With this issue of the Journal Ian Roberts steps down from the editorial team. He has been an editor since 1994 and we are most grateful for all he has done for the Journal. He becomes a member of the Editorial Board, and we look forward to receiving his advice. Ian's place as an editor is taken by Caroline Heycock of the University of Edinburgh. We are very pleased to welcome her to the editorial team.

Variation in language on the basis of formality (register variation) is often neglected both in grammatical descriptions and in sociolinguistic analyses. I demonstrate here that in Sinhala, and perhaps in other diglossic languages, register variation in syntax cannot be ignored. In a Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) analysis based on a corpus of naturally occurring Sinhala texts, I propose an analysis of register variation in which the syntax of all observed registers is accounted for within a single grammar. I further explain how the approach to register variation developed here can be extended to other types of sociolinguistic variation.

Close inspection of presupposition(= P-)cancelling and other metalinguistic negation data shows that natural language semantics must be (at least) trivalent, with the values ‘true’, ‘minimally false’ (assertion failure) and ‘radically false’ (presupposition failure). It is argued that presupposition is a semantic phenomenon originating in a distinction between two kinds of satisfaction conditions for predicates, the PRECONDITIONS generating presuppositions, and the UPDATE CONDITIONS generating classical entailments. The trivalence of language is a natural consequence of the acceptance of occasion sentences in an incremental Discourse Semantics. The logical properties of sentences are considered secondary and derived from their semantic properties. These include, besides propositional content, a speech act quality, specifying the personal commitment taken on by the speaker not only in respect of the propositional content, but also with regard to the linguistic forms selected. It is suggested that the classical truth-functional operators should be redefined as instructions under speech act commitment. The negation operator is singled out: it is redefined as an instruction to reject either an incrementable sentence, which may be a comment about a form used or to be used (P-preserving negation), or an already incremented sentence to be removed from the discourse along with some presupposition (P-cancelling negation).

In this paper we use an extensive archive of early New Zealand speakers, together with comparisons with the other Southern Hemisphere varieties of English, to argue that dialect mixture and new-dialect formation are not haphazard processes. We demonstrate that, given sufficient linguistic information about the dialects which contribute to a mixture, and sufficient demographic information about the proportions of speakers of the different dialects, it is possible to make predictions about what the outcome of the mixture will be. We also argue that we have arrived at a probabilistic solution to the problem of randomness in the transmission of dialect features from one generation to another in such situations.

This paper suggests an analysis of Modern Hebrew noun phrases in the framework of HPSG. It focuses on the peculiar properties of the definite article, including the requirement for definiteness agreement among various elements in the noun phrase, definiteness inheritance in construct-state nominals, the fact that the article does not combine with constructs and the similarities between construct-state nouns and adjectives. Central to our analysis is the assumption that the Hebrew definite article is an affix, rather than a clitic or a stand-alone word. Several arguments, from all levels of linguistic representation, are provided to justify this claim. Adopting the lexical hypothesis, we conclude that the article combines with nominals in the lexicon, and is no longer available for syntactic processes. This leads to an analysis of noun phrases as NPs, rather than as DPs; we show that such a view is compatible with accepted criteria for headedness. We provide an HPSG analysis that covers the above mentioned phenomena, correctly predicting the location of the definite article in constructs, accounting for definiteness agreement and definiteness inheritance constraints, and yielding similar structures for the two major ways of expressing genitive relations in Hebrew.

Gilles Fauconnier & Eve Sweetser (eds.),Space, worlds, and grammar. Chicago & London: University of Chicago Press, 1996. 355 Pp.

Masayoshi Shibatani & Sandra Thompson (eds.),Grammatical constructions: their form and meaning. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996. Pp. xvii+345.

Several years ago a volume of articles appeared called The view from Building 20 (Hale & Keyser 1993). As suggested by the title, the contributions reflected trends guiding the theoretical paradigm pre-eminently associated with MIT. After reading this collection, a colleague quipped that she wondered how well the view from Building 20 accorded with the broad research world beyond it. In this connection, the two books under review represent perspectives on language analysis which encourage one to pause and consider the present theoretical landscape in linguistics, and, less directly, the role of linguistics within modern cognitive science. Among their other merits, both books provide a rich and useful illustration of some of the perspectives on language analysis outside of Building 20. In doing so, they also help to define a more interesting research landscape than that usually characterized as an opposition between ‘formalists’ versus ‘cognitive/functionalists’.

Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy,The origins of complex language: an inquiry into the evolutionary beginnings of sentences, syllables, and truth. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. xi+260.

Simon Kirby,Function, selection, and innateness: the emergence of language universals. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. xvi+156.

Daniel Nettle,Linguistic diversity. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. xi+168.

If I find that a book I am reading for review is interesting, then I count myself lucky. If it turns out to be insightful, then I am fortunate indeed. The fact that I was given three books to review, each of which is not only interesting and insightful, but downright ENJOYABLE, makes me feel like a winner of the Linguistic Lottery. The books are the first three to appear in a new series on language evolution published by the Oxford University Press. Given the quality of the first entries, my advice to all linguists is to put yourselves down for standing orders for the ones to follow.