Reviewed by Irene Theodoropoulou, Qatar University

The volume consists of twelve chapters dealing with style shifting in Japanese as a context-bound phenomenon inextricably linked to language structure (2). The editors bring together diverse perspectives on the types of style shifting and factors influencing it. Several chapters focus on style shifting between ‘polite’ predicates ending in desu or masu and ‘plain’ predicates (non-desu/masu).

Haruko Minegishi Cook argues that in university academic consultation sessions between professors and students, the static tie of masu to social status is cast into doubt, given that both masu and desu can be used interchangeably within the same social context for the construction of diverse social personae. Similarly, Naomi Geyer’s study situates style shifting within politeness studies and argues that both forms have distinct but interrelated functions: the plain form marks solidarity among interlocutors and mitigates the threat of performed actions, while masu impersonalizes the speaker and indicates deference to the addressee. Politeness is the key focus also in Shoko Ikuta’s contribution on conversation interviews: her findings suggest that the (non) use of desu/masu style can work as an interactional politeness strategyfor saving face.

Senko K. Maynard’s article argues that two expressive aspects of style mixture, emotivity and creativity, are used to manipulate different voices in written discourse, while Mutsuko Endo Hudson’s study of semi-polite styles associated with the negative forms masen and nai desu argues for their signaling a psychological distance between speakers, as well as indexing their explaining or evaluating a situation. Similarly, Satoshi Uehara and Etsuko Fukushima show that masen forms index politeness and are to be found at the beginning of conversations, while nai desu forms are found in other parts of the conversation and point to growing familiarity among interlocutors.

Yuka Matsugu and Yoshiko Matsumoto each flesh out gender issues in style shifting. Matsugu argues that a binary distinction between masculinity and femininity in gendered styles is challenged by her analysis of women conveying masculine social stances when frustrated or displeased. Matsumoto’s study of middle-aged middle-class women suggests that there are several layered meanings within one style that need to be analyzed in unison.

Shigeko Okamoto’s article on regional and standard varieties of Japanese makes the important argument that regional and standard variants are used in complex manners, led by functionally-driven choices. Kuniyoshi Kataoka and Shoji Takano both push research on style shifting in new directions. Kataoka argues for the need for interactional analysis of deictics as aspects of style (shifting), while Takano argues for the need of a multi-stylistic approach to style beyond a single social situation, with casual conversations as the fundamental site.

Overall, despite its limited crossreferencing, which hinders its cohesiveness, this volume contains some eye-opening contributions that will interest not only scholars working on Japanese but also (socio)linguists interested in style.

Reviewed by María Dolores Romero, Madrid, Spain

Basic concepts and models for interpreter and translator training is the result of a study that included naturalistic, experimental, and theoretical issues in translation studies and related disciplines, especially cognitive psychology and psycholinguistics. This book, a revision of the 1995 edition, is written for practitioners who teach conference interpreting and/or translation.

The book is divided into ten chapters. Ch. 1 provides suggestions on how translators and interpreters should carry out their work. This includes a good knowledge of their passive and active languages. In addition, this chapter points out the need for formal training and a process-oriented approach focused on principles, methods, and procedures. In Ch. 2, Gile indicates that the main purpose of professional translation is to help people communicate in specific situations. He also discusses the ways the interests of translators and interpreters might conflict with their clients’.

Ch. 3 investigates aspects of the process of verbalization from a specific idea experimentally and finds that sentences expressing the same message can be quite different. Ch. 4 analyzes discourse comprehension by describing aspects of understanding and its components. The author points out the importance of extralinguistic knowledge for understanding specialized text. In Ch. 5, G presents a sequential model of written translation which consists of a succession of two-phase operations: the comprehension and reformulation phases.

Ch. 6 deals with ad hoc knowledge acquisition in interpreting and translation; this is defined as the acquisition of new knowledge for the purpose of preparing a translation assignment. This chapter also explains important issues in the use of information sources and in strategies for ad hoc knowledge acquisition. The following chapter explains simultaneous interpreting as a set of three core efforts: listening and analysis; production; and short term memory.

Ch. 8 focuses on situations in which interpreters do not understand terms or sentences in the source speech or do not know how to express a concept in the target language, and provides a list of basic tactics to cope with such problems. In Ch. 9, G explains that the formal definitions of the three categories of working languages for conference interpreters established by the International Association of Conference Interpreters (AIIC) are not very clear in practice. Moreover this chapter presents concepts and models to resolve problems for interpreting that can also be applied to written translation. In the final chapter G explains the advantages of teaching translation theory to students in the classroom. He concludes with an analysis of the interpretation, decisions, resources, and constraints (IDRC) framework.

Each chapter ends with teaching suggestions, advice on what students need to remember and appendices with exercises for classrooms demonstrations. The book concludes with a glossary of specialized terms.

Reviewed by Peter Freeouf, Chiang Mai University

The Austronesian family includes over a thousand languages, making it one of the largest language families in the world. The family extends from Taiwan and mainland Southeast Asia, the Philippines, Indonesia, and the coast of the island of New Guinea to most of the islands of the Pacific and Madagascar.

Clarity of style and breadth of coverage make this work a uniquely valuable treatment of the extensive Austronesian language family. This work will serve the needs of linguists, anthropologists, historians, and other interested readers for a long time to come. It is no exaggeration to say that it is the definitive survey of Austronesian.

The volume begins with a detailed table of contents and includes several maps as well as numerous tables and figures, all of which contribute to making this work an easy-to-use encyclopedia of one of the world’s major language families. Ch. 1, ‘The Austronesian world’ (1–28), introduces the geographical setting of the Austronesian languages. Various topics include physical anthropology, social and cultural background, contacts with the wider world, and the archaeological evidence for the pre-historical migrations that spread Austronesian languages. Ch. 2, ‘A bird’s eye view of the Austronesian language family’ (29–117), provides an overview of the language family. The chapter is divided into sections covering the internal structure of the family, the complicated problem of delineating language from dialect, national languages and lingua francas, language distribution by geographical area, language size, and selected typological features.

Ch. 3, ‘Language in society’ (118–61), deals with speech register and language contact (borrowing, linguistic areas, code-switching, pidginization and creolization, and determinates of language size). Of cultural and sociological interest is the summary of various systems of socially-based speech levels and respect vocabulary. In addition to the well-known case of Javanese, similar socially-based phenomena are discussed in Pohnpeian (Micronesian) and in the Polynesian languages Samoan and Tongan (118–29). Ch. 4, ‘Sound systems’ (162–266), presents selected phoneme inventories organized by geographical area. The following subsections deal with ‘morpheme structures (phonotactics)’ and ‘phonological processes’.

Ch. 5, ‘The lexicon’ (267–342), is a wide-ranging treatment of word classes, semantics, and semantic change. Numeral systems, color terms, and pronoun systems are summarized in detail for various languages and subgroups. Ch. 6, ‘Morphology’ (342–430), includes such features as affixation and reduplication in selected languages. B points out that the complex patterns of verbal affixation in many Austronesian languages (especially in ‘Philippine-type’ languages) cannot be easily separated from syntactic issues such as participant roles and tense and aspect.

Ch. 7, ‘Syntax’ (431–505), attempts to present some of the broad range of typologically varied syntactic patterns. A problem that B raises here is how to present as neutrally as possible the results of research based on different theoretical approaches. His solution is generally to ignore syntactic issues where ‘theory-bound work’ has been prominent, including ‘complex sentences, relativisation, extraction, and clitics, to name a few’ (431). Other topics, however, are dealt with in some detail: voice systems, case marking, word order, negation, possession, word classes, directionals, imperatives, and questions.

Ch. 8, ‘Reconstruction’ (506–93), presents an overview of work in reconstructing the proto-language and the establishment of a phoneme system that accounts for subsequent developments in the family and its subgroups. Ch. 9, ‘Sound change’ (594–680), covers the range of sound changes in language and their presence in the various languages of the family. It is of course impossible to give more than a cursory coverage of the histories of individual languages, so instead the chapter is organized around  such topics as ‘internal sound change,’ ‘normal sound change,’ ‘bizarre sound change,’ ‘quantitative aspects of sound change,’ ‘the Regularity Hypothesis,’ and ‘drift.’

Ch. 10, ‘Classification’ (681–746), deals with the general issue of establishing genetic relationships between languages, various proposals of genetic relationships of Austronesian with other language families, subgroupings within Austronesian, and  the relationship of internal genetic relationships to proposed migration histories. Ch. 11, ‘The world of Austronesian scholarship’ (747–63), discusses the large scholarly community involved with the study of the Austronesian family, major research centers, conferences over the past few decades, leading periodicals, and major bibliographies. There is a brief discussion of fifteen other language families in comparison with Austronesian, with notes on the most important scholarship associated with each family. The volume concludes with an extensive bibliography and a sparse index of subjects with virtually no languages listed.

Reviewed by David Elton Gay, Bloomington, IN

New perspectives in Latin historical syntax, vol. 3 begins with an introduction by Baldi and Cuzzolin giving a survey of the theoretical approach used in the book : they refer to it as a ‘functional-typological approach,’ though anyone with a sound command of traditional Latin grammar should be able to follow the essays with no problem. The introduction indicates the audiences the book is intended for: the ‘first of these,’ they write, ‘is the community of linguists…’; the second group ‘is Classicists, especially Latinists, who are interested in the syntax and semantics of Latin poetic and prose texts’; and the last group is ‘Indo-Europeanists, who have an abiding interest in the syntactic history of a principal Indo-European language, and whose concerns for the syntax of the protolanguage will be directly addressed by the contents and approach of this project’ (13). Although not included, a group that should be are Latin teachers. Though most of what is in these essays would be over the head of my Latin students, they nonetheless draw attention to important aspects of Latin syntax and to nuances in the language that I can easily transfer to my teaching of Latin.

The articles cover four areas. In the first article, Alessandra Bertocchi, Mirka Maraldi, and Anna Orlandini ‘provide an analysis of indefinite items [such as] quis, aliquis, [and] quispiam’ (13). Jesús de la Villa then takes up Latin numerals in their various forms and the development of the indefinite article. Philip Baldi and Andrea Nuti describe ‘the evolution and use of predicative possession’ (14); Finally, Silvia Pieroni examines anaphora and deixis.

Though the writing is often less clear than it might be, each of the articles offers an intriguing look at important issues in Latin syntax and semantics. In fact, semantics plays such an important role in these essays it is surprising that it was not included in the title of the book. The descriptions in each subject area are much fuller than is usually found in Latin grammars: each of the authors at some point echoes Jesús de la Villa’s accurate comment that ‘what we find in [Latin] grammars and monographs is a partial description, mainly focused on morphology…’ (175).

A small complaint is that the book rarely indicates the dates of Latin authors. This would be helpful for the non-Latinist reading the book. A fuller explanation of the periodization of Latin would have been useful for the same reason.

The volumes of New perspectives on Latin historical syntax fill a definite need for studies of Latin syntax and semantics that are both historical and descriptive, and may perhaps make Latin more of interest to the wider linguistic community.

Reviewed by Peter Freeouf, Chiang Mai University

While there is a one-to-one semantic equivalence in numerals across languages, there is considerable diversity in their morphosyntactic features, even in languages as similar to English as Danish and French. Cardinal numerals are lexically unique in that each numeral in a language generally has an exact equivalent in other languages. This contrasts with other semantic fields (e.g. kinship and color terms).

This study of Old English (OE) cardinal numerals is an attempt to formulate a coherent descriptive framework for language-specific analyses of numeral systems. The morphosyntactic features of numerals are the focus of the book. In the introduction the author sets out the study of numerals, not as individual lexical items but as a series or sequence of items in an interrelated system or ‘independent lexical class’ (9).

Ch. 1 (12–71) establishes rigorous definitions and terminology for the linguistic analysis of cardinal numerals. An important issue is the relationship between the concepts ‘number’ and ‘numeral’. Regular and idiosyncratic formations are discussed in detail, with examples from many languages, mainly Indo-European. Terms introduced here include ‘atoms’ for the basic numerals (‘one’ through ‘nine’), ‘bases’ (e.g. ‘ten,’ ‘hundred’, ‘thousand’), and multiples of ‘bases’. A rather complex terminology is employed but each term is carefully and exactly defined.

Ch. 2 (72–128) gives a detailed account of the morphology of OE numerals up to ‘thousand’. One section treats the historical development of OE numerals from proto-Indo-European through proto-Germanic, and the concluding part deals with the OE ordinal numerals.

Ch. 3 (129–77) deals with the internal syntactic structure of complex numeral expressions and their position in quantified NPs. An important feature of this chapter is the establishment of criteria for determining to what extent the numeral systems of OE and other languages are decimal systems. The author concludes that the Germanic languages and Lithuanian employ decimal systems, and that supposed duodecimal and vigesimal influence can be explained in decimal terms. The chapter concludes with a discussion of how OE expressed numbers higher than 999,999.

Ch. 4 (178–247) focuses on the syntactic relationship between numeral expressions and other clause constituents. The chapter surveys previous syntactic studies of OE numerals (180–89) and proposes five types of ‘quantificational constructions’ (189–247). Ch. 5 (248–85) considers how to best classify cardinal numerals as a part of speech and proposes that cardinal numerals form an independent word ‘class of their own’ (249) rather than subclasses of nouns or adjectives. An extensive bibliography is provided of primary OE texts and collections as well as secondary linguistic studies of numerals.

This intellectually demanding work presents an exhaustive coverage of the numeral system of a relatively well-attested older language and develops an analytical framework applicable to other languages. It is a solid treatment of the complex topic of cardinal numerals in language.

Reviewed by Kristen Fredriksen, University of Georgia

The massive amount of minimalist language we encounter on a daily basis often goes unnoticed, from road signs to the money in our pockets. Even if we paused to contemplate the variety of ways language permeates our lives, we would hardly come close to naming all the diverse situations that Alexander Humez, Nicholas Humez, and Rob Flynn describe in this fascinating book. Short cuts is an able guide to the wide range of abbreviated discourse.

Ch. 1, ‘In the eye of the beholder: What’s your sign?’, discusses fleeting language and the relationship between words and graphics. The authors highlight the broad extent of non-verbal communication through computer icons, street signs, billboards, graffiti, skywriting, and cartoons. Ch. 2, ‘In the dictionary: The lexicographers have spoken’, gives a history of dictionaries. The authors establish guidelines for what makes a good dictionary and explain that dictionaries occasionally include ghost words or Mountweazels (deliberately falsified entries) to catch plagiarists.

In Ch. 3, ‘By the great crikes!: Oaths both sacred and profane’, the authors provide an entertaining history of swearing, cursing, and blessing. Ch. 4, ’On or about your person: The talk of the territories of the self’, shows how identity and attitude are tied to the language and symbols found on clothing, jewelry, personal possessions, and even physical attributes. Ch. 5, ‘On the lam: The world of word crime’, discusses forensic linguistics, the language of crime and the law. Characteristic language can lead to a suspect’s arrest, and law enforcement officers must know what kind of language to use when sending out wanted posters, missing persons alerts, and more.

Ch. 6, ‘In the news: All that’s fit to print, and then some’, deconstructs the typical newspaper. The authors describe several regular newspaper features, including gripe and gossip columns, reviews, and ads, all of which tailor their minimalist language to a target audience. Ch. 7, ‘On the phone: Your call is important 2 us’, addresses the history of talking over the phone and the new language that has arisen thereby, including texting speech. Ch. 8, ‘In the mail: from SVBE to SWAK’, discusses the ever-decreasing time it takes for language to be communicated and the different styles of written letters.

Ch. 9, ‘In and out of trouble: Warnings, excuses, and remedial work’, shows how we use and manipulate language in warnings, threats, codes, apologies, and confessions. Lastly, Ch. 10, ‘In the end: Last words’, examines the language of departure, temporary (e.g. until then, bye) and permanent (e.g. suicide notes and epitaphs).

The authors write in a humorous and entertaining style while presenting a plethora of information. The authors succeed in making the reader aware of the diverse brief forms of speech we encounter on a daily basis. The numerous pop-culture references and creative illustrations of concepts allow the reader to easily discover and understand the miniature ways in which we communicate.

Reviewed by Carolin Patzelt, University of Bochum

This book investigates phonological variation among Salvadorian youths living in Toronto, Canada, focusing on three variables that have been extensively researched in Caribbean varieties but not Salvadorian Spanish: syllable- and word-final (s), syllable-initial (s), and word-final (n). The choice of these three variables is natural, as they are the best-known sociolinguistic variables in Spanish linguistics.

Ch. 1 starts off with a general overview of Latin American Spanish. The distinctive phonological features of different varieties of Latin American Spanish (e.g. Caribbean, Mexican, South and Central American) are presented, as well as an overview of Spanish speakers in Canada. Ch. 2 presents the methodology, data collection, and speakers. The author chose the Salvadorian variety of Spanish because differences within Salvadorian Spanish are not as significant as in other parts of Latin America. Moreover, the Salvadorian community of Toronto is relatively new: the thirty speakers interviewed are all aged fifteen through twenty-five and were born in El Salvador.

Variation in their speech is shown to be governed by both linguistic and social constraints. Ch. 3 investigates the realization of (s). After overview of previous studies on /s/ retention, aspiration, and deletion, it is shown that retention of /s/ is favored by both articu­latory and social constraints. Speakers who arrived in Canada at an early age are more likely to retain /s/, and so are women in general and speakers whose parents had a secondary education or higher.

Ch. 4 investigates the realization of final (n) and its linguistic and social constraints. Again, it is women and speakers with high socioeconomic status who prefer the otherwise stigmatized variant of velar [ŋ] over the overtly prestigious [n].

Ch. 5 compares the distribution and conditioning of the variables (s) and (n). Although social stratification for word-final /n/ is weaker than for word-final /s/, speakers from the highest socioeconomic background favor the velar variant. The latter is even identified as an emerging Hispanic identity marker in Toronto. In addition, the author shows several striking differences in the sociolectal uses of (s) and (n). In particular, the reduction of /s/ seems to be due to its association with rural and uneducated speakers, which raises the question of speakers’ identity and its manifestation through language. Ch. 6 elaborates on this issue, summarizes the author’s conclusions, and outlines directions for future research.

This is a well-structured, valuable study. Since the youth interviewed in this study are all first-generation Canadians, the Spanish of later generations calls for future research.

Reviewed by Stephen Laker, Kyushu University, Japan

This is a collection of eighteen articles on Modern West Frisian, a minority language spoken by about 450,000 in the province of Fryslân in the north of the Netherlands. The articles were originally published between 1986–2001 by Germen de Haan, former professor of Frisian Language and Culture at the University of Groningen, for the most part in difficult to access publications in either Dutch or Frisian. This volume succeeds in bringing them into wider circulation.

Following an introductory article on the general directions of research on Frisian (11–24), two articles consider Frisian’s periodization and historical syntax (25–62), seven articles treat its syntax within the generative framework (63–232), five articles consider the influence of Dutch on contemporary Frisian (233–315), and three articles concern phonological topics: nasalization, syllable structure, and schwa-deletion (317–56).

The main research interest of the author, as reflected in the number of papers in this volume, is syntax. Frisian displays a number of syntactic features similar to Dutch, German, and related languages whose differences allow for profitable study from typological and general linguistic perspectives. The main focus of de Haan’s research is on the syntax of verbs. In this volume, he considers the verb-second rule, embedded root phenomena, Frisian infinitive constructions (Frisian has two infinitives, in –e and –en), and the ordering of the verbal complex. In addition, he includes an article on complementizer agreement in Frisian, which is restricted to the second person singular.

Of particular note are the five articles on Dutch influence on Frisian. ‘Dutchification’ has increased since the end of World War II, a period in which Frisians were all raised as bilinguals, and the topic is very much alive in Frisian society. For instance, it is not uncommon for older speakers to complain that some presenters on Frisian national television speak a variety not far removed from Dutch with a Frisian accent. The central question for de Haan is how Dutch morphology and syntax are entering Frisian.

de Haan looks at a number of proposed Dutch influences on Frisian (his first article of 1990 considers only aspects of verbal morphology, the formation of diminutives, and word order in the verbal complex, but this database increases in later articles). His general conclusion, backed up with statistical evidence, is that Frisian is indeed becoming more Dutch-like. This leads de Haan to wonder how contact induced change can be handled within generative grammar, and while his thoughts on the matter are insightful, they sometimes lack empirical rigor: e.g. he writes that ‘there is no principled basis for ordering grammatical domains in a kind of stability hierarchy with respect to interference’ (295), yet research by Yaron Matras has since provided solid empirical support for such an hierarchical approach. Nonetheless, de Haan offers many interesting perspectives on the ongoing process of Dutchification, and his articles show notable changes in approach and attitude over time.

Overall, this is a useful addition to research on West Frisian syntax, language change, and phonology. A supplementary volume with research published after 2001 is desirable.

Fundamentals of psycholinguistics. By Eva M. Fernández and Helen Smith Cairns. (Fundamentals of linguistics.) Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Pp. xiv, 316. ISBN 9781405191470. $39.95.

Reviewed by Engin Arik, Isik University

This volume is an informative and concise introduction to psycholinguistics that can easily serve as a textbook for advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students. Each of the eight chapters starts with an outline and ends with a list of new concepts and about a dozen thorough study questions.

In Ch. 1, ‘Beginning concepts’ (1–24), the authors introduce key concepts used in the field of psycholinguistics: the creativity and universality of human language, the distinction between prescriptive and descriptive grammar, linguistic competence and performance, the acquisition of language, linguistic sounds and meaning, and linguistic perception. This chapter also discusses the origins of psycholinguistics and presents the organization of the rest of the book.

In Ch. 2, ‘The nature of linguistic competence’ (25–69), the authors introduce the speech signal by focusing on the human vocal tract, then move on to the phonological, morphological, and syntactic components of the linguistic system. Especially notable is a very good summary of the concept of the lexicon in relation to mental representations of linguistic structures.

Ch. 3, ‘The biological basis of language’ (70–96), starts with the universality of human language discussing human-specificity of language, child language acquisition, and innateness and learnability, followed by an introduction to the physiology of human language. The authors end the chapter explaining reading and writing as cultural artifacts.

Ch. 4, ‘The acquisition of language’ (97–133), provides a detailed introduction to first language acquisition from the prenatal period to later ages with respect to discourse ability and metalinguistic awareness, followed by a concise overview of second language acquisition.

The following chapters focus on language production and comprehension. Ch. 5, ‘The speaker: Producing speech’ (134–68), concerns the planning and production of speech by the speaker, whereas Ch. 6, ‘The hearer: Speech perception and lexical access’ (169–203), discusses speech perception and how hearers comprehend sentences. Ch. 7, ‘The hearer: Structural processing’ (204–34), focuses on the parsing of speech, from the psychological reality of syntactic structures to lexical, prosodic, and non-linguistic information.

The next chapter, Ch. 8, ‘Remembering sentences, processing discourse, and having conversations’ (235–66), focuses on the relationship between working memory and sentence processing, anaphoric reference and making inferences, the structure of conversations, and language use in communication.

In addition to the main text, the ‘Appendix: Experimental designs in psycholinguistics’ (268–75) provides a short introduction to experimental methodology in psycholinguistics, including materials, analysis, and procedure. The remaining end matter includes an epilogue (267), a list of references (276–98), and indexes of names (299–304) and subjects (305–16).

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

Although Madurese is Indonesia’s fourth most-widely spoken language (after Indonesian, Javanese, and Sundanese), it has been relatively underrepresented by descriptive studies. The current volume is the first complete reference grammar of Madurese and contains the most detailed description of its syntax to date. While previous descriptions focused primarily on Eastern Madurese (the prestige dialect of Sumenep), this volume deals predominantly with Western (Bangkalan) Madurese.

The grammar begins with phonology (11–60). Compared to neighboring languages, Madurese has a relatively large stop system, with five places of articulation (shared only by Javanese among closely-related languages) and a three-way voicing/aspiration system (setting it apart even from Javanese). Also of interest is the system of vowel harmony, conditioned by the voicing/aspiration of the preceding consonant. This section also discusses the various orthographies.

In the discussion of lexical categories (61–95), D argues that while the categories of verb and noun are relevant to Madurese, one must posit precategorial roots whose categorial status is determined once morphological processes are applied, e.g. the root/noun kaca ‘mirror’ gives ngaca ‘look in mirror’ with the prefix ng– for actor voice. Madurese morphology (97–128) consists primarily of affixation (including a small number of nonproductive infixes) and compounding. The important morphological process of reduplication is treated separately (129–48) with final-syllable reduplication (for which Madurese is well known in phonological circles) the most common.

Unsurprisingly, the bulk of the grammar is devoted to syntax (149–467). In addition to its value as a synchronic reference grammar, this work includes important comparative discussions. Illuminating comparisons of morphosyntax are frequently drawn in areas in which Madurese differs from its related neighbors (e.g. a second actor voice prefix a– in addition to shared ng-, and a lesser causative role for the applicative suffix –agi due to the presence of a dedicated causative prefix pa-). Also, presentation of sound correspondences with Indonesian and Javanese and occasional indications of dialect differences within Madurese itself (on all levels of the language from phonology to syntax) add to the value of the work to comparativists.

The discussion of speech levels (469–89) is of great interest, particularly concerning their use and variation in speech and writing. The book closes with four interesting texts (491–568), three traditional tales and a description of traditional Madurese bull races.

The normal admonition not to judge a book by its cover should be modified to urge the reader not to judge this book by its first page; the first four lines should be ignored (they occur lower on the page in their proper place), as should the fourteenth and start of the fifteenth line (which are from page 97!). That aside, this is a superb work that deserves a place on the shelf of everyone interested in Madurese and the languages of Java and Indonesia generally, and it should be of equal interest to Austronesianists and typologists.