Reviewed by Engin Arik, Okan University

English has prepositions, whereas Turkish has postpositions. But what are the general crosslinguistic characteristics, morphological features, syntactic functions, and semantic properties of adpositions? Claude Hagège aims to answer this question.

In Ch. 1, ‘Introduction’ (1–7), H gives a definition of adpositions as well as the scope and aims of the book. He defines adpositions as grammatical tools to mark the relationship between two parts of a sentence; an adposition governs a noun-like element. The author follows a functional and typological approach to analyze adpositions with a corpus of 434 languages from several language families, including Australian, Austronesian, Indo-European, Altaic, Caucasian, Chukotko-Kamchatkan, Dravidian, Uralic, Papuan, and Sino-Tibetan languages. In Ch. 2, ‘Towards a comprehensive characterization of adpositions’ (8–105), H first compares and contrasts adpositions with case affixes and then examines the relationship between adpositions and adverbs. The chapter also attempts to distinguish adpositions from other linguistic elements such as preverbs, direction-pointers, direct/inverse morphemes, locative stems, and applicatives. In the last section of Ch. 2, he discusses terminology for adpositions, such as relator, case-marker, flag, and functeme.

The next three chapters are devoted to detailed morphological, syntactic, and semantic analyses of adpositions. In Ch. 3, ‘A crosslinguistic survey of the morphological diversity of adpositions and adpositional phrases’ (106–90), H starts with a discussion of the typological and geographical distribution of adpositions. He then focuses on the main types of adpositions according to their place in adpositional phrases (prepositions, postpositions, and ambipositions) and their morphological complexity (simple and compound). After that, adpositions and their relations with nouns and verbs are provided.

In Ch. 4, ‘Adpositions and adpositional phrases in a syntactic perspective’ (191–256), the author analyses adpositional syntax, starting with the contribution of adpositional phrases to syntactic structure as core and peripheral complements of verbal predicates. H examines the syntactic functions of adpositional phrases as adnominal complements, predicates, and heads of certain phrases and foci of sentences. Ch. 5, ‘Adpositions from the semantic point of view’ (257–329), investigates adpositions semantically from a crosslinguistic perspective, starting with the relationship between the syntactic functions of adpositions and their semantic content, particularly place, time, and relation. H studies the relationship between adpositions and poetic language, idiomaticity, and polysemy both diachronically and synchronically.

Ch. 6, ‘Conclusion and prospects’ (330–35), concludes that adpositions are a morphological category consisting of morphemes at the midpoint of the grammaticalization process. H highlights the importance of morphosemantics in studying adpositions and of relying on typological data. Indexes of languages, names, subjects, and notions round out this rich book, whose very promising analysis of adpositions provides a great wealth of data from hundreds of languages.

Reviewed by Peter Freeouf, Chiang Mai University

This introductory text in historical linguistics is the posthumous edition of a textbook that first appeared in the early 1980s. Claire Bowern has revised and expanded this edition to take into account recent developments and advances in historical linguistics, e.g. the importance of grammaticalization, which in turn serves as a link between historical linguistics and typology.

The text is written in a style that can be easily understood by undergraduate students. The book includes numerous maps, tables, figures, an up-to-date chart of the International Phonetic Alphabet, and illustrative lists of examples. At the end of each chapter are ‘Reading guide questions’, ‘Exercises’, and ‘Further reading’, all of which provide ample opportunities for class activities and homework.

The bulk of the language examples come from languages of the Pacific and Australia, reflecting the scholarly background of the two authors. These languages, which have been extensively studied in the past century, serve also as clear models for the methods of historical linguistics that demonstrate their effectiveness and limitations quite well.

The first chapter, a broad introduction to the field, discusses the reality of language change. Chs. 2–4 discuss the various types of sound changes. The following five chapters, Chs. 5–9, present a traditional account of the principal methods of linguistic reconstruction as developed by scholars beginning in the nineteenth century: the comparative method and internal reconstruction. Recent statistical and computational methods are discussed in Ch 8. The authors use selected data from the closely related Polynesian languages to take the reader step-by-step through the procedures used to establish regular systematic sound correspondences in the basic vocabulary of the selected languages.

The next three chapters, Chs. 10–12, discuss changes in languages above the phonemic level: morphological (introducing the major types of analogical change), semantic, lexical (including borrowing), and syntactic change (including grammaticalization). Chs. 13–14 deal with more recent areas of research in the field, such as language change in progress, language contact, and the origin of pidgin and creole languages. The final chapter, Ch. 15, ‘Cultural reconstruction’, discusses the application of historical linguistics to the cultural sphere to discover undocumented aspects of societies and their histories.

Overall, this is a useful, comprehensive, and up-to-date introductory text in historical linguistics for undergraduate as well as graduate classes in linguistics. More careful editorial attention would have prevented the large number of misspellings and omitted words, among others, disappointing in a work from such a long-established and reputable publisher of linguistics texts.

Reviewed by Asya Pereltsvaig, Stanford University

This volume is a collection of papers that deal with the one particular aspect of prepositional phrase syntax: the fine-grained articulation of prepositional phrases (PPs) that express spatial relations. This topic has been relatively neglected in the syntactic literature, a gap that this volume fills. It will be of interest to generative syntacticians as well as scholars of the languages discussed in it, including Romance, Germanic, and African languages.

The collection opens with an introduction by Guglielmo Cinque (‘Mapping spatial PPs: An introduction’) that reviews the relevant issues and summarizes the research in this area. Additionally, the volume collects seven articles, some written specially for this volume, others reprints of significant earlier work on spatial PPs. For example, the paper by Hilda Koopman (‘Prepositions, postpositions, circumpositions, and particles’) was first published a decade earlier—after circulating in unpublished form for some years—because ‘it constitutes the first elaborate cartographic analysis of the fine structure of PPs based on an in-depth study of Dutch and provides a background for many of the contributions to this volume’ (12). In line with the cartographic approach espoused by the authors of the first five volumes in the series, Koopman proposes an ‘exploded-PP structure’ that includes a PlaceP hosting stative prepositions inside a PathP hosting directional prepositions, as well as a number of other projections.

Marcel den Dikken’s contribution (‘On the functional structure of locative and directional PPs’) directly builds on Koopman’s by refining the structure and derivation of the lexical and extended functional projections of stative and directional Ps in Dutch and, and by drawing a parallel between the structure of exploded PPs on the one hand and clauses and noun phrases on the other.

Peter Svenonius (‘Spatial P in English’) further elaborates on the model proposed in these two studies with data from English. Máire Noonan (‘À to Zu’) adds French and German and argues for an even richer architecture of lexical and functional projections. Converging with her work, Arhonto Terzi’s contribution (‘Locative prepositions and place’) argues for the presence of a silent noun place, based on evidence from Greek. Enoch O. Aboh’s article (‘The P route’) is concerned with spatial PPs in West African languages. According to Cinque’s introduction, Aboh claims that ‘while Kwa languages have the ground DP between a directional/stative P and an (axial) part P (lit. to/at box inside), Chadic languages have the order directional/stative/P > (axial) part P > ground DP (lit., to/at inside box)’ (13). His insight is to relate this word order difference to the order of the possessum and the possessor in Kwa and Chadic languages by arguing that the ground DP is the possessor of the (axial) part P.

Finally, Werner Abraham’s contribution (‘Misleading homonymies, economical PPs in microvariation, and P as a probe’) is dedicated to microvariation in the use of morphological case and the linear order of PPs in non-standard varieties of German, where morphological case plays an important role in distinguishing between semantic stativity and directionality of otherwise homonymous PPs.

Reviewed by Peter Freeouf, Chiang Mai University

This is a large dictionary of the Sahaptin Native American language, a member of the Sahaptian family, which also includes the closely related Nez Perce. The Sahaptian family is often included in a larger grouping, Plateau Penutian, that is itself a branch of the proposed wider Penutian stock. Various dialects of Sahaptin were still spoken by several hundred native speakers in the 1980s in Oregon and Washington. That number has greatly declined and Sahaptin is now a seriously endangered language. Fortunately, efforts are under way to preserve the language for future generations. This dictionary represents a major effort in that work. The two authors include a native-speaker linguist, Virginia Beavert, and another linguist, Sharon Hargus.

Another scholar of Sahaptin, Bruce Rigsby, contributed two articles to the introductory material, dealing with the origins and histories of the names Sahaptin (xviii–xxi) and Yakima/Yakama (xxii–xxxiv) in English. In another introductory essay, ‘Design, organization and history of Ichishkíin Sínwit’ (xxxv–lxi), Sharon Hargus describes in detail how to use the dictionary, particularly its main Sahaptin-English section (1–331). A clear explanation with diagrams is here provided on how to read each entry, as well as a fair amount of morphosyntactic information organized in paradigm charts and illustrative examples. The linguistic terms used are clearly explained for non-linguists, and more technical linguistic details are given in footnotes. This essay not only shows how to use the dictionary but helps make up for the lack of a more detailed grammatical summary.

The orthography is a slightly modified version of the standard writing system developed by Bruce Rigsby and Alex Saluskin that has been widely used since its introduction in the 1970s. A convenient orthographic chart (xii–xiii) gives a Sahaptin example word, an International Phonetic Alphabet equivalent, and (where possible) the closest English sound for each Sahaptin letter. Because the writing system employs digraphs and diacritics to represent the relatively large number of Sahaptin sounds, the Sahaptin alphabet is reproduced in alphabetic order as a footer throughout the Sahaptin-English section and the ‘Sahaptin root index’ (469–92).

Every entry in the Sahaptin-English section begins with a Sahaptin item printed in slightly larger bold type, followed by grammatical information and an English translation of the headword. Additionally, most entries contain one or two example sentences, each with an English translation; Sahaptin lexical items, phrases, and sentences are generally printed in bold typeface. The dictionary also includes a shorter English-Sahaptin section (333–467) useful to those looking for the Sahaptin equivalents of English word and expressions.

There are numerous color photographs of individuals in Sahaptin dress, cultural objects, animals, plants, and other natural phenomena with their names in Sahaptin, English translations, and short descriptions, as well as interesting black-and-white photographs from early in the previous century. The dictionary is printed on heavy paper and is designed for long use. In short, this is a beautifully designed and elegantly printed volume that serves as a fitting record of and tribute to an irreplaceable part of the cultural heritage of North America.

Reviewed by Svetlana Pashneva, Kursk State University

In eleven chapters Barbara Abbott explores the connection between words and the world, viewing reference as both a pragmatic phenomenon (taking into account a ‘human factor’) and a semantic one (abstracting away from speakers and message recipients). She focuses mostly on noun phrases (NPs), leaving out other linguistic forms considered to have reference. Each chapter begins with an overview and ends with a brief concluding section.

After an introduction, Ch.2, ‘The foundations’, presents the most important problems of reference, such as denotation, connotation, proper names, and propositions, discussing them with reference to the works of John Stuart Mill, Gottlob Frege, and Bertrand Russell. Ch. 3, ‘Subsequent developments’, takes a closer look at semantic scope and scope ambiguity, and touches on the semantics of quantificational NPs, sentence operators, and modal operators. A substantial part of the chapter focuses on possible worlds semantics and propositions, and presents sets of situations and structured combinations of intensions as alternatives to the concept of the proposition.

Ch. 4, ‘The proper treatment of quantification’, reviews the work of Paul Grice and Richard Montague. She gives a detailed description of Montague grammar and discusses a number of subsequent papers. In Ch. 5, ‘Proper names’, the author takes a closer look at descriptional, cluster, nondescriptional, metalinguistic, hidden indexical, and bite-the-bullet approaches to proper-name analysis, giving arguments for and against each of these approaches. Ch. 6, ‘Definite descriptions’, concerns whether definite descriptions are referential or quantificational expressions and whether referential interpretation is encoded semantically or conveyed pragmatically. The presented arguments are shown to be inconclusive.

Ch. 7, ‘Plurals and generics’, provides an overview of several important issues concerning plurality. The discussion includes the ways in which NPs with plural and mass head nouns can be interpreted depending on what is being predicated of their denotation, the ways predicates can apply to plural and mass NPs, and the problem of generic expressions. The author concludes that ‘this chapter must be considered only a basic introduction to this complex and interesting area’ (179). The first part of Ch. 8, ‘Indexicality and pronouns’, is devoted to the problem of indexicality. A then explores various interpretations of demonstratives and reviews two approaches to unifying them. The remainder of the chapter considers multiple uses of third person pronouns, and draws parallels between definite descriptions and pronouns.

Ch. 9, ‘Definiteness, strength, partitives, and referentiality’, investigates definiteness as one of the properties of NPs traditionally linked with referentiality and touches on related concepts such as the strong-weak distinction and partitive NPs. Ch. 10, ‘NPs in discourse’, centers on speakers’ use of NPs in conversational contexts. After providing an insight into pronouns, the problem of donkey pronouns, and dynamic semantics theories, she looks at the ways NPs are used by speakers. A review of a number of proposals for classifying NPs is followed by a brief description of the nature of discourse referents. In the final chapter, ‘Taking stock’, A compares the pragmatic and semantic conceptions of reference, and concludes that the area of noun-phrase reference remains full of unsolved problems, which she encourages readers ‘to go out and solve’. (280).

This book offers a highly readable presentation of major issues associated with reference. It is recommended for anyone interested in reference, semantics, philosophy of language, and cognitive studies.

Reviewed by Taras Shmiher, Ivan Franko National University in L’viv, Ukraine

The present volume is the outcome of two conferences: Ingenious Traditions in Translation, held in Ahmedabad; and Asia in the Asian Consciousness: Translation and Cultural Transactions, held in Tejgadh. It consists of a philosophical foreword about Asian consciousness, Buddhism, and translation by Ganesh Devy, the editors’ introduction, and thirteen articles.

In ‘Introduction’ (1–15), Judy Wakabayashi and Rita Kothari narrate about translations, cultural contexts, and theoretical issues in a wide-ranging discussion, contrasting Western European Translation Studies and alternative non-European cultural traditions.

G.J.V. Prasad (17–28) analyzes translations in Tamil in terms of long-term cultural processes aimed at removing Sanskritic influences and building Tamil identity, covering the matters of religion, caste, and political patronage. He examines periods of Tamil hybridization and purification campaigns where linguistic and cultural pride shaped the notion of Tamil identity. Similarly, E.V. Ramakrishnan (29–41) discusses how Malayalam translation was used to define a regional identity distinct from Sanskrit and Tamil. Translation was enlisted as a means of resisting the hegemonic tendencies in these separate traditions.

Texts from Indian literature are rich in multiple renderings and intertextuality. Treating written versions, oral tellings, and non-verbal representations from medieval Karnataka, T.S. Satyanath (43–56) traces the existence of pluralistic epistemologies within the episode of Kirata Shiva and Arjuna from the Mahabharata that significantly contribute to understanding the construction and continuity of texts, tellings, and renderings. Rita Kothari (119–31) discusses how the harmony of different languages and religions within Sufi practice in Sindh reflects elements of hybridity, migrancy, and translation. Farzaneh Farahzad (133–43) continues the topic by examining the misrepresentation of Sufi literature in English translations.

A group of articles is devoted to the issues of power and translation. V.B. Tharakeshwar (57–73) shows how translations of Greek tragedies into Kannada reflected discussions between colonialism and nationalism in the early twentieth century. Keeping the background of British legal search in the Sanskritic tradition for a divine/singular origin like the Christian authority during the late eithteenth century, Christi A. Merrill (75–94) questions the understanding of translational fidelity in the colonial view and nowadays. Researching the reception of Muhammad Ibn Abdul-Wahab’s ‘Kitab At-Tawhid’ in Urdu translation, Masood Ashraf Raja (95–106) argues that translation became a powerful tool of political transformation within the framework of Muslim identity in British India.

Tridip Suhrud (107–17) analyzes Mahatma Gandhi’s own translations and the translations of his works that he supervised and authorized to uncover peculiar difficulties of conveying the originality of his thought to the multilingual world. Sherry Simon (161–74) focuses on the paradoxes of vocabulary used by poet and linguist A. K. Ramanujan in his practice as a translator.

Finally, Theresa Hyun (145–59) reveals the significance for Koreans under Japanese rule of translations from Indian poetry inspired by anti-colonial struggles. Meanwhile, Judy Wakabayashi (175–94) explores the semantic domain of translation, covering terminological discrepancies, potential insights into Japanese views of translation, and divergence from standard English terminology. In the Zulu context of South Africa, Stanley G. M. Ridge (195–212) focuses on a nineteenth-century colonial trial as a nexus of competing practices of translation and interpreting.

The volume is provided with an index of names, titles, places, and notions.

Reviewed by Anish Koshy, The English and Foreign Languages University, India

Annual review of South Asian languages and linguistics (ARSALL) is an annual series that replaced The yearbook of South Asian languages and linguistics in 2007. The current volume, the third issue, has three papers as ‘General contributions’, one invited paper as a ‘Special contribution’, three ‘Reports’, five ‘Reviews’, and two ‘Dialogues’.

Drawing examples from English and Bangla, Probal Dasgupta presents the notion of intersecting economies within the substantivist program, which permits multiple characterization, and manages the coexistence of isolated irregular forms with the rest of the system, noting the failure of formal theories to explain such forms. Peter Hook and Prashant Pardeshi attempt to create a taxonomy of idiomatic EAT-expressions in Marathi through the notions of correspondence and alternation. They examine their power to reshuffle roles, increase transitivity, and add vividness and salience to the expression. Arguing for emergent unmarkedness against the notion of default unmarkedness, Shakuntala Mahanta analyzes exceptional triggering of morphologically induced vowel harmony in both nominal and verbal morphology of Assamese within the optimality theory framework, and explores the theoretical precept of locality in exceptionality. Michael W. Morgan’s ‘Special contribution’ attempts to place Indian sign language (ISL) in a wider typological and areal perspective, focusing on the encoding of core verbal arguments to classify 250 ISL verbs.

In ‘Regional reports’, Fida Birzi discusses the birth of a new pidgin called Pidgin Madam, born out of the linguistic contact between colloquial Sinhala and Lebanese Arabic (the substrate language). Kazuyuki Kiryu and Prashant Pardeshi report on research on South Asian languages in Japan between 2000 and 2008. Andrew Hardie, Ram Raj Lohani, Bhim N. Regmi, and Yogendra P. Yadava examine the morphosyntactic categorization scheme employed for tagging within the recently completed Nepali National Corpus.

The repetition of many previous authors in this volume works against the ARSALL series’ stated purpose of becoming a general forum for linguists working on South Asian languages. While the contributions in ARSALL2009 are important in themselves and useful for anyone interested in these languages, a wider participation of linguists would make the series more vibrant and better representative of the various dimensions of linguistic inquiry pursued in and about the Indian sub-continent.

Reviewed by Anish Koshy, The English and Foreign Languages University, India

The contributions in the volume are selected papers from the Second International Cognitive Linguistics Conference held in Munich in 2006 and invited papers. The book is organized into two parts.

Part 1, ‘Theory and interfaces in word formation’, deals with theoretical contributions, interface issues, and classification of Word Formation (WF) processes. With examples from the lexical network of emotion, Martina Lampert and Günther Lampert present and assess the notion of recombinance as against usage-based models of morphology in the representation of complex WF processes. Questioning proposals of a clear-cut dichotomy between synchrony and diachrony, Livio Gaeta examines if certain cases of homonymy/polysemy in Luxembourgish and Italian can be traced back to natural patterns of cognitively-grounded processes of diachronic evolution. Gerhard B van Huyssteen seeks to redefine and postulate a taxonymy of component-structures of complex words in Afrikaans for the purposes of developing a morphological parser. Working within a network approach to information-processing and drawing data from multiple sources, Hilke Elsen stresses on the significant role that words operating as gestalts play in language processing. Philipp Conzett views gender as an integral part of cognitive grammar and a constitutive factor in WF processes by arguing that diachronically, grammatical gender patterning is an efficient reuse of existing linguistic structures. Investigating Adjective+Noun compounds and phrases in Dutch and German from a constructionist perspective, Matthias Hüning argues that lexicon and grammar are seen to exist in a continuum and not as two distinct modules of a language.

Part 2, ‘Theory and processes of word formation’, explores a cognitive linguistics analysis of traditional WF processes. Réka Benczes discusses the motivations for creativity in English compounds and explains the compounds in terms of constructional schemas and conceptual blending. Analyzing hybrid compounds in German, Alexander Onysko discusses the associative relationship between the specifier and the head element in determinative compound nouns in terms of dynamic prototypicality and instantiation of inherently contiguous sub-groups. Problematizing unidirectional theories on conversion, Birgit Umbreit argues for a bidirectional understanding of lexical motivation in conversion by providing evidence from cognitive word-family organization and other sources. Bert Cappelle shows that double -er coinages (e.g. fixer-upper) are not necessarily intentional performance errors and reviews challenges it poses to usage-based accounts by exploring the role of imitation and analogy in its use. Taking up the issue of holistic versus decomposed processing of complex forms, Judith Heide, Antje Lorenz, André Meinunger, and Frank Burchert investigate how prefixed words are represented and processed in the mental lexicon focusing on ver-prefixed German verbs. Describing a fully-automated system called Zeitgeist which harvests neologisms from Wikipedia and adds semantic entries to WordNet, Tony Veale and Cristina Butnariu argue that lexical databases should be capable of interpreting neologisms with origins in existing word forms.

This book discusses language as a product of human cognition and the potential fallacies of a rule-based approach to word-formation. The papers included in this collection provide novel insights into issues like coining, the persistence of morphologically marked forms, and compositional and holistic processing of complex forms.

Reviewed by Taras Shmiher, Ivan Franko National University in L’viv, Ukraine

The present collection examines the concept of agency in translation studies where agents—mediators between a translator and an end user of a translated text—stimulate major historical, literary, and cultural changes through translation. Its agents either influence changes in translation style, broadening the philosophical borders of a language and its society, or perform their specific cultural and political role. Patronage, power, and habitus are the key conditions and factors of producing cultural artifacts, raising national consciousness, and changing literary tastes. The thirteen essays included in this volume uncover various facets of relations between these factors in a global outlook, as they are written by scholars who study agency in literatures of Europe, Asia, Africa, and South America.

Latin American polysystem is most discussed by the contributing researchers. Georges L. Bastin highlights the life and acts of Francisco de Miranda, the major agent of translation during the late eighteenth through the early nineteenth century. The author hypothesizes how the real role, played by translation in the subcontinent, contributed to the emancipation movement and the creation of a national and continental identity and culture. Maria Eulália Ramicelli presents the French magazine Revue Britannique as an important transmitter of British ideas and cultural norms for Brazilian fiction writers. The relationship between national literary production and translation in the twentieth century Argentina and Brazil are studied in the chapters by Lisa Rose Bradford and by Thelma Médici Nóbrega and John Milton, respectively.

Denise Merkle considers the significance of the publishing house Vizetelly & Company for modernizing the publishing industry in late-Victorian Britain. The publishers introduced inexpensive translated and original editions to the British market, but they greatly suffered from Victorian censorship as well. Carol O’Sullivan’s essay discusses the work of another Victorian publisher, Henry G. Bohn, who was a pioneer in popularizing translated classics for the general market and private circulation.

Among other European literatures, Outi Paloposki compares the daily routines and decision-making of two Finnish translators, Karl Gustaf Samuli Suomalainen (nineteenth century) and Juhani Konkka (twentieth century). The author describes the process of selecting books for translation, the use of source texts and versions, typographical design, and fees in order to demonstrate the limitations of Finnish translators to choose the content of their work. Christine Zurbach analyzes the activities of a special group of theater translators in Portugal from 1975–1988. Francis R. Jones explores Anglophone translations of poetry by post-war Bosnian writers.

Studying the translation activity of Ahmed Midhat and translation discourse in the Ottoman culture of the late nineteenth century, Cemal Demircioğlu reveals the foundations of dynamism in Ottoman writing, publishing, and journalism, as well as shows the mediator in conveying Western culture to Ottoman society. Şehnaz Tahir-Gürçağlar focuses on the prominent twentieth century Turkish politician Hasan-Âli Yücel, whose activities are a valuable tool for investigating the historiography of culture and translation.

The chapter by Akiko Uchiyama discusses Fukuzawa Yukichi’s translations from other non-Western literatures that significantly impacted the nineteenth century Japanese reader’s perception of these cultures. He is regarded both as a proponent of civil liberties, independent thought, and egalitarian humanism and as a supporter of Japan’s aggression towards neighboring Asian countries.

African milieu is described by Paul Bandia in his essay on Cheikh Anta Diop, who tried to establish a historical and cultural connection between ancient Egypt and Black Africa by deciphering hieroglyphs and Meroitic script into a modern writing.

Finally, the volume includes notes on contributors and an index of names, titles, and subjects.

Reviewed by Michael Zock, LIF – CNRS, Marseille

This book was written by the creator of the concept of word grammar. Richard Hudson argues that language is a conceptual network in which language can be described in terms of nodes and their relations (2–3). The book is divided into five chapters.

Ch. 1, ‘Introduction’ (1–62), describes H’s assumptions concerning language, its structure, and its processing. While he assumes that language is basically a network, he argues that language processing is mainly activation spreading.

Ch. 2, ‘Morphology’ (63–116), uses the same theory of word grammar to describe linguistic forms. H explains that ‘morphological patterns are represented as a network of relations among words, morphs, and sounds or letters’ (63).

In Ch. 3, ‘Syntax’ (117–82), Hposits that syntactic structures are best described in terms of dependency-structures (DSs). He justifies this choice by claiming that DSs (i) are simpler than phrase structures, (ii) can account for long distance-dependencies, (iii) have desirable mathematical properties, (iv) are used by most parsers, and (v) have psychological reality.

Ch. 4, ‘Gerunds’ (183–210), explains gerunds as a hybrid unit. H states that ‘English gerunds are … single words which are both verbs and nouns…nothing more is needed in order to generate ordinary gerunds, though special provisions are needed for possessive subjects and no/any’ (210).

In the last chapter, Ch. 5 ‘Meaning: Semantics and sociolinguistics’ (211–48), H deals with meaning, considering it both from a semantic and pragmatic point of view. For example, the word cookie signals not only the fact that we want to talk about a certain kind of biscuit, but also that we adhere or belong to a certain speech community (224). One of the many questions addressed in this section deals with the acquisition of meaning. H explains that people are able to store so many structures and words due to recycling, a mechanism that allows speakers to build new objects out of old ones.

I found the book to be highly stimulating and would definitely recommend it to anyone interested in understanding how language is represented or structured in peoples’ minds. Although there were some noticeable omissions, this book functions as a nice introduction to language processing and psycholinguistics.