Reviewed by Ferit Kılıçkaya, Middle East Technical University

This book, divided into four parts, focuses on how to achieve quality in translation. The first part focuses on the relationship between translation quality and translation training. The second part discusses machine translation. The third part addresses translation workflow. The final part deals with legal translation and literary translation.

Following the editors’ brief introduction, the chapter ‘A global rating scale for the summative assessment of pragmatic translation at Master’s level: An attempt to combine academic and professional criteria’, a rating scale designed to investigate the translation of pragmatic texts is described in detail. In the following chapter, ‘Comparing formal translation evaluation and meaning-oriented translation evaluation: Or how QA tools can(not) help’, the authors report on a collaborative project to evaluate whether students’ translations meet the needs of industry standards and compares how formal and meaning-oriented translation evaluations evolve. In ‘Number and gender agreement errors in student translations from Spanish into French’, the authors explain how number and gender agreement errors appear in translations conducted by sophomore students of translation, showing that the most frequent errors were categorized under grammar. The final chapter of the first part, ‘A lexicogrammar approach to checking quality: Looking at one or two cases of comparative translation’, investigates how a lexicogrammar approach can be applied to investigate the quality of a translation, comparing of two equivalent phrases in a French-English translation.

The second part opens with the chapter, ‘A contrastive analysis of MT evaluation techniques’, which analyzes, compares, and evaluates a corpus of source words translated with a rule-based machine translation (Systran 6.0) and a statistical machine system (Language Weaver). The following article, ‘MT evaluation based on post-editing: A proposal’ focuses on a methodological approach to automated quality evaluation of machine translation and compares the ratings with those obtained by human evaluation.

The third part begins with the chapter ‘Quality assurance in the translation workflow: A professional’s testimony’, which presents several quality assurance processes within the translation workflow that can be used in standard translation projects. In the following chapter, ‘A contrastive analysis of five automated QA tools (QA Distiller 6.5.8, Xbench 2.8, ErrorSpy 5.0, SDLTrados 2007 QA Checker 2.0 and SDLX 2007 SP2 QA Check)’, the authors compare and contrast several stand-alone software packages and plugins to carry out automated quality assurance checks, providing detailed charts on each error checked by these tools. The final chapter of this part, ‘Management of translation memory quality in the Spanish department of the Directorate-General for Translation of the European Commission’, focuses on how translation memories are used in the projects in the Spanish department.

The first chapter of the fourth part, ‘Quality issues in the field of legal translation’, deals with how to maintain quality assurance in legal translation, adopting a variety of approaches. This part concludes with its second chapter, ‘The problem of self-assessment in literary translation’.

Overall, the volume provides in-depth analyses on quality assurance, one of the most important aspects of translation. Students and instructors at the departments of translation will find the projects and approaches to quality in translation discussed in the book extremely useful for their current and future studies.

Reviewed by Melanie McComsey, University of California, San Diego

Amerindian languages have long enjoyed a prominent place in linguistics, but too often they are studied without regard to their long history of contact with European languages. The present book offers rigorous scholarship on Amerindian typology that is also firmly rooted in the region’s history of linguistic contact.

A brief introduction by the editors situates the book in contact linguistics literature. The first chapter, ‘“Sticky” discourse markers in language contact between unrelated languages: Tojolab’al (Mayan) and Spanish,’ by Mary Jill Brody, illustrates how both Spanish and Tojolab’al discourse markers combine in indigenous discourse structure, reinforcing a linguistic ideology that values repetition. Cristina Buenrostro’s chapter, ‘Some typological differences between Chuj and Tojolabal’, presents morphosyntactic evidence that those two Mayan languages are more typologically distinct than was supposed, due to loss of contact with each other and influence from other languages. Una Canger’s chapter, ‘(Changing) word prosody in Nahuatl’, compares sixteenth, seventeenth, and twentieth century descriptions of Nahuatl pronunciation, as well as old and new Spanish loan words to illustrate how Nahuatl may be losing phonemic vowel quantity and developing a pattern of word stress on the penultimate syllable. Claudine Chamoreau’s chapter, ‘On the development of analytic constructions in Purepecha’, examines analytic constructions that have developed alongside synthetic constructions without supplanting them; speakers can use either the analytic or the synthetic construction to different pragmatic effects.

The chapter ‘Typological differences among middle constructions in some Uto-Aztecan languages’, by Zarina Estrada Fernández and Rolando Félix Armendáriz, compares middle voice constructions in Yaqui, Warihio (Taracahitan), Pima Bajo, and Southern Tepehuan (Tepiman). In their chapter, ‘Language contact and language typology: Anything goes, but not quite’, Ewald Hekking, Dik Bakker, and Jorge Gómez Rendón, investigate the role of typological differences in Otomi, Quichua, and Guarani in how each borrows from Spanish. Anita Herzfeld, in ‘An evaluation of the linguistic vitality of contact languages: The English-based Limonese Creole of Spanish-speaking Costa Rica’, illustrates that the strong ideological link between language and identity contributes to the survival of Limonese Creole in contact with Spanish. Yolanda Lastra, in ‘Paucity of loans in Jonaz-Chichimec’, describes a situation in which this Oto-Pamean language has borrowed surprisingly little from Spanish, despite widespread bilingualism in the population. ‘Differences in incorporation of Spanish elements in Guarani texts and Guarani elements in Spanish texts in Paraguayan newspapers’, by Lenka Zajícová, examines the social, cultural, and pragmatic versus the typological factors that differentiate patterns of Spanish loans in Guarani from Guarani loans in Spanish.

Together, these chapters approach language change in America with sensitivity to both language-internal and contact phenomena. The chapters focus on change at the morphosyntactic and prosodic levels, but also address sociolinguistic and pragmatic factors. This book will be a valuable resource for scholars of contact linguistics, of Amerindian languages, and of typology.

Reviewed by Mark J. Elson, University of Virginia

This book is comprised of two parts, covering general and comparative Indo-European (IE), each divided into chapters. The first part introduces the discipline, surveys IE languages and culture, and presents relevant linguistic concepts (e.g. sound change, analogy, and morphological change). The second takes the reader through the phonology and morphology, by part of speech, of Proto-IE. There are exercises accompanying each chapter in the second part, all new to this edition and pedagogically valuable. An appendix providing answers to the exercises, a glossary of terms, and brief discussion of articulatory phonetics, is also included, followed by a bibliography, relevant maps, illustrations, and indexes.

The main interest of this book may lie in its Leiden School view of Proto-IE. Perhaps the most important views that either originated with Leiden scholars, or, although proposed by others, have been integrated into the Leiden School include the following: in the proto-language, the existence of an IE-Uralic unity (31–33); in the phonology (119–20), an obstruent system which includes only voiceless segments (distinguished by the oppositions of tense versus lax and glottalized versus non-glottalized); and in the verbal system (282–83), a classification in terms of verbal suffixes correlating with different syntactic constructions (282–86).

The phonology and morphology of Proto-IE are competently and clearly presented, but the general principles of historical and comparative linguistics are less so in certain respects. We find sound change formulated in terms of phonemes rather than phones (60, 64). The author states that the total number of sound changes is ‘very great’ (63), although it is not, typologically at least. We also find the statement that ‘a sound change can only be conditioned by sound elements, i.e. phonetically’ (59). That may be true in the narrow sense of ‘conditioned’, but there is little doubt that morphology may play a concomitant, as opposed to a subsequent, role in the outcome of a sound change (e.g. the phonetically conditioned intervocalic loss of s in Greek). The author feels that the Greek sigmatic aorist ‘restored’ intervocalic s analogically (79), presumably on the basis of aorist paradigms in which s was not intervocalic, but this is questionable. The difficulty arises because the author does not see sound change in its synchronic dimension, failing to distinguish between underlying and surface representations. The statement that the principles of internal reconstruction are ‘quite different from those of comparative’ (103) is nowhere clarified and is disputable. The difference is better described as the domain of their database and not of their principles.

Finally, there are noticeable omissions in the bibliography (e.g. Meillet for Old Persian, Lunt and Diels for Old Church Slavonic, Watkins for the Proto-IE and Celtic verb, and Antilla for historical and comparative linguistics). Instructors will want to exercise care in using the general part of the book, and may prefer to replace it with one of the standard textbooks of historical and comparative linguistics. They will be well served, however, by the treatment of Proto-IE, although the Leiden School orientation may require special attention.

Reviewed by James Murphy, University of Manchester

The work under review brings together a number of articles presented at the workshop ‘Fillers in discourse and grammar’ at the 10th International Pragmatics Association Conference in Gothenburg, Sweden, and two articles presented elsewhere.

Barbara A. Fox introduces the book with a discussion on why the study of fillers is of importance to both syntax and our understanding of human interaction. In Ch. 2, Vera I. Podlesskaya looks at Russian and Armenian data (among other languages) and gives an account of which syntactic constituents can be replaced by placeholders, in addition to describing their morphology. Makoto Hayashi and Kyung-Eun Yoon’s chapter shows how speakers use demonstratives in Japanese, Korean, and Mandarin in order to hold their places in conversation when they encounter difficulties in formulating a word.

Nino Amiridze discusses the interesting case of Georgian placeholder verbs which are less frequent than filler nouns like English ‘thingummy’. Not only do these verbs have the function of placeholders when speakers encounter lexical access failure, but, as the article explores, they can also be used deliberately by the speaker, giving rise to a number of pragmatic effects. Dmitry Ganenkov, Yury Lander, and Timur A. Maisak outline the development of placeholders in Udi and Agul, northeast Caucasian languages. Though the languages developed independently, the placeholders in both began as interrogative pronouns and have gained similar nominal and verbal placeholder functions.

Laura Dimock’s article explores fillers in an Austronesian language, Nahavaq. She finds that the different pragmatic functions of the fillers are distinguishable by the different prosodic patterns with which they are produced. She also notes that fillers are allowed to break otherwise strict phonotactic rules. The syntax of Nahavaq fillers is also described. Leelo Keevallik discusses the various functions that the Estonian demonstrative ‘see’ can have when acting as a filler. She finds that ‘see’ is used when introducing repair, to delay the production of a more specific noun and to allow the speaker to avoid using particular grammatical contingencies (typical placeholder functions). ‘See’ has developed other less typical uses, however, when used turn-initially it indicates a change in conversation topic.

Honoré Watanabe surveys fillers in Sliammon Salish, an endangered Native American language. Sliammon’s interjection hesitators do not occur at the word domain and instead are frequently found between morphemes and words, giving rise to Watanabe’s observation that those morphemes are clitics. Problems which arise in studying particles and fillers in under-documented and endangered languages are also touched upon. The final article in the book is Boyd H. Davis and Margaret Maclagan’s study of fillers in the discourse of Alzheimer’s sufferers. They find that speakers with Alzheimer’s are still able to use placeholders, pauses, and fillers appropriately even when the disease has worsened.

This book offers the reader a pertinent reminder that even the smallest of utterances has its use when it comes to the study of language in context. It is recommended for those interested in interactional linguistics, typology, and morphosyntax.

Reviewed by Taras Shmiher, Ivan Franko National University

This book contributes to the hermeneutical study of Elizabeth Bishop’s poetics. The author applies a theoretical framework grounded in cognitive linguistics, which focuses on individual poetic thought and expression. How the poet and the reader conceptualize the cognitive constructs of the human mind in a text is the crucial question explored.

Part 1 consists of an introduction (3–17) and two chapters. Cognitive poetics allows the researcher to trace the course of the mind in the language of Bishop’s poetry, incorporating such basic analytical categories as embodiment, the cognitive unconscious, metaphorical thought, prototypes, and conceptualist semantics. Ch. 1 (18–56) covers six dimensions of imaginative apprehension: the researcher chooses one cognitive process (e.g. categorization, image schemas, metaphors, conceptual integration, metonymies, narrative structure) and scrutinizes its applicability, which should be linguistically visible in Bishop’s text. This procedure makes possible the discovery of the poet’s mental processes that formed her linguistic expression. Ch. 2 (57–75) contains the readings of Bishop’s three licensing stories while investigating the two most salient cognitive domains of her conceptual universe: vision and travel. The analyst’s objective is to understand the relation between the mappings of these stories, the language of the poems, and the conceptual metaphors of her poetry. A survey of such mappings by critics of Bishop’s writings accompanies the main line of investigation.

Part 2 contains its own introduction (79–92) and eight case studies of cognitive readings of Elizabeth Bishop (93–262). Genetic criticism as the study of textual invention lies at the center of a discussion that presents new insights into the movement of the poet’s mind. Detailed analyses of Bishop’s poems include their drafts, manuscripts, transcripts along with the author’s notes, sketches, journal entries, and letters—everything that can be called her avant-texts. Cognitive poetics contributes to genetic criticism by depicting the mind thinking during the writing process, and the genetic assessment of compositional processes will be beneficial for cognitive research on the construction of meaning. The readings aim to incorporate both large compositional features and microscopic details into a cognitive analysis, unveiling in the framework of conceptualist semantics how a subject’s conceptualization contributes to the construction of meaning. The choice of poems for analysis was grounded on three principles: the availability of multiple versions, representativeness, and the thoroughness of the existing readings.

The epilogue (265–72) draws conclusions about mind reading on the part of the poet, Bishop’s conceptual and linguistic unities, and the movement of her imaginative apprehension. The introspective analysis here offers new prospects for linguistic analysts and literary critics. Three appendices include a chronology of Bishop’s life and activities, the ‘mind-as-body’ conceptual system (after George Lakoff and Mark Johnson), and ‘thinker-as-mover/manipulator’ mapping (after Mark Turner). The bibliography is divided into two parts—the primary sources (three topical groups) and works consulted (six groups)—and the book concludes with an index of names and subjects.

Reviewed by Dimitrios Ntelitheos, United Arab Emirates University

This book is a collection of articles summarizing some of the most important research projects within generative approaches to language acquisition. The book starts with a contribution by Nina Hyams, who discusses missing subjects in early child language. Hyams surveys a number of different theories accounting for the phenomenon, including those based on grammatical, pragmatic, prosodic, and processing factors. She concludes that null subjects can be explained by assuming a parametric option for children, but that other factors may also be at play, making the phenomenon more complex than initially assumed. Ken Wexler discusses the optional infinitive (OI) stage, characterized by the use of infinitival verbal forms in root contexts. He develops a maturational account of the relevant data, where children lack the ability to check more than one feature of the subject DP. The article offers a detailed discussion of empiricist models of the OI stage and shows that they cannot adequately capture the range of properties associated with this stage.

Charles Yang discusses computational models of language acquisition, including issues related to learnability theory, distributional learning models, learning as selection of the right model, and the subset principle, stressing that computational models of language development must be informed by linguistic and psychological studies of child language. Kamil Ud Deen explores the acquisition of passive structures. He shows that earlier assumptions about late acquisition of passive structures may not be accurate and that children have knowledge of the passive in earlier stages than previously assumed. Tom Roeper and Jill De Villiers turn the discussion to the acquisition of wh-questions, exploring movement rules in simple sentences, the logical properties of wh-structures, and crosslinguistic wh-movement constraints. Issues of binding and coreference are discussed in Cornelia Hamann’s contribution, which explores the interpretation of pronouns and related acquisition results. A critical discussion of binding theory, issues of bound variable configurations and coreference, the typology of anaphors, and crosslinguistic variation is followed by acquisition facts pertaining to pronoun-reflexive asymmetries and exceptional case marking (ECM) constructions.

Koji Sugisaki and Yukio Otsu review studies of the acquisition of Japanese syntax, evaluating the universal grammar approach to language acquisition. They show that abstract grammatical properties relate to certain syntactic phenomena of Japanese, such as case marking, floating numeral quantifiers, and wh-in-situ, are already present in the early stages of child grammar. Julien Musolino investigates grammatical isomorphism in the case of quantification. The author explores how children interpret isomorphic sentences but also builds a broader research program with extensions in learnability theory, the development of processing and pragmatic abilities, and linguistic theory in general. Finally, William Philip continues the discussion of quantification with an examination of the acquisition of universal quantification, including knowledge of the logical operation and related linguistic constraints. In addition, Philip presents the particular case of the exhaustive pairing comprehension error together with a new account based on new experimental results.

This book is essential reading for linguists interested in language acquisition studies and especially for both researchers and students seeking state-of-the-art reviews of some of the most important questions raised within generative approaches to language development.

Reviewed by Ksenia Shilikhina, Voronezh State University

This book unites two diverse areas associated with two diverse modes of communication–politics and humor. The book includes eleven articles that adopt a variety of methodological perspectives: from discourse analysis and sociolinguistics to culture studies and theater semiotics. The articles, however, converge in their view of humor and its function in political discourse. Firstly, it is a way of expressing criticism and social control, and, secondly, it serves as a vehicle for promoting dominant values.

The contributions are grouped into three parts: the first focuses on humor used by politicians, the second on political humor in the media, and the third on humorous discourse in public debates. The introductory chapter is aimed at readers who are new to political humor. It introduces basic concepts of linguistic humor research and outlines genres and functions of political humor.

The first part of the book unites articles that analyze humor produced by politicians in various official settings (e.g. German Bundestag, Greek parliament, and Polish television debates). The official scene is traditionally perceived as incompatible with humorous discourse. However, data from different cultures show that humor is widely used in parliamentary discourse as a tool for avoiding serious discussions and for expressing public denigration and ironic criticism of opponents.

In the second part, the authors investigate cases in various cultures in which politicians and political views are the targets of humor. Satirical performance is a popular way of discrediting the public image.  The authors analyze satirical plays in post-Communist Romania, impersonations of Silvio Berlusconi staged by a popular Italian comedian, and satirical cartoons in Italian mass media. Because this kind of humor involves large audiences, it has become an important part of both political discourse and popular culture. Inevitably the question of censorship in different cultures comes to the fore to demonstrate the limitations of political satire.

The third part discusses the ethical aspects of humorous discourse. Liisi Laineste adopts a culturally embedded perspective and focuses on the use of ethnic jokes for political purposes in Estonia. The article by Vicky Manteli addresses humor in postmodern Greek theater. The political doctrine of Stalinism is in many ways analogous to the discourse of postmodern Greek theater, and both are targets of humor.

The final chapter, written by the editors, claims that political humor in its multiple forms and contexts is not simply a way of expressing discontent with certain political views or actions, but also a tool for constructing social identity. In this sense, humor is an integral part of political discourse and, as such, can be subject to linguistic analysis.

Although the diversity of social and cultural contexts in which political humor occurs might seem eclectic, this book shows how unified the field of humor studies is in its recognition of this diversity. A strong point of this book is its elicitation of responses to key questions in humor research in linguistics. The contributions included explicate the most important features of political humor and the wide range of functions and effects it can potentially produce.

Reviewed by Taras Shmiher, Ivan Franko National University

This book implements a usage-based methodology of cognitive linguistics, linking lexical and grammatical patterns with assumptions about their cognitive foundations. The authors bring together observed patterns of linguistic usage with cognitive-linguistic concepts and models having an empirical basis and they show a high level of awareness of theoretical and methodological limitations.

The collection is divided into two parts: the first set of five articles deals with psycholinguistic experimentation, quantitative corpus, and computational simulation; the second set verifies the applicability and explanatory potential of conceptual metaphor theory, the theory of idealized cognitive models, and construction grammar on the basis of empirical data. All of these principles are described in the introduction by the editors (1–9).

George Dunbar (13–32) shows how key properties for analyzing the distinction between ambiguity and vagueness can also be properties of a particular type of neural network–based computation. Factually, these turn out to be general principles of cognition, but not specific ones of a linguistic unit. Having extracted linguistic material from the 2000–2002 English and German public discourse on embryonic stem cell research, Olaf Jäkel (33–61) examines how contested issues of life and death can be seen as ‘boundary disputes’ over the denotations of some crucial lexical terms. The aim of the article by Brigitte Nerlich (63–88) is to contrast the scientific, social, and ethical implications of conceptual metaphors and those of discourse metaphors in the framework of generating expectations about science. Dylan Glynn (89–117) studies new usage-based techniques to identify semantic relations between near-synonymous words by applying a statistical method and by experiment with direct semantic analysis. Susanne Handl and Eva-Maria Graf (119–47) hypothesize, and prove, that in language acquisition the status of multi-item units changes from being used in a particular situation only to first-language (L1) speaker–like usage and also from representing unanalyzable blocks to a rich combinatorial application.

Ewa Dąbrowska (151–70) summarizes the results of several experimental studies on English questions with long-distance dependencies to show if speakers’ representations of linguistic patterns are indeed as general as the rules defined by contemporary linguistics. The article by Klaus-Michael Köpcke, Klaus-Uwe Panther, and Davis A. Zubin (171–94) is devoted to gender agreement in German and to the circumstances that motivate the conceptualization of the target of an agreement relation. Ulrich Detges (195–223) involves fundamental issues of synchronic and diachronic linguistics in discussing the usage of past-tense forms in polite questions. Thomas Herbst (225–55) integrates the findings of corpus and valence studies along with those of construction grammar and addresses the nature and degree of generalizations in L1 speakers’ minds. Patric Bach and Dietmar Zaefferer (257–74) focus on the question-assertion distinction and on how it derives from grammaticalization in the forms of declarative and interrogative sentences.

The book concludes with the list of contributors and an index of subjects.

Reviewed by David D. Robertson, University of Victoria

This approachable volume on British family names bridges revisionist genealogy and new genetic research in historical linguistics. Both the foreword and the preface intone Shakespeare’s quote, ‘What’s in a name?’, relevantly, as the book deals with claiming or repudiating one’s father’s (supposed) lineage. Without indicating so, the book is really comprised of two separate sections: Chs. 1–6 lay out onomastic issues and Chs. 7–9 tease apart biological questions. Greater integration of the two themes might make an already good read a superb one.

Certainly, DNA is mentioned only a handful of times before Ch. 7—usually to tantalizingly suggest how to resolve open research questions—but without developing these ideas. This part of the book is no less readable for it, however; many fascinating points are developed. We learn United Kingdom surnames with which scholars have traditionally simply assumed kinship and cognacy, based on superficial resemblances among names that often have distinct sources. Entrenched suppositions about a surname’s antiquity are frequently overturned when the oldest supposed exemplars are, in fact, informal sobriquets, not inherited family names. Surnames took centuries to become the established pattern of naming, diffusing from the highest classes, and in parts of Wales did not take hold until quite recently. Occupational names (and an interesting subtype, nicknames like Skarf ‘cormorant’ for a fisherman), long a shibboleth of British name studies, actually ‘were late to stabilize…a few were still not hereditary in the sixteenth century’ (22). Census and other historical demographic data, in tandem with such observations, allow many of Britain’s astonishingly diverse surnames (over 400,000 in number) to be traced to a single ancestral family living on an identifiable parcel of land. Numerous case-study maps vividly illustrate this (e.g. that of the Ashburners of Lancashire).

The briefer genetics-oriented second section, requiring different intellectual tools of the reader, provides background information on DNA (149–66). The discussion then moves to the connection between genetics and surnames. In a patrilineal society like Britain, lineage is culturally expressed in surnames; this can be compared against its biological expression in the Y-chromosome, which also passes from father to son. Examples of such gene-to-name correlations are discussed, like the ‘Sykes’ study and a study of forty British surnames. Caveats such as chance haplogroup similarity and the effects of genetic drift are considered, and powerful DNA tools, including the determination of ‘the most recent common ancestor’ among holders of a name, are demonstrated. The authors, thus, make a solid case for an interdisciplinary onomastics.

Certain inconsistencies in format and editing may distract the reader. For example, islands enter and disappear from maps. A glossary of relatively technical terms, like ‘by-name’ and ‘non-paternity event’, would be helpful. Also, the ascribing of popular-etymology name variation to ‘educated people’ (109) is an oversight. For the scholar, the lack of citation for many generic sources (e.g. ‘It was suggested some years ago’, 56; ‘Irish writers’, 94) is more frustrating and ought to be addressed in any second edition. These are not serious shortcomings, however, in such an otherwise well-presented book.

Reviewed by Sofia Rüdiger, University of Bayreuth

As stated by the editors in the introductory chapter, the overarching goal of the individual contributions is to advance the understanding, description, and definition of telecinematic discourse (i.e. the language of television and cinema), its functionality and unique characteristics, and its relation to language in real life.

The first part of the collection is dedicated to cinematic discourse. In Ch. 2, Fabio Rossi compares the language of several Italian comedies with a reference corpus of spoken Italian relating the results regarding typical phenomena of film language to dubbing practices. Michael Alvarez-Pereyre offers a general assessment of the limitations and advantages of using film language for linguistic analysis. Rocío Montoro, in Ch. 4, uses a stylistics framework to analyze the realization of mind style in both the novel and movie Enduring love. In Ch. 5, Roberta Piazza examines the discourse of killers in realist horror movies and its deviance from pragmatic norms. The following chapter by Derek Bousfield and Dan McIntyre is an in-depth and multimodal case study of the interplay between linguistic and non-linguistic aspects of emotion and empathy in one specific scene in the movie Goodfellas. Rose Ann Kozinski (Ch. 7) employs the Dictionary of affect in language to analyze and quantify emotional language in James Bond films and compares the results to data from the Austin Powers parodies. Carmen D. Maier (Ch. 8) explores the multimodal composition of film trailers and introduces the generic structural stages of comedy film trailers.

In the second part of the collection, Michael Toolan (Ch. 9) opens the field of televisual discourse with his contribution on the incomprehensibility of dialogue in the television series The wire. In Ch. 10, Monika Bednarek uses keyword and cluster analysis to evaluate the diachronic and intersubjective stability found in the dialogue of televisual characters in Gilmore girls. Susan Mandala (Ch. 11) explores the development of positive and negative politeness in a cybernetic character of the science fiction series Star trek: Voyager. In Ch. 12, Claudia Bubel analyzes the construction of relationships through the shifting of alignment patterns in Sex and the city, a process which results in informing the audience about friendship circles on the screen. The following chapter by Brian Paltridge, Angela Thomas, and Jianxin Liu also employs data from Sex and the city, with an analysis of the construction of identity through the genre of casual conversation. Alexander Brock (Ch. 14) concludes the collection with a contribution on the manipulation of the language system to achieve humor in comedies.

The articles in this collection consist mainly of in-depth case studies of particular movies or television series, which offer valuable insights in the budding study of telecinematic discourse. The contents are based on several different perspectives and methodologies (e.g. pragmatics, discourse analysis, corpus linguistics, and stylistics) and most authors not only base their analysis on purely linguistic aspects but also use a multimodal approach to interpreting their data. Overall, this collection is a first step in the systematic analysis of telecinematic discourse and illustrates the need for further research in this field.