Syntaktische Analyse von Verbalpartizip und Infinitiv im modernen Tamil: Unter Berucksichtigung synthetischer und analytischer Strukturen und des Verbalaspekts.

• Author: STEEVER, SANFORD B.
• Position: Review

Syntaktische Analyse von Verbalpartizip und Infinitiv im modernen Tamil: Unter Berucksichtigung synthetischer und analytischer Strukturen und des Verbalaspekts. By JOSEF DEIGNER. Beitrage zur Kenntis sudasiatischer Sprachen und Literaturen, vol. 5. Wiesbaden: HARRASSOWITZ VERLAG, 1998. Pp. xxiii + 495. DM 248.

Syntaktische Analyse von Verbalpartizip und Infinitiv im modernen Tamil, the author's 1995 dissertation presented to the University of Heidelberg, purports to be an analysis of two of the most common verb forms in modern Tamil, forms whose grammatical properties are nonetheless widely misunderstood: the infinitive and the conjunctive form (also called the adverbial or conjunctive participle). Deigner takes up several large tasks: a syntactic analysis of these forms in Tamil sentences; a semantic analysis of the meaning they contribute to the structures they appear in; and an historical analysis of the change in their typological status over time. Sadly, this book disappoints at every turn; and it does so because the author plainly ignores standard forms of linguistic argumentation, as well as the established specialist literature on this very topic.

Most of Deigner's data on modern Tamil come from a narrow range of written sources. He draws most frequently from Asher and Radhakrishnan (1971), a text for beginning and intermediate students of Tamil, while other data come from grammars and scholarly monographs on the language. The role that native speakers of the language and their grammaticality judgments play in these data, if any, remains obscure--a lapse in the study of a living language. It will also puzzle scholars to learn that while Deigner has consulted scholarly works on Tamil primarily to obtain example sentences, he has virtually passed over in silence the linguistic analyses of the conjunctive and infinitive forms these works contain. Lindholm (1975) dedicates an entire dissertation to an analysis of the meaning of the conjunctive forms in terms of "natural relevance" while Steever's works of 1981 and 1983 both contain chapters that analyze these forms as terms of a Jakobsonian opposition. [1] Despite the fact that these and several other per tinent works appear in Deigner's bibliography, he conveys not the slightest hint that they contain analyses of the forms he is treating, suggesting only a secondhand knowledge of these studies, as cited in, e.g., Lehmann (1989). Failure to review the relevant literature and, therefore...