Subject, Voice and Ergativity: Selected Essays.

AuthorMiller, Roy Andrew

Three papers on Japanese account for roughly one-quarter of the bulk of this collection of eleven studies by as many authors; others treat Nivkh, Evenki, Turkish, Sinhala, Tagalog, Georgian, and Balochi, along with (in the final paper), "many languages." An anonymous introduction (pp. 1-6) describes them as "eleven papers which relate to a seminar on language typology held at SOAS in 1988-89," and goes on to acknowledge "a research grant from the Leverhulme Trust [that] enabled us to study the work of the Leningrad Group for the Typological Study of Languages and to make some of it accessible in English translation."

Apparently it is this accident of funding that accounts for the inclusion of one of these three essays on Japanese, the late A. A. Xolodovic's "Diatheses and Voices in Modern Japanese," pp. 20-52, originally published in Russian in 1974 and here translated by Judith M. Knott. It is impossible to judge a translation without access to the original, but the many almost petulant footnotes added by the translator, who also appears to be unfamiliar with Japanese, do not inspire confidence. Some of these discursive glosses document her struggles with the language of the original, others disarmingly record that an otherwise unidentified "Miss Yuki" was able to point out more than one case where Xolodovic's Japanese examples are simply wrong. At least "Miss Yuki's" emendations were mostly to the point; but that was unfortunately not true of those suggested by still other itinerant Japanese visitors to the S.O.A.S., who ended up adding yet more mistakes to Xolodovic's frequently flawed examples in their well-intentioned but uninformed efforts further to "correct" his work (e.g., p. 26, n. 16; p. 27, n. 17).

A second essay on Japanese, Masayoshi Shibatani's "A. A. Xolodovic on Japanese Passives," pp. 7-19, ostensibly aims at an encomium of Xolodovic's paper (which, somewhat confusingly, it proceeds rather than follows in this volume). But for Shibatani Japanese is either the same language as English (". . . the basic form of a given lexeme, e.g., kill or korosu," p. 7), or else a clumsy surrogate for the latter, so that the form-class of a Japanese form is determined by how it is translated into English (". . . kanozyo can be used either as a pronoun for 'she' or as a common noun with the meaning of 'girl friend, lover'," p. 9, n. 2); after a few pages of these bilingual vagaries, one concludes that Shibatani has ended up burying rather than praising "the founding father of the Leningrad School of Typology" (p...

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