With this issue of the Journal Maggie Tallerman steps down from the editorial team. Maggie has been the review editor since 1994 and we are indebted to her for the enormous contribution that she made to the Journal. We are very pleased to welcome Kerstin Hoge as the new review editor.

Singapore English is a contact language with a constant linguistic substratum and superstratum. It lends itself to an interesting case study on how linguistic neologisms emerge out of a pool of competing features from the typologically distinct languages active in the contact ecology. This paper investigates the aspectual system of Singapore English and that of Chinese, the main substrate language, and of English, the lexical-source language. Despite the presence of competing aspectual categories from the two languages, the aspectual system of Singapore English is essentially the Chinese system filtered through the morphosyntax of English. Substrate influence is systemic, and the competing grammatical subsystems do not mix.

Cantonese exhibits a pattern of variation among verbs that has often been interpreted as distinguishing a category of adjectives or a subcategory of adjectival verbs. However, neither of these approaches takes into account the complex patterns of overlap among the purported categories or subcategories. To account for these patterns, we propose a multi-dimensional, feature-based analysis, whereby morphological, phonological, syntactic, and semantic features interact to determine the distribution of each verb. While all verbs bear the same syntactic category feature, there are other features that affect the distribution of verbs independently of syntactic category. For example, constructions that resemble adjectival constructions in other languages license the semantic classes of verbs that are permanent, gradable, and/or non-dynamic, while constructions that resemble verbal constructions in other languages license the semantic classes of verbs that are dynamic, non-gradable, and/or non-permanent. Typological implications of this analysis are also considered.

Kam, a Kadai language spoken in Guizhou province (People's Republic of China), has a family of intransitive possessive constructions with the word order ‘Possessor–Verb–Possessee’. (The basic word order in Kam is SV and AVO.) While two recent papers have featured this unique construction type for an array of other Southeast Asian languages, they fail to acknowledge its distinct semantic value in contrast to the related construction type ‘Possessee–Possessor–Verb’. The former construction type displays a so-called ‘zoom-effect’: the possessor is predicated IN, AT or THROUGH his/her/its possessee; the predication zooms from the possessor on his/her/its possessee. The latter construction, in contrast, views the possessee as an entity separated from its possessor, and the predicate as applying solely to the possessee. After illustrating the ‘zoom-effect’ for a representative sample of Kam constructions, I demonstrate that ‘zoom-effects’ do not merely exist when the possessee–possessor compound has the zero-role (=intransitive subject) as above, but also when it assumes other semantic roles (e.g. patient, force, etc.). A general definition of this construction type, called ‘zoom-on-possessee construction’, is proposed; it enables us to unify and account for an array of hitherto disparate construction types that run in the literature under labels such as ‘proprioceptive state expressions’, ‘body part locative constructions’, ‘dative of affect’, etc. Furthermore, I discuss in some detail whether zoom-on-possessee constructions are better accounted for within a multi-stratal or a mono-stratal framework and, finally, whether the concept of noun-incorporation has any relevance.

Korean has a very complex phonology, with many interacting alternations. In a coronal-/i/ sequence, depending on the type of phonological boundary present, alternations such as palatalization, nasal insertion, nasal assimilation, coda neutralization, and intervocalic voicing can apply. This paper investigates how the phonological patterns of Korean affect processing of morphemes and words. Past research on languages such as English, German, Dutch, and Finnish has shown that listeners exploit syllable structure constraints in processing speech and segmenting it into words. The current study shows that in parsing speech, listeners also use much more complex patterns that relate the surface phonological string to various boundaries.

Robyn Carston,Thoughts and utterances: the pragmatics of explicit communication. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2002. Pp. x+408.

Robyn Carston's Thoughts and utterances is, in every sense, a big book. The result of years of thinking about communication from a relevance-theoretic perspective, it is long, wide-ranging, rich, intricate, demanding and radical. And it is (or should be) controversial. Essential reading therefore for anyone with any interest in language and communication, philosophy of language, semantics and pragmatics.

Katalin É. Kiss,The syntax of Hungarian (Cambridge Syntax Guides). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xii+278.

László Varga,Intonation and stress: evidence from Hungarian. Houndmills: Palgrave MacMillan, 2002. Pp. xvii+229.

László Hunyadi,Hungarian sentence prosody and universal grammar. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2002. Pp. 328.

It seems it's harvest time in Hungarian linguistics: a number of respectable publishers have in recent years put out books on various aspects of the Hungarian language by authors working in or outside Hungary. In addition to the monographs under review here, one can mention Szabolcsi (1997), Kenesei, Vago & Fenyvesi (1998), Koopman & Szabolcsi (2000) or Siptár & Törkenczy (2000).