction concludes with an overview of the book. In each case, Brinton defines semantic-pragmatic functions for the comment clause in Present Day English corpora,

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then goes back to see when these functions arose, tracing their development (19). Her approach is, she claims, essentially qualitative and corpus-based, relying on a vast diachronic corpus including the OED, the Dictionary of Old English Corpus, the quotation bank of the Middle English Dictionary, the Helsinki Corpus, the University of Virginia Electronic Text Center and modern corpora of British, Australian, American, Canadian and New Zealand English.

Chapter Two: Semantic and syntactic development of pragmatic markers

9 Although there is some potential for agreement as to the semantic development of pragmatic markers, there is relatively little exploration of their syntactic development. Brinton aims to see “whether we find syntactic clines in the development of pragmatic markers comparable to the semantic-pragmatic clines that have been postulated” (24). The semantic development of pragmatic markers is supposed, after Traugott 1991 etc., to follow a path leading “from propositional meaning, to textual meaning, to expressive or interpersonal meaning” (24). This has since been complexified to yield various possible semantic and pragmatic paths: • truth-conditional > non-truth-conditional • content > content / procedural > procedural • non-subjective > subjective > intersubjective • intrapropositional scope > extrapropositional scope > discourse scope

10 Brinton proposes to reformulate the second of these tendencies as • referential (propositional) > non-referential (pragmatic, metalinguistic, procedural) (27).

11 Syntactically, work has often focussed on the development of adverbial markers, such as then, which are seen to follow two paths of syntactic development: • adverb > conjunction > pragmatic marker or • clause-internal adverb > sentential adverb > pragmatic marker.

12 The first of these paths is exemplified by the markers why, like, so, now, what and then. The second path may be exemplified by indeed (Traugott 2003), only and while and, in former periods of English, by anon and soþlice. The path of syntactic development often proposed for comment clauses is • matrix clause > parenthetical disjunct > pragmatic marker

13 This trajectory Brinton refers to as the “matrix-clause hypothesis”. The hypothesis is challenged for a number of different reasons. Firstly, the derived and original forms are not synonymous, so that This is the trouble in schools, you see is not equivalent to You see that this is the trouble in schools (37). Secondly, although negative matrix clauses are fine, these do not develop into comment clauses (I don’t think John is a fink but *John is, I don’t think, a fink) (37). Brinton goes on to consider the matrix-clause hypothesis in the light of her diachronic corpora, showing that “the historical data do not always confirm the sequence of development postulated by the hypothesis” (38). The adverbial and relative comment clauses noted by Quirk et al do not accommodate the matrix-clause hypothesis, either, and in fact Brinton (1996) has argued for an adverbial source even for I think parentheticals, which she claims to derive from “an adjoined adverbial structure “as/so (< ‘which’) I think” in Old English” (44-45). Other comment clauses which appear problematical in the matrix-clause hypothesis are nominal relatives of the

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what’s more type and first-person subject + verb sequences that originally take non- clausal complements, like expect, which is far more common with to infinitives than with that clauses. Brinton concludes that, although the matrix-clause hypothesis, is “intuitively appealing […], in actual cases, the chronology of events proves difficult to establish, and there is often a variety of possible complement clauses”. Whatever the path, development is nonetheless always unidirectional: “scope within the proposition > scope over the proposition > scope over discourse”. (48)

Chapter Three: Processes of Change

14 Chapter Three asks “whether grammaticalization […] is indeed the process that underlies the development of pragmatic markers” (49). Brinton accepts Hopper and Traugott’s (2003) definition of grammaticalization as “the change whereby lexical items and constructions come in certain contexts to serve grammatical functions and, once grammaticalized, continue to develop new grammatical functions” (50). She goes on to cite influential theoretical models, including Lehmann’s seven “parameters of grammaticalization” and Hopper’s five “principles of grammaticalization”, together with other factors such as metaphorization, metonymization, pragmatic strengthening and subjectification. The development of pragmatic markers, claims Brinton, corresponds largely to the widely recognized morphosyntactic and semantic changes involved in grammaticalization, citing the example of only, in its development from an adjective, to a focusing adverb, to an adversative and finally a pragmatic marker. A number of studies are quoted in support of this. One important difference, however, is that, whereas grammaticalization typically involves a reduction in scope, in the case of pragmatic markers, this tendency is reversed, as “they come to relate not to smaller linguistic units but normally to larger stretches of discourse” (55). Regarding the specific category of comment clauses, Brinton quotes Thompson and Mulac (1991) who argue that I think and I guess have undergone “decategorialization of the complement- taking noun + verb sequence into a kind of unitary particle” (58). Insofar as pragmatic markers are, in some respects, on the periphery of standard grammatical paradigms, some linguists prefer to consider their development as involving a specific process of pragmaticalization, in which discourse markers develop from lexical elements “without an intermediate stage of grammaticalization” (p. 61 cit Erman and Kotsinas 1993:79). Brinton moves on to compare lexicalization and grammaticalization. The two processes are similar and some studies have in fact preferred to look at the development of pragmatic markers in terms of lexicalization. Brinton however concurs with Traugott in rejecting this approach, considering the development of pragmatic markers as a definite case of grammaticalization. She notes, in support of this, the fact that a grammaticalized item tends to spread into progressively more contexts, whereas there is no reason to expect the same of a lexicalized item. After briefly considering the related processes of idiomatization, and (inter-)subjectification, Brinton concludes this chapter by saying that her own case studies “follow received opinion for the most part, viewing comment clauses as being the result of grammaticalization, in large part because they undergo decategorialization, lose referential meaning, and acquire functional roles” (72).

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Chapter Four, Comment clauses with say

15 This chapter is the first of seven dedicated to case studies of specific markers. Brinton begins by considering six different pragmatic uses of “(I) say”, illustrated with her corpus examples below: Say1 ‘suppose, assume’: Say there actually were vultures on his tail Say2 ‘about, approximately’: Keep the reconstructed stuff down to, say, 5% of the whole Say3 ‘for example, suppose’: If we ran out of flour or sugar, say […]. Say4 ‘tell me / us’: I say, what’s that building over there […]. Say5 a. ‘to express surprise, regret, anger […] or some other mild emotional response’: “Say, that’s our City,” bubbles Dolores […]. b. ‘to call or evoke the hearer’s attention’: Say, you pronounce Kenya funny –. Say6 a. ‘to clarify or explain’: […] quasi-scientific notions. I say quasi-scientific because… b. ‘to express emphasis’: Jump, I say, and be done with it. (74-75)

16 Examples 4, 5 and 6b are said to function as parenthetical comment clauses, 2 and 3 as parenthetical adverbials, and 1 and 6a are, syntactically speaking, part of the clause. After briefly comparing uses of say with uses of like and what in Present Day English, Brinton considers the historical development of the different forms, giving examples and dating earliest documented occurrences where possible. In the light of these data, she adduces two diachronic sources for these pragmatic uses of say. Examples Say 1-4 appear to have evolved from second-person imperative forms with clausal complement, while Say 5-6 seem to have evolved according to the matrix-clause hypothesis, that is, from a matrix I say clause. In the case of derivation from second- person imperatives, there appears to be, “a syntactic reversal of matrix and subordinate clause: the original matrix imperative comes to function as a parenthetical comment clause” (89). The matrix-clause hypothesis adduced for examples 5-6 is problematical, however, in that its proponents claim that reanalysis is a consequence of the frequent use of matrix-clause I say without that. This is unsupported historically, though, since “[o]f the 180 examples of I say in the Middle English period in the OED databank, only 18% occur with complement clauses; of these 70% occur with an explicit complementizer that” (90). Whatever the case, the development of different pragmatic uses of say appears to show characteristic signs of grammaticalization, including decategorialization, phonological attribution, desemanticization, (inter-)subjectification and pragmatic strengthening (90). In reference to pragmatic strengthening, Brinton states: “[t]he extended senses of say 1-3 would seem to be invited inferences deriving from the literal meaning of say as a verb of communication, namely ‘speak’ > ‘suppose’ > ‘for example’ > ‘about’” (92). I must admit I find this a debatable chain of inference, and in any case one which would definitely require further argumentation to have anything more than intuitive appeal. Brinton also notes that the different uses of say involve varying degrees of reduction in scope and syntactic fixation in addition to some elements of idiomatization.

17 Brinton then goes on to give some brief consideration to related pragmatic uses of say, including dare say, (as) you say and that is to say. I daresay provides a clear case of grammaticalization, involving fusion, coalescence, desemanticization and decategorialization (96). Brinton takes issue with Fitzmaurice’s (2004) proposal to derive (as) you say from you say, favouring the opposite hypothesis, since “parenthetical as you say predates parenthetical you say” (103). Here again I find this debate rather

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unusual: to derive the challenging you say from the consensual as you say, or vice versa, appears quite unnecessary. The two expressions might equally have developed independently. Lastly, Brinton evokes the semi-performative that is to say for which Visser (1969) suggests the influence of a calque from the French c’est-à-dire. She points to a limited number of examples in Late Old English, but concedes that French may have had a reinforcing influence. (107)

18 In her concluding remarks to this chapter, Brinton runs over the functions of pragmatic markers involving say casting doubt on the matrix clause hypothesis, which appears to be insufficiently supported by historical evidence. She concludes that the pragmatic development of say in all its forms illustrates principles of grammaticalization, including decategorialization, desemanticization, subjectification and intersubjectification. Characteristically, for pragmatic markers, they also expand in scope, from scope over the complement to scope over the discourse.

Chapter Five: I mean

19 Brinton begins this chapter by pointing out that clause-initial I mean + declarative clause may be analysed either as a matrix clause or as a parenthetical, and gives the example I mean he was only a member because of my husband (111). Schiffrin (1987) suggests that pragmatic uses of I mean have developed from the literal meaning of intention. Brinton aims in this chapter to test Schiffrin’s hypothesis. In Present Day English, I mean is a high-frequency pragmatic marker. Although, among pragmatic markers, I mean has been widely studied, there appears to be no clear consensus as to how it functions. Brinton distinguishes one “full” meaning and four pragmatic meanings as follows:

20 Full mean: I didn’t mean to be rude last Wednesday. Appositional mean: “I’ll see you in the morning.” She laughed, “I mean, afternoon.” Causal mean (“I’m saying this because”): “Don’t you think it’s time you put that thing away? I mean, look at at, it’s antique, you could hurt yourself with it.” Expressions of speaker attitude: But Cousin Alexander is rich! Really rich, I mean. Interpersonal mean: It is because she isn’t that she is successful… if you understand what I mean.

21 The pragmatic meanings are additionally subdivided into various shades of meaning. Brinton uses these functions to guide her in her diachronic study of I mean, which she begins in the Middle English period, the marker being insufficiently represented in the Old English corpus. “Full meanings” are frequent in Middle English. Appositional mean used in reformulation or for explicitness are found in Middle English but, in the “self- repair or mistake-editing sense”, mean only occurs from Early Modern English, e.g. The chiefe use, I meane abuse, of Oaths, is as afore I have said in our Courts of Justice (121). When used to express speaker attitude or interpersonally, mean is found in Middle English but the metacommunicative “causal mean” does not appear before the Modern English period.

22 Brinton considers two possible paths of syntactic development, either from a matrix clause I mean (that) S or from an adverbial / relative structure {as / so / which} I mean. The first possibility appears unlikely, however, given that mean followed by a that- complement is rare in any period of English, being more usually followed by a phrasal

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complement. Brinton also rejects the adverbial / relative derivation. Her suggestion is: “At first, I mean governs a phrasal element ({NP, VP, AP, PP, AdvP}) and has scope within the sentence. The bonds between I mean and the phrasal element are weakened or loosened, and I mean can begin to be postposed to the phrasal element. The phrasal element is then reanalyzed as an independent element, and I mean as a syntactically free parenthetical with scope over the sentence” and later over discourse (127).

23 Semantically, the development of mean is seen to be less linear than Schiffrin’s 1987 suggestion would have it. The “extended meanings” of mean can be derived in Gricean fashion “as invited inferences arising in appositional structures, where a previous element in the discourse is restated or reformulated. By the Gricean Maxim of Manner “be brief [avoid unnecessary prolixity]” […] hearers will make the inference that the same information is not simply being restated but that some additional information is being presented.” (129)

24 Brinton remarks, finally, that I mean exhibits a good many of the characteristics associated with processes of grammaticalization, including decategorialization, desemanticization, some degree of fusion and phonetic attrition, (inter-) subjectification and idiomaticization. Like other pragmatic markers I mean acquires increased scope and syntactic mobility.

Chapter Six: Comment clauses with see

25 Brinton’s sixth chapter is devoted to comment clauses involving see, specifically (as / so) you see, and see alone. She begins, as previously, by studying the functions of see comment clauses in Present Day English. You see, which is more frequent in British English than American, is generally sentence-final and typically expresses “an explanation or justification for the preceding utterance” (134). As / so you see is far less frequent than you see. Brinton’s discussion of its use is brief, considering mainly as you see as presupposing the truth of the matrix, in opposition with you see, seen as truth- neutral. So you see is mentioned only briefly, with several illustrative examples, glossed as you may conclude. See, which is again less frequent than you see, is also mentioned, with a number of corpus examples, along with a rather bewildering diversity of postulated meanings. The Old English corpus yields examples of you see, about 10% of which have that-complements, though the literal meaning of visual perception appears to be far more common than the cognitive sense of understanding, according to Brinton. There are apparently no instances of as you see or of parenthetical you see. The frequency of clausal complements for you see increases in Middle English, as you see makes its appearance, and both you see and as you see acquire cognitive readings and begin to function parenthetically, as in the following examples: Parenthetical as you see: Of hys presens we were ryth glad; But, as þou seste, he hath forsakyn us sone 1450 (145). Parenthetical you see: “Schir”, said the fox, “it is lenterne, ye see, I can not fische” c1470 (145).

26 In Early Modern English, the frequency of parenthetical you see increases slightly, while the frequency of you see followed by a that-complement decreases.

27 Brinton next moves on to consider the history of parenthetical see which begins to function as a pragmatic marker in the 19th century. There exist different hypotheses as to the development of pragmatic see. It may be thought to derive from you see, from do

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you see? or from the imperative see, while Fitzmaurice (2004), suggests a diachronic movement from “subjective” I see to “intersubjective” you see and finally to “interactive” see. Brinton rejects this last hypothesis, considering that the data do not support a relation between first and second person uses, each of which may well have evolved independently, rightly judging that “it could be said that I see functions not in parallel to, but in contrast to you see” (155). The low frequency of complement clauses with or without that in Early Modern English similarly leads her to reject a derivation from you see (that) . In fact, Brinton proposes to derive, on the one hand, you see from as you see, and, on the other, see from both the imperative see + clause and the interrogative do you see? while admitting that the first derivational proposition poses problems given the differing pragmatic functions of as you see and you see in Present Day English. These hypotheses are presented clearly, in diagram form. Brinton briefly considers data on parallel forms in Swedish, before concluding, as in previous chapters, by assessing the correspondence between the developments she proposes and characteristic features of grammaticalization. As with the other markers studied, the evolution of pragmatic see is seen to involve decategorialization, desemanticization (metaphorization), and (inter-) subjectification, moving as it does from referential to non-referential meanings.

Chapter Seven: If you will and as it were

28 Chapter Seven looks at a pair of semantically related markers which both derive from adverbial clauses. In Present Day English both expressions serve as hedges, “making overt reference to the linguistic means of expression” (163). If you will is often used with metaphors and figures of speech, as if to excuse a particular choice of words. Brinton quotes Shapiro and Shapiro (1993) who, from a prescriptivist stance, disapprovingly see the use of if you will “as the speakers’ abnegating responsibility for their own language” (163). Interestingly, Brinton’s corpora show the expression to be more fully grammaticalized in Canadian English than in British English. As it were, on the other hand, is equally represented in both varieties and, from the examples Brinton provides, is found in very similar contexts to if you will. Historically, parenthetical if you will is already present in Old English, with the meaning of if you are willing, only acquiring its pragmatic sense in the early modern period. Brinton cites a number of 16th and 17th century examples which disqualify Shapiro and Shapiro’s criticism of if you will as a linguistic novelty. As it were is present in Old English in the form swa hit wære, emerging in Middle English both with the conditional meaning as if it were (which will soon disappear) and as a pragmatic parenthetical, in similar contexts to Present Day English. Some linguists appear to have linked the rise of as it were to calques from French or Latin, but Brinton finds no clear evidence for this. The development of the pragmatic meaning of if you will, she suggests, might have originated with examples like the following, where both the gloss as if you are willing to do so and as if you are willing to say so are possible: Call them, if you will, Popish fooles, and addlehead (178). As it were appears to have developed syntactically, Brinton suggests, through a process of reanalysis whereby the complement of were is reanalyzed as an appositive. Hence in the following example, we can either consider pricke as the complement of the conditional as it were, or as appositive to pipe: The gnatte… haþ in his mouþ a pipe, as hit were a pricke, “[o]nce this reanalysis occurs, as hit were becomes syntactically independent (parenthetical) and is free to move” (180). In her conclusion to this short chapter, Brinton considers both if

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you will and as it were to be exemplary illustrations of grammaticalization, involving as they do fixing, fusion, desanticization, decategorialization [and the] acquisition of pragmatic / politeness functions” (183). As it were is deemed to have reached a more fully grammaticalized state than if you will.

Chapter Eight: Comment Clauses with look

29 In Chapter Eight, Brinton turns her attention to a variety of comment clauses involving the verb look, including look, as in Look […] can I tell you something (184) but also lookee, look here and lookit. Look-forms all serve as attention-getters, which may, but generally do not, carry the literal meaning of visual perception. Morphosyntactically, she considers the origins of look-forms as generally unproblematic, (now) look (here) being the imperative, lookee etc. coming from look ye / thee, and lookyhere or lookahere coming from look ye here. The sources of the dialectal American form lookit are less clear and are considered in detail at the end of the chapter. A purely historical section looks at the first occurrences of each form with pragmatic function, and the findings are presented synoptically in table form. Diachronically, one appears to move from [Look] [{that, whether, how, etc.} you hear me] to [Look][you hear me] and finally to [Look you][hear me], i.e. the complement clause is reanalyzed as a matrix, its second-person subject joining the imperative, reanalyzed as a parenthetical disjunct. Look you is variously univerbated to form Lookee etc., while look appears last of all, in Late Modern English, with the disappearance of the subject pronoun. The form lookit, which appears mainly in early 20th century North American texts, and appears to carry elements of exasperation or urgency, has followed a different course. This form, illustrated by Lookit. Can’t you come back and stay with me? (195), has been considered to derive from look at it (Schourup 2004). Brinton, however, argues that pragmatic lookit finds its source in look to it or look to’t which are widely attested in Early and Late Modern English with an apparently similar function. She notes that lookit also exists in a perceptual sense, in which case it derives rather from look at, as in “Lookit this idiot” (199). After a brief consideration of the other sensory verbs hark, listen and hear, Brinton concludes this chapter, as before, by considering whether the development of look-forms matches the criteria for grammaticalization. She concludes that it does, involving processes that include decategorialization, fusion, coalescence, desemanticization, pragmatic strengthening and subjectification. In common with the grammaticalization of other pragmatic markers, but uncharacteristically, as far as grammaticalization in general is concerned, look-forms acquire increased scope and, to some extent, mobility, although they are normally placed clause-initially.

Chapter Nine: What’s more and what else

30 The two markers studied in Chapter Nine correspond to Quirk’s third class of comment clause – that of nominal relatives. What’s more, firstly, is described in Present Day English as “expressing expansion, addition or elaboration” (205). Historically, Brinton’s examples date from the end of the 16th century, and are, at first, mainly clause- internal, as what’s more takes an element inside the clause as its scope, becoming predominantly clause-external by the 19th century. A rival form, Which is more, with similar function is attested in the 17th century but is absent from modern texts (Mad as

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May-butter, / And which is more, mad for a wench 208). The preterite what was more develops later, essentially in indirect speech. Brinton rejects explanations which might adduce an elided adjective, i.e. What’s more + adjective, proposing a development from an adjectival relative, “adjoined to a phrasal category, NP, AP, PP, or VP” (210), to a nominal relative with sentential scope which goes on finally to acquire interpersonal features characteristic of pragmatic markers and comment clauses in particular. What else is used in Present Day English as a pragmatic marker in two ways, either “as a means for the speaker to claim continuation of a turn” (212) or as a means to “call […] on the hearer to agree […] with the speaker’s beliefs concerning the expectedness of the action described” (214). These two pragmatic functions might be illustrated respectively by the following examples: Continuative use: “Lucky Harriet,” said Mark. “What else? Ah yes; a Secretary at the Ministry of Industry wants you to ring him.” (214) Expectedness use: Of course, on Monday nights they settle down to watch – what else – “Murphy Brown” (213).

31 The first is said to be speaker-oriented, in that the speaker appears to be addressing himself, while the second is hearer-oriented. The pragmatic uses of what else are considered to derive, perhaps unsurprisingly, from elliptical interrogatives. Both what’s more and what else exhibit many of the features associated with grammaticalization, including decategorialization, and the acquisition of (inter-)subjective meanings. Typically for comment clauses, the scope of these elements increases as they become grammaticalized.

Chapter Ten: Epistemic / evidential parentheticals – I gather and I ﬁnd

32 The last of Brinton’s case studies focuses on the parentheticals I gather and I find. The chapter opens with a review of work on epistemic parentheticals before looking at the two cases in point. Epistemic / evidential parentheticals may be illustrated by I know / believe / guess / suppose etc. each of which functions to “guid[e] the hearer to a proper appreciation of the statement in its context, social, logical or evidential” (220 quoted from Urmson 1952). In the following discussion, Brinton draws attention to a recent approach by Wierzbicka (2006) who “argues that epistemic parentheticals have a relatively late origin in the history of the language, namely, the first half of the eighteenth century [… attributing] their rise to ‘culture-specific historical explanations’” (223 quoted from Wierzbicka 2006) and more precisely to the publication of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Brinton disagrees with this, citing a previous article in which she had detailed the existence of parentheticals such as I leve / gesse / trowe / suppose / thynke / undertake / wene / woot etc. in Middle English. She then turns to I gather, which is characteristic of spoken English, and the function of which is to express uncertainty, possibly serving “purposes of negative politeness in that the speaker does not wish to impose his or her opinions on the hearer” (227). The verb gather already functions cognitively in Middle English, but only becomes recognizably parenthetical in late 19th century English. As I gather is attested from the late 16th century on, Brinton sees little justification for deriving parenthetical I gather from the adverbial clause, considering the matrix clause hypothesis (i.e. from I gather that S to I gather Ø S to S, I gather) a likely derivation here. I find is classified by

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Hooper (1975) as a “‘semifactive’ [denoting] a process of knowing” (230). While the sequence I find is relatively frequent with nominal complements, it is far less frequent than I gather, even, when used as a parenthetical. Parenthetical I find qualifies a statement with “an element of personal experience and of personal opinion derived from personal experience” (233). Historically, find is already used with cognitive meaning in Middle English, and is indeed also used parenthetically, in as I fynde or less frequently as I fynde. The relative low frequency of that-less I find constructions in Present Day English, and a postulated difference in meaning between parenthetical I find and matrix clause I find S lead Brinton to reject the matrix-clause hypothesis in the development of I find in favour of a derivation from as I find to I find, with the ellipsis of as. Both I gather and I find are shown to illustrate processes of grammaticalization, including, as before, decategorialization, fusion, desemanticization and a move from referential to pragmatic, (inter-)subjective meaning.

Chapter Eleven: Concluding remarks

33 The final chapter to The Comment Clause in English begins with a review of the theoretical background before synthesizing the results of the case studies with regard to the syntactic development of comment clauses and lastly proposing directions for further related research. The study of comment clauses inevitably runs into the problem of their syntactic status. They can be viewed either as former matrix clauses which, as the syntactic bond between matrix and complement clauses has weakened, have been reanalyzed as parentheticals, or as syntactically independent elements which can be inserted into an anchor clause. For a number of syntactic and semantic reasons, comment clauses can be described as parenthetical pragmatic markers. Brinton has attempted to show that the development of comment clauses is a process of grammaticalization, rather than lexicalization, as other linguists have claimed (Walderheit 2002; 2006). The two processes share a number of properties, but typically “[g]rammaticalization leads to abstract meanings, such as the metalinguistic, metatextual, or epistemic/evidential meanings of the verbs in comment clauses, while lexicalization leads to semantic non-compositionality and […] specialization rather than generalization of meaning” (243). Another major difference between the two is decategorialization. A lexicalized term may move to a new category, but comment clauses tend to shift from a fully formed clause to an invariable particle. Furthermore, it is possible to establish cross-linguistic parallels in the grammaticalization of related comment clauses while the phenomenon of lexicalization is typically language-specific. The matrix clause hypothesis for syntactic derivation of comment clauses does not, in the light of Brinton’s study, appear to be borne out by the diachronic data. In particular, she shows that “the that-clause complement – the postulated source construction – is a minority form in earlier stages of the language, that that-deletion does not increase over time [and] that wh-interrogative or imperative complements as well as phrasal complements may be more frequent than that-complements” (247). Additionally, the matrix-clause hypothesis is unable to account for finite comment clauses of the adverbial type (as it were) or the nominal type (what is more). In the light of such shortcomings it might appear wise to consider comment clauses as syntactically independent elements, but in this case it is difficult to account for their frequent syntactic incompleteness (I think, for example, requires a priori some sort of complementation). All in all, Brinton concludes that “[t]he results of the case studies in

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this work suggest that the diachronic sources of comment clauses are more varied than previously assumed and that the syntactic developments are considerably more complex and less clear historically than might be expected from a straightforward extension of the matrix clause hypothesis” (249). Among other sources of comment clauses, she suggests “declarative matrix clauses with phrasal complements, imperative matrix clauses […], adjunct adverbial and / or relative clauses, nominal relative clauses, and interrogative tags” (253). In her directions for further research, Brinton points to Construction Grammar as a fertile theoretical frame within which to study comment clauses. She sketches out a possibly constructional approach to the development of epistemic parenthetical comment clauses of the I think variety which, “[i]nstead of focusing on the development of individual comment clauses in isolation […] allows […] the capturing of generalizations across a set of forms which display similar properties, and which have developed in a particular set of ways over time”. She concludes that, insofar as Construction Grammar is a multi-tiered approach integrating different types of linguistic features, it appears a rich and promising model for future work in this area.

Critical Assessment

34 The Comment Clause in English is a thoroughly researched and carefully argued study in an area which has not received the attention it deserves. Although it is often tempting, in the tradition of Sweetser (1990), to adduce links from etymology to pragmatics, Brinton’s study puts this approach to the acid test, with a full and painstaking reconstruction of the development of the markers in question, in their semantics, their pragmatics and their syntax.

35 The work is clearly presented and, where quantitative data are used, the results are often made easily accessible with figures and tables. The typographical errors the book contains are, in a work of this length and ambition, so few as to be negligible.

36 From a theoretical standpoint, I admit to finding many of Brinton’s positions questionable. As mentioned above, the chain of inference leading from SAY to “approximately” is asserted with insufficient argument. The derivation of a pseudo- matrix clause like you see from an adverbial clause like as you see also seems questionable. This type of derivation is suggested for a number of markers and, as such, it seems to ignore the role that the conjunction AS plays in the construction of meaning. I would have welcomed a fuller study of markers in their specific context and, indeed, a clearer distinction between the contribution made by the marker and that made by the context in the construction of meaning. Brinton has a tendency to take contextual meanings for core meanings. This leads her to affirm, confusingly, that I daresay is used epistemically to express “speaker tentativeness, with overlays of intersubjective emotions such as dismissiveness or impatience” (109), or that you say serves both “to confirm understanding or to introduce disagreement” (109).

37 These are minor quibbles, however, in the face of the book’s many strengths. Brinton’s criticism of the matrix-clause hypothesis is well-argued and convincing. Her skill in organizing such a huge amount of historical material is impressive as is her intellectual honesty in presenting the data, in all their complexity and confusion, without ever seeking to transform them in the interest of her arguments. The data are, incidentally, often remarkable and I found it refreshing to see how some discourse markers or

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modes of expression, which prescriptivist approaches condemn as endemic of declining standards in Present Day English, were already alive and kicking in former states of the language! All in all, The Comment Clause in English is an exemplary piece of scholarship which will be of real interest to researchers working in pragmatics, historical linguistics and grammaticalization theory.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

AIJMER K., “I think – an English modal particle”, in Toril SWAN & Olaf JANSEN Westvik eds., Modality in Germanic Languages: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, Berlin and New York, Mouton de Gruyter, 1997: 1-47.

BENVENISTE Emile, “Subjectivity in language”, in MEEK Mary Elizabeth (trans.), Problems in General Linguistics, ‘Miami Linguistics Series 8’, Coral Gables, FL, University of Miami Press, 1971 [1958]: 223-230.

BRINTON Laurel, Pragmatic Markers in English: Grammaticalization and Discourse Functions, ‘Topics in English Linguistics 19’, Berlin and New York, Mouton de Gruyter, 1996.

ERMAN,B. & KOTSINAS U.-B., “Pragmaticalization: the case of ba’ and you know”. Studier i modern språkvetenskap 10, (Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis, Stockholm Studies in Modern Philology, New Series 10.) Stockholm, Almqvist and Wiksell, 1993: 76-93.

FISCHER Olga ROSENBACH A. & STEIN Dieter (eds.), Pathways of Change: Grammaticalization in English, ‘Studies in Language Companion Series 53’, University of Amsterdam / Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf, 2000.

HOOPER Joan B.,“On assertive predicates”, in KIMBALL John P. (ed.): Syntax and semantics, Vol. 4, New York / San Francisco / London, Academic Press, (1975), 1975: 91-124.

HOPPER Paul. J., “On Some Principles of Grammaticization”, In: E. TRAUGOTT and B. HEINE (eds), Approaches to Grammaticalization, Volume I: Focus on Theoretical and Methodological Issues, Amsterdam/ Philadelphia, John Benjamins, 2000: 17-35.

HOPPER Paul J. & TRAUGOTT Elizabeth Closs, Grammaticalization, Cambridge, England, Cambridge University Press, 1993 (2003).

LEHMANN, Christian, “New Reflections on Grammaticalization and Lexicalization”, In WISCHER, Ilse; DIEWALD, Gabriele (ed.), New Reflections on Grammaticalization, Amsterdam, Benjamins, 2002: 1-18.

PELTOLA N., “Comment clauses in present-day English”, in KOSKENNIEMI Inna, PENNANEN Esko & AATONEN Hilkka (eds.), Studies in Classical and Modern Philology, Helsinki, Suomalainen Tidedeakatemia, 1982 (1983): 101-113.

QUIRK Randolph, GREENBAUM S., LEECH G. & SVARTVIK J., A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language, London, Longman, 1985.

ROSS John R., “Slifting”, in GROSS Maurice & SCHÜTZENBERGER Marcel (eds.), The Formal Analysis of Natural Languages, Mouton and Company’s Gravenhage, Holland, 1973: 133-172.

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SCHIFFRIN D., Discourse Markers, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987.

SCHOURUP L., “Lookit and the history of look-forms”, in TARO Kagyama & KISHIMOTO Kideki (eds.), Nihongo no Bunsiki to Gengo Ruikei: Shibatani Masayoshi Kyoju Kanredki-nen Robunshu (The Analysis of Japanese and Linguistic Typology: Festschrift for Professor Masayoshi Shibatani on the Occasion of his Sixtieth Birthday), Tokyo, Kuroshio Press, 2004: 543-558.

SHAPIRO Marianne & SHAPIRO Michael, “Wimp English”, in American Speech 68, 1993: 327-330.

SWEETSER E.E., From Etymology to Pragmatics: Metaphorical and Cultural Aspects of Semantic Structure, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1990.

THOMPSON Sandra A. & MULAC Anthony, “A quantitative perspective on the grammaticalization of epistemic parentheticals in English”, in TRAUGOTT E. C. & HEINE B. (eds.), Approaches to grammaticalization, Amsterdam, Benjamins, 1991: 313-339.

URMSON J., “Parenthetical verbs”, Mind, 61, 1952: 480-496.

VISSER F. Th., An Historical Syntax of the English Language, Part Three: First Half: Syntactical Units with Two Verbs, Leiden, E.J. Brill, 1969.

WALTERHEIT R., “The rise of discourse markers in Italian: A specific type of language change.”, in FISCHER (ed.), 2006: 61-76.

AUTHORS

GRAHAM RANGER Graham Ranger, Department of English, Université d’Avignon et des Pays de Vaucluse, France. Graham Ranger works as a senior lecturer at the Université d'Avignon et des Pays de Vaucluse where he teaches English Linguistics and Translation.

Lexis , Book reviews