Reviewed by Elly van Gelderen, Arizona State University

As a linguist who teaches linguistics and syntax classes that graduate students in applied linguistics and English language teaching often take, I was looking for a state-of-the-art volume to recommend to my students. This volume admirably fills that need. One of its valuable features is that it includes discussions of many languages besides English (which of course remains the most widely taught language).

The book contains thirty-nine chapters divided into eight parts. After Michael Long’s overview in Part 1, Part 2, ‘Social, political, and educational contexts of language teaching’, includes articles on the sociolinguistics of bi- and multilingual situations and issues such as diversity, language variation, planning and first language maintenance, Kachru’s circles, democracy, and access for all. Part 3, ‘Psycholinguistic underpinnings of language learning’, has five chapters, two of which are noteworthy. Alan Beretta’s ‘The language-learning brain’ (65–80) is a sensible call for neurolinguists to turn from descriptions based on thousands of imaging studies and think more theoretically about the relation between neurology and linguistics. Lourdes Ortega’s ‘Sequences and processes in language learning’ (81–105) provides a useful overview of the systematic stages of an interlanguage.

Part 4, ‘Program design’, contains articles on the bilingual classroom, immersion, heritage learners, specific purpose programs, study abroad programs, less commonly taught languages, and the acquisition of third languages. Part 5, ‘Course design and materials writing’, is very practical. James Dean Brown’s ‘Foreign and second language needs analysis’ (269–93) explains what needs analysis is and how to do it. Peter Robinson’s chapter on syllabus design (294–310) provides some historical background and a discussion of different syllabi (structural, lexical, skill, and task). In ‘Advances in materials design’ (311–26) Alan Waters explains the enormity of such tasks as authenticity in textbooks, and in ‘Corpora in language teaching’ (327–50) John Flowerdew argues that the initially slow application of corpus linguistics to the classroom has been beneficial to current practice.

Part 6, ‘Teaching and testing’, is the longest section, with thirteen chapters comprising 375 pages. Many chapters discuss the pendulum swings between grammar-based and communication-based teaching. After a methodological overview, the first four chapters examine the various language skills separately, listening, speaking, reading, and writing, followed by Keiko Koda’s ‘Learning to read in new writing systems’ (463–85). Other chapters discuss teaching and testing grammar (Diane Larsen-Freeman), vocabulary (Paul Nation and Teresa Chung), and pragmatics (Carsten Roever), among other topics. Part 7 on teacher education and Part 8, ‘Assessing and evaluating instruction’, complete the volume with, among other issues, a discussion of the proper extent to which acquisition theory should be incorporated in classroom practice.

Overall I found that the current volume compares favorably with the two other handbooks in this series that I have reviewed in being helpful to beginning applied linguistics graduate students. It covers wide ground in a very user-friendly fashion.

Reviewed by Angela Tan, University of California, Los Angeles

In Discourse and context, Teun van Dijk argues that it is the perception and definition of communicative situations by the discourse participants that shapes the trajectory of the discourse, rather than the social situation itself. He proposes a sociocognitive approach to discourse and introduces the theoretical concept of context models, in which contexts are mental models of everyday experiences. Throughout the book, the author exemplifies his case using the debate on Iraq in the British House of Commons in 2003.

Ch. 1 gives an overview of the various definitions of context, from linguistics to discourse studies to sociology and psychology. The author proposes a multidisciplinary outlook for the definition of context, in which these fields are interlinked rather than estranged. This chapter also underlines the linguistic, sociolinguistic, and cognitive aspects of context.

Ch. 2 discusses the contribution of systemic functional linguistics (SFL) to the study of contexts as well as its shortcomings, such as the dearth of interest in cognition and a narrow social theory of language. By providing a history of the study of contexts from SFL, this chapter also discusses how the early works of SFL by Bronislaw Malinowski, JR Firth, and Michael Halliday are chiefly concerned with the context of culture. However, since the context of culture is usually described as the general context for language as a system, it is an abstract and analytical category that disregards the importance of the members’ perspective. This chapter concludes with a look at how later SFL linguists, like James Martin and Michael Gregory, attempt to address these pitfalls as well as a summary of the author’s critique of the SFL approach.

Ch. 3 is the theoretical center of the book and introduces the notion of context models. Context models apply specifically to verbal communication: they organize how interlocutors adapt their talk to the ongoing communicative situation. An introduction to the (paradoxical) concept of mental models is provided: while mental models are subjective (e.g. contingent on each participant’s personal history, opinions, and emotions), they are also subjected to objective constraints (e.g. the perception of physical properties). Mental models can be seen as general everyday knowledge that governs everyday life, and yet they are also dynamic and ever-changing with experience. This chapter posits that all talk is subject to the properties of the context model. It also introduces the K-device, which determines the expression (or lack thereof) of knowledge in the discourse. Its input is the present knowledge of the speaker, and it calculates how much knowledge is already shared by the participants, taking into account members’ categories and spatial-temporality.

Ch. 4 explores the social and cultural constraints on the formation, acquisition, and deployment of context models and how social situation, context, and discourse are related. This chapter also discusses the notions of variation, register, style, and genre including perspectives from the microapproaches of grammar and meaning to the superstructures of talk-in-interaction and argumentation. Ch. 5 concludes the author’s argument and summarizes his claims.

Discourse and context is not only a comprehensive resource for scholars from various fields who are interested in the study of discourse and contexts, it also provides a refreshing perspective to the examination of context in relation to discourse. Written in a clear and accessible style, its extensive bibliography will also be extremely helpful to students and researchers.

Reviewed by Michael W. Morgan, Mumbai, India

Marathi, the official language of the state of Maharashtra, ranks numerically fourth in India and fifteenth in the world, but until relatively recently it lacked a comprehensive reference grammar in English. This volume is the second such grammar.

Ch. 1, ‘Introduction’ (1–8), gives a brief description of the language and its speakers, a history of Marathi literature and of previous treatments of Marathi grammar, and a brief introduction to the Marathi script. Ch. 2, ‘Sound system’ (9–37), covers Marathi phonology, including phonotactics, syllable structure, accent and accent rules, and a range of phonological processes, all accompanied by extensive examples. The chapter closes with a presentation of the five main intonation patterns.

Ch. 3, ‘Morphology’ (39–127), discusses noun, pronoun, adjective, and verb inflection, as well as all the non-inflecting word classes. Although this chapter deals with morphology, most sections include copious example sentences that demonstrate the functions of the forms introduced. Ch. 4, ‘Word formation’ (129–77), proceeds with an exhaustive treatment of derivational morphology and word formation, which is extremely productive in Marathi, involving both prefixes and suffixes. Roots and affixes alike derive from several source languages: Sanskrit, Perso-Arabic, and even English. The discussion continues with a treatment of compounds and reduplication, intensifiers, and finally diminutives and cranberry morphemes, of which Marathi has an extensive inventory.

The next six chapters discuss Marathi syntax. Ch. 5, ‘Subject and agreement’ (179–93), presents two prototypical morphosyntactic features: ergative and dative subject constructions, both South Asian areal features. Marathi manifests typical Indic split-ergative agreement: nominative-accusative marking and subject agreement are used with intransitive and non-perfective transitive verbs, while ergative marking and patient agreement with perfective transitives. In addition, obligative-desiderative forms show ergative patterning for both transitives and intransitives. Non-third person pronouns show a mixed agreement pattern, ergative in verb agreement and nominative-accusative in case marking. Dative subject constructions typically occur with psychological (experiencer) subject predicates. Important grammatical properties of ergative and dative subject constructions, e.g. control (of reflexives, in transitive passive verbs, and with relative participials), are also examined. This chapter concludes with a presentation of direct and indirect object marking.

Ch. 6, ‘Simple sentences’ (195–207), Ch. 7, ‘Complex sentences’ (209–30), and Ch. 8, ‘Compound sentences’ (231–40), discuss word order, simple sentence types and structures, complement clauses and correlative structures, and coordination. Ch. 9, ‘Interrogative sentences’ (241–48), discusses questions, including those with reduplicated and multiple interrogative words. Ch. 10, ‘Negation’ (249–62), examines negative structures.

Ch. 11, ‘Lexical anaphors and pronouns’ (263–74), the final chapter of the grammar proper, deals with a variety of pronominal phenomena of theoretical interest, e.g. reflexives, reciprocals, and joint vs. disjoint reference of personal pronouns.

Ch. 12, ‘Sample texts’ (275–86), presents a wide range of written and spoken Standard Marathi texts. Appendix A, ‘The language of women: A historical perspective’ (287–90), is a short essay by a feminist writer, and Appendix B, ‘Acquisition of Marathi: A case study’ (291–325), discusses a longitudinal study of L1 acquisition with detailed data.

Although concerned with modern Standard Marathi, occasional reference is made to dialectal and archaic variants (e.g. in poetry). The Marathi writing system is introduced, but all examples are given only in transcription.

Reviewed by William O. Hendricks, Portland, OR

Widespread agreement exists that one critical component of a narrative text is the plot, which progresses from a beginning through a middle to an end. Michael Toolan’s study makes the reasonable assumption that there must be explicit features in the text that guide the reader in this progression. His hope, as laid out in his introductory chapter (1–13), is that corpus linguistic methods will make possible a semiautomatic identification of those features in a few representative twentieth century short stories. Ch. 2 (15–30) provides some background to T’s approach as well as a discussion of some methodological issues.

Chs. 3 (31–52) and 4 (53–76) focus primarily on James Joyce’s story “Two Gallants”. T uses the WordSmith Tools Keywords procedure to identify words that are disproportionately frequent, compared to a 500,000 word corpus of twentieth century fiction by major British and North American authors. The top keyword in the story is the name Corley. T isolates fifty-one sentences in the story containing this name; this abridgment makes evident, to a limited degree, the progression of the story. T concludes that such top keyword sentences are only one component of the textual features that signal progression.

In Chs. 5 (77–96) and 6 (97–112), T pursues a somewhat different approach to Alice Munro’s “The Love of a Good Woman”, which might more appropriately be termed a novella since it is 25,000 words long. One of several tactics T tries is dividing the text into twenty-six subsections and identifying the keywords that occur in each section. He then applies WordSmith’s Plotlinks to the keywords of each section to determine the number of occurrences of each keyword with other keywords. Sentences in which at least four different keywords cooccur are deemed especially relevant to story progression. Another tactic is to attend to the initial clauses in narrative paragraphs. T concludes that a focus on just these linguistic features is too narrow.

Chs. 7 (113–34) and 8 (135–64) present a multifactor model of narrative progression. Eight linguistic features, or parameters, are deemed to contribute to narrative progression. These include features already examined in the earlier chapters as well as (i) free indirect representation of a character’s thought, (ii) direct speech that has a transactional function, (iii) negation-carrying clauses, and (iv) mental process verbs that have a proposition as a complement.

Ch. 9 (165–88) deals with textual features that contribute to suspense and surprise. In the final chapter (189–200), T offers his own evaluation of his attempt to apply corpus analytic methods to the study of narrative progression. He recognizes that his corpus-based approach is still at a very early stage, and throughout this book he has been candid about shortcomings in his analyses. Nevertheless, T expresses optimism that future work will be fruitful since he sees no intrinsic defect in his method.

I remain unconvinced that corpus analytic methods represent the best approach for the analysis of narrative progression. T observes that these methods necessarily focus on textually explicit features rather than more implicit ones. However, plot structure can be fully uncovered only via inferences from what is explicitly stated. T occasionally makes reference to Gricean implicatures, but these references are insufficient. Only a developed system of textual inferences will make clear what explicit textual features need to be attended to.

Reviewed by Karen Steffen Chung, National Taiwan University

Until fairly recently, Georgian language learning materials were hard to come by. The few volumes available tended to be short, inadequate, dense, overly academic, and error-prone; those that were not in Georgian or Russian were in problematic English or were not easily available outside of Georgia. During the past decade and a half, however, LINCOM Europa has published several volumes on Caucasian languages. Tamar Makharoblidze’s Basic Georgian, the first in the LINCOM practical language courses series, is one of the few introductory Georgian texts available in the West.

The volume opens with background material on Georgia and the Georgian language of the type commonly found in Georgian tourist literature. There are twenty-eight lessons consisting of a list of new vocabulary in Georgian script with English translations, a list of phrases, e.g. ‘He shouldn’t do this’, a detailed section on grammar, and a reading text, finished off by translation and other exercises.

One strength of this book is that the lessons are carefully graded in difficulty so beginners can work through them smoothly, without sudden leaps to material too difficult to handle. The vocabulary featured in the clearly-written texts is useful, e.g. family relationships, foods, colors, furniture, animals, the seasons, and common adjectives. There are four pages of common phrases in table form in the back of the book, but no glossary or index.

The book calls for improvement in two areas. First, it would be helpful to have an introduction outlining the work and how to use it. Second, the English in the instructions, translations, and exercises should be carefully edited and corrected. A typical English translation: ‘I wish I paint as you are painting’ (153). In addition, the volume is rather expensive, but that is perhaps to be expected of relatively low-circulation academic texts.

A useful comparison can be made between this book and another of the same title by Nana Danelia published by Universali (Tbilisi, 2006). Danelias work does have an introduction on how to use the book and English explanations and translations of the vocabulary. It uses less English overall than M’s volume, in part because there are no English-to-Georgian translation exercises. There is an appendix of vocabulary organized by topic. No mistakes in the English were spotted. It is not, however, easily available outside of Georgia.

Though there is now considerably more information on Georgian available than two decades ago, there is not enough yet that one can reject any book for minor flaws in format or English. This book is thus a valuable addition to the growing body of Georgian textbooks. One hopes the publishers will revise it by adding an introduction and glossary, to increase its value and utility to learners of this complex and fascinating language.

Reviewed by Laure T. Y. Peem, University of Bayreuth, Germany

How can communication on health issues, especially HIV and AIDS, be carried out efficiently in a culturally diversified country like South Africa? This volume provides a variety of answers to this question from divergent perspectives. The nine chapters investigate strategies for weaving HIV and AIDS interventions into the cultural fabric of given target groups. The contributors come from different research backgrounds (e.g. language studies, psychology, journalism and mass communication, health sciences).

The introductory chapter, ‘Optimizing health communication in South Africa’ by Hans Hoeken and Piet Swanepoel, is an overview of the content of the volume. In ‘Planned development of culturally sensitive health promotion programs: An intervention mapping approach’, Madelief G. B. C. Bertens, Herman P. Schaalma, Kay Bartholomew, and Bart van den Borne present the intervention mapping approach as a fundamental tool for successfully planning health promotion programs likely to match the socio-cultural backgrounds of their target populations. Gary R. Pettey and Richard M. Perloff, in ‘Creating a climate of safer sex: Making efficacious action plausible’, argue that for health campaigns to succeed, there must be adequate information and necessary equipment (e.g. condoms) for the target groups.

Marco Yzer’s ‘The integrative model of behavioral prediction and message-based HIV prevention’ demonstrates the usefulness and applicability of the integrative model of behavioral prediction for the development of culturally sensitive messages to fight HIV in non-Western societies. In ‘Health education in action in Southern Africa: Soul City’, Sue Goldstein, Harriet Perlman, and Caroline Jane Smith analyze the design and implementation of the Soul City model in South Africa and other neighboring countries and show that an ‘edutainment’ (73) and a participatory approach can be effective for sensitization at the individual, the community, and the socio-political levels. Piet Swanepoel, Marije Burger, Anne Loohuis, and Carel Jansen, in ‘Promoting VCT among South African students: Are we missing the message?’, propose guidelines for choosing the content of brochures that will encourage young people to overcome fear and take up voluntary counseling and testing.

In ‘Cultural differences in the perceptions of fear and efficacy in South Africa,’ Carel Jansen, Hans Hoeken, Dineke Ehlers, and Frans van der Slik show that the efficacy of ‘fear appeals’ (108) in health interventions is determined by the perception of fear, which varies from one culture to another. ‘The effect of language style in message-based HIV prevention’ by Elvis Saal, stresses the importance of selecting appropriate language varieties for successful HIV messages. In the concluding chapter, ‘Visual health communication: Why and how do literate and low literate South Africans differ in their understanding of visual health messages?’, Alfon Maes, Karen Foesenek, and Hanneke Hoogwegt demonstrate that consideration of aptitudes and strategies of interpreting health visuals may vary from one target group to the next depending on their respective level of visual literacy. They argue that this variation must be taken into account in the production of more efficient health visuals.

This collection elaborates on pertinent theoretical and methodological frameworks applicable to health communication. It provides remarkable insights for better HIV and AIDS campaigns. Thanks to its multidisciplinary focus and given the variety and the pertinence of the issues, this clearly written and well-illustrated volume will be stimulating for scholars, students, health programs planners or designers as well as those particularly interested in health communication in non-Western cultures.

Reviewed by Nikolai Penner, McMaster University

This volume consists of seventeen articles in five thematic sections selected from presentations at the workshop, Grammatical Changes in Indo-European Languages, held at the Université du Québec à Montréal in August 2007.

Section A contains five articles on gender, animacy, and number. Silvia Luraghi’s paper on the origin of the *-h₂ suffix in Indo-European (IE) is followed by an article on cognitive categories and noun classification by Maria M. Manoliu that examines the reduction from the threefold noun class of Latin tothe twofold system of the Romance languages. Next, Hans H. Hock focuses on the resolution of mixed-gender antecedents through a ‘nearest conjunct’ agreement strategy. Kyongjoon Kwon looks at the development of literacy in Early East Slavic, and argues that the Old Novgorod dialect developed the grammatical category of animacy much earlier than the other Slavic dialects. Finally, Inés Fernández-Ordóñez’s article deals with the way in which pronominal systems can become noun systems, and examines these processes in Western IE varieties in light of the hypotheses of Joseph Greenberg and Greville Corbett.

Section B—concerning definiteness, case, and prepositions—starts with Brigitte Bauer’s paper on strategies of definiteness in Latin. It is followed by Vit Bubenik’s article, which analyzes the Middle Iranian genitival construction in the context of the replacement of morphological case distinctions by an analytic phrasal system. The final paper in this section, by Gag T. T. Haug, is a theory-oriented discussion of the categorical status of ‘place holders’ in Homeric Greek.

Section C consists of four articles on tense/aspect and diathesis. Henning Andresen’s article aims to establish the relative chronology of the grammaticalization of Common Slavic aspect. Next, the paper by Driget Drinka on the *-to-/-no- construction in IE assesses the claim that periphrastic formations can be reconstructed for Proto-Indo-European (PIE). The last two papers in this section, by J. Hewson and Sarah Rose, examine the grammaticalization of Germanic verbal diathesis, and the origin and meaning of the Hittite hi/mi conjugations, respectively.

Section D features four papers on morphosyntactic problems: by Johanna Barðdal and Thórhallur Eythórsson on the origin of the oblique-subject-construction in IE languages, Azam Estaji on the origin of the ezafe construction in Persian, Hakyung Jung on the development of the North Russian be-perfect construction, and Eugenio R. Luján on the process of grammaticalization of *k^wi-/k^wo- relative clauses in PIE.

The fifth section of the collection consists of a paper by Luís Garcia-Ramón examining the reconstruction of inflectional categories in IE.

Dedicated to the memory of Carol F. Justus, the volume is a solid collection of articles in historical linguistics that will appeal to anyone interested in language change and the development of the IE languages.

Reviewed by Haitao Liu, Communication University of China

Language policy and planning frequently involve choices. In bilingual or multilingual situations, people often have to choose between two or more languages. Some of these choices reflect a conscious effort by language managers to control the options. In this book, Bernard Spolsky presents a theory of language management.

In Ch. 1 (1–9), S presents the reasons for a theory of language management and suggests how to develop such a theory.

Ch. 2 is concerned with language management within the family (10–30). Upon the establishment of a family, its members must decide on a certain language variety to be the home language. S maintains that this decision is usually made in accordance with the sociolinguistic ecology inside and outside the home as well as the parents’ beliefs about the best strategy.

Religious language policy is the topic of Ch. 3 (31–52). S notes that religious institutions are often the focus of language conflict. Therefore, the religious impingements, or the religious efforts committed to inflicting such impingements, have a great significance on language, practices, and policies. To develop some general principles, S surveys the language policies, beliefs, and management efforts of several major religions.

Ch. 4 discusses language management in the workplace (53–64). S focuses on employers who manage the language of their employees, suggesting that the perceived value of a language is a major force in driving management efforts to change language practice in the workplace.

Ch. 5 (65–89) focuses on public linguistic space—that is, places that are neither private nor institutional. Public linguistic space may include written material (e.g. public signs, newspapers, magazines, books), spoken content (e.g. announcements, radio, television), or computers and the Internet. S arrives at the conclusion that, although it seems theoretically appealing to treat it as a single domain, in practice it is advisable to observe public linguistic space as many smaller subdomains.

Without doubt, the language policy adopted by an educational system is one of the most powerful forces in language management; therefore, this topic is discussed in Ch. 6 (90–114). S points out that the school domain is probably the ultimate test of a theory of language management.

Ch. 7 (115–28) covers both legal and health institutions because they have many features in common. S contends that the legal and health domains offer classic cases of organized language management and that the solutions for these cases are the result of a complex interplay between the various participants inside and outside of the domains.

Armies, navies, air forces, and other military formations have special communication needs and problems, which are discussed in Ch. 8 (129–43). S argues that the military domain confirms the usefulness of the domain approach and that it is helpful to clarify the complexity introduced when external forces attempt to influence a domain or a domain attempts to affect others.

Ch. 9 (144–80) reviews the roles of and relationship between the local, regional, and national governments in language management. S suggests that an appreciation of language management at the level of the nation-state can be greatly enhanced with an understanding of the international activists and supranational organizations, which are dealt with in Ch. 10, ‘Influencing language management: Language activist groups’, (181–205), and Ch. 11, ‘Managing languages at the supranational level’ (206–24).

Ch. 12, ‘Language managers, language management agencies and academies, and their work’ (225–48), investigates language agencies, which, as active participants in language management, aim to solve long-term communication problems by changing participants or modifying the language.

In the final chapter (249–61), S argues that the construction of a testable predictive theory of language management may encounter extreme difficulties. He concludes this book with two fundamental questions: can language be managed? And if it can, should it be?

Reviewed by Dustin De Felice, University of South Florida

In this volume, Bill VanPatten and Jessica Williams collect introductions to nine theories in second language acquisition (SLA) currently used to explain the acquisition of a linguistic system by the foremost proponents of each theory or model. The text is written with the beginning student in SLA theory and research in mind. Each chapter addresses the following: an overview of the theory, the evidence that is used for the theory, a brief discussion of some of the common misunderstandings held about that theory or model, and an exemplary study employing it. The last area addressed in each chapter comes from a condensed list of phenomena and observations that have been catalogued over the years in numerous studies and texts, presented as a series of discussion points for each approach in Chs. 1 and 2 (1–36).

Within the text, the following theories or models are discussed. In Ch. 3 (37–56), Lydia White discusses the contributions of generative linguistics, and in Ch. 4 (57–76) Kathleen Bardovi-Harlig covers the functional approach. In Ch. 5 (77–96), Nick C. Ellis details the view that SLA is construction-based, rational, exemplar-driven, emergent, and dialectic. In Ch. 6 (97–114), Robert DeKeyser, discusses the skill acquisition theory, while Bill VanPatten handles input processing in Ch. 7 (115–36), and Manfred Pienemann discusses the processability theory in Ch. 8 (137–54). In Ch. 9 (155–74), Susanne E. Carroll details the autonomous induction theory. In Ch. 10 (175–200), Susan M. Gass and Alison Mackey cover input, output, and interaction theories and models. Finally, Ch. 11 (201–24), by James P. Lantolf and Steven L. Thorne, handles socio-cultural theory.

According to Louis Ortega in the concluding chapter (Ch. 12, 225–50), the ten observable phenomena outlined in Ch. 1 can be combined into five central areas that have been the focus of attention for most SLA researchers over the past forty years: the nature of second language knowledge, the nature of interlanguage development, the influence of the first language on the second language, the linguistic environment, and the limits on output, the effects of frequency, and the effects of instruction. The author summarizes the nine theories in terms of the five central areas of attention, and uses figures to illustrate how each theory addresses the observable phenomena.

While this volume might be challenging for a novice reader, students will benefit from such an efficiently organized overview of some of the most important current theories in the SLA field. For the teacher, the text provides an annotated bibliography with suggested further readings, as well as discussion questions and a succinct reference list at the end of each chapter that can provide novice readers the opportunity for further study of seminal as well as current research.

Reveiwed by Omaima Ayoub, Islamic Foundation School

In this book, Peter Sharpe provides an overall picture of language and its mechanisms. By posing a number of key questions, S examines several interesting lines of linguistic inquiry, including the origins of language, whether language is exclusive to humans, why languages change, the variation of language across cultures, Noam Chomsky’s impact on linguistics, how language is used in society, how language produces meaning, how language is represented in the mind, and whether there is a correct way to use language. Each chapter provides examples mostly drawn from Japanese and concludes with a summary, research and discussion questions, and suggestions for further reading.

Ch. 1, ‘What are the origins of language?’, explains several theories (e.g. onomatopoeic, interjective, synergistic) of the origin of language. Ch. 2, ‘Is language exclusive to humans?’, examines the connection between language and consciousness and argues that language is indeed unique to humans, especially when we use it for reasoning. Ch. 3, ‘Why do languages change?’, describes, from a historical linguistics perspective, how language changes with time and the underlying causes behind those changes.

In Ch. 4, ‘How does language vary across cultures?’, S examines language from a cultural-anthropological perspective to explain how language variation is caused by cultural differences. Ch. 5, ‘Where does Noam Chomsky fit into linguistics?’, briefly outlines the pre-Chomskyan era of linguistics and explains how Chomsky’s theory of generative grammar has significantly influenced the direction of linguistics.

In Ch. 6, ‘How scientific can linguistic theory be?’, S considers the main features of scientific inquiry, outlines the main tenets of two theories (Chomsky’s generative grammar and Michael Halliday’s systemic grammar), and identifies the scientific criteria that linguistic theories should meet. Ch. 7, ‘What makes semantics difficult?’, discusses the reasons why semantics has become a complicated subject and examines four approaches to the study of semantics (i.e. reference, sense, context, concept). Ch. 8. ‘From whence the power of symbols?’, examines the symbolic nature of language and the role of symbolism in society. Finally, Ch. 9, ‘How is language represented in the mind?’, probes two cognitive theories of the representation of language in the mind.

Overall, this book offers an accessible and attractive introduction to linguistics that will prove invaluable for both linguistics students and inquisitive readers.