Benefactives and malefactives: Typological perspectives and case studies. Ed. by Fernando Zúñiga and Seppo Kittilä. (Typological studies in language 92.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2010. Pp. x, 440. ISBN 9789027206732. $158 (Hb).

Reviewed by: Benefactives and malefactives: Typological perspectives and case studies John Newman Benefactives and malefactives: Typological perspectives and case studies. Ed. by Fernando Zúñiga and Seppo Kittilä . (Typological studies in language 92.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2010. Pp. x, 440. ISBN 9789027206732. $158 (Hb). The juxtaposition of the terms BENEFACTIVE and MALEFACTIVE in the title of this volume is natural since they are conceptually well paired; at the same time it is thought-provoking, as we are much more accustomed to seeing the term benefactive in grammars than malefactive. In their introductory chapter, editors Seppo Kittilä and Fernando Zúñiga provide a succinct and helpful overview of the subject matter of this most interesting volume, covering the coding of benefactives and malefactives, the semantic variability in their interpretation, and the kinds of polysemy that these meanings enter into. In working through the introductory chapter, one could be forgiven for thinking that this volume is only about benefactives, even if it occasionally makes references to malefactives and maleficiaries. For example, the section titled 'Defining benefaction and malefaction' proposes a definition of BENEFICIARY only, without any invitation to the reader to construct a comparable definition of MALEFICIARY. It is left to the reader to extrapolate from the discussion of the benefactive constructions to the malefactive constructions—something that can be difficult on occasion. Section 2.1.3, 'Serial verb constructions', is introduced with the observation that such constructions are a productive means of expressing both benefaction and malefaction. But the accompanying examples all illustrate benefactive, not malefactive, constructions. The authors observe that it is the verb give that figures most prominently as the benefactive marking in these serial verb constructions, alongside verbs such as replace, help, and use. Here, one would be naturally curious to [End Page 671] know which verbs serve to mark the malefactive meaning in the corresponding malefactive serial verb constructions, but the reader is kept in the dark about this and would be guessing to come up with candidates. Even in their concluding section, 'Topics for further investigation', Kittilä and Zúñiga seem more interested in future research on benefaction than malefaction. While acknowledging that extensive future research is necessary for both topics, they emphasize that more investigation is required particularly into multiple ways of encoding benefaction in languages, and into differences between constructional and adpositional behaviors of benefactives. It does appear that there is a bias toward grammaticalizing benefaction (as opposed to malefaction) in languages, and this is presumably what gives rise to the bias in the editors' introductory chapter as well as in the number of contributions to this volume that address benefaction more than malefaction. It is an interesting bias, however, that warrants more discussion than is given in the introduction. PAULA RADETZKY and TOMOKO SMITH's chapter, 'An areal and crosslinguistic study of benefactive and malefactive constructions' (97-120), includes pertinent discussion about the imbalance in the benefactive and malefactive constructions, and the imbalance in attention given by linguists to them (98-99); their discussion, to some extent, provides information that the introductory chapter could have given. Radetzky and Smith also allude to the challenge that faces typologists working with these categories: that is, the challenge that benefactives and malefactives are either underreported or reported unevenly in published grammars. Their observations strike me as extremely important in constructing any typology of benefactives and malefactives. The core of the working definition of beneficiary offered by the editors is 'The beneficiary is a participant that is advantageously affected by an event without being its obligatory participant (either agent or primary target, i.e. patient)' (2). This means that in the case of English, all of the underlined items in she painted the house for me, she baked me a cake , and she ate up all her food for me count as beneficiaries, while those in she benefited from my advice and my assistant helped her do not. The editors emphasize that in the interest of crosslinguistic comparison, the definition is not intended to be so strict as to exclude discussion of other flavors of beneficiaries. And indeed, later chapters discuss instances of benefactives that would fall outside this definition. For...

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