Reviewed by Carolin Patzelt, University of Bochum

This volume examines the language of men and women in different types of everyday conversation. The analysis of gender as a sociolinguistic factor is not new, of course. However, the present study does not set out to identify typical male or female commu­nicative devices but rather explores when, why, and by whom such devices are used, and whether they really hew to the traditional stereotypes of ‘male’ and ‘female’. The author does not depart from traditional stereotypes that define certain communicative characteristics as ‘typical of men’s (women’s) talk’. Instead, she uses a constructionist framework to explain why speakers frequently adopt linguistic devices usually associated with the opposite sex. Both the adoption of a constructionist framework and the analysis of different types of conversation enable the author to draw more refined conclusions on when, why, and by whom alleged ‘male’ or ‘female’ communicative devices are used.

Following a general introduction (Ch. 1), Ch. 2 provides an overview of earlier studies of gender and discourse in chronological order. Starting from Robin Lakoff’s ground-breaking Language and woman’s place (New York: Harper & Row, 1975), the author proceeds to the theory of distinct­ness, which begins with the assumption that men and women live in ‘different worlds’. This is the theory most traditional studies of gender and discourse draw on when discussing ‘typical’ male and female uses of question tags, hedges, and short answers, for instance. Finally, the constructionist model is discussed as the most recent and differentiated theoretical framework. It criticizes the distinctness model for being based on oversimplified stereotypes and suggests that additional factors (e.g. the individual communicative situation, social class, age, and sexual orientation) must be taken into consideration to classify the use of certain communicative devices.

Chs. 3–5 examine the linguistic behavior of men and women in different communicative situations. In Ch. 3, the author analyzes the transmission of historias de queja (complaints) in conversations among friends. She concludes that the expression of solidarity is not a general characteristic of women’s talk, but is a question of group identity and the topic of discussion. Ch. 4 examines the use of humor among men and women. While it is shown that women use types of humor usually attributed to men and vice versa, the author identifies different functions of humor: while men use it merely for amusement, women regard it as a sign of solidarity. Finally, Ch. 5 analyzes some typical conversations among factory workers during breaks, before Ch. 6 reviews the most significant conclusions in a detailed and convincing way. Unfortunately, the book lacks the appendix listed in the table of contents.

This book provides new insights into the relation between gender and discourse, and is strongly recommended to anyone interested in sociolinguistics and discourse analysis.

Reviewed by Don E. Walicek, University of Puerto Rico at Río Piedras

This book examines the notion of context, distinguishing between language-external context and language-internal co-text, with special attention to construction grammar (CG), though a few of its contributions offer a pre-theoretical perspective. The volume consists of an introduction and eight contributions organized in three parts: context in constructional grammar, interactional approaches, and context and grammar. The languages discussed are Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Old Czech, and Swedish.

The editors’ introduction situates context as linking pragmatics and discourse, surveys CG and frame semantics (its ‘sister theory’), and suggests topics for future research.

Marina Terkourafi begins Part 1 with a chapter arguing that the pragmatic consequences of an utterance are realized early in its production. She establishes that linguistic and extralinguistic context act as cues in this process. Henri-José Deulofeu and Jeanne-Marie Debaisieux examine parce que ‘because’ clauses in spoken French, suggesting that certain parts of an utterance, while necessary for coherency, may act as contextual background. The authors hold that any pairing between form and meaning, including non-verbal communicative behaviors, can be conceptualized as part of a construction. Next, Mirjam Fried’s intriguing corpus-based case study of Old Czech investigates how context enters conventional linguistic patterning to become part of codified relationships. The chapter applies CG to interactions among traditional semantic structure, thematic and cultural context, and systematic morphosyntactic patterns.

Part 2 begins with Per Linell’s investigation of grammatical constructions in dialogue.  Aiming to counter the interactional deficit in CG, this chapter contrasts dynamic real usage events with the view of language as tokens of fixed abstract types. Camilla Wide’s article uses CG and interactional linguistics to show that features of context need to be included in formalist descriptions of spoken language. Examining a demonstrative construction from a Swedish dialect of Finland, the hybrid approach of this article sheds light on functional understandings of constructions.

Part 3 begins with Bert Cappelle’s discussion of particle placement in transitive phrasal verbs in English. His chapter investigates contextual factors associated with alternation, including focality, accessibility, and encyclopedic world knowledge. Ease of processing is identified as motivating divergent options. Ilona Vandergriff examines word order in wenn ‘if’-initial conditionals in German. Using CG and mental spaces theory, the article rejects the idea that integration marks content or predictive conditionality. Ronny Boogaart discusses modal verbs in the volume’s final chapter. He argues that the Dutch verb kunnen ‘can’ shows different forms, each with its own meaning, rather than one form with different meanings. Asserting that modal constructions are monosemous, not polysemous, the author calls for greater attention to pragmatics in CG.

This provocative book fruitfully examines context through integrative structural, pragmatic, and discourse-oriented approaches. Established scholars and students from a wide variety of fields, including those with little knowledge of CG, are likely to appreciate the volume.

Reviewed by Dimitrios Ntelitheos, United Arab Emirates University

This book is a collection of nine articles focusing on how possession is expressed in different languages. William McGregor’s introduction discusses basic issues related to possession, such as the nature of possessum and possessor entities and of the possessive relation, including attributive/adnominal, predicative, and external possession.

The first article in the collection, by Peter Willemse, Kristin Davidse, and Liesbet Heyvaert, probes the information status of the possessum in English adnominal possessive constructions, showing that its treatment as a definite noun phrase does not adequately capture its properties. It introduces a taxonomy of givenness, showing that possessum referents can have a status at any point in this hierarchy. Jan Rijkhoff discusses co-variation between form and function of adnominal possessive modifiers in Dutch and English and concludes that the term ‘attributive possession’ is too general to capture the distribution of possessives. In Doris Payne’s contribution, the semantic/thematic relation between predicate possession and location is examined in a critical fashion on the basis of data from Maa to show that possession cannot be just a metaphorical extension of location.

Sonja Eisenbeiβ, Ayumi Matsuo, and Ingrid Sonnenstuhl provide a crosslinguistic overview of child language acquisition studies of possessive structures, and show that children follow a step-by-step process in the emergence and range of functions acquired of possessive structures. Mirjam Fried introduces a constructional account of plain vs. situational possession in Czech, and shows that the possibility of something becoming a possessum lies in cultural concepts and expectations of what can be possessed rather than animacy or concreteness.

Frantisek Lichtenberk turns the discussion to possessive constructions in Oceanic languages. Most Oceanic languages have two distinct types of attributive possession, in which the possessive affix attaches directly to the possessum (which overwhelmingly signals inalienable possession) or to a possessive classifier (which expresses some types of inalienable possession). Miriam van Staden discusses possessive clauses in East Nusantara, a linguistic area of East Indonesia and Timor. One of the languages, Tidore, exhibits a split, argument-referencing system in which verbal arguments are marked on the predicate differently than possessive arguments, which blurs the distinction between attributive and predicative possession.

In Hein van der Voort’s account of possessive expressions in Southwestern Amazon, two main adnominal possessive strategies are described, in which a possessive element attaches to either the possessor or the possessum. Finally, Kearsy Cormier and Jordan Fenlon discuss possession in British Sign Language, showing that it exhibits many of the patterns found in spoken languages (e.g. attributive versus predicative possession, the expression of inalienable possession), but differs significantly in its inherent use of ‘space’  in the expression of possession.

This collection of articles is essential reading for researchers, academics, and advanced linguistics students interested in the expression of possession crosslinguistically and the relation between the linguistic forms of different possessive structures and their semantic or grammatical functions.

Reviewed by Elly van Gelderen, Arizona State University

This book collects most of Kortlandt’s writings on Germanic, Indo-European, and Indo-Uralic. There are papers on the spread of Indo-European, the origin of the Goths, the phonology and morphosyntax of Indo-European, many of its daughter languages (Greek, Indo-Iranian, Tocharian, Albanian, Armenian, Balto-Slavic, Italo-Celtic, Anatolian), and the controversial claim of an Indo-Uralic language family that includes the Indo-European and Uralic languages. There are eight chapters on Germanic phonology, eleven on Germanic verb classes, verbal and nominal inflection, and several chapters on German, English, Scandinavian, and the Russenorsk pidgin. Many of these are short state-of-the-art articles written in a common sense style and containing a wealth of background information.

According to K, ‘a quest for relative chronology of linguistic developments’ (xi) is central to his work. His reconstructions are bottom-up and always show concern for empirical evidence. Besides the richness of his data, his citation of earlier literature and discussion of various theories reminds the reader of the wisdom and insight of such older scholars as Holger Pedersen and C.C. Uhlenbeck.

K argues that Indo-European is a branch of the putative Indo-Uralic family that was influenced by a North Caucasian substratum when early Indo-European speakers moved further north from the northern shore of the Caspian Sea. He claims that, as a result, ‘Indo-European developed a minimal vowel system…a very large consonant inventory…, grammatical gender and adjectival agreement, an ergative construction which was lost again but has left its traces in the grammatical system, especially in the nominal inflection, a construction with a dative subject…. The Indo-Uralic elements of Indo-European include pronouns, case endings, verbal endings, participles and derivational suffixes.’ (http://www.kortlandt.nl/publications/art269e.pdf)

Donella Antelmi and Francesca Santulli (111–34) compare how representatives of the Left and the Right exploit the speech presenting a new government to the Italian parliament, the two other articles focus on the discursive features of the conventionalized mechanisms of control in parliamentary debates (Clara-Ubaldina Lorda Mur on ‘questions au gouvernement’ in France) or the lack thereof (Elisabeth Zima, Geert Brône, and Kurt Feyaerts on ‘unauthorized interruptive comments’ in Austria).

Part 3 contains three chapters on ‘Procedural, discursive and rhetorical particularities of post-Communist parliaments’ that focus on changes in parliamentary discourse across the Communist, transitional, and post-Communist periods. The articles concern the management of interpersonal relationships through (dis)agreement strategies in the Romanian Parliament (Cornelia Ilie), occurrences of applause and laughter in the Polish Sejm (Cezar Ornatowski), and the discursive construction of the addressee in the Czech Parliament (Yordanka Madzharova Bruteig).

Part 4 contains crosscultural studies of parliamentary discourse. In his contribution (305–28), H. José Plug seeks to determine whether the different institutional characteristics of the Dutch and European Parliaments have an impact on how personal attacks are discursively managed, whilst Isabel Íñigo-Mora (329–72) explores the rhetorical strategies of British and Spanish MPs in discussing the Iraqi conflict.

The strength and relevance of this volume undoubtedly lies in the fact that through a rich collection of case studies, focusing on an important selection of parliamentary institutions and applying diverse analytical approaches (including discursive psychology and (critical) discourse analysis), the authors lay a sound foundation for further linguistic research on the impacts of parliamentary interaction on current political action.

Reviewed by Andy Van Drom, Université Laval, Québec

This volume starts with the idea that parliaments are at the heart of the daily (re)constructing, (re)framing and (re)shaping of the issues, ideologies, and identities that make up democracy. Discourse analysis is then proposed to gain insight into parliamentary practice by focusing on the linguistic and discursive strategies that characterize both regulated debates and more spontaneous interactions.

Part 1 opens on a broader, discursive-psychological perspective as it explores the discursive construction and negotiation of ‘Parliamentary roles and identities’. The first two chapters offer the most substantial theoretical contributions to the volume. Teun van Dijk (29–56) uses his own theory of context to examine how parliamentarians construe a political identity as part of their social identities. In Ch. 2 (57–78), Cornelia Ilie draws heavily on Erving Goffman’s work on identity construction to elaborate a typology of parliamentary participants based on their dialogue roles and institutional identities. Finally, Maria Aldina Marques presents a case study (79–108) of the use of personal deictic markers to construct individual and collective political identities.

The three chapters in Part 2 analyze ‘Ritualised strategies of parliamentary confrontation’—particular interactive patterns that result from parliamentary procedures. While Donella Antelmi and Francesca Santulli (111–34) compare how representatives of the Left and the Right exploit the speech presenting a new government to the Italian parliament, the two other articles focus on the discursive features of the conventionalized mechanisms of control in parliamentary debates (Clara-Ubaldina Lorda Mur on ‘questions au gouvernement’ in France) or the lack thereof (Elisabeth Zima, Geert Brône, and Kurt Feyaerts on ‘unauthorized interruptive comments’ in Austria).

Part 3 contains three chapters on ‘Procedural, discursive and rhetorical particularities of post-Communist parliaments’ that focus on changes in parliamentary discourse across the Communist, transitional, and post-Communist periods. The articles concern the management of interpersonal relationships through (dis)agreement strategies in the Romanian Parliament (Cornelia Ilie), occurrences of applause and laughter in the Polish Sejm (Cezar Ornatowski), and the discursive construction of the addressee in the Czech Parliament (Yordanka Madzharova Bruteig).

Part 4 contains crosscultural studies of parliamentary discourse. In his contribution (305–28), H. José Plug seeks to determine whether the different institutional characteristics of the Dutch and European Parliaments have an impact on how personal attacks are discursively managed, whilst Isabel Íñigo-Mora (329–72) explores the rhetorical strategies of British and Spanish MPs in discussing the Iraqi conflict.

The strength and relevance of this volume undoubtedly lies in the fact that through a rich collection of case studies, focusing on an important selection of parliamentary institutions and applying diverse analytical approaches (including discursive psychology and (critical) discourse analysis), the authors lay a sound foundation for further linguistic research on the impacts of parliamentary interaction on current political action.

Reviewed by Anish Koshy, The EFL University, India

The book is part of the IMPACT: Studies in language and society series of publications in sociolinguistics and is organized in nine chapters, including the introduction. The first four chapters set up the theoretical positions on the basis of which the latter chapters discuss four minority language settings.

In his introductory remarks, Edwards, a psychologist by training, lays down the major themes of the book: understanding minority languages and identities through a typology and case studies of such languages.

While discussing the maintenance of small languages in the context of languages in contact and conflict, E considers homogenization of languages as a result of people’s conscious choices and presents bilingualism as a possible solution. He also problematizes the notions of being a linguistic ‘minority’ and attempts at ‘maintaining’ a language. In the next chapter, issues of language decline, revival, and new ecology are discussed. The role of lack of inter-generational transfer in language death is emphasized and hence the role of a community in reviving its language, if only for the symbolic reason of marking identity. E maintains language is not organic and charges many revivalists with archival embalming of languages.

Giving examples of various language struggles, the next chapter discusses the social dynamics of assimilation and pluralism, arguing that linguistic tensions can resolve in four different ways, including communicative language-shift. Seeing language shift and loss as symptoms of a larger dynamic, E argues that the best assessments of linguistic conditions come from a methodological triangulation from various disciplines. Ch. 5 provides a typology of minority-language settings, discussing earlier attempts at typology (e.g. Charles Ferguson’s sociolinguistic profiling model), types of minority situations, and models of typology, concluding with a discussion of E’s own model.

Chs. 6–8 present case studies of Irish, Gaelic in Scotland, and Gaelic in Nova Scotia, providing a historical overview of their settlements, migration, and decline. Revival efforts like the founding of various associations, legislative measures, and media-support, are traced and place of these languages in modern education is also discussed, concluding with remarks on current trends and research findings. The last case study, on Esperanto, traces the history of constructed languages and attempts to discuss it in the same framework.

The book’s claim to be a dispassionate assessment of language maintenance, loss, and shift may not be fully borne out. The author’s very critical remarks on linguists’ approach to dying languages, calling it a doomsday approach, may not be fully justified. Language’s role in defining identity is discussed thoroughly. As the causes of language shift/loss are global and have far-reaching consequences throughout society, the author is justified in arguing for a methodological triangulation.

Reviewed by Engin Arik, Isik University

This volume is part of the Psych 101 series, which offers very short introductions to interesting topics in psychology. Psycholinguistics 101 consists of eight chapters and an index. In Ch. 1, ‘Introduction: What is psycholinguistics’ (1–16), the author defines linguistics and psycholinguistics, gives a brief history of the field, and introduces some of its major themes, e.g. top-down versus bottom-up processing, serial versus parallel processing, automatic and controlled processing, and modularity. This chapter ends with an overview of the remaining chapters.

In Ch. 2, ‘Language as an object of (psychological) study’ (17–33), the author presents basic features of language, from sound systems (phonetics and phonology) and word structure to sentence structure, meaning, and real-world use. In Ch. 3, ‘How we know what we know: Methods in psycholinguistics’ (35–60), the author starts with the types of measures used in psycholinguistic studies, then explains the most important psycholinguistic experimental tasks, such as questionnaires, button presses, vocal responses, eye-tracking, measurement of event-related brain potentials, and functional magnetic resonance imaging. Finally, this chapter briefly suggests how to avoid problems in using those tasks and methods.

In Ch. 4, ‘Information flow and language ambiguity’ (61–91), the author discusses how contextual ambiguity is resolved and ambiguous sentences are interpreted during language processing. In Ch. 5, ‘(Multiple) Language representation and the brain’ (93–120), the author offers a brief account of language areas in the monolingual and bilingual brain and psycholinguistic studies on phonological, lexical, and syntactic representations of language in bilinguals. Ch. 6, ‘Language in the real world: Dialogue and (co)reference’ (121–52), focuses on language use in conversation and deals primarily with the interaction between speaker and listener, discussing such topics as common ground, intelligibility, avoiding ambiguity, priming and alignment, co-reference, and factors that influence the interpretation of reference.

In Ch. 7, ‘Using your hands: Sign languages’ (153–74), the author moves from spoken to sign language. After dispelling common misconceptions about sign languages, it touches upon such issues in sign languages as structure (phonology and syntax), language processing, iconicity and arbitrariness, lexical access, grammatical space and spatial representations, and co-reference. Ch. 8, ‘How good is “good enough”?’ (175–91), shows how language processing is more complicated than previously thought.

In sum, this book provides a very concise introduction to psycholinguistics. It is well-written and touches upon a wide range of important psycholinguistic issues, such as the structure of language, methods, language processing, language representation, and sign languages. I believe that it can easily be used as an additional reading in an undergraduate psycholinguistic course.

Reviewed by David Elton Gay, Bloomington, IN

Though he is largely unknown outside of Catalan studies, Pompeu Fabra was the most important Catalan grammarian and language standardizer of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In The architect of Modern Catalan, Joan Costa Carreras and his collaborators have teamed up to introduce Fabra to the English-speaking world, and they have created a fine anthology with which to do so.

The anthology opens with a series of appreciations of Fabra and his work by Joan Josep Moresco, Salvador Giner, Joan Martí i Castells, and George Kremnitz that focus largely on biographical matters. These are followed by an introduction to the Catalan language by Carreras and Alan Yates that describes the historical and sociolinguistic situation of Catalan, as well as some of the important intellectual and literary movements in the language. The book concludes with a useful bibliography of materials on the Catalan language in English, Spanish, French, and Catalan and a list of useful websites on Catalan.

Carreras then examines ‘Pompeu Fabra: A life’s work in applied linguistics’ in a long and very detailed chapter that looks at virtually every aspect of Fabra’s life and work as a Catalan scholar. This chapter offers useful bibliographical information about Fabra’s writings in two places:  an annotated bibliography of the various grammars Fabra wrote of Catalan, English, Spanish, and French (82–86), and a fuller bibliography of Fabra’s writings and works about Fabra and Catalan more generally (95–101).

A brief chapter on the ‘presentation of the edition’ treats of editorial matters. In the anthology of Fabra’s writings (113–219), the editors have made a concerted effort to show the range of Fabra’s writings, which include work on grammar, lexicography, spelling reform, standardization, and language purification (in the case of Catalan, this meant the removal of Castilianisms from the language).

This is a very useful book about a too little known linguist and grammarian.

Reviewed by Kanavillil Rajagopalan, State University at Campinas, Brazil

This book is a collection of twelve essays on Africa, the diasporic experience, politics of postcolonialism and globalization, and cultural identity. The contributors can all trace their cultural roots to Africa, and many of them draw on their own experiences of diaspora and prolonged contact with the world at large. The result is a volume of articles at once well grounded theoretically and highly thought-provoking.

In his introduction, Ch. 1, ‘Of origins, politics and the place of the postcolonial text in black history/culture’, James Tar Tsaaior sets the tone of the entire volume with the claim that politics is of the very essence of postcolonial cultures. That politics is counter-hegemonic to the postcolonial narrative and takes a perspective of subversion vis-à-vis the Western canon. But, even while stating the importance of ‘dismantling … the architecture of imperial knowledge inscribed in the labyrinthine matrices of the master text’ (6), he also accuses ‘the decadent and indulgent political and business elite’ (10) for the predicaments in which Africa finds itself.

The eleven texts that follow amply illustrate strategies for the arduous task of dismantling the canonical readings of works by up-and-coming and classic African writers, as well as writers like Alex Haley, author of Roots. Several contributors undertake interesting forays into Ben Okri’s novels, Tanure Ojaide and Odia Ofeimun’s exilic poetry, Rebecca Njau’s Ripples in the pool, and Chinua Achebe’s Things fall apart and Anthills of the Savannah.

Some of the authors use a wide-angle interpretive lens to look at recent Nigerian popular music as counter-narratives, reconfiguring black musical genealogies in the context of the African Diaspora, the politics of representation in the postcolonial African writing, and the politics of postcolonial becoming in the Caribbean novel.

‘History and the politics of representation in the postcolonial African text’ by Gboyega Kolawole and Sule E. Egya is representative of the overall tone adopted by most of the contributors to this volume. The authors point out that ‘[p]olitical poetry, that is, poetry that thematizes sociopolitical, economic, cultural, and other issues affecting the well being of the society, has existed since the beginning of written poetry in Nigerian literature’ (105). The reference to threnody underscores Nigeria’s agonizing trials and tribulations during the 1980s and 1990s when the military took over the reins of power and brutally suppressed civil rights.

Ultimately, the contributors are all interested in discovering their true identities, unrecognizably obscured by discourses alien to their cultures and long beyond their powers to challenge.

Reviewed by Elly van Gelderen, Arizona State University

Although adverbs are an ‘oppressed part of speech’ (v), they have recently received quite some attention. Argument and rhetoric was a Habilitationsschrift in 2006/2007 (v) and contributes much to what we know about the history of connectors. The book provides a helpful review, mainly of the functional literature and classification of connectors throughout the various historical stages of English (though the literature cited stops in 2007).

The aim of the book is ‘corpus-based analyses of the development of a particular word class in connector function’ (4). The author cites an experiment on the effect of connectors that shows they provide authority and logic to a text and hence the rhetorical aspect becomes important. A further claim is that ‘changes in the history of English connectors thus seem to have been triggered by the typological and structural changes which set English … apart from other Germanic languages’ (9). Unfortunately, this is not subsequently worked out well. The final paragraph of Ch. 1 (21) summarizes the main questions: are there recurrent patterns, can we distinguish clines, and how much stylistic choice is involved?

Chs. 2–4 lay the groundwork by defining adverbs and describing their various functions. In Old English, there are few adverbial connectors, according to Ch.5, although there are stance adverbs such as eac ‘also’ and eornostlice ‘earnestly’, ambiguous adverbs such as nu ‘now’, pronominal connectors such as forþæm ‘therefore’, and demonstratives. Ch. 6 looks at the big picture from Old to Modern English, and notes that many adverbial connectors have disappeared and many new ones have taken their place (80). Ch.7 examines the morphological tools used to renew the connectors and notes that very few are loans. Ch. 8 identifies three source domains: space, time, and truth. Chs. 9–11 show that connectors for cause/result, concession/contrast, and addition are very different in character. Ch. 12 very briefly examines soþlice `truly’, classified as transitional.

Personally, I found Ch. 13 the most interesting: sentence-initial connectors, such as ‘[a]nd therefore’, in authors such as Geoffrey Chaucer change to medial connectors, such as however, in e.g. Adam Smith. This stylistic change was helped by a different application of punctuation. The eighteenth century saw a grammatical use of punctuation that indicated a core of subject, verb, and object, with adverbials ‘sequestered’ by commas.

The book is rich in well-analyzed examples and contributes to our knowledge of connectors.