Revising her 2007 Ph.D. dissertation in Greek linguistics at the University of Groningen, where she now teaches Greek, Bakker sets out a functional analysis of the ordering and articulation of the constituents in a noun phrase that determine its structure. Her goal is to identify which arguments would have led a nature speaker of Ancient Greek to choose one of the many possible patterns of noun phrase in any particular situation or context. The answers can increase knowledge about the language generally and noun phrases in particular, she suggest, but might also lead to better interpretation of the texts. She says she chose Herodotus' prose for a corpus, even though it is in Ionic rather than Attic dialect, because it contains several types of text with lots of description, and not at all because he is more fun than nearly anyone else. Annotation ©2009 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)