James W. Gair

Lexical anaphors and pronouns in selected South Asian languages : a principled typology

This volume contains detailed descriptions of the anaphoric system of 14 languages of South Asia, representing four linguistic families, Indo-Aryan, Dravidian, Tibeto-Burman and Austro-Asiatic. The data for each language are presented in terms of a common, detailed outline which was guided by both current theoretical concerns and descriptive questions, and designed to allow both precise and comprehensive comparisons across the languages. Each language is described by a recognized specialist.

Hindi agreement as anaphor

Accounting for verb agreement in Hindi has posed a problem for both traditional and modern grammarians and has led to considerable dispute, as in the recent exchange between Saksena (1981, 1985) and Comrie (1984) in this journal. This is largely a function of the fact that Hindi case and agreement vary drastically with verbal aspect in transitive sentences, so that there is no simple way of stating the agreement rule in terms of grammatical functions such as subject and object. In this paper we will show that previously presented proposals fail to account for the Hindi data satisfactorily and lack explanatory power. We then propose a unified account of Hindi verbal agreement which accounts for differing agreement patterns across sentence types and aspects. In it, we utilize principles and configurations which are independently required for other aspects of the language, together with a further specification of one commonly accepted type of configurational relation (that is, c-command). We argue that Hindi exhibits a type of agreement that is essentially anaphoric in nature, that the conditions for its application are simply expressed in terms of case marking and c-command, and that the relevant level of that application is S-structure. We further demonstrate that our proposal not only exhibits explanatory power but extends to a range of data not considered in previous proposals.

Reversing Ribot: does regression hold in language of prodromal Alzheimer's disease?

We consider the regression or retrogenesis hypothesis, which argues that order of acquisition in development is reversed in neurodegeneration or pathology. Originally proposed as a regression hypothesis for the study of memory disorders, specifically retrograde amnesia, by Ribot (1881), it has been extended to the study of brain aging and pathology and to language. We investigate this hypothesis in a new study of language development, aging, and pathology. Through interuniversity collaboration using a matched experimental design and task, we compare production of complex sentences containing relative clauses by normal monolingual children during normal development, healthy young adults, healthy aging adults, and aging adults diagnosed with mild cognitive impairment, a recognized potential harbinger of Alzheimers disease. Our results refute the regression hypothesis in this area and lead to potential syntactic markers for prodromal Alzheimers disease and predictions for future brain imaging analyses.

ROBERT J. BAUMGARDNER (ed.), South Asian English: Structure, use, and users . (English in the global context.) Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996. Pp. xx, 286. Hb

Fifty years after the nations of South Asia gained their independence from Britain, the language of the colonialists remains very much alive in the region. In fact, in some respects it is even more alive than at the time of departure – as witnessed by the efflorescence of South Asian writers in English of international stature, to the extent that the New Yorker has devoted the major part of an issue to them (June 23–30, 1997).