Reviewed by Elly van Gelderen, Arizona State University

Although adverbs are an ‘oppressed part of speech’ (v), they have recently received quite some attention. Argument and rhetoric was a Habilitationsschrift in 2006/2007 (v) and contributes much to what we know about the history of connectors. The book provides a helpful review, mainly of the functional literature and classification of connectors throughout the various historical stages of English (though the literature cited stops in 2007).

The aim of the book is ‘corpus-based analyses of the development of a particular word class in connector function’ (4). The author cites an experiment on the effect of connectors that shows they provide authority and logic to a text and hence the rhetorical aspect becomes important. A further claim is that ‘changes in the history of English connectors thus seem to have been triggered by the typological and structural changes which set English … apart from other Germanic languages’ (9). Unfortunately, this is not subsequently worked out well. The final paragraph of Ch. 1 (21) summarizes the main questions: are there recurrent patterns, can we distinguish clines, and how much stylistic choice is involved?

Chs. 2–4 lay the groundwork by defining adverbs and describing their various functions. In Old English, there are few adverbial connectors, according to Ch.5, although there are stance adverbs such as eac ‘also’ and eornostlice ‘earnestly’, ambiguous adverbs such as nu ‘now’, pronominal connectors such as forþæm ‘therefore’, and demonstratives. Ch. 6 looks at the big picture from Old to Modern English, and notes that many adverbial connectors have disappeared and many new ones have taken their place (80). Ch.7 examines the morphological tools used to renew the connectors and notes that very few are loans. Ch. 8 identifies three source domains: space, time, and truth. Chs. 9–11 show that connectors for cause/result, concession/contrast, and addition are very different in character. Ch. 12 very briefly examines soþlice `truly’, classified as transitional.

Personally, I found Ch. 13 the most interesting: sentence-initial connectors, such as ‘[a]nd therefore’, in authors such as Geoffrey Chaucer change to medial connectors, such as however, in e.g. Adam Smith. This stylistic change was helped by a different application of punctuation. The eighteenth century saw a grammatical use of punctuation that indicated a core of subject, verb, and object, with adverbials ‘sequestered’ by commas.

The book is rich in well-analyzed examples and contributes to our knowledge of connectors.