Reviewed by Ferit Kılıçkaya, Middle East Technical University

This book, comprised of articles mostly originating from the themed session ‘Motivation in language’ at the 10th International Cognitive Linguistics Conference in Krakow, Poland, 2007, aims to explore motivation in grammar and the lexicon through cognition. The book is structured according to the linguistics components impacted by language-independent factors and divided into two parts: motivation in grammar and motivation in the lexicon.

The book opens with a very concise introduction to motivation written by the editors, providing an overall framework of the interaction between human systems and of the interaction between language and cognition, in addition to brief summaries of the chapters.

The first part of the book opens with a chapter that focuses on cognitive and communicative motivation, proposing a semantically motivated grammar to apply to English auxiliaries. The following chapter, ‘The mind as ground: A study of the English existential construction’, analyzes subject and lexical verb inversion. Based on Ronald W. Langacker’s cognitive grammar framework, the following chapter, ‘Motivating the flexibility of oriented –ly adverbs’, examines participant-oriented use of adverbs through cognitive and perceptual motivation. In the chapter, ‘The cognitive motivation for the use of dangling participles in English’, the way that participial construction is motivated in the English grammatical system is examined.

Inference is examined in a chapter that presents semantic change from the concrete meanings of temporal/spatial overlap to abstract meanings of contrast/concessive constructions, through experimental methods. In the chapter ‘The conceptual motivation of aspect’ inferences having emerged from past events are investigated in experiments that focus on imperfective and perfective sentence pairs. The following chapter identifies metaphorical motivation based on conceptual metaphor theory and the lexical-constructional model, with a focus on non-motion verbs. The next chapter focuses on the use of obligation models in English and Hungarian through exemplary cases and proposes a conceptual structure of modals in relation to grammatical construals. The final chapter of the first part of the book compares systems of referent honorifics available in both Korean and Japanese.

The second part begins with a chapter that deals with the semantics of dimensional adjectives in English and Russian, indicating that dimensional adjectives are not always used with a norm as a reference point. The next chapter examines the role of the sociocultural motivation in the metonymic use of ‘capital’ for ‘government’ in Croatian and Hungarian newspapers, showing that this usage is more frequent in languages such as English and German. The following chapter “investigates judgments of native speakers of Italian with respect to intrinsic and extrinsic motivational relations in the lexicon. The chapter ‘Motivational networks: An empirically supported cognitive phenomenon’ proposes a multidirectional network of motivated relations, rather than viewing motivation as a unidirectional process as done in the traditional studies. The last chapter of the second part of the book analyzes 2,500 frequently used words in English and German in terms of motivatability and determines that German vocabulary is more motivatable than the English vocabulary.

The editors and the authors successfully provide anyone working in human cognitive processing with in-depth analysis and discussion of motivation in grammar and the lexicon. The structure of this book will encourage readers to revive their knowledge of cognition and its place in motivation and to make a connection between the chapters in the book and the framework outlined in the introduction.

Reviewed by Kanavillil Rajagopalan, State University at Campinas

This book is a celebration of a work by the late Henri Meschonnic, originally written in French and translated and edited by Pier-Pascale Boulanger. It is presented in sixteen short chapters but is billed as an essay by the editor, who writes: ‘In his essay Éthique et politique du traduire […], published in 2007, M deals concisely with the core issues he had been tackling since the 1970s […]’. He adds that ‘the present book follows up on Poétique du traduire, published in 1999, but focuses more intensely on the topic of rhythm and ethics in translation’ (11). In this regard, the title and the contents of the book do not match.

Preceding an introduction by the translator-cum-editor is a preface by Alexis Nouss, entitled ‘A life in translation’, which is essentially a eulogy. Nouss notes that M proposes no ‘new arguments on translation’, nor on ‘the dynamics of subjectivity and historicity’ (7). The all-encompassing theme is ‘poetics’, which ‘concerns the totality of human constructions’ and as such covers ‘any human relation [which] has to take place through language’ (7).

In his twenty-two–page long introduction, Pier-Pascale Boulanger begins by assessing M’s stature as an original thinker and his trail-blazing role in denouncing some grave misinterpretations of Ferdinand Saussure’s work, especially with regard to the distinction between meaning and form which, he says, Saussure never claimed was ‘the true nature of language’ (12). M was also profoundly disturbed by the way linguistics had parted company with literature, except for glorious exceptions like Roman Jakobson, who was a formative influence on M’s own thought.

Boulanger admits frankly that ‘reading M in French is trying even for native French speakers’ (29). Many English-speaking readers would readily agree. This also invites inevitable comparison with Jacques Derrida, M’s more well-known compatriot and contemporary. For Boulanger, Derrida’s style was ‘catchy’ (19) and his trademark deconstruction in tune with the dernier cri of his times. M’s work, by contrast, had no such political appeal, and it did not have ‘the seductive powers of Derrida’s writing and [the] infatuation of deconstructionists’, which M dismissed as the ‘Derrida effect’ (20).

With regard to M’s own writing, its aphoristic, and often epigrammatic, style may make it difficult for the average reader to comprehend his message, as Boulanger rightly warns. Equally challenging is his somewhat meandering way of exposing ideas. The sixteen  chapters of this book have headings like ‘Faithful, unfaithful, just more of the same, I think thee O sign’, ‘Sourcerer [sic], targeteer [sic], the same thing’, ‘Embiblicizing the voice’, and so forth, which are more enigmatic than user-friendly. Additionally, neologisms like ‘decurrentfrechify’ and ‘unthought’ may fluster a reader.

M exhorts translators to pay more attention to the materiality of their source text and its native rhythm, therein lay his ethics of translating.

Reviewed by Mark J. Elson, University of Virginia

This book by Maria Irene Moyna comprises an introduction followed by nine chapters of which the first three treat preliminaries, the next five introduce and discuss data, and the last contextualizes the data historically. References, an appendix, subject index, and word index, conclude the book.

There is much to praise in this book. It is a comprehensive survey of its subject in clear, easily accessible terms. Each analytic chapter focuses on a different non-head,  and each is subdivided according to the head constituent and discussed in terms of synchrony (e.g. constituents, compound meaning) and diachrony (e.g. frequency and productivity, evolution of meaning, orthographic representation). The appendix, containing a dataset of the compounds found in the lexicographical sources, adds greatly to the value of the book as a reference. The relationship of constituents is exemplified and clarified in terms of X-bar syntax, not the traditional phrase structure that often characterizes older studies of compounds.

Some may question the author’s view (23) that she has gone beyond description and synthesis by presenting a theory of compounds. The focus of the theory she proposes takes it point of departure (15) in her attempt to predict the morphological constituents which may enter into composition, and the related observation that the well-established opposition, lexical versus functional, is not fully predictive in this regard. This leads to the lexical/functional feature hypothesis (23), which bears the assumption of two binary primitives, L (lexical) and F (functional), yielding four designations ([+L,+F], [+L,-F], [-L,+F], and [-L,-F]). Only items designated [+L] units can participate in composition. The first three designations add little to our present knowledge. They add an intermediate level (i.e. [+L,+F]) between lexical and functional  meaning, incorporating the view that the boundary between them is not discrete, but gradient, with languages differing in the details of its location.

In contrast, the remaining designation, [-L,-F], defines a new type of constituent, one which is neither lexical nor functional. It is not clear, however, that those constituents which M claims it subsumes are defensible as such. Case constituents, for example, have semantic content, at least according to Roman Jakobson, whose contributions to our understanding of grammatical meaning are regrettably not included in the references. Semantic content can also be argued for inflectional constituents expressing person/number. This is especially obvious in languages like Spanish in which personal pronouns are normally absent, leaving the constituents in question to convey their contribution to the message, at least in surface structures. M prefers to view such constituents as ‘un-interpretable functional units’ (23), but her use of ‘functional’ in this designation seems odd in view of the designation [-F]. Since M did not argue the existence of [-L,-F], but found herself confronted with it as a result of the prior assumption of [L] and [F] as binary primitives, one wonders the extent to which [-L,-F] implies a class that calls for membership rather than a label designating a naturally definable constituent set.

These comments aside, especially in view of the fact that the feature framework proposed by M has little effect on the presentation and discussion of the corpus, the exposition is lucid and detailed, rendering the result not merely a description and, for those who find the feature framework convincing, source of theory, but a significant reference.

Reviewed by Gabriela Brozbă, Romanian-American University

This slim book collects six articles which constituted the substance of a workshop of the same name organized by Lisa Lim at the First International Conference for the Linguistics of English. The book gathers analyses on four Asian varieties of English: Singapore English (SgE), Indian English (IndE), Hong Kong English (HKE), and Thai English (ThaiE), in which some similarities and dissimilarities are delineated from a clearly typological perspective, based on judicious and well-argued assessments of quantitative and qualitative data.

In the opening chapter, Lisa Lim and Nikolas Gisborne explain the need for a typological approach in assessing the state and features of the New Englishes by looking at the structural features of the substrate languages and the ecologies from which they emerged. Additionally, the editors of the book bring forward some of the reasons why Asian Englishes should be treated as a challenging topic for research.

In his chapter, Umberto Ansaldo underlines the importance of an evolutionary approach to language change rather than treating it as a departure from the norm or as a result of system-internal processes, especially when one deals with contact language formation. Such delimitations become clear when the focus shifts to grammatical features of SgE (e.g. zero copula, predicative adjectives, and topic prominence), whose selection is based on their numerical and typological frequency in the dominant substrate languages (e.g. Sinitic and Malay).

The third article, contributed by Nikolas Gisborne, covers a central aspect of HKE morphosyntax, namely finiteness, in relation to the absence of copula and the blurred lexical boundaries between verbs and adjectives. The claim for non-finiteness in HKE is not absolute. HKE is at the third stage of its developmental cycle (nativization), according to Edgar Schneider’s dynamic model, and there is some degree of variability.

Addressing diversity, Devyani Sharma looks into the behavior of three of the so-called ‘angloversals’ in IndE and SgE. A closer analysis of past-tense omission, over-extension of the progressive, and copula omission reveals that in most cases one deals only with surface similarities, because there are systemic differences in imperfectivity-marking (substrate-sensitive) and copula omission (grammatically conditioned by the substrate languages as well).

In the instrumental study by Priyankoo Sarmah, Divya Verma Gogoi, and Caroline Wiltshire, the authors highlight the distinctiveness of ThaiE. Segmental and suprasegmental phonological aspects are compared with those of the substrate language (Thai), British English (BrE), and two other Asian Englishes (e.g. HKE and SgE). At the prosodic level, the rhythm of ThaiE closely resembles BrE when compared to that of SgE (as a transfer of the peculiar rhythmic characteristics of Thai), whereas in terms of vowel systems the Asian varieties at issue are more alike, as a reflex of the typological commonalities in their substrates.

In the final article, Lisa Lim approaches a topic that has seldom been touched upon in research on Asian Englishes: the inappropriateness of treating Asian varieties of English from a stress/intonation traditional viewpoint, and a shift to their interpretation as tone languages, given the structural features of the substrate languages. This claim is supported by evidence from SgE, where both the internal ecology (dominance of tone substrate languages) and the external ecology (high proportion of first-language users of such languages) favor such an interpretation.

Reviewed by Daria Dayter, University of Bayreuth

The present collection consists of six parts devoted to the exploration of the fluid concept of genre in the environment of the Internet. In Ch. 1, the editors discuss the practical potential of the notion of genre for empirical and computational fields. They introduce three open issues that are dealt with in this volume: the nature of web documents, the construction and use of web-based corpora, and the design of computational models.

The second part of the volume opens with a chapter by Jussi Karlgren, who takes a reader-oriented approach to genre and finds that web users perceive two new types of genre: one, based on new technology; and another, significantly more specialized in terms of content. In Ch. 3, Mark A. Rosso and Stephanie W. Haas concentrate on methodological issues in operationalizing genre theory for the enhancement of web search. Ch. 4, by Kevin Crowston, Barbara Kwasnick, and Joseph Rubleske, reports on a field study that attempts a bottom-up approach to building a taxonomy of web genres.

The third and fourth parts of this collection adopt an applied perspective by tackling various problems of automatic web genre identification (AGI) and developing structure-based approaches to genre classification. Marina Santini explores the cross-testing method to evaluate genre models. Yunhyong Kim and Seamus Ross examine the role of word distribution patterns in the classification of documents. Serge Sharoff proposes a function-based typology of web pages and tests it on two Internet corpora. Among other problems of the existing AGI models, Benno Stein, Sven Meyer zu Eissen, and Nedim Lipka suggest a method to overcome the insufficient generalization capability of these models. In the final contribution, Pavel Braslavski reports an experiment that involves merging genre-related and text-relevance rankings, with moderate improvement in search results.

As Christoph Lindemann and Lars Littig establish in Ch. 10, a twofold approach to the classification of web pages using structural and content features significantly improves the overall accuracy of classification at the super-genre level. An alternative approach is exemplified in Ch. 11 by Matthias Dehmer and Frank Emmert-Streib, who analyze web genre data by applying a graph-based representation model. In Lennart Björneborn’s contribution, an analysis of patterns of interconnectedness between genres in academic web space reveals a dynamic web of genres.

Finally, the fifth part of the book comprises three case studies of emerging web genres. An amateur Flash exchange website is the focus of attention in the chapter by John Paolillo, Jonathan Warren, and Breanne Kunz. The principal dimensions of linguistic variation in blogs are identified by Jack Grieve et al. in Ch. 14, and in Ch. 15, Ian Bruce combines social and cognitive perspectives on genre in analyzing a sample of participatory news texts.

This collection concludes with a call for further research in developing a characterization of web genres, drawing up annotation guidelines, and creating genre benchmarks in different languages.

Reviewed by Anish Koshy, The English and Foreign Languages University

This book deals with four major areas in acoustic phonetics: acoustic properties of major classes of speech sounds, acoustic theory of speech production, auditory representation of speech, and speech perception. The book contains nine chapters arranged in two parts. The first part handles the fundamentals of an acoustic-auditory study, and the second applies these fundamentals to speech analysis. Each chapter includes recommended readings and exercises, the solutions to which are provided at the end of the book. Apart from the customary graphs and figures, the book also makes ample use of shaded boxes to digress from the discussion and highlight interesting issues.

The introductory note lays down the blueprint of the book and touches upon the changes and improvements in the third edition. Basic concepts in acoustics, like frequency, amplitude, different kinds of waves, spectrum, and filters are introduced in Ch. 1. Ch. 2 introduces fundamental frequency and harmonics and discusses quantal theory, vocal-tract filtering, and resonance frequency. Ch. 3 addresses digital signal processing in terms of issues like sampling and quantization apart from a discussion on six different techniques used in digital signal processing, including root mean square (RMS) amplitude, fast fourier transform (FFT), and spectra and spectrogram, among others. Ch. 4 covers the differences between acoustic and auditory representation of speech sound, and discusses the effect of saturation and masking on audition. Describing speech perception as imperfectly categorical, Ch. 5 examines the effect of the auditory system and phonetic knowledge on perception.

Arguing that a stand-alone approach to the acoustic study of speech is incomplete, the author approaches the analysis of speech sounds in Part 2 in terms of acoustic, auditory, and perceptual attributes. Chs. 6–9 deal with the analysis of vowels, fricatives, stops and affricates, and nasals and laterals, respectively. The vocal tract constrictions for each are explained in terms of tube models. Other issues discussed include calculation of the resonances, formant frequencies, vocal tract resonance peaks, and source and vocal tract filtering. In terms of individual attributes, the importance of the first two formants for vowels, the location of acoustic energy in the spectrum for fricatives, apart from turbulence that characterize them, the effect of the coupling/decoupling of front and back cavities on resonant frequencies in stops and affricates, and the damping effect of anti-formants in nasals, laterals, and nasalized sounds are also discussed.

The book is intended to be a non-technical supplementary textbook to general phonetics or speech science texts, and will delight and interest students from non-technical backgrounds, particularly the experiments that the shaded boxes invite them to do. Teachers will also find these experiments useful in their classrooms to generate a better appreciation of the technicalities involved. However, at certain points the book might be intimidating to non-specialists, with the many formulas and calculations presented. The correlation drawn between the acoustic, auditory, and perceptual aspects of speech sounds makes this book a unique contribution to texts on speech sounds.

Reviewed by Peter Freeouf, Chiang Mai University

Few people will have ever heard of Volapük, and fewer still will know its characteristics and structure, At one time, it was a widely touted artificial ‘international’ language praised for its simplicity and regularity of morphology.

Volapük was the invention of a German Catholic priest, Johann Martin Schleyer, who devised the language in 1879–1880. The Volapük movement soon caught on, especially in Europe. There were three Volapük conventions between the years 1884 and 1889, the last being held in Paris, where only Volapük was used in the official proceedings. During this period there were numerous clubs established, and many teaching manuals and other publications appeared. By the end of the century, however, Volapük, had been pushed aside by Esperanto, with the first publication by its inventor, Ludwig Zamenhoff, appearing in 1887.

This guidebook to the language is a reprint of a work that first appeared in London in 1888, when enthusiasm for the new language was at its height. The Volapük vocabulary is based mainly on English, with some German, but whose truncated forms obscure their origin. The name of the language itself is a good example of this: Volapük, where vola- is the genitive case form of vol ‘people,’ from German Volk, followed by pükm based on the English ‘speak.’

The nouns, adjectives, and pronouns are all inflected with identical endings in four cases (e.g. nominative, genitive, dative, and accusative), with the morpheme –s (from English) added to the singular forms to form the plural. There is also obligatory agreement between nouns and adjectives in case and number. The verbs present a complex array of forms, with different inflectional morphemes for the finite categories of person, number, tense, mood, and voice, and for the various non-finite forms including infinitives, participles, supines, and gerundives.

The book begins with a short preface and introduction. Part 1 provides a brief overview of the structure of the language, its creator, and the favorable reception it received at the time. Part 2 presents the letters and pronunciation in addition to the complex, but highly regular, inflectional morphology. There are lists of prepositions, adverbs, and derivational morphemes interspersed through this section. Part 3 is a discussion of the syntax. This is mainly presented in the form of exercises, with vocabulary lists and answer keys. Part 4 is a collection of texts in Volapük, followed by translations, or originals, in English. Part 5 is a series of conversations, in parallel columns in Volapük and English. An appendix in Part 6 contains groups of words organized by subject matter. The final section, Part 7, contains a Volapük–English glossary.

It is difficult to say whether this book will find a wide audience outside the small group of linguists who study constructed auxiliary languages. In historical terms, Volapük is important in that it was the first constructed language to gain widespread adherents and promoters. It set the stage for later, more successful artificial languages, above all, Esperanto, but also Ido and Interlingua. These later languages are much more similar in sound and written appearance to their standard average European language sources than Volapük is, which at first sight does not seem to be derived from an Indo-European language.

Reviewed by Michael W. Morgan, Indira Gandhi National Open University

This book opens with an introduction, in which Gerrit Dimendaal lays out several basic issues regarding participant coding: the distinction between core and peripheral constituents; the role of event structure and how it is framed in a language, case-marking and head-marking strategies (and cases where neither head nor dependent is marked), case alignment types (including ergativity, which until recently was thought absent among African languages), issues involving part-of-speech categorization (especially the ‘fuzziness’ of the noun-verb distinction), the role of constituent order, and the interaction of syntax and pragmatics.

A remarkable range of languages is covered in this book, balanced by geography, morphological type, and genetic affiliation. Chapters by Christa König on !Xun and Christa Kilian-Hatz on Khwe describe Khoisan languages, which, while both spoken in the Namibia, Botswana, and Angola border areas, differ notably. While both have core arguments unmarked (!Xun) or optionally marked (Khwe) but nevertheless allow for the omission of one or both main core arguments, !Xun is an isolating non-Khoe language, and Khwe a suffixing Khoe language.

Nilo-Saharan languages are represented in Christa König’s chapteron Ik, a Kuliak language of Uganda, and by Gerrit Dimendaal on Tama, an Eastern Sudanic language of Chad and Sudan. Ik is a verb-subject-object (VSO) language, with perhaps Africa’s most elaborate, albeit highly defective, case system. Accusative alignment competes with no alignment, distributed through five construction types. Tama has both subject-object-verb (SOV) and object-subject-verb (OSV) word orders (depending on assertive focus), extensive clitic case-marking, and has general dependent-marking, but head-marked subjects and differential object-marking.

From the Afro-Asiatic family, three Ethiopian languages are represented: one Highland-East Cushitic, Alaaba, by Gertrud Schneider-Blum; and two Omotic, Haro by Hirut Woldemariam, and Wolaitta by Azeb Amha. All three languages are basically SOV and agglutinative, and while all three employ case, subject-indexing, and word order to establish core arguments, Haro is notable with case-marking only assigned to definites and definites unmarkable for focus.

Three Niger-Congo languages are presented, each from a different branch. Anne Storch describes Hone, a Jukun, East Benue-Congo language of Nigeria with poor noun and verb inflection. Felix K. Ameka describes Likpe, a Kwa language of Ghana, which uses word order supported by cross-referencing of subject, and with different event structure perspectives employing specific constructions and coding devices. Makonde (Peter Kraal) is a Bantu language of Tanzania and Mozambique with typical Bantu noun-class agreement, but with a distinctive system of conjoint/disjoint verb forms.

Finally there are two languages with disputed genetic affiliation, although both are often classed as Niger-Congo. The Central Mande language Jalonke of Guinea (Friederike Lübke) has grammatical relations rigidly marked by word order, but also presents  strong evidence for lexical (versus constructional) specification of argument structure. Tima of Sudan (Gerrit Dimendaal), possibly an isolate or Kordofanian, has three sets of subject-marking prefixes/enclitics (and double markings when specific tense-aspect markers are present) but is most notable for its split ergativity.

The chapters in this book have a comforting uniformity in organization and content, covering all pertinent aspects of noun and verb morphosyntax, with specific focus governed by the genius of each respective language. In addition, each chapter provides an introduction to the language and its speakers (including maps and discussion of genetic affiliation, dialects, sociolinguistic issues, and relations with neighboring languages), and a short typological overview, making each chapter a short reference grammar.

The languages discussed demonstrate that a broad range of strategies are deployed across Africa to mark argument structure and participant coding, with certain dedicated constructions and patterns in some languages, and with considerable pragmatic and semantic flexibility in others. This book and the language descriptions found within will be valuable to Africanists, language typologists, and morphosyntacticians alike.

Reviewed by Anish Koshy, The English and Foreign Languages University

This book is comprised of twenty articles, organized into six major sections, and identifies three major strands of discussion: linguistic aspects of documentation, technology in documentation, and ethical issues.

Part 1, ‘Praxis and values’, includes three articles. Empowerment of the heritage communities, capacity building, and collaborative research are strongly emphasized. While N. Louanna Furbee sees language documentation (LD) to be atheoretic, comprehensive, and multipurposed, Keren Rice considers LD research to involve ethics, advocacy, and empowerment. Martha J. Macri discusses issues of ownership, copyright, and access, and emphasizes support for continued use and intergenerational transmission.

There are four articles included in Part 2, ‘Adequacy in documentation’. Anna Berge defines adequacy as collection, preservation, and dissemination, covering all genres, registers, contexts, linguistic levels, and speaker populations. While Laura Buszard-Welcher’s case study highlights the problems with not covering all genres in LD, Verónica Vásquez Soto’s case study demonstrates the importance of oral narratives and natural conversations in LD. Barbara Lust, Suzanne Flynn, María Blume, Elaine Westbrooks, and Theresa Tobin discuss data management, the development of infrastructure, and methods for the storage and dissemination of shared data in collaborative works.

Part 3, ‘Documentation technology’, includes four articles. Jeff Good discusses the Open Language Archives Community focusing on the preservation and portability of language data. Jessica Boynton, Steven Moran, Helen Aristar-Dry, and Anthony Aristar discuss the Electronic Metastructure for Endangered Languages Data School of Best Practices, focusing on technical standards for language documentation. Nicholas Thieberger and Michael Jacobson discuss two archives Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources and Langues et Civilizations à Tradition Orale, focusing on long-term access and good practices in computerization. David Golumbia discusses the representation of minority languages and cultures on the web and warns against objectification.

There are six articles in Part4, ‘Models of successful collaboration’. Donna B. Gerdts visualizes the role of the academic in relation to the heritage community as that of a trainer, teacher, mediator, and advocate. Arienne Dwyer lays importance on ethics, design, relationships of inclusiveness, consultations, mutual training, flexibility, prioritization, and empowerment in LD. Martha J. Macri presents a case study involving the unarchiving of J.P. Harrington’s notes on the Californian Indian languages with active participation from community members. Hermelindo Aguilar Méndez et al. report a case study on Tojolabal, emphasizing the value of relationships of trust and how language renewal could lead to cultural renewal. Colleen M. Fitzgerald deals with legacy documentation on Tohono O’odham and its unarchiving with active collaboration with community members. Susan M. Burt presents a case study on language shift and pragmatic change in Hmong in Wisconsin.

Part 5, ‘Training and careers in field linguistics’, includes two papers. Judith M. Maxwell lays emphasis on flexibility in goals and commitment to dissemination apart from other best practices in the field. The case study by Frances Ajo, Valérie Guérin, Ryoko Hattori, and Laura C. Robinson presents native speakers as documenters, making the end-products more relevant and accessible to the community.

Lenore A. Grenoble concludes the book with a state-of-the-field article on language documentation and field linguistics, touching upon collaboration, accessibility, technology, training, and empowerment.

With language documentation understood as practically achievable only through collaboration, the list of online resources provided at the end proves very useful. With ample case studies, the book highlights not only the challenges in language documentation projects but also the way to move forward. Linguists, activists, policy makers, and communities interested in language documentation will find the book enlightening and resourceful.

Reviewed by Louisa Buckingham, University of Nizwa

This reader comprises forty-three contributions arranged in ten main thematic areas. It includes numerous additional studies published since the original reader’s appearance in 1997. Many of the contributing authors are among the foremost authorities on sociolinguistics. While the articles included primarily study language use in social and institutional settings in countries where English is the dominant language, several studies on other language communities are also included. Each section begins with an introduction to the theme and a brief overview of each paper.

Part 1 considers how grammar and pronunciation may index gender. The articles primarily look at quantifiable linguistic features, such as phonetic or grammatical variation, and instances of non-standard forms, as used by speakers from particular communities. Most of the articles illustrate a tendency for certain forms to be associated with ‘female’ language use, while one article (i.e. that on the Australian Yanyuwa language) discusses a gender-exclusive use of language. Articles in Part 2 focus on language functions such as complimenting, apologizing, swearing, and giving directives. The authors examine the communicative and social purposes these functions serve when used by men and women, finding, in some instances, that they may reflect cooperative and competitive ways of talking, and contribute to the construction of gender identities.

Part 3 focuses on mixed-talk scenarios, in particular, how linguistic strategies such as interruptions, silence, and delayed responses contribute to the establishment of unequal power relations.  The selected articles in Part 4 look at how gender, social and cultural identity, and, more broadly, social relations are constructed in same-sex talk.

Part 5 examines gender across a range of work places in the public domain. Being essentially male-dominated social environments, forms of discourse more typical of men predominate, and women’s more cooperative discursive style may be considered ineffective. To be ‘heard’, women may have to adopt more ‘masculine’ forms of discourse, which may even be the prevailing strategy in all-female environments functioning within broader male-dominated institutions. The articles in Part 6 investigate the contribution of language to the often fluid construction of gender identity. Linguistic resources are used to index particular gender or sexual identities in a range of social contexts.

The three parts that follow examine theoretical issues in the study of gender and language. Part 7 discusses values associated with particular ways of talking, such as hedging or particular intonation patterns, which are associated with power or the lack thereof. These values may be cultural rather than essentially gender-related. The theoretical debate in Part 8 concerns the ‘dominance’ and ‘difference’ approaches to language and gender and the emergence of the social constructivist perspective, which involves understanding the role of language in the construction of social identities, including gender. The reader ends by placing the debate on language and gender in the twenty-first century, which may be characterized by a fluid, social-constructionist view of gender, where men’s adoption of ‘female’ forms of communication is increasingly being seen as desirable in certain contexts.

The thematic organization of the reader provides a superb overview of key developments in the study of language and gender over three decades. Primarily directed toward graduate students and scholars, some articles will also be suitable at undergraduate level, accompanying general introductory course books.