According to Hooper (1976: 5), the theory of natural generative phonology places the strongest possible constraints on abstractness in phonological descriptions. She claims that ‘the major advantage of natural generative theory over previous theories is that it gives a realistic representation of linguistic competence by constraining the theory to allow only a small subset of the grammars allowed by the unconstrained theory’ (xi). She claims further that the subset of grammars which are consistent with the constraints of natural generative phonology (NGP) accurately represent a speaker's knowledge of his language. This paper considers how vowel harmony rules in languages such as Turkish and Hungarian would be formulated in NGP. It is argued that the analyses required by NGP for these and similar vowel harmony languages do not represent the internalized knowledge of speakers of these languages and, therefore, that such vowel harmony systems provide strong evidence against NGP.

In this paper some data from Russian are presented and it is suggested, contrary to the proposals put forward by Lakoff & Peters (1966), that in the deep structure of Russian two types of coordination must be recognized, an ‘and’ type and a ‘with’ type. It is also suggested that the underlying ‘with’ coordinating element may sometimes be realized as i (‘and’) or as s (‘with’), and that the s may derive from an underlying ‘comitative’ case (cf. Fillmore, 1968: 81–83).

In some languages, vowels occurring in some specified domain, which is usually the word, must share some phonetic property or properties. Such languages are said to have vowel harmony.

Luganda, a Bantu language of Uganda, is unusual in having a vowel harmony system which is entirely morphologically conditioned. There is one subsystem which operates in the noun phrase and another irregular subsystem which operates in the verb phrase. The aim of this paper is to show how the non-linear theory of phonology developed by writers like Clements (1980, 1982) can throw some light on this apparently irregularity-ridden system.

Sandra Chung, The design of agreement: evidence from Chamorro. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. Pp. xii + 423.

Sandra Chung's leading contribution to the development of generative analyses of the morphosyntax of Austronesian languages is widely known. This book is the culmination of some two decades of research on Chamorro and is also, as the title suggests, an attempt to embed that body of research within a particular theory of agreement – one which has an explicitly syntactic flavour and which emphasizes the separation of morphology and syntax. Quite apart from the treatment of agreement itself, Chung also discusses a host of fascinating issues surrounding the analysis of Chamorro that have important ramifications for the analysis of languages that are typologically and genetically related to it, including the issue of configurationality and the nature of VSO word order. Additionally, there is extensive discussion of the treatment of wh-movement and the relationship of the Chamorro phenomenon of Wh-Agreement to the constraints on extraction observed in numerous other Austronesian languages and elsewhere. This book, along with the research program it represents, is an important addition to the literature on the less well-studied languages of the world and is obligatory reading for any syntactician with an interest in the cross-linguistic viability of syntactic theory.