Reviewed by Thomas Stewart, University of Louisville

In this book, William Lamb has set himself at least two ambitious goals: presenting Scottish Gaelic (SG) both structurally and sociolinguistically, while collecting, tagging, and statistically characterizing a representative corpus of the language. The book constitutes a valuable contribution on each of these counts.

In Ch. 1 ‘Introduction’ (17–22), L provides a targeted overview of register research, including the question of whether endangered languages tend toward reduced stylistic variation (a point that L concludes need not be true). Ch. 2 ‘Spoken and written registers and Scottish Gaelic’ (23–38) fleshes out the relationship between corpus linguistics and the empirical description of putative registers—drawing especially upon the work of Douglas Biber (Variation Across Speech and Writing, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)—and provides a survey of the few previously published studies on SG registers. Ch. 3 ‘Scottish Gaelic sociolinguistics’ (39–51) presents a concise characterization of modern SG’s status as a living language today, with attention to its limited geographical distribution, its generational decline, and its history of limited outlets in print publication.

Ch. 4 ‘Methodology’ (52–72) stands as the core of the book. In this chapter, general and language-specific descriptive issues are addressed, as is the rationale for L’s choice of four spoken registers (conversation, radio interview, sports broadcast, and traditional narrative) and four written registers (academic prose, fiction, popular writing, and radio news scripts) for inclusion in his corpus (81,677 words in all; see also Appendix 2 ‘List of texts in corpus’). In order to identify trends in the corpus, significant text-tagging was undertaken, addressing multiple levels of linguistic structure (see also Appendix 3 ‘Full tag set’). L takes special care in the exposition of statistical tests and computational techniques, which are well explained and motivated.  Appendix 1 ‘A descriptive grammar of Scottish Gaelic’ is also a helpful reference for the reader, not only for this chapter but for the entire book. It consists of a revised SG grammar based on L’s earlier work  (Scottish Gaelic, Munich: LINCOM Europa, 2002),

Ch. 5 ‘Information structure and clausal types’ (73–101), Ch. 6 ‘Morphosyntax and the lexicon’ (102–49), and Ch. 7 ‘Noun phrase grammar and complexity’ (150-–71) report the results for patterns of distribution for the various tags within and across the eight source-types. This identification of tag clusters and correlations feeds directly into Ch. 8, which lays out a systematic summary description of the ‘Profiles of the individual registers’ (172–85). Ch. 9 ‘Conclusions’ (186–96) provides not only reflections on the results and on the inductive and deductive methods employed in the process of discerning registers in SG speech and writing, but also clear evidence in support of the conclusion that SG is not stylistically impoverished, despite its endangered circumstances.

Superb in how it anticipates and supplies what readers may need to know at any given moment, this insightful study of discourse and register is of particular interest to SG and other Celtic language scholars. Additionally, this book serves as a methodological demonstration of corpus linguistic work in dialogue with register theory.