Brigitte L. M. Bauer, The Emergence and Development of SVO Patterning in Latin and French: Diachronic and Psycholinguistic Perspectives . New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995, xvi + 242 pp. 0 19 509103 5

To explain the syntactic development of French from Indo-European via Latin as a coherent evolutionary change congruent with psycholinguistic demands of learnability and processing, is the ambitious goal which Brigitte Bauer sets herself in this book, a lightly revised translation of her 1992 Nijmegen doctoral thesis supervised by Bernard Bichakjian, whose influence is apparent and generously acknowledged throughout. Her central claim is that the changes observed in word order and related functions are due to the gradual replacement of the left-branching syntax of reconstructed IndoEuropean by the right-branching pattern typical of Modern French and most other European languages (prepositional phrases were early converts, and noun phrases adapted more quickly than verb phrases). She sees her emphasis on syntax as a marked departure from mainstream typology, in which the semantics and pragmatics drive the word order and its associated cluster of morphosyntactic features. As a corollary, she views inflectional morphology as more stable and enduring than syntax, so that the Romance drift towards analyticity was the consequence of the syntactic restructuring, not its instigator. More controversially, she presents the composite change as an absolute gain in linguistic efficiency, and hence unidirectional and irreversible — though she stops short of endorsing the biological determinism of Bichakjian (1988). The book has a classic symmetry: a concise introduction and conclusion enfold five substantive chapters whose central core devoted to the diachronic analysis of the noun phrase, the verb phrase, and early right-branching structures nestles between a section grappling with the definition of linguistic heads inspired by generative X-bar syntax, and an interpretation of empirical studies of language acquisition in the light of branching theory. The text is densely packed with data, quotations and discussion of relevant literature (there are no separate notes), and completed by an extensive bibliography and useful index. The impressive range of evidence adduced embraces, in addition to Latin and French, Proto-Indo-European, Hittite, Greek, Italic dialects, various branches of Germanic and Slavonic, as well as Turkish, Japanese and Korean. Inevitably, heavy reliance has to be placed on secondary sources; but these are carefully sifted and, where there is disagreement as on the 'basic' word order of Imperial Latin — the variety of perspectives is fairly reflected. Whatever the fate of its central hypothesis, the book has merit simply as a critical compilation of material not easily accessible to historians of French. Though sympathetic to the general goals, I am not convinced by the Bauer— Bichakjian focus on branching syntax as the engine of change, and much less by their contention that its outcome is irreversible. When the theoretical stakes are so high, it is well nigh impossible to interpret the data impartially. If the identifying criteria are so fluid that linguists cannot even agree on whether Modern French still has 'basic' SVO word order or has 'progressed' to VSO, consensus on Latin is unlikely, and dissent virtually assured on Proto-Indo-European. Even so, previous typological accounts of Romance (such as Harris, 1978 and Schwegler, 1990) did succeed in demonstrating its broad evolutionary coherence over two millennia, despite refractory eddies like the creation of suffixal adverbials and new future and conditional paradigms. In the eyes of some (Smith, 1982, for instance) typology failed as a predictive model of historical change because it could not deal satisfactorily with (inconsistency: while the language