A theory of ellipsis /

McShane (Univ. of Maryland, Baltimore County) draws on data from English, Russian, and Polish to craft a cross-linguistic description of ellipsis--i.e., the nonexpression of understood sentence elements. She investigates how ellipsis works syntactically, semantically, and morphologically as she develops a computationally based "parameters and values" approach to ellipsis. By this she means a theory that looks at the parameters of elided category, reference type, and the nature of an antecedent. Despite the name "parameters and values," the approach is not related to any contemporary version of linguistic theory, and McShane takes the theory to be simply a set of rules to produce a result. The double value of McShane's book lies in its extensive field survey of the various kinds of ellipsis--words and phrases, nominal and verbal, subject, object, conjunctions, preposition and pronouns--together with its focus on real-text examples rather than on constructed ones. The book also has a cross-linguistic descriptive component and a rigorous computational nature. It will no doubt be useful to linguistic theoreticians, workers in natural language processing, and students of Slavic syntax. ^BSumming Up: Recommended. Graduate students, researchers, faculty, and professional linguists. E. L. Battistella Southern Oregon University