Reviewed by Omaima Ayoub, Richard J. Daley College

The fourth volume to emerge from a series of conferences organized by the Columbia School (CS), this collection contributes both to the growth of the school itself and to the field’s mission of understanding human language. Attempting to take CS work beyond its origins, this anthology maintains the school’s sign-based, functionalist paradigm, while simultaneously raising questions pertinent to semiotics, phonology, grammar, the lexicon, anthropology, and linguistic theory. In this way, this volume demonstrates both consistency in CS linguistics and innovation in exploring new frontiers of linguistic research. One of the editors, Joseph Davis, sets the tone with ‘Introduction: Consistency and change in Columbia School linguistics’. The volume is then divided into four sections.

In Section 1, ‘Linguistic theory’, Wallis Reid, ‘Columbia school and Saussure’s langue’, argues that CS linguistics directly rests on a foundation laid by Ferdinand de Saussure. In ‘Diver’s theory’, Alan Huffman examines William Diver’s paper Theory (in Meaning as explanation: Advances in sign-based linguistics, ed. by Ellen Contini-Morava & Barbara Goldberg. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1995) and argues that, as the most comprehensive and final statement by the founder of CS, this groundbreaking paper emphasizes Diver’s antiapriorism—that is, a theory of language must not be a collection of a priori categories and speculations but rather a set of conclusions drawn from empirical and inductive inquiry.

Section 2, ‘Phonology’, begins with ‘Phonology as human behavior: Inflectional systems in English’, in which Yishai Tobin summarizes the basic theoretical and methodological principles of phonology as human behavior (PHB; a.k.a. CS phonology) and applies this theory to the synchronic and diachronic analysis of English inflection. Yishai Tobin and Haruko Miyakoda analyze Japanese speech errors and loanwords in ‘Phonological processes of Japanese based on the theory of phonology as human behavior. They conclude that PHB can account for why the observed phonological processes (e.g. deletion, substitution, epenthesis) occur as they do in Japanese. In ‘Phonology as human behavior: A combinatory phonology of Byelorussian’, Igor Dreer applies PHB to an analysis of the distribution of consonants in Byelorussian monosyllabic words. Adriaan Dekker and Bob de Jonge apply PHB to a corpus of Peninsular Spanish word stems in ‘Phonology as human behavior: The case of Peninsular Spanish’. Through an analysis of the distribution of nine Peninsular Spanish consonants in the lexicon, they notice that initial /k/ appears more frequently than expected, and thus, breaks the typical distribution of phonological units in lexicon. In ‘Functional motivations for the sound patterns of English non-lexical interjections’, Gina Joue and Nikolinka Collier argue that nonlexical interjections are discourse particles whose function depends on a combination of their position in conversation, denotation, and context. In the last paper in this section, ‘Phonology without the phoneme’, Joseph Davis argues that the phoneme has always been superfluous in CS phonology because the articulation of the signal, not of the phoneme, has been the thread linking phonetics, communication, and the human factor.

Section 3, ‘Grammar and lexicon’ begins with ‘Tell me about yourself: A unified account of English –self pronouns’, in which Nancy Stern rejects the traditional characterization of English –self pronouns as reflexive and hypothesizes that they signal a constant meaning of insistence on a referent. In ‘Se without deixis’, Radmila J. Gorup argues that the distribution of se in Serbo-Croatian cannot be explained by invoking a priori categories (e.g. reflexive, impersonal, middle voice) and hypothesizes that se is a signal in the semantic substance called participant focus. Ellen Contini-Morava’s contribution, ‘The difference between zero and nothing: Swahili noun class prefixes 5 and 9/10’, presents an analysis of three Swahili noun classes whose prefixes are traditionally analyzed as having Ø (i.e. meaningful absence) as an allomorph. She argues that only class 5 has a prefix, whose most frequent alternant is Ø, while classes 9 and 10 have no prefix at all.

In ‘A semantic analysis of the Swahili suffix li’, Robert A. Leonard and Wendy Saliba Leonard propose that the Swahili suffix li has a single, invariant meaning: ‘li instructs the hearer to interpret a nonhigh controller at a higher, more potent level of control than if li were not used’. Hidemi Sugi Riggs, in ‘The structure of the Japanese inferential system: A functional analysis of daroo, rashii, soo-da, and yooda’, analyzes Japanese inferential auxiliaries and argues that the prevailing view of these forms as epistemic markers is unsupported. Charlene Crupi’s contribution, ‘Structuring cues of conjunctive yet, but, and still: A monosemic approach’, argues that yet, but, and still do not comprise a closed grammatical system but rather are independent linguistic units that contribute unique and consistent clues about overall textual structure.

Finally, Section 4, ‘Beyond language’, includes two papers. In ‘The case of articulatory gestures—not sounds—as the physical embodiment of speech signs’, Thomas Eccardt makes the case that articulatory gestures, not sounds, are signifiers of human speech. Robert Leonard’s concluding paper, ‘Meaning in nonlinguistic systems: Observations, remarks, and hypotheses on food, architecture, and honor in Kenya’, analyzes data from fieldwork in Lamu (Kenya) and Thailand to offer an anthropological analysis of behavior involving the use of space and food.