Reviewed by Zhen-qiang Fan, Zhejiang Gongshang University

This book contains twenty-one peer-reviewed articles dealing with a wide variety of topics and research paradigms in cognitive pragmatics (CP). The aim of the collection is to ‘identify the general cognitive-pragmatic principles and processes that underline and determine the construal of meaning in context’ (4). The book is organized into five sections, the first of which presents the editor’s introduction, analyzing the ingredients of CP, and also contextualizing and setting the scene for the articles that follow.

Adopting an off-line perspective, Part 2 is concerned with entrenched cognitive routines of pragmatic interpretation, containing topics of relevance (Yan Huang), implicature, and explicature (Robyn Carston and Alison Hall), inferencing (Murray Singer and R. Brooke Lea), conceptual principles (Małgorzata Fabiszak), salience (John Taylor), and encyclopedic knowledge (Istvan Kecskes). From an online perspective, Part 3 addresses issues that pertain to the processing of pragmatic information (Ted J. M. Sanders and Anneloes Canestrelli), the role of salient meanings (Rachel Giora), the acquisition of pragmatic ability (Daniela O’Neill), pragmatics disorders (Louise Cummings), autism (Anne Reboul, Sabine Manificat, and Nadège Foudon), and aphasia (Suzanne Beeke).

Part 4 explores the cognitive processes involved in the interpretation of non-explicit and non-literal meaning-in-context, respectively. The former addresses issues such as shared knowledge and meaning negotiation (William S. Horton), and conversational and conventional implicatures (Jacques Moeschler); the latter touches upon figurative language in discourse (Alice Deignan), and humor and irony (Geert Brône). Part 5 discusses how the cognitive-pragmatic processes are entrenched and conventionalized, in addition to the ways they contribute to the emergence of grammar. Of the four contributions included, some are more theoretical (e.g. Peter Harder’s explication of a usage-based model of grammar), while others adopts a diachronic perspective (e.g. the explanation of grammaticalization, lexicalization, and constructionalization by Graeme Trousdale). Still others broaden the scope by adding a social dimension (e.g. the socio-pragmatics of language change by Terttu Nevalainen), and others offer a semantic analysis of pragmatic expression (e.g. Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen’s contribution).

This is a high-quality book that deserves the attention of any scholar interested in the cognitive aspects of meaning-in-context. Each contribution in this book is of very high scientific quality, both in content and in form. The CP research in this book enjoys more empirical evidence than philosophy-rooted pragmatics, has wider theoretical scope than psycholinguistics, and pays greater attention to online processing than cognitive linguistics. The book not only raises a wide range of new questions but also points to a variety of directions in which to explore these issues, and also exemplifies an equally wide range of methodologies (e.g. theoretical, experimental, and corpus-based studies).

As usual with a book collection, the contributions might seem quite heterogeneous at first blush, but many of them complement each other nicely, either because they present further empirical evidence for a theoretical claim (e.g. Horton’s paper provides psycholinguistic evidence for other contributions on inference and encyclopedic knowledge, especially Carston and Hall’s and Kecskes’s), or because they discuss different aspects of the same question (e.g. the issue of semantics-pragmatics continuum is approached from the perspectives of pragmatics in Carston and Hall, psycholinguistics in Giora, and usage-based cognitive semantics in Taylor).

 Reviewed by David Elton Gay, Bloomington, IN

As the jacket copy suggests, The handbook of historical sociolinguistics offers ‘an up-to-date, in-depth representation of the extent to which sociolinguistic theoretical models, methods, findings, and expertise can be applied to the process of reconstructing a language’s past in order to account for diachronic linguistic changes and processes’.

The thirty-five articles in the book are arranged into five broad subject areas. The articles in Part 1, ‘Origins and theoretical assumptions’, examine broad issues in historical sociolinguistics, such as the emergence of diachrony and synchrony as categories for research, the origins and methods of historical sociolinguistics, and the relationship between social history and the sociology of language.

The articles in Part 2, ‘Methods for the sociolinguistic study of the history of languages methodological issues’, turn to more specific methodological concerns, with articles on topics such as the generalizability principle, the uniformitarian principle, the use of linguistic corpora for studying linguistic variation and change, the editing of medieval manuscripts in their social context, and the use of various kinds of documents (e.g. medical, official, and monastic documents, private letters and diaries, literary sources, and early advertising and newspapers) in sociohistorical linguistic research.

Part 3, ‘Linguistic and socio-demographic variables’, then turns to the role of orthographic, phonological, grammatical, lexical-semantic, and pragmatic variables in sociohistorical linguistics. Issues of class, age, and gender in historical sociolinguistic research are also examined in this section, as are the roles of social networks, social mobility, race, ethnicity, religion, and castes in research.

Part 4, ‘Historical dialectology, language contact, change and diffusion’, offers a series of articles on a broad range of topics, including functional and non-functional explanations for language variation and change, internally and externally motivated language change, lexical diffusion, the role of space in reconstructing regional dialects, and the role of linguistic atlases in research.

Part 5, ‘Attitudes to language’, concludes the book with articles on language ideologies, language myths, linguistic purism, reconstructing prestige language, and reconstructing written vernaculars in Medieval and Renaissance Europe.

This book is a wide-ranging and useful anthology of articles on historical sociolinguistics. As is common in books of this type, the articles vary somewhat in the level of linguistic sophistication they assume; some are introductory, while others assume a more advanced knowledge of linguistics. On the whole, however, they are accessibly written, each with a list of suggested readings, and give the reader a good, if brief, orientation to the various topics and guidance for further reading on the topics. The handbook of historical sociolinguistics would, in fact, be a good place for someone unfamiliar with historical sociolinguistics to turn for an introduction to this branch of linguistics, or for a more experienced person to find guidance concerning the current state of the field.

Reviewed by Remi van Trijp, Sony Computer Science Laboratory Paris

One of the most unfortunate facts about the field of linguistics is that the importance of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics has been erased from the field’s collective memory, even though many ideas in contemporary linguistics were directly inspired by the work of AI researchers such as Ron Kaplan, Roger Schank, Eric Wanner, Terry Winograd, and William Woods.

This book is a good place to start for making amends. In the introductory chapter, the editors explain the major challenges of human-robot interaction (HRI). Not only does HRI require an ‘embodied agent’ that can perceive and act intelligently in a real-world environment, the field also needs to understand how communication with and learning from an often unpredictable human interlocutor is possible. Linguists will thus find operational solutions to hard problems, such as how to achieve joint attention and how to make use of contextual information for communication.

The book is divided into three parts. The first part, ‘The human in the loop’, focuses on how HRI is possible in everyday situations with non-expert human ‘users’. Apart from their technical significance, these chapters also provide important insights to linguists interested in dialogue. For instance, Ch. 1 ‘Helping robots imitate’, by Aris Alissandrakis, Dag S. Syrdal, and Yoshihiro Miyake, shows the importance of appropriate feedback to achieve more natural communication. Manja Lohse’s chapter, ‘The role of expectations and situations in human-robot interaction’, demonstrates how successful communication requires the capacity to predict the behavior of the other interlocutor. The remaining chapters touch upon subjects such as the human interlocutor’s attitudes and sociality.

The second part of the book, ‘Joint action, collaboration and communication’, handles social learning, collaborative activities, and language acquisition, and is most relevant for linguists working from a constructivist perspective. The most notable chapter is Ch. 10 ‘The acquisition of word semantics by a humanoid robot via interaction with a human tutor’, in which Joe Saunders, Chrystopher L. Nehaniv, and Caroline Lyon show that the linguistic behavior of human tutors resembles child-directed speech, and that a robot can use the tutor’s input to acquire words for referring to objects in its environment.

The final part, ‘Robots in therapy, safety and communication’, discusses how robots open up exciting new possibilities in a.o. healthcare and is, therefore, of interest to linguists who are seeking new ways to investigate and treat speech and language impairments. In Ch. 14 ‘Rehabilitation robots’, Farshid Amirabdollahian surveys how robots can be employed for the rehabilitation of humans who suffer from brain injury or spinal cord injuries. Similar work has been performed by one of the book’s editors, Kerstin Dautenhahn, on using robots as a tool for education and therapy for children with autism, which is sadly missing from the current book.

In sum, this book does not contain much of what one might classify as ‘traditional linguistics’, but it offers a wealth of fully operational studies and methods that may push the state-of-the-art in linguistics. The contributions never become too technical and should appeal to a broad, interdisciplinary audience.

 Reviewed by Dimitrios Ntelitheos, United Arab Emirates University

This book is a collection of articles providing a broad picture of the consequences of the cartographic approach to the general theory of syntax. After a brief introduction by the editors, the first section starts with a study of the German interrogative marker den by Josef Bayer. Paola Bennincà discusses wh-pronouns in headless relative clauses in Italo-Romance and early English varieties, while Alessandra Giorgi proposes a novel theory of indexicality. Günther Grewendorf presents an analysis of wh-movement as topic movement.

In the following chapter, Jacqueline Guèron and Liliane Haegeman discuss the distribution and interpretation of the neuter pronoun tet in West Flemish. Elizabeth Pearce studies the presence of a number projection within the DP in three Southern Oceanic languages, and Gemma Rigau describes the properties of the Catalan particle pla. Giampaolo Salvi studies the nature of the V2 system in Medieval Romance, and Maria Luisa Zubizarreta closes the first section with a discussion of the domain between T and negation in Romance.

The second section begins with an application of the smuggling approach to the movement of verbal strings in the low clausal functional field, by Adriana Belleti, and Luigi Rizzi. Ignacio Bosque and M. Carme Picallo argue that the clitic-like element preceding a numeral in partitive constructions in Old Catalan is not a determiner but a pronoun, followed by Richard S. Kayne and Jean-Yves Pollock’s exploration of hyper-complex inversion in French. Hilda Koopman treats Samoan ergatives as derived through a double-passivization process, while Jaklin Kornfilt discusses suspended affixation in nominal and verbal coordination in Turkish. Christer Platzack argues that the lack of backward binding in V2 languages is due to the lack of a SubjP projection because of the V2 condition.

Andrew Radford and Michèle Vincent discuss the feature composition of participal light verbs in French, containing the auxiliary avoir, while Henk van Riemsdijk proposes an inherent incompatibility of uninflected pronominal forms with the dative case in German. Alain Rouveret explains three idiosyncratic properties of the Portuguese verbal syntax. Ur Shlonsky explores wh-in-situ in French, while Dominique Sportiche discusses the properties of the adverbial particle re in the same language. Tarald Taraldsen closes the second section, proposing that a structural object position is available in the nominal.

In the final section, Werner Abraham discusses double definiteness in Old and Modern Scandinavian, followed by Peter Cole and Gabriella Hermon’s investigation of the order of verbal affixes and functional structure in Imbabura Quechua. Carmen Dobrovie-Sorin treats number as a feature, followed by Joseph Emonds’s article in which he argues for QP as the highest functional projection above NP. M. Rita Manzini and Leonard M. Savoia explore clitic and adverbial negations in Romance. Ian Roberts supports a cartographic approach to grammaticalization, while Halldór Ármann Sigurđsson and Joan Maling look at the nature of silent and overt marking of certain categories. The book ends with a discussion of postnominal adjectives in Greek indefinite noun phrases by Melita Stavrou.

This book is essential reading to anyone interested in cartographic approach within linguistic theory. Its numerous articles open new possibilities in current cutting-edge research of the morphosyntactic component of grammar.

Reviewed by Zhen-qiang Fan, Zhejiang Gongshang University

The book contains papers which were originally published in the journal English text construction 3:2 (2010). In this collection, various models from cognitive linguistics (CL) are drawn upon to explain the cognitive mechanism of the stylistic choices in a variety of genres such as literature, journalistic prose, lectures, and radio interviews. The aim is to demonstrate ‘how recent research in CL has started expanding the range of facts to be explained and reaching beyond the traditionally conceived boundaries of linguistic inquiry’ (1).

The book includes an introduction, eight articles, acknowledgements, and an index. The editors’ introductory remarks introduce the background and the organization of the whole book. On the basis of frame semantics, fictive motion, and conceptual blending, Mike Borkent proposes a new framework to show how embodied knowledge is utilized for understanding visual poems and other multimodal texts. Barbara Dancygier discusses the use of alternativity and stance in dramatic and poetic discourse, revealing mechanisms such as frame-evocating, counterfactuality, causation, and blending. The concept of joint attention is introduced by Vera Tobin to appreciate the texts of literary modernism. José Sanders, using the mental space model, aims to explain how the intertwining of voices is represented by linguistic form in journalistic texts.

Elena Semino’s chapter illustrates the power of blending theory in accounting for the rhetorical use of ‘unrealistic’ scenarios in expository and argumentative texts involving metaphorical creativity. Also relying on blending theory, Elżbieta Górska scrutinizes novel multimodal metaphors used in BBC lectures, and the use of ‘verbo-musical’ metaphors in particular. Carol Lynn Moder, by integrating blending theory and a usage-based approach to grammatical constructions, investigates metaphorical expressions in their discourse context (i.e. American radio news magazines). The book ends with the editors’ conclusion, which evaluates all of the contributions in the book and suggests possibilities for future research.

This collection succeeds in achieving its goal of offering ‘a better understanding of genre differences’ and ‘a clearer appreciation of the applicability of the cognitive framework now in use’ (185). On the one hand, it opens a new window to discourse genres from the perspective of CL, either by proposing a unified model (e.g. Mike Borkent’s article), or by borrowing notions that are considered to belong to a broadly conceived CL (e.g. joint attention). On the other hand, it contributes to CL by ‘expanding the range of facts to be explained’ and making CL reach ‘beyond the traditionally conceived boundaries of linguistic inquiry’ (1). Moreover, some researchers pose new challenges for CL. For instance, Dancygier argues that poetic discourse challenges some claims of constructional grammar (40), and Semino warns that blending theory needs to pay greater attention to interpretative variability and genre differences (112).

Overall, this book shows the cross-fertilization between CL and discourse analysis, and is a great resource for anyone interested in these areas.

 Reviewed by Dimitrios Ntelitheos, United Arab Emirates University

This book is a collection of articles from the 2010 Georgetown University roundtable on languages and linguistics, including grammatical, computational, sociolinguistic, and language pedagogy analyses. The book is divided into two parts; the first focuses on theoretical and computational linguistics, and the second discusses issues in sociolinguistics and applied linguistics.

The book starts with a discussion of negation in Moroccan Arabic by Nizha Chatar-Moumni. The author argues that sentential negation in the dialect results from the association of the negative particle ma- and an undefined quantifier, while the presence of the –S suffix licenses this association. Kamel A. Elsaadany and Salwa Muhammed Shams discuss the syntax and semantics of universal quantification in Arabic, arguing against a transformational analysis of the properties of the universal quantifier kull, proposing a lexical-functional grammar approach.

Ali Farghaly turns the discussion to statistical and symbolic paradigms in the field of Arabic computational linguistics, tracing the historical development of machine translation attempts. Youssef A. Haddad returns to Arabic syntax with a discussion of forward and backward raising, and non-raising structures, which he approaches through the Copy-plus-Merge theory of movement. Sarah Ouwayda explores the nominal domain and, specifically, the treatment of construct state nominals as semantic predicates of the type <e,t>, based on their interaction with adjectives, cardinals, and quantifiers. Usama Soltan investigates wh-questions in Egyptian Arabic and argues against a movement analysis based on empirical evidence form island insensitivity and intervention effects. The first part concludes with a historical discussion of the treatment of ‘incomplete’ verbs in the Arabic grammatical tradition, by Hana Zabarah.

The second part begins with a study on women and politeness on Egyptian talk shows by Reem Bassiouney, focusing on assertiveness techniques such as interruption and floor controlling. Elena Canna examines the use of Arabic and French codes in Casablanca, targeting forms of address and, particularly, salutations and well-wishing formulas, showing that choice of code is controlled by social conditions. Ahmed Fakhri presents a genre analysis perspective on the derivational process of nominalization in Arabic discourse in legal genres such as court judgments. Gunvor Mejdell examines the status of intermediate forms of language emerging in diglossic language communities, in order to dissolve tensions concerning the choice of code.

Catherine Miller investigates the use of Moroccan Arabic in dubbing foreign series in Moroccan television, addressing the debate that this has initiated in Moroccan society. Karin Christina Ryding concentrates on academic Arabic programs and the concept of critical thinking. The author argues for explicit grammar instruction within communicative teaching as a process that enhances the learners’ cognitive development. Yasir Suleiman considers the extralinguistic motives behind the compilation of pre-Islamic period grammars, treating grammar-making as a process that is informed by ideological considerations. Finally, David Wilmsen closes the second part with a discussion of dialectal variation in the expression of ditransitive verb arguments.

This book is a valuable collection of articles for anyone interested in Arabic linguistics from a theoretical point of view, and in the possible computational, social, and educational applications of these theoretical insights.

Reviewed by John Ryan, University of Northern Colorado

A simplified grammar of the Roumanian language by R. Torceanu was originally published in 1883 with the same title by Trübner & Co. of London as part of a series of ‘simplified grammars’. A reminder of the book’s age is the former English spelling of ‘Roumanian’, now considered obsolete, which has been preserved in the title of the new edition. The book is divided into ten unnumbered major sections (numbered here for convenience) which correspond to the Romanian alphabet, eight of the major parts of speech, and syntax. The book’s preface provides a short introduction to the external history of the Romanian language and a brief description of where in the world it was spoken at the time the book was written.

Section 1 begins with a list of the Romanian alphabet, followed by five pages of ‘phonetic remarks’, or ‘hints’ as the author suggests since there is not enough room for a more exhaustive account. The focus is primarily on the pronunciation of the vowels. Sections 2 through 8, which comprise the principal focus of the book, pertain to Romanian grammar in terms of each of the parts of speech. The subject of Section 2 is nouns and covers such areas as gender (masculine, feminine, and neuter), pluralization, and accent/intonation. Closely related is the topic of Section 3, the article, the explanation of which is dependent on the previously covered explanations of gender. This section finishes with a short explanation of the cases of nouns.

Section 4 presents the use of the adjective, including formation of the feminine from the masculine, comparisons of inequality, and numerals. Section 5 treats the use of pronouns, both standard use and abbreviated forms of the genitive and dative. The section ends with corresponding subsections on reflexive, possessive, demonstrative, interrogative, relative, and indeterminate pronouns. Section 6, the longest of sections, covers the use of verbs. Beginning with the formation of the three auxiliary verbs in all its tenses, discussion then proceeds to a comprehensive treatment of regular verbs and formation of all tenses for all three conjugations. The section ends with short subcomponents on the passive voice, reflexives, and irregular and impersonal verbs.

The last three sections of the book relevant to the parts of speech are adverbs (Section 7), prepositions (Section 8), and conjunctions and interjections (Section 9). Section 10, the final section of the book, pertains to syntax and provides a more detailed explanation of the use of cases of nouns and also of how the different parts of speech interact syntactically.

This book will make an adequate resource for students needing very basic information about structures in Romanian, particularly the use of verbs. For a more comprehensive treatment of grammatical structures, students might find some other, more current, resource more helpful.

 Reviewed by Kanavillil Rajagopalan, State University at Campinas (UNICAMP)

This book contains a collection of papers looking at ‘the contours of scholarship about the English language’ which, according to the editors, were ‘redrawn dramatically’ (1) after World War II. It comprises sixteen chapters, divided into four parts. The final chapter in each part is a response to the three others. As the blurb on the back cover announces, ‘[e]ach part is structured neither miscellaneously nor as a debate, but rather as an unfolding disciplinary conversation’. The editors declare in their introduction to the book their indebtedness to the late Richard Weld Bailey, whose monumental contribution to English studies (fifty-one entries in the bibliographical references) has inspired most of the contributors and whose name figures prominently in many of the chapters.

Part 1, titled ‘American dialects’, is concerned with work on dialects of American English (e.g. Michigander dialect, African American English). The response article highlights the author’s perspective on the issue as someone who was brought up in a low-prestige language community and also highlights the relevance of Bailey’s seminal work to our current discussions.

Part 2 is concerned with the history of the English language. The three chapters look at the concept of ‘talking proper’, developed in nineteenth-century England, the etymology of the word wife, and the growing presence of English in Asia, with focus on Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan. Each of these chapters gesture toward the future of the language, as the response piece rightly points out.

English lexicography is the theme of Part 3. The chapters address issues such as the enormous word-creating potential of American English manifested through different techniques of word formation, how quotation paragraph work in historical dictionaries, and why there has been little research on Irish English, in particular on compiling a dictionary of this variety based on historical principles. The response article to the three papers in this part draws attention to modern digital technology in the creation of dictionaries and how it can lead to lexicography as a collaborative enterprise.

Part 4 is titled ‘English language studies and education’ and consists of three chapters addressing the issues of how much progress has been made in research on African American English and the way it is dealt with in educational circles, what kind of changes have occurred in the last fifty years in language use and language scholarship, and ‘returning language to writing studies’ (298) as the final chapter declares in its very title.

In addition to the general introduction, each part also has its own separate introduction to the themes discussed in the chapters, which helps to put in perspective the rationale for why the chapters were selected. The book includes a sixty-three-page bibliography, brief notes on the contributors, and an index of key terms.

Reviewed by Kanavillil Rajagopalan, State University at Campinas (UNICAMP)

In his forward, Stephen Levinson sums up the unbelievably checkered life of this book, first published in 1956 and now hitting the stands again: ‘Initially admired, then reviled, then rehabilitated, then once again attacked, it has proved unsinkable’ (vii). He goes on to expatiate on why Benjamin Lee Whorf’s name is so controversial and often invites acerbic and disparaging dismissals. Nevertheless, the very fact that it continues to resurface every now and then bears testimony to its vitality and robustness.

The book is a collection of eighteen of Whorf’s seminal papers. These cover his fourteen years as a part-time academic. Whorf published very little during his short span of life, which ended in 1941 at the age of forty-four. The book contains some material Whorf left unpublished, along with the original introduction to the book by John B. Carroll, spanning forty-three pages. In addition, the so-called ‘Yale report’ (a report on linguistic research in the Department of Anthropology of Yale University from September 1937 to June 1938) is reproduced in full as an appendix. According to Levinson, Whorf wrote it alone, although the name of George Trager appears as coauthor, as he ‘probably intended to revise it’ (xix).

Undoubtedly, as Levinson makes clear, the renewed interest in Whorf today is taking place in tandem with the decline in enthusiasm for the generative paradigm and disenchantment with its unflinching commitment to universalism against all mounting evidence to the contrary. Whorf’s ideas on connections among the three concepts highlighted in the title of this book, namely, language, thought, and reality, have immense resonance among contemporary researchers.

Curiously enough, the opening text in the book is an unpublished essay dated 1927, ‘partly type-written, partly hand-written’ as part of a correspondence addressed to a certain Dr. English, is titled ‘On the connection of ideas’. Whorf examines words, not ideas, in a manner that reminds one of ordinary language philosophers, notably J. L. Austin. The last four essays, namely, ‘Science and linguistics (1940)’, ‘Linguistics as an exact science (1940)’, ‘Languages and logic (1941)’, and ‘Language, mind, and reality (1941)’, contain food for thought valid even today.

No fewer than eight of the essays deal with indigenous languages of America. They cover a diverse array of topics. Three others draw on Whorf’s field experience but address topics of a more general, philosophical interest. The odd one out, titled ‘On psychology’, is an undated fragment. Whorf impresses the reader with his forthrightness in claims such as the following: ‘Psychology has developed a field of research that may no doubt be useful or valuable in itself; but it throws little or no light on the problems of the normal human mind or soul’ (51).

Reviewed by Kyle Gorman, Oregon Health & Science University

This monograph, a revision of the Jason Brown’s 2009 University of British Columbia dissertation, examines gradient consonant cooccurrence restrictions found in the lexicon of Gitksan, an endangered Interior Tsimshianic language spoken in British Columbia. This analysis is couched in harmonic grammar, in which input-output mappings are selected by numerically weighted constraints. The analysis is up-to-date and carefully argued.

B asserts that all statistically significant restrictions in the lexicon should be incorporated into the synchronic grammar, an assumption shared in much of the previous research on phonotactics: ‘…the patterns outlined above are statistically significant. Given this, it stands that these sound patterns should be explained by some linguistic mechanism’ (48). While it would be a result of great interest were it to be shown that statistical criteria are both necessary and sufficient to identify phonotactic generalizations that are linguistically significant (i.e. internalized by speakers), there is no reason to grant this assumption; a plausible alternative is that lexical tendencies are the result of a long complete diachronic change, but synchronically inert. Indeed, B himself suggests that the high frequency of roots containing multiple uvular consonants is the result of a diachronic process of long-distance assimilation. No attempt is made to show that the documented tendencies are reflected in word-likeness judgments or other psycholinguistic tasks.

B identifies lexical tendencies by comparing the observed cooccurrence statistics to those that would arise by free combination, estimated with a Monte Carlo technique (Brett Kessler, The significance of word lists, 2001). This requires a random shuffling procedure which is unbiased, one for which all n! possible permutations of the list are equally likely to be generated, which further demands a pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) with a period of at least (n – 1)!. Even for the relatively short root list used in this study (n = 645), the minimum period required is approximately 2⁵⁰⁸⁰  (≈ 644!), far exceeding the abilities of all but the most sophisticated PRNGs. In such a situation, all but a tiny fraction of the possible permutations of this wordlist can never be generated by shuffling, and the Monte Carlo procedure is biased.

B argues that gradient phonotactics should be considered in future efforts to document endangered languages. Ignoring questions about the synchronic status of the generalizations in question and the statistical procedure used to identify them, a catalog of gradient lexical tendencies is surely of far less documentary value than an enumeration of roots, since the former can be extracted from the latter. Unfortunately, B does not provide a root list and describes few substantive details of the phonological analysis used to phonemicize these roots.

 The book itself suffers from an unusually small typeface, poorly rendered figures, and many stylistic and typographical errors, although I found none of consequence.