Reviewed by Wolfgang Schulze, University of Munich

The Dani people figure among the most famous ethnic groups in the Indonesian province of Papua. There are some 300,000 Danis, most of whom speak Western Dani (about 200,000 people). Western Danis dwell on the northern slopes of the Star Mountains west of the Baliem Grand Valley and are marked for a well-studied and well-documented cultural tradition that is sometimes erroneously labeled as being especially archaic. The Dani language belongs to the southern division of the Dani-Kwerba stock, itself a part of the Trans-New Guinea Phylum. Today, Western Dani is a written language, as expressed by the fact that the entire Bible has been translated into this language. Although some brief descriptions of Western Dani are available, Peter Barclay’s voluminous grammar sets the knowledge about this language into a new dimension. The author, who has a long experience of living with Danis and who has acquired a profound knowledge of the language based on long-lasting fieldwork, exploits a wide range of (primarily) written sources in order to extract the Dani grammar. These sources include both recorded native texts and translations, mainly from the Bible and related texts.

B applies the standard descriptive tools to access the grammar of Western Dani. The description is theory-neutral to the extent ever possible and is also marked for a wide range of specific—but not to say idiosyncratic—glosses that reflect the categorical and functional specifics of this language.

B’s book, which is framed by four maps, a list of specific glosses, and a helpful bibliography, is divided into eleven sections. Chs. 1 and 11 are more essayistic in nature, discussing the sociolinguistics of the Western Danis as well as some methodological issues and prospects of research. The bulk of the book is made up of chapters that are devoted to the standard domains of linguistic description, namely, phonology, morphology, and syntax. Ch. 2 (13–41) extensively discusses the phonetics and morphophonology of Western Dani. The language is marked for heavy assimilatory processes that are present when lexical stems become suffixed, all of which are thoroughly described here. The brief Ch. 3 (42–49) introduces Dani word classes. Western Dani is marked for the typical features of head marking, attributing only few morphological categories to the nominal domain but making extensive use of morphology within verbs. Additionally, B discusses twelve more or less closed word classes such as adjectives, pronouns, and postpositions. Ch. 4 turns to the grammar of noun phrases (50–181), which includes a discussion of nouns themselves (e.g. cultural context, nominal derivation, possession, and compounding), pronouns and pronominal affixes, adjectives and their morphology, intensifiers, anaphoric references, demonstratives, relative clauses, postpositions, and conjunctions (in this order).

Chs. 5–7 (182–424) represent the heart of the book. Here, B skillfully describes the expressive world of Dani verb morphology. The Dani verb is marked for subject agreement, object agreement (if human), a complex system of modal categories heavily interacting with aspectual distinctions as well as localizing strategies and valency reducing devices. Ch. 5 also conveys information about semantic verb classes and includes the typical set of generic verbs used to derive verbal concepts. B also considers the paradigm of reduplication present not only with verbs but also with nouns. Ch. 6, which concentrates on the multiple techniques of marking objects on the verb, is a highlight of the chapters on verb morphology. Adverbs are discussed in Ch. 7, followed by an extremely useful chapter on expressions of time and place (Ch. 8; 425–64).

The remaining two chapters are devoted to syntax. Ch. 9 (465–86) briefly considers specifics of the simple sentence. However, much of what would be expected to be described in this chapter was already included in the preceding chapters on the verb. B thus confines himself to the presentation of verbless sentences, copula clauses, interrogation, imperatives, negation, and different types of exclamatory sentences, including greetings. Finally, Ch. 10 (487–634) is an impressive elaboration on the make-up of complex sentences, which range from complementation and coordination to clause chaining and subordination.

B’s description of Western Dani is more than just a grammatical description of the language. The author constantly refers to actual language use and frequently includes valuable information about cultural and regional aspects concerning the given usage of a term, construction, or paradigm. The linguistic information is presented in a very readable way, although readers will have to accustom themselves to the way B handles interlinear glosses. The fact that this volume lacks the presentation of a longer sample text does not harm the overall quality of the book. The many lengthy examples given by the author, especially in Chs. 6–10, compensate for this seeming deficiency. The theory-neutral approach guarantees that this book can be used by linguists from various theoretical backgrounds. Additionally, this volume may help to correct some prejudices about Western Dani that falsely relate this language to the notion of primitiveness.

Reviewed by Omaima Ayoub, Furqaan Academy

This volume includes nine papers that were presented at the Twenty-First Annual Symposium on Arabic Linguistics, which was held in 2007 at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. The papers examine authentic data and cover a variety of topics in Arabic linguistics but have a considerable focus on pragmatics.

Zina Saadi’s contribution entitled ‘Orthographic unicode variations in Arabic: A case study of character occurrences in news corpora’ examines the problem caused by writers of Arabic who choose different Unicode characters to represent a particular Arabic letter, and the impact of this problem on the field of natural language processing. After demonstrating that there are three types of orthographic variations in Arabic Unicode, she calls for normalizing such variations in processed texts to reduce dictionary lookup errors.

In ‘Toward an LFG account of agreement mismatches of numerals within Arabic NPs’ Kamel Elsaadany adopts a lexical functional grammar approach in his investigation and supports the implementation of the INDEX versus CONCORD analysis over the two-tier approach in accounting for agreement mismatches in Standard Arabic noun phrases that contain numerals.

In ‘A text-pragmatic approach to moot questions in Arabic’ Reda Mahmoud analyzes a corpus of more than 400 moot questions collected from thirty-six arguments that took place on Arabic television programs. Mahmoud examines syntactic, lexical, and pragmatic features of these moot questions and concludes that the moderator uses them to stimulate more debate between the two participants on the show.

Mustapha Mughazy’s ‘The pragmatics of denial: An information structure analysis of so-called ‘emphatic negation’ in Egyptian Arabic’ argues that emphatic negation is a pragmatic feature for denial in contrast to plain negation in Egyptian Arabic.

Jonathan Owens and Trent Rockwood’s ‘Yaʕni: What it (really) means’ examines the contextual meanings of the Arabic discourse marker yaʕni in a fairly large corpus of data to determine what it actually means in usage. The authors conclude that the meaning of yaʕni resides in its discourse organizing function.

In ‘Citations in Arabic legal opinion: Iftaa versus qadaa’ Ahmed Fakhry offers a valuable contribution on how cultural, rhetorical, and thought patterns are embedded into Arabic texts through a comparison of the legal language of religious and secular judges in Morocco.

Abderrahmane Zouhir’s ‘Language policy and factors influencing it in some Middle Eastern countries and Morocco’ describes the complex relations between cultural, historical, religious, and political ideologies and language policies in Israel, Lebanon, Turkey, and Morocco. Zouhir argues that identical policies work out differently according to varying forces in each country.

Selim Ben Said’s ‘The perception of Arab-accented speech by American native speakers and non-native speakers from East and South-East Asia’ examines attitudes to accented speech from a sociolinguistic perspective. The author analyzes data on the perception of Arab-accented speech (compared to Latino, East European, and Asian accented English) by native speakers of American English.

Finally, in ‘Linguistic losses in the translation of Arabic literary texts’, Hanada Al-Masri examines a number of short story translations from a semiotic/pragmatic perspective and illustrates the types of losses that occur in the translated text.

Reviewed by Omaima Ayoub, Furqaan Academy

In a dictionary-like format, Silvia Luraghi and Claudia Parodi present an easily accessible reference book that can be used for both self-study and supplementary material in syntax courses. Both linguistics scholars and students will find this book to be an accessibly written summary of the history and development of the field of syntax from the seventeenth century through the present day. However, it does not only outline key syntactic theories and supply definitions of key syntactic terms but also provides a brief account of key thinkers in the field of syntax. Divided into five chapters, the book offers an exhaustive survey of the key syntactic theories, terms, thinkers, and texts that readers will encounter in the linguistic literature.

The introduction offers a brief historical sketch that traces the development of syntactic theory through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and surveys the contemporary theories within the field of syntax. Starting with early schools of syntactic thought such as the grammaire general of Port-Royal, the Prague School, glossematics, and then moving to American structuralism, transformational generative grammar, systemic grammar, functional grammar, and generative semantics, the authors briefly discuss the current approaches to syntax such as cognitive grammar, systemic functional grammar, West Coast functionalism, and the functional-typological approach. L&P conclude their introduction by saying that cognitive grammar and functionalism together provide the most complete theoretical alternative to transformational generative grammar.

In the next two chapters, ‘Key theories’ and ‘Key thinkers’, L&P offer more details about these theories. Alphabetically—not chronologically—ordered, ‘Key theories’ briefly outlines twenty six syntactic theories through the use of tables, diagrams, trees, and examples in English as well as several other languages (accompanied by word-for-word translations and grammatical glosses). Some of the theories included in this chapter are: case grammar, dependency grammar, the minimalist program, and optimality theory. The chapter on ‘Key thinkers’ provides profiles of pioneer linguists in both historical and contemporary theories of syntax, including Leonard Bloomfield, Noam Chomsky, Joseph Greenberg, Michael Halliday, and George Lakoff. Each entry in this chapter concludes with a list of relevant texts intended for further reading.

‘Key Terms’, which occupies over half of the book’s pages, offers a comprehensive survey of 250 key terms that are currently being used in syntax, including clitic, auxiliary, anaphora, oblique, modification, wh-movement, dislocation, ellipsis, node, voice, and so on. Once again, these terms are alphabetically ordered and illustrated by tables, diagrams, trees, and examples in English as well as several other languages (and are also accompanied by word-for-word translations and grammatical glosses). The complicated terms covered in this chapter are presented with an accessible approach that should appeal to both scholars and students within the field of linguistics. The book concludes with a list of key readings that is intended to direct readers towards further study.

Overall, Key terms in syntax and syntactic theory is a valuable contribution to readers interested in linguistics in general and syntax in particular.

Reviewed by Omaima Ayoub, Furqaan Academy

Advanced media Arabic is a textbook to be used in advanced Arabic as a second language courses. Through its extensive use of authentic Arabic media materials, it will help learners to sharpen their reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills, with a focus on analytical and translation skills. By introducing recent authentic texts and audio files, this textbook not only eliminates the need for any auxiliary material but also enables advanced learners of Arabic to learn about the Arab world through the lens of the Arabic media. Thus, students are able to enhance their knowledge of Arabic language and culture in addition to their critical thinking and language learning skills.

This textbook is organized into ten modules: ‘Diplomacy’, ‘Elections’, ‘Violence and anarchy’, ‘War and military action’, ‘Economy’, ‘Law and order’, ‘Trade and industry’, ‘Natural disasters’, ‘War on terrorism’, and ‘Arabic TV extracts’. Each module includes reading texts, vocabulary lists, comprehension questions, examples of language in context, and discussion and debate prompts as well as writing, listening, and translation exercises. Within each module, students are provided with a variety of drills and exercises that are intended to develop confidence in practicing basic language skills thus promoting mastery of Arabic media language.

Divided into a number of smaller units, each module offers learners a glossary for each media text as well as a supplementary glossary at the end of the book. These glossaries should prove to be invaluable in expanding learners’ word repertoires. Moreover, learners’ vocabulary building skills can be polished through the multiple translation and writing exercises provided with each text. Similarly, students’ speaking skills can be enhanced by the discussion and debate prompts that allow an examination of current affairs. In this way, this textbook meets the current call for a closer look into the troubled area of the Middle East. Additionally, intensive 60-minute listening materials from prominent Arabic channels (e.g. BBC Arabic, Aljazeera) are made available for free to teachers and students on the website of Georgetown University Press. These up-to-date authentic materials are intended to familiarize students with Arabic talk shows and the latest news items.

Advanced media Arabic is a valuable textbook that provides advanced learners of Arabic as a second language with a wide array of authentic media Arabic texts and audio files that should not only educate learners about the Arab world media but also enhance their Arabic reading, writing, speaking, and listening skills.

Reviewed by Louisa Buckingham, Sabanci University Writing Center, Turkey

This volume is a compilation of six papers originally published in the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics in 2006, which had been presented previously at the conference Teaching and Language Corpora in Spain in 2004. These papers cover a diverse field of spoken and written language, with a preponderance of academic language and newspaper language corpora.

In the first paper, John Morely shows in his newspaper corpus study how lexical cohesion can help structure discourse. He begins by illustrating how headlines can indicate lexical fields—and occasionally even the argumentation—that the following article will contain. He then moves on to lexical phrases in the body of the text, such as in theory and in the past, and illustrates how these phrases function as discourse markers, or predictors, providing potentially useful clues to the reader regarding how the text will unfold.

Hilary Nesi and Helen Basturkmen examine how the use of four-word lexical bundles (e.g. what I want to, a little bit of, in terms of the) in university lectures differs from other registers. The authors discuss their contribution to discourse cohesion and illustrate the discourse signaling role these bundles play in lectures. While it may be true, as the authors maintain, that these bundles constitute features that may warrant greater attention in didactic materials, it is questionable as to whether learners are necessarily likely to be without implicit knowledge of the function of such bundles. Allowing for cross-linguistic differences, learners arguably may well transfer their comprehension of such structures from other languages they may use. Nevertheless, much is still to be learned with regard to how learners identify and process such bundles.

Martin Warren investigates the communicative role of prominence using a spoken corpus of job placement interviews. His analysis reveals that the usual prominence given to lexical items may on occasion be transferred to function words in certain contexts of interaction, highlighting the context-dependent nature of prominence. Winnie Cheng discusses a corpus-driven approach to describing lexical items. By looking at patterns of coselection in the most frequently occurring words in a corpus of speeches relating to the SARS crisis, she demonstrates the dynamic and genre-specific nature of semantic prosody.

Using a written corpus of second language learning students’ texts, John Flowerdew demonstrates how signaling (or shell) nouns contribute to textual coherence. He also shows that students who made accurate use of such nouns tended to achieve a higher grade on their papers. The examples of student work illuminate the problems second language learning writers have in grappling with this means of discourse signaling in complex sentences. Finally, Michaela Mahlberg reflects on the interface between lexical and grammatical cohesion and how cohesion may be approached in the context of classroom language teaching.

The studies in this text support the application of corpus-driven research to language acquisition contexts. The broad selection of topics and the variety of corpora used in the studies constitute an additional feature of interest. It is a text that will respond to the needs of postgraduate students and scholars.

Reviewed by Douglas C. Walker, University of Calgary

This detailed study, an extensive revision of Martin Elsig’s Hamburg doctoral dissertation, is a welcome addition to the burgeoning literature on both historical sociolinguistics and syntactic variation. It applies the tools of variable rule analysis to the extensive corpus of material available on the French interrogative system, focusing on nineteenth and twentieth century Quebec French, supplemented by data from late Middle and Classical French literature.

French interrogatives, both yes/no- and wh-questions, provide a complex set of variables for analysis in the direct question domain—for example, pronominal inversion; simple, free/stylistic, and complex inversion; intonation questions; grammaticalized markers (e.g. est-ce-que, –ti/tu); wh-fronting; and wh–in situ). In addition to their social conditioning, these variables show both diachronic and geographic diversity. Therefore, the Quebec data, drawn from the extensive records in the Ottawa Sociolinguistics Laboratory (led by Shana Poplack), can be appropriately compared to the data from the Hamburg’s Research Centre on Multilingualism (led by Jurgen Meisel) on the syntactic aspects of change in Romance languages. E is thus able to supplement work on European French with synchronic studies of oral data from two centuries of data from Quebec and insert these results into a historical context encompassing roughly five centuries of documentation.

After a detailed introduction (1–12), an ‘Overview of the literature’ (13–32) precedes chapters on ‘Data and methods’ (33–72), ‘Results’ (73–164), and an ‘Interpretation and discussion of results’ (165–260). A conclusion (261–66), a list of ‘Literary texts consulted’, references, and an index close the book. The results themselves are of considerable interest, investigating both regionally and historically such factors as subject identity, verb identity, frequency and length, tense and mood, style, and social category as affecting both yes/no- and wh-questions. Among other results, the reduction in inversion and the increase in intonation as means of question formation are notable.

The heart of this study, however, lies in the interpretation and discussion, in which the results of the extensive empirical investigations are brought to bear on questions of syntactic theory. Here, there is an analysis of the interrogative system of colloquial Quebec French (from the extensive corpora in the Ottawa Sociolinguistics Laboratory), which includes interesting and extensive discussions of the morphological—rather than syntactic—status of pronominal clitics and of the characteristic Québécois question marker –tu (including the latter’s progressive replacing of intonation questions in Quebec). Then follow reviews of est-ce que questions and of the TP (inflectional projection) as the locus for checking the interrogative feature, which leads to a detailed historical review of interrogative syntax from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, a time during which unmarked subject-verb inversion eventually became the exception in the modern vernacular. Brief comments on the contemporary standard language and on Old French interrogatives conclude the chapter.

Grammatical variation across space and time: The French interrogative system provides a detailed and sophisticated syntactic, historical, and sociolinguistic analysis of a well-documented, complex, and highly variable domain. It shows the benefits of bringing variationist sociolinguistic analyses to bear on current matters of syntactic theory and is a welcome contribution to the literature on both French syntax and syntactic variation.

Reviewed by Louisa Buckingham, Sabanci University Writing Center, Turkey

This book is the second part of a two-volume collection of papers from the 2007 University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee symposium on formulaic language. Each volume consists of three sections: acquisition and loss, psychological reality, and functional explanations. The first section examines the acquisition of phraseology from a first language (L1) and a second language (L2) perspective (in the latter case, by both beginning and advanced learners) with data collected from written and spoken language. Not limited to English, this section includes chapters on the acquisition of Japanese as a L1 and a L2. The breath of the coverage is surely one of its strengths. Several of the studies suggest that formulaic language is the starting point of L1 acquisition and that, because it is learned in chunks, formulaic language is only analyzed after it is acquired. For L2 learners, acquisition is hindered by difficulties that include learners’ relatively low level of exposure to target expressions and the potential variation of the form of formulaic expressions. Some of the findings confirm that advanced language learners make greater use of formulaic language than low level learners.

Two studies address the psychological reality of formulaic language. The first study challenges the belief that function words intrinsically have a lower saliency than content words. Focusing specifically on verb plus particle combinations, this study concludes that native speakers’ detection of a particle depends on the rate of the frequency of the combination and suggests explanations for the surprisingly higher saliency accorded to particles of moderate frequency. The second study examines the effect of semantic prosody on the processing of collocations by using an affective priming task.

The final section comprises studies of a rhetorical nature on both particular word combinations as well as more discursive phrases. The first paper examines the increased use of the rhetorical functions, such as this paper argues, in scholarly writing in the humanities. It is a topic that invites reflection on the rhetorical functions by other commonly used reporting phrases. Languages other than English are also included in this section, such as a study on Khmer’s use of reduplication compounds and a study on Thai formulaic expressions that specifically help the speaker manage time pressures when formulating ideas.

This book, along with its accompanying first volume, has made a broad range of studies on formulaic language accessible in a very attractive publication that is relevant to both postgraduate students and other scholars. Although some studies confirm or extend findings from previous research, several papers consider the importance of formulaic language from perspectives less commonly encountered in the literature.

Reviewed by Louisa Buckingham, Sabanci University Writing Center, Turkey

This monograph investigates language change and language evolution that occurs during periods of contact between speakers of Spanish or Portuguese as a second language and speakers of other languages in Latin America and in Europe. Changes to syntactic, lexical, and phonetic features of both languages are discussed. The book provides an overview of issues involved in language contact and change, looking primarily at naturalized language learning of colonized peoples and immigrants, while also providing an introduction into Spanish and Portuguese migration history. Ch. 1 positions this study within the framework of the author’s understanding of the processes involved in language acquisition, language borrowing, and language shift through language contact. In Ch. 2, Joseph Clancy Clements provides an overview of the historical emergence of Spanish and Portuguese on the Iberian Peninsula since the Roman times and surveys the linguistic shifts made in the Celtic substrate languages due to interaction with Latin in the centuries leading up to the Moorish invasion in 711.

In Ch. 3, C describes the fascinating and perhaps under-appreciated case of the incorporation of African slaves into both rural and urban Portugal in the fifteenth century. He discusses elements of African-Portuguese as portrayed in the literature of the period and finds similarities in this variety with other learner or restructured varieties that are acquired naturalistically (discussed later in this book). C goes on to discuss Portuguese-based creoles spoken in Africa and Asia, paying particular attention to the influence of the substrate on the development of certain markers. Ch. 4 is dedicated to a discussion of whether a stable pidgin or a creole existed in Cuba in the nineteenth century, based primarily on information gained from the correspondence of two contemporary scholars.

Ch. 5 considers the language spoken by Chinese indentured laborers, or coolies, to Cuba in the nineteenth century. Although the short thirty-year period of shipping laborers was insufficient to foster the development of a pidgin, this language variety displayed the common features of a basic variety of naturalistically learned Spanish. Chinese immigrant Spanish in the twentieth century, discussed in the following chapter on the basis of limited data provided by two informants, indicates that the acquisition processes in the formation of a pidgin is not wholly unlike those displayed by untutored second language learners.

Ch. 7 considers the situation of language contact between Spanish and Andean languages, in particular Quechua, from the conquistador and early colonization period. Despite the strong presence of Quechua linguistic features in Andean Spanish, C suggests that, due to the negative evaluation of these nonstandard features, they do not contribute towards group identity. This contrasts with the findings from the final chapter in the volume on Barranquenho, the dialect spoken in the Spanish-Portuguese border area of Barancos. C discusses issues of language prestige in the area, noting again the importance of sociopolitical factors in determining the higher prestige of Castilian Spanish over both Portuguese and Barranqueño but also commenting that linguistic identity has contributed to Barranqueño’s maintenance.

C makes ample use of examples from the languages under analysis, which appear with an English translation. This is not only a fascinating reader but is also an unusual compilation of studies, which enables a look at aspects of Spanish and Portuguese colonial expansion from a linguistic perspective. For students of Spanish and Portuguese linguistics, this work will provide a refreshing and unusual overview of the socio-political background of varieties of learner Spanish through history.

Reviewed by Kanavillil Rajagopalan, State University at Campinas, Brazil

‘Language lends itself to humor’ (x) says Barry Blake in his introduction to this book. It does so because of the pervasiveness of vagueness and the existence of ambiguities of all sorts. Humor often results from ambiguities, whether used deliberately or occurring inadvertently, as when someone says I am a baker because I knead the dough, or a newspaper headline says Killer sentenced to die twice, or in an eye witness report such as I saw a man eating a pizza and a dog.

But, says B, ‘language play is part of normal language use’ (viii) and ‘exploiting the humorous possibilities in language obviously provides entertainment’ (viii). However, joking is not just a light-hearted pastime, insofar as it is a way of dealing with the vicissitudes of life, there is also a serious, indeed a therapeutic, aspect to it.

The book is presented in twelve chapters, of varying lengths generally ranging from ten to twenty pages each. The shortest chapter, Ch. 12, is barely three pages long. Ch. 1 is introductory and is titled ‘The nature of humor’. It addresses such phenomena as grammatical ambiguities, transpositions, style mixtures, dashing of expectations, clever connections, and ‘logic or lack thereof’ (9). Ch. 2 is about the kinds of topics that people joke about, and Ch. 3 distinguishes between professional and amateur humor.

Chs. 4, 5, and 6 deal with different places in an utterance in which humor may be located. Ch. 4 focuses on the lexicon, while Ch. 5 discusses how puns work and how they serve as ‘the most common basis for humor’ (68). Ch. 6 concentrates on grammatical ambiguities, and how these ambiguities are frequently exploited in different parts of speech as well as for the purpose of occasioning humor.

Ch. 7 takes a closer look at different types of humor, distinguished on the basis of common and recurring themes—for instance, blonde jokes, cannibal jokes, dumb jokes, graffiti, oxymora, stickers, Tom Swifties, Wellerisms, and so forth. Ch. 8 is on wit, and an attempt is made to distinguish wit from humor, although B admits that ‘the difference is certainly not clear-cut’ (119). Ch. 9 looks at humor from an essentially Gricean perspective (without mentioning the name of the philosopher even in passing!) and analyzes some jokes by invoking the principle of cooperation (or deliberate flouting of it).

Ch. 10 is devoted to an analysis of some jokes arising out of ‘faulty knowledge of language’ (121), a broad category that subsumes such varied phenomena as slips of tongue, mispronunciation, accents and lisps, malapropisms, misspellings, mispunctuations, and even ‘logic or lack thereof’ (9). Ch. 11 looks at how rhymes are used for humorous ends in children’s and adult verses, limericks, nursery rhymes, and clerihews. This book is rounded off with a brief chapter titled ‘Beyond a joke’, in which B returns to the theme of how pervasive humor is in language and how humor is a sure sign that there is more to language than communication and the exchange of information.

Reviewed by Louisa Buckingham, Sabanci University Writing Center, Turkey

This monograph investigates the development of certain features of scientific writing in texts that date from Geoffrey Chaucer’s Treatise on the astrolabe (fourteenth century) through to a corpus of scientific articles from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, which range from 1700–1980. This study illustrates diachronic language change and how the context in which scientific writing is produced has shaped the genre’s stylistic features. David Banks conducts his study within the theoretical framework of systemic functional linguistics, providing an accessible introduction to aspects of the framework in the introduction.

B’s analysis and discussion of texts from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century form the background of the systematic study then undertaken of scientific articles from the Philosophical Transactions. Whereas B limits himself in his linguistic analysis of Chaucer’s Treatise (in Ch. 1) to the use of the passive, personal pronouns, and the nominalization of processes, his study of the corpus of texts compiled from the Philosophical Transactions also includes thematic structure and, briefly, interpersonal and intertextual elements.

B’s analysis of scientific articles is accompanied by plentiful excerpts, both to illustrate examples of specific constructions and to portray the respective author’s writing style. In his survey of scientific writing in Ch. 2 ‘Between Chaucer and Newton’, B notes the evolution that the biological sciences have undergone from being purely descriptive (until well into the nineteenth-century) to becoming more analytical. In contrast, the experimental orientation of the harder sciences has propelled this genre from early on to employ a wide variety of discourse styles to discuss research methods and outcomes.

The main body of B’s study is found from Ch. 4 onwards, in which B analyses the evolution of certain features of scientific writing. His corpus comprises thirty articles from the physical and biological sciences, selected at twenty-year intervals from 1700–1980. B tracks the changing levels of frequency in the use of the passive in the two subdisciplines, noting the relationship between the passive and mental and material processes as well as the use of particular pronouns. Additionally, B provides a quantitative analysis for the use of nominalization and thematic structure, although, the reader might wish for more discussion on how these results may relate to a teaching context (or other fields of applied linguistics).

The final chapter provides a brief but entertaining discussion on various interpersonal elements, such as references to the ancients and inclusions of correspondence, praise, reference to, or criticism of colleagues and their work. As the use of citations and references to other authors in a writer’s scholarly work has received some attention in recent research on academic writing, further analysis of trends noted in this section might be welcomed.

Apart from its obvious relevance to those involved in the study of scholarly writing from a diachronic perspective, this text (or parts thereof) may also be met with interest by scientists interested in the evolution of the written scientific genre.