REVIEW ARTICLE - Samoan Reference Grammar (see abstract of review in this issue)

A review of Ulrike Mosel's & Even Hovdhaugen's Samoan Reference Grammar (Oslo: The Instit for Comparative Research in Human Culture & Scandinavian U Press, 1992 [see listing in IRPL, this issue]). The book is characterized as a major descriptive work based on a large written & spoken corpus, & supported by native speaker judgments. The scope of the work is considered to be broad, providing a detailed analysis of the phonology & moving progressively to the larger syntactic units, though the treatment is limited primarily to the high variety of Samoan. The nonstandard linguistic terminology used is found to be distracting & often misleading. Although the work in general is assessed as being insufficiently geared toward either a linguistic or a Samoan teacher/learner audience, & poorly copy-edited, it is found to constitute a classic resource work on Samoan. 1 Reference. S. Novak