Reviewed by Stephen Laker, Kyushu University

Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm’s Kinder-und Hausmärchen (Children’s and household tales) was first published in 1812 and went into its seventh and final edition in 1857. Over the years, the Brothers Grimm changed the number and selection of the tales, and those that remained often underwent substantial revisions. In this book, Orrin W. Robinson presents a linguist’s interpretation of the motivations behind some of the editorial choices performed by the Grimms.

Ch. 1 introduces the approach, aims, and limits of the book. Ch. 2 then gives some idea of how the language of the tales transformed over time by juxtaposing the first and seventh editions of a single tale, ‘Die sechs Schwäne’ (‘The six swans’). Clearly, the tales become much longer, and the reader gains an impression of the range of linguistic alterations that were made, some of which are explored in detail in later chapters.

Ch. 3 considers how the Grimms used dialect, usually snippets of dialect in the form of regional names and verses, to give the tales an extra air of German authenticity. Ch. 4 investigates how possession is expressed grammatically in the tales. With very few exceptions, the Grimms avoided the non-standard dative + possessive pronoun construction (e.g. dem Mann sein Haus ‘the man-DATIVE his house’) and the von ‘of’ possessive (e.g. das Haus von Hans ‘the house of Hans’), in favor of traditional genitive case marking. Ch. 5 looks at how characters in the tales address one another. R shows that the formal Sie-plural form, for the polite second-person singular, is rarely used; the Grimms clearly favored the older ihr form. Ch. 6 deals mainly with the use of the present and preterite subjunctive in earlier and later editions of the tales. Interestingly, several grammatical changes between the first and seventh editions echo opinions found in Jacob Grimm’s Deutsche Grammatik about what constitutes proper German grammar.

Chs. 7–11 consider lexical choices (e.g. nouns, adjectives, and pronouns) and how these relate to gender roles in the tales. R determines, for instance, that boys are more likely to be referred to by their real names than girls, and if girls do have a name, then their appearance is key (e.g. Schneewittchen ‘Snow White’, Rotkäppchen ‘Little Red Riding Hood’). Girls are more commonly described for their appearance, morals, and industry, while boys tend to be described in terms of sociability, size, and mental aptitude. Such choices probably reflect not only the attitudes of the Grimms, but also nineteenth-century German attitudes, about gender roles.

Grimms’ fairy tales are some of the most famous and influential works of world literature, and much scholarship has been devoted to the interpretation of their plots. R demonstrates that the German language in which they are written also offers considerable scope for interpretation, especially as a reflection of attitudes about language and society in nineteenth-century Germany.

Reviewed by Roberta D’Alessandro, Leiden University

This book reports a special event taking place in the Basque Country in 2006, which saw Noam Chomsky as the interlocutor of several scholars from different disciplines discussing with him issues regarding language, mind, and the brain. The book is divided into four parts. Each chapter is authored by a leading scholar in linguistics, psycholinguistics, language acquisition, cognitive neuroscience, comparative cognitive psychology, or evolutionary biology, and includes a discussion at its end.

The book opens with an introduction by the editors, followed by Part 1, which offers a joint introduction to the themes treated in the book. These introductions are meant to serve also as a general reference for readers with varying backgrounds and are hence written in a non-technical fashion. In the first chapter, Noam Chomsky traces the history of biolinguistics and outlines the main questions that have interested generative linguists throughout the years. In the following chapter, Cedric Boeckx traces a parallel between language and other cognitive systems, attempting to reduce what is traditionally believed to be language-specific to more general cognitive factors. C. R. Gallistel follows, examining the parallel between human and animal cognition, and Marc D. Hauser discusses the ontological commitments that babies have prior to the maturation of language, which primates lack. Gabriel Dover then discusses the extent to which a biology of language can be pursued at all, and Donata Vercelli defends the view whereby language cannot be completely reduced to other cognitive functions. In the final chapter of Part 1, Christopher Cherniak discusses the optimization of brain wiring and non-genomic nativism.

Part 2 addresses the question, ‘What is language, that it may be part of biology?’. In his chapter, Wolfram Hinzen addresses the origin of human semantics, which James Higginbotham follows up with a discussion of the ‘two interfaces’: that between syntax and semantics and that between linguistic semantics and the world. Luigi Rizzi examines locality and movement in his chapter, and Angela D. Friederici shows how the brain differentiates hierarchical and probabilistic grammars. Part 2 concludes with a round table discussion between Cedric Boeckx, Janet Dean Fodor, Lila Gleitman, and Luigi Rizzi on language universals.

Part 3 is devoted to language acquisition. In the first chapter, Rochel Gelman discusses innate learning, which is complemented by Lila Gleitman’s chapter, ‘The learned component of language learning’. Janet Dean Fodor examines the inputs that can allow a learner to fix syntactic parameters, and Thomas G. Bever addresses the extended projection principle (EPP) as a problem for acquisition.

Part 4, ‘Open talks on open inquiries’, features a chapter by Marc D. Hauser on the illusion of biological variation, in which he claims that at different levels of granularity some core invariant mechanisms always emerge. Itziar Laka addresses the question of the content of universal grammar, while Núria Sebastián-Gallés wonders whether linguistic differences may be caused by perceptual difficulties. In the following chapter, Angela D. Friederici presents a thorough overview of what is known about language and the brain, and the book ends with a conclusion by Noam Chomsky. 

Reviewed by Jason D. Haugen, Oberlin College

In this monograph, Roland Pfau aims to test the psychological plausibility of distributed morphology (DM) by analyzing its theoretical architecture from a mentalistic perspective. P’s essential question is whether DM is amenable to integration with psycholinguistic models of language production, and he approaches the issue from a novel source of linguistic data: spontaneous speech errors in language use (primarily from German and English). P ultimately concludes that the DM model not only accounts for the speech error evidence but also makes correct predictions about possible and impossible speech errors—for example, the processing of morphosyntactic features (e.g. gender, number) playing a role in language production but categorial information (e.g. noun, verb, adjective) not.

A crucial element of DM that makes it compatible with multilevel processing models is the separation of morphosyntactic processes from morphophonological ones. The book begins with an introduction, a review of mentalistic approaches to grammar, and an extensive theoretical background discussion on psycholinguistic models and DM. P proceeds by addressing different speech error types along the time-course assumed in the models: ‘…from semantic planning and selection of items…(Chapter 4) via grammatical encoding and manipulation of morphosyntactic features (Chapter 5) towards morphological processes, Vocabulary insertion, and phonological readjustment (Chapter 6)’ (81).

With respect to semantic planning and selection (Ch. 4), P considers semantic substitutions, where a semantic competitor is inserted into a syntactic slot intended for a different root (e.g. Radiergummi ‘eraser’ ← Spitzer ‘pencil sharpener’), as well as semantic anticipations and perseverations, where a meaning-related concept is activated by a target and is inserted into another slot in a sentence (e.g. They even fly on the wing ← sleep on the wing). P concludes that such evidence requires a pre-syntactic conceptual level, where roots must be attached to some kind of conceptual content (in parallel with the lemma level in psycholinguistic production models), which contrasts with most DM research, which has maintained that root content is irrelevant to the syntax.

In Ch. 5, P convincingly makes the case that particular morphosyntactic features in language production are manipulable (as per DM), and as such they can be specifically implicated in speech errors. Spontaneous speech errors related to various types of mismatch in feature copying are examined (e.g. subject-verb agreement, pronoun agreement). In general, errant triggers are usually more proximate (at deep structure or surface structure) than the actual targets, although long-distance (across clause boundaries) agreement errors also occur. Other types of errors relating to morphosyntactic features include slips (stranding features in their base position) and shifts (exchanges, perseverations, or anticipations of features).

Although he introduces and illustrates a descriptive four-way typology for accommodation types (phonological, morphophonological, morphological, and morphosyntactic), in Ch. 6 P contends that the notion of accommodation as a psycholinguistic process involving repair operations in speech production is theoretically superfluous. He proposes instead to account for morphology-related speech errors by way of an appeal to DM-based morphological operations such as feature copy, licensing, morpheme insertion, and phonological readjustment.

In sum, this book provides much food for thought worthy of careful digestion by linguists who desire psycholinguistic compatibility for their grammatical theories. It would be very interesting to see how competing morphological theories would account for P’s speech error data utilizing alternative theoretical machinery. I have little doubt that P’s thought-provoking work will be instigating very lively debates in the field.

Reviewed by Roberta D’Alessandro, Leiden University

This book is a collection of articles on some of the key properties of Brazilian Portuguese (BP) syntax within the minimalist framework. The book is comprised of two parts: Part 1, ‘Movement and empty category issues’, and Part 2, ‘Issues on the syntax-morphology interface’.

After a brief introduction by the editor, the book opens with Marcelo Ferreira’s chapter, ‘Null subjects and finite control in Brazilian Portuguese’. Ferreira examines the behavior of referential null subjects in BP, concluding that they behave like obligatory controlled PRO. He arrives at the conclusion that referential null subjects are to be considered as traces left by the (hyper)raising of the phrases originally merged in subject position. Null possessor constructions are the topic of the third chapter. In it, Simone Floripi and Jairo Nunes examine the dele construction, observing how dele behaves as an anaphor in some contexts but as a pronoun in others. This is due, according to the authors, to the fact that dele is an obligatorily controlled trace of movement to theta positions. When this movement is impeded (because of an island separating dele from its antecedent), dele behaves as a pronoun. Pronominalization is, however, a less economic alternative than movement.

In her chapter ‘Patterns of extraction out of factive islands in Brazilian Portuguese’, Marina R. A. Augusto shows that extraction can happen out of arguments and even adjuncts, depending on the nature of the complement and the presence or absence of a Top projection. In the following chapter, ‘Uniform raising analysis for standard and nonstandard relative clauses in Brazilian Portuguese’, Mary A. Kato and Jairo Nunes argue in favor of Richard Kayne’s derivational approach to relative clauses. The final chapter of this part of the book, by Jairo Nunes and Raquel S. Santos, proposes new diagnostics for the identification of empty categories based on stress shift.

Part 2 opens with a chapter on possessive-existential constructions with ter in BP, by Juanito Avelar, who postulates a reanalysis (albeit non-morphological) of this form as a fusion of estar and com. In the following chapter, Ana C. Bastos-Gee discusses vP/verb fronting, showing how it amounts to topicalization. She identifies three different types of topicalization: (i) topicalization of the infinitival verb only, (ii) topicalization of the infinitival verb with its specific internal argument, and (iii) topicalization of the infinitival with a generic internal argument. In Ch. 9, Jairo Nunes and Cristina Ximenes discuss apparent PP coordination, arguing that the insertion/copy of the second preposition is morphological, and is triggered by a parallelism requirement on coordinated structures. In the final chapter, Jairo Nunes and Cynthia Zocca investigate ellipsis resolution in the case of non-morphological identity between the antecedent and the elided phrase.

The first part of the book is more uniform in its subject matter, while the second touches on several different issues. Overall, the book is a must-have for anyone working on BP syntax.

Reviewed by Gian Claudio Batic, University of Naples ‘L’Orientale’

This collection of folk tales is the natural complement to two preceding works published by the same author in 2004 and 2007: Kabba: A Nilo-Saharan language of the Central African Republic and (with Jean-Pierre Dingatoloum) Kabba-English-French dictionary, respectively, both published by LINCOM Europa.

This book is divided into five parts. The first four sections are devoted to the thirty-four Kabba tales collected by the author. In the first section, the stories are presented in the original language; the three following sections display French, English, and German translations, respectively. The final part of the book is comprised of a collection of eighty-one Kabba proverbs along with translations (in French, English, and German) and an explanatory/interpretative note.

Each tale is introduced by an illustration representing the main characters involved in the story. The name of the storyteller, as well as that of the translator (if any), is given below the title. The transcription of the Kabba version follows the orthography established by the author, with accent marks employed to mark low and high tones.

Rich in formulaic language, which works to establish a special connection between the storyteller and the listener, the thirty-four tales offer an important point of view upon the world, exemplifying human relationships from a culture-oriented perspective. Through metaphorical and symbolic conceptualization, these tales ‘imply acceptable norms of behaviour, cultural values, belief systems and acceptable relationships between people’ (vii).

The folk tales use animals to convey moral, educational, or social messages.. The employment of characters taken from the animal world is a crosslinguistic and well-known feature in African cultures and oral traditions. Common themes in the tales are easy to find, for example the struggle between strong (but naïve) and small (but clever) animals. Hausa oral literature, represented mostly by the tatsuniyoyi, is rich in animal characters depicting human weakness and strength: the tricky spider and the clever cockroach are constantly kept busy by their will to cheat and exploit stronger but ingenuous creatures, similar to the rat in the Kabba tale ‘The lion and the rat’ (19). These stories often involve a certain degree of magic and cruelty, with the explicit aim to warn against antisocial behaviors. It is the case of ‘A mother and her son’, a tale that targets the practice and notion of incest.

This book shows once more the author’s commitment in describing and documenting a minority language. The texts compiled here strengthen M’s previous grammatical and lexical descriptions by offering the scientific community a rich bulk of data.

Reviewed by Paisly Di Bianca, Northeastern Illinois University

This book ‘is written with English speakers in mind’ (xii) and is geared toward the learner who has at least an intermediate knowledge of the language, including the graphemes, grammar, and some vocabulary for comprehension of the examples. It serves as a reference manual that explains some of the particulars of Japanese grammar and provides tips for successful study of the language. Moreover, it includes numerous sociolinguistic and discourse examples that facilitate language competency and performance. M is a linguist and bilingual speaker of Japanese and English. Her knowledge and experience manifest well in a book that answers many of the questions a student of Japanese as a foreign language might have.

The book is divided into seven parts. In Part 1, ‘Preliminaries’, which comprises the first three chapters, M details her intentions in the book and includes a discussion on the history of Japan, its culture, and variations in the language. Part 2, ‘Sounds and scripts’, (Chs. 4 and 5), covers the sound and writing systems of Japanese. Part 3, ‘Words’, (Chs. 6 and 7), discusses the lexicon. Part 4, ‘Grammar’ (Chs. 8–11), covers grammar basics, including a section on emotive expressions. Part 5, ‘Use’ (Chs. 12–16), addresses discourse and sociolinguistics. Part 6, ‘Genres’ (Chs. 17 and18) includes real examples from manga (comic books/graphic novels), advertisements, magazines, and cell phone novels (a Japanese phenomenon), to illustrate the language topics discussed in the book. The inclusion of these genre sections make M’s book stand out because they are current, pragmatic, and meaningful. The final section, Part 7, ‘Learning Nihongo’ (Chs. 19 and 20), includes tips for improving language learning, a list of books on Japanese language learning, and information on select study abroad programs.

The book is geared toward American English speakers; the author often points out the differences between Japanese speakers and American speakers. For example, M explains that ‘in some parts of the United States it is common to…greet complete strangers in an elevator’, which is not customary in Japan (205), and points out that ‘Japanese speakers apologize far more frequently than Americans’ (212), but she does not give similar examples for other speakers of English.

The book also targets traditionally college-aged students. The resources provided in the final chapter are opportunities typically available to young people. This is not to say that the book would not be useful for the older learner of Japanese, but it is a point worth mentioning.

Overall, this book would be a useful tool for students of the Japanese language who are interested in developing their knowledge of the language as they move towards fluency.

Reviewed by Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini, Centre for Applied Linguistics

This is the fourth special issue in the short life of a fascinating journal first published in 2006. As stated in the journal’s aims on its web site, ‘[e]very volume contains something for and about each of the senses, both singly and in all sorts of novel configurations’ (http://www.bergpublishers.com/?TabId=523). The 2011 special issue concentrates on the connections between language and the senses in a number of original short studies. The introduction by the editors  sets the scene for the following eleven articles, each reporting on the findings of a large crosscultural, crosslinguistic study of the Language of Perception (LoP) hosted at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (Nijmegen, The Netherlands).

The editors remark how the focus on language as text, further exacerbated by a certain postmodernist desensualization of ethnography, had led to a ‘disembodiment’ of the social science inquiry. Through the ‘social sciences of the senses’ movement of the last two decades, the senses have become a popular topic in anthropology, but the study of the connection between language and the senses has lagged behind. While the editors remind us that language as a specifically human capacity expressed in acoustic or visual form appears limited in its capacity to connect us with the remaining senses, language as individual tongues affords new essential insights into the conceptualization of the senses. The restricted or amplified sensoria emerging from ethnographic work on individual languages point to the cultural construction of the senses. Moreover, experimental research has shown that language affects primary perception in its ‘fundamental intermediary role between the subjective, individual nature of sensation and the cultural world that constructs the perceptual field’ (9).

Most of the eleven articles report findings from field experiments and naturalistic observation of small-scale speech communities inhabiting pre-industrialization environments minimally affected by labor division and without literary traditions. Unsurprisingly, a whole gamut of previously unknown sensual categories have rewarded the search of the LoP researchers, and are discussed in fascinating ethnographic detail for the intellectual and sensual delectation of the reader. In fact, each article is a window into an unknown sensual world that re-awakens our Western perception dulled by over-exposure to the social media and to specialist taste and olfactory registers. If a book-sized introduction to the language of the senses is a restrictive task for the time-conscious reader, this slim special issue provides an enticing taster that will no doubt result in a return for a second helping.

Reviewed by Engin Arik, Isik University

This excellent resource book consists of a list of entries, a note, preface, acknowledgements, eight color plates of brain images, seven chapters, around 483 entries, a list of contributors, and a sixty-eight-page index.

In Ch. 1, ‘Language structure in its human context: New directions for the language sciences in the twenty-first century’ (1–11), William Croft proposes that in addition to mainstream linguistic analyses such as phonological, morphological, and syntactic structures, linguistic research will focus on the question of how context constrains language structure and use, which is fostered by theories originating in philosophy, psychology, and sociology, as well as subfields of linguistics.

In the following chapter, ‘The psychology of linguistic form’ (12–22), Lee Osterhout, Richard A. Wright, and Mark D. Allen argue that while most research supports linguistic representations distinct from motor movements, sensation, memory, and conceptual knowledge, some of these play a significant role in language processing at all levels.

In Ch. 3, ‘The structure of meaning’ (23–34), James Pustejovsky focuses on how meaning is carried in linguistic expressions, starting with lexical meaning supplemented by introductions on semantic classes, argument structure, decomposition, noun meaning, and polysemy. He also deals with sentence-level meaning focusing on compositionality and noncompositionality, quantifiers and their scope, semantic modification, arguments versus adjuncts, presupposition, and meaning at discourse level.

Florian Coulmas covers writing in a global context in Ch. 4, ‘Social practices of speech and writing’ (35–45). The author starts with technological aspects of writing from invention to digitization and ends with institutional aspects of literacy such as government, cult, schooling, and economic organization.

In Ch. 5, ‘Explaining language: Neuroscience, genetics, and evolution’ (46–55), Lyle Jenkins reviews research on left-right asymmetries and language areas in the brain, genetics and speech disorders, genetics and evolution, and studies on the DNA of hominids.

Barbara Lust takes on the field of language acquisition in Ch. 6, ‘Acquisition of language’ (56–64), beginning with a discussion on innateness, and provides an overview of the findings on language acquisition, including cross-species comparative methods and future directions.

In the final chapter, ‘Elaborating speech and writing: Verbal art’ (65–74), Patrick Colm Hogan introduces theories of language and of literature, and then focuses on topics such as indirect address, side participation, play, the purposes of verbal art, the maximization of relevance, interpretation and the uses of texts, and Shakespearean indirection.

In addition to providing excellent chapters that include suggestions for further reading, the encyclopedia covers a variety of traditional topics such as aspect, babbling, and conversational implicature; relatively new topics to the language sciences, such as brain and language, genes and language, gesture, and sign languages; subfields of linguistic study, including morphology, phonology, pragmatics, semantics, and syntax; and other subfields such as corpus linguistics, forensic linguistics, historical linguistics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, text linguistics, and typology.

Also included in the encyclopedia are theories such as cognitive linguistics, construction grammars, functional linguistics, generative grammar, head-driven phrase structure grammar, lexical-functional grammar, and usage-based theory; and theory-specific concepts such as blended space, c-command, compositionality, core and periphery, embodiment, metaphor, and representations. Each entry is very helpful because it is detailed enough to provide sufficient information about its topic (approximately 2000 words on average).

Reviewed by Kanavillil Rajagopalan, State University at Campinas

The general introduction, written by one of the editors, Nancy Hornberger, is followed by an introduction to the volume by Patricia Duff. The book consists of twenty-four chapters, presented in five sections: ‘Language socialization: Theoretical and methodological approaches’, ‘Language socialization at home and in the community’, ‘Language socialization and schooling’, ‘Language socialization among adolescents and adults’, and ‘Language socialization in particular communities of practice’.

In Ch. 1,  Elinor Ochs and Bambi Schieffelin recall that socialization research began as part of developmental psycholinguistic research and mostly constituted a response to Noam Chomsky’s over-emphasis on the linguistic competence of the individual speaker, considered in isolation. Its early beginnings related to work done by Dan Slobin and John Gumperz at the University of California, Berkeley, in the late 1960s. By the 1980s, the field had consolidated itself and addressed ‘socialization through language and socialization into language’ (5). The remaining chapters in the first section examine language socialization from different perspectives, such as language ecology, linguistic anthropology of education, systemic functional paradigm, and pragmatics.

As their section headings make clear, the eighteen remaining chapters are all concerned with language socialization at work in the different settings in which the child finds itself at different stages in its development from toddler to adult. As Shoshana Blum-Kulka makes clear at the outset of her chapter, ‘[t]he basic tenet of language socialization theory is that children learn language and culture through active engagement in meaningful social interactions with adults and peers’ ( 87). Language learning and enculturation are not separate processes; they are in fact one and the same.

One important setting where socialization takes place early on in the life of a child, especially in Western societies, is the school. As Patricia Baquedano-López and Shlomy Kattan observe, schooling and institutionalized education are seen as ‘the normative activity through which knowledge and mores are passed down to the younger generation’ (161).

No less important in the socialization of a child is the role of ‘learning communities’, which are especially formative for adolescents. In her contribution, Shirley Brice Heath traces the history of learning communities to as far back as the Crusades and argues that children are tutored in important aspects of age-grading and gender differences.

Socialization practices are equally at work in non-Western communities. In their contribution, Diane Pesco and Martha Crago take an in-depth look at how children are socialized in Canadian aboriginal communities, particularly in Inuit families. Haruko Minegishi Cook shows how ‘[s]ocialization starts long before children produce their first word’ (314) and that Japanese mothers talk to their infants significantly less often than their North American counterparts She emphasizes such socially important practices as issuing indirect commands and obeying intricate rules for manifesting empathy and conformity.

Overall, this volume makes an invaluable contribution to the field.

Reviewed by Carolin Patzelt, University of Bochum

As observed in the introduction, ‘[r]esearch in His­pa­nic Sociolinguistics has grown…to such an extent that it has become an independent subfield’ (1). This volume sets out to pro­vide a comprehensive, up-to-date overview of contemporary Hispanic sociolinguis­tics. It covers an impres­sive range of topics, which are grouped into six main sections.

The first section addressing phonological variation focuses on both linguistic and social fac­tors conditioning variation. Following a comprehensive introduction to laboratory approa­ches to studying sound variation and change (Laura Colantoni), external and internal factors conditioning variation in phonology are discussed (Anto­nio Medina-Rivera and Francisco More­no-Fernández). The contributions by John M. Lipski and José Antonio Sam­per Padilla then focus on sociophonological variation in Latin American and European Spanish.

The second section deals with morphosyntactic variation and is organized similar to the first section. Scott A. Schwen­ter discusses internal and external factors determining variation in Spanish morphosyntax, and Rena Torres Cacoullos shows how the variationist method can help to examine gram­maticalization. Two articles, one by Paola Bentivoglio and Mercedes Sedano and the other by María José Serrano, discuss morphosyntactic variation in Latin American and European Spanish.

Section 3, ‘Language, the individual, and the society’, begins by discussing the impact of various social variables on lan­guage variation (Richard Cameron, Jonathan Holmquist and Diane R. Uber). Donald N. Tuten and Fernando Tejedo-Herrero then present the rather new field of ‘historical socio­linguistics’. Finally, Manuel Díaz-Campos and Kimberly Geeslin deal with variation in language acquisition.

Section 4 is dedicated to Spanish in contact with indigenous languages (Anna María Esco­bar and Shaw N. Gynan), with creoles (Luis A. Ortiz López and Armin Schwegler), with other European languages (José Luis Blas Arroyo as well as J. Clan­cy Clements, Patrícia Amaral, and Ana R. Luís), and with Arabic (Lotfi Sayahi).

Section 5 deals with a variety of aspects concerning Spanish in the United States. Four contributions focus on concrete linguistic outcomes of the contact between Spanish and English (Lourdes Torres, Almeida Jacqueline Toribio, and Jorge Porcel) and intrafamilial contact between different varieties of Spanish (Kim Potowski). Three chapters (Ricardo Otheguy; Norma Mendoza-Denton and Bryan James Gordon; Guadalupe Valdés andMichelle Geoffrion-Vinci) analyze the linguistic behavior of concrete groups of Latinos living in the United States. Finally, the perception of Latinos and their language in the United States is discussed by Adam Schwartz.

Section 6, ‘Language policy/planning, language attitudes and ideolo­gy’, begins with an introductory chapter by Ofelia García discussing the possibilities of language planning for Spanish as both a national and a minority language. The following contributions focus on language planning and policy in Latin America (Serafín M. Coronel-Molina and Megan Solon; Mercedes Niño-Murcia) and Spain (Juan Manuel Hernández-Campoy). Finally, Clare Mar-Molinero and Darren Paffey discuss the concept of linguistic imperialism and the question, ‘Who owns global Spanish?’.

The book is an impressive collection of key issues in today’s sociolinguistics. It presents the most researched areas of the field in a comprehensive way and thereby reflects the rich diversity of dialects and varieties spoken across the Americas and Spain. This volume should certainly be compulsory reading for anyone interested in socio­linguistics.