{"id":1300,"date":"2010-12-26T10:00:34","date_gmt":"2010-12-26T08:00:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/elanguage.net\/blogs\/booknotices\/?p=1300"},"modified":"2010-12-20T12:28:38","modified_gmt":"2010-12-20T10:28:38","slug":"scottish-gaelic-speech-and-writing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/?p=1300","title":{"rendered":"Scottish Gaelic speech and writing"},"content":{"rendered":"
Scottish Gaelic speech and writing:<\/strong> Register variation in an endangered language. By William Lamb<\/strong>. (Belfast studies in language, culture and politics, 16) Belfast: Cl\u00f3 Ollscoil na Banr\u00edona [Queen\u2019s University Belfast], 2008. Pp. 330. ISBN9780853898955. $54.45.<\/div>\n

Reviewed by Thomas Stewart<\/strong><\/a>, University of Louisville<\/em><\/p>\n

In this book, William Lamb has set himself at least two ambitious goals: presenting Scottish Gaelic (SG) both structurally and sociolinguistically, while collecting, tagging, and statistically characterizing a representative corpus of the language. The book constitutes a valuable contribution on each of these counts.<\/p>\n

In Ch. 1 \u2018Introduction\u2019 (17\u201322), L provides a targeted overview of register research, including the question of whether endangered languages tend toward reduced stylistic variation (a point that L concludes need not be true). Ch. 2 \u2018Spoken and written registers and Scottish Gaelic\u2019 (23\u201338) fleshes out the relationship between corpus linguistics and the empirical description of putative registers\u2014drawing especially upon the work of Douglas Biber (Variation Across Speech and Writing<\/em>, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988)\u2014and provides a survey of the few previously published studies on SG registers. Ch. 3 \u2018Scottish Gaelic sociolinguistics\u2019 (39\u201351) presents a concise characterization of modern SG\u2019s status as a living language today, with attention to its limited geographical distribution, its generational decline, and its history of limited outlets in print publication.<\/p>\n

Ch. 4 \u2018Methodology\u2019 (52\u201372) stands as the core of the book. In this chapter, general and language-specific descriptive issues are addressed, as is the rationale for L\u2019s choice of four spoken registers (conversation, radio interview, sports broadcast, and traditional narrative) and four written registers (academic prose, fiction, popular writing, and radio news scripts) for inclusion in his corpus (81,677 words in all; see also Appendix 2 \u2018List of texts in corpus\u2019). In order to identify trends in the corpus, significant text-tagging was undertaken, addressing multiple levels of linguistic structure (see also Appendix 3 \u2018Full tag set\u2019). L takes special care in the exposition of statistical tests and computational techniques, which are well explained and motivated. \u00a0Appendix 1 \u2018A descriptive grammar of Scottish Gaelic\u2019 is also a helpful reference for the reader, not only for this chapter but for the entire book. It consists of a revised SG grammar based on L\u2019s earlier work \u00a0(Scottish Gaelic<\/em>, Munich: LINCOM Europa, 2002),<\/p>\n

Ch. 5 \u2018Information structure and clausal types\u2019 (73\u2013101), Ch. 6 \u2018Morphosyntax and the lexicon\u2019 (102\u201349), and Ch. 7 \u2018Noun phrase grammar and complexity\u2019 (150-\u201371) report the results for patterns of distribution for the various tags within and across the eight source-types. This identification of tag clusters and correlations feeds directly into Ch. 8, which lays out a systematic summary description of the \u2018Profiles of the individual registers\u2019 (172\u201385). Ch. 9 \u2018Conclusions\u2019 (186\u201396) provides not only reflections on the results and on the inductive and deductive methods employed in the process of discerning registers in SG speech and writing, but also clear evidence in support of the conclusion that SG is not stylistically impoverished, despite its endangered circumstances.<\/p>\n

Superb in how it anticipates and supplies what readers may need to know at any given moment, this insightful study of discourse and register is of particular interest to SG and other Celtic language scholars. Additionally, this book serves as a methodological demonstration of corpus linguistic work in dialogue with register theory.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Scottish Gaelic speech and writing: Register variation in an endangered language. By William Lamb. (Belfast studies in language, culture and politics, 16) Belfast: Cl\u00f3 Ollscoil na Banr\u00edona [Queen\u2019s University Belfast], 2008. Pp. 330. ISBN9780853898955. $54.45. Reviewed by Thomas Stewart, University of Louisville In this book, William Lamb has set himself at least two ambitious goals: […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1300"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1300"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1300\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1301,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1300\/revisions\/1301"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1300"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1300"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/journals.linguisticsociety.org\/booknotices\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1300"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}