The Deep Syntax of Lisu Sentences: A Transformational Case Grammar by Edward ReginaldHopeReview by: James A. MatisoffJournal of the American Oriental Society, Vol. 100, No. 3 (Jul. - Oct., 1980), pp. 386-387Published by: American Oriental SocietyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/601846 .

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386 Journal of the American Oriental Society 100.3 (1980)

the interpenetration of Theravada Buddhism and the political order in Thailand, which Tambiah treats first in historical terms, and then as a defining feature of contemporary Thai society. It culminates in a remarkable section of monographic length in itself that focusses upon the Sangha within the unfolding framework of a masterful macrosociological analysis which seems sure to preside over the study of modern Thailand for some time to come. But this emphasis on Thailand is bracketed by a broader argument about the character of early Buddhism that will powerfully accelerate an unprecedented interpretive shift that has been rapidly gathering force in the field of Buddhist studies. The centerpiece of the entire work, it is of great interest for Asian scholars and also bears important lessons for anyone attentive to the empirical or theoretical investigation of the relationship between religion and society.

Tambiah's major thesis is a repudiation of Max Weber's very influential proposition that Buddhism was entirely apolitical until Asoka concocted a connection between what had previously been a minor sect of mystics who maintained an adamant indifference to the world and the political domain over which he had gained such extraordinary dominance. Tambiah's position can be gauged by the revision he advances of Asoka's achievement: rather than contriving a relation between Buddhism and the polity de noivo. it was instead Asoka's genius to realize on a previously unparalleled scale one that was there from the start.

His point of departure is a canonical genesis myth that encodes the Buddhist rejection of what aambiah calls the rajadharma vision of king and society. in which it is the dharma of both the king and the Kshatriya at large to employ the nasty and often brutal devices natural to the vocation of politics for the maintenance of order, under the moral guidance of purer Brahman preceptors. In place of this Brahmanical appraisal of political men as a dharmically ordained echelon of elevated goons. the myth propounds a social contract theory of sovereignty which pairs the elected king righteously ruling over the world with the taintless bhikkhu in passage to salvation from the world as its finest issue and the king's only superior. It is. Tambiah holds. the mythical template for the dharmaraja ideology of Buddhism. in which the king as Cakkavatti. world conqueror, is the ordinating counterpart of a Bodhisatta. Embodied in the Asokan paradigm. this already increased conception of the kingship was further dilated by the practice of identifying kings as Bodhisattas, especially in Southeast Asia where it mingled with earlier Indic notions and took the form of what Tambiah describes as the galactic polity. an especially ingenious construct that is likely to be widely applied and tested in studies of premodern states in Asia and elsewhere.

The detailed treatment of Thailand is recurrently set off by comparisons with Sri Lanka and Burma that are never less than instructive and often revelatory. This running triangulation of the varying vicissitudes of the Theravada tradition in its three major historical vehicles displays some far-reaching theoretical proposals that are addressed to the clasical problem of distinguishing between continuity and change in the historical process. There is only space to say of them that they have been ingeniously extrapolated from structuralist theory in anthropology and are very significant.

To enter two low-keyed reservations, specialists are likely to raise some complicating chronological questions about Tambiah's handling of early texts. Second, it is surprising that he makes no connections at all between the religious conceptions that are central to this work and those he encountered in his previous research on a regional variant of Thai peasant religiosity, which he reported upon in the widely acclaimed Buddhism and the Spirit Cults in North-east Thailand (London: Cambridge University Press, 1970). A full account would have been out of order, but one would have expected at least some mention of how the Buddhist basis of Thai nationhood is conceived and conveyed in an exemplary village Tambiah himself had studied.

But there is only so much that can be fitted into any book, and Tambiah must have felt he was pressing against the limits well before he finished. As matters stand, in the scale of its conception and the force of its execution, one must go back to the works of "the incomparable Max Weber," as Tambiah once refers to him, to find a parallel to this magnificant investigation of the career of Buddhism in its constitutive social matrix.

ARNOLD L. GREEN

GENEVA, NEW YORK

The Deep Syntax of Lisu Sentences: A Transformational Case Grammar. By EDWARD REGINALD HOPE. Pp. xiii + 184. Pacific Linguistics. Series B, No. 34. Canberra: DEPARTMENT OF LINGUISTICS. RESEARCH

SCHOOL OF PACIFIC STUDIES, THE AUSTRALIAN NA-

TIONAL UNIVERSITY. 1974.

This book IDSLSI is a major contribution to Tibeto- Burman linguistics. It far surpasses the previous works on Lisu by Fraser (1922), Nishida (1967-8). and Roop (1970), and bespeaks a profound understanding of the language. Along with the reviewer's The Grammar of Lahu

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Reviews of Books 387

(1973) 1 GLI. it is the most substantial grammar of a Loloish language to have appeared.

DSLS is cast in a version of Fillmore's case-grammar. yet allows transformations which are sensitive to semantic presuppositions in order to account for the relatively free ordering of NP's before the VP of a clause. In Ch. iii. the most innovative and important chapter in the book. Hope neatly shows how topicalized NP's are fronted to sentence- initial position. while NP's in focus are right-shifted to the "powerful" pre-verbal slot.

Case-grammar is indeed an appropriate model for describing Loloish languages. with their pellucid surface structure. simple complementational apparatus. and ob- vious demarcation of the VP on the one hand from all its preceding associated NP's on the other. Yet Hope sometimes runs into difficulties and complications which are artifacts of his theory rather than the data (like "iatrogenic" disease in medicine). Practically all modifying structures in the NP are analyzed as deep relative clauses (Ch. iv). leading to a multiplication of complex underlying entities which usually have to be "deleted" on the surface anyway. Hope is willing to entertain the singularly unilluminating notion that all nouns are underlyingly verbs (pp. 27. 116). but bridles (p. 122) at Roop's quite sensible suggestion (supported by GL's analysis of sentential nominalization in Lahu) that all Lisu declarative sentences are basically NP's. Occasionally Hope seems to confuse synchronic and diachronic considerations. as when he tries to identify the general classifier ma with a homophonous "relative pro-NOUN" (pp. 89-91). with which it might conceivably have some historical connection (cf. Lahu ma .classifier' vs. ma 'agentive nominalizer'). but whose synchronic behavior is totally different.

To his great credit, however, Hope is concerned more with being faithful to the Lisu language than to somebody else's theory. After considering various "deep explana- tions" for subordinate clause constructions. involving "abstract verbs" and the like. he admits that these are all "ad hoc" (p. 70). Similarly. when discussing the subtle way a verb may acquire a more abstract aspectual meaning in combination with other verbs, he avows that his Fillmorean framework, which insists on a sharp distinction between "proposition" and "modality," is too rigid to do justice to the facts (pp. 150-1).

For many readers the chief interest of DSLS will be comparative. Some similarities with Lahu are arresting in their specificity. The obscure classifier iwe. which "for some idiosyncratic reason" is only used with the numeral '4' (p. 91) is exactly paralleled by Lahu li. which only occurs with '3,' '4,' and'9.' Scattered through DSLS are 10 pairs of morphophonemically related simplex/causative verbs (e.g., dza 'eat'/tsd 'feed'), like those that have been discovered in Lahu (e.g., ci 'eat'/ca 'feed': see GL, p. 33).

The syntactic/semantic categories of Lisu and Lahu functors are often strikingly similar. though the forms "filling the slots" are not necessarily cognate: e.g.. Ls. dwu/Lh. tu 'purposive nominalizer.' Ls. t 'e/Lh. c} .causative auxiliary' Isame function. same forml: Ls. swu 'agentive nominalizer'/Lh. 511 'remote 3rd person pronoun.' Ls. vi 'noun-prefix'/Lh. ve 'indicative nominalizer' Idiffer- ent function, same formi: Ls. tsi/Lh. thd 'temporal nominalizer' Isame function. different forml .

More profoundly. Lisu (like Lahu) provides evidence for the intimate connection between the processes of relativiza- tion and nominalization (p. 100). Yet Lisu relative clauses are syntactic mirror-images of those in Lahu: in Lisu the RC typically comes after its head-noun. but can sometimes be preposed to it. while in Lahu the RC typically precedes its head but may sometimes be postposed to it.

Most important for comparative-typological purposes is the phenomenon of verb serialization or concatenation. which Hope rightly calls 'the most complex aspect of the deep structure of Lisu sentences" (p. 146). Here the parallels and differences between Lisu and Lahu (GL. pp. 199-264) are truly fascinating. Lisu tolerates strings of at least 9 verbs in a row, while Lahu never has more than 5. but the ordering in both languages is ultimately dependent on the "degree of abstractness" of the verbs involved (p. 15 1). In Lisu the negative morpheme must precede the first verb in the series, even at the cost of multiple ambiguity (p. 154). while in Lahu it may sometimes intervene at a later point. Hope's analysis of the ordering possiblities of concatenated verbs is not carried as far as in GL. so that it is not clear whether two classes of auxiliaries ("pre-head" vs. "post-head") must be recognized.

Recent excellent work on a third Loloish langauge. Akha (Egerod, Hansson) reveals that it is "ergative"-a label that there is no reason to pin on either Lisu or Lahu. How different these closely related languages are turning out to be!

JAMES A. MATISOFF

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA. BERKELEY

Die weisse Geschichte. Eine mongolische Quelle zur Lehre vion den Beiden Ordnungen. Religion und Staat in Tibet und der Mongolei. By KLAUS SAGASTER. (Asiatische Forschungen, Bd. 41.) Pp. IX + 489. Wiesbaden: OTTO HARRASSOWITZ. 1976.

In Mongol historiography the Arban bu van-tu nom-un cayan teuke ("The White History of the Ten Meritorious

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