Book Notices

Reviewed by Louisa Buckingham, Sabanci University Writing Center, Turkey

This volume is a compilation of six papers originally published in the International Journal of Corpus Linguistics in 2006, which had been presented previously at the conference Teaching and Language Corpora in Spain in 2004. These papers cover a diverse field of spoken and written language, with a preponderance of academic language and newspaper language corpora.

In the first paper, John Morely shows in his newspaper corpus study how lexical cohesion can help structure discourse. He begins by illustrating how headlines can indicate lexical fields—and occasionally even the argumentation—that the following article will contain. He then moves on to lexical phrases in the body of the text, such as in theory and in the past, and illustrates how these phrases function as discourse markers, or predictors, providing potentially useful clues to the reader regarding how the text will unfold.

Hilary Nesi and Helen Basturkmen examine how the use of four-word lexical bundles (e.g. what I want to, a little bit of, in terms of the) in university lectures differs from other registers. The authors discuss their contribution to discourse cohesion and illustrate the discourse signaling role these bundles play in lectures. While it may be true, as the authors maintain, that these bundles constitute features that may warrant greater attention in didactic materials, it is questionable as to whether learners are necessarily likely to be without implicit knowledge of the function of such bundles. Allowing for cross-linguistic differences, learners arguably may well transfer their comprehension of such structures from other languages they may use. Nevertheless, much is still to be learned with regard to how learners identify and process such bundles.

Martin Warren investigates the communicative role of prominence using a spoken corpus of job placement interviews. His analysis reveals that the usual prominence given to lexical items may on occasion be transferred to function words in certain contexts of interaction, highlighting the context-dependent nature of prominence. Winnie Cheng discusses a corpus-driven approach to describing lexical items. By looking at patterns of coselection in the most frequently occurring words in a corpus of speeches relating to the SARS crisis, she demonstrates the dynamic and genre-specific nature of semantic prosody.

Using a written corpus of second language learning students’ texts, John Flowerdew demonstrates how signaling (or shell) nouns contribute to textual coherence. He also shows that students who made accurate use of such nouns tended to achieve a higher grade on their papers. The examples of student work illuminate the problems second language learning writers have in grappling with this means of discourse signaling in complex sentences. Finally, Michaela Mahlberg reflects on the interface between lexical and grammatical cohesion and how cohesion may be approached in the context of classroom language teaching.

The studies in this text support the application of corpus-driven research to language acquisition contexts. The broad selection of topics and the variety of corpora used in the studies constitute an additional feature of interest. It is a text that will respond to the needs of postgraduate students and scholars.

Reviewed by Douglas C. Walker, University of Calgary

This detailed study, an extensive revision of Martin Elsig’s Hamburg doctoral dissertation, is a welcome addition to the burgeoning literature on both historical sociolinguistics and syntactic variation. It applies the tools of variable rule analysis to the extensive corpus of material available on the French interrogative system, focusing on nineteenth and twentieth century Quebec French, supplemented by data from late Middle and Classical French literature.

French interrogatives, both yes/no- and wh-questions, provide a complex set of variables for analysis in the direct question domain—for example, pronominal inversion; simple, free/stylistic, and complex inversion; intonation questions; grammaticalized markers (e.g. est-ce-que, -ti/tu); wh-fronting; and wh-in situ). In addition to their social conditioning, these variables show both diachronic and geographic diversity. Therefore, the Quebec data, drawn from the extensive records in the Ottawa Sociolinguistics Laboratory (led by Shana Poplack), can be appropriately compared to the data from the Hamburg’s Research Centre on Multilingualism (led by Jurgen Meisel) on the syntactic aspects of change in Romance languages. E is thus able to supplement work on European French with synchronic studies of oral data from two centuries of data from Quebec and insert these results into a historical context encompassing roughly five centuries of documentation.

After a detailed introduction (1–12), an ‘Overview of the literature’ (13–32) precedes chapters on ‘Data and methods’ (33–72), ‘Results’ (73–164), and an ‘Interpretation and discussion of results’ (165–260). A conclusion (261–66), a list of ‘Literary texts consulted’, references, and an index close the book. The results themselves are of considerable interest, investigating both regionally and historically such factors as subject identity, verb identity, frequency and length, tense and mood, style, and social category as affecting both yes/no- and wh-questions. Among other results, the reduction in inversion and the increase in intonation as means of question formation are notable.

The heart of this study, however, lies in the interpretation and discussion, in which the results of the extensive empirical investigations are brought to bear on questions of syntactic theory. Here, there is an analysis of the interrogative system of colloquial Quebec French (from the extensive corpora in the Ottawa Sociolinguistics Laboratory), which includes interesting and extensive discussions of the morphological—rather than syntactic—status of pronominal clitics and of the characteristic Québécois question marker -tu (including the latter’s progressive replacing of intonation questions in Quebec). Then follow reviews of est-ce que questions and of the TP (inflectional projection) as the locus for checking the interrogative feature, which leads to a detailed historical review of interrogative syntax from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, a time during which unmarked subject-verb inversion eventually became the exception in the modern vernacular. Brief comments on the contemporary standard language and on Old French interrogatives conclude the chapter.

Grammatical variation across space and time: The French interrogative system provides a detailed and sophisticated syntactic, historical, and sociolinguistic analysis of a well-documented, complex, and highly variable domain. It shows the benefits of bringing variationist sociolinguistic analyses to bear on current matters of syntactic theory and is a welcome contribution to the literature on both French syntax and syntactic variation.

Reviewed by Louisa Buckingham, Sabanci University Writing Center, Turkey

This book is the second part of a two-volume collection of papers from the 2007 University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee symposium on formulaic language. Each volume consists of three sections: acquisition and loss, psychological reality, and functional explanations. The first section examines the acquisition of phraseology from a first language (L1) and a second language (L2) perspective (in the latter case, by both beginning and advanced learners) with data collected from written and spoken language. Not limited to English, this section includes chapters on the acquisition of Japanese as a L1 and a L2. The breath of the coverage is surely one of its strengths. Several of the studies suggest that formulaic language is the starting point of L1 acquisition and that, because it is learned in chunks, formulaic language is only analyzed after it is acquired. For L2 learners, acquisition is hindered by difficulties that include learners’ relatively low level of exposure to target expressions and the potential variation of the form of formulaic expressions. Some of the findings confirm that advanced language learners make greater use of formulaic language than low level learners.

Two studies address the psychological reality of formulaic language. The first study challenges the belief that function words intrinsically have a lower saliency than content words. Focusing specifically on verb plus particle combinations, this study concludes that native speakers’ detection of a particle depends on the rate of the frequency of the combination and suggests explanations for the surprisingly higher saliency accorded to particles of moderate frequency. The second study examines the effect of semantic prosody on the processing of collocations by using an affective priming task.

The final section comprises studies of a rhetorical nature on both particular word combinations as well as more discursive phrases. The first paper examines the increased use of the rhetorical functions, such as this paper argues, in scholarly writing in the humanities. It is a topic that invites reflection on the rhetorical functions by other commonly used reporting phrases. Languages other than English are also included in this section, such as a study on Khmer’s use of reduplication compounds and a study on Thai formulaic expressions that specifically help the speaker manage time pressures when formulating ideas.

This book, along with its accompanying first volume, has made a broad range of studies on formulaic language accessible in a very attractive publication that is relevant to both postgraduate students and other scholars. Although some studies confirm or extend findings from previous research, several papers consider the importance of formulaic language from perspectives less commonly encountered in the literature.

Reviewed by Louisa Buckingham, Sabanci University Writing Center, Turkey

This monograph investigates language change and language evolution that occurs during periods of contact between speakers of Spanish or Portuguese as a second language and speakers of other languages in Latin America and in Europe. Changes to syntactic, lexical, and phonetic features of both languages are discussed. The book provides an overview of issues involved in language contact and change, looking primarily at naturalized language learning of colonized peoples and immigrants, while also providing an introduction into Spanish and Portuguese migration history. Ch. 1 positions this study within the framework of the author’s understanding of the processes involved in language acquisition, language borrowing, and language shift through language contact. In Ch. 2, Joseph Clancy Clements provides an overview of the historical emergence of Spanish and Portuguese on the Iberian Peninsula since the Roman times and surveys the linguistic shifts made in the Celtic substrate languages due to interaction with Latin in the centuries leading up to the Moorish invasion in 711.

In Ch. 3, C describes the fascinating and perhaps under-appreciated case of the incorporation of African slaves into both rural and urban Portugal in the fifteenth century. He discusses elements of African-Portuguese as portrayed in the literature of the period and finds similarities in this variety with other learner or restructured varieties that are acquired naturalistically (discussed later in this book). C goes on to discuss Portuguese-based creoles spoken in Africa and Asia, paying particular attention to the influence of the substrate on the development of certain markers. Ch. 4 is dedicated to a discussion of whether a stable pidgin or a creole existed in Cuba in the nineteenth century, based primarily on information gained from the correspondence of two contemporary scholars.

Ch. 5 considers the language spoken by Chinese indentured laborers, or coolies, to Cuba in the nineteenth century. Although the short thirty-year period of shipping laborers was insufficient to foster the development of a pidgin, this language variety displayed the common features of a basic variety of naturalistically learned Spanish. Chinese immigrant Spanish in the twentieth century, discussed in the following chapter on the basis of limited data provided by two informants, indicates that the acquisition processes in the formation of a pidgin is not wholly unlike those displayed by untutored second language learners.

Ch. 7 considers the situation of language contact between Spanish and Andean languages, in particular Quechua, from the conquistador and early colonization period. Despite the strong presence of Quechua linguistic features in Andean Spanish, C suggests that, due to the negative evaluation of these nonstandard features, they do not contribute towards group identity. This contrasts with the findings from the final chapter in the volume on Barranquenho, the dialect spoken in the Spanish-Portuguese border area of Barancos. C discusses issues of language prestige in the area, noting again the importance of sociopolitical factors in determining the higher prestige of Castilian Spanish over both Portuguese and Barranqueño but also commenting that linguistic identity has contributed to Barranqueño’s maintenance.

C makes ample use of examples from the languages under analysis, which appear with an English translation. This is not only a fascinating reader but is also an unusual compilation of studies, which enables a look at aspects of Spanish and Portuguese colonial expansion from a linguistic perspective. For students of Spanish and Portuguese linguistics, this work will provide a refreshing and unusual overview of the socio-political background of varieties of learner Spanish through history.

Reviewed by Kanavillil Rajagopalan, State University at Campinas, Brazil

‘Language lends itself to humor’ (x) says Barry Blake in his introduction to this book. It does so because of the pervasiveness of vagueness and the existence of ambiguities of all sorts. Humor often results from ambiguities, whether used deliberately or occurring inadvertently, as when someone says I am a baker because I knead the dough, or a newspaper headline says Killer sentenced to die twice, or in an eye witness report such as I saw a man eating a pizza and a dog.

But, says B, ‘language play is part of normal language use’ (viii) and ‘exploiting the humorous possibilities in language obviously provides entertainment’ (viii). However, joking is not just a light-hearted pastime, insofar as it is a way of dealing with the vicissitudes of life, there is also a serious, indeed a therapeutic, aspect to it.

The book is presented in twelve chapters, of varying lengths generally ranging from ten to twenty pages each. The shortest chapter, Ch. 12, is barely three pages long. Ch. 1 is introductory and is titled ‘The nature of humor’. It addresses such phenomena as grammatical ambiguities, transpositions, style mixtures, dashing of expectations, clever connections, and ‘logic or lack thereof’ (9). Ch. 2 is about the kinds of topics that people joke about, and Ch. 3 distinguishes between professional and amateur humor.

Chs. 4, 5, and 6 deal with different places in an utterance in which humor may be located. Ch. 4 focuses on the lexicon, while Ch. 5 discusses how puns work and how they serve as ‘the most common basis for humor’ (68). Ch. 6 concentrates on grammatical ambiguities, and how these ambiguities are frequently exploited in different parts of speech as well as for the purpose of occasioning humor.

Ch. 7 takes a closer look at different types of humor, distinguished on the basis of common and recurring themes—for instance, blonde jokes, cannibal jokes, dumb jokes, graffiti, oxymora, stickers, Tom Swifties, Wellerisms, and so forth. Ch. 8 is on wit, and an attempt is made to distinguish wit from humor, although B admits that ‘the difference is certainly not clear-cut’ (119). Ch. 9 looks at humor from an essentially Gricean perspective (without mentioning the name of the philosopher even in passing!) and analyzes some jokes by invoking the principle of cooperation (or deliberate flouting of it).

Ch. 10 is devoted to an analysis of some jokes arising out of ‘faulty knowledge of language’ (121), a broad category that subsumes such varied phenomena as slips of tongue, mispronunciation, accents and lisps, malapropisms, misspellings, mispunctuations, and even ‘logic or lack thereof’ (9). Ch. 11 looks at how rhymes are used for humorous ends in children’s and adult verses, limericks, nursery rhymes, and clerihews. This book is rounded off with a brief chapter titled ‘Beyond a joke’, in which B returns to the theme of how pervasive humor is in language and how humor is a sure sign that there is more to language than communication and the exchange of information.

Reviewed by Louisa Buckingham, Sabanci University Writing Center, Turkey

This monograph investigates the development of certain features of scientific writing in texts that date from Geoffrey Chaucer’s Treatise on the astrolabe (fourteenth century) through to a corpus of scientific articles from the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, which range from 1700–1980. This study illustrates diachronic language change and how the context in which scientific writing is produced has shaped the genre’s stylistic features. David Banks conducts his study within the theoretical framework of systemic functional linguistics, providing an accessible introduction to aspects of the framework in the introduction.

B’s analysis and discussion of texts from the fourteenth to the eighteenth century form the background of the systematic study then undertaken of scientific articles from the Philosophical Transactions. Whereas B limits himself in his linguistic analysis of Chaucer’s Treatise (in Ch. 1) to the use of the passive, personal pronouns, and the nominalization of processes, his study of the corpus of texts compiled from the Philosophical Transactions also includes thematic structure and, briefly, interpersonal and intertextual elements.

B’s analysis of scientific articles is accompanied by plentiful excerpts, both to illustrate examples of specific constructions and to portray the respective author’s writing style. In his survey of scientific writing in Ch. 2 ‘Between Chaucer and Newton’, B notes the evolution that the biological sciences have undergone from being purely descriptive (until well into the nineteenth-century) to becoming more analytical. In contrast, the experimental orientation of the harder sciences has propelled this genre from early on to employ a wide variety of discourse styles to discuss research methods and outcomes.

The main body of B’s study is found from Ch. 4 onwards, in which B analyses the evolution of certain features of scientific writing. His corpus comprises thirty articles from the physical and biological sciences, selected at twenty-year intervals from 1700–1980. B tracks the changing levels of frequency in the use of the passive in the two subdisciplines, noting the relationship between the passive and mental and material processes as well as the use of particular pronouns. Additionally, B provides a quantitative analysis for the use of nominalization and thematic structure, although, the reader might wish for more discussion on how these results may relate to a teaching context (or other fields of applied linguistics).

The final chapter provides a brief but entertaining discussion on various interpersonal elements, such as references to the ancients and inclusions of correspondence, praise, reference to, or criticism of colleagues and their work. As the use of citations and references to other authors in a writer’s scholarly work has received some attention in recent research on academic writing, further analysis of trends noted in this section might be welcomed.

Apart from its obvious relevance to those involved in the study of scholarly writing from a diachronic perspective, this text (or parts thereof) may also be met with interest by scientists interested in the evolution of the written scientific genre.

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.