Reviewed by Edward McDonald, University of Auckland

This short grammar of Scottish Gaelic (ScG) was written as part of a PhD thesis on register variation and is characterized by Lamb as ‘descriptive’ and ‘by no means complete’ (4). In length and coverage it is roughly comparable to the chapter-length treatments by Donald MacAulay (The Scottish Gaelic language. The Celtic languages, ed. by Donald MacAulay, 137–248, 1992) and William Gillies (Scottish Gaelic. The Celtic languages, ed. by Martin J. Ball and James Fife, 145–225, 1993); the only book-length treatment I am aware of, though a pedagogical rather than descriptive grammar, is by Michel Byrne (Facal air an Fhacal: Gràmar na Gàidhlig, 2000), written in Gaelic, which deals with the syntax mainly through the morphology. So although a full-length descriptive grammar is, as L notes, ‘still a desideratum of ScG linguistics and pedagogy’ (4), this work makes a good start in that direction, supplementing the basic description with a typological treatment that should make it of broader use beyond Celtic studies. A particularly pleasing innovation is the use of authentic material from a corpus of spoken and written Gaelic compiled by the author; it would certainly be a boon to have that corpus available to other researchers.

Apart from an introductory chapter on sociolinguistics (6–16) and a brief summary of phonology (17–21), the bulk of the work deals with morphosyntax. The chapter on morphology (22–67) is the longest in the book, reflecting not only perhaps a traditional bias but the central role of morphological marking in the syntax, and provides an ‘overview of morphological characteristics’ plus a detailed treatment of nominal and verbal morphology. The chapter on syntax proper (68–100) deals with predicate nominals, constituent order and grammatical relations, and clause combinations, plus a short but suggestive treatment of discourse phenomena such as referential devices and highlighting of constituents.

L’s exposition is clear and consistent, though occasionally the theoretical apparatus, mainly taken from functional typological frameworks such as William Foley and Robert Van Valin’s Functional syntax and universal grammar (1986), proves a bit too weighty to digest for its brief presentation. The organization of the grammar is such that it would allow anyone searching for the main syntactic typological features of Gaelic to find the necessary information quickly and easily. Apart from the use of authentic examples in the text itself, particularly in the chapter on syntax, L also provides a complete sample text, an oral folktale, in a appendix. This would perhaps have been even more useful if it had been divided into clauses/sentences, with some discussion of the principles on which this was done. With these minor reservations, however, this is a very useful, concise volume, and we can only hope it will be followed up by a longer treatment of a language underrepresented in the linguistic literature.