Book Reviews

Author(s): J W De Jong
Publisher: J W De Jong

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REVIEWS
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as the provisos of his introductory chapter clearly show, of the many difficulties of dealing with this disparate material. He notes, among other questions, the need not to overlook the importance of change and innovation in an essentially synchronic study, the risks involved in dealing with unevenly documented material, the possibilities (not always obvious) that morphological units which are formally identical in different languages will not be functionally identical, and the frequent non-morphological, especially syntactic aspect of morphological questions; in this connection it may be remarked that he has apparently not taken any of the opportunities offered by his material to refer to the distinctive ergative constructions of the central and western languages. Reference to these as syntactic structures is not necessary in itself to establish the east-west language division, but would have been a justifiable extension of the morphological study as illustrating the different range of function of instrumental and agentive forms in the languages concerned. Other matters dealt with in the introduction include relationships between language and dialect, and between literary and colloquial language. It is no doubt Zograf's grammatical interest that occasions his drawing the latter distinction most explicitly between the grammatically archaic sādhu bhāsă of Bengali and the Bengali colloquial calit bhāsa; comparable, if different distinctions can of course be drawn for other languages (e.g. for Hindi and Marathi in lexical and phonological terms). The introduction concludes with a survey of the NIA languages, including (p. 27; further p. 31) the recently discovered Parya (Par'ya) of Tajikistan.
The study is based on the data offered by the modern literary languages and also by various dialect or regional forms of speech, a majority of those referred to being located within the Hindi language area (p. 44). The differences between Zograf's and Grierson's presentation of the relationship between the languages etc. are largely accountable for by Zograf's synchronic perspective on the material. He sees the NIA language area as showing on the whole a gradual decrease in the number of synthetic inflectional forms in use, together with a corresponding increase in analytic and agglutinative forms, as one moves across the area from west to east. This view, arrived at on a synchronic analysis, has certain advantages. For instance, the distinctive structural differences which do after all exist between Marathi and Bengali, two of Grierson's outer languages, and which no doubt outweigh the affinities between these languages, are better suggested by a model of general west-east gradation of linguistic tendencies than by the model of the outer and inner languages. On the other hand, if the synthetic inflectional forms characteristic of the modern N.-W. languages are, with Grierson, relatively modern innovations (as is borne out by the status of some of them, e.g. those of Mūltāni (Sirāiki) occurring in ergative construction), it must be admitted that this fact is obscured by Zograf's synchronic classification. And yet at the same time there is a compensating factor here: in linking Marathi specifically with the N.-W. languages Zograf accommodates the modern tendency of Marathi to modify the older ergative construction by the use of synthetically inflected verbs (e.g. tū apler vacan pälilers 'you kept your word').
Six chapters deal with the main parts of speech. These chapters are organised in terms of grammatical categories such as gender, number and case (the noun), thematic or athematic formation (the adjective), semantic reference (the pronoun) and morphological types (the verb). The subsection of the chapter on nouns dealing with direct object forms and constructions (pp. 55 ff.) well illustrates the care taken generally in the work to amass and present facts in a balanced way, and the author's interest in proceeding beyond individual grammatical facts towards an assessment of typological implications. This subsection is entitled Kategoriya personal'nosti (oduševlennosti) 'Category of personal (animate) reference'. Zograf identifies personal reference as the factor chiefly inducing suffixation of direct objects (p. 62), and with this one is ready to agree.insofar as the category personal' may here be taken as falling within the category 'individualised' or 'of contextual importance'. Zograf however would separate the categories of personal and individualised objects (p. 57). He is perhaps partly led to do this by overlooking in his discussion on pp. 57-8, as it seems, the Hindi construction of personal objects without ko, e.g. as seen in such an example as darzi bulāo *call a tailor';