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Talk that counts: Age, gender, and social class differences in discourse. By Ronald K. S. Macaulay. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. 236. ISBN 0195173821. $39.95.

Reviewed by Charlotte Brammer, Samford University

In Talk that counts: Age, gender, and social class differences in discourse, Ronald K. S. Macaulay applies quantitative analysis ‘to determine to what extent variation in the use of certain linguistic features correlates with extralinguistic categories, in this case, age, gender, and social class’ (8). He situates this text with other variation studies (notably Labov 1966, Wolfram 1969, Fasold 1972, Trudgill 1974, Milroy 1980, Coates 1996, Eckert 2000) and claims a continued interest in ‘the distribution and effects of stable differences … similar to those expressed in Bernstein’s early work (e.g., Bernstein 1962)’ (5).

To explore linguistic variation in terms of age, gender, and social class, M works with two groups of data: (i) Ayr interviews, a recorded collection of twelve interviews with speakers from Ayr, Scotland (reported in Macaulay 1991), and (ii) Glasgow conversations, recorded talk between friends (reported in Stuart-Smith 1999). The Ayr interviews were analyzed for social-class comparisons; the Glasgow conversations were analyzed for age, gender, and social class. Using frequency counts, comparisons with other variationist studies, and some statistical analysis (primarily the Mann-Whitney nonparametric test), M provides good support for his findings. After thoroughly discussing the corpora, his methods, and specific definitions of social class, age, and gender, M unveils his findings in Chs. 6 through 14.

In terms of social class, M identifies differences in frequency of use and variation of application, and reveals as well similarities in the use of specific discourse features. For example, he found that middle-class speakers use passive voice more frequently than working-class speakers do (p < 0.05) and that working-class speakers use dislocated syntax (e.g. she was a very quiet woman my mother) more frequently than middle-class speakers do (p < 0.001) (Ch. 8). In terms of modifiers, M found that middle-class speakers use evaluative adjectives more frequently than do working-class speakers (p < 0.004) (Ch. 10). He also found minimal social-class differences in the frequency of use of you know (Ch. 7) and the use of modal auxiliaries (Ch. 9), and suggests that syntactic variation may not be as salient for exploring social-class linguistic differences as originally thought.

Gender, particularly when linked to social class, may yield the more interesting findings. Age is also an important aspect of his findings. In the Glasgow data, for example, M found that females, especially middle-class women and girls, use you know substantially more often than do males, and that middle-class females are more likely to use you know for emphasis or elaboration, reserving I mean for explanations. In Ch. 7, M proposes that ‘the use of these discourse lubricants is a distinctive part of the discourse style used by middle-class women and that their daughters are learning to follow their example’ (86). Two important discoveries include the females’ more frequent use of coordinate clauses and because clauses (p < 0.05). M found neither modals nor modifiers particularly promising as identifying either gender- or age-specific discourse features. Pronouns are more frequently used by females than males, and M points out that this is consistent with other research, noting that ‘in their use of articles and pronouns the males show themselves to be less interested in people than are the females’ (Ch. 11, 138).

In addition to the highly accessible and engaging discussion, the text’s rich context and extensive bibliography (some thirteen pages) make it an important resource for future studies in discourse and variation analysis.

Yearbook of morphology 2004. Ed. by Geert Booij and Jaap van Marle. Dordrecht: Springer, 2005. Pp. 323. ISBN 1402028997. $179 (Hb).

Reviewed by Marcin Kilarski, Adam Mickiewicz University

This volume consists of nine articles, including six papers from the 4th Mediterranean Morphology Meeting in Catania, 2003. Stephen R. Anderson, in the opening paper ‘Morphological universals and diachrony’, considers the value of typological regularities in the study of the language faculty; on the basis of three examples, Anderson shows that such regularities may not be due to cognitive limitations but to the pathways of historical morphology. In ‘Morphological universals and the sign language type’, Mark Aronoff, Irit Meir, Carol Padden, and Wendy Sandler demonstrate the paucity of morphology in new languages on the basis of Abu-Shara Bedouin Sign Language—a unique sign language from Israel that has developed de novo in a stable community without any external influence. In ‘Typology and the formal modelling of syncretism’ Matthew Baerman evaluates proposed constraints on syncretism against a corpus of over a hundred languages; the data for subject person marking on verbs do not appear to be fully compatible with earlier predictions, the results being described as ‘not encouraging’ (60).

Berthold Crysmann, in ‘An inflectional approach to Hausa final vowel shortening’, presents evidence against a phonology-based view of phonological alternations in Hausa, suggesting instead that they are an exponent of an inflectional category—the marking of the mode of argument realization. Paul Kiparsky, in ‘Blocking and periphrasis in inflectional paradigms’, considers paradigms that combine synthetic and periphrastic forms, and argues that a lexicalist treatment is superior to approaches in terms of distributed morphology and paradigm function morphology. In the last conference paper in the volume, ‘Morphological autonomy and diachrony’, Martin Maiden focuses on diachronic changes in the Romance verb, claiming that autonomous morphological structure is present within both the paradigmatic and the syntagmatic dimensions, that is, in inflectional paradigms and in the concatenation of morphemes, and should not be regarded as ‘a stagnant backwater of linguistic structure’ (169).

Ana Luís and Andrew Spencer, in ‘A paradigm function account of “mesoclisis” in European Portuguese’, offer an analysis of the pronominal clitic system in European Portuguese. The clitic clusters, which exhibit both morphological and syntactic properties despite being identical, are treated as morphological elements with three types of placement: the default suffixed placement (to the verb in enclitics or the stem in mesoclisis), with alternate proclitic placement as phrasal affixes. Gereon Müller, in ‘Syncretism and iconicity in Icelandic noun declensions: A distributed morphology approach’, provides an account of Icelandic noun declensions. With the widespread syncretism and the constant reuse of a small number of inflectional markers, the prevalent properties of economy and optimal design are said to be manifested in the interaction of inflection markers, rather than inflection markers themselves. Finally, in ‘A constraint on interclass syncretism’, Rolf Noyer focuses on stems belonging to more than one inflectional class in Old Russian and the dialects of Greek. The proposed constraint is tested against three types of mechanisms in mixed inflection: phonologically conditioned allomorphy, default spell-out, and impoverishment. The volume concludes with a discussion note by Jonathan David Bobaljik, ‘Itelmen plural diminutives: A belated reply to Perlmutter 1988’, and two book notices by Geert Booij.

In conclusion, the papers in this volume have important implications for the study not only of morphology but also of typology and universals and historical linguistics. On the formal side, there are a few distractions, for example, the lack of standardization in references (e.g. in first names), missing or inconsistent references (e.g. Aronoff et al., Baerman, Kiparsky, Noyer), spelling (e.g. Aronoff et al., Kiparsky, Müller, Noyer), numbering of footnotes (Baerman), and informal citations (Kiparsky).