Componential Analysis of Lushai Phonology by Alfons WeidertReview by: James A. MatisoffJournal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 99, No. 3 (Jul. - Sep., 1979), p. 496Published by: American Oriental SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/602422 .

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496 Journal of the American Oriental Society 99.3 (1979)

Componential Analysis of Lushai Phonology. By ALFONS WEIDERT. Pp. xiv + 139. Amsterdam Studies in the Theory and History of Linguistic Science, IV: Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, Vol. 2. Amsterdam: JOHN

BENJAMINS B. V. 1975. H. fl. 30.00 paperback.

Lushai, a language of the Central Chin group of the Kuki- Chin-Naga branch of Tibeto-Burman (TB), has long been an important mine of comparative data. The excellent dictionaries of J. H. Lorrain (esp. 1940) were heavily utilized by Shafer and Benedict in Sino-Tibetan Linguistics (1939-41), and again in Benedicts's Conspectus (1972), to establish such features of proto-TB phonology as vowel length and final *-1, *-r, and *-s.

Weidert, who has contributed to Austroasiatic studies (esp. Khasi) as well as to TB, has now considerably deepened our understanding of Lushai phonology. He is in the generative phonological tradition, but with some eclectic twists of his own, having been influenced by the Prague School, Firthian prosodism, and apparently Kenneth Pike's ideas on coexistent phonemic systems. He espouses a 3-level theory (taxonomic phonemic as well as morpho- phonological and phonetic) that is reminiscent of American structuralism.

Weidert's formalistic approach leads him to impute a quasi-magical power to "rules," as if the rules formulated by the linguist were responsible for the phenomena they can merely describe. When discussing phonological differences between Form I/Form II pairs of verbs (quite analogous to what E. J. A. Henderson has discovered for Tiddim Chin), he speaks of tone, vowel, and/or final consonant being "responsible" for morphologically conditioned changes of syllables (p. 59). Yet these are merely the features affected by the operation of natural, blind phonetic processes, articulatory and psychological. (E.g., tonal variation is often due to the effect of now-lost prefixes of suffixes, and vocalic variation is often due to stress differences at earlier stages of the language.

Wiedert tries to eliminate exceptions by writing rules for them. He does a brilliant job of listing the various phonotactic and morphophonemic patterns in Lushai phonology, even those whose productivity is minimal, but neither he nor anyone else can point to a given morpheme and predict a priori what "rules" may apply to it. The arbitrary cannot be banished from linguistic structure. and a language's derivational unpredictability cannot be formal- ized away.

Weidert has a keen understanding of the continuum of morphematicity, though his terminology, based on the semantic theory of Klaus Heger, is forbiddingly discursive (e.g., "morpheme with exclusively reflexive-metalinguistic sememe"). His treatment of "reduction" (or cliticization)

and "extension" (what Boodberg called "dimidiation") are excellent, shedding light o the analytic/synthetic cycle in TB diachronic grammar.

The careful study of tone in this work will be of value in deciding whether a tonal system can be reconstructed for Proto-Kuki-Chin, which could then be compared to the tones of Proto-Lolo-Burmese. If no systematic correspond- ence can be found, it would cast serious doubt on Benedict's reconstruction of tones way back to the level of Proto-Sino- Tibetan.

JAMES A. MATISOFF

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY

A Semantic Study of Transitivity Relations in Chinese. By SHOU-HSIN TENG. Pp. ix + 177. University of Cali- fornia Publications in Linguistics, 80. Berkely, Los Angeles, and London: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS. 1975. $8.00 paper.

This work is the refinement of Professor Teng's dissertation in seven chapters. The work also includes a preface, a bibliography, an index and an appendix entitled "Verb Classification." The transcription system used for Chinese is Pin- Yin without the usual diacritics used to indicate tone.

The preface states "This work studies the semantic role of nominal elements occurring in a sentence." Teng goes on in the first chapter to present a synopsis of 1. Fillmore's case grammar (Charles Fillmore, "The Case for Case," in Universals in Linguistic Theory, eds. E. Bach and R. Harms, 1968.), 2. M. A. K. Halliday's systemic grammar ("Notes on Transitivity and Theme in English," Parts 1, 2, 3, Journal of Linguistics, 3.1 [1967], 37-81; 3.2 [1967], 199-244; and 4.2 [1968], 179-215, respectively.), and 3. Wallace Chafe's grammar found in Meaning and the Structure of Language, 1970. Teng offers a detailed comparison of the three grammars with their properties and inadequacies, and reformulates out of these theories a theoretical framework which he adopts for his description of Chinese. Teng notes that in Chomsky's framework "the functions," e.g., subject and object are defined by relations and are not necessary notions in the specification of sentences. Fillmore calls this 'pure relations' and states that "pure relations grammar imposes too much structure on the grammatical categories in the underlying structure so that certain generalizations are missed." Fillmore's response is to assign constant values to nouns which apparently play the same role in different environments. This in turn simplifies the verb specification. The underlying structure is no longer such that it defines grammatical functions like

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