Reviewed by Theresa McGarry, East Tennessee State University

This account of an empirical study of elicited requests of Chinese learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) addresses the relative paucity of research on second language learners’ communicative competence and thereby contributes to the understanding of cross-cultural pragmatics and interlanguage pragmatics (ILP). Chs. 1 and 2 contextualize the study in light of the increasing emphasis on the social element of second language acquisition and the goals, constructs, and theories of ILP. Ch. 3 describes the methodology, involving two groups of EFL learners and a native speaker baseline group. Responses are elicited using scenarios meant to construct realistic social contexts, in which respondents request specific types of services of favors.

Chs. 4–7 present the results. In certain scenarios, the learners differ markedly from the native speakers in strategy use, suggesting that they have difficulty adapting their strategy use to different contexts. They tend to rely heavily on relatively few formulae, using fewer syntactically complex formulae and formulae bound to particular contexts. Analysis of internal modifications to the request act shows differences in the use of conditionals, bi-clausal structures, and address terms. Finally, learners use supportive moves more frequently than native speakers, yielding longer request utterances, and they show some differences in how they organize the utterance moves.

In Ch. 8, the author interprets the results as suggesting strategic, sociopragmatic, and lexical interference. He finds advantages for the context-based and formulae-based approaches and argues for considering both formula use and strategy type use to be core constructs in measuring ILP competence. He further notes that instruction appears to have little effect, but the type of input does make a difference. Ch. 9 presents general conclusions as answers to the research questions posed earlier and discusses directions for future research.

This timely and exceptionally readable account of a well-conducted research project addresses important questions, and the methodology is clearly motivated and described. The operationalized constructs are explained with effective examples, as are the results, and the tables are helpful and complete. The analysis considers various aspects of the learner’s experience and, relating the results to earlier research, and the author makes judicious pedagogical recommendations without becoming overly prescriptive. An especially interesting part of the analysis is the consideration of sociopragmatic issues.

The book occasionally feels repetitive, because the same information is arrived at by different analyses, but the points are made concisely, and the independence of each unit would facilitate using one section in a class or reading group. While the author’s claim that Chinese EFL speakers accept the native speaker as the model, although unsubstantiated, seems entirely likely, the English as an international language viewpoint could have been considered more thoroughly. However, its mention is appreciated. Overall, this book is a strong contribution to the field of ILP that is highly accessible to the intended audience and is of great interest for both practical and theoretical reasons.

Reviewed by Philip W. Davis, Rice University

Warrongo was an Australian language spoken in northeastern Queensland, and Tasaku Tsunoda worked with the last fluent speaker of the language, Alf Palmer, who died in 1981 at over 100 years of age. Prior to Palmer’s participation in the description of his language, beginning in the 1970s, there was a period of fifty years during which he had not spoken Warrongo (45). Since 2000, T has made extensive efforts to promote the revival of Warrongo (v, vii), and this book ‘is almost entirely based on the lecture notes’ (v) from a course on the language taught at the University of Tokyo (2003–2009).

The book is organized into four chapters: The language and its speakers (1–52), Phonology (53–155), Word classes and morphology (156–317), and Syntax (318–699). The book concludes with excerpts from three texts (700–22), followed by indices of subjects, languages, and names.

Ch. 1 contains information about Warrongo’s language type, its dialects, the territory in which it was spoken, the anthropological context, speech styles, post-contact history, other studies on Warrongo, and present day situation. There were two fluent speakers in the 1970s, but the data from the second are ‘severely limited’ (3). Each speaker probably represented a different dialect, and the exact geographical extent in which Warrongo was spoken is not known (4). The Warrongos were never the focus of archaeological or anthropological study (15).

Ch. 2 presents Warrongo phonology in a phoneme-allophone format. The language had three vowels, with a marginal fourth, a long /a:/. There were two semivowels and eleven consonants at the bilabial, apico-alveolar, retroflex, lamino-palatal, and dorso-velar positions. Together they composed ‘one of the smallest phoneme inventories among Australian languages’ (53). Of interest is the non-discrete use of voice as a distinctive feature among the stops (60). Stress (133) and pitch (141) were not distinctive.

Ch. 3 identifies five word classes: nouns, personal pronouns, adverbs, verbs, and interjections. Adjectives are included among the nouns (157). The chapter is generally organized upon a distinction between derivational and inflectional morphology, and noun cases are presented according to their meanings and functions. Warrongo was a syntactically ergative language, ‘and word order is ‘fairly free’ (2, 318). This sets the task for Ch. 4, which is organized generally by types of sentences, clauses, then by constituents of clauses, and types of phrases. Among the construction types, a discussion of the antipassive occupies seventy-eight pages.

The treatment of the texts deserves special commendation. They are presented in the Warrongo, accompanied by a line of grammatical glosses and then by an English translation. T additionally accompanies the whole with running comments on Warrongo usage and includes reflective remarks by Alf Palmer himself.

T has performed an admirable job of language documentation. Against this background, it is a small quibble to note that we are not told certain sorts of information, such as how to say something like Alf shot the snake as a specific response to a question like Who shot the snake?

Reviewed by MaryAnn Parada, University of Illinois at Chicago

In this well-written and intriguingly diverse book, editor Marina Terkourafi provides an invaluable contribution to the growing scholarship on hip hop. Consistent with the heterogeneity characteristic of the genre’s principal forms (i.e. breakdancing, DJ-ing, graffiti, and rap), the common thread across the book’s twelve chapters is in fact the distinctly ‘glocalized’ nature of the multiple hip hop varieties highlighted. From Germany to Egypt, Hungary to South Korea, Cyprus to Chicago, the linguistic analyses contained in this work offer diverse perspectives on the intersections between music, language, and identity in a globalized society.

Examining the linguistic peculiarities and local flavor of hip hop culture and production in their respective regions of study, specifically within the context of ‘connective marginalities’ (3) and the transnational notion of ‘keepin it real’, the authors adopt a number of methodologies and frameworks through which they analyze the ways in which authenticity is dually established both at the level of local life and in the acknowledgement of the broader hip hop movement and its origins.

In her engaging introduction, Terkourafi details how artists work to ‘claim’ authenticity at each of the two levels through strategic choices involving ‘both form (music samples and language varieties used) and content (topics and genres referred to, and attitudes expressed)’ (7). Authentic production in the local sense is typically accomplished through the incorporation of local rhythms, songs, or sounds, through the (often combined) use of national, regional, immigrant, or minority languages, and by referencing aspects of local culture and community. Global social issues highly relevant to the immediate environment, such as migration, may also be invoked to the same end. On the other hand, staying ‘real’ to hip hop culture more broadly is regularly observed in artists’ recognition of its Black inner-city roots through their use of linguistic features and styles associated with African American English (AAE) and through their stances of social critique and resistance.

Embedded in the book’s consistently clear prose are a host of other recurring and interconnected topics that relate to or directly interface with notions of authenticity, including ethnolinguistic identity, multilingualism and codeswitching, global English, audience design and marketability, emblematic discourse, lyrical structure, and sociopolitical taboo. This thematic variety endows the collection with an interdisciplinary appeal and utility to individuals of diverse research interests. However, despite the helpful glossary of hip hop terms in the appendix, it may read somewhat densely for those unacquainted with the hip hop genre or its trajectory of linguistic analysis. One may wish to first read one or two of the abundantly cited precursors to this book for a better understanding of pertinent sequences of events and investigative approaches.

The rich analyses contained in this work both advance hip hop research in exciting directions and expand the scope of sociolinguistics, and in so doing, offer important insights to scholars and graduate students dedicated to investigating the relational complexities of language and society.

Reviewed by Ángela Lobo López, Universidad Complutense Madrid

This book by Anne Storch represents the outcome of extensive fieldwork started in 1995 and carried out in Nigeria (Jukun-speaking communities), Uganda, and Sudan (Western Nilotic area). The book aims to show that the manipulation of language, by strategies such as secrecy, mimesis, sacrilege, and ambiguity, is functional to the construction of power and of social norms.

 The book is divided into ten parts: an introductory section with a preface by the author (ix–x), followed by acknowledgments (xi–xii) and  lists of maps (xiii), tables (xv), illustrations (xvii), and abbreviations (xix–xx); eight chapters; and a final reference section with a list of languages (235–36), bibliographical references (221–34), an index of languages (235–36), an index of authors (237–39), and a subject index (241–42).

 In the first chapter (3–18), the author defines the form of language change under investigation (i.e. deliberate manipulations of a language by its speakers), the sociocultural background (i.e. language change in the Africanist tradition, started by Westermann), and the theoretical framework for which ‘languages are seen […] as a powerful form of socially active knowledge maintained by and belonging to people who share ideas and ideologies of aesthetics, truth, sacredness, and identity’ (9).

 The second chapter (18–52) offers a typology of manipulated languages. The author discusses and exemplifies the following types: play languages, honorific registers, hunting and blacksmithing special-purpose registers, avoidance language, and taboo words, and ritual language. The third chapter (53–83) deals with the notion of secrecy with examples taken from Jukunoid languages (e.g. the story of Kona), Lango (e.g. Western Nilotic, morphologization), and Fulfulde (e.g. Niger-Congo, accumulative manipulation).

 In the fourth chapter (84–132) the author discusses the concept of mimesis, taking into consideration the language used in spirit mediumship and in cathartic possession, and also discusses the mimetic strategies displayed in expressive language (e.g. ideophones). The fifth chapter (133–67) takes into account sacrilege that is the revelation of a secret through unmasking. One paragraph in particular is dedicated to the role of Hone proverbs, by means of which it is possible to expose a secret (in a ritualized context) without destroying it.

 The sixth chapter (168–86) explores how potentially dangerous items and actions may be grammatically encoded as ambiguous concepts. Ambiguity is explained here through the conceptualization of food and poison. In the seventh chapter (187–200), the author outlines ‘how alterity is negotiated in the intercultural setting of African scenarios’ (187). Such an enquiry may be an arduous undertaking, given the number of intertwining features that play a role, such as trade contacts, inter-marriage, river systems, and geo-political issues. The author discusses the importance of rivers as cultural pathways in the history of Jukun-based empires. The final chapter (201–13) draws the conclusive remarks, offering some considerations about the way in which deliberate manipulation can improve our understanding of language change.

 Extremely rich in examples and approaches, this book is an important tool that can be used to attain a deeper understanding of the linguistic and cultural dimensions of language change.

Reviewed by Sanford B. Steever, New Canaan, Connecticut

The 2011 edition of the Annual review of South Asian languages and linguistics includes four general contributions, two special contributions, one regional report, and two extended book reviews. The two special contributions on Munda linguistics constitute the centerpiece of this book. John Peterson’s ‘Aspects of Kharia grammar’ (81–124) gives a lively and insightful overview of the role and reference grammar treatment of Kharia, a South Munda language, serving as an advertisement for the author’s 2011 book, A grammar of Kharia from Brill. Felix Rau’s ‘Grammatical voice in Gorum’ (125–58) provides an exemplary demonstration that Gorum possesses an opposition of active vs. middle voice (or effective vs. affective voice). This is a feat, given that many scholars have generally held that Gorum lacks the category of voice. Rau ably demonstrates what the morphophonemic exponents of these voice markers are, debunking their traditional analysis as markers of other categories. One can only hope that both scholars continue to bring the same clarity of analysis to further work on the too often overlooked Munda languages.

In the general contributions, Umberto Ansaldo’s ‘Metatypy in Sri Lanka Malay’ attempts to define metatypy as a typological category and discusses its role in the formation of the Sri Lanka Malay creole. Shishir Bhattacharja’s ‘Benglish verbs: A case of code-mixing in Bengali’ (17–34) brings to bear whole-word morphology on the analysis of Bangla verbs that consist of an English word and a Bangla verb (e.g. /EksiDenT kOra/ ‘have an accident’). Probal Dasgupta’s ‘Agreement and non-finite verbs in Bangla’ (35–48) considers the analysis of dependent clauses with non-finite verbs and an unexpressed subject in what he calls a biaxial approach. Ghanshyam Sharma’s ‘On the role of protases in conditional statements’ (49–78) uses Hindi data to support a definition of conditional propositions as crucially consisting of a string of the protasis and another element, such as Hindi to or English then. Against this model, however, the string does not constitute a constituent in any recognizable sense and his model makes the protasis a conjunct of the apodosis, not a subjunct. In any event, all four chapters are too short to make strong arguments for their positions. In addition, the transcription system for Bangla examples differs both between and within the relevant chapters; example ten on page 44 lacks the appropriate symbol (*).

Pigali Sailaja offers a regional report on linguistic activity in India (161–80), excerpting and cataloguing relevant articles from Indian journals from 2005 to the present. Finally, Shishir Bhattacharja reviews Linguistic traditions of Kashmir, edited by Mrinal Kaul and Ashok Aklujkar, while Ghanshyam Sharma reviews Problematizing language studies, a festschrift for Rama Kant Agnihotri, edited by S. Imtiaz Hasnain and Shreesh Chaudhary.

Reviewed by John Ryan, University of Northern Colorado

This book is the long-awaited second edition of Melvyn C. Resnick’s original work from 1981 which, along with the newly added collaboration of Robert Hammond, has been considerably expanded to include additional content and new student material. The book is divided into seven chapters, the first three of which are general and introductory in nature and the last four of which deal more specifically with the diachronicity of Spanish.

Ch. 1 places the development of Spanish within an overall global context, discussing where it is currently spoken in the world as well as historical contact situations that have shaped it over the centuries. Ch. 2 continues the language contact discussion with a sketch of both primitive (e.g. Celtiberian, Celt, and Basque), and later foreign (e.g. Germanic and Arabic), influences on the Spanish lexicon as well as the possibility of substrate influence on Spanish phonology. Ch. 3 serves as a final introductory chapter which provides some additional preliminary details to aid in the understanding of the remainder of the book. Its topics include the pronunciation of Latin, the criteria for establishing genetic relationships between words, and the analysis of cognates.

The first two of the final four chapters deal specifically with internal changes of the language, first in terms of phonology and secondly with regard to grammar. Ch. 4 provides the comprehensive analysis of phonological changes from Classical to Vulgar Latin and then to Early and Modern Spanish. Melvyn C. Resnick’s original and unique student exercises have been included in this new edition and serve to further illustrate the sound changes explained in each section. Ch. 5 shifts the discussion from phonological to grammatical change by posing the question of why Spanish speakers cannot understand Latin; from there ensues an explanation from the authors for the evolution of morphological and syntactic structures over time. In addition to structures that have evolved, the chapter also addresses those which were previously nonexistent in Classical Latin but introduced later, such as definite and indefinite articles and the new compound tenses.

The remaining two chapters of the book turn to more external historical phenomena, namely, dialectology and the expansion of the lexicon over time. Ch. 6 comprises a comprehensive treatment of the different dialects of Spanish placed within a historical framework and includes discussions of variation both within and outside the Peninsula. Topics include the purported influence of the dialects of Andalucía and the Canary Islands on Latin American Spanish, the use of voseo (i.e. the use of the second-person singular pronoun vos), and an explanation of the history of distinction (or not) between /s/ and /θ/. Finally, Ch. 7 concludes the book with a comprehensive account of the different areas in which the lexicon of Spanish has been enhanced from both external contact situations and internal processes. The chapter also treats the notion of semantic change over time.

This newly expanded and comprehensive Introducción a la historia de la lengua española promises to be a useful tool in the Spanish historical linguistics classroom for both undergraduate and graduate students alike.

Reviewed by Josep Soler-Carbonell, University of Oxford

This book provides an elegant and in-depth analysis of linguistically experimental modernist novels written between 1898 and 1945. It concentrates on language politics and the multilingual characters portrayed by authors such as Gertrude Stein, Jean Toomer, Henry Roth, Nella Larsen, John Dos Passos, Lionel Trilling, Américo Paredes, and Carlos Bulosan. The authors’ lives and biographies are carefully analyzed in combination with their works, which are interpreted as a result of their social, cultural, and political background. In brief, this is not only a very detailed literary critical analysis, but could also be considered an ethnography of modernist and interwar literature.

The primary object of study of this volume is literature, particularly the language politics and linguistic experiments of modernist writers. It also offers insight into important topics such as Americans’ views of English and of languages other than English at that time. Joshua L. Miller’s analysis offers interesting resonances with current debates over identity, culture, and language in the United States, such as the ‘English-only’ movement and its origins.

The book consists of six chapters preceded by an introduction, acknowledgements, and a foreword by the series editors, and followed by a concluding chapter, notes, and an index. The introductory chapter sets down the book’s aims and method. The first two chapters (‘Reinventing vox americana’ and ‘Documenting “American”’) provide a detailed picture of the historical background of the cultural politics of English in the United States. M focuses on two figures: Henry Ford and H. L. Mencken. The Ford English School and its ‘mass-production’ methods of teaching English to immigrants, together with its explicit link to personal hygiene, were important ways of instilling national ideals in the working class. H.L. Mencken’s The American language set another relevant precedent in the English debate in the United States. It described a vernacular language that, because it was so flexible, could always assimilate new forms (e.g. words, accents) without losing its essential shape or its national character.

In the rest of the book, M analyzes how modernist writers responded to debates over culture, politics, and language and how they challenged them by means of hybridism and linguistic experimentation, reflecting traces of the languages and accents on which English had imposed. In Ch. 3 (‘Foreignizing “English”’), M offers a contextualized reading of Gertrude Stein and John Dos Passos. Ch. 4 (‘Vernacularizing silence’) concentrates on Jean Toomer and Nella Larsen, Ch. 5 (‘Translating “Englitch”’) on Henry Roth and Lionel Trilling, and Ch. 6 (‘Spanglicizing modernism’) on Carlos Bulosan and Américo Paredes.

One negative aspect of the book that I would highlight is the referential system that the author has used. Cited material is referred to in the form of endnotes at the end of the book, but there is no separate list of bibliography or cited works, which hinders readers from having an easy access to the author’s sources. The book, however, is a welcome contribution to scholarly debates over language politics, culture, and identity in the interwar United States.

Reviewed by Kanavillil Rajagopalan, State University at Campinas

This book results from a colloquium titled ‘Negotiating the self in another language: Discourse approaches to language learning as cross-cultural adaptation’, presented at the International Pragmatics and Language Teaching Conference at the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 2007. Six chapters were written specifically for the present volume.

The mind-boggling transformation of the concepts of self and identity has become a pressing issue against the backdrop of growing transnationalism and the proliferation of intercultural global contact zones. Far from presenting a uniform and homogenous picture, transnational realities reveal themselves to be multifarious upon closer inspection. The articles assembled in this volume address these complex realities in terms of their local specificities without losing sight of their overarching commonalities.

The book consists of three parts titled ‘Forming identities within (trans)national ethnoscapes’, ‘Identifying third spaces among ideoscapes’, and ‘Constructing identities in mediascapes’. These are preceded by a preface and an opening chapter titled ‘The formation of L2 selves in a globalizing world’, wherein Christina Higgins presents the basic concepts and also the scope of the field. The book is rounded off with an epilogue, a list of references, and an index.

Thanks to the large-scale movement of peoples across the globe in recent decades, new forms of hybrid and alternative identities are springing up everywhere. This is tied up with increasing interconnectedness of what Arjun Appadurai has called scapes. Thus, ethnoscapes, technoscapes, finanscapes, mediascapes, and ideoscapes crisscross to form new kaleidoscopic possibilities of self and identity.

Not everyone responds in the same way to these radical changes. The chapters in this book thematize different, at times idiosyncratic, responses. Ch. 2, for instance, looks at South Asian immigrants in the United States and Canada in general and focuses on Etienne, a working-class Cambodian-Vietnamese man and his struggles with the all-too-common sensation encapsulated in ‘I’m two pieces inside of me’. Brianna and Olivia, two young undergraduate students from the United States about to spend a spring semester in Montpellier, France, discover to their horror that they ‘have arrived just in time to witness the widespread and vocal outpouring of anti-American sentiment accompanying the onset of the U.S. -led invasion of Iraq’ (148).

In Ch. 11, Yumiko Ohara zeroes in on learners of Japanese as a foreign language at a university in Hawaii and their struggles to create new identities for themselves. Steven L. Thorne and Rebecca Black take a close look at how online digital environments have given rise to new spaces of identity construction thanks to a new set of ‘textual and multimodal tools involving what are arguably new literacies and communicative genres’ (258). Finally, in the epilogue to the volume, Christina Higgins points out some issues for future research among which is the question of how additional language users need to confront new identity formations.

Reviewed by Mark Irwin, Yamagata University

This is not a ‘language course’, and only a small portion of the material is based on either historical or linguistic principles.

Proportionally, the content of the volume breaks down as follows: ‘Introduction’ (1%); ‘Basic German’ (<1%); ‘Pronunciation’(3%); ‘English words and their German relatives’ (26%); ‘Advanced grammar’ (18%); ‘Particles’ (2%); ‘Conjunctions’ (1%); ‘High frequency words’ (3%); ‘Selected abbreviations’ (1%); ‘Glossary’ (1%); ‘Appendix A: Reading exercises’ (5%); ‘Appendix B: Practical German’ (1%); ‘Appendix C: Further pronunciation exercises’ (3%); ‘Appendix D: The gender, further materials’ (4%); ‘Appendix E: German-English word list’ (24%); and ‘Appendix F: English-German word list’ (3%).

Approximately two-thirds of the book’s content consists of word lists (e.g. the vast bulk, or all, of Ch. 4, Chs. 6–10, and App. C–F). A handful of exercises are scattered sporadically throughout the text. The vast bulk of German example sentences are left untranslated. The volume exhibits no pedagogical structure, and it is often hard to discern for whom the ‘course’ is designed. As a reference work, it is not very useful to the beginner, but it will perhaps be of interest to some learners of a high-intermediate level or above. It is the potential of the longer chapters on which I will concentrate in the remainder of this review.

Ch. 4, ‘English words and their German relatives’, shows the most originality. The section opens with a table of English–German sound correspondences (e.g. p–pf, th–d), then proceeds to give examples of vocabulary items for each (e.g. plough–Pflug, thorn–Dorn). Unfortunately, these are introduced in a different order from the preceding table. They also include correspondences not cited therein, as well as correspondences where both English and German are identical (e.g. b–b: bush–Busch) and whose expository value is thus questionable. By way of word lists, the remainder of the chapter examines word derivation, compounding, and affixes. All of these, while useful references, have no connection with ‘English words and their German relatives’. The chapter also includes a list of loanwords common to German and English, although information on the donor language is unfortunately lacking.

Ch. 5, ‘Advanced grammar’, is not particularly advanced. It includes sections on number and case, adjectival declension, the verb, and the plural and gender of nouns, as well as lists of prepositions, adverbs, and irregular verb declensions. Ch. 8, ‘High frequency words’, contains a list of 280 ‘common German words’; it is unclear why 280 were selected and not more or fewer. With examples such as Annahme ‘assumption’, Hochleistung ‘top performance’, and Tagesschau ‘eight o’clock news’, the authors’ selection process is curious. Appendix A, ‘Reading exercises’, contains a mix of nursery rhymes, poetry, and ‘stories’ (e.g. the Bible stories by Franz Kafka and by the brothers Grimm). Appendix B, ‘Practical German’, gives advice on job application letters and looking for a flat. Probably the most useful of the appendices is Appendix D, on gender, offering guidelines on gender assignment.

Reviewed by Thomas Hoffmann, University of Osnabrück

Great technological advancements of the past thirty years have led to a significant increase in computational speed and efficiency, and the success of the computer has had an enormous impact on the field of linguistics. The present handbook on computational linguistics (CL) and natural language processing (NLP) should, therefore, be of great interest to a large number of graduate students and researchers.

The volume is divided into four parts and covers all of the main fields of CL and NLP research. Following the editors’ concise introduction (1–8), Part 1 provides the ‘Formal foundations’ of the two disciplines. First, Shuly Wintner gives an overview of the elementary concepts of formal language theory (11–42), which includes a detailed discussion of basic issues such as formal language classes and the Chomsky Hierarchy. Next, Ian Pratt-Hartmann investigates computational resources in time and space in ‘Computational complexity in natural language’ (43–73). Ciprian Chelba’s chapter, ‘Statistical language models’ (74–104), follows and, among other topics, reviews probabilistic n-gram models and their relation to Markov systems, and compares them with models generated by probabilistic context-free grammars. The final chapter of Part 1 by Mark-Jan Nederhof and Giorgio Satta (‘Theory of parsing’, 105–30) focuses on the parsing of several context-free grammars and compares these with dependency grammar parsers and tree adjoining grammars.

Part 2 presents current methods employed in CL and NLP and begins with five chapters on widely used and influential techniques for machine learning, namely, ‘Maximum entropy models’ by Robert Malouf (133–53), ‘Memory-based learning’ by Walter Daelemans and Antal van den Bosch (154–79), ‘Decision trees’ by Helmut Schmid (180–96), ‘Unsupervised learning and grammar induction’ by Alexander Clark and Shalom Lappin (197–220), and ‘Artificial neural networks’ by James B. Henderson (221–37). Following is a chapter by Martha Palmer and Nianwen Xue, ‘Linguistic annotation’ (238–70), which deals with CL and NLP issues of corpus annotation, and a chapter by Philip Resnik and Jimmy Lin, which addresses the issue of evaluation of NLP systems (271–95).

CL and NLP approaches to various linguistic domains comprise the focus of Part 3, ‘Domains of application’: Steve Renals and Thomas Hain concentrate on phonetic issues and acoustic modelling in automatic speech recognition (299–332). This is followed by a chapter on the statistical parsing (333–63) of syntactic corpus data by Stephen Clark, a contribution on segmentation and morphology (364–93) by John A. Goldsmith, and an article by Chris Fox on computational semantics (394–428). ‘Computational models of dialogue’, by Jonathan Ginzburg and Raquel Fernández (429–81), and ‘Computational psycholinguistics’, by Matthew W. Crocker (482–513), round off Part 3.

Finally, Part 4 (‘Applications’) of the book deals with engineering tasks that NLP and CL procedures have been applied to, namely, ‘Information extraction’ (Ralph Grishman, 517–30), ‘Machine translation’ (Andy Way, 531–73), ‘Natural language generation’ (Ehud Reiter, 574–98), ‘Discourse processing’ (Ruslan Mitkov, 599–629) and ‘Question answering’ (Bonnie Webber and Nick Webb, 630–54).

Handbook editors always have the difficult task of deciding which topics to include and which to omit. This task is even more daunting for a handbook on a field as vibrant and dynamic as CL and NLP, which can never be documented exhaustively. Nevertheless, the editors of the present volume have succeeded in compiling a collection of articles that together constitute a state-of-the art introduction to CL and NLP.