Reviewed by Mikael Thompson, Bloomington IN

Grace Qiao Zhang’s Using Chinese synonyms collects about 1700 Mandarin Chinese words and expressions into 315 sets of synonyms. Within each set the words are ranked by register from most formal to least, their meanings carefully distinguished and important grammatical information and numerous example sentences provided. The book is intended for intermediate to advanced students of Mandarin and not surprisingly is based on mainland standards. Pronunciations are indicated with pinyin, only simplified characters are used, and the frequency and difficulty level of each word is given as judged for the HSK (the national language proficiency test of the People’s Republic of China).

The main body of the book is divided into two parts, with pages numbered 1–42 and 1–393; although a bit confusing at first, this numbering system soon presents no trouble. There are three finding lists, a pinyin list of all words (1–20), and a pinyin list of frame titles (headwords for each set of synonyms, 21–36) in the first part, as well as an introduction explaining the use of the book (first part, 37–42). The second part of the book includes an index of English glosses (372–93) and a bibliography (370–71).

Each set of synonyms is labeled by the word chosen as most general or neutral, and all members of a set have the same word class. Each set is organized into three columns: the pronunciation, characters, word class, register, and HSK frequency/difficulty level on the left; an English gloss, definition, grammatical information, important connotations, antonyms, and other similar features in the middle; and from three to ten example sentences on the right. More detailed notes (particularly the meaning and use of a given word in another word class and related words in other word classes) are provided at the end of each set.

The book covers a wide range of meanings and major function words, including prepositions and important classifiers. As an example, the set for guǎngkuò ‘wide’ (161–63) includes ten synonyms with detailed connotations that can bedevil students, such as guǎngdà ‘large and vast (of land or territory), large-scale, massive, numerous (of people)’, guǎngfàn ‘wide-ranging, widespread, extensive (usu. referring to abstract items)’, kāikuò ‘open, wide, spacious (of area, mind, etc.)’, and kuāndà ‘spacious, wide, generous (referring to concrete or abstract items)’, along with fifty-five example sentences illustrating the various connotations of these words.

This is a  well organized book richly informed by the author’s long experience teaching Chinese at the university level. It is highly recommended for all English-language students of Mandarin, who would do very well to obtain a copy when starting the intermediate level and refer to it regularly thereafter. It is also a valuable reference for Mandarin teachers. In short, this is a book I wish I had had when I was learning Chinese.

Reviewed by David Elton Gay, Bloomington, IN

John Wolff’s Proto-Austronesian phonology with glossary is, he tells us, a ‘project to update Dempwolff’s Vergleichende lautlehre (1934-38), the cornerstone of the historical study of the Austronesian languages’ (vol. 1:xi).

W’s book (published as two volumes, with continuous pagination) is divided into three basic sections. The first is an introductory section that consists of three chapters covering the Austronesian languages as a language group, ‘considerations of theory and methodology’ relevant to the study of Proto-Austronesian and, finally, introducing ‘Proto-Austronesian phonemes and other issues of phonology’. Much of what is here is surprisingly introductory, but some of it will be helpful for those with no knowledge of the Austronesian languages.

The second section consists of reconstructions of the phonological histories of selected Austronesian languages. W presents an especially full discussion of the development of the Formosan languages, followed by studies of selected Philippine languages, several of the languages of the Kalimantan Malagasy and Malay, Old Javanese, Toba Batak, Moken, four languages of eastern Indonesia, and six Oceanic languages. W’s approach to historical phonology is theoretically conservative but also very thorough.

The Proto-Austronesian glossary and the registers comprise the third section of the book. The glossary provides Proto-Austronesian forms with definitions, followed by a list of the forms of the words in the respective modern languages. The glossary is followed by registers of modern Austronesian languages and words cited in the glossary, along with their reconstructed Proto-Austronesian form, as well an English-to-Austronesian languages register and registers to the forms in Robert Blust’s and Otto Dempwolff’s works on comparative Austronesian.

The book concludes with a bibliography and index of topical references and is overall a very useful and intriguing work to read. Although theoretically conservative, it will certainly be of interest to anyone working on the Austronesian languages. The one major criticism I have with the book is that the glossary is not fully indexed to the studies of the languages in the book’s second section. Many of the entries are, but not all; and none of the entries in the registers are indexed to the studies. This is surprising given W’s interest in words and their history. In fact, he opens the book by stating that it is a ‘study of the history of words in the Austronesian languages—their origin in Proto-Austronesian or at later stages and how they developed into the forms that are attested in the current Austronesian languages’ (vol. 1: xix). Still, there is an enormous amount of useful information in the book, even if accessing that information is not as easy as it could be.

Reviewed by Elly van Gelderen, Arizona State University

The first edition of A comprehensive Russian grammar (CRG) by Terence Wade dates from 1992; David Gillespie’s 2010 revisions in the current edition have kept the contents of the grammar largely as they were in the first edition but have expanded ‘the sources and reference materials used’ (xxix). The book is one of the Blackwell reference grammars and is intended for intermediate students of Russian, not for readers with little or no knowledge of Russian. The grammar includes very minimal linguistic terminology, which again may be useful to English-speaking learners of Russian but is not as efficient for other users. I will offer a few comments on the book’s descriptions of null subjects, negatives, and the particle zhe, from the point of view of a linguist using this grammar; many of my comments apply also to other topics.

The linguistic literature on Slavic discusses pro-drop, or null subjects at length, but the CRG treats null subjects in a footnote (136-37) of ten lines. ‘Я [`I’] is often omitted in everyday speech…and in official applications and announcements….In spoken Russian, pronouns in general are often omitted, since present and future verb forms alone are sufficient to express person and number’. It would be interesting to know if first-person pronouns are omitted most often, as well as answers to a number of other questions; nevertheless, the CRG provides information that is relevant to learning Russian grammar.

Negatives in Slavic are again a frequent topic of linguistic investigation, but one has to look for a treatment throughout the grammar. For instance, in one part of the book we learn about the genitive and accusative after negated verbs, where the reader is required to know the case endings to understand the examples (112), and later in the book, we find examples of the negative particle не with the negative pronouns (157-61), but these examples are not systematically distributed. For example, many have the negative pronoun in preverbal position.

The use of the particle же zhe is introduced in a few places in the book. It is mentioned briefly in a note (154), and then later in the book it is said that the particle follows the word it qualifies and ‘introduces a more categorical emphasis’ (506-07). Additionally, there is included a helpful section with six ways in which the particle is used (513–14). There is no mention, however, of whether it is ever obligatory or of what kind of grammatical category it may be.

Despite some shortcomings that may be noted by readers with a linguistic background, the CRG is a great resource on Russian. For instance, the declension chart (73) is among the most insightful I have seen, and looking up topics is made very easy. There are nineteen pages of table of contents, seventeen pages indexing English concepts and thirty-one pages of Russian words. In sum, I consider this book to be a useful grammar.

Reviewed by Anish Koshy, The English and Foreign Languages University

Cognition and pragmatics has fifteen articles concerning various aspects of the cognitive processes underlying language use. All the articles deal with current methodologies and debates in the field and summarize latest research findings, while keeping the importance of pragmatics foregrounded.

In the introductoryarticle, Dominiek Sandra discusses paradigm shifts in linguistic investigation and gives an overview of the body of the volume.

Three articles provide necessary background to the field of cognitive science. For Ronald W. Langacker grammar is fully reducible to assemblies of symbolic structures organized in terms of schemas and usage events, for instance. Seana Coulson and Teenie Matlock provide a brief history of cognitive science studies, highlighting the contribution of multiple disciplines and multiple approaches to the field. Dominiek Sandra discusses important aspects of experimentation and statistical tests like the chi-square test and analysis of variance (ANOVA).

Two articles deal with developmental issues. Susan M. Ervin-Tripp sees the developmental process as orderly, universal, and predictable and discusses constructivism and the critical period. Steven Gillis and Dorit Ravid examine language acquisition via innateness, connectionism, and bootstrapping.

Seven articles address various issues of the relationship between language and cognition. Dominiek Sandra traces the establishment of psycholinguistics as a research discipline and discusses connectionism, corpus research, and simulation-studies. Discussing the word recognition system underlying the cognitive processing of multilingual individuals, Ton Dijkstra investigates the possibility of an integrated lexicon. Exploring the relationship between comprehension and production, J. Cooper Cutting looks at the evidence for an associated or dissociated system from various studies.

Roger Lindsay investigates the relationship between perception and language in terms of constraints and neuropsychological evidence and discusses linguistic relativity and determinism. Eleanor Rosch explores categorization studies through the classical phase and prototype theories, challenges against them, and the idea of categories as theories. Awareness, intentionality, and role-plays form part of Elizabeth Mertz and Jonathan Yovel’s discussion on the conceptualization of metalanguage and its constitutive and creative functions. Wallace Chafe explores the debate on language as a conscious versus unconscious activity, asserting that consciousness shapes language pervasively even if largely unconsciously.

Three articles address modern techniques used for modeling human cognition/language processing. Ton Weijters and Antal van den Bosch focus on the role of connectionist models like back-propagation and distributed script processing and episodic memory network (DISCERN) in natural language processing and pragmatics. Discussing the representation and manipulation of concepts and the encoding of background knowledge, Steven Gillis, Walter Daelemans, and Koenraad DeSmedt introduce artificial intelligence and computational linguistics. Michel Paradis discusses cerebral division of labor in verbal communication through investigations of brain-damaged individuals and data from neuroimaging.

There is a sincere attempt made to showcase the crucial relationship between pragmatics and cognitive investigations. That every article begins with basic definitions and ends with the state of the art benefits both a newcomer and an advanced researcher.

Reviewed by Carmela Chateau, Université de Bourgogne

Corpus linguists generally start their careers as linguists or computer scientists. Researchers from vastly different backgrounds will find this book of great assistance in learning more about the sources of the discipline, and it will prove invaluable for students just starting out as corpus linguists. This reader contains forty-two key texts in chronological order spanning fifty years. Besides a general introduction, each paper has a brief introduction setting it in historical context.

The first article predates electronic corpora: Charles Carpenter Fries (1952) used recordings of telephone conversations (about 250,000 words) to investigate the structure of English in use. The subcorpus of 72,000 words used by F. G. A. M. Aarts (1971) contained some spoken texts. Bengt Altenberg (1986) worked on spoken English, to chunk language naturally as part of a Text-to-Speech (TTS) program; Louis C.W. Pols et al. (1998) explored the use of authentic corpora to improve such programs. Peter C. Collins (1987) examined differences between spoken and written English using the Lancaster-Oslo-Bergen (LOB) and London-Lund one-million-word corpora, constructed along the lines of the Brown corpus presented by W. Nelson Francis (1965). Geoffrey Leech and Roger Fallon (1992) examined the cultural aspects revealed by the Brown (American) and LOB (British) comparable corpora.

Corpus construction was discussed by John Sinclair (1987), a key figure in the creation of the Collins Birmingham University International Language Database (COBUILD) Bank of English. Douglas Biber (1992) showed how statistics can be used to confirm the representativeness of a corpus. Statistics were brought into play by William Gale and Kenneth Church (1989) and by Peter F. Brown et al. (1990), investigating parallel corpora for machine translation. Jean Carletta (1996) suggested using the kappa statistic to assess interannotator reliability. Donald Hindle and Mats Rooth (1993) investigated parsing, finding that in some cases there could be no single correct answer.

The treebank approach to parsing corpora was presented by Mitchell P. Marcus et al. (1993). E.J. Briscoe and J.A. Carroll (1995) evaluated a probabilistic parser. The topic of treebanks was discussed in greater depth by Eugene Charniak (1996) and by Geoffrey Sampson (1999). Another approach to treebanks, for Czech, was presented by Alena Böhmová and Eva Hajičová (1999). A Swedish corpus was discussed by Staffan Hellberg (1991), and Anthony McEnery (2001) made the case for corpus research into nonindigenous minority languages (NIMLs). Estelle Campione and Jean Véronis (2001) presented spoken French corpora, semiautomatically tagged for intonation. Esther Grabe and Brechtje Post (2002) looked at Intonational Variation in English (IViE). Ossi Ihalainen (1991) also investigated a British dialect, while Jan Tent and France Mugler (1996) discussed the creation of the Fiji component of the International Corpus of English (ICE).

Douglas Biber and Edward Finegan (1987) examined English from a historical viewpoint, as did Matti Rissanen (1991). Various idiosyncratic aspects of spoken English were also investigated: Ingrid Kristine Hasund and Anna-Brita Stenström (1996) looked into female disputes; Anthony McEnery et al. (1998) focused on swearing; Christopher C. Werry (1996) examined Internet Relay Chat (IRC); David McKelvie (1998) studied disfluency; and Mark G. Core (1998) investigated the use of Dialog Act Markup in Several Layers (DAMSL) utterance tags to explore speech acts.

Gavin Burnage and Dominic Dunlop (1992) were involved in encoding the British National Corpus (BNC). Jean Carletta et al. (2000) used XML for linguistic annotation. L.W.M. Bod and R.J.H. Scha (1996) provided an overview of data-oriented language processing. Gill Francis (1993) and William Louw (1993) used the COBUILD to produce a new, corpus-driven grammar of English and to investigate semantic prosody, respectively.

Corpora have also been used to produce dictionaries for language learners. Philip Resnik and David Yarowsky (1997) discussed word sense disambiguation. Patrick Hanks (1986) investigated meaning potentials. Kenji Kita et al. (1994) used corpora for the automatic extraction of collocations for language learning. Dieter Mindt (1996) investigated corpus linguistics and foreign-language learning. Kenneth Hyland and John Milton (1997) explored differences in native speakers’ and second language learners’ writing. Finally, Adam Kilgarriff (2001) explored the twenty-firstcentury trend, web-as-corpus.

Reviewed by Lucas Bietti, Center for Interdisciplinary Memory Research, Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut Essen

Robert D. Rupert proposes a system-based theory of cognitive processes to demarcate the boundaries of mental processes and thereby argue against the extended mind theory (EMT). The EMT, which is a relatively new hypothesis about the extended nature of the mind, claims that while some mental states and experiences can be defined internally, there are many in which the meaning attribution processes are highly influenced by external factors. That is, some environmental elements can have a crucial influence on cognitive processes. According to the EMT, cognition depends on multiple connections between the brain, body, and world—both the physical and social world. That is, cognitive processes are no longer simply characterized at an abstract, brain-bound, purely information-processing level, but as sets of interacting networks that integrate and synchronize the brain, body, and world in a functional and goal-oriented way.

R’s book is divided into three main parts. The first part discusses criteria for demarcating those elements causally active in driving cognitive processes and those that may trigger these processes but are not part of such systems. The author makes a clear distinction between the biological mechanisms responsible for cognitive processes and the social and material environments that trigger their activation. This demarcation of cognitive systems leads R to undermine the extended nature of (some) cognitive processes as maintained by advocates of the EMT.

In the second part R continues his attack on the EMT. His system-based theory places cognitive processes within the boundaries of the brain. In doing so, R gives further arguments to set clear boundaries between the causally active biological processes that determine mental states and constitute cognitive systems, and the external environment, which is essential to triggering these biological processes but is not part of our cognitive systems. As the EMT does not account for this distinction, R asserts that it fails to accomplish its main goal of an integrative functionalist account of how the mind works in everyday situations.

In the third part R further explains his system-based approach. He claims that his theory of cognition contributes to the research agenda of the brain-bound approaches in cognitive psychology. R maintains that those approaches have enabled cognitive psychology to become the most progressive discipline in the cognitive sciences.

Overall, this book is a remarkable attempt at developing a system-based theory on cognition that provides solid arguments against the EMT. R’s criticisms are very well elaborated and undoubtedly make an outstanding contribution to the current debates about the embodied and extended nature of the human mind.

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

Mehri is the largest of six so-called Modern South Arabian Languages (MSAL), and is spoken by well over 100,000 speakers in Yemen and Oman. These languages, although spoken in the Arabian peninsula and heavily influenced by bilingualism and long contact with varieties of Arabic, are in fact either a separate branch of West Semitic or perhaps more closely related to the Semitic languages of Ethiopia.

This book is a corpus-based descriptive grammar of Omani Mehri based on Harry Stroomer’s Mehri texts from Oman: Based on the field materials of T.M. Johnstone (1999), supplemented by T.M. Johnstone’s Mehri lexicon and English-Mehri word-list, (1987). Other published material on Yemeni Mehri dialects, Hasusi, and other related MSALs (especially interesting when the same texts exist in Yemeni Mehri or Hasusi) and comparative material from Arabic are also presented as appropriate. As much of Johnstone’s audio material still exists (albeit often of limited value), in cases of doubt the text versions were checked against the audio, and an appendix of suggested corrections to Stroomer’s edition is given (311–30). All the over 1000 text passages cited in the grammar are also indexed (341–60).

The bulk of the grammar is dedicated to morphology, organized in a traditional manner: pronouns (31–57), nouns (59–75), adjectives (77–88), verbs (stems: 89–120, tenses and forms: 121–71), prepositions (173–208), numerals (209–18), adverbs (219–223), interrogatives (225–233), and particles (235–58). The description of phonology is relatively brief (13–30) and the treatment of syntax, while somewhat longer, is also cursory (259–305). The brevity of the phonology presentation is dictated by the poor quality of the corpus data, and the chapter on syntax, entitled ‘Some syntactic features’ is a syntactic hodgepodge. Fortunately, both phonology and syntax have been treated more extensively in other works. Throughout the grammar all points are accompanied by copious examples from the corpus (Johnstone’s 106 texts).

As the Semitic languages are very similar, there will be few surprises. However, especially to those not familiar with the other literature on MSALs, there will be points of contrast. This volume is of immense value and is sure to be of great use to all Semiticists, as it is the first complete detailed descriptive grammar of a MSAL in any of our lifetimes. One also imagines its value for scholars of the Yemen and Oman dialects of Arabic, as one suspects substratal influence in the opposite direction. It is also a pleasure for those of us, Semiticist or not, who savor a good reference grammar on an unfamiliar language.

Reviewed by Ilya Yakubovich, Moscow State University

The principal representatives of the Baltic group of the Indo-European language family are Lithuanian, Latvian, and the extinct Old Prussian. Although all these languages are attested beginning in the second millennium CE, they display archaic traits that make them almost as useful for the reconstruction of Proto-Indo-European as their relatives recorded two or three millennia earlier. In particular, Lithuanian is commonly seen as the most conservative living Indo-European language. An especially well-known feature of Lithuanian and Latvian grammars is the combination of the unpredictable place of accent and phonological tone oppositions in the accented syllable. The closest relatives of the Baltic group within Indo-European are the Slavic languages, but they tend to be phonologically more innovative.

Five chapters of this volume constitute self-contained essays dealing with particular aspects of Baltic historical linguistics that began as lectures at the 2006 Indo-European summer school in Berlin. Ch. 1 is devoted to the dialectal relationships within the Baltic group, and also contains a useful survey of the earliest written texts preserved in individual Baltic languages. Ch. 2 explores the genesis of Baltic tonal oppositions from Proto-Indo-European segmental oppositions. Contrary to the traditional point of view, the author suggests that the tonal opposition between Lith. varnas ‘raven’ and várna ‘crow’ is not rooted in the difference of Indo-European ablaut grades but represents a Balto-Slavic innovation. Ch. 3 discusses the vestiges of the Indo-European neuter gender in Lithuanian and Latvian, which contrast with its apparent full-scale preservation in Old Prussian.

Ch. 4 addresses the origins of the ‘semi-thematic’ verbal stems in Baltic. In my opinion, this is the least successful part of the monograph. The author tells us that he will not fully answer some of the questions he has raised (cf. e.g. 257, 259). When answers are given, they are sometimes problematic: thus the ‘analogical lengthening of the thematic vowel *-a- to *-ā- on the model of the other preterit formation –ē-’ (253) appears to refer to a sort of analogy that is not predicted by general linguistic theory. Ch. 5 discusses Baltic clitics with an emphasis on the evolution of their placement and the chronology of their fusion with accented word forms.

An important positive feature of Daniel Petit’s work is careful attention to primary data. Even scholars not interested in the Indo-European discussion per se can refer to it to learn, for example, about the neuter pronominal forms attested in Lithuanian or the suspect clitics in Old Prussian. Its other commendable trait is honesty toward the reader: if the investigation of a particular chapter does not yield conclusive results, the author informs us accordingly (cf. e.g. 138–39). While P does not claim that his monograph contains groundbreaking discoveries, it does advance our knowledge of Baltic linguistics.

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

The Indus Valley ‘script’ is one of the most interesting of the as-yet-undeciphered scripts, not the least because of the potential political impact of its decipherment. In addition to those who argue for an Indo-Aryan origin (an idea readily exploited by right-wing Hindutva groups) or a Dravidian one, there are also those unconvinced by all proposed decipherments, and those arguing that it is a system of non-linguistic symbols. This volume presents the data without taking a stance on the issue, although, for example, the first editor has elsewhere argued for a Dravidian solution (A Dravidian solution to the Indus script problem, Kalaignar M. Karunanidhi Classical Tamil Research Endowment Lecture, 25 June 2010, Coimbatore.).

This volume is part of a series publishing all Indus Valley seals and inscriptions. Its material comes from collections in numerous countries outside India and Pakistan (covered in the first two volumes) of seals from the main sites of Mohenjo-daro and Harrappa (the remaining minor sites are covered in Part 2), from seals and inscriptions that have previously been described but that are currently lost or unlocatable, and from excavations since earlier publications, especially the Harappa excavations of 1986–2007, to which an introductory article by J. Mark Kenoyer and Richard H. Meadow is devoted (xliv–lviii). The introductory section also includes Ute Frank’s article on two compartmented seals from Mohenjo-daro by (xvii–xliii) and a short article by Asko Parpola on Major Clark, owner of the first published seal (lix–lx).

The main body and attraction of the current volume consists of photos of 475 seals from Mohenjo-Daro (1–136) and 1571 seals from Harappa (137–363), including 125 in color (365–412). Addenda and corrigenda to previous volumes are also included. Seals without inscription are printed full-size, those with inscriptions are reproduced double-sized, and sketches are included where photos are unavailable. Data on each object (excavation number, museum or owner, source of photograph) are given at the end of the volume (413–43).

The current volume, and indeed the entire series, is and will remain a valuable contribution to Indology whether or not the Indus Valley script is ever deciphered.

Reviewed by Niladri Sekhar Dash, Indian Statistical Institute, India

This useful volume offers new avenues for lexicography and touches on many issues vital to it.

In Ch. 1, Rufus H. Gouws shows that neither space-saving nor linguistic motivations suffice as criteria for macrostructural ordering procedures, arguing that the use of nesting and niching is permissible only to satisfy lexicographic functions. Sandro Nielsen, in the following chapter, suggests that reviewers should evaluate dictionaries through lexicographic, factual, and linguistic approaches, keeping in mind the three features of functions, data, and structures.

In Ch. 3, Sven Tarp distinguishes between concrete user needs and needs related to specific situations and shows some of the possibilities made available to lexicography by information technology. Herbert E. Wiegand shows in the following chapter that hybrid text constituent structures of dictionary articles are represented through hybrid article micro- and partial-structures. Explicitness and information value of hybrid textual structures are useful in homogeneous structures.

Addressing user needs, in Ch. 5, Sven-Göran Malmgren argues that information categories in monolingual dictionaries should serve production and reception purposes, and in Ch. 6, Patrick Leroyer describes the use of dictionaries by tourists. Lars S. Vikør presents in Ch. 7 a critical assessment of dictionaries as tools in language planning and analyzes lexicographical means of language standardization. As part of a discussion about specialized lexicographical needs, Bo Svensén argues in Ch. 8 that subject-field classification is necessary for compiling specialized dictionaries and assesses the efforts made for preparing an international edition of a handbook of lexicography in Swedish.

In Ch. 9, Pedro A. Fuertes-Olivera makes some proposals for inclusion in a planned English-Spanish online dictionary of accounting, as systematic introductions are useful in cognitive and communicative situations, such as specialized translation. In Ch. 10, D. J. Prinsloo reflects on the use of corpora and such lexicographic tools in dictionary making as corpus creation, annotation, processing, and dictionary writing, as vital components for future corpus-based lexicography. Franziskus Geeb shows in the chapter that follows that well-formed definitions of lexicographical data are useful for automated chatbot. Contexts, in which lexicographical data are used as the knowledge base for a chatbot, can enhance the rate of success of such data.

Under the premise that description and explanation of collocations make a dictionary more user-friendly, Marie-Claude L’Homme describes in Ch. 12 a methodology for encoding and organizing collocations in a French terminological database. In Ch. 13, Jón H. Jónsson argues for using an onomasiological approach to dictionary description as it focuses more clearly on the entire vocabulary and internal relations between lexical units than has been possible through semasiological description of individual words. Following a corpus-based approach, Thomas Herbst argues for including meaning in monolingual dictionaries. In Ch. 14, he discusses different ways in which information of complementation and valency patterns are represented in dictionaries for foreign learners of English and German.

The volume ends with a biographical sketch of Henning Bergenholtz, in whose honor the book was composed, who believed that a dictionary is a tool that helps users solve problems encountered in communicative, cognitive, and operative situations.