The complete code of Hammurabi. 2 vols. By H.-Dieter Viel. Munich: LINCOM Europa, 2005. Pp. 799. ISBN 3895868604. $158.40.

Reviewed by Magnus Widell, University of Chicago

The large work under review here is an essentially unrevised, albeit slightly reorganized, English translation of the author’s German book Der Codex Hammurapi (Göttingen: Duehrkoph & Radicke, 2002). After a rather unclear map of Mesopotamia and a short acknowledgment, Viel offers a few words about the motives and methodology of the book (6–7). According to this section, the main reason for writing the book is to address the inconsistencies in previous hand copies of the Codex Hammurabi (CH), and to facilitate the study of this text for students and lay people of Assyriology. The Old Babylonian signs used in the book are based on E. Bergmann’s Codex Hammurabi: Textus Primigenius (Rome: Pontificium Institutum Biblicum, 1953) and on a replica of the stele itself, which was available to V in the Knauf-Museum Iphofen. By including a complete sign list of all of the variants of the Old Babylonian monumental signs used in the CH, V hopes to provide the student with an easy and comprehensive tool for reading the text.

The statement of purpose is followed by a rather meager description of the codex and the stela of Hammurabi, in which several confusing and unsubstantiated statements are made. For example, V writes: ‘It is certain that to a large extent the drastic punishments were in practice not applied’ (10). Unfortunately, V does not explain why this is certain, nor does he provide any bibliographical references to a discussion of this issue. V also writes that the bloody punishments of Old Babylonian Law set it apart from the jurisdiction of Sumerian law, and that the ‘origin of these innovations must undoubtedly be attributed to so-called Canaanite classes’ (9–10). It’s not clear to the reviewer why anything in the CH should be attributed to ‘Canaanite classes’ (or even what ‘Canaanite classes’ exactly is supposed to mean).

The following chapter, ‘Structure of the Codex Hammurabi’ (13–70), attempts to introduce the student to the different persons, deities, buildings, and cities/countries occurring in the CH. While such an introduction in itself may be an excellent idea, the abysmal quality of both the language and the content of the chapter does not make this text suitable for anyone, especially not for students or lay people. The problems, misunderstandings, and inaccuracies in this chapter are too numerous to be listed here, but there are a few examples that can be considered representative for the entire chapter. The examples speak for themselves and require no further comments. Under Sin-muballit, V writes: ‘Remarkable is that under the eleven kings of the I. dynasty of Babylon only the predecessor of Sumula’il and he himself beared [sic] an Akkadian name. All other kings have names of Semitic origin’ (17). On page 32, we learn that Nintu is the Akkadian version of the Sumerian Ninhursag. Often, the poor English in the section completely distorts the meaning of a statement. For example, the description of Shamash begins: ‘The Semitic word for son became to the name of the Babylonian god of the sun, who sees everything during the day’ (33).

The remainder of the first volume is dedicated to the various cuneiform signs found in the CH (75–346) and a ‘Grammar’, which consists of five pages of paradigms (350–54). V provides a number of specialized lists with different signs or expressions. These lists, which cover both the monumental Old Babylonian signs used in the stele and their Neo-Assyrian equivalents, which often is the first type of cuneiform writing students of Assyriology learn, include lists of the determinatives (both in the CH and in general), the rare signs in the CH, and the Sumerograms used in the CH. In addition, V offers several complete lists of signs used in the CH organized according to a number of different systems.

The second volume of The complete code of Hammurabi contains the actual edition of the CH (363–782). V provides a copy of the original text using his computer fonts, along with transliterations, transcriptions, and translations of the prologue, epilogue, and the 282 law paragraphs of the CH. Full editions are provided for both the Old Babylonian and Neo-Assyrian versions, the latter being an artificial construction for students. The transcriptions and translations in the second volume are of much higher quality than the text in vol. 1. The simple reason for this is that they are copied word for word from M. E. J. Richardson’s Hammurabi’s laws: Text, translation and glossary (Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press, 2000). For various problems in that publication that found their way into the book under review, the reader is referred to the reviews by Dominique Charpin (Revue d’Assyriologie 95.2.181–82, 2001), Gary Beckman (Journal of the American Oriental Society 122.1.178, 2002), and Jeremy Black (Journal of Semitic Studies 48.1.127–29, 2003). The volume ends with a chronological chart and five tables with the development of a few cuneiform signs and some alphabetic scripts, as well as metric conversions for the measurements in the CH.

In conclusion, a comprehensive English classroom tool for the CH with the Old Babylonian monumental signs and complete transliterations of the text is long overdue. However, The complete code of Hammurabi cannot be recommended to either the student or the teacher of Assyriology. Students learn by translating texts and using the tools of the field, not by being provided with transliterations and translations of dubious quality without any explanations or commentary whatsoever. The countless factual mistakes and the appalling English of the book, which is reminiscent of translations obtained online through BabelFish, cast serious doubts on the editorial and peer-review policies of LINCOM Europa. My advice to students and lay people who wish to study the CH is to procure the two volumes of R. Borger’s Babylonisch-Assyrische Lesestücke (Rome: Pontificium Institutum Biblicum, 1979) and Bergmann’s original hand copy Codex Hammurabi mentioned above. As a grammar, they might want to consider J. Huehnergard’s A grammar of Akkadian (Eisenbrauns: Winona Lake, 2000), which also contains a sign list with the Old Babylonian monumental signs.

Quechua-Spanish bilingualism: Interference and convergence in functional categories. By Liliana Sánchez. (Language acquisition and language disorders 35.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2003. Pp. x, 189. ISBN 1588114716. $119 (Hb).

Reviewed by J. Clancy Clements, Indiana University

The present book examines the phenomena of interference and convergence in a Spanish-Quechua contact situation in Peru. The study, following a universal-grammar-type model, examines the issues of interference and convergence with a focus on functional categories within the mind of a bilingual person. As defined by Sánchez, functional interference is ‘the activation of functional features in one language triggered by input in the other language’ in the bilingual mind (13). It is argued that this activation process generates syntactic changes in the bilingual grammar of the speaker. Functional convergence, by contrast, is defined here as ‘the specification of a common set of features shared by the equivalent functional categories in the two languages spoken by the bilingual individual’ (15). This specification occurs when a set of features not activated by one of the languages is frequently activated by input in the other language within the mind of the bilingual speaker. These functional features are assumed to behave independently of lexical items. That is, the interference among members of lexical categories does not necessarily generate interference of functional categories.

The data used for the study were collected from three informant groups with the help of a data-elicitation task designed by S. The groups consisted of one ‘monolingual’ urban group of thirty-six Spanish-speaking children who had passive knowledge of Quechua but did not speak it, and two actively bilingual groups (numbering thirty and twenty-eight subjects respectively) from two different rural areas. The instruments used to collect the data were a picture-based storytelling task and a picture-sentence matching task (in Appendices 1 and 2).

After a detailed discussion of the data, S presents her case that the results of the studies are evidence of functional interference in Quechua-Spanish bilingual children, specifically with reference to a range of phenomena: in bilingual Quechua, predominance of SVO instead of SOV order, dropping of the Quechua accusative marker –ta, and the emergence of an indefinite determiner; in bilingual Spanish, the gender-neutral specification of clitics and the emergence of null objects as continuing topics.

In her conclusions, S speaks about the implications of the results of her study for bilingual acquisition theories and mentions ideas for further research, hypothesizing what other types of interference would likely be found in the contact situation she has studied (e.g. evidence of evidentiality marking in Spanish due to the influence of the corresponding functional categories in Quechua). She includes two additional appendices that contain examples of two varieties of Quechua that were studied, as well as lists of transitive verbs from the Spanish and Quechua varieties that were analyzed. The type of analysis will be of interest to universal-grammar-oriented scholars, but the data themselves, the descriptions of the contact situations, and the instrument the author developed to elicit her data will be of keen interest to all researchers and students of contact-induced language change and language change in general.

Historical linguistics 2003. Selected papers from the 16th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, Copenhagen, 11–15 August 2003. Ed. by Michael Fortescue, Eva Skafte Jensen, Jens Erik Mogensen, and Lene Schøsler. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2005. Pp. ix, 319. ISBN 1588115860. $162 (Hb).

Reviewed by Olga Thomason, University of Georgia

This volume includes a collection of nineteen papers presented at the 16th International Conference on Historical Linguistics held in Copenhagen, on August 11–15, 2003. The selected papers discuss numerous topics in phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics and use a praiseworthy variety of data from different Indo-European and non-Indo-European languages ranging from traditional choices like English and German to less studied dialects like Kok-Papónk. All presentations follow more or less the same format, beginning with an introductory part in which authors explain the goals of their studies and closing with their final remarks and conclusions. All papers offer helpful notes and extensive references. An index (317–19) concludes this volume and adds to its readability.

The majority of the papers in this book discuss issues of morphology. Most of them concentrate on problems involving grammaticalization, which demonstrates the significance of this theory for modern historical linguistics. Kasper Boye advocates a distinction between Danish raising verbs and auxiliaries in light of grammaticalization (31–46). Michael Fortescue argues against the wholesale borrowing of auxiliaries from Chukotian into Itelmen and uses examples of their similar grammaticalization pathways (along with other materials from these language branches) as additional proof of their genetic connection (115–30). Michèle Fruyt stresses the importance of Latin evidence for grammaticalization (131–39). Maria M. Manoliu traces the evolution of Lat et and sic in French and Romanian (159–77). Johan Pedersen reveals a strong possibility of reanalysis in process of the Spanish complex construction si mism- (199–223). Henrik Rosenkvist conducts similar research analyzing the development of the conditional subordinator bara in Swedish (224–39). Gudrun Svensson discusses the grammaticalization of the Swedish modal epistemic lär (257–77). Thora Vinther examines grammatical and semantic features of the Spanish construction ir + past participle (279–300). Finally, Kazuha Watanabe talks about the grammaticalization of aspect markers in Japanese, Newar, Parji, and Korean (301–15).

Only two papers on morphology are not connected with the theory of grammaticalization. John Ole Askedal is interested in a typological perspective of case loss in Middle Low German and in the Mainland Scandinavian languages (1–19), while Gaillynn D. Clements examines specifics of copular usage in rural Southern America in the framework of sociolinguistics and language variation (61–73).

Five papers deal with various phonological aspects. Paul Black comments on the problem that ethnoreconstruction in Kok-Papónk creates for comparative linguistics (21–29). Maria José Carvalho investigates the elevation of Portuguese final unstressed e and suggests an interpretation of the phenomenon that is different from the traditional point of view. She stresses the importance of taking into account sociolinguistic factors and specifics of oral and written language traditions (47–60). B. Elan Dresher and Aditi Lahiri discuss particulars of the English stress system development, noting the relationship between stress patterns and their realizations (75–85). Andrés Enrique-Arias adds to the traditional explanation of the Old Spanish shift from ge to se using the concepts of grammaticalization (103–14). Michael Schulte explains the Nordic loss of preverbs in light of metrical phonology (241–55).

Matters of syntax and semantics are discussed in the remaining three papers. Tamás Eitler analyzes word-order variation in Middle English texts by focusing on sociolectal, dialectal, and audience-related communicative factors (87–102). Rosa Maria Ortiz Ciscomani examines Spanish prototypical and reanalyzed ditransitive constructions in Spanish using the framework of grammaticalization (179–97). Silvia Luraghi presents the only purely semantic investigation concerned with the connection between the concepts of cause, beneficiary, and purpose in Greek (141–57).

This volume would have benefited greatly if the papers had been arranged topically rather than alphabetically by authors. The outcome would have had a much clearer structure and it would have been more accessible for readers.

Overall this publication presents a diverse collection of thorough investigations offering insightful discussions of primarily morphological and phonological problems. It is highly recommended to linguists interested in issues of grammaticalization.

A grammar of Mosetén. By Jeanette Sakel. (Mouton grammar library 33.) Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2004. Pp. xxxi, 504. ISBN 9783110183405. $235.20 (Hb).

Reviewed by Harald Hammarström, Chalmers University

This grammar of Mosetén, a revised version of Sakel’s Ph.D. thesis (University of Nijmegen, 2002), is a full-length description of the tiny Mosetenan (or Mosetén-Chimane) family on the eastern foothills of the Andes in Bolivia. There are three languages/dialects within this family: Mosetén of Covendo, Mosetén of Santa Ana, and Chimane. The Mosetén consider themselves ethnically distinct from Chimane, but all three forms of speech are actually mutually intelligible, and thus should be considered one language from a purely linguistic point of view. The present grammar describes the dialect of Covendo, which is an endangered language/dialect (even if not immediately dying) and has an estimated 600 speakers (Santa Ana has 150–200), almost all bilingual, who have been served by missionaries for 200 years. This is in contrast to Chimane, whose 4,000+ speakers have resisted missionaries until recently and who do not have an endangered sociolinguistic profile.

Section 1.4, ‘The history of the Mosetenes and previous research’, justly dismisses earlier lexicostatistical attempts to establish a wider genetic relation for Mosetenan. A certain amount of linguistic material on Mosetén by missionaries and travelers has been in print for a long time, and there is a recent (1997) New Testament translation for Chimane, plus a manuscript dictionary and grammar materials (which are inaccessible to most linguists). The present work is based on fieldwork and is the first full-length, modern, typologically oriented grammar.

The phonology of Moséten has some interesting points: typical consonant and vowel inventory, with no tone, but it has nasal vowels. There is nasal vowel harmony that spreads from stems, and a dozen verbs have vowel-quality harmony triggered by suffixes. Morphologically there are prefixes, one infix, and many suffixes; verb morphology, as we shall see, is especially massive. There are many clitics serving case-marking and clausal functions. Partial and full reduplication is active in several word classes. As in many newer grammars, the book contains a separate section on morphophonological processes, allowing leaner-individual morpheme-function accounts later in the book.

Category-changing morphology in Mosetén includes derivational affixes and noun incorporation. Mosetén has a gender system like French, a cross-referencing verb reminiscent of Bantu, and a macrofunctional linker reminiscent of some Southeast Asian languages. The macrofunctional linker produces structures comparable to noun compounds; it introduces relative clauses; it sanctions adjectives, possessives, verbal participles and ordinals; and it has a few further uses as well. The verb can be loaded very heavily, with markers of voice derivation, aspect, motion, and subject and object gender-number reference.

The grammar at hand is complete, as it contains chapters on basic and complex clauses and discourse particles. Word order is pragmatically variable, but the basic order is AVO for transitive clauses and SV for intransitives (a conclusion substantiated by corpus-based statistics in an appendix). Often, however, a clause has no overt subject/object noun-phrase arguments as the verb carries so much information alone. Noun phrases can be discontinuous and relative clauses may precede their head, but may also follow it, especially if they are long.

This book is a must for typologists, reference libraries, and Andean language specialists. The orientation, however, is strongly toward the typological-functional, and the book does not have a lot of information on history and ethnography, language prehistory through loans, or comparative studies. The presence of endnotes instead of footnotes is an editorial failure—with 291 of them one wastes reading time flipping back and forth—in an otherwise fine book.

Rules and representations. By Noam Chomsky. Foreword by Norbert Hornstein. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Pp iii, 299. ISBN 0231132719. $25.

Reviewed by Sharbani Banerji, Ghaziabad, India

Rules and representations initiates the principles-and-parameters approach in the real sense. First published in 1980, the first four chapters of Part 1 are based on Chomsky’s 1978 Woodbridge lectures. The chapters in Part 2 are based on two lectures delivered in 1976. This edition begins with a foreword by Norbert Hornstein extensively discussing how Chomsky’s impact in linguistics, philosophy, and psychology has changed the way we think about language.

Chomsky postulates, and proves through numerous arguments, that the study of language is part of human biology, that the mind should be conceived of as modular in structure, a system of mental organs, of which the language faculty is one. The grammar represented in the mind is a real object, which grows in our mind. There is a genetically determined initial state, the universal grammar, that allows for several possible realizations. Each such possible realization is a possible final steady state, the grammar of a specific language.

In the foreword, ‘Chomsky’s natural philosophy’ (vii–xlix), Norbert Hornstein claims that Chomsky’s central conceptual contribution has three interrelated parts. First, we must shift from the study of (linguistic) behavior to the study of the structures and etiologies of mental/brain states. Second, we must adopt the abstractions and idealizations characteristic of the Galilean approach in the physical sciences to the study of mental sciences, too—in particular, to the study of language. Third, Chomsky has demonstrated how to actually do it, by developing research tools and strategies. The most important of these is the well-known ‘poverty of stimulus argument’.

Ch. 1, ‘Mind and body’ (3–46), argues that the number faculty, the language faculty, and others are ‘mental organs’, analogous to the visual system, and so on. In Ch. 2, ‘Structures, capacities, and conventions’ (47–87), Chomsky gives clinical evidence to prove that to ‘know a language’ is to be in a certain mental state, composed of structures of rules and principles. Ch. 3, ‘Knowledge of grammar’ (89–140), argues that the ‘knowledge of grammar’ is tacit. In this context, it is demonstrated that the properties of a wide-scope quantifier like any must be expressed in logical form (LF).

Ch. 4, ‘Some elements of grammar’ (141–81) gives substantial syntactic, semantic, and even phonetic evidence to prove that the mental representation at the level of the S-structure includes trace [_NP e], a bound variable with no phonetic content. The reality of trace argues against a variable-free notation of logic. It is also shown that the rule of focus is part of the mapping from S-structure to LF, and that LF provides representation relevant to pragmatic presupposition as against logical presupposition. It is proved that LF is governed by the principle of opacity. Ch. 5, ‘On the biological basis of language capacities’ (185–216), argues that the evidence provided for the apparatus of the language faculty, for example, the ‘locality principle’, is analogous to that of the physicist postulating certain processes in the interior of the sun, based on the evidence provided by the light emitted at the periphery. Ch. 6, ‘Language and unconscious knowledge’ (217–54), argues that the theories of grammatical and pragmatic competence must find their place in a theory of performance. Such a rationalist approach contrasts with other learning models.

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.

Written communication across cultures: A sociocognitive perspective on business genres. By Yunxia Zhu. (Pragmatics and beyond new series 141.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2005. Pp. xvii, 215. ISBN 9027253846. $126 (Hb).

Reviewed by Aleksandar Čarapić, University of Belgrade

What is the best way to approach the comparison of intercultural business genres? What persuasive orientations can be embedded in English and Chinese cultural and rhetorical backgrounds? What are the main persuasive strategies used in English and Chinese business correspondence? How are they similar or different, and what causes such similarities and/or differences? What are the implications of the research for learning and teaching business language in cross-cultural communication? These major questions underlie the research in Yunxia Zhu’s exciting study, Written communication across cultures.

The volume consists of nine chapters. In addition to a brief introduction to the book, Ch. 1, ‘Introduction and outline’, brings in the necessity for developing a theoretical framework for genre comparison. It discusses genre in relation to a ‘stock of knowledge’ that is shared in a relevant discourse community in specific sociocultural contexts. Ch. 2, ‘Communication across cultures’, focuses on cross-cultural aspects as a part of the theoretical groundwork for comparing Chinese and English genres, and discusses sociocultural, organizational, and interpersonal levels for studying the business genres involved. Specifying the main theoretical framework for intercultural genre analysis, Ch. 3, ‘Conceptual framework: A dual perspective’, proposes a model for genre comparison, emphasizes genre-intertextuality interaction, and promotes cross-cultural genre study from sociocognitive and intercultural viewpoints based on English and Chinese literature related to genre analysis.

An overview of the research design, its methodology, data, questionnaires, and interviews, and of the method of analysis is given in Ch. 4, ‘Research design’. Both Ch. 5, ‘Comparing English and Chinese sales letters’, and Ch. 6, ‘Comparing English and Chinese sales invitations’, apply the proposed model with regard to the specific differences that different genre types impose. Ch. 7, ‘Comparing English and Chinese business faxes’, focuses on business faxes as a relatively new business genre, showing the possibilities of extending the use of the approach to high-tech-related business genres, thus going beyond business genres and involving the influence of technology on genre writing in general.

Ch. 8, ‘Cross-cultural genre teaching’, considers implications of the proposed framework for the processes of learning and teaching genre, and applies previous findings to cross-cultural genre learning with respect to pedagogical issues in English and Chinese curricula. Ch. 9, ‘Summaries and conclusions’, offers a working definition of genre from a cross-cultural standpoint based on the previous findings.

Written communication across cultures has made several great contributions. First, as one of the first books to study the cross-cultural business genre, it conceptualizes this field with a sociocognitive and intercultural dimension. Second, it presents an in-depth theoretical exploration of business discourse by considering discourse community, cognitive structuring, and the deep semantics of genre and intertexuality. Third, it offers an insider’s perspective on cross-cultural comparison by soliciting professional members’ intracultural and intercultural viewpoints about the target cultures. As such, the book is a valuable read for scholars interested in intercultural communication, applied linguistics, (critical) discourse analysis, contrastive rhetoric, interlanguage pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and other interdisciplinary fields.

English and globalization: Perspectives from Hong Kong and Mainland China. Ed. by Kwok-kan Tam and Timothy Weiss. Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2004. Pp. xxvii, 276. ISBN 9629961849. $35 (Hb).

Reviewed by Liwei Gao, Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center

This volume collects fifteen papers that examine the different cultural and pedagogic aspects of English as an international language, and the effects of Englishization in Hong Kong and Mainland China. The papers in this book address the issue from a broad variety of perspectives, which include culture, communication, and the classroom; standards and variations; diversity and plurality; computers and linguistic fashions; interrelationships among language, literature, and culture; English language education and intercultural competencies; and interrelationships among linguistic standards, international communication, and linguistic imperialism. Papers about the context in Hong Kong precede those about Mainland China.

In Ch. 1, ‘World English(es) in the age of globalization’, Kwok-kan Tam provides a theoretical and historical overview of this issue. He argues that language cannot be conceived of as being independent from cultural formation in the process of globalization. In Ch. 2, David Parker discusses the relationships among English, culture, and modernity and stresses that students in Hong Kong need to be literate in the cultures where English is the major medium of communication via the study of English literature. In Ch. 3, Timothy Weiss argues that English study is a creolizing event in that it is done through readers with diverse cultural backgrounds who interpret, fragment, and transform the texts that they read through different cultural lenses. In Ch. 4, ‘Linguistic imperialism and the history of English language teaching in Hong Kong’, Joseph Boyle notes that English now actually mostly serves a pragmatic means of globalization. In other words, it has largely transcended its colonial heritage. In Ch. 5, Stuart Christie discusses Maxine Hong Kingston’s The woman warrior and observes that Hong Kong students tend to use cross-cultural imagery to interpret the cultural issues in this work.

In Ch. 6, ‘Globalization, tribalization, and online communication’, Suying Yang remarks that globalization does not necessarily lead to the end of diversity in the modern society. Instead, globalization and localization will coexist and interact with each other. In Ch. 7, ‘Globalization and English language teaching in Hong Kong’, George C. K. Jor describes how internationalization affects the teaching of English in Hong Kong and suggests that new information technology and global resources be applied in English teaching. In Ch. 8, ‘The English language and Chinese people’, Phillip Shu-yue Sun discusses the disadvantages inherent in the communicative approach to language teaching and argues that one’s mother tongue may actually be an asset for learning foreign languages. In Ch. 9, ‘When English becomes big business’, Labao Wang points out that English in China has now become a trendy commodity and cautions people against the potential corrosion of the Chinese culture in the process of excessive consumption of English. In Ch. 10, ‘Globalization and intercultural competence’, Qiufang Wen points out the inadequacy in present models of English teaching in China and proposes a new model, a model of intercultural communicative competence.

In Ch. 11, Ming Li (Suzhou) discusses the issue of standard and variation in teaching English as a foreign language and suggests that educators should not be teaching one and only one so-called standard variety. In Ch. 12, Liyan Ma emphasizes the important role of empathy in intercultural communication and contends that students will be able to be engaged in more effective intercultural communication once they understand the role of empathy. In Ch. 13, Hong Ye calls people’s attention to the significance of cultural literacy and stresses a cultural approach to teaching literature to Chinese students. In Ch. 14, Ming Li (Guangdong) demonstrates how the integration of language and culture will help Chinese students to improve their intercultural communication. In the last chapter (Ch. 15), Agnes Lam and Kathy Chow review English language education in China and conclude that both ideology and economic needs provide the impetus for English learning in China.

Linguistic dimensions of crisis talk: Formalising structures in a controlled language. By Claudia Sassen. (Pragmatics & beyond new series 136.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2005. Pp. ix, 230. ISBN 9789027253798. $132 (Hb).

Reviewed by Charlotte Brammer, Samford University

In Linguistic dimensions of crisis talk, Claudia Sassen presents a complex method for describing and analyzing crisis talk within the specific realm of aviation parlance and posits the method’s applicability to other types of crisis talk. Her goal seems two-fold: to illuminate possible communicative opportunities to avoid future crises and to propose a methodology that ‘promises to lead to extensions for a comprehensive modeling of discourse that is both theoretically well founded and empirically testable’ (175).

In Ch. 1, S uses her previous work (2003) to carefully define ‘crisis talk’ as ‘a dialogue genre that occurs in threatening situations of unpredictable outcome, with no obvious way out, and requiring spontaneous decision, unconventional strategies and unrehearsed actions’ (1). In Ch. 2, she justifies her use of head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG) as a ‘reductionist’ tool for operationalizing illocutionary force, as derived primarily from Austin 1962, Searle 1969, and Searle & Vanderveken 1985, among others.

Seventy-seven transcript files and five audio files make up the corpus of air traffic control and cockpit voice recordings (ATC/CVR) used for this project. As a condition for inclusion in the corpus, the files are available on the internet. Additionally, all of the transcripts are in English, even though English may not have been the first language for all speakers. Chs. 3 and 4 contain extensive detail of S’s use of KWIC-concordance and XML-markup, and provide as well a list of steps for creating the XML tags (115). In Ch. 4, S finds that intra-cockpit conversation is ‘leaky’ at times, meaning nonprofessional or off-task, and that normal conversation patterns are disrupted (131). One possible explanation for this behavior, according to S, is because ‘the participants, in particular the crew hopes to receive help from the tower’ (sic, 132).

In Ch. 5, S selects three transcripts for closer analysis and makes several observations about crisis talk in comparison to noncrisis talk in aviation. First, she finds that crisis talk exhibits more patterns, defined in terms of illocutionary force (e.g. command, ask, response). She also finds that elaboration occurs only in the noncrisis talk examples, presumably because ‘to elaborate on one’s preceding clarification is probably too time-consuming for a situation that requires quick action’ (155). Not surprisingly, perhaps, she also finds that expressives (curses and warnings) are relatively frequent in crisis talk, but not in noncrisis conversation; similarly, ‘the number of politeness formulae like thank and greet decreases in crisis talk’ (155). In sum, S develops a speech act/HPSG model in order ‘to detect leaky and thus dangerous points in communication … to minimise escalations during flights and to make aviation safer’ (173). Her model appears substantive and should be tested in other types of crisis talk.

Dialect and dichotomy: Literary representations of African American speech. By Lisa Cohen Minnick. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004. Pp. xxii, 194. ISBN 0817313990. $39.95 (Hb).

Reviewed by Charlotte Brammer, Samford University

In Dialect and dichotomy: Literary representations of African American speech, Lisa Cohen Minnick combines qualitative criticism with quantitative corpus-linguistics methods to analyze the use of African American dialects in literary texts or ‘literary dialect’. M justifies this dual approach by arguing that ‘in order to give a thorough evaluation of an artist’s work with respect to literary dialect, neither exclusively linguistic nor exclusively literary approaches can do justice to literature that incorporates imaginative recreation of the sounds of language along with the social themes surrounding the places in time that are recreated’ (149). The first two chapters of the text provide rich background on, including criticism of, literary dialect and its analysis. Combined, the chapters present a strong case for adding corpus approaches to literary analysis for understanding authorial use of literary dialects.

M uses two well-known text-analysis programs (the Summer Institute of Linguistics’s LinguaLinks and Oxford University Press’s WordSmith Tools) to examine select phonological and grammatical features of direct speech from four important American texts: Mark Twain’s The adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Charles W. Chesnutt’s ‘Dave’s Neckliss’ (1889), William Faulkner’s The sound and the fury (1929), and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their eyes were watching God (1937). For each text, she analyzes between 4,000 and 6,000 words and reports statistically significant quantitative results that enhance the qualitative discussion. While she cannot definitively assert that Twain either was or was not racist in his depiction of Jim, she can demonstrate that Twain ‘incorporated features that have been identified with African American speakers in the scholarship, and he did so in a way that reveals his understanding of how these features functioned in real speech’ (67). Similarly, she asserts that Chesnutt’s ‘exacting depiction of [phonological and grammatical] features contributes substantially to an image of Chesnutt as a conscientious and definitive recorder of late-nineteenth-century black speech in North Carolina’ (94).

In her analysis of literary dialect use in each text, M tries to reframe the most salient debates, not to resolve them. For example, one critical and persistent debate about Faulkner’s use of dialect in The sound and the fury centers around race: specifically, was he a racist? Though troubled by some of Faulkner’s recorded comments, M does not seem to accept an unqualified view of the author as racist and concludes ‘that Faulkner’s use of dialectal grammatical features probably indicates a sincere attempt to represent them realistically rather than stereotypically’ (101). The sheer quantity of direct speech in Hurston’s text creates space for interesting corpus analysis. As M points out, ‘substantial portions of the novel consist not of narration or presentation of actual events but in fact are related second-hand in conversation’ (138). Importantly, M’s discussion of this text focuses more on gender conflicts than racism.

In her conclusion, M restates her justification for engaging such challenging and unconventional methods: ‘using interdisciplinary methods to access literary texts helps to offer fresh insight not only into the texts themselves but also into issues of language variation and attitudes surrounding it’ (152–53). Both literature scholars and linguists can appreciate that.