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Gabriele H. Cablitz. 2006. Marquesan: A grammar of space. New York: Mouton de Gruyter. xx + 682 pp. ISBN-13: 978-3-11018949-0. $172.80, hardcover.
When I finished reading this book I tried to make sense of the many reactions that were crowding my mind. First and foremost, there was a sense of accomplishment: the book is long and the linguistic details to absorb through a foreign language are, to say the least, abundant. Second, I found myself pleasurably enriched with a substantial knowledge of Marquesan, a Polynesian language. Third, I realized that the literature on the linguistic representation of spatial relationships was now brilliantly lengthened by another exquisite linguistic description. Of course, these reactions do not fully represent the "crowd" in my mind, but they are the ones that appropriately illustrate my fundamental reading of the book. They describe, and at the same time constrain, its merit. Details follow.
In the introductory chapter, the aim of the book is clearly stated as "the linguistic analysis of the form, the meaning and the use of spatial expressions or lexemes, as welt as a general formal classification of lexemes in Marquesan" (7). This is motivated by "two interesting aspects of the language, namely the semantic structuring of space, and the formal classification of Marquesan spatial 'expressions'" (7). The book is then intended as a "reference grammar of space" [italics in original] and "includes the description of how ... locative constructions are actually used on different scales of reference" (11).
In chapter 2 a clear and concise sketch is provided of the geographic, historical, and linguistic context within which the study was conducted. The same chapter contains a brief description of the methodology used to collect the linguistic data, mainly from the kit of stimuli designed by the Cognitive Anthropology Research Group of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen, The Netherlands (CARG, 1992).
Chapter 3, entitled 'Grammatical Sketch', is 157 pages long. It is a lucid, well organized, and informative description of the 'Ua Pou vernacular, the Northwest Marquesan language investigated (two other vernaculars are spoken on neighboring islands). This chapter in itself is an excellent contribution to the grammatical description of Polynesian languages and should be of considerable value to interested scholars. In fact, it could stand as...