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An interpretation of the meaning of girls' initiation rituals in Nandi society is presented in which emphasis is laid upon the role of cheerseet "encouragement" and in which it is shown that the element of transvestism previously claimed to be present (Langley 1979) is in fact not present. In addition, it is argued that girls' initiation is one of the ways in which Nandi women have struggled to achieve gender equality with men. (Kenya, Nandi, ritual, girl's initiation, gender equality) Jane Tapsubei Creider received a traditional upbringing as a Nandi and is the author of two books dealing with the Nandi: Two Lives. My Spirit and I (London 1986), The Shrunken Dream (Toronto 1993); and two stories: The Woman in the Pit, The Elephant's Trunk (Toronto 1994). Together the Creiders have written A Grammar of Nandi (Hamburg 1989) and are currently working on a dictionary of the Nandi language.

Anthropologists have long recognized that Australian aboriginal cultures have a rich repertoire of cognitive achievements, and they have contrasted this richness with the relative impoverishment of their technological repertoire. However, despite the richness of the cognitive repertoire, the anthropological literature contains no overall inventory for any aboriginal cultural group. McKnight's monograph is the first work that covers everything: social structure (including kinship), myth, ritual, dancing, property structure, and biological classification. The quality of the scholarship is very high. At the time of writing, McKnight had worked with the Lardil for 30 years, including 16 field trips, with a total time of residence among the Lardil of more than five years. After completing an MA on West African materials under Darryl Forde, he switched to Australia, where he also worked with the Wik-mungkan and a number of other groups. The present monograph is the first of a projected trilogy; work is under way now on the second volume, a monograph on marriage, sorcery, and violence. In recent years, McKnight has been involved, on behalf of the Lardil, in negotiations with the Australian government for land claims.

The treatment of morphology in Word Grammar has received less attention than syntax and semantics, but the general principles are equally applicable to morphology. We outline a theory of inflectional morphology which uses ideas familiar from the Word-and-Paradigm tradition — Inflection, Lexeme and Stem — in combination with the logic of default inheritance. We apply this theory to a range of different morphological data: agglutinative (Swahili) and fusional, with and without syncretism (English, Welsh). We show that it is possible to analyse each of these types in a natural way without forcing it into an unsuitable mould, and in a discussion of Cree we show how dialect variation can be accommodated. We compare the WG theory with other approaches which are currently popular, especially a-morphous morphology, distributed morphology and network morphology.

Modeling the morphological structure of natural languages in terms of a nondeterministic finite-state automaton is shown to be inadequate in its handling of some common natural language phenomena. We show that a two-tape nondeterministic automaton is capable of handling these phenomena. The modeling is improved by the specification of a new type of automaton, the preset two-head automaton, which we argue is equivalent in expressive power to a linear context-free grammar. We discuss the operation of a parser which implements the improved model.

Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought. David McNeill. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1992. 416 pp.

The use of binary features in the classical works in generative phonology and its phonetic foundations has met with considerable opposition. This opposition has come from both phoneticians and phonologists. The evidence against binary features, however, has primarily been phonetic (‘there is no justification for regarding any single phonetic parameter as a composite of binary features’, cf. Lindau (1978)), and there are surprisingly few phonological arguments in the literature. The principal aim of this paper is to present phonological evidence from a process of vowel coalescence in Nandi (a Southern Nilotic language spoken in the highlands of Western Kenya) which argues in favour of the appropriateness of splitting a single articulatory/acoustic dimension (vowel height) into two binary features. I also discuss a number of other cases in the vowel, tone and consonant feature areas which are relevant to the binary/non-binary feature controversy.

Examination of spontaneous conversational (East Africa) and musical (Southern Spain) materials shows the existence of two distinct modes of discourse construction. One mode proceeds in a non‐structural fashion (locally‐connected topical developments and transitions). The other mode involves the use of a higher level of formal organization.

The semantics of three valency-changing verbal derivational suffixes in Nandi (a Nilo-Saharan language spoken in East Africa) are investigated. Two cases of polysemy and one of homonymy are found and related to general case theory (DeLancey 2000, Jakobson 1936, 1990) as well as to the general theory of concept formation (Rosch and Mervis 1996)., Cet article présente une étude de la sémantique des suffixes dérivationnels verbaux qui changent de valence en nandi (une langue nilo-saharienne de l’Afrique de l’Est). Deux cas de polysémie et un cas d’homonymie ont été trouvés et considérés par rapport à la théorie générale des cas (DeLancey 2000, Jakobson 1936, 1990) et à la théorie générale de la formation des concepts (Rosch et Mervis 1996).

Norwegian Nynorsk An introduction for foreign students Peter Hallaraker Bergen — Oslo — Stavanger — Tromso 1983. 246 pages North American distribution: Columbia University Press