Reviewed by Martin R. Gitterman, Lehman College and The City University of New York

In this substantive and thought-provoking book aimed at defining and heightening an understanding of the domain of applied linguistics, Alan Davies makes a valuable contribution to the scholarly literature. His target audience of professional colleagues and graduate students will welcome this volume.

In Ch. 1, ‘History and “definitions”’, the difficulty of satisfactorily defining the discipline of applied linguistics is made apparent. It is notable that D moves away from the previously held—and quite narrowly-focused—definition restricted only to language teaching. An equally complex task is teasing apart the fields of general or theoretical linguistics and applied linguistics. Ch. 2, ‘Doing being applied linguists: The importance of experience’, centers on the work applied linguists actually do. A number of case studies are outlined (e.g. workplace communication, assessing English as a lingua franca, pedagogical grammar), each of which essentially poses a problem whose solution is fostered by linguistic theory.

Ch. 3, ‘Language and language practices’, provides examples to distinguish the roles of linguists and applied linguists, roles that differ even when examining the same phenomenon or situation. For example, listening to speech samples from an aboriginal community in Australia in which the first language is no longer used by many may prompt a linguist to write a grammar of that language. An applied linguist, in contrast, might focus on whether steps should be taken to help maintain that language. Discussion of gender-related language issues as well as clinical linguistics provides further illustration of the separate, although somewhat intertwined, roles of linguists and applied linguists.

Ch. 4, ‘Applied linguistics and language learning/teaching’, touches on divergent views of the breadth of subject matter contained by applied linguistics. Noted here are various subspecializations of applied linguistics, including fields such as curriculum planning, applied sociolinguistics, language-teacher training, language in the workplace, and forensic language studies. This chapter also provides insight into how the applied linguist grapples with particular problems and issues in the area of teaching and learning language.

In Ch. 5, ‘Applied linguistics and language use’, additional insight is provided on the role of the applied linguist in contexts outside teaching and learning. Issues addressed include the role of the applied linguist in the courtroom, in which the testimony of the applied linguist may be a factor in determining guilt or innocence of a defendant. Ch. 6, ‘The professionalising of applied linguists’, centers on the growth of applied linguistics as a discipline and expands the concept of profession as it relates to applied linguistics.

Ch. 7, ‘Applied linguistics: No “bookish theoric”’, analyzes applied linguistics in the context of intellectual movements or approaches such as structuralism. Recommendations for future directions of applied linguistics are touched on as well. Ch. 8, ‘The applied linguistics challenge’, provides a brief summary of the book. The eight chapters are followed by a glossary and a set of exercises.

This book has many commendable features. It presents an in-depth and intellectually stimulating treatment of the discipline of applied linguistics. The interdisciplinary focus of the volume heightens its appeal. The glossary is useful, and the exercises are well designed. In short, this book is a scholarly achievement, likely to spark numerous intellectual discussions.

Reviewed by Mitchell R. Ferris, Northeastern Illinois University

The classification of languages according to how motion events are encoded is controversial. Leonard Talmy, who regards the semantic component of path as the core of a motion event, proposes a two-way typology based on whether the language habitually encodes path information in the main verb (i.e. a verb-framed language) or in a subordinate element (i.e. a satellite-framed language). Dan Slobin suggests a third type (i.e. an equipollently-framed language), to account for languages such as Mandarin Chinese and Thai, which characteristically use serial verb constructions to encode both manner of motion and path.

In this book, Liang Chen explores descriptions of motion events in Mandarin—in spoken discourse by children and adults and in written compositions—to validate Slobin’s classification of Chinese as an equipollently-framed language.

In Ch. 1 (1–12), C outlines the theoretical framework for Talmy’s typology as well as Slobin’s modifications. C describes what he would expect to find in analyzing Chinese narrative discourse, if Chinese were to fit one of Talmy’s two language types. He also mentions Slobin’s thinking for speaking hypothesis (which calls to mind the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis), in which descriptions of events are colored at least partly by the relative richness or paucity of the language components available to the speaker.

In Ch. 2 (13–40), C describes how motion events are expressed in Chinese and shows how Mandarin encodes the semantic components of motion. Most notably, he illustrates the use of two—and sometimes three—verbs used in serial constructions to describe motion events.

As a research base, C uses the corpus of frog stories (i.e. narratives prompted by the wordless picture books by Mercer Mayer) previously collected across several languages. To this base, he adds a set of Mandarin narratives produced by adults and children of varying ages. His analysis and comparisons with other languages are described in Ch. 3 (41–76). Analysis of motion events in written discourse (i.e. nine Chinese novels) is discussed in Ch. 4 (77–93).

C found that Mandarin (both spoken and written) patterns with satellite-framed languages with respect to the richness of motion lexis—particularly manner-of-motion verbs—and the use of multiple action clauses. However, it patterns with verb-framed languages with regard to descriptions of ground and setting. C’s conclusion is that Mandarin is legitimately classified as an equipollently-framed language.

In Ch. 5 (94–114), C examines the frog stories across the different age groups to determine if the data validate either the universal hypothesis or the language-specific hypothesis of first-language acquisition. He finds support for both hypotheses in his analysis. Ch. 6 (115–17) reprises C’s conclusions reported in Chs. 3–5.

C’s book offers a highly readable description of motion event typology, shows clearly how Mandarin expresses motion events, and adds to the corpus of crosslinguistic data in this area of research. It is recommended for those interested in first-language acquisition and in the relationship between language structure and language use.

Reviewed by Picus S. Ding, University of Potsdam

Focusing on the use of ga as a conjunction, Tatsuya Fukushima uses a multidimensional approach to ‘identif[y] all five functions of ga unilaterally’ (153). This monograph contains five chapters, which are preceded by an introduction and followed by a conclusion as well as detailed references for the data sources and a general index.

In Ch. 1 (6–23), F briefly presents the historical development of ga from exclusively functioning as a case marker in Old Japanese, to its emergence as a conjunction in the Insei-ki Era (i.e. 1086–1192). Additionally, F examines the six functions of the conjunction ga in Medieval Japanese. Ch. 2 (24–47) reviews work on the conjunction ga in Modern Japanese, incorporating prescriptive, descriptive, and pedagogical accounts. Previous studies suggest five functions of the conjunction ga in Modern Japanese: conflictive/contrastive, referential, insertive, implicative, and continuative. Ch. 3 (48–57) offers a pragmatic analysis of the conjunction ga used in a multi-interlocutor setting from Japanese live televised talk shows. The data from spontaneous spoken Japanese contain all five functions of ga. While the conflictive/contrastive function occurs with the highest frequency, the continuative function is the most infrequent.

Ch. 4 (58–122) widens the analysis to include data from Asahi Shinbun editorials, on-line Asahi Shinbun breaking news stories, press conferences with Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi, television interviews with Japan Communist Party chairman Tetsuzo Fuwa, and Yahoo! Japan message boards. Only the texts from the Yahoo! Japan message boards show all five functions of ga; the implicative function is absent from the other genres. Moreover, only the conflictive/contrastive function is observed in the Asahi Shinbun editorials. Ch. 5 (123–49) presents a comparison of the speech of Japanese prime ministers Ryutaro Hashimoto, Keizo Obuchi, and Jun’ichiro Koizumi at domestic and international press conferences. F also discusses the general personality profiles of these prime ministers in relation to their use of ga.

F’s methodology is exemplary for discourse analysis. His findings have undoubtedly increased our understanding of the functions of ga outside noun phrases in spoken Japanese and in computer-mediated communication. However, one variable that F did not explore is the difference in style between genders. Since Japanese is well known for gender-based differences in speech, female speakers may show interesting patterns of the conjunction ga.

Reviewed by Barbara De Cock, University of Leuven, Belgium

A Festschrift for Paola Bentivoglio, professor of linguistics at the Universidad Central de Venezuela, this collection of papers pays tribute to Bentivoglio’s corpus research on linguistic variation. Written for the most part in Spanish, the papers are situated within the realm of Spanish linguistics, with special attention paid to Latin American varieties of Spanish.

The volume is divided into five sections. Section 1, ‘Fonética, fonología y entonación’, reflects Bentivoglio’s work on phonetics and phonology as well as her strong interest in oral corpora. Section 2, ‘Gramática’, is rather heterogeneous in its inclusion of not only examinations of variation in syntactic phenomena but also metareflections on linguistic research, such as the history of grammar writing.

The most extensive section is Section 3, ‘Léxico y semántica’, which contains papers that deal with a specialized lexicon and forms of address as well as cases of sociolinguistic, dialectological, and geographical variation. Additionally, Section 3 provides diachronic accounts of phenomena in Venezuelan Spanish. Section 4, ‘Discurso y pragmática’, is short and contains studies on genre-specificity and genre-definition as well as papers on Latin American political discourse. Section 5, ‘Historia, sociedad, teoría y metodología’, is perhaps the most general section: it is devoted to methodological comments and suggestions, in particular, factors that influence linguistic variation and evolution.

Overall, the heterogeneity of these papers yields an interesting overview of a wide variety of topics in Spanish linguistics.

Reviewed by R. A. Brown, Bunkyo University and Waseda University, Japan

With some notable exceptions, linguistic field workers have primarily relied on the inconsistent introspections and intuitions of native speakers—including themselves—for semantic judgments both as data and as evidence in support of a theory. Senko K. Maynard does not depart from this tradition. M’s objective is to clarify the methods by which speakers of Japanese communicate ‘personalized expressive meanings’ (i.e. ‘feelings of intimacy or distance, emotion, empathy, humor, playfulness, persona, sense of self, identity, [and] rhetorical effects’ [xiii]) in addition to the literal, propositional, truth-functional content of an utterance.

M covers an impressive range of discourse phenomena, including language play, genre mixing, style borrowing, metaphor, and several specifically Japanese rhetorical devices (e.g. mitate, which ‘connects items unconnected through the ordinary grammar […] based on common knowledge or […] analogy’ [35], and futaku, which is ‘a method for expressing one’s feelings by borrowing something concrete’ [35]), and most interestingly, perspectivization of selves, an idea with important crossdisciplinary relevance. M draws on the ideas and vocabulary of Lev Semenovich Vygotsky, Mikhail Mikhailovich Bakhtin, Max Black, Motoki Tokieda, Nobuo Sato, and Roy Harris to highlight a view of language in which meaning is created by the act of speaking in a context, rather than, for example, being inherently expressed by lexical elements.

Of interest is M’s discussion of the utterance-final expression mitaina ‘it seems’, which is used by younger speakers as a modal operator that functions to disclaim personal responsibility for what has just been asserted—even if the content of the assertion is the speaker’s internal subjective state. A similar phenomenon has been observed in South Korea: South Korean college-aged students describe their condition as though by a third party, for example kwaenchanun kot k’attayo ‘I seem to be ok’. M takes this as characteristic of contemporary Japanese youth as well as a symptom of social and psychological insecurity.

The conclusions are impaired by M’s over-reliance on the noncontextualized intuitions of isolated and exceptional individuals. This is unfortunate, because the questions are highly amenable to empirical investigation exploiting Labovian methods. However, a positive contribution of this volume is the inclusion of extensive textual materials from a variety of print and discourse sources in both alphabetic rooma-ji ‘Romanization’ and Japanese mazegaki (i.e. mixed kanji and kana) script, along with translations. These texts will be extremely useful for beginning and intermediate students of Japanese as a foreign language.

Reviewed by Margaret J. Blake, Aarhus University, Denmark

The contributions to this volume investigate linguistics empirically and scientifically, using data-driven rather than theory-driven methods.

This book consists of seven parts. Parts 1 and 7 (‘Orientation to hard-science linguistics’ and ‘Disciplinary considerations’, respectively) are the philosophical and methodological core of the work. All of the chapters in Parts 1 and 7 are written by the editors. Parts 2–6 (‘Reconstituting phonetics-phonology’, ‘In search of context’, ‘Variational and historical linguistics’, ‘Social and psychological issues’, and ‘Practical applications’, respectively) contain efforts to put scientific methodology into practice in areas of classical linguistics as well as in areas in which linguistics intersects literary studies. Unfortunately, Parts 2–6 contain contributions from researchers who have been won over to the hard-science paradigm, rather than those who are already doing empirical, experimentally-focused work in areas such as psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, or even sociolinguistics.

The contrast between Parts 1 and 7 and Parts 2–6 is striking. I almost wish that the editors had turned this volume into two books: one slim textbook, consisting of Parts 1 and 7, suitable for inexpensive purchase by undergraduates and new philosophical converts, and an expanded volume, including Parts 2–6 as well as contributions from psycholinguists, neurolinguists, and sociolinguists, which would have lent credence to this otherwise admirable attempt at promoting a paradigm shift in linguistics.

This volume, while slightly lacking, is an important philosophical contribution to the field. Scholars who wish to see the scientific approach to language would do well to read this volume.

Reviewed by Przemysław Czarnecki, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland

In this volume, Kuniya Nasukawa addresses a well-known crosslinguistic puzzle: the relationship between voice and nasality. Although this problem has long been recognized in the phonological literature, no satisfactory and unified account exists that solves the question of the peculiar similarities between voicing and nasality. N’s contribution to this discussion is at least two-fold. First, his analysis aims at doing away with language-specific arbitrariness to describe the correlation between voicing, nasalization, and prenasalization. Second, N uses the framework of government phonology, which only allows for phonological information in phonological analyses and which dramatically breaks from the derivational tradition in phonology. In applying this framework, N ensures that the analyses and the subsequent results will be based solely on phonological premises.

The book consists of seven chapters, notes, a reference section, and three helpful indexes (language, subject, and author). Ch. 1 introduces the general problem of the relationship between nasality and voice as phonological features. Ch. 2 addresses the typological aspects of nasality and voicing, while Ch. 3 concentrates on the melodic structure of nasalized, voiced, and prenasalized consonants according to the principles of element theory (i.e. a subtheory of government phonology that works with melodic primes). Chs. 4 and 5 apply and revise the element theory to account for nasality and voicing in Japanese. In Ch. 6, although both nasality and voicing are demonstrated to be assimilatory processes, nasality is shown to be long-distance assimilation, while voicing appears to be a process restricted to a short-distance domain. Ch. 7 summarizes N’s proposals and concludes with a discussion of general issues that call for further analysis and research.

N has indeed produced an interesting and important contribution to the relation between nasality and voicing as well as to the ongoing phonological discussion.

Reviewed by Przemysław Czarnecki, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poland

This volume presents a collection of fourteen phonological papers authored by internationally recognized linguists to honor the distinguished contemporary scholar John M. Anderson. Anderson’s prominent position in the linguistic arena is indisputable: the broadness of his intellectual achievements is manifested in his prolific writing as well as in the warm critical appraise he has received from his colleagues. Anderson’s interest in linguistics spans nearly all facets of the discipline, from the synchronic and diachronic investigation of phonology, morphology, and syntax, to the exploration of various languages including English, Gothic, Basque, French, and Greek.

The editors of this volume have gathered papers that deal with one area of Anderson’s linguistic research: phonology. These papers represent differing (and in some cases, competing) theories of contemporary phonology, including dependency phonology, government phonology, head-driven phonology, declarative phonology, and optimality theory. Among the contributors are such distinguished and recognized names as Philip Carr, Fran Colman, Mike Davenport, Jacques Durand, Edmund Gussmann, John Harris, Phil Harrison, Patrick Honeybone, Harry van der Hulst, Ken Lodge, April McMahon, Nancy A. Ritter, Sanford A. Schane, and Jørgen Staun. Regardless of their personal impact on the field, each of the contributors focuses to some extent on particular phonological problems that are central to Anderson’s work on phonology and dependency phonology (of which he is a cofounder). These problems concern the structure of phonological representations and address such issues as headhood, dependency, and elements (i.e. phonological primitives). Questions on the phonetic content of phonological primes or the role of derivations in phonological theory are the subject of great controversy among linguists today, and the papers in this volume contribute significantly to the development of the recent phonological discussion. Of particular importance is the wide range of languages used to illustrate certain phonological phenomena. Here, the papers contain data from Old and Modern English, Polish, Yorùbá, Hungarian, High German, Spanish, and Modern Greek.

Producing a collection of papers in honor of a scholar such as Anderson is a task that requires particular diligence on the part of the editors and contributors alike. The editors have succeeded not only in gathering a highly impressive list of contributors but also in compiling a collection of papers that contribute demonstrably to the phonological debate.

Reviewed by Alessandra Cingi, Swansea University

The Middle English (ME) period, from 1100 to 1500, was a time of great social transformation in Britain, which resulted in deep changes to all aspects of the English language. In this volume, Luis Iglesias Rábade explores, with the help of ME texts, the evolution of English from preconquest to the language we currently speak.

Following a sociolinguistic overview of ME in Britain, the book is divided into four parts, which discuss morphology, phonology, syntax, and a collection of prose and verse texts.

In Part 1, Chs. 1 and 2 analyze ME determiners and heads of noun phrases, including gender, number, case, and inflectional endings. Ch. 3 deals with adjectives, and Ch. 4 is dedicated to verbs, exploring weak and strong classes, mood, aspect, and voice.

R then moves on to phonology, opening Part 2 with an outline of ME phonemes and syllable quality in Ch. 5. A detailed analysis of vowels is provided in Ch. 6, which illustrates the shift from each Old English vowel to its ME equivalent. Ch. 7 traces the evolution of diphthongs. The study of vowels concludes with Ch. 8, which explores vowel development in unaccented syllables as well as the weakening and loss of final schwa. Consonants and their length, voicing or devoicing, assimilation, and metathesis are discussed in Ch. 9. Ch. 10 concludes the discussion of phonology with an account of the Scandinavian influence on English phonology and spelling, coupled with a list of criteria to determine whether an English word is of Scandinavian origin.

In Part 3, R begins the discussion of syntax with an exploration of the grammatical categories in Ch. 11 and morphemes and words in Ch. 12. Chs. 13 through 17 investigate noun, adjective, verb, preposition, and adverb phrases. Chs. 18 and 19 are concerned with the structure of kernel clauses and with interrogative and negative clauses, respectively. A description of simple, multiple, and complex grammatical units is provided in Ch. 20. Ch. 21 overviews multiple and complex clauses, and Ch. 22 details noun, comparative, and adverbial clauses. Finally, in Ch. 23, R turns his attention to paratactic structures and the workings of apposition and coordination in ME.

Part 4 includes ten ME texts. Some texts are well-known (e.g. Peterborough chronicle and The owl and the nightingale), whereas other texts are more unusual (e.g. Dame Sirith and Cursor Mundi). Each text is introduced by a foreword, which sets the historical and literary context and specifies the dialect and other details of the manuscript. A glossary follows each text, which provides the specific meaning of words in the context in which they appear.

This volume has several virtues, including its clarity of exposition, its richness of examples, and its coverage of many ME dialects. R does not presuppose an understanding of morphology and syntax: he thoroughly explains each concept. Moreover, R presents the ME period as a continuum from Old to Present English rather than as a snapshot frozen in time. For these reasons, this volume will be a useful tool for under- and postgraduate students of English.

Reviewed by Louisa Buckingham, Sabanci University Writing Center, Turkey

This comprehensive text is an invaluable contribution to materials for the teaching of Spanish at upper-intermediate and advanced levels. Informed by the proficiency guidelines of the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, this text supports students as they move from merely knowing about the language to having the ability to spontaneously use and manipulate the language for various communicative purposes. The text is accompanied by a detailed teacher’s manual and supplementary exercises for self-directed student learning (which are both available for download free on-line). The teacher’s manual contains assistance with the broader goals of syllabus organization and the details of lesson planning as well as suggestions for additional activities for each unit and guidelines for correction and dictionary use. This highly practical, well-planned bonus will doubtlessly be of great use to instructors.

The text comprises seven chapters. The first six are dedicated to rhetorical discourse styles (e.g. description, narration, argumentation) and the final (shorter) chapter offers instruction on the use of abbreviations, verb declination with the pronoun vosotros ‘yourselves, you’, and derivation, followed by exercises in word morphology.

Each chapter moves from a focus on word- and sentence-level grammar (for which practice is provided through simple fill-in-the-blank and manipulation exercises), to guided discourse-level exercises (e.g. cued paragraph writing and discourse manipulation exercises such as changing perspective, analysis of model texts, guided self-expression, and independent essay writing). Many of the word- and sentence-level activities can be assigned for homework as reinforcement for the discourse-level exercises. As preparation for the independent composition exercise, each chapter concludes with text analysis exercises that use a model text (often taken from a newspaper) and a student’s composition. These model texts are less than a page in length and are well chosen to serve as examples of a particular rhetorical style.

The text ends with a series of appendices. The first two consist of a list of words and expressions commonly confused by English speakers (e.g. parecer, aparecer, and comparecer, which might all be translated by the word appear; or asistir and atender, which both equate to attend), which are clearly presented with examples and explanations. Following this list, the student is provided with simple fill-in-the-blank exercises to practice the meaning and use of these distinctions. The final two appendices offer a summary of verb conjugation and a bilingual glossary of linguistic terms, with a reference to where each term is found. The explanations of grammar and word use include a system of crossreferencing throughout the book, which facilitate review through revisiting appropriate sections of the text.

The emphasis on text analysis and text production constitutes a practical, skill-oriented framework to promote the mastery of grammatical structures. This textbook is highly recommended: it will be used with pleasure by students and teachers alike.