Reviewed by David D. Robertson, Spokane, WA

Peter Elbow’s long bibliography of investigations into freewriting culminates in this deeply informed and readable book. Eschewing footnotes and long-form citations for an intentionally personal point of view, he reaches conclusions that are frequently surprising but uniformly well-backed. E deftly summarizes research by scholars like Douglas Biber, Camilla Vasquez, and Wallace Chafe on ‘what’s best in speaking and writing’ (Part 1, especially Ch. 1). He highlights the communicative strengths of each as activities, modalities, and subjects of linguistic analysis, the clearest differences separating spontaneous speech, and planned writing. The fortes of writing (Ch. 2) include preserving utterances, sharing data, doing mathematics, and perceiving speech as an object. The act of speaking excels (Ch. 3) at being easy, getting to the gist, facilitating dialogue, and being inherently satisfying. Detailing the ‘virtues’ of speech (Chs. 4–5), E notes the superiority of speech at connecting with audiences; its freedom from standardized, restrictive syntax, nominalizing tendencies, etc.; and—partly because of intonation—its greater processibility and informational coherency. Ch. 6 argues the book’s core claim, that the ease of speaking can and should help improve people’s performance at the more difficult activity, writing.

Part 2, ‘Speaking onto the page’, carries this theme, referring to M.A.K. Halliday’s ideas of the two modalities as occupying a continuum. Ch. 7 discusses how unrehearsed drafting transfers speech’s strengths onto the academic page; Ch. 8 notes other frequent venues of spontaneous writing: diaries and letters, written exams, and now also blogs and email. In Ch. 9, E pauses to parry objections to harnessing casual speech in writing. Linguists recognize some (‘speaking onto the page will hasten impurity and change in written language’, 191ff); others perhaps less so (‘speech is for everyone, but literacy is an exclusionary club’, 196). E also specifies (in Ch. 10) his awareness that continual revision and editing remain necessary for success with unplanned and strictly formal writing.

Part 3 explores a reverse process. Reading one’s composition aloud is an unimpeachable check for fluency (Ch. 11), exposing the presence or absence of invaluable structures like intonation units, sounds and ‘music’ (Ch. 12). Ch. 13 on punctuation is especially well-researched, meditating on conflicting traditions and misleading assumptions. These can be handled by ‘careful reading aloud and listening’ (Ch. 14), letting one take advantage of the time-bound and -binding qualities of written language (Ch. 15, summarizing in Ch. 16). Part 4 examines writing as a gateway to literacy, considering why high-literacy culture tends to exclude speech (Ch. 17) and optimistically foreseeing changes to the status quo (Ch. 18).

E’s already lively presentation finishes each chapter with an evocative historical ‘Literacy story’. This book as a whole amounts to one keenly engaged observer’s literacy forecast: it concludes that the future promises a decentralized standard of good writing as that which genuinely reaches an audience. That point is well made and sure to inspire many an educator in this exciting and challenging time of flux. Those of us who teach grammar, usage, and composition will find here a sane perspective on hitherto hard and fast rules of English writing.

Reviewed by Daniel W. Hieber, Rosetta Stone

This book is a short grammatical sketch of Alorese, a still-vital Austronesian (Malayo-Polynesian) language spoken by 25,000 speakers in Eastern Indonesia and used as a regional lingua franca until the mid-1970s. It is based on a small corpus (500 lexical items, three texts, and approximately 250 elicited sentences) collected by Marian Klamer in 2003. Since Alorese is both surrounded by Papuan languages and situated at some distance from its nearest genealogical relative, Lamaholot, the book examines Alorese from a primarily areal and diachronic perspective.

In the introduction, K shows that Alorese and Lamaholot share only between 52.6% and 58.6% lexical similarity and that Alorese has lost nearly all its inflectional and derivational morphology while gaining a new set of pronouns. The two languages are mutually unintelligible, which is apparently the effect of Alorese having undergone a period of ‘imperfect or second language learning’, presumably because of its status as a trade language. In Ch. 8, ‘Alorese from an areal perspective’, K determines that some Papuan features of Alorese are due to reflexes of Papuan influences on Proto-Lamaholot, while others are due to more recent, direct contact. An appendix provides a 270-word lexical comparison of Alorese and Lamaholot, as well as two glossed texts.

Standard grammatical topics comprise the rest of the book: phonology, nouns and noun phrases, verbs, clause structure, sentence types, and clause combinations. K shows that Alorese is nominative-accusative in its alignment (indicated via word order) and exhibits no distinct category of adjective. The only productive morphological process is reduplication, and zero-derivation is rampant. The language has no indigenous means of marking relative clauses (K does not say whether it has other, borrowed techniques), nor is there a formal means of indicating complementation, making Alorese of potential theoretical interest for its syntactic simplicity.

For such a small corpus, this sketch is impressive, and constitutes a worthy contribution to the linguistics of East Indonesia. The book does, however, show problems common to books in LINCOM’s languages of the world series, including typos, formatting problems, and inconsistency in glosses, glossing styles, and fonts. It is fairly expensive for a small paperback and is not available in digital format. Its double-spaced text means that much of the book is white space. As far as content, it is disappointing that only two of the three texts are included in the appendix, and only half the lexical items, when such a small corpus could have been included in its entirety. Although the work is only a short sketch, many sections could have been much improved with minimal elaboration, such as the details of the alienable-inalienable possession or the demonstrative system. K also adopts a non-International Phonetic Alphabet orthography, but it is unclear whether this orthography is pedagogical (for the purpose of local literacy) or practical (for ease of typing).

In sum, these problems are relatively minor, and perhaps understandable. The book is an excellent overview of the previously undescribed Alorese language and is recommended for anyone interested in the linguistics of East Indonesia, language simplification through contact, languages purported to lack an adjective class, or languages with little evidence for clausal complements.

Reviewed by David Douglas Robertson, Spokane, WA

There are many reasons to welcome Jack B. Martin’s grammar of the Muskogean language Creek, also called Muskogee. The most visible is that this detailed account of phonology, orthography, morphology, and syntax was prepared in digestibly short chapters. The scope of each is a coherent idea, as a result avoiding the daunting breadth of so many grammars’ syntax chapters. At the same time, a refreshing openness to presenting sensibly related notions makes chapters like ‘Expressing time: Tense and related notions’ (Ch. 29) useful mini-surveys of the various ways a given category can be expressed in a language.

The collaboration of native-speaking sisters Margaret Mauldin and Juanita McGirt offers a depth and nuance that are much to be admired. The explication of innumerable fine points of Creek is invigorated by firsthand evaluations such as that of imperatives using -ip ‘indirect causative’ as ‘gentler’ (291). Likewise, the consultants’ evident linguistic sophistication enables them to clearly specify circumstances in which uncommon but acceptable constructions are used (cf. their comments about ‘independent’ freestanding pronouns, 408).

With a sharp eye and a deft hand, M dissects the notorious complexity of Creek verbs. These exploit simultaneously several morpho-phonological dimensions from ‘grades’ (~stem-internal changes) to infixation and affixation, expressing aspect, tense, mood, and several other categories. There is additionally the option of expressing verbals either as single words or periphrastically by adding an inflected copula; these periphrases can at times be contracted. Verbs understandably comprise approximately half the book (i.e. Chs. 19–36, of forty-four chapters), with a fourteen-page example paradigm of a single verb (423–35) illustrating the highly nuanced nature of this class. Nonspecialists will have to mentally translate the term ‘triplural’ to ‘plural’ (as opposed to the dual).

With its sensitivity to native-speaker intuitions and usage, this study contains several sections that stand out as addressing topics often omitted from grammatical descriptions: those on names (§44.4 et al.), and both ordinal and adverbial numerals (§33.2–3). More technical but equally useful additions include the notes on the grouping of syllables into feet (§6.2) and recognizing word shapes by category (§6.3).

The organization of this grammar is unusual in ways that faithfully reflect Creek structure. The section on discourse markers (Chs. 37–40) precedes that on syntax, but several of the discourse markers are actually affixal, which justifies their discussion adjacent to the morphosyntax. The reader might at first wonder why there is no section titled, say, simply ‘adverbs’ or ‘adjectives’, but M shows clearly how both functions are borne primarily by (certain kinds of) nouns and verbs (Chs. 17 and 27, §42.3, §3.5, §11.4, and Ch. 18, respectively).

There are symbols that M employs that are not defined in the section listing abbreviations and conventions, for example the apostrophe for a postulated deleted vowel. In addition, distinguishing plain V (verb) from italic V (vowel) could be mildly confusing for nonspecialist readers. These are very minor quibbles about a model work of ethnolinguistic documentation.

 Reviewed by Sofia Rüdiger, University of Bayreuth

Christiane Meierkord’s book focuses on interactions between non-native speakers of English stemming from diverse, often multilingual, backgrounds. The aim, as outlined in the first chapter, is to develop a theoretical framework for the description of how varieties of English mix and blend in interaction and how the resultant varieties can be described on the levels of phonetics, phonology, morphosyntax, lexicon, and discourse. In addition, the book aims to connect theoretical considerations with descriptive accounts.

Following a short introduction, M explains how she loosely based her theoretical approach on Braj Kachru’s three circles model in order to differentiate between intranational interactions across Englishes (i.e. in the outer circle countries) and international interactions across Englishes (i.e. including participants from expanding circle countries).

Ch. 2 explicates the notion of English as a lingua franca, challenges several ‘myths’ regarding the concept, and provides a historical overview. Other lingua francas, such as Kiswahili, Malay, and Quechua are also introduced. Ch. 3 considers the nature of language contact and its processes and products: code-alternation, nonce-borrowing, and the mixing and leveling of varieties. The following chapter introduces M’s interactions-across-Englishes (IaE) model. Essentially, all participants of an interaction bring their individual features to the ‘feature pool’ from which they can then, with certain constraints, select.

Ch. 5 looks at IaEs between participants from outer circle countries located in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific (e.g. Cameroon, Nigeria, Kenya, India, Singapore, Malaysia, and Fiji). M then proceeds to focus on the situation in South Africa, detailing the countries multilingual history and ecology before introducing her own data. M’s project consists of twenty-seven interviews with participants from diverse social backgrounds, focusing on interactions between black and colored speakers. Excerpts from the interviews are used to exemplify phonological, grammatical, and lexical choices made during these IaEs.

Ch. 7 looks at trends and developments regarding the use of English in expanding circle countries and how these countries use English for international IaEs. The highly diversified situation of interaction between participants from the outer circle and participants from the expanding circle in English (termed global IaEs) is highlighted in Ch. 8.

M introduces another of her projects in which she collected data from an international hall of residence open to students from expanding and outer circle nations. Even though outer circle English speakers bring features from their local English variety to the feature pool, whereas expanding circle English speakers bring structures associated with learners’ communication strategies, all speakers seem to accommodate to each other. M analyzes these data at the levels of vocabulary, grammar, and discourse. The concluding chapter summarizes the IaE-framework, places it in relation to previous research, and offers an outlook on the future of IaEs, especially in terms of the Internet.

This book introduces an interesting new approach to interactions across varieties of English. Especially valuable is the inclusion of the chapter on interactions between outer circle and expanding circle English speakers, since this subject matter has often been neglected by previous studies. Students might especially profit from the chapter on English as a lingua franca, which provides a very good overview of the topic.

Reviewed by Eirene C. Katsarou, Greek EFL State Teacher

The volume consists of eleven chapters. In Chapter 1 ‘Introduction: Developments in Language Teaching Research’ (1-19) a brief history of language teaching research as was  recorded in major journals of the area is provided and an overview of the main language teaching research areas discussed in the book is presented. Chapter 2 ‘Methods for Researching the Second Language Classroom’ (21- 49) considers some of the main research traditions followed in the area of L2 language teaching such as ‘discourse analysis’,  ‘conversational analysis’ and the ‘ethnography of communication’ in terms of their theoretical underpinnings, their research design, their data collection methods and the methods of data analysis. Chapter 3 ‘Comparative Method Studies’ (51-73) distinguishes between ‘global’ and ‘local’ comparative method studies focusing specifically on the former in an effort to examine and assess the variety of methods/approaches applied in L2 teaching over a long period of time in terms of gains in general language proficiency and achievement. Chapter 4 ‘Second Language Classroom Discourse’ (75-114) examines research that illuminates a number of key aspects of L2 classroom discourse such as teachers’ turn-taking mechanisms, IRF (initiate-respond-follow-up) exchanges, participant structure, repair sequences and scaffolding based on results of microgenetic and ethnolinguistic methods of specific interactional sequences in the L2 classroom. Chapter 5 ‘Focus on the Teacher’ (115-149) examines some of the key characteristics of teacher’s use of language in the L2 classroom, i.e. teacher talk, teacher questions, use of the L1, metalanguage, corrective feedback and teacher belief systems on L2 language teaching.

Chapter 6 ‘Focus on the Learner’ (151-193) looks into descriptive studies of different aspects of learners’ use of language in the L2 classroom such as the silent period and private speech, use of formulaic speech, structural and semantic simplification, use of the first language (L1), use of metalanguage, discourse features, uptake, language play and learner-talk in small group work. Chapter 7 ‘Investigating the Performance of Tasks’ (195-235) discusses research on the language use resulting from performing tasks in the classroom and on how the design and implementation variables impact on the way tasks are performed through micro- and macro-evaluations of task-based (TBLT) language teaching. Chapter 8 ‘Interaction and L2 Learning in the Classroom’ (237-270) examines the extent to which classroom input and interaction contributes to learning drawing on the premises of (i) sociocultural theory and (ii) interactionist-cognitive theory which both view interaction as providing learners with input, feedback and opportunities to modify their own output which connect with learnerinternal processing to foster L2 acquisition. Chapter 9 ‘Form-focused Instruction and Second Language Learning’ (271-306) addresses research that has investigated deliberate attempts, planned instructional activities to teach specific linguistic forms (‘focus on form’ (FFI) instruction). Chapter 10 ‘Instruction, Individual Differences and L2 Learning’ (307-335) reviews research on the relationship between individual learner factors and instruction and emphasizes the bi-directionality of this relationship as L2 learners’ initial affective and motivational states and cognitive abilities can both affect and be affected by the type of instruction they experience in the L2 language classroom. Finally, Chapter 11 ‘Conclusion: Research and Language Teaching’ (337-348) concludes the book through a discussion of ways in which the language teaching research reviewed in the preceding chapters of the book can contribute to language teaching practice.

Ellis provides a state-of-the-art review of second language teaching research intended for both L2 teachers and researchers familiarizing them with the most recent findings in the area to assist them to conduct further research in their own classrooms. Some of the key issues that have figured in language teaching research over the last sixty years are identified and highly clarified and the limitations of the research methods that have been employed for their investigation are revisited.

Reviewed by Marcella Bertuccelli Papi, University of Pisa

Until a few decades ago, historical grammars of Italian have largely neglected the evolution of syntax, concentrating mostly on phonetic and morphological changes. In 2010 the Grammatica dell’italiano antico edited by G. Salvi and L. Renzi (Bologna, il Mulino, 2 vols., pp. 1745), essentially based on generative syntax principles, provided the first modern systematic description of Early Italian Grammar. Two years later, the Sintassi dell’italiano antico edited by Maurizio Dardano provides another significant contribution from a different standpoint: focused on the syntax of complex sentences in Early Italian prose, it is textually and pragmatically oriented, and brings together the results of research carried out for the Syntax Archive of Literary Italian over the last decade. It consists of 16 chapters plus an Introduction by M. Dardano, who is also the author of the first chapter in which the theoretical coordinates shared by the individual studies are set out. The topics covered are the following: the syntax and semantics of the verb (M. Dardano and G. Colella); sentence types (G. Lauta); coordination and subordination (I.Consales); sentential complementation (M. Dardano); relative clauses (E. De Roberto); adverbial clauses: temporal (F. Bianco and R. Digregorio), causal (G. Frenguelli), consecutive (G. Frenguelli), purpose (M. D’Arienzo and G. Frenguelli), conditional (G. Colella), concessive (I. Consales), comparative (A. Pelo), manner (F. Bianco); absolute constructions (E. De Roberto) and reported speech (G. Colella). The chapters are strongly interrelated and, through the analysis of about 2,700 examples drawn from texts belonging to various registers, offer a comprehensive overview of the status of Early Italian Syntax from its origins to the end of the 14^th century.

The overarching principles underlying the analyses belong to the functionalist paradigm and are integrated with, and enriched by, the teachings of pragmatic and text linguistics. Many of the phenomena analysed in the individual chapters illustrate the tight interconnections between syntax and pragmatics, showing awareness of the many dimensions involved in language change – from the role of orality to that of literacy, from the legacy of classical rhetoric to the dynamics of genre textuality, from word order typological changes to information structure, discourse strategies and context sensitivity. Each chapter finely describes classes of phenomena that point to scalarity and gradualness, rather than discreteness and finiteness, as the observable outcome of several interacting dimensions. Parataxis and hypotaxis are cases in point: the two extremes of a cline that exhibits variable points of weak and strong dependency, they encode pragmatic relations complying with the communicative principles of intentionality, relevance and salience (1.4.3), and surface in various forms of sequential linearization conforming to principles of iconicity (7), information structure (2.4), referentiality (6, 15), or discourse strategies (16) . On the other hand, the semantic configuration of logico-conceptual categories such as cause and effect underlying different syntactic realizations (8, 9, 10, 11, 12) are shown to be variously modulated under the combined actions of perspectivization, point of view and logical implication.

Reviewed by Michael W. Morgan, National Federation of the Deaf Nepal

Guajira, also called Guajiro, and less frequently Wayuu (Waiú in Spanish orthography) from the autonym meaning ‘(indigenous) person’, and least frequently Wayuunaiki ‘indigenous language’, is a major Arawak language spoken by about 300,000 people in Venezuela and Columbia. Wayuunaiki is verb- (or more specifically) predicate-initial, and is a morphologically complex agglutinative language. Although fusion is relatively limited, assimilation and elision do occur at morpheme boundaries (e.g. teʹraajüin ‘I know’ < ta-ʹraaja-in = first singular prefix + ‘know’ + subordination suffix; pié ‘your tongue’ < pü- + ayé). There is also a fair degree of (mostly) phonologically-conditioned allomorphy; for example, the suffix –aiata, indicating that the action takes place at various times or places but sporadically without regularity, has conditioned allomorphs -áiata, -áwáita, -eiata, -éiata, -éwéita, -iiata, and -úiata, depending on the final vowel of the stem. Prefixes are mainly limited to person markers (both on verbs and as possessive markers on nouns); suffixes are extremely numerous and include both grammatical and derivational morphology (with grammatical morphology being much more extensive for verbs than for nouns).

This book is a collaboration between two linguists, one of them a native speaker of Guajira. It is an encyclopedic grammar in Spanish containing seventy-seven chapters, plus an introduction, a bibliography, and an ‘In memoriam’ to its second author, who died in 2009 after a long career as author, lexicographer, and grammarian dedicated to his native tongue.

The work is indeed compendious, and includes details on dialect variation in the morphology (which is basically an eastern dialect and a west and central dialect). However, despite—or perhaps because of—its thoroughness and extensive detail, to linguists more accustomed to reference grammars that have come to take on a more or less standard format, this book may appear somewhat quirky. To begin, although replete with examples of the language, accompanied by a Spanish translation, there is no morphemic analysis and glossing for illustrative sentences, which may cause difficulty for the non-native reader (especially given the morphological complexity of the language, the degree of allomorphy, and instances of morphophonological assimilation and elision). Although the table of contents is detailed, the book has no index and very little cross-referencing, which may cause difficulty for a general linguist (say, a linguistic typologist) using it as a reference grammar. Although the organization is quite logical, at times chapter divisions seem arbitrary, as if this book were written for serialization. For example, Chs. 69–71 comprise a treatment of suffixes, which are arranged alphabetically (with nominal and verbal suffixes both included), so the division into three separate chapters (A–K, L–S, T–Y) seems to be motivated solely so as not to have one overly long chapter.

Nevertheless, this book comprises a thorough treatment of the language and as such is an important contribution to Guajira and Arawak linguistics, especially as an exhaustive pedagogical grammar in the hands of a native (or near-native) speaking teacher.

Reviewed by Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini, University of Warwick

Identity is arguably a topic that continues to attract great interest among social scientists, yet its exact contours remain elusive. Depending on the disciplinary perspective from which one chooses to approach it, identity displays diverse facets. In this book, identity is viewed as ‘a process rather than being [….] as always developing rather than static; […] as co-production […] rather than simple co-construction’ (30). In addition to considering it processual, Sigrid Norris’s understanding of identity is multidimensional and mediated by cultural tools, including social time-space configurations. In other words, out of ‘constellations of practices’ and ‘meditational means’ social identities emerge as co-production involving actors and cultural artifacts in time-space.

The book is organized into nine chapters, including an introduction to multimodal (inter)action analysis (Ch. 1), a discussion of the theoretical underpinnings (Ch. 2), the description of an ethnographic case-study from which the author draws her illustrative sample data (Ch. 3), and a presentation of the concept of ‘modal density’ as analyzed in the case-study data (Ch. 4). The following four chapters (5–8) examine aspects of the production of identity, namely ‘horizontal identity’ (Ch. 5), ‘vertical identity’ (Ch. 6), ‘shifting identity’ (Ch. 7), and ‘stabilizing identity’ (Ch. 8).

The study in hand illustrates how the workings of identity-in-action can be effectively charted by a multimodal interaction analytical approach theoretically inspired by the principles of mediated discourse analysis and visual research methods. Moreover, given the situated nature of identification processes, N maintains that only ethnographic data collection allows the analyst to capture the fine details of identity dynamics as they unfold. This synchronous analytical perspective is complemented by a diachronic one, gained through N’s two-year longitudinal case study of individuals engaged in ordinary daily activities.

The sample data analyzed in this book persuasively illustrates the complexity involved in trying to capture the ‘modal density’ of human interaction. For example, one of the figures (Fig. 5.1, 144–45) consists of a sequence of sixteen frames, each representing a multimodal scene, movement in time-space and accompanying discourse, which effectively represents contexualized dialogue as one of the actions and its ‘positionality’ vis-à-vis the participants’ other behaviors in time-space.

The kind of multimodal interaction analysis extensively documented in this book is quite costly in terms of the time investment and relational involvement of the analyst with her participants in the field. Alongside other labor-intensive methodologies, successful multimodal interaction analysis demands sustained and meticulous dedication and the deployment of highly honed observational and perceptual skills over long periods. The degree of ‘invasiveness’ in people’s private lives also inhibits a more widespread adoption of this approach in the social sciences, even though the rewards to be reaped are rich.

Reviewed by Elly van Gelderen, Arizona State University

Domari is an Indo-European language spoken by the (traditionally nomadic) Dom people of the Middle East. Dom is cognate with Rom (i.e. Roma). This book describes the grammar of Domari as spoken in Jerusalem. At the time of Yaron Matras’s fieldwork in the mid- to late 1990s, there were fifty to seventy fluent speakers, but currently there are only ten to twenty speakers (2).

The introductory chapter reviews previous work on varieties of Domari and distinguishes between a northern and southern dialect. One dialect difference involves the third person: (u)hu is typical in northern varieties, whereas pandži occurs in the south. The north shows Kurdish and Persian influence, whereas the south is more influenced by Arabic. The Domari of Jerusalem falls in between these varieties (18). The introduction also outlines the major similarities and differences between Domari and Romani, and describes the Dom community in Jerusalem and the methodology for data collection.

Ch. 2 provides an inventory of sounds and phonemes, assimilatory processes, syllable structure, prosody and stress, and a set of sound changes. Ch. 3 discusses parts of speech and inflection and gives us a sense of M’s theoretical approach, which is to ground parts of speech in a continuum between topical entities and events (70). However, a ‘more practical procedure [to describing parts of speech]…is to follow natural indicators of parts of speech in the way that the language assigns inflectional potential to different types of words’ (71). Thus, there is gender and number marking reminiscent of other Indo-Aryan languages, case, person inflection, and definite and indefinite suffixes. Parts of speech ‘differ in their potential to be assigned one or more inflectional paradigms’ (72) and in how they combine with other elements.

Chs. 4 through 6 cover nouns, nominal inflection, noun modifiers, and pronouns, and Ch. 7 covers verb inflection, modals, and auxiliaries. Ch. 8 discusses grammatical and thematic roles and also spatial relations. Ch. 9 concerns clause structure and various types of clauses, and Ch. 10 focuses on adverbs and particles.

In Domari, subjects are marked through agreement on the verb and can additionally be marked through independent pronouns in contrastive function or when switched. There is a set of object suffixes, also serving as possessives and as subjects with past tense verbs (evidence of an earlier ergative alignment), and there is a set of ‘marginal’ (225) enclitic third-person pronouns that attach to interrogative pronouns and the presentative particle. The third-person pandži is used in Domari as third-person singular (pandžan is the plural), but it overlaps with the demonstrative -h– pronoun in interesting ways. M attributes the difference to the perceptual-sensory focus of the demonstrative as opposed to the conceptual focus of the personal pronoun pandži (222). The form pandži is derived from a reflexive; a renewed Domari reflexive has been borrowed from Arabic (237).

The remaining chapters discuss the Arabic component, samples of talk, notes on the lexicon, and a Domari vocabulary of fourteen pages. In sum, this grammar presents a wealth of information on a moribund language in an accessible manner and with ample historical and comparative insights.

Reviewed by Michael W. Morgan, National Federation of the Deaf Nepal

Yawuru, spoken in West Kimberley (northwest Australia) is a highly agglutinative language. Noun derivation occurs by suffixation and case marking is enclitic; verbs have from 1–4 prefixes and 0–5 suffixes. Complex verbal morphology allows for simple clause structure, with a single verb expressing a complex argument and event structure, and also allows for relatively loose word order. Yawuru also manifests split cross-referencing (i.e. ergative noun inflection but accusative verb agreement).

This book is a revision of the author’s 1991 dissertation. Ch. 1 (1–17) provides an introduction to the language, its dialects, and its speakers. This is followed by a brief preview (Ch. 2, 18–41) of many of the remarkable features of the language. Ch. 2 includes a detailed treatment of phonology (42–112). Yawuru, unusual among Australian languages, has word-final tense/lax and three-way dorsal voicing contrasts. It also has a number of extra-systemic sounds and special phonation types.

A chapter on verbal morphology and semantics (113–98) follows. In Yawuru, all predicates must be verbal. As noted above, conjugation involves a number of prefix and suffix/enclitic slots. Prefixes include subject, mood/tense, number, conjugation class, and reflexive; suffixes/enclitics include reciprocal, aspect, comitative, dative-imperative or subordinative (but not both), (accusative/dative) object, and vocative. Affixes generally follow this order, although future and irrealis differ slightly. Although inflecting (finite) verb roots are obligatory, indicating argument structure, they are few in number (82). Their limited number is compensated by a large number of preverbs added to finite verbs to make complex verbs. Preverbs are the subject of Ch. 5 (199–236).

Ch. 6 (237–89), concerns the semantics of case-marking and related issues. Case is marked on phrase-initial constituents rather than heads. This results in serialized (so-called double) case marking, when the marked constituent is initial in both the main and imbedded noun phrase, and each has a separate case function. Yawuru, with its loose word order, also allows for phrasal discontinuity.Pronouns are discussed in Ch. 7 (290–350). They include absolutive and genitive free forms, and accusative and dative enclitics. Demonstratives, interrogatives, and indefinites are also treated in this chapter.

Adverbs are the topic of Ch. 8 (351–400). Yawuru possesses a range of both uninflecting and inflecting adverbs. In addition, sentence adverbs include epistemic, deontic, and epistemological adverbs. Reduplication, discussed in the following chapter (401–17), is used extensively in nominals, finite verbs, and onomatopoeic words; it expresses a range of concepts but is not a fully productive part of the morphology. The final chapter, ‘Syntax’ (418–84), describes various simple and coordinative sentence types, including passive, quasi-passive, and a number of special identity-sensitive types (e.g. double subject and double object).

Finally, the book contains a bibliography (485–507), three appendices (two short analyzed and glossed texts, 508–11), a list of bound morphemes with their glosses and function (512–14), and a list of minimal and near-minimal pairs (515–24). No topical (or other) index is provided. All grammatical forms are illustrated with copious examples. The extensive footnotes are useful, especially those that point to dialect features and to cases of similarity (or differences) with related and area languages.