Children’s discourse: Person, space and time across languages. By Maya Hickmann. (Cambridge studies in linguistics.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xviii, 392. ISBN 0521584418. $91.40 (Hb).

Reviewed by Mohammad Rasekh Mahand, Bu-Ali Sina University

Maya Hickmann tries to answer two main questions in her comparative study: What are the universal and specific features of language development in children? What are the different roles of structural and functional factors in this development? These questions are discussed with reference to three domains of child language: referring to entities, the representation of space, and the uses of temporal-aspectual markings. Narratives from English, French, German, and Chinese constitute the basis for H’s presentation. The book includes a complete review of different theoretical approaches to language acquisition.

The book is divided into two parts. Part 1, ‘Available theories and data’, begins with an introduction of the domains of child language and the aims of the book. Ch. 2 is a theoretical review of language acquisition, while Ch. 3 highlights some universal vs. language-specific properties of linguistic systems that bear on the developmental issues of language acquisition. In Ch. 4, H discusses the role of coherence and cohesion in the development of discourse, and in Ch. 5 she examines how children mark information status, with regard to both referring expressions and clause structure. H’s findings on referring expressions reach divergent conclusions about the rhythm, course, and determinants of acquisition. She also finds that the developmental evidence shows variable uses of clause structure across languages. Ch. 6 covers how spatial and temporal-aspectual markings are acquired. The literature on these two issues has two perspectives: one shows a universal tendency, and the other shows some crosslinguistic differences.

In Part 2, ‘A cross-linguistic analysis of children’s narratives’, H introduces the methodological issues (Ch. 7) and then devotes three chapters to animate entities, space, and time. In Ch. 8, ‘Animate entities’, H discusses the late mastery of obligatory newness markings in all languages. In addition, indefinite determiners are used systematically at around seven years old in Indo-European languages, postverbal positions at about ten in Chinese. In Ch. 9, ‘Space’, H reports her primary finding that ‘form variations in reference maintenance are massively determined by discourse factors’ (320) in all languages and all ages, despite crosslinguistic and developmental variations otherwise observed. The analysis also shows that there are differences with respect to the predicates that were used. French uses more static predicates compared to other languages, and the analysis of dynamic predicates shows wide differences in how narrators represent motion events across languages. Finally, in Ch. 10, ‘Time’, H analyzes temporal reference and shows that perfectivity and boundedness are related in all languages and that tense-aspect shifts were shown to take on discourse functions with increasing age.

Children’s discourse is a useful book for anyone interested in linguistics, psychology, and first language learning.

Meaning, expression and thought. By Wayne A. Davis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. 653. ISBN 9780521039048. $55.

Reviewed by Alessandro Capone, University of Messina

This book was written by a distinguished philosopher. It is difficult, nowadays, to find books that, in addition to displaying enormous erudition, exhibit clarity of thought and expression. Davis’s is one such book. The book is about a rational approach to language and communication and engages the readers with continuous attempts to revisit and revise the views on meaning by the great philosophers of the twentieth century, such as, for example, Paul Grice. This is an important volume that should be widely read.

This book deals with the principles of semantics and develops the classical doctrine that words conventionally stand for mental states, principally thoughts and ideas. Meaning consists in their expression. This ‘expression theory of meaning’ is put forward through the classical Gricean program. The author explains the meanings that words have in terms of speaker meaning. The book also deals with the important notion of (a speaker) having a certain intention in uttering a sentence. The intention underlying meaning is the intention to indicate in some way that certain thoughts and thought parts (‘ideas’) are entertained by the speaker. D argues that this definition can avoid the problems caused by the Gricean definition. This may very well be true, but some may argue that this theory is too weak to be really useful. Communication surely involves commitment to beliefs, not just to having ‘ideas’. A written utterance on the lecture room blackboard saying ‘Napoleon is an ass’ surely communicates somebody’s idea that Napoleon is an ass, but in default of an individual’s commitment to the belief ‘Napoleon is an ass’, I would take this to be a case of imperfect (or partial) communication (as are all cases of anonymous letters and messages).

Notions such as communication and reference are discussed at length in the book. D argues that the notion of thought crucial to meaning is a fundamental cognitive phenomenon that must be kept separate from belief and desire. He produces various arguments in support of the view that thoughts are complex units, and that the complexity of thought is at the basis of the compositionality of meaning. His thesis is distinguished from many other ‘language of thought’ theories. Finally, the author defends ideational and mentalistic theories of the sort he develops against the most influential objections.

One criticism I have is that D might have written a more informative section on propositional attitudes; but he will surely smile at this point, since he has written another thick book on similar topics (Nondescriptive meaning and reference, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

I am persuaded that this is a very balanced, critical, and informative book. It is a monumental volume and I must recommend it to all philosophers and linguists.

Notes grammaticales et lexique du Kiholu. By Jan S. Daeleman. (LINCOM studies in African linguistics 58.) Munich: LINCOM Europa, 2003. Pp. 81. ISBN 389586756X. $65.80.

Reviewed by Benji Wald, Los Angeles, CA

As the title states, this book is an organized set of notes on Kiholu (Holu), a Bantu language straddling Angola and the DRC, most closely related to Kwezo and Pende. After a brief introduction identifying the location, sources of data, and affinities of Kiholu, Daeleman covers the language’s phonology (Ch. 1, 7–11), morphophonology (Ch. 2, 12–13), morphology (Ch. 3, 14–43), syntax (Ch. 4, 44–45), and lexicon (Ch. 5, 46–78).

As might be evident from the amount of space devoted to each area of linguistic analysis, the description is in the mold of early twentieth-century linguistic sketches, particularly of Bantu, with maximal attention paid to expected Bantu morphological characteristics. D’s chapter on syntax is unusually marginal, without the slightest indication of analysis, and is simply a two-page list of fifty-six decontextualized sentences with French translations. Contrary to the more usual practice for such linguistic sketches, no folktale or other example of naturally occurring Kiholu discourse stands in as a substitute for syntactic analysis. It is not clear that any of the examples are from coherent discourse rather than simply being elicited translations of sentences given in French, though a few examples seem to be from original Holu discourse, such as example 20, which translates as ‘Further on you come to a fork in the road and go to the right; if you go to the left you’ll get lost’. The experienced Bantuist could draw some minimal syntactic conclusions from the limited data presented, but certainly would have preferred some generalizations from the author. By contrast, tone is meticulously marked on every syllable, according to general Africanist tone-marking conventions, and the phonological transcription, though based on a brief presentation, indicates a careful and informed analysis, which can be considered authoritative as far as it goes.

In sum, the book is most useful to Bantuists who can understand the tacit synchronic and historical implications of the descriptions given, particularly for phonology and morphology. They can also recognize that the author is drawing on a much larger knowledge base. Such Bantuists can only regret the severe limitations on the present publication and hope that more detailed data, if not analyses, will be forthcoming. The book is much less useful to a more general linguistic readership for the same reason that Bantuists would like to see more—there is a lack of explicit theoretical concern that would, at the least, guide the author to the presentation of a richer array of data, with regard to which the lack of syntactic description in the present book is most salient.

Classical Mongolian. By Alice Sárközi. Munich: LINCOM Europa, 2004. Pp. 61. ISBN 3895868590. $51.80.

Reviewed by Joshua Ross, SIL International

Written Mongolian has never been spoken in this form, but has been the literary language for all the Mongols. Classical Mongolian presents a short grammar of Written Mongolian.

The first of six sections gives a brief outline of the history and usage of Classical Written Mongolian, as well as an outline of the different types of text that may be regarded as source material for research. The section concludes with a list of previous studies. The second section details the phonology, looking at the vowels and consonants, where they may occur in words, and which combinations are not used. Vowel harmony is also discussed, including the two forms of k/q and g/γ used with front and back vowels, respectively.

The third section, the main body of the book, examines the morphology. After detailing the agglutinative nature of Written Mongolian, there is a subsection discussing nominal morphology. The foundations for this are laid with the morphology of nouns. Adjectives, being essentially the same as nouns, are dealt with very quickly, and then a detailed analysis of pronouns and numerals is presented. The subsection concludes with a description of adverbs, which, formed from nouns, pronouns, or numerals, follow the earlier material, and postpositions. Each in turn is enumerated using tables to succinctly give easily referenced detail. The rest of the section is dedicated to verbs and verbal adverbs. The suffixes dealing with tense, aspect, and mood are all considered.

The syntax of Classical Mongolian is dealt with in the fourth section. Since suffixes and particles are dealt with in the third section, this is a fairly brief introduction to the main sentence types found in Classical Mongolian. The survey starts with indicative and interrogative sentences, outlining the general word and phrase order, and then turns to detailing how complex sentences may be built up. The section then concludes with a look at the parts of a sentence.

Two sample texts, ‘The history of Geser Kahn’ and ‘Altan tobči “The golden button” ’, are given in the fifth section. They are helpfully interlinearized, with a free translation given afterwards. A copy of these texts in the Mongolian script is given in the appendices.

Classical Mongolian ends with an extremely short section (six lines) on the script and its development. There is also an appendix giving the script together with the transcriptions used in the body of the book; there is no discussion about the ambiguities in the script, however, nor about which cases are resolvable from vowel harmony and which require a knowledge of the lexemes.

This short volume makes a good reference for Classical Written Mongolian. It is clearly organized and finding the relevant material is made easy by the well laid out table of contents. Although it is not within the remit of the volume to make comparisons with modern dialects of Mongolian, it still provides a good basis for such an undertaking.

The history of English: A student’s guide. By Ishtla Singh. London: Hodder Arnold, 2005. Pp. xiii, 226. ISBN 9780340806951. $29.95.

Reviewed by Colette van Kerckvoorde, Simon’s Rock College

The story of the English language is one of the few areas in linguistics with popular appeal. As a result, various publications and documentaries have appeared under similar titles, and beginners may be inclined to believe that there is only one specific narrative for the history of our language, handed down from one generation to the next, with only a few updates. Singh’s book includes this kind of standard, orthodox material, but she also wants to draw the reader’s attention to recent scholarship and topics under debate in the academic community. Most likely, her reader already has some limited background knowledge of the conventional history, but wants to explore different, even controversial perspectives.

S starts by describing the major processes of change that have affected English over the centuries and stresses that virtually every kind of change can be observed for any time period. She then turns to the prehistory of the English language and gives an overview of the Indo-European language family; she includes a discussion of the Indo-European homeland and the controversies that surround this topic. She concludes with a discussion of April McMahon and Robert McMahon’s (2005) development of quantitative methods for language classification.

The following four chapters are structured around the traditional periodization of the history of the English language and provide a solid overview of the standard material that would be expected in a textbook with this title. Therefore, I highlight here only what is new and unusual. For Old English, there is a discussion of studies that have explored the constructions of Anglo-Saxon masculinity and femininity as manifested in Beowulf. The chapter on Middle English describes Charles-James N. Bailey and Karl Maroldt’s (1977) creole hypothesis and the subsequent debate that widely discredited it. The Early Modern English chapter includes a treatment of the introduction of English in Barbados, one of the earliest landing points for English in the new world. The final chapter, on Modern English, presents two snapshots. For the eighteenth century, there is a detailed discussion of Jonathan Swift’s A modest proposal, where S demonstrates that its underlying ideology to this present day is ‘alive and well’ (188). For the nineteenth century, the spread of English as a result of the expansion of the British Empire is exemplified by focusing on Singapore. S concludes with an overview of predictions made at the end of the twentieth century for the future use of English.

This textbook successfully demonstrates that research in the history of the English language is ongoing and that there are still many unanswered questions and unexplored areas. In addition, it emphasizes that traditional views can be reexamined and updated, especially through interdisciplinary contributions and even through the application of new computer technology. It goes without saying that S was limited to only a few representative examples of current research. Her goal is to encourage further exploration through classroom discussions and student research papers. A great feature is the inclusion of study questions at the end of each chapter: they provide a basis for further research and encourage the student to include approaches from other disciplines.

Khamnigan Mongol. By Juha Janhunen. Munich: LINCOM Europa, 2005. Pp. 62. ISBN 3895862266. $53.20.

Reviewed by Joshua Ross, SIL International

Khamnigan Mongol is an extremely conservative, ethnospecific community language, which Juha Janhunen suggests may not be viable given various fundamental changes to its social and ecological context. This volume gives an outline of the grammar of Khamnigan Mongol and seeks to examine its ethnolinguistic context. It is divided into five parts: ‘Introduction’, ‘Ethnoliguistic context’, ‘Phonology’, ‘Morphology’, and ‘Diachronic aspects’.

The introduction consists of eight sections spread over five pages. After first defining Khamnigan Mongol, J then turns to the distribution and history of the speakers. The nomadic nature of the Khamnigans is then addressed, followed by their spiritual culture. The introduction concludes with an analysis of population trends and a history of the research into Khamnigan Mongol.

Part 2, ‘Ethnolinguistic context’, includes discussion about the significant Ewenki-Khamnigan Mongol bilingualism; while Khamnigan Mongol is taxonomically a separate Mongolic language, Khamnigan Ewenki should allow smooth communication with other Ewenki speakers. There is also discussion of tribal divisions and dialects, together with the issues of ethnic environment and interethnic communication, as well as the sociolinguistic trends.

Part 3, ‘Phonology’, covers the main phonological issues, including palatal and labial harmony, with restrictions on consonants and sandhi also surveyed. Part 4, ‘Morphology’, treats the three clearly distinguished parts of speech: nouns, verbs, and invariables. These are each dealt with in turn, as is the varying strength of suffixal bonds. The presentation is systematic and clear, isolating the commonly used forms for particular attention.

The final part, dealing with diachronic issues, begins by considering other Mongolic dialects. It first examines their influence with reference to their location, and then makes comparisons in order to substantiate the claim that Khamnigan Mongol is exceptionally conservative, noting that there are substantially fewer phonological innovations than in the other living Mongolic languages. Part 5 also summarizes some comparative evidence, tabulating counts of the shared and separating features among five major Mongolic languages.

Four sections in Part 5 relate Khamnigan Mongol to areally close languages: Buryat, Mongol proper, Dagur, and finally Ewenki. First, the notion that Khamnigan Mongol should be regarded as a dialect of Buryat is considered and rejected as politically rather than linguistically motivated, although J acknowledges that there are some features that link the two languages. There is some consideration also of a three-way comparison between Khamnigan Mongol, Buryat, and Mongol proper. The common features with Dagur are also examined, together with the probable origin of these due to the common influence of Ewenki. The final section contrasts the isolation and conservative nature of Khamnigan Mongol with the similar isolation, but without the conservativeness, of Dagur.

The volume concludes with one interlinearized sample text and a short bibliography.

The function of function words and functional categories. By Marcel den Dikken and Christina M. Tortora. (Linguistik aktuell/Linguistics today 78.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2005. Pp. 293. ISBN 9789027228024. $162 (Hb).

Reviewed by Asya Pereltsvaig, Stanford University

This volume is a collection of papers presented at the 19th Comparative Germanic Syntax Workshop, held at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. The papers selected for this volume all address the question of the function of function words and functional categories. This is a brief outline of the contributions in the volume.

C. Jan-Wouter Zwart challenges the widely adopted hypothesis that morphological properties of functional heads (in this instance, on the left periphery) are responsible for whether a language does or does not exhibit verb second. Instead, he places verb second in the domain of narrow syntax and analyzes it as a positional dependency marking strategy. Verb second is also the topic of Ute Bohnacker’s article, which examines the second language acquisition of this phenomenon by Swedish learners of German.

The article by Josef Bayer, Tanja Schmid, and Markus Bader concentrates on the functional superstructure of embedded control infinities with zu, focusing on German (but discussing also Dutch and Bangla). They argue that while ‘extraposed’ zu-infinitives are CPs with a null functional head, ‘intraposed’ zu-infinitives that exhibit no clause-union properties cannot be taken to be null-headed CPs: they project no further than VP. The C-head once again plays an important role in the paper by Marc Richards and Theresa Biberauer, which concerns itself with the question of how best to explain the distribution of expletives in the Germanic languages. Their central hypothesis is that expletives may only be merged in the specifier positions of phase heads—C and v. The former introduces expletives such as German es, while the latter is the merge-site of English-type there-expletives. The contribution by Marika Lekakou is related in as much as she is concerned with the question of whether reflexive markers such as German sich and Dutch zich are argumental lexical categories or dummy functional categories (like the expletives). She argues that while German sich can be either an argument or what she calls a marker of valency reduction, Dutch zich is systematically an argument. The article by Guido Vanden Wyngaerd is concerned with constructions in English where the simple present is used episodically, namely sports commentaries and performatives. His central observation is that all such constructions denote an event of ‘very short duration’ (in contrast to languages like Dutch).

The final two papers in this volume are concerned with functional categories in the nominal domain. The article by Marit Julien is a detailed study of possessive noun phrases throughout Scandinavian, bringing together an impressive array of empirical facts and discussing them against the background of a uniform base configuration, with surface variation resulting from movement operations in the course of the overt syntactic derivation. The paper by Dorian Roehrs zooms in on the left periphery of the extended noun phrase, looking at fillers of the D-head. His central claim is that the approach to phrases like us linguists that takes the pronoun to be in D is correct; yet, he argues that all D-elements are moved to D from a lower functional category.

Overall, this volume makes an excellent contribution to the study of microparametric Germanic syntax as well as to syntactic theory in general.

A grammar of Semelai. By Nicole Kruspe. (Cambridge grammatical descriptions.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xxiii, 493. ISBN 0521814979. $180 (Hb).

Reviewed by Harald Hammarström, Chalmers University

This grammar of Semelai, a revised version of the author’s Ph.D. thesis (University of Melbourne, 1999), is the first-ever full-length description of an Aslian language, and Semelai itself has previously been known only through word lists collected fifty to one hundred years ago. Semelai has approximately 4,100 speakers, who subsist mainly by hunting and gathering. Despite Malay influence, it is not an endangered language at the present time.

The book begins with an overview of research on the Aslian languages, which consist of nineteen languages located in the jungles of the Malay peninsula. This section is complete but short, since there has been surprisingly little research on these languages; to K’s credit, she includes references to work by non-Western scholars. Summaries of the classification of Semelai within Aslian, Aslian within Mon-Khmer, and Mon-Khmer within Austroasiatic are all up to date.

The phonology section is authoritative. Minimal pairs show thirty-two consonants (including a series of unvoiced nasals), ten oral and ten nasal vowels, and no phonemic length, diphthongs, or tone. The section further presents phonotactics, loanword phonology, syllable structure, and comparative notes.

As for morphology, while Semelai has a rich inventory of prefixes, infixes, and suffixes, it is not isolating; but a cursory inspection of the glossed texts at the end of the book shows a morpheme-to-word ratio of not more than two to one—that is, the average word consists of one affix plus one root. A considerable amount of word-prosodic analysis would be needed to account for the affixation processes, which would result in a section that would be of special interest.

Kruspe shows that word classes in Semelai can be robustly distinguished by syntactic and morphological criteria. The open classes are nominals, verbs, and expressives (i.e. ideophones). Except for a small number of ambitransitives, verbs are either transitive or intransitive, with adjectives being a subclass of the intransitives. While expressives, which also occur in nonstandard Malay varieties of the region, exhibit vowel alternations that are irregular for Semelai, there is insufficient evidence for sound symbolism.

Syntactically, Semelai has fixed head-dependent order in phrases, but clause-level constituent order is fluid. For transitive clauses, the most common order is VSO, but SVO sentences exhibit less morphological role marking; for intransitives, neither VS or SV is dominant.

Everything one expects in a typologically oriented reference grammar has been worked on, generally with great systematicity; the discussion covers all kinds of clause combininations, serial verbs, locative prepositions and directionals, classifiers, and quotative constructions, but too little attention is devoted to the expression of tense and aspect. The descriptive style is typically modern; and there are plenty of glossed examples, comments on language contact, and comparisons with Malay and the three Aslian languages (Jah Hut, Temiar, and Jahai) for which grammatical sketches exist.

Crosslinguistic curiosities of Semelai include more number marking on third-person pronouns than on first- or second-person, and an avoidance speech style where mostly nouns but also verbs are tabooed and duly replaced.

This grammar is a must for reference libraries, Southeast Asianists, and typologists. I regret that this well-edited ‘Cambridge grammatical descriptions’ series has been discontinued.

The semantics of polysemy: Reading meaning in English and Warlpiri. By Nick Riemer. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2005. Pp. 487. ISBN 3110183978. $165.20 (Hb).

Reviewed by Martin Hilpert, Rice University

Nick Riemer’s The semantics of polysemy can be divided into two sections. The first four chapters explore the philosophical and methodological underpinnings of cognitive semantics and the study of polysemy. Chs. 5 and 6 present case studies of polysemous English and Warlpiri verbs from the semantic domain of percussion and impact.

Ch. 1 questions the identification of linguistic meaning with conceptualization, an assumption that is championed, for example, by Langacker (1987). The meaning of words such as English above is viewed as a conceptually basic figure-ground configuration. With the later Wittgenstein, R argues that in order to be understood, such a configuration would still need to be interpreted, as would the resulting interpretation, leading to an infinite regress. He concludes that cognitive semantics cannot lay claim to psychological reality, or even scientific validity. Instead, cognitive semantics is viewed as an interpretive enterprise.

Ch. 2 is a critique of the natural semantic metalanguage (NSM) developed by Anna Wierzbicka and colleagues, which aims to offer an alternative to cognitive semantics by defining the meaning of words through a set of universal semantic primitives. R shows that words, contra NSM, need not be understood through component primitives. The commitment to undefinable primitives also leaves a large residue of basic vocabulary unaccounted for. Hence, R does not adopt NSM, but uses ordinary English as a semantic metalanguage.

Ch. 3 examines different types of evidence that characterize a lexeme as polysemous. R proposes that metaphor and metonymy provide a way to organize different senses of a word into a polysemy network. For example, the Warlpiri verb pakarni means both ‘hit’ and ‘kill’. As the two senses are distinct, but connected through a cause for effect metonymy, it is warranted to view pakarni as polysemous.

Ch. 4 develops a typology of semantic extensions that give rise to polysemy. Besides metaphor, R distinguishes three types of metonymies. In effect metonymies, an action stands for its result. In context metonymies, a particular action stands for its wider event frame. Conversely, in constituent metonymies, an action stands for a subpart of its event frame. R’s typology of metonymies thus resembles a classification into cause for effect, part for whole, and whole for part.

Chs. 5 and 6 explore the meanings of verbs of percussion and impact, such as English strike and Warlpiri pakarni ‘hit’. Using dictionary data and field notes, R shows how the proposed semantic extensions allow for a classification of the encountered meanings. For example, A thought has struck me! is motivated through metaphor, while strike a fire is motivated through an effect metonymy.

To summarize, The semantics of polysemy is a thought-provoking book that questions a number of assumptions that are widely held in cognitive linguistics. R rightly points out that cognitive semantics in its current state is an art, rather than a science. Still, not everyone will give up on the psychological reality of semantic representations because of a philosophical argument. A growing body of experimental and corpus-based work in cognitive linguistics promises to address at least some of R’s criticisms in the near future.

Analysing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. By Norman Fairclough. London: Routledge, 2003. Pp. 288. ISBN 0415258936. $39.95.

Reviewed by Bingyun Li, Fujian Normal University

In this well-written and accessible book, Norman Fairclough convincingly shows how a social perspective can be successfully combined into ‘real’ language analysis. The book is divided into four parts. Part 1 (‘Social analysis, discourse analysis, text analysis’) contains three chapters. In Ch. 1 (1–18), F distinguishes text analysis from discourse analysis, touching upon the causal effects of the textual elements of social events on social life. Ch. 2 (21–38) treats the relationship between texts, social events, social practices, and social structures. For F, ‘Any social practice is an articulation of the following elements: action and interaction, social relations, persons, the material world and, discourse’ (25). F also discusses three major types of text meaning: action, representation, and identification. Seeing texts as part of social events, F argues for a relational approach to text analysis. Ch. 3 (39–61) deals with intertextuality and assumptions, pointing out that ‘intertextuality is inevitably selective with respect to what is included and what is excluded from the events and texts represented’ (55). F distinguishes, among other things, three types of assumptions: existential, propositional, and value. I agree with F that ‘making assumptions is one way of being intertextual’ (17). The ideological aspects of assumptions are also discussed.

In Part 2 (‘Genres and action’), Ch. 4 (65–86) looks at three types of genre: dialogue, argument, and narrative, attempting to link the analysis of genres to a number of themes in social research. For F, the individual genres of a text or interaction can be analyzed in terms of activity, social relations, and communication technology. In Ch. 5 (87–104), F, making use of a lot of ‘real’ examples, focuses on meaning relations between sentences and between clauses within sentences. Ch. 6 (105–19) distinguishes two types of speech exchanges (knowledge exchanges and activity exchanges) and three main grammatical moods (declarative, interrogative, and imperative).

In Part 3 (‘Discourses and representations’), Ch. 7 (123–33) focuses on discourses, in which F argues that discourses are ways of representing the world. F also talks about how to differentiate discourses. Ch. 8 elaborates on representations of social events. In Part 4 (‘Styles and identities’), Ch. 9 (159–63) looks at styles, while Ch. 10 (164–90) discusses modality and evaluation, focusing on categories of explicit and implicit evaluation and showing how these two analytical perspectives can be used to address a range of social issues. Ch. 11 (191–211) summarizes the major ideas in the preceding chapters in the form of questions and presents a short ‘manifesto’ for the critical discourse analysis research program.

At the very beginning of each chapter there are boxes to highlight the important text-analysis issues and social-research issues covered in the chapter, and at the end of each chapter there is a summary. The book ends with glossaries of key terms and key theorists, an appendix of texts, references, and an index. In this sense, the book is very reader-friendly. Another strong point is that F makes use of a variety of ‘real’ language data (advertisements in newspapers, interviews, personal speeches, radio news reports, TV debates, etc.). This book should be welcomed by those looking for ways to analyze real language data without neglecting the social outlook. However, I find it odd that Ch. 9 on style is unusually short, as the essential role of style should never be underestimated. The second thing I would like to point out is that although discourses are ways of representing the world, as discussed in Ch. 7, the world represented by discourses is not necessarily the one we have. Third, is it really easy and necessary to make a distinction between text analysis and discourse? Finally, one has to wonder what is meant by ‘real language data’, especially since errors and verbal missteps abound in actual usage.