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the same time, to do intensive research on their historical development. The wide range of specialized references found in the bibliography and in the relevant chapters is indeed impressive. It gives evidence of the author's unremitting ability to collect, analyze and select almost all essential data over years. He proves himself not only to have been thoroughly acquainted with the present structures and usages of these five languages, but also with the earlier stages and the main connections and tendencies during the evolution of certain phenomena in each one of them. As an expert in comparative linguistics, he does not hesitate to present his own hypothesis and frank speculation on how lexico-grammatical and funcional relations might have developed in earlier history. In this way and considering the overall view this tremendous work has adopted and inspite of the very detailed analysis and exemplification in all important cases, it conveys an. impression which contrasts refreshingly with the narrowly viewed and laboured works typically found in the tradition of each single philology.
The reason for choosing this object of research is, in the author's own words, his discovery of "the ease and frequency by which verbs or verbal phrases in languages like Chinese, Hmong, Vietnamese, Thai and Khmer can be positioned next to each other" (p. 1). The verb serialization is described as an essential part of the typology of these languages which in fact are distributed among the three different language groups of SinoTibetian (Chinese), Austro-Tai (Thai and Hmong, - Nevertheless, there is some doubt to be cast on the classification of Hmong which belongs to the Miao-Yao languages) and Austro-Asiatic (Vietnamese and Khmer, belonging to the Mon-Khmer branch). The surprising fact that these five languages all display similar structural functions is explained by their cultural and linguistic contact with each other over many centuries. According to their individual characteristics the author distinguishes a northern group, represented by Chinese, and a southern group represented by Vietnamese, Thai and Khmer. Hmong takes up a position in between, according to its geographic distribution.
The main part of the book presents a great variety of verb serialization in surface structure considered separately in each language in order to work out the main types of verb sequences and to discover the linguistic forces by which they are built up as well as their mutual relationships, and, finally, to track down the motivation and communicative value of verb serialization. This last aspect is the strong point of the study, the author has succeded in working out the general functional relationships rather than purely listing typological patterns. Especially in Chinese where enough written material is available since the early stages of the language, the
