Reviewed by Anish Koshy, The English and Foreign Languages University

This volume includes twenty-six chapters, organized into four major sections.

Part 1, ‘Foundations’, begins with a contribution from the editors, who address diagnoses of communication disorders and the task of labeling them and related negative fallouts, such as stereotyping, isolation, and stratification. Exploring factors underlying/influencing communication disorders, Brian A. Goldstein and Ramonda Horton-Ikard analyze cultural and linguistic factors. Laura W. Kretschmer and Richard R. Kretschmer discuss hearing impairment and blindness, and Vesna Stojanovik discusses genetic factors, such asWilliams, Down, and Fragile-X syndromes. Megan Hodge and Tara Whitehill address how comprehensibility and acceptability of speech defines intelligibility, and Bonnie Brinton and Martin Fujiki discuss assessment and intervention principles aimed at maximizing functional communication.

Part 2, ‘Language disorders’, begins with a contribution from  John Muma and Steven Cloud, who discuss autism spectrum disorders that lead to dysfunctional social interactions and communication. Deborah Weiss and Rhea Paul present a discussion of delayed language development in pre-school children with respect to sounds, meaning, morphology, syntax, and pragmatics. Sandra L. Gillam and Alan G. Kamhi discuss linguistic and processing deficiency in specific language impairment and the role of non-verbal intelligence. Michael R. Perkins explores difficulties in the pragmatic use of language and various adaptive strategies. A contribution from Robert Reid and Laura Jacobson studies learning disabilities that result from language disorders and complications of memory. Jack S. Damico and Ryan Nelson discuss reading as a component of human learning and explore reading impairments like dyslexia. Truman E. Coggins and John C. Thorne discuss the organic after-effects of prenatal substance abuse on the linguistic abilities of children. Ending this part of the book, Chris Code explores aphasia and its emotional and psychosocial effects, such as depression and problems with turn-taking, conversational repair.

In Part 3, ‘Speech disorders’, Sara Howard discusses developmental disorders, focusing on the heterogeneity of a population and multiple etiologies for disorders. Hermann Ackerman, Ingo Hertrich, and Wolfram Ziegler examine dysarthria and its types, which result from neurological disorders, and Adam Jacks and Donald A. Robins take up apraxia of speech, a speech motor planning/programming disorder resulting from neurological diseases and cognitive deficits. Kathryn D. R. Drager, Erinn F. Finke, and Elizabeth C. Serpentine discuss alternative communication techniques and clinical procedures to augment speech for those with communicative disorders. A contribution from John A. Tetnowski and Kathy Scaler Scott examines stuttering from behavioral and constructivist perspectives. Richard Morris and Archie Bernard Harmon take up laryngeal/voice disorders. Finally, Jane Russell studies speech disorders as a result of orofacial anomalies like cleft lip/palate and craniofacial and velopharyngeal dysfunctions, and Tim Bressmann deals with speech disorders related to head and neck cancer, focusing on speech production.

Part 4, ‘Cognitive and intellectual disorders’, includes four chapters. Carol Westby and Silvana Watson explore learning disabilities and language/literacy disorders, such as delayed speech and pragmatic and discourse/reading deficits due to attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder, and Margaret Lehman Blake explores various deficits in discourse comprehension/production due to right-hemisphere brain damage. A contribution from Jennifer Mozeiko, Karen Lé, and Carl Coelho discusses cognitive communication disorders resulting from traumatic brain injuries. Nicole Müller takes up dementia and its effect on physical, cognitive, and communicative abilities, examining Alzheimer’s disease in detail.

Each chapter follows a general structure. After detailing symptoms, each author presents diagnostic tools, highlights causal factors, suggests multiple remedial/intervention measures, highlights future research prospects, and discusses matters pertaining to the topic under focus. With its comprehensive and step-by-step details, this handbook is a unique resource, indispensable for researchers, clinicians, and therapists, in addition to care-givers.

Reviewed by Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini, University of Warwick

This volume is the third of nine handbooks intended to provide a comprehensive perspective on the field of applied linguistics. In the words of the series editors, the collection aims to ‘present the knowledge available in applied linguistics today firstly from an explicitly problem solving perspective and secondly, in a non-technical, easily comprehensible way’ (xiii). Structured in four parts and twenty-six chapters, the 626 pages of this volume contain the work not only of several distinguished contributors and some younger scholars, but they represent also the editors’ own understanding of what applied linguistics is about and what future may lie ahead for its practitioners.

In this respect, the choice of areas representing organizational and professional communication reflects the track record and the long-standing research interests of the editors, both internationally known for their work in professional communication. Three domains of practice, namely health and social care, the legal arena, and the workplace, are introduced by position papers in Part 2, authored, respectively, by Aaron Cicourel, Roger Shuy, and James Taylor. The latter is a scholar speaking from an organizational communication angle. Both Parts 3 and 4 include chapters illustrating empirical studies conducted in all three fields. Worth highlighting in Part 4 are two chapters on professional learning and two chapters on research-practitioner collaboration, which the reader with an interest in pedagogic and methodological issues will find especially interesting.

If the reader is looking for the rationale behind the ordering of chapters in this handbook, the introduction offers clarification: a substantive forty-two-page discussion of their understanding of an applied linguistic approach to professional and organizational practice. The choice of distributing chapters on all three domains of practice across both Parts 3 and 4 is intended to give the reader the opportunity to identify ‘discursive parallels’ between domains, cross-cutting ‘critical themes’ (e.g. expertise, evidence, relevant knowledge, and rationality), and the discursive devices associated with their realization. This requires a certain degree of effort on the part of the reader, in spite of the editors’ useful chapter synopses in their introduction.

It is quite clear, however, that the applied linguistics perspective that the editors envisage for professional communication, and partly realize in their handbook, can only be multidisciplinary. In their words, their perspective ‘not only builds on the cumulative insights gained from discourse based studies [  ], the sociology of professions and the sociology of work’ (45) but, also, for example, on organizational communication and organization studies. Similarly, research on the embodied nature of social interaction (hinted at as ‘multimodality’ in Ch. 14), and the contribution of materiality to professional practice, are not documented in this collection but should be included in future research on applied linguistics. Regrettably, the high cover price may put the volume beyond the means of most individuals.

Reviewed by Peter Freeouf, Chiang Mai University

This grammar is an exact reprint of a work that first appeared in Vienna in 1917. The author is best known and frequently cited by English-speaking scholars for his later work Yiddish: A survey and a grammar (1979), which in some respects represents an expanded version of the German original. The book was reprinted using Fraktur typeface, suggesting the older style of German printing.

This book comprises a densely packed description of modern East Yiddish at the period of its greatest geographical spread and largest number of speakers, coinciding with an explosion of literary, educational, and scholarly use of the language. It begins with a short introduction (5–10) that briefly describes the state of limited scholarship in Yiddish at the time. The section that follows provides a detailed description (11–33) of the Hebrew-alphabet-based writing system, the sounds of the language, phonemic transcription, Yiddish handwritten forms, and notes on the differences between the orthography and pronunciation of the extensive Hebrew-Aramaic and Indo-European elements of Yiddish. This fusion of elements from two different language families is characteristic of Yiddish, and the contrast therein is crucial in a study of the written form of the language. This is something the author stresses, as do most contemporary scholars of Yiddish, as opposed to laying emphasis on much older German scholarship, which was mainly interested in the Germanic element in Yiddish and its significance in German dialects and historical studies. This section contains exercises for practice reading individual words and sentences in Yiddish orthography, which are accompanied by transcription.

The following section of the book (33–57) describes the nominal and verbal morphology of Yiddish. The strong verbs are divided into their Germanic classes, making for easy comparison with other Germanic languages. Syntax is covered in the next section (57–70). The readings section (70–101) contains selections by three of the most prominent writers in Yiddish of modern times, namely I. L. Peretz, Mendele Mocher Sforim, and Scholem Aleichem; each selection is followed by a translation.

There is an extensive Yiddish-German vocabulary (102–75) with indications of correct pronunciation of the Semitic forms. Grammatical information is provided for most of the entries. The glossary is followed by a various lists (176–81), including a list of the most common Yiddish abbreviations, a brief description of the Hebrew numeral system, a list of common variant forms of the Semitic vocabulary, a list of the most common East Yiddish given names, and a list of common geographical names. A tabular summary of the Yiddish phonological system is provided and concludes with a short bibliography (185–88) of the main works dealing with the contemporary Yiddish of the time, with the latest entry dated 1917.

Students and scholars of Yiddish can be thankful to the publisher for returning to print a classic in the history of Yiddish scholarship, one that has long been out of print and mainly available in libraries. This is a nicely printed and bound volume that will be useful to anyone interested in Yiddish and capable of reading the older printed style of German.

Reviewed by Peter Freeouf, Chiang Mai University

This grammar is a facsimile reprint of an edition published originally in Spain in 1919, presenting Gipozkoan, one of the older literary dialects of Basque,. Until relatively recently, various written forms of the main Basque dialects were the only literary forms of the language available to writers and readers of Basque. In the recent decades, in the post-Franco era, a standard Unified Basque (euskara batua) has been developed and has become widely used, at least in public domains, especially in the Spanish Basque Country. Unified Basque is also one of the two official languages of the autonomous Basque region of Spain.

Since the standardized form of Unified Basque is based, to a considerable extent, on the Gipuzkoan literary language (with some input from the two most important dialects of the French Basque Country, Lapurdian, and Low Navarrese), the student of Basque will find the language described in this grammar to be rather similar to the contemporary standard language in many respects. Standardized Basque is now the form most commonly studied by non-native learners of the language and the one presented in contemporary linguistic descriptions and discussions of Basque.

The Gipuzkoan dialect is geographically situated in the central area of the Basque-speaking region of northern Spain and southwestern France. Spoken Basque is conventionally divided into seven major dialect clusters, and Gipuzkoan is one of the most widely spoken of the dialects. Since it is centrally located, it shares features with the westernmost dialect, Bizkaian, with the other dialects of the Spanish Basque Country, and with those across the political border in France.

This grammar is designed to be primarily an instructional manual of Basque. It is divided into two parts. The first part (5–158) contains a brief exposition of the author’s purpose followed by a very short discussion of the orthography and pronunciation, including indications where the spoken forms differ from the written. The rest of the first part treats the basic elements of the language: articles, noun inflections, and basic verbs. This part is divided into twenty lessons, each of which deals with a particular point of grammar and/or inflectional paradigm, and includes a vocabulary list as well as example sentences in Basque with Spanish equivalents given in parallel columns. Each lesson contains exercises consisting of sentences in Basque and in Spanish to be translated into the other language.

The second part of the book (159–370), containing thirty lessons, is organized in a similar way, but deals in much more extensive detail with the complex verb morphology of the language. Here the Basque verb is presented in its splendid complexity of subject/object/number/person agreement with its various tenses and other forms. A Basque-Spanish and Spanish-Basque glossary occupies the final portion of the book, and there is also a short index of grammatical topics.

The publisher is to be commended for making more widely available a classic description of an older Basque literary dialect. This work will be of interest to linguists of Basque, especially those interested in the history and development of the language in the twentieth century.

Reviewed by Peter Freeouf, Chiang Mai University

This textbook first appeared in 2000 and has since become the standard learning manual for those interested in the classical form of ancient Egyptian, usually referred to as Middle Egyptian. Egyptian is a separate branch of the wider Afro-Asiatic family and is conventionally divided into several periods: Old Egyptian, Middle Egyptian, and Late Egyptian, including Demotic and Coptic (the language of Christian Egypt). While it has been extinct for approximately half a millennium, extensive written records in Egyptian are available from around 3,000 BCE and to the last documents written in Coptic in the eleventh century CE, although Coptic is reported to have continued to be spoken into the seventeenth century CE. The language and writing system described and taught in this book continued to be extensively used, especially in monumental hieroglyphic inscriptions, until the end of ancient Egyptian civilization and its replacement by Christian culture. Middle Egyptian continued to be in use long after spoken Egyptian had changed. In this way, its use is analogous to the use of Latin in Romance-speaking areas of the former Roman Empire for centuries after the end of the empire.

This manual is more extensive than a mere ‘introduction.’ It is for the serious beginner student of Egyptology and may also be useful to linguists who want to acquire some knowledge of the structure of ancient Egyptian and its complex hieroglyphic writing system, one of three used by the ancient Egyptians. The textbook is divided into twenty-six lessons. The first three lessons consist of a short overview of the language, its history, and its genetic affiliation. The phonology of the language is discussed in detail, and the initial part of the book gives a thorough treatment of the hieroglyphic system of writing used in Middle Egyptian.

The grammar portion begins in Lesson 4, with nouns, followed by lessons on pronouns, adjectives, prepositions, adverbs, numbers, and non-verbal sentences. Verbs are introduced in Lesson 13, and the subsequent nine lessons deal with the tense-aspect-mood (TAM) forms of the language. Lesson 23 covers participles, and the following two lessons cover relative constructions and their usage. The final lesson presents a summary of the grammar and a comparative discussion of the three main theories of Egyptian grammar that have been developed over the years by scholars since the decipherment of the hieroglyphic writing system in the early nineteenth century. The author uses what he calls the ‘current theory’. This comparison is useful for those who want to look to older linguistic descriptions of the language, such as Sir Alan Gardiner’s grammar. The book concludes with extensive lists of hieroglyphic signs, organized first by representational form and then by sign shape, a short glossary, a key to the exercises, and a detailed index.

All of the examples given in the text appear in hieroglyphs, transcription, and English translation. Since the book is also an introduction to the ‘culture of hieroglyphs’, each but the final lesson contains a short essay on ancient Egyptian history, society, or culture. This textbook is probably the best, and certainly the most detailed, manual for Middle Egyptian available in English. It is an exhaustive survey of the language and culture of ancient Egypt and is destined to remain the standard textbook in English on the language for a long time to come.

Reviewed by Thomas R. Wier, University of Chicago

In modern sociolinguistic models of how languages are distributed around the world and how they interact, it is usually implicit that both the data and analysis are drawn from case studies of contemporary societies. This new work by Ilya Yakubovich illustrates that this assumption is not a necessary one: with a sufficient number of textual attestations and attention to detail, the same principles can also be applied to the languages spoken in remote antiquity with no living speakers.

Y focuses his attention on the Luvian language, an Anatolian language closely related to Hittite once spoken in what is now southwest-central Turkey between the late third and early first millenniums B.C. Though less well-known than their Hittite relatives and their eponymous empire, the Luvians actually outlived them by a number of centuries and probably already by the time of the Hittite New Kingdom (fourteenth–early twelfth centuries B.C.) constituted the largest ethnolinguistic groups of Bronze Age Anatolia. After the empire’s fall, Hittite disappeared entirely from the written corpus of cuneiform texts, and it is the possible implications of this fact that Y explores in detail. Did the collapse of the empire, precipitating the disappearance of bureaucratic records written in Hittite, leave behind illiterate native speakers, or had the language already died out even before the elite culture that protected it?

Y begins his answer to this question in Ch. 1 with a close look at the paleographical record of Luvian, illustrating the differences between various Anatolian Indo-European languages, as well as dialectal variation within Luvian. These will form the foundation for his later argument that, towards the late Hittite New Kingdom, probably all speakers of Hittite were also speakers of Luvian, as evidenced by various forms of lexical and morphological borrowing as well as converging patterns of morphological syncretism. In Ch. 2, Y tries to sort out the social history behind these changes by looking at the complicated and poorly documented ethnographic literature of western Anatolia, including a fascinating excursus on the possible equation of Wilusa/Tarwisa in Hittite texts with Classical Ilium/Troy. Ch. 3 examines in detail prehistoric contact between the Hittite and Luvian languages, illustrating how the changing parallel patterns of syncretism of pronominal clitics in Luvian and Hittite only make sense in a context of persistent bilingualism of the two language communities. In Chs. 4 and 5, Y treats the historical sources of contact of Anatolian communities before and after the establishment of a unified Hittite Empire, respectively, through prosopographic analysis, lexical borrowing, structural interference, the direct assessment of historical information, and the analysis of acronymic values assigned to Anatolian hieroglyphic syllabograms.

Ultimately, what makes this book interesting is the light it sheds on a society separated from us by not one but two Dark Ages, through the lens of languages whose very names had been forgotten in the intervening three millennia. Thoroughly grounded in a detailed understanding of that world, Y’s prose allows us to hear those voices clearly and articulately from across that abyss of time.

Reviewed by Fan Zhen-qiang, Zhejiang Gongshang University

Based on case studies on Czech, German, and French languages, this book demonstrates how to use metaphor, which is one of the major approaches to conceptual organization in language, as an effective tool to analyze the worldviews of different cultures. The book is intended to ‘invite readers into the kind of intellectual adventure that translators set off upon when they enter into foreign worldviews; because translators must inhabit more than one “world”, if they are to be able to build bridges between worlds with their translations’ (12).

Besides the introduction and conclusion chapters, a glossary, bibliography, and index, the book contains nine chapters, which are divided into two parts. The first part (Chs. 1–6) critically evaluates the studies of metaphor by cognitive researchers. Ch. 1 introduces the notions of ‘worldview’, ‘patterning’, and the dialectical relationship between them. It also previews what will be covered in the following chapters. Ch. 2 stresses the crucial role of metaphor for the study of language and thought by explicating the ideas of the German thinker Ernst Cassirer, the French scholar Georges Matoré, and American researchers George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (L & J). The author argues that the ideas proposed by L &J are ‘not revolutionary’ (23) since similar ideas have already explored by Cassirer, Matoré, and others. Ch. 3 summarizes the main claims of L & J’s cognitive metaphor work into seven points.

In addition to these cognitive-oriented studies, Ch. 4 overviews approaches and perspectives to metaphor from a wide range of disciplines, such as philosophy, linguistics, poetics, and rhetoric. The purpose of the overview is to ‘prevent the contribution made to metaphor by cognitive linguists in recent decades from eclipsing the wide variety of other approaches’ (43). Ch. 5 discusses additional cognitive-oriented contributions to metaphor theory, pointing out that many cognitive linguists employ universalist approaches and more research is needed to be based on different languages. Ch. 6 provides representative comparative studies of metaphor with data from a variety of languages.

Part 2 begins with an introduction offering a bird’s-eye view of the case studies, which are presented in the three chapters of this part. Ch. 7 examines how the concepts of ‘history’, ‘people’, ‘Party’, and ‘State’ are metaphorically constructed and expressed in Czechoslovak communist discourse, attempting to ‘enter into its world in order to unveil its logic and its strategies in order to understand how people thought with and within the conceptual world of the communist mindset’ (110). It is discovered that communism concepts and arguments are logical and coherent. In contrast, in Ch. 8, an analysis of metaphors in Nazi discourse reveals that Nazi rhetoric is obscure, incoherent, and perverse. A third case study in Ch. 9 discusses the metaphorical construction of ‘language’, comparing and contrasting how French and English are conceptualized metaphorically. The final chapter summarizes the conclusions presented throughout the book.

Overall, this book is highly recommended for researchers in the fields of critical discourse analysis, cognitive linguistics, translation studies, and linguistic typologies.

Reviewed by I. M. Laversuch Nick, University of Cologne

This book offers a superbly written exploration of ‘the ways in which ideas and beliefs about language permeate the social life of groups, communities and societies and how such ideas and beliefs are called upon to justify and legitimate actions that have consequences for people’s opportunities and for their relationships with each other’ (11). Sadly, however, as soon as the authors begin to apply their theory to reality, the excellence of this work dissipates.

While it is understood that this investigation is qualitative in nature, one, nevertheless, expects clear answers to basic questions (e.g. the precise number of participants, the exact context of interviews). Without such answers, it is virtually impossible to critically appraise or appreciate the conclusions drawn. Though disappointing, these oversights are negligible in comparison to the following methodological flaw.

As the authors describe, the historical focus is divided into five conjunctive periods: ‘the present-day situation, the communist era; the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, the interwar period, and the late nineteenth century, and the years prior to the First World War’ (50). What is conspicuously absent here is the period during World War II. Given the unquestionable importance of this period for the border regions of the Czech Republic and Hungary and the people residing there, this omission is inexplicable, especially given the number of times their respondents make direct reference to this period. Without direct examination of National Socialism in these regions, much of the historical impetus for the emergence of anti-German ideology, discourse, and language policy after the war is lost. The aim here is neither to excuse nor condone the institutionalized discrimination which many ethnic Germans suffered after World War II. Instead, the point is to reiterate an essential observation that the authors themselves make in their theoretical discussion: ‘texts are produced under particular historical conditions from which they cannot be released’ (19).

The violation of this tenet is one weakness of the applied portion of this work, .in addition to its unclear organization and cumbersome rhetorical style. The chapters which report the study methodology and results were weakened by a repetitive presentation of the interview material, unsystematic analysis of documentary evidence, and many inadequately founded conclusions. It is unclear whether these problems are attributable to one of the book’s two authors; it is clear, however, that the disparate quality between the theoretical and applied sections is so extreme and systematic that two separate evaluations are needed. As a theoretical treatise on the discourse of language and language ideology, this reference is an unqualified triumph, but as an example of modern ethnolinguistic research, it is an unfortunate disappointment.

Reviewed by Peter Tunstall, Saginaw, MI

A ‘brief introduction to modern generative syntax in the Chomskyan tradition’ (2), this book aims to ‘introduce terms and concepts basic to the study of human language, and especially syntax’ and to ‘explore the operational details of particular hypotheses/theories of syntactic structure’ with an ‘emphasis on argumentation and hypothesis-testing’ (11). It succeeds admirably.

Ch. 1 sets the tone with a discussion of the scientific method and some remarks on language acquisition. The history of modern syntactic theory is very briefly summarized. In Ch. 2, traditional grammatical categories are subjected to empirical scrutiny and found wanting. Here we also find a discussion of how morphemes combine to form words. Chs. 3 and 4 introduce phrase structure grammar. Ch. 5 relates syntax to semantics with sections on grammatical function, theta roles, and argument structure. Ch. 6 begins the process of generalization from the category-specific rules described so far to a category-neutral system. Pronoun reference is dealt with in Ch. 7, which includes such important concepts as c-command and binding. Ch. 8 brings in transformational rules to explain complex verb forms. The relation between deep and surface structure is further explored in Chs. 9 and 10, where X-bar theory is at last unveiled. Ch. 11 extends the analysis to functional categories. Ch. 12 examines questions, relative clauses, and WH-movement, while Ch. 13 looks at NP movement. Ch. 14, ‘Things to come’, touches on a selection of remaining topics that are in need of more extensive study: unaccusative verbs, VP shells and verb raising, and the DP hypothesis. There are two appendices: an annotated list of some minor grammatical categories and a list of twenty-eight verbs together with their argument structure.

Each chapter ends with summary points and a problem set. One appealing feature of the book is that the author begins with a simple model of English syntax, which he elaborates and nuances in later chapters as new evidence is presented, thereby encouraging readers to play with the material themselves and to engage critically with it from the outset. (The book is as much about how linguists make deductions as it is about what they deduce.) The author is also successful in motivating theoretical innovations.

Examples are taken mostly from English, although occasionally other languages, especially German and Quechua, are deployed to illustrate linguistic possibilities, which may not be apparent from English alone. The exercises are graded, advanced problems being marked as such. Many exercises are a simple matter of applying the definitions. Some invite the reader to reproduce an argument or generalize ideas from the preceding chapter. Problem 6 in Ch. 12 is exceptional in introducing a new concept (cyclic rule application) not yet covered in the text (142).

In conclusion, this is a short, gentle, inspiring guide to the fundamentals of syntax as science. The author demands little by way of prerequisites—a passing acquaintance with traditional grammar terms (e.g. adverb, subject) should suffice, and offers much by way of key concepts, methodology, and pointers for future study.

Reviewed by I. M. Laversuch Nick, University of Cologne

According to the authors, this reference was conceived not only for researchers specializing in comparative typology but also for advanced university students. With this readership in mind, the authors have taken considerable care to introduce key concepts and principles of generative grammar, complete with diagrams. Furthermore, each step in the process is meticulously illustrated with not one but several sample sentences extracted from a wide typological range of languages and language families. From Albanian, Arabic, and Avar, to Wolof, Yareba, and Yidiny, the sentences analyzed in the book are taken from seventy-four different languages from around the globe.

This impressive linguistic breadth stands as a compelling testament to the power of generative grammar to successfully account for the remarkable surface diversity and underlying unity which simultaneously characterize the world’s store of languages. With almost 700 sample sentences, this reference offers a refreshingly well-written, entirely logic-driven presentation of the ways in which a limited set of generative principles can be used to explain the seeming limitlessness of human linguistic expression. To do this, the authors begin with a concise introduction to the fundamental principles underlying generative grammar in Ch. 1.  Each successive chapter is devoted to examining an individual level of grammar, beginning with the argument structure of the verb phrase in Ch. 2 and ending with illocutionary force and performative structure in Ch. 7.

All too aware that this surface structure might tempt some readers to skip ahead and dive headlong unprepared, the authors issue the following warning: the order of the chapters ‘reflects the unitary and gradual progression of [their] research’ (2), and reading the chapters out of turn may lead to unnecessary confusion. Part of the elegance of this work is that the hierarchical, recursive structure of the discussion which cleverly mirrors the perpetual inter-relatedness of the linguistic processes the authors trace from the deepest levels of lexical insertion up through to the highest levels of communicative intention. To help readers navigate their way through this intellectual travail, each chapter is further supplemented by an average of forty endnotes filled with alternative analyses, typological oddities, historical tidbits, and unresolved points of controversy. These comments will be greatly appreciated by dyed-in-the-wool generativists, and therein lies the crux of the book.

Given its degree of detail, this fast-moving book is entirely inappropriate for all but the most ardent follower of Noam Chomsky. Even those who are familiar with other generative frameworks may find this work somewhat disappointing, as comparatively little time or attention is given to exploring competing theoretical approaches. For Chomsky-enthusiasts with a keen interest in comparative typology, however, this volume will no doubt constitute a much welcomed, highly recommendable contribution to the field.