Reviewed by Katrin Hiietam, Manchester, UK

This 2004 reissue is an unabridged republication of the original book first published in 1921. A general introduction to the study of language, the topics covered are accessible to both general readers and students of linguistics since the field-specific terminology is kept to a minimum.

The book begins with a reflection on the nature of human language. Edward Sapir provides insight into the psychological and physical basis for speech—that is, the connection between words and their meaning as well as the relationship between thought and language. S also discusses whether language is an innate or an acquired skill.

The next two chapters deal with the micro level of language. ‘The elements of speech’ focuses on word types and significant parts of words, whereas ‘The sounds of language’ sketches the possible sounds, the production of consonants and vowels, the phonetic patterns of languages, and the organs of speech production.

Ch. 4 discusses grammatical processes in languages such as word order, compounding of radical elements (i.e. parts that carry the lexical meaning of a word), affixation, vocalic and consonantal change, and the grammatical functions of stress and pitch.

Ch. 5 analyzes an English sentence (The farmer killed the duckling) and introduces grammatical concepts such as constituency. The conclusion is, however, that it is not possible to offer an absolute classification of the constituents of a sentence.

Ch. 6 offers an overview of the existing classifications of language types. S proposes that the traditional classification of languages into strict types (e.g. isolating, agglutinating, polysynthetic, inflective) offers too simplistic a view of the actual language types. Rather, S suggests a threefold classification based on the types of concepts a language expresses, its prevailing grammatical technique, and the degree of synthesis in a language.

Chs. 7 and 8 look at the changes in languages through history at the level of words and sentences (Ch. 7) as well as sounds (Ch. 8).

Ch. 9 describes the effect cultural contact can have on a language, focusing on the phenomenon of borrowing and the speakers’ resistance to it. S provides examples from the level of sound systems and word composition to illustrate the discussion.

Ch. 10 investigates whether it is correct to link certain languages with certain races and cultures. S concludes that race and language need not correspond and that cultural and linguistic boundaries are not identical.

Finally, Ch. 11 examines language as a material of art (e.g. literature) and states that linguistic art, in contrast to other forms or uses of language, is untranslatable because it is strictly language specific. This idea was developed further in the Sapir-Worf hypothesis, which states that the way an individual thinks is largely influenced by the nature (i.e. structure) of their native language.

Reviewed by Harald Hammarström, Chalmers University, Sweeden

As the subtitle indicates, this book is an attempt at a reconstruction of Afroasiatic with an interpretation of its putative proto-vocabulary. Unfortunately, this attempt is an amateurish recasting of Ehret (1995) and the Moscow school’s work on proto-Afroasiatic (Diakonoff, Belova, Chetverukhin, Militarev, Porkhomovsky, & Stolbova 1993–1997).

The introductory chapter recounts Ehret’s (1995) hypothesis on the Afroasiatic family: that Omotic was the first subfamily to split-off at about 12,000 BC. The section is riddled with unclarities, spurious remarks, and outright errors (e.g. page 7 says Joseph Greenberg introduced Cushitic into Afroasiatic).

The chapter on phonology and phonetics recasts Ehret’s (1995) hypothesis on proto-phonemic inventory with occasional comparisons to Orel-Stolbova. There is no real comparison or critical review and the author’s remarks are often unsupported.

The chapters on morphology, syntax, and semantics follow the same pattern. Many of the analyses are so poor that they belong to nineteenth century linguistics—for example, ‘it is hard to estimate the time of introduction of s/z into the humean [sic] phoneme inventory. It porobably [sic] happened in [sic] different times in different places of the earth but hardly before 15,000 BC’ (13), ‘We can state that it is impossible to reconstruct tonal oppositions for any protolanguage. It is better not to deal [sic] the problem in spite of Ehret’s strong argument for the case (Ehret 1955. 67–78 [sic])’ (15–16), ‘Also the rivers were in principle feminine in Indo-European as they contributed fish to the food pattern of prehistoric men. Women, trees and rivers were connected with the common feature of fecundity (fertility) in the mind of human ancestors’ (53).

The last two thirds of the book is a simplified proto-Afroasiatic vocabulary taken from Ehret (1995) but without the commentary, attested forms, and proper diacritics.

This is the first time I have come across a scientific book with so many spelling and typesetting errors (pages 53–54 have commercials for books in the same series!) that it significantly detracts from reading.

Needless to say, this book offers no advantage to Ehret’s (1995) or the Moscow school’s (Diakonoff et al. 1993–1997) work. Interested readers or libraries should forgo this volume and go directly to those works.

References

Diakonoff, Igor, Anna G. Belova, Alexander S. Chetverukhin, Alexander Militarev, Victor Ja. Porkhomovsky, and Olga Stolbova. 1993–1997. Historical comparative vocabulary of Afrasian. St. Petersburg Journal of African Studies 2–6.

Ehret, Christopher. 1995. Reconstructing Proto-Afroasiatic (Proto-Afrasian): Vowels, tone, consonants, and vocabulary. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Reviewed by Dinha T. Gorgis, Jadara University

This book is a collection of twelve articles. The first article, by Anatol Stefanowitsch (1–16), focuses on some methodological problems of corpus-based research into metaphor and metonymy from both the linguistic and cognitive perspectives. Stefanowitsch describes the field as ‘still very much in its initial stages’ (12).

In ‘Metaphoricity is gradable’ (17–35), Patrick Hanks extends the idea that ‘metaphor depends on “resonance” between at least two concepts’ (31). In cases in which the resonance gets amplified, some metaphors become more metaphorical than others ‘when two concepts share fewer semantic properties’ (31).

Elena Semino’s ‘A corpus-based study of metaphor for speech activity in British English’ (36–62) is filled with new ideas, although Semino draws heavily on previous celebrated work outside the field of corpora studies. Based on a corpus of more than a quarter-of-a-million words, this study goes beyond the now classical conceptual metaphor ARGUMENT is WAR (Lakoff & Johnson 1980, 1999) and Michael Reddy’s (1979) CONDUIT metaphor.

Stefanowitsch’s second contribution, ‘Words and their metaphors: A corpus-based approach’ (63–105), is undoubtedly challenging. Set against the George Lakoffian tradition and Kövecses (1990), Stefanowitsch examines five basic universal emotions (i.e. anger, disgust, fear, happiness, and sadness) using metaphorical pattern analysis (MPA). Being committed ‘to quantification and exhaustive data extraction’ (66), MPA is demonstrated to be superior to introspective frameworks.

In ‘The grammar of linguistic metaphors’ (106–22), Alice Deignan suggests that data-driven approaches should be balanced with theory-driven methods to conceptual metaphors. Deignan argues that theory-driven methods ‘can allow linguistic patterns to be ignored, possibly at the expense of useful insights’ (121).

Similar to the preceding papers, Martin Hilpert’s ‘Keeping an eye on the data: Metonymies and their patterns’ (123–51) strongly recommends a data-driven approach over intuitive methods. Looking into a ten-million word selection from the British National Corpus (BNC), Hilpert uncovered 909 usages of eye, of which almost half are metonymic or metaphoric. He claims that ‘metonymic expressions like “under the eye of NP [noun phrase]” have entered the lexicon as constructions and are thus a matter of semantics’ (147) rather than of pragmatics.

In ‘Metonymic proper names: A corpus-based account’ (152–74), Katja Markert and Malvina Nissim discuss their study of four-thousand annotated occurrences of location and organization names extracted from the BNC. Their framework is based on seven principles designed to account for conventional and unconventional metonymic patterns as well as literal and mixed readings. Through experimentation, Markert and Nissim discovered that the reliability of their annotation scheme is exceptionally high (169).

Kathryn Allan’s article, ‘On groutnolls and nog-heads: A case study of the interaction between culture and cognition in intelligence metaphors’ (175–90), is a diachronic corpus-based study that links intelligence and density as expressed by the conceptual metaphor STUPIDITY is CLOSE TEXTURE. Investigating Old English through to present-day English, Allan notes that STUPIDITY is associated with the source domains WOOD, FOOD, EARTH as well as a few other substances.

‘Sense and sensibility: Rational thought versus emotion in metaphorical language’ (191–213), coauthored by Paivi Koivisto and Heli Tissari, is a historical study that compares metaphors associated with the English words mind, reason, wit, love, and fear as used in Early-Modern and present-day English. The authors claim that ‘cultural change is reflected in cognitive metaphors’ (210).

James H. Martin’s article, ‘A corpus-based analysis of context effects on metaphor comprehension’ (214–36), is an examination of the facilitation and inhibition effects observed in laboratory subjects. His experiments demonstrate that ‘recognition time was shorter with metaphorical context, longer with relevant literal target contexts, and much longer still with literal source contexts’ (225).

Veronika Koller, ‘Of critical importance: Using electronic text corpora to study metaphor in business media discourse’ (237–66), uses texts published between 1996–2001 from Business Week, The Economist, Fortune, and the Financial Times to compare metaphoric expressions in marketing and sales corpora with mergers and acquisition corpora. Koller focuses on ‘the socio-cultural and ideological aspects of metaphor usage’ (238).

Finally, Alan Partington, ‘Metaphors, motifs and similes across discourse types: Corpus-assisted discourse studies (CADS) at work’ (267–304), observes that (i) ‘the presence of certain prepositions and adverbs can be indicative of metaphors specific to a certain discourse type’ (275); (ii) ‘some discourse types are more dense in metaphor than others’ (293); (iii) ‘familiarity automatically reduces the cognitive distance of juxtaposition’ (296); and (iv) the difference between similes and metaphors is in whether scalar functionality is intended or inferred.

Disregarding dozens of typos, this book will be valuable for cognitive or corpus-oriented figurative language students and researchers.

References

Kövecses, Zoltán. 1990. Emotion concepts. Dordrecht: Springer Verlag.

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the flesh. New York: Basic Books.

Reddy, Michael. 1979. The conduit metaphor: A case of frame conflict in our language about language. Metaphor and thought, ed. by Andrew Ortony, 284–324. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Reviewed by Sharbani Banerji, Ghaziabad, India

Italian does not have a well-defined class of morphologically or syntactically marked forms to express modality, such as the English modals. However, through a rigorous diachronic analysis of the Italian epistemic system, Paola Pietrandrea demonstrates that metapropositionality in Italian affects ‘the aspectual semantics of propositional content, which can only be aspectually incomplete’ (209).

Ch. 1, ‘The notional category of epistemic modality’ (6–39), separates epistemic modality from other categories such as deontic modality, mood, illocution, reality status, and evidentiality and defines modality as ‘the performative category expressing the speaker’s genuine opinion towards the modalized proposition’ (39).

In Ch. 2, ‘A typological classification of epistemic systems’ (40–52), five parameters are identified for a typological classification of epistemic systems.

Ch. 3, ‘Epistemic modality in Italian’ (53–68), demonstrates that the epistemic future, the indicative, and the conditional (as well as the subjunctive, in subordinate clauses) forms of the modal verbs dovere ‘must’ and potere ‘can’ are identified as grammaticalized epistemic forms in Italian.

Ch. 4, ‘Semantic oppositions’ (69–99), provides a semantic analysis of Italian epistemic forms. The epistemic future emerges as the genuine epistemic form, unmarked to the degree of certainty. Deve is an epistemic-evidential form that marks a strong degree of certainty and nonmediated evidence, dovrebbe is an epistemic-evidential form that marks a medium degree of certainty and mediated evidence, può is primarily a deontic form, and potrebbe is the epistemic counterpart of può.

In Ch. 5, ‘A typological characterization of Italian epistemic modality’ (100–107), Italian is characterized as a language that (i) does not have specific forms dedicated to the expression of epistemic modality; (ii) distinguishes three degrees of certainty (i.e. strong, medium, and weak); (iii) distinguishes between genuine epistemicity and inferential evidentiality; (iv) displays a complex interaction between evidentiality and epistemicity; and (v) has low performativity.

Ch. 6, ‘Inflectional and distributional constraints: The (low) performativity of Italian epistemic modality’ (108–32), examines to what extent the morphosyntactic behavior of Italian epistemic forms obeys constraints on tense, personal inflection, and distribution, such as their occurrence in the protasis of conditional constructions and in interrogatives.

Ch. 7, ‘Aspectual constraints on the propositional content’ (133–53), argues that the only propositions that allow epistemic modalizations are those that display stative, progressive, habitual, or perfect predicates. Thus, incompleteness is an aspectual feature shared by all epistemically modalized predicates and, furthermore, all ‘predicates occurring in epistemically modalized propositions can be represented as intervals open to the right’ (153).

Ch. 8, ‘The incompleteness of the propositional content and the meta-propositionality of epistemic modality’ (154–86), demonstrates that the aspectual incompleteness that characterizes epistemically modalized propositions is an index of their propositional character. The converse also holds true: Aspectual completeness characterizes the complements of predicational predicates.

Ch. 9, ‘A diachronic hypothesis’ (187–206), puts forward a reconstructivist diachronic hypothesis concerning the rise of epistemic meanings in Italian. The little historical evidence available shows that, whereas aspectually complete predications are not susceptible to reanalysis, aspectually incomplete propositions are. The ‘Conclusions’ (207–09) summarizes the work.

Reviewed by Carolina González, Florida State University

This volume is an introduction to the fundamentals of Spanish phonetics and phonology. It is written in Spanish and intended for native speakers of English with an advanced level of Spanish. Conceived as a practical handbook of Spanish sounds, this book provides a concise presentation of the basic facts of the articulation and phonology in Spanish and its main dialectal variants (v).

The contents are organized into nine chapters, of which the first three deal with linguistics proper. Ch. 1 (6–10) introduces linguistics and its areas of study, and Ch. 2 (11–21) focuses on human language and its development as well as animal communication. The first half of Ch. 3 (22–32) presents a brief overview of modern linguistics, while the second half deals with language and the brain.

Chs. 4–6 are the core of the book and cover the basics of Spanish phonetics and phonology. Ch. 4 (33–50) distinguishes between sounds and letters and introduces the notions of syllable, stress, rhythm, and intonation. Phonemes are the topic of Ch. 5 (51–57), which also discusses neutralization and archiphonemes. Ch. 6 (58–79) is a straightforward presentation of articulatory phonetics and sound classification.

Chs. 7 and 8 deal with variation of Spanish sounds. Ch. 7 (80–89) considers instances of phonemic and allophonic variation in Spanish, outlines some phonetic and phonological phenomena, and presents pointers and examples of phonetic and phonological transcription. Ch. 8 (90–107) provides a brief history of the development of Spanish and lists the main characteristics of Spanish in Spain, Latin America, and the United States. Ch. 9 (109–17) lists a few observations and examples to improve students’ pronunciation of Spanish. The book ends with a list of references, a glossary of linguistic terms, and appendixes on vowels and phonetic alphabets.

Even though the first three chapters are more general in their scope, overall this book succeeds in providing students with a practical handbook on the basics of Spanish pronunciation and phonology. This book is best suited for undergraduate courses in Spanish phonetics for native speakers of English with no previous background in linguistics. Some chapters (especially 1–4, 6, and 8) might also be used in undergraduate introductions to Spanish linguistics.

This volume is concise, well-organized, and features clear examples and plenty of visual aids that will help the students understand the main points. Every chapter includes exercises targeted for review, discussion, and practice; additionally, Chs. 4–6 end with a comparative list between English and Spanish sounds and phonemes. However, it would be helpful to have some discussion of the rationale for transcription and phonetic alphabets, and the concept of archiphonemes should probably be avoided in a book of this type. Furthermore, the inclusion of audio recordings of Spanish sounds (either on a CD-ROM or a website) would have been a welcome addition to this volume.

Reviewed by Jakob Dempsey, Yuan-ze University, Taiwan

This volume combines three main themes: (i) a review of modern scholarly activity related to the medieval rime-tables; (ii) papers discussing early Chinese phonology with reference to rime-table categories; and (iii) papers and appendices focusing on transcription-related issues, including a lengthy treatment of diasystemic transcription systems for Chinese (i.e. systems used to represent more than one dialect or language).

David Branner’s introduction includes instructions on how to use the tables to spell out contemporary (i.e. literary) pronunciations in a given dialect, along with background on the Indian, especially Buddhist, origins of such tabular phonology. The introduction focuses on ‘the contested place in the modern study of Chinese historical phonology’ (12) accorded to the rime-tables. The intentions of the original writers are a central issue: What language were the original rime-table creators trying to represent? How was this methodology used to describe later forms of Chinese? In East Asia, many scholars regard the rime-tables as a guide to the language of the Qiè yùn, but Branner is rightly suspicious (e.g. how would the tables’ creators know the pronunciation of a language spoken several hundred years before their time?) and focuses more on Edwin Pulleyblank’s influential analysis and its problems. The introduction also discusses the word 等 děng, often transcribed as ‘division’, a concept central to the rime-tables. How to phonologically interpret the apparent contrasts among the various divisions has been a matter of dispute for over a century; papers by Abraham Chan, Axel Schuessler, Wen-chao Li, and An-king Lim offer new interpretations, with the latter two invoking influence from Altaic speakers. Two papers by W. South Coblin and one by Branner deal with the medieval and early modern history of rime-table scholarship. Papers by Richard Vanness Simmons and Jerry Norman speak against the common tendency to force modern dialectology into the Procrustean bed of rime-table categories.

The last third of this book demonstrates ways to transcribe and represent the phonological categories of the rime-tables to serve a utilitarian purpose such as a comparison of modern dialects (in another paper by Richard Vanness Simmons), or depicting a phonological system that (according to the paper by Jerry Norman) underlies a majority of modern Chinese dialects. Branner’s paper ‘Some composite phonological systems in Chinese’ covers these issues, and he further offers a large appendix with ten transcription systems for medieval Chinese, including his own neutral transcription system. However, the systems used by Norman and Branner limit themselves to the basic twenty-six letters; years ago this was a practical if not ideal procedure, but now it leads to misleading representations and overly complex formulations that could easily be avoided. What Norman transcribes as *iang may well have been *eŋ; however, the character e is already being used for /ə/. He transcribes 萬 as mvan, which resembles no historical development known to this reviewer. A more practical way to merely representing the rime-books’ categories might resemble this reviewer’s long-standing 历代拼音 (lidaipinyin) system, a historical spelling (cf. right-rite-write-wright), which is simply pronounced as modern Standard Chinese.

This book is recommended for its innovative treatment of a topic rarely covered in books outside of China.

Reviewed by Przemysław Czarnecki, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań, Poland

This book is the long awaited product of Tobias Scheer’s fruitful research on various phonological phenomena examined within the framework of the CVCV theory (or, as the title of the book indicates, the lateral theory of phonology [LTP]). Although many of S’s ideas have already been presented in conference talks and published articles, this book will be enthusiastically received, as the phonological community has long needed and looked forward to a compact presentation of the tenets of LTP.

In the theoretical section of this book, S devotes himself entirely to the presentation and defence of the central ideas of LTP. This theory, a direct offshoot of government phonology, breaks dramatically with what are normally considered the cornerstones of most phonological theories. LTP stipulates that phonological organization is in fact extremely simple because it can be reduced to sequences of consonantal and vocalic positions arranged along two theoretical devices: government and licensing. Due to a lack of sufficient space to present even a fraction of the theory’s foundations, and given that part of the book is intended merely as a guide to LTP, the specifics of this theory will not be examined here.

This volume is divided into two main parts: the first clarifies the nature of CVCV, the second attempts to justify the theory and support the premise that CVCV is preferable to other phonological approaches. To this end, S analyzes an impressive amount of data, gathered from such disparate and often unrelated languages as English, German, Czech, Polish, Moroccan Arabic, French, Icelandic, Somali, Italian, Dutch, Brazilian Portuguese, and Tiberian Hebrew, among others. The sheer magnitude of data facilitates a lively discussion of, and solutions to, a wide range of traditional dilemmas within the field of phonology, such as word-initial consonant clusters, vowel and consonant length, syllabification, vowel-zero alternations, empty nuclei as well as weak and strong phonological positions within the syllable. Interestingly, the core of the discussion is framed at every point in reference to broader phonological controversies. With a keen eye as well as persuasive argumentation, S elucidates both the theoretical and empirical weakness of some pivotal positions held within traditional generative phonology (in the spirit of Sound pattern of English, Noam Chomsky and Morris Halle, New York: Harper and Row, 1968), government phonology or optimality theory (criticized for its alleged arbitrariness and tendency to overgeneralize). In widening the scope of discussion, S generates interest and accessibility not only for students of LTP but for every practicing phonologist.

In sum, S has offered an interesting read. As this volume is only the initial installment of a larger book project, vol. 2 will be eagerly anticipated.

Reviewed by Louisa Buckingham, University of Granada, Spain

This book is a study of the verb-noun collocations known as light verb constructions, verb support constructions, and complex predicates. Although these structures have been studied in depth in German—and have experienced some recent popularity in Spanish linguistics—surprisingly few recent studies have been attempted in English. Antonio Álvarez Rodríguez uses a substantial corpus of British newspapers to demonstrate how the use of these verb structures varies across different journalistic genres (e.g. politics, economics, sports). Moreover, the author provides an in-depth study of how morphosyntactic features vary in frequency, versatility, and productivity in both the verb and the noun phrase. A considerable number of tables and graphs illustrate these syntactic characteristics. The author limits himself to the study of seven verbs (do, have, give, make, take, hold, and keep), the first five representing the most frequent support verbs, while the final two verbs, of lower frequency, were selected for their contrastive value.

The literature review in Ch. 1 provides an outline of the general syntactic and semantic characteristics of complex predicates. A diachronic perspective of these structures in Old English enhances the discussion. Subsequently, the coverage given to complex predicates in dictionaries is also reviewed.

Ch. 2 describes the corpus used for this study as well as the system of scanning for the targeted verbs using Microsoft Word.

Ch. 3 is dedicated to the analysis of the verb support and a discussion of the results. Have and make occur extremely frequently, while do, keep, and hold occur only sporadically. As might be expected, the past tense and the nonfinite verb forms predominate, although the passive voice is frequent in the political genre.

Ch. 4 discusses the various noun phrase determiners, beginning with an overview of the different determiner types and their relative frequency. Interestingly, the sports genre makes strong use of possessive and complex determiners.

Ch. 5 describes the different types of noun phrase modifiers and their relative frequency in both the verbs and the different genres. The author considers both pre- and postmodification, covering adjectival, participle, and clausal modification.

Ch. 6 investigates the characteristics of the noun, specifically, the deverbal character of nouns—perhaps the most emblematic aspect of complex predicates. The author notes that, although the English noun and verb may be isomorphic, this is not necessarily a relevant characteristic of these structures in other languages. The nouns, however, certainly tend to be abstract and appear with greater frequency in the singular. Additionally, the occurrence of multiple complex predicates is discussed here—that is, the merging of two structures that share the same support verb (e.g. give help and advice).

The relative frequency of each support verb together with its noun complements is also examined. Some nouns, of course, are able to combine with more than one support verb, and the distribution of nouns across different verbs is also investigated (lead is perhaps the most productive, combining with give, have, hold, keep, and take).

This book is clearly written, logically organized, and easily accessible. The numerous tables and the examples extracted from the corpus ensure an adequate illustration of the phenomena. In sum, this is a worthy contribution to an important area of the English language.

Reviewed by Susan Windisch Brown, University of Colorado

Recent advances in brain imaging have inspired linguists, psychologists, and neuroscientists to explore more deeply the brain functions involved in language. With this book, Fred Peng attempts to provide these scientists with the information needed from outside their core fields to pursue this task competently. Additionally, P presents his model of language in the brain while exhorting linguists to abandon the nonsensical claim that syntax plays any role in language (229). The book is divided into five main parts: (i) a historical overview of how various fields have defined language and where they went wrong, (ii) a proposal on how to correct scientists’ misunderstanding of language and appropriately redirect their efforts, (iii) a primer on neuroanatomy, (iv) P’s explanation of the brain functions that support language, and (v) an outline of a model of language production and reception.

In the introduction, P argues against language innatism and promotes the importance of neuroanatomy to the analysis of language, warning that without it, linguistics will most likely be renamed pseudo-theology (xvi). The historical overviews of linguistics and semiotics that follow seem largely accurate, although P neglects to mention any theories of functional linguistics or research in psycholinguistics. He concludes this section by describing how medical specialists, including aphasiologists, have grossly obfuscated and misunderstood language (48).

Part 2 proposes a new direction for linguistics, semiotics, and neuroscience that establishes improved communication between these fields. P suggests an extension of Ferdinand de Saussure’s langue/parole distinction that subdivides each into individual and social aspects.

Next, P describes in detail the development of the human nervous system and the parts of the brain. However, this section is peppered with controversial comments presented with no direct engagement with opposing theories. For example, P asserts, ‘communication disorders include autism, dementia, mental retardation [. . .] which are actually none other than various forms of language disorder’ (71). No research is cited to either support or contest this claim.

In Part 4, P fleshes out his theory that language is memory-governed, meaning-centered, and multifaceted. Several widely accepted notions about brain functions are challenged, often by refuting extreme forms of these claims. For example, P explains that the idea of regional specializations in the brain—such as those for language or facial recognition—is based on the view that each is ‘manipulated exclusively by a designated brain structure […] as if other brain functions, such as memory, play no role in these so-called specializations’ (235).

Finally, a model of language production and reception is presented, in which production is achieved by binding concepts to motor images. These then separate so that motor impulses can be sent to the appropriate physical apparatus. Crucial to this model is the notion that proto-meanings are chunked into pieces to match the number of acoustic images they are to be bound to. At the same time, these chunks are lined up in ‘some kind of a vague time axis’ (259). Unfortunately, it is not clear how this chunking, binding, and sequencing is achieved or how it is different from syntax, the existence of which P has repeatedly denied.

This book may be useful to linguists looking for a primer on neuroanatomy, although care would have to be taken to independently identify which descriptions of brain functions are supported by current research in the field. As a resource of linguistic theory for psychologists and neuroscientists, this book neglects to include many theories of interest to those fields. Additionally, P’s strawman techniques and simple dismissals of opposing theories undermine the credibility of his claims. This book does provide, however, important reminders that language and speech are not separate entities, that language requires the use of many parts of the brain, and that the hearer’s reconstructed meaning of an utterance is not exactly the same as the speaker’s intended meaning.

Reviewed by Susan Windisch Brown, University of Colorado

Eneko Agirre and Philip Edmonds have done an admirable job of providing a comprehensive look at the natural language processing task of word sense disambiguation (WSD). Rather than gathering papers on individuals’ recent research, the editors have commissioned the top names in the field to present overviews of major issues, methods, and research directions.

The first several chapters establish the context for word sense disambiguation: why it is seen as necessary for natural language processing (NLP) applications, what the parameters of the task are, and how to evaluate a system’s performance. Adam Kilgarriff (29–46) explores the fundamental question of the nature of word senses and the difficulty of establishing a definitive word sense inventory. Nancy Ide and Yorick Wilks (47–74) question the assumption that WSD systems must determine fine-grained sense distinctions. The need to shift to more coarse-grained sense distinctions is echoed by Martha Palmer, Hwee Tou Ng, and Hoa Trang Dang (75–106), within the context of explaining the current methods of WSD evaluation.

Diving into the nuts and bolts of implementing WSD systems, the next three chapters review several broad categories of methodology. Rada Mihalcea (107–32) explores knowledge-based methods, starting with the influential Lesk algorithm and continuing through measures of semantic similarity, selectional restrictions, and heuristic-based methods. Ted Pedersen (133–66) reviews unsupervised corpus-based methods, which he characterizes as ‘knowledge lean’ (134). Supervised corpus-based methods are described by Lluís Màrquez, Gerard Escudero, David Martínez, and German Rigau (167–216), including such algorithms as Naïve Bayes and Support Vector Machines. Each of these chapters covers the history of the approach, state-of-the-art research, and future directions for the methodology. Additionally, the strengths and weaknesses of each approach are explored.

Researchers have hoped to increase the performance of WSD systems with the addition of various linguistic features. Eneko Agirre and Mark Stevenson (217–52) identify and evaluate linguistic knowledge that could be helpful in the task and match these to concrete features available from lexical resources. Given the enormous task of gathering such features by hand, Julio Gonzalo and Felisa Verdejo (253–74) explore methods for automatically acquiring lexical information. Paul Buitelaar, Bernardo Magnini, Carlo Strapparava, and Piek Vossen (275–98) discuss using domain-specific information, such as subject codes or topic signatures.

Philip Resnik (299–338) concludes the book with an excellent discussion of the ultimate goal of creating WSD systems: improvement of actual natural language processing applications. He critiques some of the usual arguments for WSD, asserting that the only true test of WSD is assessing a system’s benefit to actual applications. He describes the level of success in current NLP applications and considers emerging applications and potential reformulations for the WSD task.

Lecturers, researchers, and students will benefit from this well-organized and highly informative book. Whether looking for an introduction to the field, an extension of their knowledge of methods and resources, or insight into future approaches, readers will be satisfied with this book.