Rezensionen 175 title, by the way, is “The Limits of Religion and History: The African American Intellectual in the Twentieth Century.” Nassim W. Balestrini has studied the poetry of Robert Hayden in the light of the latter’s Bahá’í religious beliefs. Only nine of Hayden’s 100 poems allude to this religion, but one-third deal with the African American experience in general and all, according to Balestrini, reflect Hayden’s belief that art is “intrinsically religious” (195). There is again a useful comparison made with T.S. Eliot’s brand of religious Modernism. The final essay in the collection, Frank Kelleter’s “The Nation of Islam as an American Religion” may smack a bit of tokenism - the editors’ desire to be inclusive of at least one (besides Bahá’í) non-Christian group. Kelleter’s Hegelian approach, however, leads us right back to the centrality of Christianity for Black America. He explains, “‘American Islam’ is first and foremost a dialectical antithesis of African American Christianity, an antithesis which, in its tenets and rituals, still echoes the conventions of the religious community it has set out to confront” (220). As one proof of his own thesis, Kelleter points out that Louis Farrakhan in his Million Man March speech of 1995 quoted the Bible 30 times and the Koran only five times (221). Or could it be that Farrakhan just knew his audience? Kelleter is not, of course, alone in his insistence that the Nation of Islam lives in symbiosis with the Black church. He quotes Henry Louis Gates’ statement that the NOI is “a kind of Reformation movement within the black church - a church that had grown all too accommodating to American racism” (221). That last negative remark about the modern Black church in America simply echoes a suspicion that is virtually coeval with the founding of slave-holding America by Bible-patting (if not thumping) Anglican Virginians. This collection of essays provides a very useful critique of Black religion. Though it calls for supplementary reading if one really wants to learn about Black denominational practices, it also should inspire supplementary research across the various cultural studies disciplines. Page Laws Norfolk State University Department of English and Foreign Language Patrick Duffley, The English Gerund-Participle. A Comparison with the Infinitive. Frankfurt, Bern, New York: Lang, 2006. Tünde Nagy Patrick Duffley’s book is a study of the English gerund-participle. As the book compares the use and function of the gerund-participle to that of the to-infinitive, it can also be considered an analysis of infinitival constructions. The book consists of six chapters. The first is an overview of the different uses of -ing constructions and the meanings and functions that can be attributed to them. These meanings and functions are then compared to those of the to-infinitive, which are analysed in chapter AAA Band 33 (2008), Heft 1 Rezensionen 176 two. Chapters three and four compare gerunds and to-infinitives as complements of another verb and as subjects of a clause respectively. Chapter five gives an account of the progressive construction and other adjective-like uses of the -ing form, while the final chapter proposes a unified analysis of the -ing form. Duffley presents the different uses of the -ing form (adjective-uses as well as noun-like uses) and at the same time also criticizes previous approaches which treat the -ing as an imperfectivizing operator (e.g. Freed 1979, Wierzbicka 1988, Brinton 1988). The author thus argues throughout the book that the -ing gerund-participle cannot be given an inherently imperfective value. He defines the value of the -ing according to semiological principles, where the form-meaning relation results in the same form expressing both a perfective and an imperfective meaning. In his analysis of the -ing form Duffley follows Langacker’s concept of schematicity, permitting a unified account of the different functions of the gerund-participle. In the case of the -ing form, the main dimension of the generalized schema is that of interiority, with the different uses of the gerund-participle form depending on how the schema of interiority is evoked. In a progressive interpretation, the gerund-participle is supposed to evoke an inherently perfective process upon which it imposes an immediate temporal scope blanking out the endpoints (this view of -ing corresponds to Langacker’s definition). When the -ing expresses a perfective event, the latter is seen as an abstract entity - a process called “reification”. In this case the endpoints are integrated into the interiority of the event. Duffley presents detailed analyses of the -ing form as complement of another verb and as subject, and also examines its progressive and adjective-like usages. He argues that when -ing appear as a verb complement or as subject, its meaning is usually atemporal, so that semantically it simply behaves as a direct object, i.e. something which is V-ed. Duffley draws upon both syntactic and semantic criteria to define the direct object function of the -ing form, emphasizing, however, the primacy of the semantic criteria. These syntactic criteria comprise the appearance of the -ing form in the subject position of passive clauses with the same verb, the possibility of pseudo-clefting, as well as the substitution by a pronoun in an objective case. Regarding the semantic criteria, the main reason state for treating the -ing form as a direct object is its temporal relation to the main verb. Duffley argues that in many cases there is no such relation and gives examples where the -ing simply expresses a general fact. In cases where there is a temporal relation between the verb and the -ing this can, according to Duffley, be attributed to the logical implication of the verb’s lexical meaning. The temporal relation between the -ing construction and the main verb is then one of anteriority, posteriority or simultaneity. Duffley relates the function of the -ing to semantic classes of verbs, in particular verbs of effort, verbs of liking, verbs of positive and negative recall, and also instances where -ing appears as complement of aspectual verbs. Except for a few cases (e.g. keep, go on) where the -ing functions as a subject complement, the function and meaning of -ing is seen as that of a direct object. By defining the -ing as having a direct object value in complement function, Duffley stresses its atemporal value. The book rejects the idea that the -ing is always temporal, being defined in most cases as an imperfectivizing operator. The only cases where the -ing clearly receives an imperfective value are those where it appears in progressive constructions (functioning as a subject complement) and also when it is a complement to the direct object (sentences (1.) and (2)): Rezensionen 177 1. He was brooding. 2. I found him brooding. However, even in such cases, the -ing does not always produce an imperfective reading. When it appears as a subject, this will for instance result in a perfective meaning. In the last chapter, Duffley gives a unified account of all the uses of the -ing gerund-participle. He does this by drawing a comparison between, on the one hand, the internal semantic structure of a verb (which can be dependent on an event originator [subject] and an event-conditionee [direct object]) and the verbal use of ing, and between the structure of a noun (which is not dependent on an eventconditionee) and the nominal and adjectival uses of -ing, on the other. Thus, while the verbal use of the -ing evokes a dynamic temporal relation between two participants in an event, this relation is missing from the nominal and adjectival realizations. The nominal and adjectival uses of the -ing are then also distinguished by the fact that while nominal -ing corresponds to the reification of an event, the adjectival uses do not take the event as a whole, but rather “evoke the potential for a position within the event’s interiority”. Duffley states that the nominal use of -ing and the verbal gerundive use are semantically very close, yet he leaves open the question of under what circumstances the gerundive use acquires a dynamic relation in time. An important strength of Duffley’s theory is that the functions and meanings of the -ing - as well as those of the to-infinitive - are defined in relation to the meaning of the main verb in the sentence. In other words, the aspectual meaning expressed in the sentence is regarded as compositional. There is a strong interaction between the verb and the complement form (-ing/ to-infinitive) so that in many cases the choice of the latter depends on the semantic value of the main verb. The exact nature of the interaction between the verb and the complement form, i.e. whether the verb and the complement equally contribute to the meaning of the sentence and also if there is conceptual overlap between them, remains unclear. The extent of the compositionality is also not explicit, being either total (Is the meaning of the sentence fully predictable from the meanings and functions of its component structures? ) or partial (Do the component structures contribute to the overall meaning to a high degree without defining it completely? ). Treating the function and meaning of -ing as if it were a direct object also disregards some problems such as whether to accept the -ing with eventuality types and whether the restrictive use or unacceptability of a certain eventuality type is attributable to the meaning of the verb, the meaning of -ing or both. Throughout the book the meanings and functions of -ing are contrasted with those of the to-infinitive, which, according to Duffley, does not have a direct object value, but can often be defined as an adverbial goal circumstantial, expressing a movement leading up to a point. Besides the fact that the to-infinitive does not meet the syntactic and semantic criteria necessary for a direct object function Duffley mentions other differences between the -ing and the to-infinitive form, for example with regard to control (when functioning as complement of another verb the to-infinitive usually requires coreferentiality, while the -ing form does not) or with regard to temporality (in many cases the to-infinitive expresses a subsequent or prospective temporal relation to the matrix, whereas -ing is temporally indifferent). Rezensionen 178 Duffley assumes that the to-infinitive is more complex than the -ing form, consisting of two parts, the stem and to, and that the function of to is to portray the represented event as the endpoint of the situation expressed by the matrix. In certain cases the to infinitive can also have a direct object function when it meets the syntactic criteria necessary for a direct object. In such cases, however, to does not express a relation between the bare infinitive and the main verb but rather denotes a movement towards the end of the event expressed by the bare infinitive. Though the distinction between -ing and the to-infinitive seems to work well for the cases in which they appear as objects of a matrix, the distinction is not as obvious when they occur in the subject position. Both -ing and the to-infinitive can express a fact, with no real difference in meaning. How these cases should be treated, and what different values the -ing and the to-infinitive can be given in these cases, remain open to debate. In cases where the two forms are not substitutable, this is explained as being due to certain additional meanings of the to-infinitive (that of expressing goal, desire and purpose) which the -ing lacks. Overall, Duffley’s book is an interesting and valuable study of the -ing gerund participle. It raises many relevant issues and also gives its own internally coherent account of how the values and functions of the -ing could be treated. For the present reviewer, an important insight frequently expressed and documented in the book is that the aspectual meaning of the sentence is not attributable solely to the meaning of the matrix verb, but rather the outcome of an interaction of multiple factors. The variety of values that have been attributed to the to-infinitive and -ing constructions over the years (in terms of factivity, modality, temporality, etc.) have shown that complementation is a complex phenomenon and in order to account for all the phenomena involved, a close interrelation between the matrix and subordinate clause must be presupposed. Duffley’s approach is a plausible one, since he gives a schematic meaning to the to-infinitive and -ing construction, and, at the same time, defines the meaning of these constructions with respect to the meaning and function of the matrix. Tünde Nagy KLTE University of Debrecen & University of Freiburg Roy Goldblatt, Jopi Nyman, and John A.Stotesbury (eds.), Close Encounters of an Other Kind. New Perspectives on Race, Ethnicity and American Studies. (Studies in Literature and Culture, 13). Joensuu: Univ. of Joensuu, 2005. Larisa Mikhaylova On the cover of this book we see a snake plaited into a braid, a highly ambiguous image. A tame snake? A snake hiding in order to bite? Or a snake willingly becoming an ornament? Hardly. Snakes don’t do that kind of things. However, people can … It does not often happen that most of the articles included in a book of conference proceedings turn out to be not only well organized (which might be work of the AAA Band 33 (2008), Heft 1