Book Notices

Reviewed by Francesca Bargiela-Chiappini, University of Warwick

This is a commemorative book for a research group which, based in Europe but with an international mailing list of over 200 members, has been discussing, publishing, and contributing to politeness research for over a decade. It is also a landmark publication for a multidisciplinary field of studies that has commanded constant interest since the 1980s, and has grown ostensibly more vivacious and argumentative—not only in the Anglophone world.

As one of the founding members of the Linguistic Politeness Research Group (LPRG, http://research.shu.ac.uk/politeness/) in 1998, I inevitably hold an insider’s perspective on this volume, the group’s first collective effort and one that also marks a turning point in the evolution of Western politeness research. I should probably add that I was not involved in planning or reviewing the contents, and only read an early draft of the introduction; therefore I can look at this work with some detachment while still offering insights that are informed by a long-standing involvement in both the field and the group’s activities.

This volume is a timely, representative collection of advances in a field that has responded only quite recently to the ‘discursive turn’ of the 1980s in the social sciences but that in the last decade or so has striven to incorporate the best of the discursive analytic tradition into the interpretation of the elusive phenomenon of politeness.

Taken together, the introduction and the first chapter provide a lucid and comprehensive framing of Anglophone politeness research in its evolution towards embracing discursivity, its implications, and challenges. The influence of Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus and Etienne Wenger’s communities of practice are acknowledged tools in the theoretical baggage of politeness research, which also includes relevance theory, framework analysis, conversation analysis, and discursive psychology. The relationship between politeness and impoliteness is discussed, the latter now increasingly recognized as a distinct field.

The remaining seven chapters, authored by founding LPRG members as well as newer members, articulate recent debates within the field through the analysis of interactions in a range of social contexts and engage with contested notions such as first- and second-order politeness, listener’s evaluation, order and civility, and the universality of politeness. A reader new to the field will find in these essays cogently argued and illuminating examples of state of the art politeness research. Finally, neither bland nor self-congratulatory, these essays boldly confront the consequences of the discursive turn in politeness research, the ideological import of a widely used vocabulary that is too often taken for granted, and the unconscious debt to the universalism of current research, and urges self-reflexive reevaluation.

All in all, this is a collection of high-quality essays that reflect the maturity of the field without shying from past and recent theoretical and methodological challenges, especially those raised by the new discursive approaches to the analysis of polite behavior.

Reviewed by Josep Soler-Carbonell, University of Oxford

Pedagogically oriented, this book is a useful tool for both teachers and students of general and introductory courses to linguistics. It contains eleven chapters, with each of the first ten dealing with a particular branch of linguistics, and the eleventh containing a special summary focusing on Eurolinguistics. The first chapter is preceded by a preface, a table of contents, and preliminary remarks on how to use the book, with clear explanations of what to find in each chapter and how to most effectively use its contents. The book concludes with two indexes: an index of names that lists all of the linguists mentioned in the book, and an index of technical terms.

Ch. 1 is dedicated to the field of semiotics, Ch. 2 to lexicology, Ch. 3 to phonology, Ch. 4 to morphology and syntax, Ch. 5 to pragmatics and text linguistics, Ch. 6 to non-verbal communication, Ch. 7 to psycholinguistics, Ch. 8 to sociolinguistics and the sociology of languages, Ch. 9 to historical linguistics, and Ch. 10 to the history of linguistics. Ch. 11 underlines and gathers the most important aspects mentioned throughout the book that hold a close relation with the languages of Europe, and responds to the spread and rise of  ‘European studies’ programs.

The material in each of the chapters is neatly presented, with tangible and illustrative examples. It is clear from reported class results and comments that the material has been tested and improved empirically, which necessarily has a positive impact in the final result. Although the work of relevant linguistic anthropologists is discussed throughout the text, such as Franz Boas, Edward Sapir, Benjamin Lee Whorf, and Dell Hymes, a separate chapter could have been devoted to anthropological linguistics Nevertheless, this do-it-yourself-then-do-it-in-class book, as defined by the author himself, should be positively welcomed by students majoring in linguistics, as well as those who are not, and their tutors, because it is thought-provoking and encourages the learning of the most basic and key linguistic concepts in a friendly manner. In addition to figures, illustrations, and examples, each chapter contains wrap-up riddles for concepts to be more easily memorized, and classroom activities, which are helpful for group discussions of those concepts. All in all, this book is highly recommended for both teachers and students alike.

Reviewed by Natalia Levshina, University of Leuven

Dagmar Divjak’s monograph is a fascinating attempt to disentangle the complexity of verb synonymy in Russian with the help of cutting-edge quantitative methods. It sheds light on fundamental semantic issues, such as external delineation and internal organization of near-synonyms, relationships between lexical and constructional meaning, and cognitive reality of corpus-based models.

The book comprises six chapters and a large appendix with detailed information about the sample of Russian verbs. In the first chapter, D introduces the key concepts of her study and outlines the methodology applied in the book. She shows how the cognitive-linguistic notions of construal, linguistic category, and prototype can be operationalized with the help of the corpus-based behavioral profiles approach, which is based on a large number of contextual features identified in a corpus.

Ch. 2 presents an impressive typology of 289 Russian verbs that require an infinitival complement, which reflects a continuum of event integration. The typology was created on the basis of native speakers’ judgments about a few coarse-grained constructional features of verbs. As Ch. 3 demonstrates, these constructional features can also be useful in the identification of near-synonyms in a group of semantically related verbs.

In Chs. 4 and 5, D zooms in on nine near-synonymous Russian verbs of trying. She finds three main clusters in this group of near-synonyms (Ch. 4) and examines the prototypicality structure of each cluster individually (Ch. 5). Here the behavioral profiles method is thrown into action. D employs hierarchical cluster analysis to visualize and explore the multivariate data.

Ch. 6 is the most heterogeneous in the book, where D aims to validate her results. First, she tests the hypotheses presented in Chs. 4 and 5, with the help of confirmatory techniques. Next, she interprets the role of morphology in the construction-lexeme interaction, with the focus on the verbs of contriving or managing. She also compares the results of her corpus-based analyses (verbs of intending) with existing lexicographic descriptions. Finally, she finds converging experimental evidence of the lexical relationships captured with the help of behavioral profiles. The results show that D’s corpus-driven approach yields trustworthy and theoretically meaningful results at a high level of precision.

To sum up, the book provides a revealing and innovative approach to lexical synonymy. It is abundant in semantic and quantitative details, and the scope of analysis is impressive. It succeeds in bridging the gap between the theory and corpus data, on the one hand, and between lexicographers’ intuitions and objective evidence, on the other hand. All of this should guarantee that the book will be of great interest to anyone in the field of usage-based cognitive semantics.

Reviewed by Elly van Gelderen, Arizona State University

This book contains six articles on English grammar and six on the English lexicon. Each article is followed by a commentary from one of the other authors in the volume and accompanied by a response by the original author. These twelve chapters are thus ‘conversations’ that ‘demonstrate the state of the art’ in the history of English.

The first part, on English grammar, contains contributions by Elizabeth Closs Traugott, Joanna Nykiel, Olga Thomason, Sherrylyn Branshaw, Akiko Nagano, and Don Chapman. The second part, on the English Lexicon, contains articles by Anatoly Liberman, Ann-Marie Svensson and Jürgen Hering, Markku Filppula, and Juhani Klemola, Elizabeth Tacho, Emily Runde, and Stefanie Kuzmack. The topics vary from dialogic contexts, sluicing, strong verb inflection, compounding, Celtic influence, the use of the word fence, and changes in the verb arrive, to name a few. I will concentrate on two, namely Joanna Nykiel’s article on sluicing and Markku Filppula and Juhani Klemola’s article on Celtic influence.

Nykiel’s study is the first I know on sluicing in the history of English. She provides examples and statistics, distinguishing between merger and sprouting. A sluice is a stranded wh-element, as in I want to read something but I don’t know what. If the deleted words after the wh-element correspond exactly to previous, overt material, as they do in the example, Nykiel calls it a merger; if they do not, it is called sprouting and the sluice builds on the argument structure of the overt predicate, as in Tell me! What? In Old English, the structural identity between the deleted and overt material is high (i.e. over 80%). An example is butan nettum huntian ic mæg. Hu? ‘Without a net I can hunt. How?’, but this changes dramatically in Middle English in favor of sprouting. Nykiel makes use of The dictionary of Old English corpus and the Middle English Compendium and various later corpora, although it is not clear how she found the sluices.

Filppula and Klemola’s work on the influence of Celtic is well-known by now, and it is hoped that all histories of English acknowledge the unlikelihood that the Celtic-speaking population was completely replaced by a Germanic-speaking one. The authors review archeological, demographic, historical, and genetic background as well as contact-linguistic and areal-typological evidence for the hypothesis that Celtic had a significant influence on English, and they provide a case study on the dummy do. The do used in questions and negatives has been claimed to arise from the use of a causative light verb. The problem with this analysis is that causative do was more prevalent in the Southeast and the dummy do was introduced in the Southwest. This argument confirms work by Walther Preusler in the late 1930s, who made a similar claim that was discarded by Alvar Ellegård in the 1950s and by subsequent researchers because the appearance in Middle English would have been too late to show earlier Celtic influence. The authors here make clear that delayed appearance is no longer a problem, using sociolinguistic insights, and is actually expected.

In conclusion, this book, with its emphasis on empirical studies, contains engaging articles that use a variety of frameworks and methodologies for people interested in the history of English.

Reviewed by Natalia Levshina, University of Leuven

This book contains several contrastive analyses of constructions in English and other languages. Assuming a meaning-based (onomasiological) approach, the studies demonstrate similarities and differences in the encoding of the same meaning in contrasted languages. The volume is a significant milestone in the development of the constructionist theory and practice, which tends to focus on one language (most commonly English).

In the introductory chapter, the editor outlines the general aims and principles of this contrastive enterprise. The existing construction grammars have displayed a remarkable lack of interest in crosslinguistic comparisons and generalizations, probably as a reaction to formalist syntactic theories and the pursuit of a universal grammar. Questioning this, the editor proposes the detailed bottom-up meaning-based approach, which will ‘eventually allow scholars to systematically compile an inventory of constructions with equivalent semantic-functional counterparts in other languages’ (2). The ultimate goal of the approach is to identify crosslinguistic generalizations in the form of implicational universals and grammaticalization paths.

The first part of the volume contains a few articles that contrast English constructions with other Indo-European languages. The corpus-based study of English and Swedish comparatives by Martin Hilpert demonstrates that comparatives, though strikingly similar, display many surprising peculiarities at the phonological, morphosyntactic, semantic, and pragmatic levels. An article by Francisco Gonzálves-García compares the English and Spanish accusative-with-infinitive constructions and finds crosslinguistic differences in the division of labor between semantic and information structure factors, and also in the degree of productivity of the constructions. In her contribution ‘Conditional constructions in English and Russian’, Olga Gurevich demonstrates that the choice between two Russian conditional constructions allows for the encoding of the speaker’s viewpoint, whereas English conditionals can indicate different degrees of the epistemic stance.

In the second part of the book, the approach is extended to non-Indo-European languages. In his contribution ‘Results, cases, and constructions’, Jaakko Leino finds that the correspondences between the English and Finnish argument structure constructions are constrained by typological, cultural, construal-based, and idiomatic differences. In their empirical contrastive study of the caused-motion and ditransitive constructions in English and Thai, Napasri Timyam and Benjamin K. Bergen find that the constructions are marked by different semantic and pragmatic constraints, although the latter reflect the universal mechanisms of language. The article ‘On expressing measurement and comparison in English and Japanese’ by Yoko Hasegawa, Russell Lee-Goldman, Kyoko Hirose Ohara, Seiko Fujii, and Charles J. Fillmore investigates measurement expressions in English and Japanese. The tertium comparationis of the contrastive analysis is the semantic information from the English and Japanese FrameNet. The final article in the volume by William A. Croft, Jóhanna Barðdal, Willem Hollmann, Violeta Sotirova, and Chiaki Taoka revises the well-known typological classification of complex event constructions by Leonard Talmy. As a result of a fine-grained analysis of a few complex event exemplars in different languages (e.g. English, Dutch, Icelandic, Bulgarian, and Japanese), the authors devise a universal implication scale that constrains language variation in expressing these events.

The broad range of languages and constructions discussed make this book a valuable contribution to the descriptive and theoretical inventory of construction grammar. The studies also demonstrate convincingly that constructions as form-meaning pairings are viable units of analysis, which allow for crosslinguistic generalizations.

Reviewed by Natalia Levshina, University of Leuven

This book provides a theoretical framework and methodological tools for analyzing registers, genres, and styles in English, with a particular focus on the register. Based on the teaching experience of the authors, the book offers copious examples of register analysis, as well as activities and practical guidelines that can be used by senior undergraduates and graduate students in their own research.

The book consists of nine chapters, two large appendices, a list of references, and a subject index. In the first chapter, the authors introduce the fundamental concepts of register, genre, style, situation, and variety. The differences and commonalities between these notions are explained in detail. The first part of the book, which consists of Chs. 2 and 3, provides the analytical framework for studying registers. Ch. 2 explains how to conduct a situational analysis, and contains a list of important situational characteristics, whereas Ch. 3 shows how to link these situational properties with linguistic features and interpret them functionally.

The second part of the book contains a detailed description of different registers, genres, and styles. Spoken interpersonal registers (conversation, university office hours, and service encounters) are dealt with in Ch. 4, followed by a discussion of written registers (newspaper writing, academic prose, and fiction) in Ch. 5. Ch. 6 offers a historical perspective and shows the evolution of a few written varieties from early modernity up to the present day, whereas Ch. 7 presents an overview of emerging electronic forms of communication, such as e-mail, internet forums, and text messages. The final part of the book adds a broader theoretical and methodological perspective. It introduces multivariate analysis as the main tool of empirical research of registers (Ch. 8) and contrasts the notion of register with related sociolinguistic and functional categories, such as dialects, sociolects, speech, and writing (Ch. 9). Each chapter ends with a set of activities for overview, reflection, and analysis. It also offers project ideas for large-scale studies. The book has two appendices: an overview of register studies and a collection of activity texts.

In consideration of the authors’ outstanding achievements in the realm of register studies, the book is a perfect example of how the results of academic research can be converted into a ready-to-use toolkit. The book is richly illustrated with examples of texts taken from various corpora. The lists of linguistic and situational features of registers, based on the extensive empirical research, can be applied immediately in a new project. To summarize, the book provides theoretically and methodologically advanced, yet accessible, insight into the intricacies of register, genre, and style.

Reviewed by Josep Soler-Carbonell, University of Oxford

This edited volume contains invaluable information on eighteenth-century English, with chapters encompassing more formal linguistics and variationist studies together with other contributions looking at the subject of discussion from a more sociocultural point of view. Both perspectives are fruitfully put into dialogue, providing a remarkably positive outcome overall. The volume contains sixteen chapters with excellent contributions by experts from institutions from a variety of countries: Canada, Finland, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Switzerland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. It is, therefore, a truly international project on an important period in the history of English. The first chapter is preceded by a table of contents, a list of figures, a list of maps, a list of tables, notes on contributors, and a preface. At the end of the book, preceding a list of references, there is a twenty-page timeline for the eighteenth century with a useful summary of the most important historical events affecting the history of English, ranging from the late seventeenth century to the early nineteenth century.

As the subtitle indicates, there are broadly two main strands that are followed in the book: the ideological, on one hand, and the more formal linguistic, on the other. The majority of the chapters encompass both strands within themselves, while some of them are more inclined toward either one or the other. It can be highlighted that the book offers original insights resulting from complementary views on important aspects such as linguistic ideologies, prescriptivism, and norms of correctness and politeness. Other topics covered in this book include the role of women in eighteenth-century grammars (Chs. 3 and 6), regional aspects of eighteenth-century English (Ch. 12 on Scotland and Ch. 13 on Ireland), and the influence of writers, journalists, grammarians, and lexicographers in public debates about language and their role as linguistic authorities.

This book is a rich source of data and information on eighteenth-century English, providing an account of how actual forms of the language coexisted with ideas of it at a very important period in its history. This is why, as the editor himself concludes at the end of his chapter on Irish English, research on this particular period of time is so informative and yields so many relevant insights, not only for English language in Ireland, but also from a more general point of view. Moreover, the book is a good model as well of how to carry out research in historical sociolinguistics, whether from a more ‘socio’ perspective or a more ‘linguistic’ one, and how to reconcile both approaches.

Reviewed by Josep Soler Carbonell, University of Oxford

This is a brilliant book in the field of historical sociolinguistics, a model that can be used as a reference for how to conduct research in this particular area. It contains twelve chapters and is clearly written, which makes it a useful source for pedagogical purposes as well.

The main theme of the book revolves around the concept of ‘myth’: how myths are formed by ‘conceptual metaphors’ and how they help to construct particular language ideologies. If these ideologies are powerful enough to become part of a dominant discourse, then a discourse archive, in a Foucauldian sense, is formed. The aim of the book is not to provide yet another history of the English language, as the author repeatedly states, but rather to deconstruct specific myths that, during the history of English, have formed the basis of a dominant discourse on what modern English is.

There is a series of myths that the author deals with in each chapter, quite independently from each other, but because they are interrelated to a certain extent (some more than others), they can be grouped into three main sets. First of all, there are myths that appeared in the latter half of the nineteenth century within the context of the establishment of the nation-state. Using the author’s own labels, these include the longevity of English myth, the ancient language myth, the unbroken tradition myth, the polite language myth, and the legitimate language myth. Another set of myths that has resonance in other languages throughout history, and thus appears to be universal, includes the pure language myth, the perfect language myth, the contamination through contact myth, the decay and death myth, the barbarians myth, the immutability myth, the good climate/soil myth, and the pure language of the South and the corrupted language of the North myth (the latter being specific only to England). Finally, the last set of myths derives from more modern times: the English as a creole myth and the English as a global language myth.

The beliefs driven by myths need to be taken into account carefully, in particular if they are to be part of hegemonic discourses about language. To prove that that is the case and that they may thus bring about important consequences to more practical and applied terrains, the author discusses in detail the question of English in Switzerland and the misguided language policies derived from a blind belief in English as the global language. As the author himself concludes, even if there will always be lay conceptualizations of language built on mythical beliefs, as there have always been, as sociolinguists, we need to know as much about the myths as possible. This volume provides a remarkable way to look at and analyze them.

Reviewed by Mark J. Elson, University of Virginia

Following a first chapter presenting terminology, methodology, and a survey of the phonology and morphology of Proto-Indo-European, each chapter of this useful book provides a synchronic phonology and historico-synchronic morphology of one of the ancient Indo-European languages, and includes as well an inventory of the sound changes, with attention to relative chronology, which relate the language to Proto-Indo-European. There are, in addition, exercises and a short text for each language, with each word of the latter parsed. The book is intended for students, its goal being to provide the necessary background for transition to more detailed treatments, which are often inaccessible to beginners. The languages included are Gothic (41–120), Latin (121–214), Greek (215–310), Old Irish (311–92), Old Church Slavic (393–472), Sanskrit (473–562), and Hittite (563–612). The book concludes with references (613–20) and word indices (621–47).

There are features of this book which some will criticize. Perhaps foremost among them is the theoretical structure that the authors introduce in the first chapter for the presentation of data. This structure, to the extent it qualifies as a coherent framework, is best described as early generative, including four components termed levels: deep, transformational, morphological, and phonological. The authors’ brief commentary (2–6) reveals that the deep and transformational levels are essentially syntactic. It is difficult to see their relevance because syntax plays no role in this book. The morphological and phonological levels as the authors conceive them require nothing more than a basic knowledge of the traditional morpheme, phoneme, and associated concepts (e.g. allomorph, phonological feature, allophone). There is a description of the comparative method (6–7), but no discussion of the important associated concept of sound change and its relevance to the realization of morphemes. The authors may believe they have attended to these concepts in their theoretical structure under the headings, respectively, of phonological rule and morphological rule. If so, however, there is a concomitant, albeit tacit, likening of reconstructions to synchronically motivated underlying representations, an equation that will not suit all users of this book.

Another difficulty is the impression given that a proto-language is always related more or less directly to its attested daughters, which ignores the generally accepted assumption that other proto-languages may intervene. In the case of Slavic, for example, the authors’ presentation, despite their division of the period preceding Old Church Slavic into stages (393–94) and the comment that some of the changes affected ‘the Slavic area’ (363), suggests a direct connection between sound changes like the first palatalization of velars and Old Church Slavic, obscuring the fact that such changes are best understood as having occurred within Common Slavic, a reconstructed period of common development that takes reconstructed Proto-Slavic as its point of departure. Finally, and despite the claim of the authors, there is no significant analysis in the presentation of the ancient morphologies. There is only an inventory of forms paradigmatically arranged and accompanied by their reconstructed etyma morphologically, divided according to their Indo-European constituents. Language-specific details of the evolution of the inherited nominal and verbal systems are left virtually unattended.

Instructors will nevertheless recognize the potential of this book in linguistic curricula which offer specialization in Indo-European linguistics. The difficulties are relatively superficial, and easily remedied by the use of any currently available general introduction to historical linguistics in combination with language-specific clarification and amplification provided in the classroom.

Reviewed by Elly van Gelderen, Arizona State University

This book is a reprint of the 1919 edition, printed in Baghdad at the Government Press. There is no preface or explanation for why the book was reprinted, which would have been helpful to know. The author wrote many articles and books about Kurdish and is well-known for his book To Mesopotamia and Kurdistan in disguise (Cosimo Inc, 2007); he also wrote Grammar of the Kurmanji or Kurdish language (Luzac and Co., 1913).

Kurdish, an Indo-European language of the Iranian branch, forms a dialect continuum with three standardized varieties, one of which is Kurmanji. The elementary grammar was meant to be a guide for officers with duties in southern Kurdistan; the dialect is that of Sulaimaniyah. This book can still be of use as a grammar for people learning introductory Kurdish. It begins with a brief description of the sounds and then discusses characteristics of the noun (the singular, plural, and diminutive), provides a word list of about forty words and two sets of exercises. This pattern of short grammatical explanation followed by new vocabulary and exercises repeats itself. The series of grammatical points, vocabulary, and exercises are followed by an English–Kurmanji word list of seventy-four pages and two appendices.

The grammatical topics that S deals with are the five cases of the noun, derivational suffixes, independent and enclitic personal pronouns, other pronouns, adjectives, and numerals, as well as eleven pages of paradigms for the auxiliaries ‘to be’ and ‘to become’, five pages on the absence of the verb ‘to have’, eight pages on the first conjugation (the transitive verb), fourteen pages on the other four conjugations (the intransitive, causal, and passives), compound verbs with chun ‘to go’ and keshan ‘to pull’, the adverb, conjunctions, and prepositions. There are two pages on syntax and idioms and a chart on the constructions of the sentence. The intricacies of the languages look to have been viewed as residing in the morphology and not in the syntax.

Some of the grammatical points that S describes are interesting but often raise more questions; this is to be expected from a short grammar. Kurmanji is split ergative language; that is, the past tense verb (but not the present tense one) agrees with the object of the transitive verb in the same way as it does with subjects of intransitives. There are only hints of this in a description of the pronominal system. S makes an interesting point that the diminutive -aka, which he considers a number, ‘has largely lost its meaning’ and is used as a euphonic (3). In such a case, it would be beneficial to have a little more insight from texts. In short, in studying a language, it is always helpful to have the use of a multitude of grammars, written for different audiences. This book serves this purpose for learners of Kurdish.