Reviews 338 John Holm and Peter L. Patrick (eds.), Comparative Creole Syntax: Parallel Outlines of 18 Creole Grammars. (Westminster Creolistics Series 7). London: Battlebridge, 2007. Dagmar Deuber “All creolists”, as Mark Sebba once remarked (1997: viii), “owe a debt to John Holm, for his encyclopedic volumes, which represent the mass of our knowledge about pidgins and creoles”. He was referring to Holm (1988-89), two volumes which have provided Creolists with an overview of theoretical developments in the field and of structural features specifically of the Atlantic Creoles (volume 1), as well as a comprehensive survey of Pidgins and Creoles around the world focusing on their history and social status (volume 2). The present volume, in whose compilation Holm was joined by Peter Patrick as co-editor in 1999, has grown out of Holm’s work on the survey of the syntax of the Atlantic Creoles in Holm (1988-89, volume 1), as he explains in the Introduction (p.v). The syntactic similarities between the Atlantic Creoles have been much discussed in the perennial debate about the role of substrates versus universals in the genesis of Creoles. However, the discussion has suffered from a lack of comparable and easily accessible data on a range of Creoles with different lexical source languages. A systematic survey of the syntax of different Creoles is also needed to address other important issues in Creolistics, for example, as Holm mentions in the Introduction (p. xi), the typological status of Creoles and their structural relationship to their superstrates. The present volume makes an important contribution in the area of comparative descriptive work on Creole syntax. While the coverage is not comprehensive, as in Holm’s socio-historically oriented volume (1988-89, volume 2), the varieties included are a well-chosen set which appropriately represents the range and diversity of Creoles. The cover quite ingeniously shows the scope and focus of the volume at a glance. It consists of a map of the world split between the front and back cover, with the countries in which the 18 Creoles in question are spoken highlighted. Atlantic Creoles, the focus of the book with 12 varieties, appear on the front cover. On the back cover, one can see the broad geographical spread of the six non-Atlantic Creoles included, from East Africa to the Pacific. A glance at the table of contents (p. iii) makes immediately apparent that the Creoles chosen are a diverse set not only in terms of their geographical locations but also in terms of their lexical source languages, as chapter headings give the names of the Creoles as well as their lexical affiliations. Most of the varieties have European lexifiers, but two varieties based on non-European languages are also included: Nubi (Creole Arabic) and Nagamese (restructured Assamese). Among European-lexifier Creoles, the Iberian group is quite well represented in the volume, with a total of seven varieties: three West African Portuguese-based Creoles (Angolar, Cape Verdean and Guinea-Bissau), Korlai Creole Portuguese (India), Palenquero, Papiamentu and Zamboangueño, a variety of Philippine Creole Spanish. The small group of Dutch-based Creoles is represented by Berbice Dutch and Negerhollands. The two largest groups of European-lexifier Creoles, those based on French and on Reviews 339 1 Although not set out as a systematic comparative chapter like the one on Cape Verdean and Guinea-Bissau, the chapter on Angolar, one of three Portuguese-based Creoles spoken on S-o Tomé and Príncipe, also offers considerable comparative information on S-otomense. English, are not especially prominent in this volume, with three French-based Creoles (Dominican, Haitian and Seychellois) and four English-based ones (Jamaican Patwa, Krio, Ndyuka, and Tok Pisin) included. This, however, seems justified, since these groups include some of the most well-researched varieties and have figured prominently in the large body of literature in Creolistics which has grown up in the last decades. Thus, for the Creolist reader the volume strikes a good balance between the very prominent varieties and those which are less well known and have been less often considered. Anglicists may find that for their purposes, the volume is nicely complemented by volume 2 (Morphology and Syntax) of the Handbook of Varieties of English (Kortmann and Schneider 2004), which covers most of the English-based Creoles and Pidgins listed by Holm (1988-89, volume 2), though some appear only in overviews for a country or region. The Handbook of Varieties of English overlaps with the present volume in that both have chapters on Jamaican Patwa and Tok Pisin (with the chapters on Jamaican Patwa both written by Peter Patrick), but the Handbook does not have a separate chapter on Ndyuka and, importantly, does not cover Krio, the West African Creole which seems to have played a pivotal role in the development of the different varieties of West African Pidgin English (cf. Huber 1999). The book contains separate chapters on each variety (arranged in alphabetical order) except the closely related Portuguese Creoles of Cape Verde and Guinea- Bissau, of which a comparative description is given in a single chapter. 1 Many of the authors are (near-)native speakers of the varieties in question and/ or have done extensive fieldwork on them. Several chapters originally written by doctoral students working with John Holm have been revised in collaboration with leading experts on the respective Creoles, which has resulted in some co-authored contributions. The Introduction is written by John Holm (pp. v-xi), with a shorter addition by Peter Patrick (pp. xi-xii). All chapters closely follow a common structure. An introductory section provides background information on the history and current sociolinguistic status of the Creole(s). The main part of each chapter treats the same set of grammatical features, close to 100 in total. These are organized into twenty sections with several subsections each; a common numbering system facilitates comparisons. Subsections contain a discussion of the feature in question as well as examples (with word-byword glosses as well as English translations), if the feature is attested. Summaries of the occurrence of features are given at the end of each of the twenty sections. In these, the features dealt with in the different subsections are marked as attested (“+”), rare (“R”), known to be absent (“0”), or, if there is no information, “? ”. Some - but not all - chapters also have a brief conclusion addressing such questions as the possible origins of the structures reported. The references sections will be useful for those seeking further information on specific varieties. A brief note on the author(s) is also given at the end of each chapter. Reviews 340 The selection of features in the volume, more than the selection of varieties, reflects its origin in Holm’s comparative work on the Atlantic Creoles. As he explains in the Introduction (pp. vi, xi), they are mainly features which distinguish the Atlantic Creoles from their lexical source languages and include some which have been referred to as typical Creole features, though research on their actual occurrence in Creoles worldwide has been limited. The great advantage of the design of the volume is that it makes it possible to systematically trace the occurrence of such features - e.g. relevance of the stative/ non-stative distinction to the interpretation of unmarked verbs, preverbal markers for anterior tense and various aspectual categories, adjectival verbs, and serial verbs - in a broad selection of Atlantic Creoles, as well as several non-Atlantic ones. On the other hand, the rigid structure may appear somewhat of a straightjacket for varieties which differ substantially from what Armin Schwegler and Kate Green in their contribution on Palenquero refer to as “the (old) Atlantic Creole typological model” (p. 304). For example, the only word order feature included is “Word order: questions SVO” (in section 20 “Miscellaneous”), but this seems irrelevant or misleading where a variety does not have a basic SVO word order, which is the case in Korlai Creole Portuguese (transitioning from SVO to SOV under the influence of Marathi), as well as in Nagamese (SOV) and Zamboangueño (VSO). However, this problem is mainly apparent in the summaries, as the text allows the authors enough freedom to accommodate such special features. Even in the case of the Atlantic Creoles the summaries are more helpful in some cases than in others, depending on the complexity of the area of syntax in question. One of the more straightforward cases are the different types of serial verb constructions, whose occurrence or non-occurrence can be easily captured in a summary table. A more complex case are unmarked verbs: the majority of varieties, both among the Atlantic and non-Atlantic ones, have a “+” for all four features in this section, namely “statives with non-past reference”, “statives with past reference”, “non-statives with past references” and “non-statives with non-past reference”, but this masks major differences between varieties conforming to the Atlantic model, where unmarked verbs are frequent and their default interpretation as non-past or past depends on whether they are stative or non-stative, and varieties where this does not apply, such as, among the Atlantic Creoles, Berbice Dutch. In spite of their limitations, however, the summaries are a helpful feature of the book, if they are used with the necessary degree of caution, and can provide a good starting-point for more detailed comparisons. By giving fairly comprehensive syntactic overviews rather than addressing selected features, the chapters often highlight the complexity of questions such as that of the genesis of Creoles. For example, in his conclusion to the chapter on Haitian Creole, Michel DeGraff mentions features with African origins, others which reflect French influence, and a third group of features which are less obviously related to the substrates or superstrate but show “unsurprising parallels with more general patterns of so-called gradual language change and of language creation via language acquisition” (p. 123). If individual contributions highlight such complexities, this is even more true of the volume as a whole, as it includes not only varieties like Haitian Creole, Jamaican Patwa, or Krio, which represent the Atlantic model quite well, but also other Atlantic Creoles such as, notably, Palenquero, which diverge from the model in important respects, and, besides, non-Atlantic Creoles which show a number of important Reviews 341 resemblances to the typical Atlantic ones (e.g. Tok Pisin, where Nicholas Faraclas emphasizes the importance of substrate influence on the features which happen to be shared with Atlantic Creoles) as well as others such as Nagamese or Zamboangueño, where resemblances to Atlantic Creoles are fewer. With its excellent selection of varieties, rich data and, overall, well thought-out design, this will become an important reference work in Creolistics, and Creolists owe a further debt to John Holm for having taken the initiative. Many will share the editors’ hope that it will lead to even more systematic comparisons of Creole syntax (p. xi), but the present volume already offers much information which should be exploited to the fullest. References Holm, John (1988-89). Pidgins and Creoles. 2 vols. Cambridge: CUP. Huber, Magnus (1999). Ghanaian Pidgin English in Its West African Context: A Sociohistorical and Structural Analysis. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Kortmann, Bernd and Edgar W. Schneider (eds.) (2004). A Handbook of Varieties of English. 2 vols. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Sebba, Mark (1997). Contact Languages: Pidgins and Creoles. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Dagmar Deuber Englisches Seminar Universität Freiburg Christina Sanchez, Consociation and Dissociation. An Empirical Study of Word-Family Integration in English and German. (Language in Performance 37). Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2008. Alwin Fill When Ferdinand de Saussure established his principle of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, he admitted that some words show only “degrees of arbitrariness” and are at least “relatively motivated”. In 1946, Walter von Wartburg wrote of the different formal realizations of semantically related concepts, as in aveugle (blind) vs. cécité (blindness). In the French translation of Wartburg’s work, this phenomenon was named ‘dissociation’, a term which gained recognition and wide acceptance through Ernst Leisi’s Das heutige Englisch (first edition 1955), at least in the German speaking world. Leisi’s hypothesis was that English and French have mainly dissociated, German and Italian chiefly ‘consociated’ vocabularies. This was rarely drawn into question, but has rather become a classic statement, particularly concerning English