- Email: [email protected]
Minor Mlabri, a hunter-gatherer language of Northern Indochina
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at the end of volume 2 may be helpful, but I am still afraid that the handbook will only be of use to scholars or advaraced students of linguistics. This modest criticism does not undermine my conviction that the two volumes deserve to be called an outstanding and successful enterprise of present-day linguistics. They contain an immense bulk: of duly systematized knowledge and draw a concise and realistic picture of what linguistic inquiry has achieved in the field of syntax so far. Nobody interested in these achievments can avoid making extensive use of the Handbook of Syntax.
J~rgen Rischel, Minor Mlabri, A hunter-gatherer language of Northern Indochina. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 1995. 367 pp. $98.00. Reviewed by David Gil, Department of Linguistics, University of Delaware, Newark, DE, 19716-2551, USA, and Department of Audiology and Speech Sciences, Universiti Kebangsaan IVlalaysia, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. In a better world than ours, each and every person engaged in the professional study of human language would feel, and then go out and fulfill, the urge to spend at least one substantial chunk of their life on some jungle hilltop, desert island or other remote outpost, doing fieldwork on a hitherto unknown or little-known language, and then producing a piece of work such as JCrgen Rischel's outstanding book on the Minor Mlabri people of Southeast Asia. Of course, in an even better world, books like this one, hundreds and hundreds more of them, would not be crying out to be written with such appalling urgency. Reading Rischel's description of the Minor Mlabri language is rather like leafing through a photo album displaying the happy moments in the past life of a loved one now in the advanced stages of a terminal illness. The Mlabri are a group of hunter-gatherers living in the mountain forests of eastemmost northern Thailand, occasionally wandering into neighboring parts of Laos; previous studies have characterized them "as possessors of a pre-stone-age 'bamboo culture' " (p. 27). Needless to say, their lifestyle stands little chance of surviving the onslaught of modernization throughout Southeast Asia. In total, the Mlabri number less than two hundred; as if this were not enough, they are divided into two subgroups, characterized by "strong mutual repulsion" (p. 30), and speaking different dialects with a low degree of mutual intelligibility. The Minor Mlabri, also referred to as fI-Mlabri, are so called because they are the numerically smaller group: "As of now", writes the author, "I know of only eleven surviving members of the group" (p. 26). Sadly, he concludes, "[i]t seems unavoidable that their variety of the language will succumb to language death within one or two decades" (p. 32). J~rgen Rischel's book, and his other, related studies of the Minor Mlabri, will thus very soon be almost all that is left as record of a departed people. For this reason alone, the book is an invaluable piece of research, and as such is deserving of unreserved praise.
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While the immediate need to document dying languages has finally been accorded at least some recognition by the academic community, there is less consensus with regard to the most appropriate ways of going about the task. Rischel takes a clear stand on this issue in a number of passages: "I have seen as my major tasks to present organized raw data and to make the most basic generalizations about the ways in which morphemes, words, phrases, and clauses are combined to encode various types of meanings." (p. 11) "It is therefore my conviction that a language documentation such as the present one should be designed in such a way that it is applicable as a tool in anthropological and linguistic studies alike. It is often the immediate linguistic data, rather than sophisticated a posteriori analyses and formalizations, that turn out to have the most lasting relevance. That is one reason why I have chosen a 'non-technical' format of presentation and have strived to remain faithful to immediately observable language data." (p. 13) "It has been my main ambition to characterize 13-Mlabri grammar in a way which is both general and explicit enough to serve as easily accessible input to genetic and typological studies." (p. 133) Implicit in the author's remarks is the rejection of an alternative approach in which linguistic descriptions are couched in a specialized theoretical framework - be it another obscure "alphabet-soup" theory, or the flavor-of-the-month version of generative grammar. Anybody who has experienced the frustration of trying to wrest a few elementary linguistic facts in an exotic language from a description couched in some abstruse and/or ephemeral terminology cannot fail to wholeheartedly welcome Rischel's approach. Nevertheless, it is an illusion to believe that one can conveniently separate "description" from "theory", and - in the context of the documentation of endangered languages, at least - engage in the former without having to bother with the latter. The truth of the matter is that there can be no description without theory, just as there can be no theory without description. Since the bare facts about any language are infinite in number, a finite description of the facts has no choice but to posit categories and formulate generalizations governing these categories which is theory. To cite but one example, the author characterizes the basic word order of Minor Mlabri as "S[ubject]V[erb]", illustrating this generalization with sentences such as ?oh j r r m "I stay" (p. 171). However, it should be clear that even such commonplace categories as subject and verb are theoretical constructs, which may or may not be the ones most appropriate for the data under consideration. Indeed, the word order of basic intransitive~ sentences is potentially amenable to a variety of alternative accounts, making reference to different kinds of categories: for example, ' N P precedes VP', 'actor precedes verb', 'topic precedes verb', 'participant precedes monovalent activity', 'less complex constituent precedes more complex constituent', 'shorter constituent precedes longer constituent', and so forth. And this is anything but armchair terminological hairsplitting. Rather, such alternative accounts bear empirical consequences: each one makes different predictions with regard to the word order of various other sentences - predictions which one can only hope will be tested before the language is extinct.
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A related issue concerns the mode of organization of the linguistic description. At one extreme is a system which may be characterized as top-down, or 'templatic'. This is an approach that has been productively institutionalized by the annual field expeditions organized by Moscow State University (see Kibrik, 1988); well-known exemplars are the grammatical descriptions produced in the UK by the Croom Helm Descriptive Grammars and in tile former USSR by the many publications of Izdate!'stvo Nauka, such as those in the series titled Jazyki Narodov SSSR and Jazyki Narodov Azii i Afriki. In this system, the author produces a linguistic description in accordance with a pre-prepared and standardized checklist, which spells out the topics to be covered and the order in which they are to be dealt with. This way of doing things is intended to guarantee a relatively complete coverage of the major features of the target language, and to ensure that descriptions of different languages by different scholars be readily comparable. Such descriptions are generally extremely user-friendly. For example, when I was working on my Ph.D. dissertation, a typological study of distributive numerals (Gil, 1982), I knew that I could pick up any grammar book by Nauk, zip through the table of contents to a sub-sub-section titled 8islitel'nye ('numerals'), and home straight in on a brief, usually one-paragraph description of razdelitel'nye 8islitel'nye ('distributive numerals') in the language in question. However, such convenience comes at a price. Although guaranteed to be free of arcane theoretical terminology, a description of this kind is anything but atheoretical. On the contrary, by its very nature, a templatic description involves the imposition of a universal scheme upon a particular language - and such a scheme necessarily invokes a host of theoretical assumptions concerning the relevant units of linguistic description. Moreover, given the history of linguistics, such a universal template is very likely to be rooted in grammatical traditions that are fundamentally Eurocentric, and may accordingly be ill-equipped to handle the diversity exhibited by languages spoken in other parts of the world. This problem is particularly acute in the case of Southeast Asian languages. One of the most salient characteristics of this linguistic area is the extent to which many traditional grammatical categories are left unexpressed, both morphologically and syntactically; see, for example, ]Riddle and Stahlke (1992), Huang (1994), Gil (1994c, to appear) and Bisang (1996). In this vein, Rischel observes: "... therd is no constancy in the degree of morphosyntacticredundancy across languages: the isolating languages of Southeast Asia do not necessarilymake up for the lack of inflection by syntactic elaboration. One might expect rigid explicitness in terms of specificationof syntacticarguments, but on the contrary in these very languages, sentence-materialwhich can be inferred from the linguistc or situational context, is often left out, and Mlabri is no exception. This may lead to a high degree of structural and semantic ambiguity of utterances if they are considered in isolation when subjected to linguistic analysis." (p. 170) Thus, for such languages, the imposition of a descriptive template and its concomitant theoretical constructs runs the risk of distorting the character of the language, not only by ignoring various 'exotic' phenomena, but, perhaps more perniciously, by introducing would-be patterns, categories, and structures where there are none. Rischel is very much aware of this problem:
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"When one is analyzing Mlabri grammar it is not always so simple to specify the meaning with reference to hierarchical constituent structure [...] it easily becomes a stright-jacket [sic] forcing the analyst to posit st~cture which is not really there." (p. 191) "[...] the evidence on which one may attempt to posit syntactic structures in [Mlabri and several other minority languages of northern Indochina] is to a great extent semantic and pragmatic rather than morphosyntactic. If viewed in isolation, a string of Mlabri words often seems ambiguous as regards the possibilities of syntactic parsing. I cannot, however,help feeling that such formal ambiguitymay arise as a pseudo-problem generatedby a choice of a rigid descriptiveframework.That is an additional reason for choosing a non-technicalformat of presentation at the present level of understanding." (p. 13) One can only wish that more linguists engaged in the description of Southeast Asian languages and citing data from such languages in support of various theoretical positions might exhibit a similar sensitivity with regard to this issue. Accordingly, Rischel opts for an approach that is diametrically opposed to the templatic - an approach which might appropriately be characterized as bottom-up, or 'free-wheeling'. In accordance with this system, the data themselves are taken as the starting point, and the description of the data is what then provides the motivation for the postulation of appropriate categories and structures. Doing linguistics this way involves turning an attentive ear to the language under investigation and listening to what it is trying to say, even if the message is inconsistent with certain dogmas or assumptions that one has been brought up with. Although freeing the researcher from the neccessity of handling a particular theoretical framework, such an approach imposes a heavier burden, that of organizing the data from scratch, identifying the interesting regularities, and accounting for these regularities by means of various theoretical constructs. This, then, is the challenge that Rischel takes upon himself. If this challenge is not always met with complete success, the result, at least, is a solid and reliable foundation upon which further advances can be sought. Often, as is indeed the case here, a bottom-up approach is also forced upon the investigator by methodological considerations. In Minor Mlabri, as in many other languages, the elicitation of data is not always practical (Thongkum, 1992: 57, cited on p. 15), and it is, therefore, necessary to rely heavily on spontaneous data from naturally occurring speech. Such data may be of value with regard to certain empirical domains, such as word order; however, if, by chance, the researcher happens to harbor a specific interest in certain other domains, such as, for example, quantifier scope or long-distance reflexives, such data are well-nigh useless - one might have to wait a lifetime for the relevant construction to pop out of a speaker's mouth. In compensation, though, spontaneous data are invaluable in the way they bring to the attention of the field worker various unexpected constructions that would never have been obtained though elicitation, for the simple reason that the researcher would never have thought of asking for them. Thus, the use of data from naturally occurring speech lends itself straightforwardly to such an inductive approach. The organization of the book is straightforward and bipartite. The first part, 'Description', contains two chapters, providing the historical, social, and cultural setting, followed by three chapters, presenting the major phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic patterns of the language. The second part, 'Lexicon' contains
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an introductory chapter, followed by a Mlabri-English dictionary and a shorter English-Mlabri dictionary. Since most non-specialist readers will find more of interest in Part I, the following, more specific comments focus on the first part of the book. All in all, the book lives up to its self-proclaimed goal of providing an "easily accessible input to [...] typological studies" (p. 133), with many facts and observations that should be of considerable interest to general linguists. To cite just one particular domain, Minor Mlabri appears to be exceptional in its paucity of strategies for the expression of quantificational meanings. Thus, even though Minor Mlabri has a set of numerals from one to ten, only the numerals for 'two' and 'four' can occur in adnominal position; it is impossible to use the numeral for, say 'three', in a construction meaning 'three items' (pp. 146-147). In contrast, in most Southeast Asian languages, such expressions are commonplace, and typically involve the use of a numeral classifier, for example Thai s3m sham lfiuk ('orange three CLF'), White Hmong peb lub txiv duaj ('three eLF fruit peach'), and Vietnamese ba quh t6o ('three CLF apple'). Equally remarkable i:~ the absence of any morphosyntactic strategy for the expression of distributivity, short of repetition of the relevant clause in its entirety, as for example in ma mla? toc ma kw~o ma mla? toc ma kwnq ('one person take one CLF one person take one CLF', for 'Everybody take one container') (p. 162). Again, this is in contrast with most neighboring languages, which would make use of a distributive universal quantifier 'every', such as Thai thfik and Vietnamese m.oi, or some other, more specific marker of distributivity, such as Thai 1~ and Vietnamese tfrng. In addition, the book contains much information of value to the study of Southeast Asia as a linguistic sprachbund. One particularly interesting feature is the discussion of the possessive connective di, as for example in bra)~ di ?eew ('young of dog', or 'the dog's whelp(s)') (pp. 140-141). Rischel notes that this grammatical marker is "strangely reminiscent of Modem Chinese da" (p. 140). In fact, it is an obvious borrowing from the Yunnanese dialect of Mandarin, in which the corresponding form is also di - indeed, the same morpheme also occurs in the neighboring White Hmong, where it assumes the form li. However, in Minor Mlabri, an interesting syntactic reanalysis appears to have taken place. Whereas in Mandarin and Hmong the connective forms a constituent with the preceding possessor, in Minor Mlabri it would appear as though di is "a determiner occurring in front of the possessum" (p. 141); evidence for this is provided by constructions of the form di NP, in which the preceding possessor is understood. It is tempting to speculate that this reanalysis is correlated with the north-to-south transition from a Chinese head-final to a mainlandSoutheast-Asian head-initial syntactic type. However, in addition to the possessive di, a homophonous form di marks the imperative (pp. 140, 159): this would appear to be a borrowing from Vietnamese, in which di 'go' is also used as an imperative marker. Areal connections of a different kind are evident with regard to the marker ?at, which occurs before a noun, and "is used to identify the specific item talked about as an integral or inalienable part (or possession) of the person, thing or situation that functions as theme" (p. 152). Judging by the examples provided, the use of ?at bears a striking resemblance to that of the enclitic -nya in Malay/Indonesian. The author
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speculates that ?at derives historically from the suffixation of possessive -di (see the preceding paragraph) to a pronominal form *?a- (p. 154); the plausibility of such a development is supported by the Malay]Indonesian, in which -nya also functions synchronically as a third person possessive pronoun. Another interesting construction, involving a possessive pronoun in combination with an existential marker, is that exemplified by ?ot che?na~ ('my lice exist', for 'I have lice') (p. 173). In this construction, the NP ?or che? is non-referential: The author appears to consider this fact to be unexpected, and suggests that the construction in question "is not in line with productive modem Mlabri syntax, but is a relic from an older state of the language in which possessives did not yet encode referentiality of the possessed object, or in which the forms simply meant something else" (p. 174). However, the non-referentiality of ?ot che? is surprising only from a European perspective; in Southeast Asian languages, possessives are typically unmarked for referentiality and (in)definiteness; for some relevant data from the Singaporean dialects of English, Malay, and Mandarin, see Gil (1994a, to appear). Evidence for areal connections is also provided by specific lexical items. Two such words pointing in the direction of Austronesian languages are lmb~r ('leaf') (p. 51) corresponding to Malay]Indonesian lembar ('page', 'sheet'), and klkiil ('knee') (p. 94), calling to mind Tagalog kilikili ('armpit'). Thus, Minor Mlabri provides a fine illustration of the myriad regional interrelationships which so bedevil the task of deep genetic classification in the Southeast Asian linguistic area. Perhaps inevitably for an empirical study of such scope, the book contains a number of minor misrepresentations and unclear passages, which, although not detracting from the overall value of the work, might, with greater care, have been avoided. On the topic of noun classifiers, it is claimed that "It]his category is rather marginal in Mon-Khmer languages compared to its proliferatation e.g. in Thai" (p. 51); however, the validity of this claim is open to question. For example, a cursory comparison of the standard varieties of Vietnamese (a major, albeit somewhat divergent Mon-Khmer language) and Thai would suggest a somewhat different state of affairs. Thus, in simple construction with a bare noun, a classifier is possible, in fact common, in Vietnamese, for example qu~ tdto ('CLF apple'), but ungrammatical in Thai, for example *l~uk srm ('CLF orange'), *srm Iauk ('orange CLF') (see Gil, 1994b, for some discussion of this construction). In the treatment of morphology, inflection is defined as "a morphological device which is used in order to express syntactic relationships", and Minor Mlabri is claimed not to exhibit any such devices (p. 99). However, it is not obvious why the above rather vague definition does not encompass two morphological processes which do occur in Minor Mlabri and which, presumably, one would not wish to subsume under inflection: infixation forming deverbal nouns (p. 85), and prefixation marking the causative (p. 90). With regard to the latter process, a further lack of clarity results from some of the purported examples of causative constructions, whose glosses seem to have little to do with the causative, for example ktum ('throw') > bakuim ('throw away', 'discard') (p. 90). (In a personal communication, the author has promised to deal with the above examples in a forthcoming correction sheet.) A different kind of lapse occurs in a section on word semantics, in which it is stated: "[...] the Mlabri lexicon very obviously
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reflects the traditional culture of the people by its emphasis on differentiation within certain semantic fields. This is the same kind of phenomenon that is so often illustrated in linguistic lore by the richness of terms for 'snow' in Eskimo" (p. 103). While the author is most probably correct regarding the relationship between Mlabri lexicon and culture, it would perhaps have been advisable at least to acknowledge the existence of a recent article characterizing the purported richness of Eskimo 'snow' words as a 'hoax' (Pullum, 1989). Of somewhat greater pervasiveness are a considerable number of stylistic inappropriatenesses which detract from the readability of the text. Many passages reflect the writer's non-native command of English - at the stylistic if not grammatical level. More generally, the book has a rather rambling and disorganized feel to it, sometimes resulting in lack of clarity. To cite but one example, consider the treatment of genetic affiliation. In several places, one obtains the impression that Mlabri is a Mon-Khmer language, in fact, one belonging to a specific branch thereof: "The Mlabri language [...] has been classified, on somewhat shaky lexical evidence, as belonging to a 'Khmuic' branch of Northern Mon-Khmer" (p. 22); "A very large proportion of the words in Mlabri are unmistakably of Mon-Khmer type, and out of these a sizeable proportion have very close or even phonologically identical cognates in languages of the proposed Khmuic branch of Mon-Khmer. Accordingly, Mlabri was already classified as belonging with these languages by Nimmanhaeminda (1963)" (p. 59). However, in other places, a rather different picture emerges: "So far, virtually nothing is known about the genetic placement of Mlabri" (p. 46); "One may even ask whether the very deepest layer in the Mlabri language was at all MonKhmer" (p. 47). Of course, the author is fully entitled to remain agnostic with regard to such a possibly intractable issue; however, after working through all of these passages, the reader ends up confused as to what the author's position on the matter actually is. The title of the book contains two stylistic infelicities, which recur in the course of the text. Rischel writes about the Minor Mlabri with sensitivity and affection, yet his choice of ethnonym, specifically, the appelation "Minor", has an unnecessarily cold and impersonal feel to it, conjuring up the taxonomic enterprises of botanists and zoologists, and names such as "lesser grey shrike", aka "lanius minor". One wishes that this small and disappearing group of people, portraits of two of which embellish the front and back cow:rs of this book, might have merited a more appropriate name - perhaps one reflecting their intrinsic qualities, or, alternatively, one derived from their geographical location. Which leads to the second unfortunate word in the title, the toponym "Indochina". My initial assumption was that the Minor Mlabri lived somewhere in Vietnam, Laos, or Cambodia, and I was surprised, and a little bewildered, to find out that they actually reside mainly in Thailand. This terminological confusion prompted me to post an informal e-mail poll on the Southeast Asian Language ("sealang") list, asking subscribers how they understood the term "Indochina". The 16 responses produced an approximately even split between those who, in accordance with the author's usage, interpreted "Indochina" as roughly coextensive with "mainland Southeast Asia", encompassing Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, part or all of
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Burma, and perhaps also parts of Malaysia and Indonesia, and those who, like myself, took "Indochina" to be synonymous with erstwhile "French Indochina", consisting only of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Interestingly, both camps were able to muster various corroborative sources supporting their respective interpretations. For example, favoring the latter usage, I came across a newspaper article by one Christopher Tan from Bangkok (Singapore Business Times, 24.4.1996: 6), reporting that "Honda is studying the feasibility of exporting Thai-assembled Citys to Indochina and Singapore" - obviously, in the above passage, "Indochina" cannot be understood to include Thailand. Be this as it may, whatever the historical or political justification of either usage, given the de facto existence of such terminological inconsistency, it would probably be best to completely abandon the use of the term "Indochina" in scholarly discourse. Additional faults could perhaps have been prevented by the publishers. Aesthetically, the sans-serif phonetic font in which the data are cited clashes with the slightly smaller serifed font of the text: in this age of desk-top publishing and easy-to-use font applications, a more pleasing combination could have been found. More importantly, the occasional Thai and Lao data are often lacking their lexical tone marks an all too common practice which, ultimately, betrays a Eurocentric bias towards Southeast Asian sound systems. More seriously again, many sentences (for example p. 107 (2); p. 146 4th paragraph; p. 195 top) are provided without a literal morpheme-by-morpheme gloss, which makes their structure difficult or even impossible to figure out. Elsewhere (for example p. 196, p. 197) such glosses are provided; however, even here, readability would have been greatly improved by a more judicious format, vertically aligning each Minor Mlabri morpheme with its literal gloss, as is customary in much of the linguistic literature. But matters such as these detract little from the overall value of JOrgen Rischel's excellent book. And, of course, they pale into insignificance when contrasted with the concerns of the Minor Mlabri themselves. Apropos of which, it is perhaps most fitting to leave the final - and all too appropriate - words of this review to the author himself: "The fate of the Mlabri and their culture and language ... deserves being looked upon as an international concern of the same nature as the protection of rare species." (p. 33)
Acknowledgements I am grateful to the author, J0rgen Rischel, for helpful comments on a preliminary version of this review. For their assistance with data from other Southeast Asian languages, I am indebted to Michael Johnson (Yunnanese Mandarin and White Hmong), Martha Ratliff (White Hmong) and Uri Tadmor (Thai). I would also like to express my appreciation to Edward M. Anthony, Doug Cooper, Christopher Court, Nick Enfield, Blaine Erickson, Ross Fenske, L.V. Hayes, Trin Indra-Opas, Kent Lee, Waruno Mahdi, John Marston, Alena Lee Sanusi, Uri Tadmor, David Thomas, and Gwyn Williams, for their contributions to the email discussion on the sealang list
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concerning the term " I n d o c h i n a " . This review was written during August and September 1996, at the Hotel Sari Jaya in Nagoya, Riau Province, Indonesia, and at the Hotel H~i Quan in S~m Strn, Thanh H6a Province, Vietnam; I would like to thank everybody there, and in particuhtr Rudicandra, S.tr and Ctrb~ng, for making m y stays pleasant and productive.
References Bisang, Walter, 1996. Areal typology and grammaticalization: Processes of grammaticalization based on nouns and verbs in East and Mainland Southeast Asian languages. Studies in Language. Gil, David, 1982. Distributive numerals. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles. Gil, David, 1994a. Genitives, number and (in)definiteness: Some data from English, Singlish, Mandarin and Malay. In: F. Plank, ed., Agreement gender number genitive &, 109-131. EUROTYP Working Papers, Series 7, Number 23. Berlin: The European Science Foundation, EUROTYP Programme. Gil, David, 1994b. Numeral classifiers: An e-mail conversation. In: F. Plank, ed., Conversations on noun phrases, 1-30. EUROTYP Working Papers, Series 7, Number 20. Berlin: The European Science Foundation, EUROTYP Programme. Gil, David, 1994c. The structure of Riau Indonesian. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 17: 179-200. Gil, David, to appear. English goes Asian; Number and (in)definiteness in the Singlish noun-phrase. In: F. Plank, ed., Noun-phrases in European languages: Empirical approaches to language typology. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Huang, Yan, 1994. The Syntax and pragmatics of anaphora: A study with special reference to Chinese. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kibrik, Aleksandr E., 1988. ~to takoe 'lingvisticeskie ekspedicii'? Vestnik 12: 94-102. Akademii Nauk SSSR. Nimmanhaeminda, Kraisri, 1963. The Mrabri language. Journal of the Siam Society 50: 179-184. Pullum, Geoffrey K., 1989, Topic ... comment: The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 7: 275-281. Riddle, Elizabeth and Herbert Stahlke, 1992. Linguistic typology and sinospheric languages. In: M. Ratliff and E. Schiller, eds., Papers from the first annual Meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society, 1991, 351-366. Tempe, AZ: Arizona State University. Thongkum, Theraphan L., 1992. The Language of the Mlabri (Phi Tong Luang). Pookajorn and Staff 1992: 43-65.
B r u c e Bain, Pathways to the peak of Mount Piaget and Vigotsky: Speaking and cognizing monolingually and bilingually. R o m e : Bulzoni, 1996. 423 pp. + index. $35.00 (hb.). Reviewed by Marlene Dolitsky, lnstitut Universitaire de la Formation des Maitres, 10 rue Molitor, F-75016 Paris, France. The trail o f research into speech and cognition is wrought with difficulties. Firstly, "Bilingual studies is often a confusing and frustrating area o f inquiry in which the distinctions between politics, ideologies, curricular, and research methodologies are sometimes blurred. It is not an area o f inquiry for the faint of heart" (p. 139). Secondly, there are few "bridges between linguistics and developmental p s y c h o l o g y "
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at the end of volume 2 may be helpful, but I am still afraid that the handbook will only be of use to scholars or advaraced students of linguistics. This modest criticism does not undermine my conviction that the two volumes deserve to be called an outstanding and successful enterprise of present-day linguistics. They contain an immense bulk: of duly systematized knowledge and draw a concise and realistic picture of what linguistic inquiry has achieved in the field of syntax so far. Nobody interested in these achievments can avoid making extensive use of the Handbook of Syntax.
J~rgen Rischel, Minor Mlabri, A hunter-gatherer language of Northern Indochina. Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 1995. 367 pp. $98.00. Reviewed by David Gil, Department of Linguistics, University of Delaware, Newark, DE, 19716-2551, USA, and Department of Audiology and Speech Sciences, Universiti Kebangsaan IVlalaysia, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. In a better world than ours, each and every person engaged in the professional study of human language would feel, and then go out and fulfill, the urge to spend at least one substantial chunk of their life on some jungle hilltop, desert island or other remote outpost, doing fieldwork on a hitherto unknown or little-known language, and then producing a piece of work such as JCrgen Rischel's outstanding book on the Minor Mlabri people of Southeast Asia. Of course, in an even better world, books like this one, hundreds and hundreds more of them, would not be crying out to be written with such appalling urgency. Reading Rischel's description of the Minor Mlabri language is rather like leafing through a photo album displaying the happy moments in the past life of a loved one now in the advanced stages of a terminal illness. The Mlabri are a group of hunter-gatherers living in the mountain forests of eastemmost northern Thailand, occasionally wandering into neighboring parts of Laos; previous studies have characterized them "as possessors of a pre-stone-age 'bamboo culture' " (p. 27). Needless to say, their lifestyle stands little chance of surviving the onslaught of modernization throughout Southeast Asia. In total, the Mlabri number less than two hundred; as if this were not enough, they are divided into two subgroups, characterized by "strong mutual repulsion" (p. 30), and speaking different dialects with a low degree of mutual intelligibility. The Minor Mlabri, also referred to as fI-Mlabri, are so called because they are the numerically smaller group: "As of now", writes the author, "I know of only eleven surviving members of the group" (p. 26). Sadly, he concludes, "[i]t seems unavoidable that their variety of the language will succumb to language death within one or two decades" (p. 32). J~rgen Rischel's book, and his other, related studies of the Minor Mlabri, will thus very soon be almost all that is left as record of a departed people. For this reason alone, the book is an invaluable piece of research, and as such is deserving of unreserved praise.
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While the immediate need to document dying languages has finally been accorded at least some recognition by the academic community, there is less consensus with regard to the most appropriate ways of going about the task. Rischel takes a clear stand on this issue in a number of passages: "I have seen as my major tasks to present organized raw data and to make the most basic generalizations about the ways in which morphemes, words, phrases, and clauses are combined to encode various types of meanings." (p. 11) "It is therefore my conviction that a language documentation such as the present one should be designed in such a way that it is applicable as a tool in anthropological and linguistic studies alike. It is often the immediate linguistic data, rather than sophisticated a posteriori analyses and formalizations, that turn out to have the most lasting relevance. That is one reason why I have chosen a 'non-technical' format of presentation and have strived to remain faithful to immediately observable language data." (p. 13) "It has been my main ambition to characterize 13-Mlabri grammar in a way which is both general and explicit enough to serve as easily accessible input to genetic and typological studies." (p. 133) Implicit in the author's remarks is the rejection of an alternative approach in which linguistic descriptions are couched in a specialized theoretical framework - be it another obscure "alphabet-soup" theory, or the flavor-of-the-month version of generative grammar. Anybody who has experienced the frustration of trying to wrest a few elementary linguistic facts in an exotic language from a description couched in some abstruse and/or ephemeral terminology cannot fail to wholeheartedly welcome Rischel's approach. Nevertheless, it is an illusion to believe that one can conveniently separate "description" from "theory", and - in the context of the documentation of endangered languages, at least - engage in the former without having to bother with the latter. The truth of the matter is that there can be no description without theory, just as there can be no theory without description. Since the bare facts about any language are infinite in number, a finite description of the facts has no choice but to posit categories and formulate generalizations governing these categories which is theory. To cite but one example, the author characterizes the basic word order of Minor Mlabri as "S[ubject]V[erb]", illustrating this generalization with sentences such as ?oh j r r m "I stay" (p. 171). However, it should be clear that even such commonplace categories as subject and verb are theoretical constructs, which may or may not be the ones most appropriate for the data under consideration. Indeed, the word order of basic intransitive~ sentences is potentially amenable to a variety of alternative accounts, making reference to different kinds of categories: for example, ' N P precedes VP', 'actor precedes verb', 'topic precedes verb', 'participant precedes monovalent activity', 'less complex constituent precedes more complex constituent', 'shorter constituent precedes longer constituent', and so forth. And this is anything but armchair terminological hairsplitting. Rather, such alternative accounts bear empirical consequences: each one makes different predictions with regard to the word order of various other sentences - predictions which one can only hope will be tested before the language is extinct.
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A related issue concerns the mode of organization of the linguistic description. At one extreme is a system which may be characterized as top-down, or 'templatic'. This is an approach that has been productively institutionalized by the annual field expeditions organized by Moscow State University (see Kibrik, 1988); well-known exemplars are the grammatical descriptions produced in the UK by the Croom Helm Descriptive Grammars and in tile former USSR by the many publications of Izdate!'stvo Nauka, such as those in the series titled Jazyki Narodov SSSR and Jazyki Narodov Azii i Afriki. In this system, the author produces a linguistic description in accordance with a pre-prepared and standardized checklist, which spells out the topics to be covered and the order in which they are to be dealt with. This way of doing things is intended to guarantee a relatively complete coverage of the major features of the target language, and to ensure that descriptions of different languages by different scholars be readily comparable. Such descriptions are generally extremely user-friendly. For example, when I was working on my Ph.D. dissertation, a typological study of distributive numerals (Gil, 1982), I knew that I could pick up any grammar book by Nauk, zip through the table of contents to a sub-sub-section titled 8islitel'nye ('numerals'), and home straight in on a brief, usually one-paragraph description of razdelitel'nye 8islitel'nye ('distributive numerals') in the language in question. However, such convenience comes at a price. Although guaranteed to be free of arcane theoretical terminology, a description of this kind is anything but atheoretical. On the contrary, by its very nature, a templatic description involves the imposition of a universal scheme upon a particular language - and such a scheme necessarily invokes a host of theoretical assumptions concerning the relevant units of linguistic description. Moreover, given the history of linguistics, such a universal template is very likely to be rooted in grammatical traditions that are fundamentally Eurocentric, and may accordingly be ill-equipped to handle the diversity exhibited by languages spoken in other parts of the world. This problem is particularly acute in the case of Southeast Asian languages. One of the most salient characteristics of this linguistic area is the extent to which many traditional grammatical categories are left unexpressed, both morphologically and syntactically; see, for example, ]Riddle and Stahlke (1992), Huang (1994), Gil (1994c, to appear) and Bisang (1996). In this vein, Rischel observes: "... therd is no constancy in the degree of morphosyntacticredundancy across languages: the isolating languages of Southeast Asia do not necessarilymake up for the lack of inflection by syntactic elaboration. One might expect rigid explicitness in terms of specificationof syntacticarguments, but on the contrary in these very languages, sentence-materialwhich can be inferred from the linguistc or situational context, is often left out, and Mlabri is no exception. This may lead to a high degree of structural and semantic ambiguity of utterances if they are considered in isolation when subjected to linguistic analysis." (p. 170) Thus, for such languages, the imposition of a descriptive template and its concomitant theoretical constructs runs the risk of distorting the character of the language, not only by ignoring various 'exotic' phenomena, but, perhaps more perniciously, by introducing would-be patterns, categories, and structures where there are none. Rischel is very much aware of this problem:
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"When one is analyzing Mlabri grammar it is not always so simple to specify the meaning with reference to hierarchical constituent structure [...] it easily becomes a stright-jacket [sic] forcing the analyst to posit st~cture which is not really there." (p. 191) "[...] the evidence on which one may attempt to posit syntactic structures in [Mlabri and several other minority languages of northern Indochina] is to a great extent semantic and pragmatic rather than morphosyntactic. If viewed in isolation, a string of Mlabri words often seems ambiguous as regards the possibilities of syntactic parsing. I cannot, however,help feeling that such formal ambiguitymay arise as a pseudo-problem generatedby a choice of a rigid descriptiveframework.That is an additional reason for choosing a non-technicalformat of presentation at the present level of understanding." (p. 13) One can only wish that more linguists engaged in the description of Southeast Asian languages and citing data from such languages in support of various theoretical positions might exhibit a similar sensitivity with regard to this issue. Accordingly, Rischel opts for an approach that is diametrically opposed to the templatic - an approach which might appropriately be characterized as bottom-up, or 'free-wheeling'. In accordance with this system, the data themselves are taken as the starting point, and the description of the data is what then provides the motivation for the postulation of appropriate categories and structures. Doing linguistics this way involves turning an attentive ear to the language under investigation and listening to what it is trying to say, even if the message is inconsistent with certain dogmas or assumptions that one has been brought up with. Although freeing the researcher from the neccessity of handling a particular theoretical framework, such an approach imposes a heavier burden, that of organizing the data from scratch, identifying the interesting regularities, and accounting for these regularities by means of various theoretical constructs. This, then, is the challenge that Rischel takes upon himself. If this challenge is not always met with complete success, the result, at least, is a solid and reliable foundation upon which further advances can be sought. Often, as is indeed the case here, a bottom-up approach is also forced upon the investigator by methodological considerations. In Minor Mlabri, as in many other languages, the elicitation of data is not always practical (Thongkum, 1992: 57, cited on p. 15), and it is, therefore, necessary to rely heavily on spontaneous data from naturally occurring speech. Such data may be of value with regard to certain empirical domains, such as word order; however, if, by chance, the researcher happens to harbor a specific interest in certain other domains, such as, for example, quantifier scope or long-distance reflexives, such data are well-nigh useless - one might have to wait a lifetime for the relevant construction to pop out of a speaker's mouth. In compensation, though, spontaneous data are invaluable in the way they bring to the attention of the field worker various unexpected constructions that would never have been obtained though elicitation, for the simple reason that the researcher would never have thought of asking for them. Thus, the use of data from naturally occurring speech lends itself straightforwardly to such an inductive approach. The organization of the book is straightforward and bipartite. The first part, 'Description', contains two chapters, providing the historical, social, and cultural setting, followed by three chapters, presenting the major phonological, morphological, syntactic, and semantic patterns of the language. The second part, 'Lexicon' contains
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an introductory chapter, followed by a Mlabri-English dictionary and a shorter English-Mlabri dictionary. Since most non-specialist readers will find more of interest in Part I, the following, more specific comments focus on the first part of the book. All in all, the book lives up to its self-proclaimed goal of providing an "easily accessible input to [...] typological studies" (p. 133), with many facts and observations that should be of considerable interest to general linguists. To cite just one particular domain, Minor Mlabri appears to be exceptional in its paucity of strategies for the expression of quantificational meanings. Thus, even though Minor Mlabri has a set of numerals from one to ten, only the numerals for 'two' and 'four' can occur in adnominal position; it is impossible to use the numeral for, say 'three', in a construction meaning 'three items' (pp. 146-147). In contrast, in most Southeast Asian languages, such expressions are commonplace, and typically involve the use of a numeral classifier, for example Thai s3m sham lfiuk ('orange three CLF'), White Hmong peb lub txiv duaj ('three eLF fruit peach'), and Vietnamese ba quh t6o ('three CLF apple'). Equally remarkable i:~ the absence of any morphosyntactic strategy for the expression of distributivity, short of repetition of the relevant clause in its entirety, as for example in ma mla? toc ma kw~o ma mla? toc ma kwnq ('one person take one CLF one person take one CLF', for 'Everybody take one container') (p. 162). Again, this is in contrast with most neighboring languages, which would make use of a distributive universal quantifier 'every', such as Thai thfik and Vietnamese m.oi, or some other, more specific marker of distributivity, such as Thai 1~ and Vietnamese tfrng. In addition, the book contains much information of value to the study of Southeast Asia as a linguistic sprachbund. One particularly interesting feature is the discussion of the possessive connective di, as for example in bra)~ di ?eew ('young of dog', or 'the dog's whelp(s)') (pp. 140-141). Rischel notes that this grammatical marker is "strangely reminiscent of Modem Chinese da" (p. 140). In fact, it is an obvious borrowing from the Yunnanese dialect of Mandarin, in which the corresponding form is also di - indeed, the same morpheme also occurs in the neighboring White Hmong, where it assumes the form li. However, in Minor Mlabri, an interesting syntactic reanalysis appears to have taken place. Whereas in Mandarin and Hmong the connective forms a constituent with the preceding possessor, in Minor Mlabri it would appear as though di is "a determiner occurring in front of the possessum" (p. 141); evidence for this is provided by constructions of the form di NP, in which the preceding possessor is understood. It is tempting to speculate that this reanalysis is correlated with the north-to-south transition from a Chinese head-final to a mainlandSoutheast-Asian head-initial syntactic type. However, in addition to the possessive di, a homophonous form di marks the imperative (pp. 140, 159): this would appear to be a borrowing from Vietnamese, in which di 'go' is also used as an imperative marker. Areal connections of a different kind are evident with regard to the marker ?at, which occurs before a noun, and "is used to identify the specific item talked about as an integral or inalienable part (or possession) of the person, thing or situation that functions as theme" (p. 152). Judging by the examples provided, the use of ?at bears a striking resemblance to that of the enclitic -nya in Malay/Indonesian. The author
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speculates that ?at derives historically from the suffixation of possessive -di (see the preceding paragraph) to a pronominal form *?a- (p. 154); the plausibility of such a development is supported by the Malay]Indonesian, in which -nya also functions synchronically as a third person possessive pronoun. Another interesting construction, involving a possessive pronoun in combination with an existential marker, is that exemplified by ?ot che?na~ ('my lice exist', for 'I have lice') (p. 173). In this construction, the NP ?or che? is non-referential: The author appears to consider this fact to be unexpected, and suggests that the construction in question "is not in line with productive modem Mlabri syntax, but is a relic from an older state of the language in which possessives did not yet encode referentiality of the possessed object, or in which the forms simply meant something else" (p. 174). However, the non-referentiality of ?ot che? is surprising only from a European perspective; in Southeast Asian languages, possessives are typically unmarked for referentiality and (in)definiteness; for some relevant data from the Singaporean dialects of English, Malay, and Mandarin, see Gil (1994a, to appear). Evidence for areal connections is also provided by specific lexical items. Two such words pointing in the direction of Austronesian languages are lmb~r ('leaf') (p. 51) corresponding to Malay]Indonesian lembar ('page', 'sheet'), and klkiil ('knee') (p. 94), calling to mind Tagalog kilikili ('armpit'). Thus, Minor Mlabri provides a fine illustration of the myriad regional interrelationships which so bedevil the task of deep genetic classification in the Southeast Asian linguistic area. Perhaps inevitably for an empirical study of such scope, the book contains a number of minor misrepresentations and unclear passages, which, although not detracting from the overall value of the work, might, with greater care, have been avoided. On the topic of noun classifiers, it is claimed that "It]his category is rather marginal in Mon-Khmer languages compared to its proliferatation e.g. in Thai" (p. 51); however, the validity of this claim is open to question. For example, a cursory comparison of the standard varieties of Vietnamese (a major, albeit somewhat divergent Mon-Khmer language) and Thai would suggest a somewhat different state of affairs. Thus, in simple construction with a bare noun, a classifier is possible, in fact common, in Vietnamese, for example qu~ tdto ('CLF apple'), but ungrammatical in Thai, for example *l~uk srm ('CLF orange'), *srm Iauk ('orange CLF') (see Gil, 1994b, for some discussion of this construction). In the treatment of morphology, inflection is defined as "a morphological device which is used in order to express syntactic relationships", and Minor Mlabri is claimed not to exhibit any such devices (p. 99). However, it is not obvious why the above rather vague definition does not encompass two morphological processes which do occur in Minor Mlabri and which, presumably, one would not wish to subsume under inflection: infixation forming deverbal nouns (p. 85), and prefixation marking the causative (p. 90). With regard to the latter process, a further lack of clarity results from some of the purported examples of causative constructions, whose glosses seem to have little to do with the causative, for example ktum ('throw') > bakuim ('throw away', 'discard') (p. 90). (In a personal communication, the author has promised to deal with the above examples in a forthcoming correction sheet.) A different kind of lapse occurs in a section on word semantics, in which it is stated: "[...] the Mlabri lexicon very obviously
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reflects the traditional culture of the people by its emphasis on differentiation within certain semantic fields. This is the same kind of phenomenon that is so often illustrated in linguistic lore by the richness of terms for 'snow' in Eskimo" (p. 103). While the author is most probably correct regarding the relationship between Mlabri lexicon and culture, it would perhaps have been advisable at least to acknowledge the existence of a recent article characterizing the purported richness of Eskimo 'snow' words as a 'hoax' (Pullum, 1989). Of somewhat greater pervasiveness are a considerable number of stylistic inappropriatenesses which detract from the readability of the text. Many passages reflect the writer's non-native command of English - at the stylistic if not grammatical level. More generally, the book has a rather rambling and disorganized feel to it, sometimes resulting in lack of clarity. To cite but one example, consider the treatment of genetic affiliation. In several places, one obtains the impression that Mlabri is a Mon-Khmer language, in fact, one belonging to a specific branch thereof: "The Mlabri language [...] has been classified, on somewhat shaky lexical evidence, as belonging to a 'Khmuic' branch of Northern Mon-Khmer" (p. 22); "A very large proportion of the words in Mlabri are unmistakably of Mon-Khmer type, and out of these a sizeable proportion have very close or even phonologically identical cognates in languages of the proposed Khmuic branch of Mon-Khmer. Accordingly, Mlabri was already classified as belonging with these languages by Nimmanhaeminda (1963)" (p. 59). However, in other places, a rather different picture emerges: "So far, virtually nothing is known about the genetic placement of Mlabri" (p. 46); "One may even ask whether the very deepest layer in the Mlabri language was at all MonKhmer" (p. 47). Of course, the author is fully entitled to remain agnostic with regard to such a possibly intractable issue; however, after working through all of these passages, the reader ends up confused as to what the author's position on the matter actually is. The title of the book contains two stylistic infelicities, which recur in the course of the text. Rischel writes about the Minor Mlabri with sensitivity and affection, yet his choice of ethnonym, specifically, the appelation "Minor", has an unnecessarily cold and impersonal feel to it, conjuring up the taxonomic enterprises of botanists and zoologists, and names such as "lesser grey shrike", aka "lanius minor". One wishes that this small and disappearing group of people, portraits of two of which embellish the front and back cow:rs of this book, might have merited a more appropriate name - perhaps one reflecting their intrinsic qualities, or, alternatively, one derived from their geographical location. Which leads to the second unfortunate word in the title, the toponym "Indochina". My initial assumption was that the Minor Mlabri lived somewhere in Vietnam, Laos, or Cambodia, and I was surprised, and a little bewildered, to find out that they actually reside mainly in Thailand. This terminological confusion prompted me to post an informal e-mail poll on the Southeast Asian Language ("sealang") list, asking subscribers how they understood the term "Indochina". The 16 responses produced an approximately even split between those who, in accordance with the author's usage, interpreted "Indochina" as roughly coextensive with "mainland Southeast Asia", encompassing Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, part or all of
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Burma, and perhaps also parts of Malaysia and Indonesia, and those who, like myself, took "Indochina" to be synonymous with erstwhile "French Indochina", consisting only of Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia. Interestingly, both camps were able to muster various corroborative sources supporting their respective interpretations. For example, favoring the latter usage, I came across a newspaper article by one Christopher Tan from Bangkok (Singapore Business Times, 24.4.1996: 6), reporting that "Honda is studying the feasibility of exporting Thai-assembled Citys to Indochina and Singapore" - obviously, in the above passage, "Indochina" cannot be understood to include Thailand. Be this as it may, whatever the historical or political justification of either usage, given the de facto existence of such terminological inconsistency, it would probably be best to completely abandon the use of the term "Indochina" in scholarly discourse. Additional faults could perhaps have been prevented by the publishers. Aesthetically, the sans-serif phonetic font in which the data are cited clashes with the slightly smaller serifed font of the text: in this age of desk-top publishing and easy-to-use font applications, a more pleasing combination could have been found. More importantly, the occasional Thai and Lao data are often lacking their lexical tone marks an all too common practice which, ultimately, betrays a Eurocentric bias towards Southeast Asian sound systems. More seriously again, many sentences (for example p. 107 (2); p. 146 4th paragraph; p. 195 top) are provided without a literal morpheme-by-morpheme gloss, which makes their structure difficult or even impossible to figure out. Elsewhere (for example p. 196, p. 197) such glosses are provided; however, even here, readability would have been greatly improved by a more judicious format, vertically aligning each Minor Mlabri morpheme with its literal gloss, as is customary in much of the linguistic literature. But matters such as these detract little from the overall value of JOrgen Rischel's excellent book. And, of course, they pale into insignificance when contrasted with the concerns of the Minor Mlabri themselves. Apropos of which, it is perhaps most fitting to leave the final - and all too appropriate - words of this review to the author himself: "The fate of the Mlabri and their culture and language ... deserves being looked upon as an international concern of the same nature as the protection of rare species." (p. 33)
Acknowledgements I am grateful to the author, J0rgen Rischel, for helpful comments on a preliminary version of this review. For their assistance with data from other Southeast Asian languages, I am indebted to Michael Johnson (Yunnanese Mandarin and White Hmong), Martha Ratliff (White Hmong) and Uri Tadmor (Thai). I would also like to express my appreciation to Edward M. Anthony, Doug Cooper, Christopher Court, Nick Enfield, Blaine Erickson, Ross Fenske, L.V. Hayes, Trin Indra-Opas, Kent Lee, Waruno Mahdi, John Marston, Alena Lee Sanusi, Uri Tadmor, David Thomas, and Gwyn Williams, for their contributions to the email discussion on the sealang list
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concerning the term " I n d o c h i n a " . This review was written during August and September 1996, at the Hotel Sari Jaya in Nagoya, Riau Province, Indonesia, and at the Hotel H~i Quan in S~m Strn, Thanh H6a Province, Vietnam; I would like to thank everybody there, and in particuhtr Rudicandra, S.tr and Ctrb~ng, for making m y stays pleasant and productive.
References Bisang, Walter, 1996. Areal typology and grammaticalization: Processes of grammaticalization based on nouns and verbs in East and Mainland Southeast Asian languages. Studies in Language. Gil, David, 1982. Distributive numerals. Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles. Gil, David, 1994a. Genitives, number and (in)definiteness: Some data from English, Singlish, Mandarin and Malay. In: F. Plank, ed., Agreement gender number genitive &, 109-131. EUROTYP Working Papers, Series 7, Number 23. Berlin: The European Science Foundation, EUROTYP Programme. Gil, David, 1994b. Numeral classifiers: An e-mail conversation. In: F. Plank, ed., Conversations on noun phrases, 1-30. EUROTYP Working Papers, Series 7, Number 20. Berlin: The European Science Foundation, EUROTYP Programme. Gil, David, 1994c. The structure of Riau Indonesian. Nordic Journal of Linguistics 17: 179-200. Gil, David, to appear. English goes Asian; Number and (in)definiteness in the Singlish noun-phrase. In: F. Plank, ed., Noun-phrases in European languages: Empirical approaches to language typology. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Huang, Yan, 1994. The Syntax and pragmatics of anaphora: A study with special reference to Chinese. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kibrik, Aleksandr E., 1988. ~to takoe 'lingvisticeskie ekspedicii'? Vestnik 12: 94-102. Akademii Nauk SSSR. Nimmanhaeminda, Kraisri, 1963. The Mrabri language. Journal of the Siam Society 50: 179-184. Pullum, Geoffrey K., 1989, Topic ... comment: The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax. Natural Language and Linguistic Theory 7: 275-281. Riddle, Elizabeth and Herbert Stahlke, 1992. Linguistic typology and sinospheric languages. In: M. Ratliff and E. Schiller, eds., Papers from the first annual Meeting of the Southeast Asian Linguistics Society, 1991, 351-366. Tempe, AZ: Arizona State University. Thongkum, Theraphan L., 1992. The Language of the Mlabri (Phi Tong Luang). Pookajorn and Staff 1992: 43-65.
B r u c e Bain, Pathways to the peak of Mount Piaget and Vigotsky: Speaking and cognizing monolingually and bilingually. R o m e : Bulzoni, 1996. 423 pp. + index. $35.00 (hb.). Reviewed by Marlene Dolitsky, lnstitut Universitaire de la Formation des Maitres, 10 rue Molitor, F-75016 Paris, France. The trail o f research into speech and cognition is wrought with difficulties. Firstly, "Bilingual studies is often a confusing and frustrating area o f inquiry in which the distinctions between politics, ideologies, curricular, and research methodologies are sometimes blurred. It is not an area o f inquiry for the faint of heart" (p. 139). Secondly, there are few "bridges between linguistics and developmental p s y c h o l o g y "