The contest of language: Before and beyond nationalism. Ed. by W. Martin Bloomer. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005. Pp. 274. ISBN 9780268021917. $30.

Reviewed by Pramod K. Nayar, University of Hyderabad

A collection of essays that deals with the links between language and national–cultural identity, The contest of language is a useful, if disconcertingly eclectic, volume. It is useful to study the political history of a language when nationalism (or the nation, as we know it today) did not exist. The opening essays, dealing with Latin, Syriac, and the Irish lexicon, locate the modes through which certain languages acquired dominance—modes that involve institutional, academic, and textual politics in social, political, and cultural realms. Thus, while Latin humanistic culture was the cornerstone of the debates over Italian in Dante’s time, Syriac’s negotiations with Greek (and emergent Christianity) and the Irish-Gaelic lexicon’s working with contemporary ideas of kingship and sovereignty both point to very complex engagements with structures of political, mercantile, and theological power. Nationalism, these essays demonstrate, was often peripheral in communities, even though strong views of ethnic identities or popular (and vernacular) culture did exist. Language and imperial divisive politics have often gone together.

Studying late antiquity, Dimitri Gutas shows how non-Arabs were initially excluded from the ambit because Islam was rooted in Arabic, and it took the Abbasid dynasty to use Arabic culture, based on the language, to unite the empire. Haun Saussy demonstrates that philosophers who wrote language manuals actually invented social communication by drafting rules of linguistic conduct. Susan Blum’s essay shows how the Chinese rarely worry about linguistic difficulty and how most people acquire multiple varieties of language—her argument ties in with Suzanne Romaine’s idea of discrete languages as a European invention. Thus, Blum shows, linguism and nationalism don’t always go together. Tony Crowley explores both the Irish resistance to and support for the English language in the early modern period, and also the ways in which Gaelic has survived.

Richard Hunter returns to classical Greece to explore, in great detail, the link of language evolution with literary genres. Looking at Greek poetry, Hunter explores debates over authenticity and purity with the appropriation of genres into the classical scheme. Martin Bloomer’s fascinating essay shows how literary figures as diverse as Robert Browning and Seamus Heaney have retained Latin as a source of memory, pointing to the fact that Latin is not really a dead language because it is the stuff of memory itself. The battle against English and the compulsory enshrinement of Gaelic, Seamus Deane argues, has caused its own slow demise. Vittorio Hösle argues that a process of inversion is taking place, where English is essaying the role of Latin as the new academic lingua franca.

The volume’s focus on national and cultural identity as they are shaped by language is very welcome. The book’s organization, which returns to antiquity and classical times, shows how debates about languages have often excluded the nation from their focus. In other cases, nationalism has directly affected the ‘shape’ of language. The collection’s range, both temporal and geopolitical, provides an overarching view of these debates. This is a useful historical study of languages and the many ways they interact with politics.

Hearing gesture: How our hands help us think. By Susan Goldin-Meadow. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003. Pp. 304. ISBN 0674018370. $16.95.

Reviewed by Sandra Cristina Becker, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais

Susan Goldin-Meadow has established a remarkable track record of expressive publishing, investigating language development, language structure, and, above all, the relationship between language and gesture. Her work invariably stands out due to its exploratory character. As with every book produced by Goldin-Meadow, the reader of Hearing gesture will definitely profit from its didactic, step-by-step, and user-friendly style. She provides ample supporting material for her claims; illustrative and carefully explanatory vignettes, graphs, and schemas that a book on gesture ought to have; examples of numerous studies carried out on gestures; a well-designed methodological approach; and even better theorizing.

The volume is divided into four parts. The first part introduces the notion of gesture and the language it conveys. The author does not neglect building a picture of how integrated these two systems are. She also delineates distinct categories of gestures and offers some glimpses of semantic and pragmatic characteristics of nonverbal communication. Especially revealing are the studies on mismatching described in Ch. 4. As pointed out, mismatch may signal the readiness to learn and profit from new input. Understanding the path to learning seems to depend on investigating the relation between speech and gesture.

Do gestures communicate? Is substantive information conveyed by gestures? Can toddlers and slightly older children make pragmatic inferences from nonverbal interactions? These and more intriguing questions are addressed in the second part of this volume. Particularly welcome are Chs. 7 and 8 covering in clear language how much everyone learns through gestures. The influence and impact on how students interpret their teacher’s explanations and, conversely, on how teachers understand their student’s ideas are explored deeply. A number of studies on the influence of gestures on communication in different areas, namely therapy sessions and forensic interviews, illustrate the assumptions raised and highlight the importance of tracking gestures and speech in those domains.

Gestures have communicative and cognitive functions. In G’s own words, ‘The mechanism by which we produce gestures, however, need not involve communication and the listener’ (136). Based on this assumption, Part 3 explores the force that drives us to gesture. G describes experiments with congenitally blind individuals, and mentions various studies that have manipulated the presence of a listener. To support the fact that gesturing reduces demands on a speaker’s cognitive effort, a considerable number of investigations are depicted in detail.

The last chapters focus mainly on interactions that rely purely on nonverbal language, when gestures assume all the burden of communication. A broad view of how deaf communities explore the iconic function of hand gestures is offered, together with interesting remarks on mouth movements produced by signers. Particularly absorbing are the reports on language development and specific language impairment (SLI), not to mention the accounts of situations when talk is restricted by the social world, as for religious observance, mourning, or in the case of indigenous communities that did not share a spoken language.

I see the detailed description of experiments and studies as a plus, revealing the thoughtfulness that has gone into this volume. I appraise this book as a welcome step-up to the investigations of human cognition, language, and thought. This is without doubt an invaluable addition to the reference library of everyone, expert or lay, interested in exploring human cognition. I recommend it without any reservations to those engaged in the study of gestural connection to language and thought.

The handbook of bilingualism. Ed. by Tej K. Bhatia and William C. Ritchie. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004. Pp. xviii, 884. ISBN 0631227342. $146.95 (Hb).

Reviewed by Bingyun Li, Fujian Normal University

This handbook is divided into four parts. Part 1, ‘Overview and foundations’, presents some foundational issues of bilingualism (John V. Edwards) and conceptual and methodological issues in studying bilingualism (François Grosjean). It is a pity that Grosjean does not touch upon how to collect, transcribe, and categorize naturalistic data or on problems related to data analysis.

Part 2, ‘Neurological and psychological aspects of bilingualism’, is divided into five sections. Section 1, ‘Neurology’, contains only one chapter, which looks at the phenomenon of bilingual aphasia (Elizabeth Ijalba, Loraine K. Obler, and Shyamala Chengappa). Section 2, ‘Approaches to bilingualism and language acquisition’, deals with the development of child bilingualism (Jürgen M. Meisel) and the relationship between bilingualism and second language acquisition (Yuko G. Butler and Kenji Hakuta). Section 3, ‘Bilingual language use: Knowledge, comprehension, and production’, focuses on how grammar plays a role in bilinguals’ speech comprehension and production. It would be better if pragmatic aspects of bilingual language use were also included. Section 4, ‘Bilingualism: Memory, cognition, and emotion’, looks at bilingual memory (Roberto Heredia and Jefferey M. Brown) and emotional and mental aspects of bilinguals (Jeanette Altarriba and Rachel Morier). The final section, ‘The bilingual’s repertoire: Code mixing, code switching, and speech accommodation’, treats code mixing, code switching, and speech accommodation, the more extensively researched areas in bilingualism. Of particular note are Ch. 13, ‘Social and psychological factors in language mixing’ (William C. Ritchie and Tej K. Bhatia), and Ch. 14, ‘Bilingual accommodation’ (Itesh Sachdev and Howard Giles), the latter of which ‘aims to provide a general overview of a social psychological approach to bilingual communication that springboards from notions of bilingual accommodation’ (353).

Part 3, ‘Societal bilingualism and its effects’, is divided into two sections and focuses on how social factors have an important bearing upon bilingualism. The first section, ‘Language contact, maintenance, and endangerment’ consists of five chapters. Ch. 15, ‘The bilingual and multilingual community’ (Suzanne Romaine), provides an overview of types of bilingual and multilingual communities. Ch. 16, ‘Language maintenance, language shift, and reversing language shift’ (Joshua A. Fishman), presents a blueprint for the restoration of endangered languages, an issue of major concern to many members of linguistic minorities. Ch. 17, ‘Minority and endangered languages’ (Nancy C. Dorian), provides an in-depth review of a wide variety of issues concerning the process of language endangerment. Ch. 18, ‘Multilingualism in linguistic history: Creolization and indigenization’ (Salikoko Mufwene), argues against the traditional view that special processes of creolization and indigenization occur in multilingual societies and in favor of the notion that the processes occur in any case of language change determined by language contact. Finally, Ingrid Piller and Aneta Pavlenko (Ch. 19, ‘Bilingualism and gender’) discuss gender and bilingualism in various contexts.

In Section 2 of Part 3, ‘Bilingualism: The media, education, and literacy’, Ch. 20 (‘Bilingualism in the global media and advertising’ by Tej K. Bhatia and William C. Ritchie) is a review of work on the place of languages in a bi-/multilingual society in the media in general and in advertising in particular. It addresses the question of why more than one language might be used in the advertiser’s effort to attract buyers for products and services. Ch. 21, ‘What do we know about bilingual education for majority-language students?’ (Fred Genesee), reviews in depth the research on one case of bilingual education. Ch. 22, ‘The impact of bilingualism on language and literacy development’ (Ellen Bialystok), discusses the wide range of factors that contribute to or detract from success in the attainment of literacy in bilinguals.

Part 4, ‘Global perspectives and challenges: Case studies’, examines the state of bilingualism in the Americas, in Europe, in Southern Africa, in East, South, and Central Asia, and finally, in the Middle East and in North Africa.

All in all, this handbook covers current important issues in bilingualism studies and points to future possible directions. It promises to be the standard reference guide to research on bilingualism.

Le français en contact avec l’anglais au Cameroun. By Edmond Biloa. (LINCOM studies in French linguistics 4.) Munich: LINCOM Europa, 2006. Pp. iv, 194. ISBN 3895864897. $69.60.

Reviewed by Angela Bartens, University of Helsinki

With 279 living languages according to the Ethnologue database, Cameroon features a singularly high degree of linguistic diversity. While one might expect that the engineers of Cameroonian independence would have opted for one official language to unite the nation, colonial history and the initially federal union of the Cameroons dictated otherwise: in 1961, both English and French were declared official languages. In his most recent monograph, Edmond Biloa, best known for his work on the Cameroonian Bantu language Tuki and on Cameroonian French, tackles the ensuing situation of language contact and conflict.

The volume begins with a general discussion of language contact and conflict, followed by a short chapter on the French-English bilingualism of Cameroon. Chs. 3 and 4 deal with Cameroonian English and French, respectively. When discussing the tense-mood-aspect (TMA) system and other structures of Pidgin English (50–54), B notes parallel structures from the Grassfields Bantu language Lamso but ignores the fact that the structures in question are shared by most Atlantic English-based creoles. Several of the examples cited as typical of Cameroonian English are not exclusive to it and some are even acceptable in Standard English. Likewise, lexical items and structures shared by other varieties of French are not recognized in a satisfactory manner: recognition occurs to some degree as far as European French is concerned, but not at all in the case of other African varieties. Chs. 5–7 deal with the sociolinguistic and didactic aspects of the contact situation and the mutual influence of one language on the other. For sociolinguistic reasons, the French influence on English is much stronger than vice versa. There is considerable overlap between these and preceding chapters: many of the examples given in Chs. 6 and 7 are repetitions from Chs. 3 and 4, and one wonders why the corresponding chapters were not merged in the first place. One may also note that, oddly, Camfranglais is not recognized as an instance of code-switching but is considered a result of imperfect language acquisition (143).

Apart from sometimes unfortunate typographic errors that are not the author’s responsibility, certain passages suffer from the fact that B relies too heavily on the work of colleagues. It should be said to his credit that it is always difficult to produce accurate panoramic descriptions that go beyond one’s original area of specialization. To my knowledge, no single researcher has attempted to tackle the entire language-contact scenario in question. The volume under review constitutes an important contribution that will doubtlessly motivate others to look deeper into the intricacies of Cameroonian French-English contact.

The enlightening postscript by George Echu, ‘Official bilingualism in Cameroon: From myth to reality’ (175–87), demonstrates that it will still take effort and time to reconcile the theory and practice of bilingualism in Cameroon so that it can become an effective tool of national unity.

An Ili Salar vocabulary: Introduction and a provisional Salar-English lexicon. By Abdurishid Yakup. (Contribution to the studies of Eurasian languages 5.) Tokyo: Department of Linguistics, University of Tokyo, 2002. Pp. xiv, 182. OCLC 60659716.

Reviewed by Craig Farrow, SIL International

Publications on the Salar language (primarily Qinghai Province, China) are few and far between, and so An Ili Salar vocabulary is a welcome contribution, especially since it is the first publication to focus on the Ili variety (Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, China; population in 1985 census: 3,706). Although the book is not a treatise on the Salar language (that is not its intent), Abdurishid Yakup offers interesting insights into the historical development of the Ili variety and helpful comparisons with the many languages it has been in contact with.

The main factor that sets this variety of Salar apart from the varieties spoken in Qinghai is that the language of wider communication in Ili is Uyghur, as opposed to Mandarin Chinese. ‘Unlike Qinghai Salars, not many Salars in Xinjiang are able to communicate in Chinese’ (19), and since Salar has no written script ‘the Salars use Modern Uyghur as the main literary medium’ (20). The Ili Salars have migrated from Qinghai over the last hundred years and Y believes that Ili Salar is regaining Turkic morphological features from Uyghur that had been almost lost in Qinghai. This leads him to conclude that Salar’s recent exposure to a related language, after being isolated from Turkic languages for a long time, has resulted in a faster assimilation of Uyghur features than would normally be expected through contact with languages of different language families.

In light of the variety of languages that Salar speakers have been in contact with over the last centuries, Y’s discussion of the influence that contact with related and unrelated languages has had on Ili Salar is noteworthy. In fact, a chief strength of this work is the frequent presentation of cognates from the various contact languages—Chinese, Tibetan, Uyghur, Kazakh, and Arabic—as well as relevant comparisons with the Qinghai variety of Salar. Y not only gives illustrative examples in the introduction, but borrowings from contact languages are also an integral part of the lexicon.

The lexicon itself is, of course, the main part of this work. It consists of around 5,000 entries covering an extensive range of primarily concrete lexemes. Lexemes are transcribed in IPA using a mixture of phonemic and phonetic representations (to illustrate how various phonemes are realized), although these are not marked in any way, so it is not always clear which is which. Glosses are supplied in English, and, where Y has identified borrowings from other languages, he also gives the likely source lexemes. A significant feature of the lexicon is numerous example phrases and collocations, with the result that this work also provides some basic morphological and grammatical data.

Y also briefly includes a comparison between Ili Salar phonology and the Qinghai (Gaizi/Jiezi) variety, a history of the linguistic classification of Salar, a good background and historical summary of the Ili Salar people, cultural and sociolinguistic observations, and a thorough bibliography.

Overall, this work is a valuable contribution to the linguistic literature. Being the first publication on Ili Salar, it provides good groundwork for further study and comparison between Salar varieties. It is also a useful resource for researchers interested in the dynamics of language contact, especially among Central Asian languages.

William Dwight Whitney and the science of language. By Stephen G. Alter. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. Pp. 339. ISBN 0801880203. $50 (Hb).

Reviewed by Gert Guthenberg, University of Georgia

Stephen G. Alter’s book on William Dwight Whitney (1827–1894) is the first complete biography of this important nineteenth-century American linguist and orientalist. Its main accomplishment is that it succeeds in unveiling Whitney’s sometimes downplayed yet pivotal contributions to the development of the study of general linguistics during the past century.

A very convincingly shows the influence Whitney had on the neogrammarian, Bloomfieldian, and structuralist schools, as well as on all forms of modern sociolinguistically oriented research. Whitney introduced the uniformitarian principle to the field of linguistics, rejecting the ‘organic’ view of language history that prevailed in his day. This allowed him to count grammatical analogy as an important factor in language change, a view that was not possible as long as language change was conceptualized in terms of degradation of an original systematic and structured stage. In allowing greater emphasis on ongoing processes of language change as well as on synchronic language states, the uniformitarian principle cleared the path for modern approaches to the study of language. In opposition to his contemporary adherents of the organic view, Whitney treated language as a social institution. This approach was at odds with the neogrammarian ‘mechanical’ rules of change, as well as the structuralist and, eventually, Chomskyan focus on an ideal language state that lead them to generalize from the speech of the individual to that of a group.

A demonstrates the multiple aspects of Whitney’s influence. Many of his ideas, ground-breaking and controversial when they first appeared, quickly became part of common wisdom among linguists. Since Whitney’s theories both cleared the path for many later schools of linguistic research and at the same time anticipated the critique that these schools eventually would have to face, no Whitney school of linguistic thought has ever developed. Although he never rejected the proposal that sound change acts without exceptions, he pointed out inconsistencies and variation in the speech of individuals and the linguistic community as a whole. He therefore did not pass for a mainstream neogrammarian. Although Whitney saw the material and formal aspects of language in a reciprocal relationship on a strictly synchronic plane, his theory could not be considered structuralism since he added that meaning is not only generated by word oppositions but also imposed by social convention.

A shows the importance Whitney’s theory had for the development of sociolinguistics and lexical diffusionism in the late 1960s. Whitney’s recognition of the present moment of exchange between speakers as a source of knowledge about any and every aspect of language change laid the groundwork for sociolinguists’ investigation of ongoing language change. In both his Sanskrit grammar (1879) and Proportional elements of English utterance (1874), Whitney showed a great interest in the relative frequencies of speech sounds in these two languages. In this research Whitney anticipates not only phonemic analysis in general, as pointed out by Leonard Bloomfield, but also the focus on frequency of use as determining mental representation in later usage-based approaches to the study of language.

The mathematics of language. By Marcus Kracht. (Studies in generative grammar 63.) Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003. Pp. xvi, 589. ISBN 3110176203. $137.20 (Hb).

Reviewed by Sean A. Fulop, California State University Fresno

Books in mathematical linguistics are not published very often, and this one is certainly a welcome addition to the literature, as it is a highly independent and novel treatment of many mathematical aspects of linguistics. Kracht begins with a brief introduction that serves as an overview of the book, highlighting a major innovation of his overall approach to the mathematical modeling of language. In traditional mathematical linguistics, deriving from Noam Chomsky’s early work in the late 1950s, a formal language is simply a set of sentences, whether treated as strings simpliciter (most commonly) or as syntactic structures of some kind (occasionally done; cf. Philip Miller, Strong generative capacity, CSLI Publications, 1999), but K brings meanings into the fold and also treats elements of every syntactic category in a more egalitarian kind of formal model. For K, a formal language is an ‘algebra of signs’, where a sign consists of its exponent (string), its syntactic category, and its meaning. In this way, all the strings of every syntactic category can be admitted into the language and given interpretations as a result of his algebraic view—in algebra, one has a set of elements together with operations that act on some of the elements to yield other elements, so that both parts and wholes are included, as it were.

Ch. 1, ‘Fundamental structures’, presents the needed mathematical preliminaries, but K’s methods are quite novel because his command of mathematics is evidently great. Nowhere does he rely on ‘standard’ treatments, preferring to make everything up his own way from more basic principles. This has the advantage of presenting a highly unified perspective that is quite interesting, but it comes with the drawback that even the experienced mathematical linguist will find it essential to actually read the chapter in order to understand the rest of the book. It is clear from the outset that here we have no ordinary mathematical methods book in the vein of Barbara Partee, Alice ter Meulen, and Robert Wall’s Mathematical methods in linguistics (Kluwer, 1991). It also becomes clear very quickly that a decent amount of mathematics experience is a prerequisite. The chapter includes an interesting and original section on fundamentals of linguistics.

Ch. 2, ‘Context free languages’, discusses recognition and parsing in connection with regular, context-free, and semilinear languages, concluding with a useful section addressing the perennially confusing question of whether natural languages are context-free. Ch. 3, ‘Categorial grammar and formal semantics’, introduces the central novel contributions of the work mentioned above, viz. treating languages as algebras of signs that admit compositionally interpreted meanings. Here K also treats basic logic, lambda calculus, combinatory logic, and Montague semantics from his own perspective, including a tutorial run-through of Pentus’s proof that Joachim Lambek’s syntactic calculus generates exactly the context-free languages.

Ch. 4, ‘Semantics’, delves into various aspects of formal semantics, including Boolean semantics, intensionality issues, binding and quantification, and even dynamic semantics of discourse. Ch. 5, ‘PTIME languages’, discusses various approaches to formal grammar, all possessing polynomial-time parsing algorithms and loosely describable as ‘mildly context-sensitive’, namely literal-movement grammars, linear context-free rewrite systems, tree-adjoining grammars, index grammars, and K’s own revisionist ‘de Saussure grammars’.

The sixth and final chapter, ‘The model theory of linguistic structures’, presents a model-theoretical approach to various elements of formal linguistic structure, including categories, strings, allophones and phonemes (no, phonology is not ignored here as usual), and also ordered trees. K then treats numerous well-known grammar formalisms using the preceding groundwork, viz. transformational grammar, generalized and head-driven phrase structure grammar, and finally government and binding theory, after which the book simply stops in true mathematician’s form (mathematicians often do without such niceties as conclusions).

At the end, one finds a valuable bibliography that includes all relevant primary sources, and an excellent index that includes the numerous arcane symbols—handy when the reader has forgotten a definition. All in all, it is a wonderful book, highly worth studying (one can hardly ‘read’ the book in the normal sense of the word). The extremely original approaches that are introduced everywhere get a bit draining because no amount of familiarity with the literature will ease the reader’s burden, but they also have the great merit of providing an uncommonly uniform perspective on a very wide range of topics that one would expect to suffer from a disjointed array of approaches. The book includes useful exercises at the end of most sections (247 in all!), and this makes it easy to use for teaching (advanced) courses.

One slight quibble with K’s book is that it might better be titled ‘The mathematics of linguistics’, since it is really a unified set of tools for developing and evaluating linguistic formalisms, and does not really consider very many mathematical properties of languages themselves. That said, the book derives numerous important facts about the mathematical properties of linguistic theories that all linguists should be aware of, not least of which are: (i) Because so many currently studied syntactic formal frameworks possess identical language-generating power, empirical results showing that a particular framework can account for certain syntactic facts in this or that language are as worthless as they are sophistic; (ii) There is no way to determine a unique set of phonemes of a language, so there can be no single correct phoneme inventory.

A feature-based syntax of functional categories. By Michael Hegarty. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2005. ISBN 3110184133. $109.20 (Hb).

Reviewed by Antje Lahne, University of Leipzig

In this book, Michael Hegarty provides a study of the nature of functional categories in a minimalist model of grammar. The central point of the theory is a feature-based analysis of the structure and mapping of functional categories. It is then shown that this approach accounts for a number of syntactic phenomena, including Germanic V2, as well for data from language acquisition and specific language impairment (SLI).

Ch. 2 (‘A feature-based derivation of functional heads’) investigates the function and form of functional categories in a movement-based generative model of grammar. H rejects the concept of features projecting automatically and invariantly onto preidentified categories, and proposes an analysis of functional categories as matrices of morphosyntactic and semantic features (along the lines advocated by Alessandra Giorgi and Fabio Pianesi in their work of the late 1990s). Functional categories, being originally complex, are made up of distinctive bundles of features. These bundles are feature matrices that are mapped onto functional categories in the numeration. There are principles that constrain this mapping process. Ordered checking operations are guaranteed by ordered feature sequences.

Ch. 3 (‘Germanic verb-second and expletive subjects’) shows how this approach can be implemented to account for Germanic verb-second phenomena (in an approach similar to that taken by Owen Rambow and Beatrice Santorini in the mid-1990s) and expletive subjects in Germanic languages. Crosslinguistic variation is explained by differences in feature ranking and divergent constraints on features, which can result in different matrices of features being projected as functional categories.

Ch. 4 (‘Aspects of clitic placement and clitic climbing’) applies the aforementioned mapping principles to account for data involving clitic placement and clitic climbing in Romance languages.

Ch. 5 (‘Tenseless clauses and coordination’) provides an analysis for coordination structures of the type He should check out the book tomorrow and her return it on Saturday, and shows that it also covers small-clause complements of perception verbs.

Ch. 6 (‘The acquisition of functional features’) examines various syntactic constructions in early child English. The author argues that the same operations of functional-category construction are at work in child and adult grammar. The observed differences between the two systems are explained by child language operating on more limited feature inventories, which results in limitations for the number of functional categories projected within a clause.

Ch. 7 (‘The acquisition of adult functional features’) focuses on the development from child to adult grammar, yielding a more comprehensive explanation for the given data by assuming a development in the representational resources of functional features.

Ch. 8 (‘The representation of functional categories as a factor in specific language impairment’) applies the approach developed in the book to data on SLI. Basically, SLI is defined as a deficit in the representational resources required to project multiple functional categories within a single clause.

H’s book is a thought-provoking contribution, presenting several ideas that would merit being worked out in more detail. For example, the notion of functional categories entering the derivation as complex elements (i.e. made up of multiple features) contradicts basic assumptions of the cartographic approach to syntactic structures associated with work of Luigi Rizzi in the late 1990s. It would therefore be a rewarding enterprise to implement the idea of originally complex functional categories sketched out in the book more consequently (thus yielding a system opposing Rizzi’s more recent ‘local simplicity’ approach) and to write out explicitly how the mapping of functional features from the lexicon to the numeration works, and how the notions of ‘feature sequence’ and ‘ordered feature satisfaction’ can be implemented in a minimalist model (presumably not by referring to linearity rules).

A point of criticism is that the publisher’s use of endnotes rather than footnotes is a completely unnecessary nuisance to the reader. Overall, the value and interest of this contribution lies in the fact that it convincingly shows that a feature-based approach to grammar design has the potential to bring forth effective analyses and correct predictions in many fields of syntactic research.

Fundamentos de semántica composicional. By María Victoria Escandell Vidal. (Ariel lingüística.) Barcelona: Ariel, 2004. Pp. 349. ISBN 8434482568. €27.

Reviewed by Luis Alonso-Ovalle, University of Massachusetts

This book is an introduction to formal semantics aimed primarily at a Spanish-speaking audience with little or no background in formal linguistics. The volume is divided into ten chapters, which are conceptually organized in three units. The first three chapters are a broad introduction to some fundamentals of formal semantics (the assumption that the meaning of a sentence is given by its truth conditions, and the importance of the principle of compositionality). The next four chapters introduce an extensional semantics. Ch. 4 considers some basic semantic relations (entailment, logical equivalence, presupposition) and discusses the standard propositional-logic semantics of conjunction, disjunction, and the material conditional. Ch. 5 develops a semantics for a language containing proper names, adjectives, and both transitive and intransitive verbs. Ch. 6 is devoted to generalized quantifiers, and Ch. 7 to the semantics of adjectives (intersective, subsective, intensional) and relative clauses. The book concludes with a lightweight discussion of some intensional constructions. Ch. 8 introduces a Reichenbach-style temporal semantics; Ch. 9 discusses the semantics of some locative and temporal adjuncts, and Ch. 10 some modal constructions, including counterfactual conditionals and propositional attitude predicates. A brief introduction to naive set theory is included in an appendix.

The volume is more an overview of some topics of research in formal semantics than an illustration of the application of formal methods to the analysis of natural language. Its intended audience will find it provides a useful bird’s eye view of the discipline, although a more detailed consideration of the Spanish data is likely to be desired.

Formal semantics has seen an increasing interest in the analysis of languages that have been traditionally underrepresented in the literature. The publication of this book should therefore be welcomed as an opportunity to foster further semantic research on Spanish.

Image, language, brain. Ed. by Alec Marantz, Yasushi Miyashita, and Wayne O’Neil. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2000. Pp. 272. ISBN 0262133717. $60 (Hb).

Reviewed by Jyrki Tuomainen, University College London

Linguistic description of language behavior and accounts of brain functions underlying language processing are currently not compatible with each other. The background of this book edited by Alec Marantz and his colleagues is the Mind Articulation Project, which strives to bridge the gap between linguists and cognitive neuroscientists. To reach this goal, it tries to implement the successful approach of visual neuroscience to the study of language and the brain. The book, based on presentations given in Tokyo in 1998 at the first symposium of the Mind Articulation Project, is an excellent introduction for linguists and other professionals who are interested in brain imaging of experimental research on language and other cognitive functions.

Image, language, brain consists of two parts, ‘Language and the brain’ (seven chapters) and ‘Image and the brain’ (five chapters), and covers a wide variety of topics on cognition and brain functions. The twelve chapters and the introduction are written by forefront linguists, cognitive scientists, psychologists, and cognitive neuroscientists who bring on their expertise with a clarity one can only admire. Most of the chapters are accessible to readers without much of previous conceptual machinery required by cognitive neuroscience, or linguistics for that matter.

The introduction by the editors appropriately sets the scene for the book and the Mind Articulation Project. It provides the reader with many of the basic concepts and background information needed to tackle the difficulties in correlating mind and brain. Another excellent feature is that it presents testable predictions about how linguistic operations could be carried out in the brain. Furthermore, the introduction cautions against overinterpreting the results of brain-imaging studies, and one is reminded, rightfully, that mapping of brain activity to a function is most useful when much is already known about the brain area that is presumably activated by a specific function. The other side of the coin is that brain imaging of cognitive functions in its best form is a business in which solid functional models of cognitive function guide the interpretation of brain activation patterns. Thus, brain imaging of cognitive functions should not be just a hunt for ‘blobs’ (i.e. activation spots in the brain images) for which a function will be assigned using hindsight and without proper task analysis of behavior.

In line with the tone of the introduction, in Ch. 1, Noam Chomsky suggests that despite extensive progress and optimism in many areas that investigate brain, behavior, and cognitive faculties, we are still a long way from the solution of the ‘mind-body’ problem, and there is still a lot to do with regard to understanding the brain correlates of much simpler cognitive processes than speech and language.

In Ch. 2, David Poeppel and Alec Marantz present a valuable review of different neuroimaging techniques that are used in investigating speech processing (which in this context denotes speech perception). This is a valuable chapter in pointing out the difficulties in trying to tease out different processing levels in speech perception. One can conclude that we are far from understanding the different transformations the speech signal undergoes, and are even further from neuroscientific evidence of a single abstract phonological component that would subserve both production and perception of speech.

In Ch. 3, Jacques Mehler, Anne Christophe, and Franck Ramus give an account of the initial and often highly remarkable abilities of the infant to recognize complex auditory phenomena such as the rhythm of the mother tongue, voice of the mother, sensitivity to auditory contrasts that underlie phonetic categories, and so on. They present a version of their phonology class hypothesis (refined in their later publications), one corollary of which is that infants are sensitive to the rhythmic aspects of language. The reason for this might be that the fetus has access to the prosodic features of speech, which are more tolerant to the low-pass filtering properties of the womb and abdominal wall than, for example, the acoustic features that correlate with phonetic categories.

Ch. 4, by Willem Levelt and Peter Indefrey, begins with a review of the recent version of a model of lexical access in speech production by Levelt and his coworkers. The authors then summarize the meta-analysis of brain-imaging studies of speech production by Indefrey and Levelt (2000; further refined in Indefrey & Levelt 2004). This is an important meta-analysis in the realm of psycholinguistics and brain imaging and should be read by all who are interested in the psycholinguistics of speech production.

Echoing one of the general themes of the book, in Ch. 5, Edward Gibson’s research testifies for the primacy of behavioral models and suggests that most of the progress in understanding the processing of syntactic structures owes to behavioral studies. The latest version of his dependency locality theory is presented in some detail, focusing on two resource-consuming aspects of syntactic parsing, namely, performing structural integrations (i.e. connecting words into the structure for the input so far) and storage cost (i.e. usage of working memory in keeping track of incomplete dependencies).

Ch. 6, by Angela Friederici, introduces a tentative model of the neuronal dynamics of auditory language comprehension. One interesting and commendable aspect of this model is that it includes prosody as an important processing component that makes a lot of information about syntactic and phonological structures available for the language processor. Ch. 7, by Masao Ito, provides an account of control functions of cognition and language.

Part 2 begins with a chapter entitled ‘Imaging neuroscience: System-level studies of the physiology and anatomy of human cognition’, by Richard Frakowiak. It illustrates the systemic approach to brain functions and brain imaging, which emphasizes the functional connectivity of different brain areas underlying specific cognitive processes. Ch. 9, by Hiroshi Shibasaki, describes the central control mechanisms of voluntary movement studied by multidisciplinary noninvasive approaches. Ch. 10, by Kensuki Sekihara, David Poeppel, Alec Marantz, and Yasushi Miyashita, focuses on the inverse problem in neuroimaging and describes how an ‘eigenstructure-based’ approach can be applied to extracting localized cortical activity from magneto-encephalographic (MEG) data. This chapter is valuable to expert readers, but it is an oddball in this book because it requires a mathematical background that one cannot expect from the audience the book is intended for. Ch. 11, by John Reynolds and Robert Desimone, focuses on competitive mechanisms subserving selective visual attention, and finally, Ch. 12, by Yasushi Miyashita, deals with the neurophysiological basis of visual imagery.

Overall, this book is an elegant example of research on the mind-body problem; it provides an account of an enterprise harnessed with enthusiasm created by current advancement in the methodology in brain imaging, yet accompanied with words of warning not to use advanced brain-imaging technology just to ‘see what’s happening in the brain’ without theory and prediction of what the outcome might be. One can never emphasize too often that true progress in (cognitive neuro)science lies in clever research ideas directly related to models and theories about the human mind.