No abstract

Frank Palmer's new book is a typological survey of grammatical roles, such as Agent, Patient, Beneficiary, and grammatical relations, such as Subject, Direct Object and Indirect Object, which are familiar concepts in traditional grammars. It describes the devices, such as the Passive, that alter or switch the identities between such roles and relations. A great wealth of examples is used to show that the grammatical systems of the familiar European languages are far from typical of many of the world's languages, for which we need to use such terms as 'Ergative' and 'Antipassive'. Professor Palmer provides an elegant and consistent framework within which grammatical roles and relations may be discussed, combining a great clarity of discussion with evidence from an enormous number of the world's languages.

An essential part of the prosodic approach is the abstraction of those features that may be regarded as syntagmatic. One feature of this kind is ‘vowel harmony’; prosodic analysis is well equipped to deal with this in terms of x2018;frontness’ and ‘backness’, or ‘openness’ and ‘closeness’, these being treated as characteristic of the entire word or of a considerable part of it.In the phonological analysis of Tigre a prosodic feature of this kind may be abstracted, the relevant phonetic observation being that there are sequences of open front vowels, and that within those sequences there are no half open central vowels. It is this feature that is referred to in the title as ‘openness’.

Part of the meaning of a verb phrase containing a form of one of the English modal verbs CAN and WILL1 is that the actions, events, etc., indicated by the following full verb took place, takes place and will take place. I shall use the term MODALITY to refer to the meaning of the modal verb and EVENT to refer to the meaning of the full verb and say that, in certain circumstances, there is ACTUALITY of the event or that the event is ACTUALIZED. I wish to discuss the circumstances in which this is so and attempt to provide explanations in terms of some of the characteristics of modality in general.

THE paradigms that may be set up for the nominals in Tigrinya1 in terms of the category of number (established on syntactical and further morphological grounds) consist of two members, conveniently termed ‘singular’ and ‘plural’. The morphological analysis for the forms placed in this grammatical relationship may, for some of them, be given in terms of ‘external flection’ or ‘sumxation’, but for many forms, including those in commonest use, the differences of syllabic pattern, and other differences throughout the entire forms, justify the use of the traditional term ‘broken plural’. It is the purpose of this paper to make a phonological analysis to handle the morphological relation between the broken plurals and the singular forms with which they are grammatically paired.