1388 AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST [73,1971]

The first of the six principal parts of the grammar is “Phonemes and Phonemic Change.” This is not the authors’ long suit. The evidence presented for the phonemic analysis is hardly adequate, and Capell’s chapter on stress and intonation is wholly unphonemic. This is characteristic of Western Australian linguistics which often falls down in analyzing the sound systems (see my 1959 review of Wilfred Douglas’ Zntroduction to the Western Desert Lan- guage, AA 66:164-165, and Richard Pittman’s 1962 demurrer in Language

The next three parts are devoted to subject-object constructions, predicate con- structions, and minor word classes and phrases. This deals with the parts of speech, and they are modified by the very rich system of affixation that gives all Australian languages their notoriety and fascination. The analysis is condensed into hundreds of algebraic formulas, replete with scores of different symbols for different kinds of tagmemes and processes. For example, the indicative intransitive verb form in the ir- realis aspect is: “iiirv -+‘S:B, ppii + ir:[g- ] + irvnu:irvr + T: irt (+num,cont,dir)” where “+” means that this is obligatory, namely to have a subject “S” which is “:” to be filled in by a “B3 pp” intransitive verb prefix, etc.

The fifth and sixth parts deal with clause types and sentence types. Here the formulas are not so formidable. But here it becomes difficult to decode the literal translation of an utterance into a free translation of it. For example, a representative Ngarinjin sentence is: Gadjigga gund-ajelma labura gund-a-ma-ra. Its literal translation is:

Cannot we-you pl-irr-help track we- youirr-do-fu t.

(The “irr” is like the indicative intransitive irrealis verb form given above, and the other abbreviations have the conventional mean- ings.) The free translation of this sentence, I believe, is:

We can’t help you with it nor can we follow you along.

To get from the literal meaning to the actual meaning, even after much study of this grammar, is still a leap of faith in

42: 846-849).

mysteries. Naturally this is largely a matter of working in another cognitive system. But it is also a shortcoming of tagmemic analyses in general. Nevertheless, within the tag- memic tradition and the tradition of Western Australian linguistics, this is indeed an ad- mirable grammar.

Nez Perce Grammar. HARUO AOKZ. Uni- versity of California Publications in Lin- guistics, 62. Berkeley & London: Univer- sity of California Press, 1970. xii + 168 pp., figures, illustrations, tables, bibliogra- phy. $3.50 (paper).

Reviewed by M. DALE KINKADE University of Kansas

Given the surprising paucity of studies of the Nez Perce language, this is an extremely important contribution to the literature of Sahaptian in particular and Penutian in general.

The grammar is presented in a traditional way, with rather specifically IC (immediate constituent) diagrams of sentences at the end. Aoki admits in his preface that this is only an analysis of the surface structure of Nez Perce. The text is difficult to follow for two reasons: (1) Aoki uses morphemic, morphophonemic, and phonemic notations throughout, but the numerous charts do not usually indicate which of the three is used, and it is occasionally difficult to see how a phonemic form is derived from the mor- phemic one; (2) charts use various affixes as one parameter, but these are not identified or referred to the place in the text where they are discussed, and it is often difficult to locate them. Still, one does gain an under- standing of how the language works, and that should be the main goal of a grammar.

My general impression of the language is that it is typical of the Northwest in many ways, as one would expect. It has the usual complex consonant system, although glot- talized consonants seem to occur much less frequently than in Salishan languages. Back velars also seem less frequent, but this may be due to the lack of labialized velars in Nez Perce as well as the infrequency of glot- talized consonants. A feature I had not expected to find in Nez Perce was the occurrence of a number of affixes (pp. 58-59, 84-86) that seem to have lexical

LING UIS TICS 1389

tical stems in the grammar, only two were similar, and another of the stems was a borrowing from Salishan. If these affixes are unrelated to stems, it would appear that this type of affix may have developed in Nez Perce under the influence of languages to the north (i.e., Salishan).

reference, and thus resemble (as a category, not in actual form) Salishan, Wakashan, and Chemakuan lexical suffixes. No indication is given whether or not these affixes are related to Nez Perce roots, and one cannot very well check this without a lexicon; but of six affixes for which I found semantically iden-