Reviewed by Elly van Gelderen, Arizona State University

This is a reprint of the 1923 first edition, and there is no preface justifying reprinting it. Perhaps it is because De Lacy O’Leary was a well-known author of his day on a number topics including Arabic. He was an Irish priest who taught himself Arabic (as well as Gaelic) outside of academia (Harry Bracken p.c.).

The book consists of an introduction, five chapters on phonology (a little over 100 pages), three chapters on pronouns, one on the noun, one on the verb, and a last on particles. The introduction considers Semitic as consisting of five branches, Arabic, Abyssinian, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Assyrian, and Semitic itself as belonging to a larger Hamitic group (5). The phonological chapters are quite detailed and contain much diachronic information. There are chapters on the ‘temporary modification’ of consonants, vowels, and syllables. Assimilation and dissimilation of various kinds are described, as are metathesis, insertion, and elision.

I found the chapters on pronouns very readable and providing much diachronic insight. For instance, the absolute personal pronoun is used as emphatic and in the first and second person, it is often resumed by a demonstrative `an– similar to the Egyptian ‘in– (from which we get the forms ‘ink and ntk), which led to the loss of the enclitic pronouns in later Egyptian (139). The numerous particles that are involved in the demonstrative pronoun system are described and compared (da, di, ha, ‘ay, la, ka, na,ma, ta, ya, and aga), with a treatment of their combinations in the various languages. Unfortunately, the chapter on relatives and interrogatives is only three pages long, but it has interesting short hints on the use of the article al, the root sha, and the interrogative ma as relative pronouns.

While the chapter on the noun starts by inquiring into whether nouns or verbs are the older word class (175), O concedes that this will not ‘advance the practical work of philology’. It includes a discussion of roots, affixes, gender, number, and case. The last chapter but one discusses the verb’s valency alternations, tense, mood, and aspect, and the last chapter concerns prepositions, ‘Prepositions governing clauses’, and exclamatory, negative, interrogative, and conditional particles. Of the negatives, Arabic la, bal, ma, and ‘in are discussed with counterparts in the other languages, but (again unfortunately) this chapter is short (with only nine pages).

Although this book might serve as a useful introduction for a historical linguist, the reader should check the current literature on all topics. In short, this book is valuable for reminding us how the state of the art has changed in the past century.

Reviewed by Dimitrios Ntelitheos, United Arab Emirates University

This book treats subordinators as modal markers, with general subordinators expressing propositional modality, the speaker’s attitude to the truth value of the proposition. The book is divided into eleven chapters. The first chapter introduces the main topic of subordination as propositional modality and provides a brief discussion of the research paradigms, the methodology, and the materials used. Chs. 2–4 present a typological study of modality and subordinators, while Chs. 5–10 treat the same structures within the Germanic languages.

Ch. 2 discusses the general issue of modality and explains the terms and definitions used. Modality is divided into three categories: speech-act, propositional, and event modality, with a focus on the second. Crosslinguistic data are adduced to argue against a super-category of Modality as being too vague conceptually. Ch. 3 discusses the morphosyntactic status of propositional modality, presenting two new typological surveys. If subordinators express propositional modality, then modality markers should be able to take scope over the finite proposition, including tense. The surveys show that across languages modality markers occur outside tense nine times more often than inside it. Ch. 4 discusses the relation between subordinators and modality. N argues that complementizers denote factuality, which is distinct from speech-act modality. This is supported by surveys showing that complementizers often denote modal distinctions and is further strengthened in Ch. 5 with the robust typological observation that there are many markers of realis-irrealis mood that double as subordinators.

Ch. 6 treats the Germanic indicative and subjunctive as propositional modality markers. Ch. 7 moves to the distribution of modal markers and word order in Germanic languages. Languages lacking the indicative-subjunctive distinction still maintain propositional modality as a functional category of the verb. In Ch. 8 then presents her main proposal that general subordinators like that and if lexicalize propositional modality; that is mainly used when the speaker presupposes that the proposition is true or presented as true. Ch. 9 moves to speech-act modality, while Chapter 10 discusses the status of relative and adverbial subordinators. The former are treated on a par with general subordinators (and thus propositional modality markers), while the latter belong to different functional categories. Ch. 11 provides overall concluding remarks for the book. There follow two appendices presenting N’s typological surveys of the morphosyntactic status of propositional modality and her sources.

This book provides a novel account of the status of general subordinators. There is a detailed literature review of modality and subordination, and N provides rich typological data, some new, to support her main proposal. It is essential reading for anyone interested in subordination and modality, whether coming from a typological/functional or a purely formal theoretical background.

Reviewed by Don E. Walicek, University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras

This book surveys projects that use creole languages in education. The initiatives documented are situated in terms of sociolinguistic context, language ideologies, educational policy, and future goals. Most of the discussions analyze curriculum, teaching, and current challenges.

In Ch. 1 the editors survey the sociohistorical and political issues traditionally hindering the pedagogical use of creole languages. The editors also comment on factors that have encouraged the integration of these varieties. They include a fourteen-step roadmap for establishing and maintaining effective programs.

In the next chapter, Christina Higgins describes Da Pidgin Coup, a group working to raise awareness about Pidgin in Hawai’i and discusses efforts to counter and transform negative language attitudes. In the following chapter, Eeva Sippola discusses three Chabacono (Philippine Creole Spanish) projects, comparing an extra-institutional grassroots program in Cavite with two others.

The focus shifts to the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe in Ch. 4. Mirna Bolus explains that France instituted competitive qualifying examinations for teachers of Creole (a medium of instruction in Guadeloupe) in 2001. The documentation of projects in French overseas departments continues with Bettina Migge and Isabelle Léglise’s insightful description and assessment of three programs in French Guiana, noting resources they provide and obstacles they face.

The use of Kriol in the schools of Nicaragua’s Caribbean Coast is the focus of Arja Koskinen’s Ch. 6. Written by Karen Carpenter and Hubert Devonish, the next chapter evaluates a bilingual education program involving Jamaican Creole and English. In both cases, preliminary results attest to the effectiveness of the fully bilingual approach.

Next, Hazel Simmons-McDonald reviews the language situation in St. Lucia and describes a bilingual instructional pilot program in English and French Creole. In Ch. 9, Jo-Anne S. Ferreira describes programs and materials involving Kheuól, the mother tongue of the indigenous Karipúna and Galibi-Marwono of northern Brazil. The author suggests that future language preservation initiatives should directly address the needs of specific groups.

The survey continues with Marta Dijkhoff and Joyce Pereira’s work on Papiamentu’s historical trajectory as a language in the educational systems of Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao. Next, Marlyse Baptista, Inês Brito, and Saídu Bangura describe the use of Cape Verdean in education as a linguistic and human right, documenting language attitudes, orthographic conventions, and dialectal variation. Finally, Ronald C. Morren describes the linguistic situation on three Colombian islands where an English-lexifier Creole is spoken: San Andres, Providence, and Santa Catalina. The chapter discusses a primary school trilingual project involving Creole, Standard English, and Spanish.

This inspiring and highly informative volume has much to offer readers and policy makers. It brings linguistics to life by making timely and empirically-supported arguments about the importance of creole languages. What contribution could be more valuable than improving such a basic element of the educational opportunities of creole-speaking youth?

Reviewed by Kanavillil Rajagopalan, State University at Campinas, Brazil

This book is concerned with an intensely researched issue in contemporary language studies, the formation and refashioning of identity in and through language. Rather than discussing identity in the abstract, G focuses on the negotiation of identity in a concrete linguistic setting, the island of Java.

Subtitled ‘Neighborhood talk in Indonesia’, the book takes an in-depth look at the bewildering linguistic reality of Indonesia, made even more complex and, to many outsiders, intractable by the religious and ethnic diversity of the region. What distinguishes G’s approach is his emphasis on hard-nosed empirical investigation instead of the more familiar post-structuralist and social constructivist approaches, as discussed in Ch. 1. The object of G’s investigation is how talk plays a vital role in mediating social relations. The analysis is based on data gathered from two Rukun Tetangga (‘ward(s)’) of Semarang, a city in north-east Java.

Chs. 2 and 3 are devoted to unpacking the complexities of enregisterment, in which certain stereotypes of language-identity relationships come into being. G drives home the point that language and identity are ultimately inseparable concepts. Ch. 4, ‘Linguistic signs, alternation, crossing and adequation’, examines how language categorization, language choice, codeswitching, and so forth play out in the conversational narratives of ward members. Ch.5 focuses on processes of social identification in a situation of increasingly large migratory movements.

The chapter that follows takes a closer look at how ‘one non-Javanese newcomer learns to use fragments of ngoko [informal] Javanese as part of a collusive telling of a story about one neighbor’s perceived inappropriate actions’ (5). Chs. 7 and 8 further explore the set of strategies that newcomers employ to integrate themselves into the host community, which often fly in the face of firmly entrenched language ideologies. G notes that these practices, despite their first appearance of being gendered, may admit of more nuanced interpretations. Ch. 9 distinguishes two language ideologies in the wards, one relating to interaction among local Javanese and the other to language use in interethnic interactions. G underscores the vital role of governmental policy in the formation of the second language ideology.

The book offers the reader a window on a corner of the earth where language and identity go hand in hand, a fact further brought into relief by ongoing migration and the resultant readjustments in fashioning individual identities and imagining the social fabric.

Reviewed by Dimitrios Ntelitheos, United Arab Emirates University

This book is a collection of updated versions of fifteen talks presented in a workshop on QP Structure, Nominalizations, and the role of DP at Saarland University in December 2005. The collection is introduced by the editors’ thorough overview of quantifiers and definiteness in recent syntactic theory. The book is divided into three parts exploring connections between quantification, definiteness, and nominalization.

The first part starts with an article by Lisa Matthewson analyzing the element –nukw in St’at’imcets as assuming a presuppositional element to the semantic definition of the item. Lisa Lai-Shen Cheng explores the cooccurrence of Chinese mei ‘every’ with dou ‘all’ and reduplicated classifiers, relying on selectional/interpretive differences in Mandarin and Cantonese classifiers. Urtzi Etxeberria discusses contextually restricted quantification in Basque, showing that quantifiers are restricted by both nominal restriction and the presence of Q-determiners. Luisa Martí argues from contextual restrictions that the Spanish indefinite algunos introduces a contextual variable and proposes a hierarchical organization of the basic building blocks of indefinites. Kook-Hee Gil and George Tsoulas discuss quantification and DP/QP structure in Korean and Japanese, addressing the status of classifiers and indeterminate quantification.

The second part of the book starts with Louise McNally’s article arguing that there is room for semantic variation within property-based analyses of existentials. There-existential predicates are better analyzed as involving true property predications and not semantic incorporation. Donka Farkas and Henriëtte de Swart extend a previous analysis of crosslinguistic variation in article choice in generic and non-generic contexts. Amim von Stechow introduces a new positive operator Pos (a universal quantifier over degrees) to derive the semantics of German temporal adjectives by viewing times as ‘degrees’. Helen de Hoop proposes that animacy affects the ‘prominence’ of noun phrases, thereby contributing to the interpretation of animate noun phrases similarly to definiteness.

The final part, on nominalizations, begins with Artemis Alexiadou’s discussion of the role of syntactic locality in morphological processes. Using data from Greek derived nominals, the author distinguishes verbalizers from projections that introduce arguments and shows that result nominals and nominals with argument structure share the same basic verbal structure. Manfred Bierwisch treats nominalizations as syntactically and semantically conditioned lexical phenomena. Heidi Harley explores the internal structure of event nominalizations based on the properties of verb-particle constructions and proposing an analysis of verbalizing morphemes as underspecified spell-outs of an eventive v head. Thomas Roeper and Angeliek van Hout treat   –ability nominalizations on par with passive structures based on thematic restrictions on the DP-specifier position. Finally, Tal Siloni and Omer Preminger address crosslinguistic restrictions on voice alternations within nominalizations.

The volume is an essential reference on the syntax and semantics of quantification, nominalization, and definiteness. The breadth of empirical coverage and the unique explorations of the interfaces between syntax, semantics, and the lexicon make this volume important reading for specialists, as well as graduate students interested in the nominal domain.

Reviewed by Carolin Patzelt, University of Bochum

This volume examines the language of men and women in different types of everyday conversation. The analysis of gender as a sociolinguistic factor is not new, of course. However, the present study does not set out to identify typical male or female commu­nicative devices but rather explores when, why, and by whom such devices are used, and whether they really hew to the traditional stereotypes of ‘male’ and ‘female’. The author does not depart from traditional stereotypes that define certain communicative characteristics as ‘typical of men’s (women’s) talk’. Instead, she uses a constructionist framework to explain why speakers frequently adopt linguistic devices usually associated with the opposite sex. Both the adoption of a constructionist framework and the analysis of different types of conversation enable the author to draw more refined conclusions on when, why, and by whom alleged ‘male’ or ‘female’ communicative devices are used.

Following a general introduction (Ch. 1), Ch. 2 provides an overview of earlier studies of gender and discourse in chronological order. Starting from Robin Lakoff’s ground-breaking Language and woman’s place (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), the author proceeds to the theory of distinct­ness, which begins with the assumption that men and women live in ‘different worlds’. This is the theory most traditional studies of gender and discourse draw on when discussing ‘typical’ male and female uses of question tags, hedges, and short answers, for instance. Finally, the constructionist model is discussed as the most recent and differentiated theoretical framework. It criticizes the distinctness model for being based on oversimplified stereotypes and suggests that additional factors (e.g. the individual communicative situation, social class, age, and sexual orientation) must be taken into consideration to classify the use of certain communicative devices.

Chs. 3–5 examine the linguistic behavior of men and women in different communicative situations. In Ch. 3, the author analyzes the transmission of historias de queja (complaints) in conversations among friends. She concludes that the expression of solidarity is not a general characteristic of women’s talk, but is a question of group identity and the topic of discussion. Ch. 4 examines the use of humor among men and women. While it is shown that women use types of humor usually attributed to men and vice versa, the author identifies different functions of humor: while men use it merely for amusement, women regard it as a sign of solidarity. Finally, Ch. 5 analyzes some typical conversations among factory workers during breaks, before Ch. 6 reviews the most significant conclusions in a detailed and convincing way. Unfortunately, the book lacks the appendix listed in the table of contents.

This book provides new insights into the relation between gender and discourse, and is strongly recommended to anyone interested in sociolinguistics and discourse analysis.

Reviewed by Don E. Walicek, University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras

This book examines the notion of context, distinguishing between language-external context and language-internal co-text, with special attention to construction grammar (CG), though a few of its contributions offer a pre-theoretical perspective. The volume consists of an introduction and eight contributions organized in three parts: context in constructional grammar, interactional approaches, and context and grammar. The languages discussed are Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Old Czech, and Swedish.

The editors’ introduction situates context as linking pragmatics and discourse, surveys CG and frame semantics (its ‘sister theory’), and suggests topics for future research.

Marina Terkourafi begins Part 1 with a chapter arguing that the pragmatic consequences of an utterance are realized early in its production. She establishes that linguistic and extralinguistic context act as cues in this process. Henri-José Deulofeu and Jeanne-Marie Debaisieux examine parce que ‘because’ clauses in spoken French, suggesting that certain parts of an utterance, while necessary for coherency, may act as contextual background. The authors hold that any pairing between form and meaning, including non-verbal communicative behaviors, can be conceptualized as part of a construction. Next, Mirjam Fried’s intriguing corpus-based case study of Old Czech investigates how context enters conventional linguistic patterning to become part of codified relationships. The chapter applies CG to interactions among traditional semantic structure, thematic and cultural context, and systematic morphosyntactic patterns.

Part 2 begins with Per Linell’s investigation of grammatical constructions in dialogue.  Aiming to counter the interactional deficit in CG, this chapter contrasts dynamic real usage events with the view of language as tokens of fixed abstract types. Camilla Wide’s article uses CG and interactional linguistics to show that features of context need to be included in formalist descriptions of spoken language. Examining a demonstrative construction from a Swedish dialect of Finland, the hybrid approach of this article sheds light on functional understandings of constructions.

Part 3 begins with Bert Cappelle’s discussion of particle placement in transitive phrasal verbs in English. His chapter investigates contextual factors associated with alternation, including focality, accessibility, and encyclopedic world knowledge. Ease of processing is identified as motivating divergent options. Ilona Vandergriff examines word order in wenn ‘if’-initial conditionals in German. Using CG and mental spaces theory, the article rejects the idea that integration marks content or predictive conditionality. Ronny Boogaart discusses modal verbs in the volume’s final chapter. He argues that the Dutch verb kunnen ‘can’ shows different forms, each with its own meaning, rather than one form with different meanings. Asserting that modal constructions are monosemous, not polysemous, the author calls for greater attention to pragmatics in CG.

This provocative book fruitfully examines context through integrative structural, pragmatic, and discourse-oriented approaches. Established scholars and students from a wide variety of fields, including those with little knowledge of CG, are likely to appreciate the volume.

Reviewed by Dimitrios Ntelitheos, United Arab Emirates University

This book is a collection of nine articles focusing on how possession is expressed in different languages. William McGregor’s introduction discusses basic issues related to possession, such as the nature of possessum and possessor entities and of the possessive relation, including attributive/adnominal, predicative, and external possession.

The first article in the collection, by Peter Willemse, Kristin Davidse, and Liesbet Heyvaert, probes the information status of the possessum in English adnominal possessive constructions, showing that its treatment as a definite noun phrase does not adequately capture its properties. It introduces a taxonomy of givenness, showing that possessum referents can have a status at any point in this hierarchy. Jan Rijkhoff discusses co-variation between form and function of adnominal possessive modifiers in Dutch and English and concludes that the term ‘attributive possession’ is too general to capture the distribution of possessives. In Doris Payne’s contribution, the semantic/thematic relation between predicate possession and location is examined in a critical fashion on the basis of data from Maa to show that possession cannot be just a metaphorical extension of location.

Sonja Eisenbeiβ, Ayumi Matsuo, and Ingrid Sonnenstuhl provide a crosslinguistic overview of child language acquisition studies of possessive structures, and show that children follow a step-by-step process in the emergence and range of functions acquired of possessive structures. Mirjam Fried introduces a constructional account of plain vs. situational possession in Czech, and shows that the possibility of something becoming a possessum lies in cultural concepts and expectations of what can be possessed rather than animacy or concreteness.

Frantisek Lichtenberk turns the discussion to possessive constructions in Oceanic languages. Most Oceanic languages have two distinct types of attributive possession, in which the possessive affix attaches directly to the possessum (which overwhelmingly signals inalienable possession) or to a possessive classifier (which expresses some types of inalienable possession). Miriam van Staden discusses possessive clauses in East Nusantara, a linguistic area of East Indonesia and Timor. One of the languages, Tidore, exhibits a split, argument-referencing system in which verbal arguments are marked on the predicate differently than possessive arguments, which blurs the distinction between attributive and predicative possession.

In Hein van der Voort’s account of possessive expressions in Southwestern Amazon, two main adnominal possessive strategies are described, in which a possessive element attaches to either the possessor or the possessum. Finally, Kearsy Cormier and Jordan Fenlon discuss possession in British Sign Language, showing that it exhibits many of the patterns found in spoken languages (e.g. attributive versus predicative possession, the expression of inalienable possession), but differs significantly in its inherent use of ‘space’  in the expression of possession.

This collection of articles is essential reading for researchers, academics, and advanced linguistics students interested in the expression of possession crosslinguistically and the relation between the linguistic forms of different possessive structures and their semantic or grammatical functions.

Reviewed by Elly van Gelderen, Arizona State University

This book collects most of Kortlandt’s writings on Germanic, Indo-European, and Indo-Uralic. There are papers on the spread of Indo-European, the origin of the Goths, the phonology and morphosyntax of Indo-European, many of its daughter languages (Greek, Indo-Iranian, Tocharian, Albanian, Armenian, Balto-Slavic, Italo-Celtic, Anatolian), and the controversial claim of an Indo-Uralic language family that includes the Indo-European and Uralic languages. There are eight chapters on Germanic phonology, eleven on Germanic verb classes, verbal and nominal inflection, and several chapters on German, English, Scandinavian, and the Russenorsk pidgin. Many of these are short state-of-the-art articles written in a common sense style and containing a wealth of background information.

According to K, ‘a quest for relative chronology of linguistic developments’ (xi) is central to his work. His reconstructions are bottom-up and always show concern for empirical evidence. Besides the richness of his data, his citation of earlier literature and discussion of various theories reminds the reader of the wisdom and insight of such older scholars as Holger Pedersen and C.C. Uhlenbeck.

K argues that Indo-European is a branch of the putative Indo-Uralic family that was influenced by a North Caucasian substratum when early Indo-European speakers moved further north from the northern shore of the Caspian Sea. He claims that, as a result, ‘Indo-European developed a minimal vowel system…a very large consonant inventory…, grammatical gender and adjectival agreement, an ergative construction which was lost again but has left its traces in the grammatical system, especially in the nominal inflection, a construction with a dative subject…. The Indo-Uralic elements of Indo-European include pronouns, case endings, verbal endings, participles and derivational suffixes.’ (http://www.kortlandt.nl/publications/art269e.pdf)

Donella Antelmi and Francesca Santulli (111–34) compare how representatives of the Left and the Right exploit the speech presenting a new government to the Italian parliament, the two other articles focus on the discursive features of the conventionalized mechanisms of control in parliamentary debates (Clara-Ubaldina Lorda Mur on ‘questions au gouvernement’ in France) or the lack thereof (Elisabeth Zima, Geert Brône, and Kurt Feyaerts on ‘unauthorized interruptive comments’ in Austria).

Part 3 contains three chapters on ‘Procedural, discursive and rhetorical particularities of post-Communist parliaments’ that focus on changes in parliamentary discourse across the Communist, transitional, and post-Communist periods. The articles concern the management of interpersonal relationships through (dis)agreement strategies in the Romanian Parliament (Cornelia Ilie), occurrences of applause and laughter in the Polish Sejm (Cezar Ornatowski), and the discursive construction of the addressee in the Czech Parliament (Yordanka Madzharova Bruteig).

Part 4 contains crosscultural studies of parliamentary discourse. In his contribution (305–28), H. José Plug seeks to determine whether the different institutional characteristics of the Dutch and European Parliaments have an impact on how personal attacks are discursively managed, whilst Isabel Íñigo-Mora (329–72) explores the rhetorical strategies of British and Spanish MPs in discussing the Iraqi conflict.

The strength and relevance of this volume undoubtedly lies in the fact that through a rich collection of case studies, focusing on an important selection of parliamentary institutions and applying diverse analytical approaches (including discursive psychology and (critical) discourse analysis), the authors lay a sound foundation for further linguistic research on the impacts of parliamentary interaction on current political action.

Reviewed by Andy Van Drom, Université Laval, Québec

This volume starts with the idea that parliaments are at the heart of the daily (re)constructing, (re)framing and (re)shaping of the issues, ideologies, and identities that make up democracy. Discourse analysis is then proposed to gain insight into parliamentary practice by focusing on the linguistic and discursive strategies that characterize both regulated debates and more spontaneous interactions.

Part 1 opens on a broader, discursive-psychological perspective as it explores the discursive construction and negotiation of ‘Parliamentary roles and identities’. The first two chapters offer the most substantial theoretical contributions to the volume. Teun van Dijk (29–56) uses his own theory of context to examine how parliamentarians construe a political identity as part of their social identities. In Ch. 2 (57–78), Cornelia Ilie draws heavily on Erving Goffman’s work on identity construction to elaborate a typology of parliamentary participants based on their dialogue roles and institutional identities. Finally, Maria Aldina Marques presents a case study (79–108) of the use of personal deictic markers to construct individual and collective political identities.

The three chapters in Part 2 analyze ‘Ritualised strategies of parliamentary confrontation’—particular interactive patterns that result from parliamentary procedures. While Donella Antelmi and Francesca Santulli (111–34) compare how representatives of the Left and the Right exploit the speech presenting a new government to the Italian parliament, the two other articles focus on the discursive features of the conventionalized mechanisms of control in parliamentary debates (Clara-Ubaldina Lorda Mur on ‘questions au gouvernement’ in France) or the lack thereof (Elisabeth Zima, Geert Brône, and Kurt Feyaerts on ‘unauthorized interruptive comments’ in Austria).

Part 3 contains three chapters on ‘Procedural, discursive and rhetorical particularities of post-Communist parliaments’ that focus on changes in parliamentary discourse across the Communist, transitional, and post-Communist periods. The articles concern the management of interpersonal relationships through (dis)agreement strategies in the Romanian Parliament (Cornelia Ilie), occurrences of applause and laughter in the Polish Sejm (Cezar Ornatowski), and the discursive construction of the addressee in the Czech Parliament (Yordanka Madzharova Bruteig).

Part 4 contains crosscultural studies of parliamentary discourse. In his contribution (305–28), H. José Plug seeks to determine whether the different institutional characteristics of the Dutch and European Parliaments have an impact on how personal attacks are discursively managed, whilst Isabel Íñigo-Mora (329–72) explores the rhetorical strategies of British and Spanish MPs in discussing the Iraqi conflict.

The strength and relevance of this volume undoubtedly lies in the fact that through a rich collection of case studies, focusing on an important selection of parliamentary institutions and applying diverse analytical approaches (including discursive psychology and (critical) discourse analysis), the authors lay a sound foundation for further linguistic research on the impacts of parliamentary interaction on current political action.