Reviewed by Janne Skaffari, University of Turku

Lawrence Venuti’s history of translation is more precisely a history of literary translation (mainly) into English in the last four hundred years, and a critique of the dominant translation strategies that aim at fluency and effortless intelligibility. V responds in this volume to criticism he received in 1995 for the controversial first edition and seeks to improve and update the discussion. The seven chapters incorporate extensive case studies of translations from the seventeenth century onwards.

V introduces the key issues in Ch. 1, ‘Invisibility’ (1–34), dealing with the lowly status of translation in the U.S. and the U.K. He emphasizes that foreign texts tend to be domesticated or made to conform to the expectations of the receiving Anglophone culture through fluent and transparent translation. It renders the translator’s work invisible to the readers, conceals cultural and linguistic dissimilarities between original texts and translations, and does violence to the source-language texts. This practice is traced to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Ch. 2, ‘Canon’ (35–82). While both classical literature and popular texts were translated to read naturally in English, they were also altered with contemporary social, political, and cultural values in mind. This recommended practice was not seen as producing inaccurate translations.

The opposite practice is introduced in Ch. 3, ‘Nation’ (83–124): the cultural and linguistic differences between the original and the translation are underscored rather than suppressed by foreignizing translation, a method that was not approved of in nineteenth century England, for example, but which is promoted by V himself. ‘Dissidence’, the title of Ch. 4 (125–63), refers to the preference for the marginal over the dominant in foreignizing translations. This is also a political and ideological act that can be achieved by adopting particular translation strategies and selecting ‘deviant’ foreign texts for translation.

In Ch. 5, ‘Margin’ (164–236), the modernism of the early twentieth century emerges as a potential turning point in the history of fluent translation: there was greater heterogeneity in both poetry and translations, but especially in the post-war era the more experimental translations still remained on the margin. V brings us closer to the present in Ch. 6, ‘Simpatico’ (237–64): he uses some of his own work as examples of ‘resistant’, discontinuous and challenging rather than transparent translations of recent Italian poetry.

The concluding Ch. 7, ‘Call to action’ (265–77), is considerably longer than in the first edition. It not only sums up the discussion and suggests directions for the future, but also includes a new discussion of foreignizing translation from the late nineteenth century. The bibliography (286–307) has also been revised to include some eighty entries not available at the time of the original volume. While the second edition has been updated and many issues have been clarified, The translator’s invisibility is still a provocative book that serves to bring translation and translators out of the margin.

Reviewed by John D. Phillips, Yamaguchi University, Japan

This textbook, which examines Prolog for text processing, aims to make students capable of using and building systems with linguistic data, such as dictionaries and large text corpora. Although the author assumes a basic knowledge of Prolog and an ability to write programs, this text is not written for particularly advanced students. M first provides a general explanation of each subject and then expands the discussion with a programming example and exercises. Sample answers to the exercises, along with the programs used in the examples, are collected at the end of the book.

The book’s sixteen chapters are divided into four parts. Part 1 explains character input, how to read a line or sentence from an unformatted text file, and the implementation of several sorting algorithms. Part 2 builds on these programs to create word frequency lists, a key word in context (KWIC) concordance program, and a vocabulary test for learners of English. Part 3 implements finite state automata and transducers to create a word-hyphenation program for dictionary look-up and a simple morphological analyzer for Danish nouns. Part 4 implements a relational database, paying particular attention to modularity, robustness, and the user-interface.

From the book’s title, one may expect to find discussion of definite clause grammars, parsing, formal semantics, knowledge representation, and inference, but none of these topics are mentioned. The book is concerned with words and characters, not sentences or meanings. It will be of use to those with a basic knowledge of Prolog who want to try their hand at corpus linguistics and to teachers designing courses using Prolog for text processing or database management.

A prominent feature of this book is the way each chapter builds on the one before it to create a library of useful functions and templates. Part of the programming for each new example and exercise has already been detailed earlier in the book. However, one shortcoming of the text is the poor editing. In a couple of places it is difficult to understand what the author means: the many infelicities interrupt smooth reading and distract from the subject matter. The publisher’s policy of minimal editorial intervention may have advantages to the throughput and cost of the often valuable linguistic resources they publish; however, it may also allow for problems such as the poor editing and the inappropriate title of this volume, which make the book less useful than it could have been. With its high price and narrow scope, this is mainly a book for libraries, where it will be a useful reference work.

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

The present volumes are the fifty-fifth and fifty-sixth yearbooks published by the Permanent International Committee of Linguists under the auspices of the International Council for Philosophy and Humanistic Studies of UNESCO. The 2002 volume is the last to have been compiled at the National Library of the Netherlands; the 2003 volume was compiled at the Institute for Dutch Lexicology. The bibliographies contain substantial references (19107 titles in 2002 and 14792 titles in 2003) with a particular focus on less described and lesser known languages.

Many scholars will find the structure of the books very helpful, much like the appendix to an encyclopaedia of linguistics. The volumes open with published bibliographical guides and reviews, proceedings of conferences, chronicles, Festschriften, and other collections. The compilers’ assiduous attention to the biographical data of linguists is evident in Section 0.2.3 of ‘General linguistics and related disciplines’.

The section for general linguistics starts with a thematic bibliography. What follows is the history of linguistics that is based on the territorial division, i.e. Western and Non-Western traditions, the latter concerning Indian and Arab linguistics. Within the Western tradition, the chronological division is applied (Antiquity, Middle ages, Renaissance, the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth century), followed by linguistic theory and methodology, philosophy of language, semiotics, interlinguistics, and applied linguistics. Afterwards follow thirteen sections concerning the main branches of linguistics: phonetics and phonology; grammar; lexicon (lexicology and lexicography); semantics and pragmatics; stylistics; metrics and versification; translation; scripts and orthography; psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics (including origin of language); sociolinguistics and dialectology; historical and comparative linguistics; mathematical and computational linguistics (including machine translation); and onomastics. These sections cross-reference the special ‘languages’ part of the bibliography.

The bibliographies cover thirteen language groups (including pidgins and creoles), along with Nostratic and sign languages, in which languages are listed according to genealogy (e.g. Indo-European, Hamito-Semitic, Dravidian languages) or territory (e.g. Asianic, Mediterranian, Caucasian languages). Two language isolates receive their own sections, Basque and Burushaski. The exact number of all languages listed in these volumes is ambiguous in any case because of difficulties in distinguishing between languages and dialects.

The Indo-European family is the most extensive group, covering a vast territorial and chronological space. The coverage is very variable in size: A rich literature is devoted to such languages as French, German, English and Polish, while other languages have much smaller entries reflecting lesser scholarly attention. Specialists might quibble with some of the distinctions drawn by the editors. Thus, Kashubian and Rusyn are listed as Slavonic languages: the former is often considered a dialect of Polish, and the latter has not been proven to differ from Ukrainian.

This issue sometimes carries political overtones. The Moravians are strongly regarded as Czechs. Similarly, as the only surviving form of the Pomeranian language, Kashubian may be seen as a full-fledged language and it is taught in state schools. However, the Rusyn language does not possess any divergent features in syntax and morphology that would not have originated from the Ukrainian vernacular.

Another terminological confusion might sow misconceptions concerning the ‘Old Russian’ language, which might be taken as referring to a direct ancestral form of contemporary Russian, whereas in fact it refers to the Kyivan recension of Church Slavonic, for which the proper term is the Old Rus’ language.

Simultaneously, the bibliographies do not register the Moldavian (Moldovan) language among other Romance languages. While the question of whether Moldovan is a separate language from Romanian is hotly disputed and fraught with political overtones, as it is the state language of the Republic of Moldova, it deserves a wider presentation in the reference literature. In short, the reader should bear in mind that the names of languages in different subdivisions and cross-references reflect the decisions of the authors of the articles listed and should therefore be viewed critically.

The principal virtue of these bibliographies is their length. The periodicals included alone amount to 2778 and 2726, respectively, exclusive of books and non-periodical collections. This work is possible due to the cooperation of bibliographers from more than twenty countries and the strenuous job of four editors. Especially noteworthy is the high-quality, reader-friendly name index, which represents immense labor on the part of the compilers

The bibliographical description includes all the obligatory components in accordance with the rules of the International Standard Bibliographic Description of the International Federation of Library Associations. The alphabetical order does not treat letters with diacritics separately, but lists them with the simple English/French letter. Some titles are given with an English-language translation in addition to a transcription of the original, a practice that would be desirable for a wider range of languages, but which is motivated by the policy of giving the English version only when it was present in the original publication. Additionally Greek-language titles are granted the privilege of appearing in the original script; all other scripts are Latinized. Perhaps it would be reasonably convenient to start entries with an English-language title and retain the original title in the original script if the software allows.

Researchers will greatly benefit from the editors’ stress on papers published outside Western Europe and North America. The criteria of representativeness and bilateralness (multilateralness) cross here to aid contemporary international linguistic cooperation, adding much to current Internet-oriented unsystematized search. These bibliographies provide an invaluable resource in language studies.

Reviewed by Carolin Patzelt, Ruhr-University of Bochum, Germany

In this volume, Luís Filipe Cunha describes the semantic profile of stative predications, determines the properties that allow for a reliable identification of this aspectual class, and establishes criteria that distinguish states from other types of situations.

The book consists of six chapters. In Ch. 1 (9–62), aspect is compared with other closely related concepts, such as tense and Aktionsart. Drawing on previous studies by David Dowty (Word meaning and Montague grammar. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1979) and Zeno Vendler (Linguistics in philosophy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1967), C contrasts the aspectual classes of states, activities, accomplishments, and achievements. In Ch. 2 (63–114), C explores the aspectual features of stative predications in more detail. His basic assumption is that stative predications do not represent a homogeneous class, and, therefore, it is necessary to define subcategories of states. C establishes tests that allow for a more precise characterization of the linguistic behavior of stative predicates. He argues for three fundamental distinctions: (i) states versus events, (ii) phase versus nonphase states, and (iii) individual-level versus stage-level states.

In Ch. 3 (115–224), C tests his hypotheses. He systematically examines different linguistic configurations that convey stative predications, such as lexical states with verbal, adjectival, or nominal predicates. A careful analysis of stative predications confirms the necessity of establishing a difference between individual-level and stage-level states as well as between phase and nonphase states. Thus, C works out rather subtle differences, such as the difference between ser ‘to be’ (an individual-level state) and estar ‘to be’ (a stage-level state).

Ch. 4 (225–98) deals with the interaction between states and other grammatical components, such as tense, adverbials, and sentential negation. Crucially, C illustrates how stativity affects various levels of the grammar of a language. Ch. 5 (299–342) examines the role of stative predications on the temporal structure of discourse. Discussing different stative subcategories, C draws interesting conclusions: for instance, in contrast to individual-level phase states, individual-level nonphase states usually cannot combine with the pretérito perfeito. C concludes this chapter with the analysis of authentic narrative texts.

Finally, Ch. 6 (299–376) returns to the basic concepts and problems of stativity. The development of the different subcategories is traced to two essential factors: (i) a temporal feature that leads up to the opposition between individual-level and stage-level states and (ii) an aspectual feature that is related to the difference between phase and nonphase states.

This volume provides a thorough semantic description of stative predications. Of particular value, C departs from a concept of aspectual homogeneity to systematically describe the different grammatical configurations that convey stativity. By bringing these configurations together into one unified scheme, C succeeds in accounting for the complex interaction between aspectual and temporal properties.

Reviewed by Malcolm Ross, The Australian National University

Jennifer Wei’s slim volume discusses the language choices of politicians in Taiwan in the democratization period of the last two decades and their implications for building and manipulating group identities, examined against the background of language policy since Taiwan became a part of the Japanese empire in 1895. This is a somewhat postmodernist work on the sociology and politics of language, illustrated by analyses of portions of political speeches. It is not a sociolinguistic work and includes no quantitative analysis.

There are six chapters. Ch. 1, ‘To -er is to err: Acts of identity in Chinese’ (1–17), focuses on the social significance of (originally diminutive) -r suffixation in Beijing Mandarin. The author also discusses whether Chinese is one language with dialects or a language family with member languages, pointing out that both answers are laden with ideological meanings.

Ch. 2, ‘Language choice in Mandarin and Tai-yu’ (19–32), discusses the social meanings of language choice and codeswitching in public discourse between the two major forms of Chinese spoken in Taiwan. Tai-yu (‘Taiwanese speech’) is a Southern Min dialect of Chinese spoken natively by perhaps eighty per cent of the population. Its use was generally frowned upon by the Japanese administration (1895–1945) and the autocratic Kuomintang government but has acquired ideological significance since democratization.

Ch. 3, ‘Chen Shui-bian’s language choices’ (33–53), discusses the presidential candidate’s use of Tai-yu as an ideological instrument and marker of Taiwanese identity during the 2001 election campaign, in which he was elected Taiwan’s first non-Kuomintang president. The second half of the chapter is devoted to descriptive analyses of short passages from his speeches.

The fourth chapter, ‘Language choice and politics’ (55–79), is a further examination of candidates’ uses of Mandarin and Tai-yu, in which public language choice reflects whether the candidate stands nearer the China-centred or the Taiwan-centred extreme of the Taiwanese political spectrum. In her analysis of short excerpts from 1995 television debates, W emphasizes that these choices entail a good measure of ambiguity and subtlety.

In Ch. 5, ‘From nationalism to multiculturalism: Making choices in language policy’ (81–101), W deals with more general issues of language policy, both before and since democratization. They centre on the recognition that Taiwan is a multicultural society that includes the Tai-yu-speaking majority, the large Mandarin-speaking minority, a significant Hakka-speaking minority, and a number of indigenous minorities who traditionally spoke Austronesian languages. She touches on legislation regarding indigenous language rights and on bilingual education (i.e. education in Mandarin and another language of Taiwan).

Ch. 6, ‘A hybrid Chinese for the twenty-first century’ (103–20), is explicitly ideological, arguing against the equation of language and nation-state. On the one hand, W presses for continuing Taiwanese multiculturalism; on the other, she expresses a desire for a form of Mandarin that will express a broader Chinese identity rather than an identity linked to a political entity. She recognizes, however, that this will entail a shift in attitudes towards both language and ethnicity for many Taiwanese.

Although this book is written in English, it seems aimed at educated Taiwanese, not at an international audience, not only from the content of the final chapter but from the book’s organization. If it were aimed at the interested outsider, one would expect an introductory survey of Taiwanese history, language use, and language policy. In its absence the general reader is left to cull what background he can from passages scattered through the book.

Reviewed by Iván Ortega-Santos, University of Memphis

With an emphasis on Romance languages and the principles and parameters framework, this volume presents a selection of papers from The Romance Turn, a workshop on first and second language acquisition that took place in Madrid in 2004.

Section 1 focuses on ‘Clitics, determiners and pronouns’. Sergio Baauw, Marieke Kuipers, Esther Ruigendijk, and Fernando Cuetos explore the development of se– and self-anaphors in Spanish and Dutch. Anna Gavarró, Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux, and Thomas Roeper contrast the acquisition of the bare nouns and definite nouns in English and Catalan. Isabelle Barrière and Marjorie Perlman Lorch investigate the acquisition of ambiguous valency-marking morphemes in French. The acquisition of object clitics in French and Italian is detailed by Natascha Müller, Katrin Schmitz, Katja Cantone, and Tanja Kupisch, and Maren Pannemann contemplates interference in the first language acquisition of determiner phrases in French-Germanic bilingual children.

In Section 2, ‘Verbs, auxiliaries and inflections’, Claudia Caprin and Maria Teresa Guasti discuss the acquisition the auxiliary be in early Italian. Elisa Franchi looks at patterns of copula omission in Italian. The acquisition of imperatives and the root infinitive hypothesis are discussed by Manola Salustri and Nina Hyams. Finally, the acquisition of subjects and external arguments are explored by Vincent Torrens, Linda Escobar, and Kenneth Wexler for Spanish and by Jacqueline van Kampen for French, Spanish, and Portuguese.

Section 3, ‘Movement and resumptive pronouns’, includes Elaine Grolla’s contribution on the acquisition of A- and A’-bound pronouns in Brazilian Portuguese, María Junkal Gutiérrez Mangado’s exploration of the acquisition of long-distance wh-questions in first language Spanish, and Magda Oiry and Hamida Demirdache’s investigation of the acquisition of wh-in situ in first language French.

The focus of Section 4 is ‘Syntax/discourse interfaces’. João Costa and Kriszta Szendröi discuss focus marking in early European Portuguese, and Manuela Pinto examines the effect of crosslinguistic influence on bilingual first language acquisition.

Finally, Section 5 explores ‘L2 acquisition’. Claudia Borgonovo, Joyce Bruhn de Garavito, and Philippe Prévost discuss English native speakers’ interpretation of determiner phrases signaled by mood in Spanish relative clauses. Cristóbal Lozano investigates the second language acquisition of presentational focus by Greek-speaking learners of Spanish. Silvina A. Montrul and Celeste Rodríguez Louro consider the acquisition of morphosyntactic and discourse-pragmatic aspects of subject expression in second language Spanish across different proficiency levels of English-speaking learners.

The variety of issues addressed will make this volume particularly interesting not only for those specializing in Romance languages or in language acquisition but for a broader audience as well.

Reviewed by Marc Pierce, University of Texas at Austin

This interesting, readable book focuses on verbal blunders, ranging from slips of the tongue (spoonerisms, Freudian slips) to speech disfluency (e.g. the use of um and other fillers). According to the introduction, it was inspired by the author’s reaction to the speech patterns exhibited by George W. Bush during the 2000 presidential campaign in the USA, whose speech during the campaign exhibited a relatively high proportion of verbal blunders, yet received a positive public response: ‘around half of the American electorate seemed willing to accept [Bush’s] verbal blunders as an authenticity that they found lacking in smoother-tongued politicians’ (12). Erard saw this as ‘a remarkable moment in the public life of language in the United States’ (12) and waited for someone to publish an explanation of this phenomenon. When no such explanation emerged, E decided to write a book on verbal blunders himself.

The book consists of eleven thematic chapters, e.g. ‘The secrets of Reverend Spooner’, which addresses the life and influence of the Reverend William Spooner of Oxford University, who is reported to have committed so many verbal blunders (e.g. he is said to have told a student, ‘You have hissed all my mystery lectures’ instead of ‘You have missed all my history lectures’) that one type of verbal blunder, the spoonerism, is now named for him. Similarly, ‘The life and times of the Freudian slip’ (28–52) discusses Sigmund Freud’s view of verbal blunders, which holds that speech errors result from psychological factors, and its scholarly reception. Freud’s work has given rise to the now popular term ‘Freudian slip’, coined in the 1950s, which was famously defined by the character Cliff Clavin on the 1980s American sitcom Cheers as ‘saying one thing and meaning a mother’. There is also an introductory chapter, three indexes (further readings, a glossary of types of verbal blunders, and a clarification of the distinction between ‘slips of the tongue’ and ‘speech disfluencies’), and an accompanying website (www.umthebook.com).

As noted above, the book is both interesting and readable. At times it overextends itself in striving to be both erudite and charming, but this is not a serious problem. It contains a good deal of interesting material on a wide array of topics and is well worth reading. The volume itself is hardcover and cleanly edited, with only a handful of typographical errors.

Reviewed by Dimitrios Ntelitheos, United Arab Emirates University

A republication of Margaret K. Omar’s original 1973 book with the same title, this volume is the only currently available in-depth study of the developmental stages in the acquisition of Egyptian Arabic. The book is divided into seven chapters.

Ch. 1 introduces the goals of O’s developmental study. Methodological issues are explored, including the types of recordings, the transcription methodology, and the children who participated in the study. A structural sketch of the language is also provided. Ch. 2 discusses the living conditions, physical characteristics, and family members of the children studied.

In Ch. 3, the acquisition of the phonological system is shown to proceed through three distinct stages, immediately following the babbling state: stage 1, in which children exhibit very limited phonemic repertoires with no consonant clusters; stage 2, in which children produce diphthongs and some consonant clusters although cluster simplification is still productive; and stage 3, in which children appear to have acquired adult-like phonological competency. O describes the order of acquisition for phonemes and phoneme combinations and concludes by comparing the phonological acquisition of Egyptian Arabic to phonological acquisition in other languages.

In Ch. 4, O investigates early communication and the initial vocabulary of Egyptian Arabic speaking children. She discusses the results of a vocabulary comprehension test in relation to the general recognition of objects by the children, their ability to manipulate objects, and their ability to produce minimal grammatical contrasts (e.g. number, tense, voice, gender, agreement). O demonstrates that children produce vocabulary items not available in adult speech although these words are present in child-oriented adult speech (i.e. baby-talk).

In Ch. 5, O discusses syntactic development. Early stages in the acquisition of Egyptian Arabic are shown to correspond to early stages in the acquisition of other languages, including a one-word and a two-word stage. O divides the subsequent multiword stage into two parts. In the early part, children display a mean utterance length of about 1.75 words and significant omission of function words. In the later part, children display a mean length utterance of 3.5–3.75 words and a significant decrease in the omission of function words and inflections. Subsequent sections discuss the acquisition of negation and interrogative sentences.

Ch. 6 explores the development of morphology. Following a description of early morphological development, O discusses the acquisition of inflectional affixes related to number and gender.

In Ch.7, O provides some concluding remarks, including the implications of her findings for theories of first language acquisition and suggestions for further research. The book ends with a short bibliography.

O’s volume is currently the only book-length study of the acquisition of a dialect of Arabic. As such, it remains a valuable reference and an essential read for those interested in the acquisition of Semitic languages and in language acquisition in general.

Reviewed by Bert Peeters, Macquarie University

Cliff Goddard is best known for his numerous contributions to Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) theory—a paradigm for semantic explication based on sixty odd empirically defined semantic primes or irreducible conceptual building blocks that are lexicalized in all the languages of the world, and a universal syntax that spells out the combinatorial patterns of primes allowed in the metalanguage. In his introductory chapter (1–30), Goddard defines ethnopragmatics as a new paradigm within NSM theory, but admits in a footnote (19) that ‘a good deal of ethnopragmatics has been conducted under the banner of ‘cross-cultural pragmatics’, including Anna Wierzbicka’s…groundbreaking volume of this name’ (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1991, republished 2003). Goddard provides the following informal definition: ‘the whole idea is to understand speech practices in terms which make sense to the people concerned, i.e., in terms of indigenous values, beliefs and attitudes, social categories, emotions, and so on’. The terms must also make sense to ‘cultural outsiders’: unlike ‘universalist pragmatics’ such as Gricean and neo-Gricean approaches, politeness theory, and contrastive pragmatics, ethnopragmatics relies on truly universal tools and principles rather than on presumed universal principles of communication, presumed universal models of face needs and a presumed universal inventory of speech act types, all of which have proven to be Anglocentric.

Apart from the editor’s introductory chapter, the book includes seven chapters by close allies of the framework. Anna Wierzbicka (31–63) proposes a number of ‘cultural scripts’ against putting pressure on other people and examines how these are implemented in day-to-day discourse. Cliff Goddard (65–97) focuses on Australian English, defining a fairly widespread communicative pattern that he calls ‘deadpan jocular irony’. Jock Wong (100–25) deals with social hierarchy in Singapore’s speech culture. Zhengdao Ye (127–69) examines emotionality and facial expressions in Chinese, commenting on the so-called ‘inscrutable’ Chinese face. Through a series of cultural scripts, Rie Hasada (171–98) provides glimpses into the emotional world of the Japanese. Catherine E. Travis (199–229) explores how the cultural values of confianza and calor humano are realized in the discourse patterns of native speakers of Colombian Spanish. Felix K. Ameka (231–66) provides a fascinating insight into the ethnopragmatics of gratitude in several West African languages.

Ethnopragmatics as defined by Goddard takes ‘indigenous values, beliefs and attitudes…and so on’ (2) as given. Description of relevant speech practices would then, presumably, lead to a better understanding of these values, beliefs, and attitudes. I would like to argue that it is possible to go further than that: ethnopragmatics could also aim at discovering previously unsuspected values, the reality of which would subsequently have to be demonstrated through more detailed analysis of a different nature. NSM practitioners are currently working on an overall framework that includes ethnosemantics, ethnophraseology, ethnosyntax, and ethnoaxiology, within which this volume will no doubt occupy a place of choice.

Reviewed by Dimitrios Ntelitheos, United Arab Emirates University

A resource for the study of the language used in newspapers, books, broadcasts, and formal speech, this book provides a detailed description of the grammatical structure of Modern Literary Arabic. It contains thirty-nine chapters and an appendix of tables for verb conjugation paradigms.

The organization of the chapters does not relate to grammatical components or categories but rather to the level of difficulty in learning specific aspects of the grammar. This organization will be useful to those following a curriculum or learning as an independent study. The chapters on the Arabic script, transliteration, punctuation, handwriting, and pronunciation of consonants and vowels each provide extensive exercises on the Arabic alphabet as well as discussions of special cases and numerous examples.

Several chapters explore the nominal domain and include a discussion of nominal classes, definiteness and indefiniteness, gender, number (including a chapter on discontinuous plurals), free and bound pronominal forms (e.g. personal, demonstrative, reflexive, reciprocal, interrogative), the possessive construction, and derived nominals (e.g. participles, verbal nouns). Each discussion is supported by examples as well as practice sentences (which contain the Arabic script, its transliteration, and an English translation) and translation exercises. New Arabic words are marked with a superscript that indicates the English translation, which facilitates the translation process.

The chapters that investigate the verbal system of Arabic provide discussion of roots and radicals, trilateral verbs, aspect morphology (e.g. perfect and imperfect verbs), derived verb forms, transitivity, and mood morphology. Special chapters deal with classes of verbs with weak initial, middle, or final radicals; verbs of wonder; the negative copula; and verbs with special uses. As with the chapters on nouns, these sections provide extensive examples and translation exercises.

The remaining chapters examine grammatical categories such as conjunctions, prepositions, particles, adjectives (e.g. comparatives, superlatives, diminutives), cardinal and ordinal numbers, expressions of time, adverbs and adverbial phrases, circumstantial clauses, conditional sentences, and word order. Because some of these chapters provide a more general overview of the grammatical system, the exercises are more complex and require knowledge of the preceding chapters.

Arabic: An essential grammar is, as the title suggests, a practical reference guide to the structure of Formal Modern Arabic. It will be of use to students within the classroom as well as to independent learners of the language. Suitable for both beginners and intermediate students, this volume will provide a strong introduction to the complexities of the grammatical structures of Formal Modern Arabic.