The Cambridge encyclopedia of the English language. 2nd edn. By David Crystal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. 499. ISBN 0521530334. $35.

Reviewed by R. A. Cloutier, University of Amsterdam

Divided into six parts that are further subdivided into chapters and subsections, this revised volume by David Crystal offers a colorful and informative overview of various aspects of the English language. The texts on each topic are short but informative, and almost every page is punctuated with various tidbits of information contained in boxes of varying colors. Turning to a random page, the reader will surely find something interesting to read. A summary of the various parts and chapters gives a good idea of the breadth of the book.

Part 1 gives an overview of the history of English, from its continental Germanic origins (Ch. 2) to the various stages of its development—Old English (Ch. 3), Middle English (Ch. 4), Early Modern English (Ch. 5), and Modern English (Ch. 6)—and continuing on to the status and the varieties of English the world over (Ch. 7). Part 2 informs the reader on various aspects of English vocabulary: ‘The nature of the lexicon’ (Ch. 8), native and foreign vocabulary items and various other sources of new words in ‘The sources of the lexicon’ (Ch. 9), ‘Etymology’ (Ch. 10), ‘The structure of the lexicon’ (Ch. 11), and ‘Lexical dimensions’ (Ch. 12), discussing other facets of the lexicon such as jargon, doublespeak, slang, archaisms, political correctness, and so on. Part 3 discusses various aspects of English grammar: an introduction to the nature of grammar, knowing about versus knowing grammar, prescriptivism, and the like (‘Grammatical mythology’, Ch. 13); different features of morphology (‘The structure of words’, Ch. 14); parts of speech (‘Word classes’, Ch. 15); and word order (‘The structure of sentence’, Ch. 16).

Part 4 treats the sound system of English (Ch. 17) and the writing system (Ch. 18). Part 5 concerns the use of English: varieties of discourse (Ch. 19) and variation on a regional (Ch. 20), social (Ch. 21), personal (Ch. 22), and electronic (Ch. 23) scale. Part 6 concludes the volume by enlightening the reader on aspects of learning about and learning English: Ch. 24 deals with learning English as a mother tongue and Ch. 25 with new ways of studying English.

The volume includes various helpful appendices: a glossary for those who may be less familiar with various linguistic terms; a list of special symbols and abbreviations used throughout the book, including phonetic symbols; a list of references; general suggestions for further reading, as well as suggestions corresponding to the various parts of the book; and indices of linguistic items, authors and personalities, and topics. As claimed on the back cover, this book is aimed at ‘a new generation of language-lovers and of teacher, students and professional English-users concerned with their own linguistic legacy’.

UG and external systems: Language, brain and computation. Ed. by Anna Maria Di Sciullo. (Linguistik aktuell/Linguistics today 75.) Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2005. Pp. xviii, 395. ISBN 1588116239. $182 (Hb).

Reviewed by Roberta D’Alessandro, University of Cambridge

This volume is a collection of eighteen essays on the interaction of the grammar with external systems, the conceptual-intentional and the sensorimotor, in the sense of Chomsky 1995, 2000, 2001.

Anna Maria Di Sciullo introduces the essays in the book, which are organized into three main parts: ‘Language’, ‘Brain’, and ‘Computation’. In Part 1, ‘Language’, Daniela Isac, in ‘Depictives’, addresses the issue of object and subject depictive sentences. In ‘On two issues related to the clitic clusters in Romance languages’, Stanca Somesfalean explores the differences between clitic clusters in Romance languages. Edit Jakab, in ‘On the question of (non)-agreement in the uses of Russian imperatives’, presents an explanation for the different types of Russian imperatives, arguing that they are due to configurational asymmetries. In ‘Computational puzzles of conditional clause preposing’, Nicola Munaro explores the ordering restrictions in protasis and apodosis structures. ‘Clefts and tense asymmetries’ by Manuela Ambar is dedicated to the analysis of tense in Portuguese clefts. The last chapter of this section, ‘Generating configurational asymmetries in prosodic phonology’ by Evan W. Mellander, examines some asymmetries that are found crosslinguistically in prosodic entities.

Part 2, ‘Brain’, starts with a chapter by Thomas Roeper and William Snyder on ‘Language learnability and the forms of recursion’, where the authors argue that language learners have as a major task that of identifying recursive grammatical processes. Then, Sharon Armon-Lotem and Idit Avram examine ‘The autonomous contribution of syntax and pragmatics to the acquisition of the Hebrew definite article’. Helen Goodluck addresses the problem of ‘D(iscourse)-linking and question formation’ by presenting comprehension studies in children and Broca’s aphasics. Ronnie B. Wilbur presents ‘Evidence from ASL (American Sign Language) and ÖGS (Austrian Sign Language) for asymmetries in UG’. Ning Pan and William Snyder examine the ‘Acquisition of phonological categories’ by presenting a case study of early child Dutch, while on the prosody front, Matt Bauer presents two experiments on ‘Prosodic cues during online processing of speech: Evidence from stress shift in American English’.

In Part 3, ‘Computation’, Anna Maria Di Sciullo and Sandiway Fong describe a bottom-up parser for a theory of morphological selection in ‘Morpho-syntax parsing’. In ‘A minimalist implementation of Hale-Keyser incorporation theory’, Sourabh Niyogi and Robert C. Berwick outline an implemented parser with lexicon grounded on the incorporation theory of Hale and Keyser (1993, 1998). ‘Minimalist languages and the correct prefix property’, by Henk Harkema, describes a top-down recognition method for languages generated by minimalist grammars. Sandiway Fong examines issues in ‘Computation with probes and goals’ from a parsing perspective. In ‘Deep & shallow linguistically based parsing: Parameterizing ambiguity in a hybrid parser’, Rodolfo Delmonte presents an approach to natural language processing defined as hybrid. The last chapter, ‘Towards a quantitative theory of variability’, by Philippe Blache, presents a framework within which it is possible to express relations between different components of grammar.

This book is a mine of information, and as such it constitutes a valid reference for anybody working on language, brain, and computation. It is, however, not suitable for nonspecialists.

Secondary stress in English words. By Nóra Wenszky. Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 2004. Pp. 248. ISBN 963058039X. $29.

Reviewed by Karen Steffen Chung, National Taiwan University

This is a highly detailed study on one specific topic: how to predict secondary stress in any given English word. In Part 1, Wenszky offers a survey of previous studies on the subject, discussing the works of Mark Liberman and Alan Prince (18–28), Elizabeth Selkirk (29–36), Erik Fudge (37–39), Jean-Roger Vergnaud and Morris Halle (40–46), Luigi Burzio (47–53), and Halle (54–59). Based on three test words—academician, dissimilarity, and emanatory—W concludes that Burzio’s theory (Principles of English stress, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) can best account for the most patterns of English secondary stress, building upon this theory in the rest of her work.

In Part 2, ‘Pre-tonic secondary stress’, W notes that she recognizes only two levels of stress, primary and secondary (not tertiary), and unstressed syllables. She covers such topics as syllable weight and alternating stress, adjacent stresses, stress preservation and affixation, and prefixes and classical compounds.

Part 3 addresses ‘Post-tonic secondary stress’, which occurs mainly in suffixed words (e.g. propagate). She devotes a chapter each to the special cases of words ending with -ative and -atory, noting differences between standard British and American English.

W summarizes her work and presents her findings in Part 4, the main conclusion being that, after testing it on a corpus of almost 1,000 words, she finds Burzio’s (1994) framework, with the addition of Fudge’s classification of prefixes and compound initials (English word-stress, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1984), to be ‘an adequate device for describing stress patterns of English’.

For all the minute details of her study, W does not clearly define exactly what secondary stress is. Is stress, as Ladefoged suggests (A course in phonetics, 5th edn., Boston: Thomson Wadsworth, 2006, pp. 111–14), a binary feature that is either there or not, with variations in level being attributable to intonational prosody? Is there a tertiary or further levels of stress? Or do stress values fall along a relative rather than absolute scale, dependent on the overall structure and prosody of the entire utterance (my personal belief)? W leaves many issues open for further study.

The printing quality and no-frills layout of this volume are reasonably good, though the pages tend to fall out after a period of use. No major typos were spotted. The book lacks an index, a minor inconvenience to the reader, and the bibliography is surprisingly just a page and a half long.

W has produced a solid dissertation, but in its present form it is not very accessible to even a specialist, let alone a general reader. Even if one tries very hard to follow the fine detail presented in this work, one soon gets bogged down and is unable to see the forest for the serrations of the leaves. If W were to revise her work, I would suggest keeping the survey material to an absolute minimum and concentrating instead on offering only the best answers to the stated research questions in a more user-friendly format, rather than documenting all the wrong paths tried. This would constitute a worthy and much more accessible contribution to both theoretical and applied linguistics.

Black doves speak: Herodotus and the languages of Barbarians. By Rosaria Vignolo Munson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Pp. 121. ISBN 0674017900. $14.95.

Reviewed by Edmund P. Cueva, Xavier University

Black doves speak: Herodotus and the languages of Barbarians asks the central question, ‘Does the role Herodotus attributes to language reinforce or undermine the authoritative Greek-barbarian antithesis of contemporary thought?’ (3). Consequently, Munson aims to examine the numerous instances in Herodotus’s Histories where issues of language provide the historian with ‘special opportunities to instruct his audiences’ (5). These opportunities, in sum, demonstrate that to Herodotus, non-Greek cultures were similarly proficient in assorted areas. In addition, M suggests in her introductory chapter that the language differences did not serve as impediments to understanding non-Greek peoples, but rather allowed for greater analyses that in turn improved not only the historian’s but also his readers’ knowledge about other cultures, and, more importantly, enhanced the knowledge of their own Greek culture. M’s volume includes an introduction, four chapters, a bibliography, an index of passages, and a general index.

Ch. 1, ‘Greek speakers’ (7–18), focuses on Herodotus’s conceptions about the Greek linguistic community and its relationship to Pelasgian, barbarians, and other languages. M places emphasis on diachronic and synchronic differentiations and their use in determining Greek and non-Greek ethnicities and the distinctions between barbaroi and xenoi. In Ch. 2, ‘The ethnographer and foreign languages’ (19–29), M justifies Herodotus’s venture into language as a legitimate area of ethnographic and anthropological study; she writes, ‘Herodotus’ recurring reminders of a people’s different or special speech confirms that language constitutes a branch of the ethnographer’s study of nomoi, diaita, and ēthea’ (25). Indeed, the linguistic heteroglossia of the text endows the historian with a multilingual character; this is not to say that Herodotus is a polyglot, but rather he is comfortable with the major languages included in the history and attentive to the importance of these languages in constructing his narrative.

Ch. 3, ‘Herodotus Hermēneus’ (30–66), assembles passages that serve as metanarrative and metalinguistic glosses that appear in the ethnographic descriptions and historical section of the text. These glosses are translations that both give ‘a means of access to a distant environment’ and ‘emphasize … the gap between “here” and “over there” ’ (32). The significance of these glosses ‘indicate[s] that different languages are equivalent in worth and meaning, so that the narrator can make an unfamiliar world more familiar through translation’ (51). The final chapter, ‘The meaning of language difference’ (67–83), reviews passages from the history that have language as their centers of attention. The conclusion from this review is that for Herodotus, language does not make a difference.

This concise examination of Herodotus’s text is intriguing and should serve as a catalyst for future scholarly discussion and research. It should be noted that there are several errors in the Greek print, and in the bibliography and corresponding references in the footnotes.

Language, cohesion and form. By Margaret Masterman, ed. by Yorick Wilks. (Studies in natural language processing.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. x, 312. ISBN 0521454891. $101 (Hb).

Reviewed by Aleksandar Čarapić, University of Belgrade

Language, cohesion and form brings together some of the most influential papers by Margaret Masterman (1910–1986), a pioneer in the field of computational linguistics and the founder of the Cambridge Language Research Unit. According to the editor, Yorick Wilks, the collection ‘is a posthumous tribute to Margaret Masterman’, which aims to represent ‘the influence of her ideas and life on the development of processing of language by computers, a part of what would now be called artificial intelligence’ (ix).

In addition to the editor’s preface, the collection consists of eleven chapters, which are organized into five parts. Part 1, ‘Basic forms for language structure’ (21–80), opens with Ch. 1, ‘Words’, which—using the term ‘word’ in the sense used by logicians—discusses three typical philosophers’ replies to the question ‘What is a word?’. Ch. 2, ‘Fans and heads’, is an extreme instance of M’s idea that certain kinds of logical formalism were essential for understanding the function of language. Outlining a sketch of a mathematical model of language, Ch. 3, ‘Classification, concept-formation and language’, proposes an alternative method of analyzing language.

As the opening chapter of Part 2, ‘The thesaurus as a tool for machine translation’ (81–146), Ch. 4, ‘Potentialities of a mechanical thesaurus’, deals with the thesaurus as an aid to mechanical translation (MT). It also provides examples of dictionary tree uses and outlines a mechanical translation program using a thesaurus. Ch. 5, ‘What is a thesaurus’, presents arguments for the necessity of an MT thesaurus.

Part 3, ‘Experiments in machine translation’ (147–223), opens with Ch. 6, ‘Agricola in curvo terram dimovit aratro’, which, using Roget’s Thesaurus, examines a first-stage translation from Latin into English. Ch. 7, ‘Mechanical pidgin translation’, provides ‘an estimate of the research value of word-for-word translation into a language, rather than into the full normal form of an output language’ (161). Ch. 8, ‘Translation’, presents a philosophical model of translation.

Ch. 9, ‘Commentary on the Guberina hypothesis’, opens Part 4, ‘Phrasings, breath groups and text processing’ (225–88). Ch. 10, ‘Semantics algorithms’, aims to compute semantic paragraph patterns.

Part 5, ‘Metaphor, analogy, and the philosophy of science’ (281–309), includes the final chapter, ‘Braithwaite and Kuhn: Analogy-clusters within and without hypothetico-deductive systems in science’, which, on the one hand, discusses Thomas Kuhn’s relativist conceptions of science and of a paradigm, and on the other, Richard B. Braithwaite’s account of science.

As the collection shows, M was ahead of her time because her beliefs and proposals ‘for language processing by computer have now become part of the common stock of ideas in artificial intelligence (AI) and MT fields’ (1). Some parts would not be easy to read without the commentaries of both the editor (Chs. 2, 8, and 10) and Karen Spärk Jones (Ch. 6). In short, the collection represents an important document on the development of ideas related to AI and MT and is a nice tribute to a scientist whose ideas did not get sufficient attention during her lifetime.

Language endangerment and language revitalization. By Tasaku Tsunoda. (Trends in linguistics: Studies and monographs 148.) Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2005. Pp. xxvi, 307. ISBN 3110176629. $179.20 (Hb).

Reviewed by Picus S. Ding, Macao Polytechnic Institute

This book is based on Tsunoda’s lecture notes for a university course intended for postgraduate and advanced undergraduate students of linguistics. Having worked on aboriginal languages of Australia since 1971, T has presented a high-quality introductory textbook to language endangerment and revitalization with the voice and perspective of an active participant in this field.

The book is composed of fourteen chapters, appended with three indices. Ch. 1 is a brief review of the history of language loss and terminology (1–8). Ch. 2 deals with how languages may be and have been classified according to their degree of endangerment (9–15). Ch. 3 surveys the current state of language endangerment worldwide (16–28). Ch. 4 discusses approaches to the issue of language endangerment (29–35). Ch. 5 addresses problems in defining language death and identifies various types of language death (36–48). Ch. 6 focuses on the cause of language endangerment with reference to external setting such as ecology of language (49–64). Ch. 7 concerns speech behavior, looking at sociolinguistic aspects of language endangerment such as language shift (65–75). Ch. 8 turns to structural changes in language endangerment: how the critical condition of a language may impinge on its linguistic system (76–116). Ch. 9 centers on speakers and the speaking community of endangered languages (117–33). Ch. 10 highlights the value of linguistic heritage, offering views from the speaking community, language activists, and linguists, and pointing out a lack of concern for language endangerment by the general public and governments (134–67). Ch. 11 is devoted to language revitalization, covering issues from theory to practice (168–215). Ch. 12 revolves around the role and ethics of professional linguists (216–28). Ch. 13 continues with method of language documentation and training of fieldworkers (229–52). Finally, concluding remarks are made in Ch. 14 (253–54).

Since a large part of the book comes from T’s lifelong engagement in working on endangered languages of Australia, observations and insights from his first-hand experience greatly enhance the readability of the book. Given its intention as a textbook, I suggest that some questions for discussion be included in some chapters. A definition of language death, even provisional, would also be beneficial to students. Just as declaring the death of a human being is controversial (with ‘brain death’ vs. ‘clinical death’), perhaps language death could also be approached at different levels.

There is a fault concerning Xixia (Tangut). While its disappearance is triggered by glottocide, it does not represent an instance of sudden language death (as claimed on p. 45). According to archeological findings, Xixia characters were in use until as late as 1502 AD after the Xixia kingdom was destroyed in 1227 (cf. LIU Pujiang, ‘On descendants of the Khitan, Tangut and Jurchen’, Mainland Journal 96.6.19–34, 1998).

Sociolinguistics: The study of speakers’ choices. By Florian Coulmas. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. 263. ISBN 0521543932. $28.50.

Reviewed by Rotimi Badejo, University of Maiduguri

How can the study of language in society be viewed from the perspective of choice? This is Florian Coulmas’s primary objective in Sociolinguistics: The study of speakers’ choices, where he develops the theme that what, where, and how we speak are all ultimately dependent on the choices we make. The book consists of thirteen chapters: an introductory chapter followed by twelve others in two evenly distributed parts. Ch. 1, ‘Introduction: Notions of language’, isolates sociolinguistics from all other language sciences and considers all of the choices we make as either micro or macro. Opening up the micro choices, Ch. 2, ‘Standard and dialect: Social stratification as a factor of linguistic choice’, shows how language varies along a social dimension. Such concepts as dialect variation, social stratification, and accommodation are presented as factors influencing our choices.

Ch. 3, ‘Gendered speech: Sex as a factor of linguistic choice’, takes the argument further to the sphere of gender. Is gendered speech a sign of sex-difference or one of domination? C presents both ideologies and takes an eclectic position, positing that network and culture may eventually lead to language reform. In Ch. 4, ‘Communicating across generations: Age as a factor of linguistic choice’, C deals with the variable linguistic choices of coexisting generations of speakers, showing how beliefs and attitudes about age divisions and notions of age-specific suitability determine speakers’ choices.

Ch. 5, ‘Choice and change’, shows how languages may change over time, driven by the needs of standardization, promoted more often by women than by men. In Ch. 6, ‘Politeness: Cultural dimensions of linguistic choice’, C differentiates between common-sense and theory-bound definitions of politeness as a factor shaping interpersonal relationships, but advocates the interplay of both in conducting research into how politeness is encoded in a language, the strategies employed, and the demands of culture that come into play in shaping politeness.

Ch. 7, ‘Code-switching: Linguistic choices across language boundaries’, kicks off the ‘macro-choices’ part of the book by examining the why, the who, the how, and the when of code-switching. C highlights the critical role of choice in code-switching in view of the fact that the speaker chooses how much and in what proportion he or she wants to use the different linguistic codes at his or her disposal. And Ch. 8, ‘Diglossia and bilingualism: Functional restrictions on language choice’, continues the discussion by bringing out language-contact situations in which switching may be restricted: with diglossia, writing may promote the high variety of a language at the expense of the low and at the same time engineer standardization in order to demonstrate its linguistic ideology, while (societal) bilingualism exercises controls through (i) status and function of language, (ii) domains of language use, (iii) context of use, (vi) language accommodation, and (v) networks of individuals as well as their cooperation (which may produce pidgins and creoles).

In Ch. 9, ‘Language spread, shift and maintenance: How groups choose their language’, C considers language spread as involving situations in which a language spills over beyond its primary speech community. The opposing notions of language shift and maintenance are discussed via the concepts of language loyalty, ethnolinguistic vitality, and demographic factors, as well as perceived utility. Ch. 10, ‘Language and identity—Individual, social, national’, brings out how language is used in constructing individual, social, and national identities of people according to ‘a multilayered dynamic process’.

In Ch. 11, ‘Language planning: Communication demands, public choice, utility’, C sets language planning apart from the other subfields of sociolinguistics because of its prescriptive nature and shows its low success rate in complex multilingual settings. Ch. 12, ‘Select letters: A major divide’, presents a writing system as the outcome of choices in terms of language variety, writing system, and spelling conventions, which users usually cling to. In Ch. 13, ‘The language of choice’, C presents Global English as the premier choice of those who use it.

C’s central theme, choice, which is greatly enriched by citations from literary works and propelled by his and others’ findings (such as those of Neville Alexander, David Crystal, and Lachman Khubchandani), ensures a coherent presentation of the basic preoccupations of this fascinating branch of linguistic enquiry. The work, apart from its appeal to both specialists and nonspecialists (there are questions for discussion, notes, and further reading sections at the end of most chapters), therefore plays a tripartite role of extensively covering topics, raising key issues, and indicating future trends in the complex relationship between language and society.

Politeness and face in Caribbean Creoles. Ed. by Susanne Mühleisen and Bettina Migge. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2005. Pp. 293. ISBN 9789027248947. $169 (Hb).

Reviewed by Michael Haugh, Griffith University

The notions of ‘politeness’ and ‘face’ in different languages and cultures have been the subject of a vast amount of research over the past thirty years. However, there has been little research done on politeness phenomena and facework in nonstandard Englishes. The eleven chapters in this edited volume address a significant gap in face and politeness research to date, focusing on these issues in the context of communicative practices in various Caribbean Creole communities.

Bettina Migge and Susanne Mühleisen’s opening chapter, ‘Politeness and face in Caribbean Creoles’, gives an overview of previous anthropological research in the Caribbean context, before framing the collection in terms of Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson’s politeness theory and Erving Goffman’s work on face and self. The remaining chapters are divided into three broad sections.

Part 1, which focuses on facework in the context of performing rudeness, contains four chapters. Peter Snow, in ‘The use of “bad” language as a politeness strategy in a Panamanian Creole community’, investigates the use of ‘obscene’ language to participate in conversation and thereby cooperatively preserve the face of the storyteller. In ‘Ritualized insults and the African diaspora’, Nicolas Faraclas, Lourdes Pérez González, Migdalia Medina, and Wendell Villanueva Reyes compare ritual insulting among Nigerian Pidgin-speaking children with African American practices, as well as with patterns found among young people in Turkey. Esther Figueroa, in ‘Rude sounds: Kiss Teeth and negotiation of the public sphere’, shows how this gesture is involved in the negotiation of moral standing between individuals in public contexts. Finally, Joseph Farquharson, in ‘The sociopragmatics of homophobia in Jamaican (Dancehall) culture’, analyzes how the use of derogatory words and threats in songs is used to perform and maintain heterosexual norms and identity.

Part 2, which attends to face and positive politeness practices in the context of performing speech acts, contains another four chapters. Bettina Migge, in ‘Greeting and social change’, examines changes in greeting routines in the East Maroon community. Jack Sidnell then argues that displays of both uncertainty and expertise are interactionally achieved rather than being driven by face needs in ‘Advice in an Indo-Guyanese village and the interactional organization of uncertainty’. Janina Fenigsen, in ‘Meaningful routines’, next examines ideological contestation of greeting routines for satirical purposes rather than being courteous indications of recognition. Finally, Susanne Mühleisen, in ‘Forms of address in English-lexicon Creoles’, discusses the origins and development of different uses of address forms across English-based Creoles.

Part 3, which discusses the development of face in relation to linguistic and cultural socialization, encompasses two more chapters. In the first chapter, ‘The development of face-saving in young Trinidadian children’, Valerie Youssef examines how the development of attention to face needs can be observed in the conversations of three Trinidadian children. Lastly, Alex Louise Tessonneau examines the teaching of greetings to very young children in ‘Learning respect in Guadeloupe’.

While acknowledging recent work that has attempted to move beyond Parsonian conceptualizations of politeness and face, this collection makes a contribution that is oriented more toward broadening our understanding of these phenomena in social contexts that have been relatively unexplored to date, rather than on theorizing about face or politeness per se. Nevertheless, interesting theoretical insights and implications for face and politeness theory can be gleaned from various chapters in this volume.

A handbook of phonetics. By Luciano Canepari. (LINCOM textbooks in linguistics 10.) Munich: LINCOM Europa, 2005. Pp. 502. ISBN 3895864803. $209.72 (Hb).

Reviewed by Jason Brown, University of British Columbia

A handbook of phonetics was originally written in Italian and translated into English and is the companion volume to A handbook of pronunciation, also authored by Canepari. The book introduces the phonetic method of natural phonetics, which involves articulatory, auditory, and functional aspects. The work is a full system of descriptive phonetics, especially for means of teaching and learning pronunciation. Thus, the aims are toward a systematic method and thoroughly descriptive set of phonetic symbols and visual components that are designed to help a learner develop phonetic kinesthesia and accurate pronunciation.

The book can be broken down into two main parts: a general part, and a series of phonetic descriptions of various languages. The first fourteen chapters deal with issues concerning phonetics and the learning of pronunciation. A description of all of the segmental sounds of speech, the suprasegmental sounds (including tone and intonation), and paralinguistic phenomena is provided. The book deals with approximately one thousand segmental sounds, and each is described in detail with regard to place of articulation, manner of articulation, and so on. Many visual devices are introduced in order to aid in phonetic description and pronunciation, such as vocograms, labiograms, orograms, palatograms, and tonograms. The book provides a detailed criticism of the official International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and offers the alternative, extended version of the IPA, referred to as ^CANIPA. In general, the goal of using ^CANIPA is to achieve greater accuracy with respect to teaching and learning a given pronunciation, but also with respect to the description of languages. Such accuracy is the stimulus for the second part of the book, which is based on actual recordings of each language as analyzed by the author.

The second part of the book, Chs. 15–23, gives a brief overview of the phonetics, or ‘phonosyntheses’, of various languages. The languages covered in these chapters are classed geographically (and not necessarily genetically). In concordance with the original Italian version of the handbook, sixty-three Italian dialects are described first, followed by languages from Europe (79), Africa (25), Asia (58), Oceania (6), and America (31). There are also phonosyntheses of seventy-two dead languages, devised through internal reconstruction and the sound files of existing daughter languages, and one extraterrestrial language (considered as a potential interlanguage). Each phonosynthesis consists of a description of the segmental inventory of each language, a brief intonational inventory, and notable differences from related languages or dialects. Also provided is a utilizable bibliography at the end of the book.

Overall, the book offers a systematic method (and alphabet) for transcribing and describing speech sounds, as well as a series of descriptions of the sounds of many languages. While natural phonetics involves more symbols and more descriptive rigor than other phonetic methods, it has been designed for the maximal amount of accuracy attainable, both for the sake of language description, and with the learner of pronunciation in mind. It is in this way that the author has produced a comprehensive system of descriptive standards, as well as provided a set of language descriptions based on this method.

Sociolinguistic variation in seventeenth-century France. By Wendy Ayres-Bennett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xii, 267. ISBN 052182088X. $101 (Hb).

Reviewed by Kirsten Fudeman, University of Pittsburgh

Near the beginning of her latest book, Wendy Ayres-Bennett writes, ‘it may seem perverse to try and reconstruct variation in seventeenth-century France, since this period is generally characterized as one of rigid codification and standardization, concerned with the establishment of the norms of written French, and thus of the elimination of variation’ (3–4). In fact, as she states and then demonstrates, the seventeenth century is fertile ground for this kind of enterprise, thanks to the attention paid by authors of metalinguistic texts (e.g. dictionaries, grammars, and collections of observations on the French language) to even small departures from the standard. The genius of this study lies in the way that A combines information from these sources with data from literary and nonliterary texts, and comparative evidence from Canadian French and French-based creoles.

The book has six chapters. Ch. 1, ‘Introduction: Methodological issues’ (1–16), addresses topics such as finding appropriate sources, choosing variables for analysis, and interpreting the data. Ch. 2, ‘Spoken and written French’ (17–60), explores in greater detail the sources available for evidence regarding spoken seventeenth-century French and offers several case studies, with many more to follow in later chapters. In Ch. 3, ‘Social and stylistic variation’ (61–110), A examines evidence of variation according to socioeconomic status or social class and asks to what degree it is possible to separate this from register. Ch. 4, ‘Women’s language’ (111–80), deals with a number of issues, including women’s education and position in society, positive and negative attitudes toward women’s language use, préciosité, and specific features of women’s language. Ch. 5, ‘Age, variation and change’ (181–224), is primarily concerned with change over time. Ch. 6 is the ‘Conclusion’ (225–29). An appendix contains a useful listing of metalinguistic texts available for the study of seventeenth-century French, ranging from collections of observations and remarques to dictionaries, grammars, model dialogues, and works on French pronunciation, orthography, versification, and prosody.

A’s concern with methodology is evident throughout the volume. How does the sociohistorical linguist concerned with variation in the spoken language select appropriate sources? What problems are associated with these sources, and is it possible to compensate for them using other types of evidence? When are statistical approaches possible, and when does the type of evidence available render them meaningless or impossible? A demonstrates that historical studies of syntactic variation in speech can pose particular challenges. Syntactic constructions that were presumably common in lower registers based on criticisms found in metalinguistic texts are not necessarily well documented in other types of written sources, even those that are rich in dialogue. Literary texts often convey the impression of lower-register speech through their vocabulary; their syntax tends to be standardized. Nonetheless, A successfully documents syntactic variation, along with variation in morphology, phonology, and lexis.

This volume will be of great interest not only to specialists in the history of the French language, but also to scholars interested in historical and sociohistorical linguistics in general. A’s many carefully constructed case studies would make excellent models for graduate students and others wishing to embark on similar kinds of studies.