Reviewed by Kirsten Fudeman, University of Pittsburgh

In his latest book, Maweja Mbaya takes a sociolinguistic approach to the languages of Senegal, exploring their functions and contexts, as well as the attitudes and aspirations linked to their use. M has a strong interest in linguistic politics, and towards the end of the volume he turns to questions such as the following: How will the linguistic physiognomy of Senegal change in the twenty-first century? How might politicians intervene in linguistic affairs so as to enable the people of Senegal to take full advantage of their complex linguistic situation? What is the future of French in Senegal? Of Arabic? Of English? And of the various lingua francas currently in use there?

The book has an introduction, five chapters, and a conclusion. Ch. 1, ‘Le pays, les habitants, les langues’ (26–53), answers fundamental questions about Senegal and its people. The author moves quickly from describing the country’s size, location, and political system to describing its ethnic communities, of which the Wolof is the largest. It rapidly becomes clear that with about thirty linguistic varieties and six national languages, Senegal is an ideal topic of study for scholars who, like M, are interested in language contact and linguistic attitudes. Ch. 2, ‘Aperçu sociolinguistique’ (53–81), provides essential background information on the linguistic situation in Senegal by sketching four main periods: the precolonial period (before 1885), the colonial period (1885–1960), the postcolonial period (1960–1990), and the 1990s. Ch. 3, ‘Les langues en contact’ (82–176), deals with peaceful contact and conflict between languages, with the term ‘conflict’ often simply referring to competition for functions. For example, English is becoming increasingly important in domains that were once more heavily associated in Senegal with French, such as science, technology, education, and industry. More importantly, the relationship between French and the vernaculars is changing, with French losing ground to Wolof and local languages. And, of course, the French one hears in the streets of Senegal is not necessarily standard French. In the final two chapters, ‘La situation demain’ (177–94), and ‘Une réelle prise en charge’ (195–200), M focuses on linguistic politics, considering how the sociolinguistic situation in Senegal might change over the course of the next century, and formulating and motivating concrete suggestions that respond to the needs of the Senegalese people and increasing opportunities offered by globalization. Of the five maps that supplement the text, four are quite useful, but the type on one is so small as to be illegible.

The early chapters of this book provide the reader with a clear introduction to the linguistic situation of Senegal, and all five chapters, as well as the conclusion, contain much food for thought. I appreciated not only the discussion of topics listed above, but also the many examples in the text, including a code-switching dialogue in Wolof and French, lists of Arabic words borrowed into Wolof, Senegalese-French words and expressions, excerpts from the works of African writers of French expression, and specific details about the structure of Senegalese-French.

Reviewed by John A. Erickson, Indiana University

Kazak (also spelled Kazakh from its rendering in Russian), a language of the Kypchak group of the Turkic family, is spoken primarily in Kazakstan and in the neighboring countries of China, Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Russia. It has gained in importance with the independence of Kazakstan from the Soviet Union in 1991 and its designation as the new country’s state language. As a result, there has been a growing demand for competent grammars of Kazak written in English. Unfortunately, this brief book falls far short of meeting this demand.

Kara notes that the grammar, prepared on the basis of ‘fieldwork with the Kazaks of Kazakstan and other Kazak-speaking groups in neighboring countries’, is ‘based on personal observations’ and that he ‘concentrated on oral literature’ and used a ‘lot of Russian publications from Soviet times, grammar sketches and dictionaries’ (3). Only twelve descriptive works of grammar are cited in the reference section, and not one dictionary. No citations to these or other works accompany the data and text of the grammar. K also does not specify the names and locations of any Kazak native speakers consulted in compiling the data. Nor are any sources given for statistical data, such as estimates of the number of Kazaks or Kazak speakers in the introduction (4) and on the back cover.

The grammar is divided into four main sections—‘Introduction’, ‘Phonology’, ‘Morphology’, and ‘Sample texts’—the most substantial of which is devoted to morphology. No section is devoted specifically to syntax or to the lexicon, and no mention is made of word order (which is SOV), agreement, anaphora, and subordination. Sections are divided into numbered subsections with a title indicating the grammatical category or topic under consideration, followed by a few examples. Many subsection titles are accompanied by further explanation, but it is often too poorly written to be understood by those who have no background in Turkic languages. Most, however, contain no further explanation at all.

The section on phonology provides a phonemic inventory of Kazak vowels and consonants, some phonological rules, succinct comments on diphthongs, and some phonotactic information concerning etymology. Like many other Turkic languages, Kazak exhibits various kinds of vowel harmony, and consonant harmony at morpheme boundaries.

The section on morphology is divided into three main subsections: nominal morphology, verbal morphology, and auxiliary verb formations. Here, K includes additional information about the phonological rules that determine the shape of suffixes in his remarks on individual morphemes. His description of Kazak grammar, however, is often inadequate or erroneous. For instance, in the section on adjectives, K notes that ‘Adjectives morphologically do not differ from nouns’ (28), but subsequently gives examples that contradict this statement, e.g. zhaz ‘summer’ (noun) vs. zhaz-gy ‘summer’ (adjective) (28–29). K attributes only four locational, directional, and comparative functions to the ablative case (20); but even a rapid examination of other sources on Kazak readily reveals many others, such as partitive, causal, and the expression of the material from which items are made. Examples given without explanation can be just as bewildering; for instance, under ‘Indefinite pronouns we find bir kisi ‘someone’ (26), but also kejde ‘sometimes’ (26) and älde kašan ‘sometimes, long ago’ (27), which makes one wonder how K would define pronouns as a category.

The ‘Sample texts’ consist of a single folktale, collected by K in southern Kazakstan in 1994. The short narrative is given in interlinear format with a parsed transcription and a morpheme-by-morpheme gloss followed by a free translation. The morphemic glossing is mostly accurate, but also contains some annoying inconsistencies, glaring errors, and infelicitous renderings in the English. For instance, the grammatical abbreviations PAR and PRT, both defined as ‘particle’(58), and MOD, which is undefined, are all used to mark the same verbal suffix, while PAR is also used to gloss an exclamatory particle occurring after an imperative verb (53). The free translation, rendered into unidiomatic English with many grammatical and lexical infelicities, does not do justice to the original Kazak narrative.

K’s grammar is replete with typographic errors, inconsistencies, and many other editorial infelicities. Many abbreviations are poorly defined, or completely undefined. A botched mechanical replacement of ‘ger’ for ‘gerund’ with ‘CV’ for ‘converb’ is evidently responsible for errors such as ‘KrueCV’ for the surname ‘Krueger’ (59), ‘CVunds’ for ‘gerunds’ (39), and so on. Amazingly, editorial pencil marks indicating needed revisions appear on some pages of the printed text; a stray paragraph of draft notes on the final page of the book also failed to be excised.

In sum, this concise grammar is a rough draft that should never have been published in its current form. Its description is often inadequate or erroneous, lacking many points of grammar that would be essential for any native speaker or student of Kazak. It further suffers from poorly written, unidiomatic English, which is often vague and imprecise, filled with numerous grammatical errors and in dire need of copyediting. Kazak deserves a higher standard of scholarship and better quality of production than evinced in this work. Thus, I cannot recommend this book to individuals and libraries.

Reviewed by John A. Erickson, Indiana University

This manual is an important addition to English-language materials on Uzbek. Its two volumes grew out of class materials used in both regular and intensive Uzbek courses at UCLA and aim to provide ‘culturally balanced language materials’ for students who wish, in the authors’s words, to obtain ‘well rounded composition and conversation competence’ in modern literary Uzbek, covering elementary, intermediate, and advanced levels of instruction.

The book contains an introduction; thirty chapters; a bibliography of selected works on Uzbek grammar, dictionaries, modern literature, and other materials on the language; an index of grammatical and other topics covered; and an index of Uzbek morphemes. The introduction provides a succinct overview of modern literary Uzbek, the letters of its Cyrillic alphabet (but not its new Latin alphabet) together with their phonemic correspondents and a description of its phonology.

The chapters are uniformly organized, beginning with a sample proverb and an outline of grammatical topics and exercises covered. This is followed by a short dialogue with its translation and then by sections containing vocabulary (50–100 words); roughly fifteen phrases and idioms; five proverbs; grammar; a brief Uzbek text and its vocabulary; 10–20 Uzbek sentences to be copied and translated into English; about ten sentences in English for translation into Uzbek; ‘Directed composition’, with a topic described in English for students to write about in Uzbek; and ‘Conversation’, with a list of 15–30 expressions for use in conversations on various topics without the context of a dialogue.

The book covers most essential topics in Uzbek grammar, providing detailed descriptions of morphology, with many nominal declensions and verbal conjugations given in table format; however, it does not adequately address many topics in syntax, such as word order, agreement in complex sentences, coordination, subordination, and relative clauses. The vocabulary, phrases and idioms, and proverbs glossed in English at the beginning of each chapter often have no relevance to the readings or exercises that follow. The proverbs are rendered literally and without an illustrative context or explanation.

The conversation sections include topics such as ‘Greetings’, ‘Being thankful’, and ‘Complaints’, as well as ‘Curses’ and ‘Being rude’. Many essential conversation topics are missing, however, such as family, food, cooking, dining, shopping at the bazaar, transportation, and asking for directions, and this absence leaves significant gaps in needed vocabulary, as well as in common examples of certain grammatical constructions (e.g. bare ablative partitive expressions, as in ‘Take some of the bread’, routinely heard while dining). There are also many gaps in what might be expected for certain conversation topics; for example, under ‘Greetings’ one finds expressions such as ‘Hello’, ‘Good-bye’, and ‘How are you?’, but not ‘What is your name?’, ‘Where are you from?’, or their appropriate responses.

In sum, this book could serve as a useful reference manual on Uzbek grammar for both students and instructors, with many exercises that could be incorporated into language courses. Nonetheless, it would clearly need to be supplemented by other language materials to teach students communicative proficiency in many practical topics of conversation.

Reviewed by Mark J. Elson, University of Virginia

This reference grammar fills a much neglected gap in the arsenal of materials available to those learning Hebrew and those interested in the structure of the language. Prior to its appearance, there was no comprehensive description of the contemporary language in English other than Haiim B. Rosén’s A textbook of Israeli Hebrew (2nd edn., Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1966), which is usable, with some effort, as a reference grammar due to its relatively detailed presentation of grammatical topics reflecting Rosén’s background as a linguist as well as a pedagogue. In contrast, the book under review was written as a reference grammar, and, although it was the authors’ intention to maximize accessibility by making the presentation simple and avoiding complex linguistic analysis (xiii), the result is not primarily a resource for beginners, but for more advanced learners and linguists. It comprises fifteen chapters, including ‘Preliminary discussion’ (1–15), ‘Writing and pronunciation’ (16–32), ‘The verb system’ (33–55), ‘Verb pattern groups’ (56–124), ‘The noun system’ (125–57), ‘Pronouns’ (158–76), ‘Numerals’ (177–93), ‘Adjectives’ (194–208), ‘Adverbs and adverbial expressions’ (209–24), ‘Particles’ (225–51), ‘Noun phrases’ (252–87), ‘Verb phrases’ (288–99), ‘Modal verbs and expressions’ (300–313), ‘Clauses and sentences’ (314–63), and ‘Language in context’ (364–89). There are five appendices (390–437), and an index of grammatical topics (438–47). Facts relating to Biblical Hebrew are interspersed throughout.

The exposition is consistently clear, comprehensive, and well-exemplified. These features will be appreciated most by those who come to the book with limited, or no, background in the structure of Semitic languages. The chapters on the noun phrase, verb phrase, clause, and sentence are models of organizational clarity. The presentation and discussion of the ‘construct phrase’ (261–75)—a complex syntactic structure of pivotal importance in the syntax of the noun phrase and, in textbooks, typically dealt with in too superficial a manner to be of use to advanced learners or to linguists—is treated here in sufficient detail. The chapter on language in context contains a large amount of information of central importance to students , and typically absent in textbooks of Hebrew, which are satisfied to comment on these aspects of language in only the most shallow way, if at all.

There is one minor criticism that might be made of this otherwise fine piece of work. The occasional notes on Biblical Hebrew are often too brief to be of real value, and do not generally provide explanations that reach the level of clarity the authors offer in their explanations of synchronic phenomena. As a result, the references to biblical phenomena are less likely to be accessible to those who are acquainted only with the contemporary language but want to know something about its biblical predecessor. The section on ‘waw consecutive’ (42–44) is a good example. Even a rudimentary understanding of this construction presupposes familiarity with the concept of narrative sequence, which is mentioned by the authors but inadequately discussed and exemplified. The authors may have tried to do too much, and might better have saved the biblical information for an appendix, in which it could have been treated more extensively. It should also be noted that the initial chapter, which is a brief survey of the grammatical terminology necessary for use of the book, assumes that the reader brings a basic knowledge of grammatical concepts to the scene, and may therefore be difficult, in part, for some. Minor matters such as these aside, we have in this book a valuable source for scholars, and an aid for pedagogues as well as students.

Reviewed by Catherine Doherty, Queensland University of Technology

This edited collection explores academic writing by comparing expert academic writing with that of novice writers, or of first language writers’ choices with those of second language students, to make evident the necessary learning for academic success. Thus the theoretical analyses, predominantly built from M. A. K. Halliday’s systemic functional linguistics (SFL), serve to resource pedagogic practice in academic and language support programs in higher education settings. There are three sets of chapters: the first looks at the writerly identities and interpersonal aspects of academic text; the second examines textual strategies; and the third more broadly addresses pedagogies for developing academic writing.

In the first set, Ken Hyland’s chapter explores students’ control of rhetorical devices to build interpersonal engagement in academic text, and the intrinsic difficulty for students when it comes to negotiating such a peer-to-peer tenor in any assessment’s simulation of the research report. Susan Hood’s chapter explores how evaluations are encoded in experts’ research papers as choices across the appraisal system to communicate the interpersonal semantics of an evaluative stance and the challenges this presents the novice writer. Helmut Gruber’s analysis of Austrian business students’ writing in German displays the tension between their role as students and their imagined futures as business consultants, evident in their different deployment of modals. Sue Starfield outlines the case study of a successful mature black student in South Africa positioned as a first-year student and his strategy in a sociology essay of suppressing his personal voice while drawing on his unionist life experiences. Brian Paltridge focuses on the genre of exegesis specific to art/design studies and offers an ethnography of the production and the consumption of such texts in a New Zealand institution.

The second set of chapters addresses how academic texts work as text. Louise Ravelli compares novice essays, graded and ranked by the subject lecturers, in the disciplines of management and history, with particular reference to the logico-semantic moves structuring the argument and signaling the relation between parts of the text, revealing significant disciplinary differences. Ann Hewings compares first-year and final-year undergraduate essays in geography to track the students’ growing control of the meaning potentials of textual Theme towards the expectations of that particular discourse community and its factions. Using similar analyses of Theme with appraisal, Caroline Coffin and Ann Hewings reveal how the IELTS test’s ‘academic writing’ task elicited and rewarded more personal arguments in a corpus of fifty-six essays by second language candidates. Mary Schleppegrell compares the choices of migrant students writing in their developing second language with that of other ‘proficient’ students studying chemical engineering in US colleges and their variable control of technical and scientific English, in particular the resource of grammatical metaphor. Youping Chen and Joseph Foley also analyze the use of grammatical metaphor as a resource to carry ‘buried reasoning’ in expository text, to make evident the interference Chinese EFL students experience when attempting such textual strategies in English.

The third set of chapters features SFL-informed pedagogical responses to the challenges of academic writing. Robert Ellis describes an innovative genre-based pedagogy in an undergraduate science unit using an online database of scaffolding models and exercises to show how the technology weakened control of aspects of the pedagogy. Helen Drury is similarly interested in how open online environments might host rich genre-based pedagogy for academic literacies, and gives a mixed review of their potential. Finally, Janet Jones offers a summary of the variety of theoretical frameworks informing pedagogy around academic literacy/literacies and then profiles how the metalanguage of SFL with its focus on language in social contexts has informed the teaching and research programs in the Learning Centre at the University of Sydney.

The collection reflects a diversity of settings from Australia, New Zealand, Austria, China, the UK, Singapore, and the US, and a variety of disciplines, to demonstrate the changing yet unchanging context of higher-education settings: despite technology, internationalized student groups, and global knowledge economies, there remain resilient disciplinary conventions that continue to demand intricate, nuanced texts from its novices.

Reviewed by Manuel Padilla Cruz, University of Seville

This volume is a cross-cultural study of pragmatic and discourse transfer of compliment responses in Vietnamese advanced learners of English as an L2 when interacting with Australian English native speakers. It falls squarely within a sound and fruitful tradition of cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics studies. Tran is motivated by the obvious impact of the nonnative speaker’s L1 and culture on their L2 production, and hence analyzes their performance in the L2 and the consequences of pragmatic and discourse transfer for cross-cultural communication.

The volume has eleven chapters. The first chapter is introductory and presents the aims of the research, the significance of its topics, and the structure of the book. The rest of the chapters can be divided into two parts. Chs. 2–6 comprise a theoretical part, while Chs. 7–11 comprise the empirical research carried out and its conclusions.

Ch. 2 describes and explains the key concepts that allow readers to understand pragmatic and discourse transfer: pragmatics, discourse, interlanguage, transfer, cross-cultural interaction, and interlanguage pragmatics. Ch. 3 is exclusively dedicated to pragmatic and discourse transfer, so it offers a complete review of previous research into this area. In close connection with it, In Ch. 4, T extensively discusses research into compliment responses, explains the reasons behind the choice of this communicative act for the analysis of pragmatic and discourse transfer, reviews contradictory findings about pragmatic and discourse transfer in this act, and suggests possible solutions to that research. In Ch. 5, T addresses again the notion of pragmatic and discourse transfer, reviews it, and offers a new and complete definition of the term. Finally, Ch. 6 critically discusses issues related to methodology in cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics research.

Ch. 7 presents the research questions of the study and expands on the reasons for examining them. Ch. 8 explains the procedures for data collection and data analysis and describes naturalized role-play, the procedure employed to obtain data. It also explores the conditions of pragmatic and discourse transfer through data from background questionnaires, retrospective interviews, closed and open role-plays, and field notes of natural data. Ch. 9 presents the research findings. These findings reveal the usage of different strategies by Vietnamese advanced learners of English as an L2 to respond to compliments, indicate what is transferred, show patterns and conditions of pragmatic and discourse transfer, and confirm the effectiveness of the naturalized role-play in cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics research. Ch. 10 focuses on the nature and conditions of pragmatic and discourse transfer in compliment responses, and the role of awareness in pragmatic and discourse transfer, and offers some pedagogical implications for L2 learners, teachers, and speakers of different languages in cross-cultural interaction. It also stresses the contributions and practicality of the naturalized role-play, and reflects on the limitations of the study carried out. Finally, Ch. 11 offers the general conclusions of the study, some suggestions for further research, and some remarks on related issues.

Reviewed by Manuel Padilla Cruz, University of Seville

Variational pragmatics, a recent field of pragmatics explicitly and officially established at the 9th International Pragmatics Conference held in Riva del Garda (Italy), investigates, according to Schneider and Barron, pragmatic variation taking into account social and geographical factors. It aims to analyze the impact of variables such as region, social class, gender, age, and ethnicity on how individuals use (a) language, and is a reaction to traditional dialectology, which has mainly centered on the study of pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar, thus ignoring to a great extent linguistic action and interactive behavior.

The volume gathers together ten empirical papers by thirteen leading researchers, accompanied by an introductory chapter by the editors, ‘Where pragmatics and dialectology meet; Introducing variational pragmatics’, where they delineate the field, establish its relationship with dialectology and explain the levels of pragmatic analysis that variational pragmatics seeks to explore. The papers are based on naturally occurring discourse obtained from already existing electronic corpora or recordings made by the authors and on experimental data collected by production questionnaires, role plays, discourse-completion task (DCT), and open discourse-completion task.

The book is organized into three parts—‘English’, ‘Dutch and German’, and ‘Spanish and French’—which contain papers examining pragmatic phenomena in those languages and some of their varieties. Seven papers address individual speech acts, such as requests, apologies, invitations, and thanking, stressing the action level of the varieties of different languages explored. These are ‘The structure of requests in Irish English and English English’ by Anne Barron, ‘The pragmatics of a pluricentric language: A comparison between Austrian German and German German’ by Rudolf Muhr, ‘Requesting in German as a pluricentric language’ by Muriel Warga, ‘Requests in corner shop transactions in Ecuadorian Andean and Coastal Spanish’ by María Elena Placencia, ‘Apologizing in French French and Canadian French’ by Ursula Schölmeberger, ‘Different realizations of solidarity politeness: Comparing Venezuelan and Argentinean invitations’ by Carmen García, and ‘Gratitude in Bristish and New Zealand radio programmes: Nothing but gushing?’ by Sabine Jautz.

Two papers analyze formal aspects of specific varieties: ‘Response tokens in Bristish and Irish discourse: Corpus, context and variational pragmatics’ by Anne O’Keefee and Svenja Adolphs, where the authors examine response tokens such as ‘yeah’, ‘oh my God’ or ‘absolutely’, and ‘The distribution of T/V pronouns in Netherlandic and Belgian Dutch’ by Koen Plevoets, Dirk Speelman, and Dirk Geeraerts, where the authors discuss the distribution of the T/V pronominal forms in those varieties of Dutch. Finally, ‘Small talk in England, Ireland, and the USA’ by Klaus P. Schneider adopts an interactive perspective to analyse topic selection and sequencing in small talk.
Apart from shedding light on the pragmatic phenomena analyzed, the papers contained in this volume also offer valuable suggestions for further research and raise additional questions that will awaken the reader’s interest in this new field of pragmatics. Certainly, scholars and students in pragmatics, dialectology, and sociolinguistics will welcome this collection of most interesting and illuminating papers on linguistic variation, for they approach this issue taking into account pragmatic differences between varieties of languages and adopting a multi-level perspective.

Reviewed by Manuel Padilla Cruz, University of Seville

This special issue of the journal Acta Linguistica Hafniensia gathers ten interesting papers on a topic that has received much attention over the last decades, the semantics/pragmatics interface. In the introduction, Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen and Ken Turner deal with the salient positions concerning the semantics/pragmatics interface. The papers that follow can be grouped into two sub-sets, depending on whether they are synchronically or diachronically oriented.

In ‘Semantic and pragmatic contributions to information status’, Betty J. Birner reviews a taxonomy of the possible information statuses of individual clause constituents and shows that inferables from bridging inferences must be described in terms of ‘hearer-new/discourse-old’ so as to satisfactorily account for their syntactic distribution. In ‘Salience and anaphoric definite noun phrases’, Klaus von Heusinger contends, from a dynamic discourse semantics standpoint, that anaphoric relations in discourse can be explained on the basis of the salience of discourse referents, so anaphoric pronouns can refer only to the referent that becomes most salient.

‘The unitary procedural semantics of the, this and that’ is a relevance-theoretic account of these three definite determiners in which Alex Klinge suggests that their root morpheme th- procedurally encodes an act of textual ostention. In turn, ‘Semantic, pragmatic, and lexical aspect of the measure phrase + adjective construction’ is a reflection made by M. Lynne Murphy from a construction-grammar standpoint on the possibility of combining measure phrases with adjectives; the author argues that different combinations have achieved different degrees of lexicalization but are semantically and pragmatically similar, and that this permits generalizations.

In ‘Probability logic and conversation’ Ken Turner, rejecting the Gricean approach, contends that indicative conditionals do not express material implications and do not have truth conditions at all, so their meaning is better explained within the framework of probability logic. In ‘The semantics of polyphony (and the pragmatics of realization)’, Henning Nølke presents the so-called Scandinavian theory of linguistic polyphony, an independent module in a larger theory of linguistic meaning and utterance interpretation, according to which sentences have a polyphonic structure, which roughly corresponds to their semantic level, and a polyphonic configuration that constitutes the polyphonic interpretation of utterances of those sentences and, hence, corresponds to their pragmatics.

Corinne Rossari shows in ‘The grammaticalization process and the phenomenon of persistence at work in two hybrid discourse markers: la preuve and regarde’ that the original meanings of discourse markers still constrain their grammaticalized uses. In turn, in ‘From pragmatics to semantics: esto es in formulaic expressions’ Salvador Pons Bordería explains the evolution of this reformulation marker.

Jacqueline Visconti argues in ‘The role of lexical semantics in semantic change’ that the source meaning of items undergoing semantic change imposes serious constraints on the result of such change. Finally, in ‘GCI theory and language change’ Maj-Britt Mosegaard Hansen and Richard Waltereit examine the processes whereby initially pragmatic inferences may become conventionalized as the coded semantic content of some linguistic items.

Reviewed by Charlotte Brammer, Samford University

In The social art: Language and its uses, Ronald Macaulay updates his classic introduction to linguistics, adding two new chapters that address some of the main theories in language development and language evolution. Also new to this edition is an appendix, appropriately titled ‘A note on Saussure, Bloomfield, and Chomsky’. In the introduction to this edition, M states that these additions ‘are intended to show how there is considerable controversy about certain claims that have been developed through a complex process of reasoning rather than being based on generally accepted objective evidence’ (ix). Working from descriptive and pragmatic perspectives, M critiques Noam Chomsky’s theories because ‘Chomsky vehemently rejects the notion that communication is central to the notion of language’ (55). Communication is never far removed from M’s discussion of the various aspects of the study of language.

M wrote this text for those who are new to the field of linguistics, and it may be particularly well suited for those in teacher education programs. The text has thirty-five chapters, averaging five pages each. Its brevity, however, does not indicate paucity of information. Chapter topics progress from language acquisition to syntax (three chapters) to semantics to pragmatics, before addressing the evolution of language, the history of English, and more recent topics in sociolinguistics. Each chapter provides key definitions and concepts about the particular topic as well as animated and often humorous examples. In Ch. 13, ‘Regional dialects’, M uses Peter Trudgill’s work from the Potteries area of England to demonstrate shifts in vowel sounds from one region to another. He then provides a brief anecdote of his own: ‘I once bought a freezer from someone who had grown up in New Jersey. He warned me that here was a plastic pen in it that sometimes rattled. Knowing that he had young children who were quite lively, the presence of a plastic pen did not seem surprising to me. It was years later that I realized that he had been talking about a plastic pan’ (65). Such pointed yet light-hearted prose makes seemingly complex concepts quite accessible for anyone new to the field.

In keeping with the goal of introducing the study of language, M includes an extensive glossary and list of references. The glossary offers clear definitions of linguistic terms, often incorporating examples to reinforce meaning, and the list of references offers a valuable starting point for more in depth research on the topics covered in the text. Communication is not just the center of M’s notion of language; it is also the rhetorical emphasis of this text.

Reviewed by Manuel Padilla Cruz, University of Seville

This volume gathers twelve papers that explore relationships between different languages and the contexts where they are used with a wide array of methodologies. It is organized into three parts, each containing four chapters: ‘Information structure’, ‘Lexis in contrast’, and ‘Contrastive perspectives on SLA’,

‘Themes zones in contrast: An analysis of their linguistic realization in the communicative act of non-acceptance’, by Anita Fetzer, opens Part 1. Using German and British data taken from politicians’ reactions to electoral defeat, the author contrasts nonacceptances in British English and German, focusing on how Theme is related to its textual function and integrates clausal grammar. ‘Last things first: A FDG approach to clause-final focus constituents in Spanish and English’, by Mike Hannay and Elena Martínez Caro, examines Rheme in English and Spanish and discusses whether clause-final constituents in both languages allow for special focus positions. In ‘Contrastive perspectives on cleft sentences’, Jeanette Gundel analyses the distribution and frequency of those constructions in Norwegian and Spanish translations of Harry Potter and the philosopher’s stone, revealing that their frequency differs across languages. Then, Ilse Magnus considers the placement of circumstantial adjuncts in Dutch and French in ‘The position of adverbials and the pragmatic organization of the sentence: A comparison of French and Dutch’, showing that some sentence constituents can be focusable.

Part 2 addresses lexical matters. ‘Swedish verbs of perception from a typological and contrastive perspective’, by Ǻke Viberg, analyses these verbs and their patterns of polysemy. In ‘ “Abroad” and semantically related terms in some European languages and in Akan (Ghana)’, Thorstein Fretheim and Nana Aba Appiah Amfo discuss the concepts ‘abroad’ and ‘home’ and their respective semantic fields, arguing that their corresponding expressions in Norwegian and Akan have different denotations. ‘The expression of emotion in Italian and English fairy tales’, by Gabrina Pound, reflects on the similarities and differences in the ways in which emotion is expressed in those languages and cultures, revealing that fairy tales in those languages emphasize various concerns. Finally, Felix Rodríguez González explores some lexical features of effeminate English and Spanish gay men in order to contrast their usage, connotations, and semantic evolution in ‘The feminine stereotype in gay characterization: A look at English and Spanish’.

Part 3 is devoted to contributions of contrastive linguistics and pragmatics to S/FL teaching. ‘Communicative tasks across languages: Movie narratives in English, in English as a foreign language and in German’, by Andreas H. Jucker, is a contrastive analysis of the different ways in which those speakers sequence narrative elements, introduce characters, and report acts of thought and speech. In ‘Linguistic theory and bilingual systems: Simultaneous and sequential English/Spanish bilingualism’, Raquel Fernández Fuentes, Juana M. Liceras, and Esther Álvarez de la Fuente explore bilingual twins’ lexico-grammatical patterns when learning their first languages. Edward D. Benson and Pilar García Mayo reflect on the possibility of raising students’ awareness of the rules of orthography in ‘Awareness of orthographic form and morphophonemic learning in EFL’. Finally, Francisco Gutiérrez Díez examines Spanish learners’ of English errors at the suprasegmental level in ‘Contrastive intonation and error analysis: Tonality and tonicity in the interlanguage of a group of Spanish learners of English’.

Practitioners, scholars, and students in different fields of linguistics will find in this volume valuable and revealing approaches to a wide array of issues that will certainly contribute to a better understanding of linguistic diversity across cultures. Its contents will also suggest new directions for future research and contribute to an enhancement of teaching methodologies.