Shi-Xu, A cultural approach to discourse. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Pp. x, 233. Hb $69.95.

This book presents Shi-xu's theoretical and methodological framework for discourse analysis, which he terms the Cultural Approach to Discourse (CAD), and critiques what he sees as the predominantly “Western” canon of social science research so far. Shi-xu argues, often convincingly and engagingly, that culture has a far more important role to play than it has hitherto enjoyed in Western approaches to discourse. He positions himself as a researcher operating from “in-between” cultures. After critiquing Western theories and methodologies of discourse research such as representationalism, universalism, and foundationalism, Shi-xu sets out the theoretical and methodological framework for CAD, and then proceeds to give practical examples of how the approach can be applied to research. Unfortunately, there are a few incongruities between the claims the author makes about his book and more generally about his approach, and what the book actually contains and what CAD is shown to have achieved. I will highlight these in the course of describing the different sections of the book. As a whole, however, A cultural approach to discourse contains much that will interest “Western” social scientists; it could serve as a guide to those who have previously ignored “culture” in their research (at least, in the author's estimation of the term), and will perhaps lead to interesting debates with those who have already incorporated some conception (perhaps an opposing one) of “culture” in their theoretical frameworks.

R. M. W. Dixon, Australian Languages: Their nature and development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xlii, 734. Hb $95.00.

Australian languages is a typological approach to the description and historical study of the Aboriginal languages of Australia. Together with its planned companion volume, Australian languages: A complete catalogue, a collection of sketches of some 250 languages, it is intended to present non-Australianist scholars with comprehensive information about Aboriginal languages and to offer specialists a summary and an agenda for future research. There are 14 chapters: “The language situation in Australia,” “Modelling the language situation,” “Overview,” “Vocabulary,” “Case and other nominal suffixes,” “Verbs,” “Pronouns,” “Bound pronouns,” “Prefixing and fusion,” “Generic nouns, classifiers, genders and noun classes,” “Ergative/accusative morphological and syntactic profiles,” “Phonology,” “Genetic subgroups and small linguistic areas,” and “Summary and conclusion.”

When I have a dinner party, it's a matter of great importance to me that all the places are set with the same tableware. It's the same at a restaurant – a group of people sitting down for dinner should be served on the same dishes. It's neurotic, I know. But aside from some primitive sense of symmetrical comfort, the plates tell you much about the meal that is to follow: Fine porcelain sets expectations of grace and elegance; brightly colored stoneware establishes a casual ambience; and simple plates communicate a utilitarian attitude to the ensuing meal. The form serves as a gatekeeper, announcing at the outset the intended clientele. If a family with small children in search of cheeseburgers and fries wanders by chance into an establishment that places Royal Doulton in front them, they will know instantly that the content will not meet their expectations. Form matters, and content is partly conveyed by the form.

Zarina Estrada Fernández et al., Diccionario yaqui-español y textos: Obra de preservación lingüística. Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico: Universidad de Sonora; Mexico City: Plaza y Valdés Editores, 2004. Pp. 405.

The Yaqui or Yoeme live historically in the state of Sonora in northwestern Mexico, and in recent times also in Arizona. They are well known ethnographically and ethnohistorically through the works of Edward Spicer (e.g., 1980, 1984), and ethnopoetically through the work of Evers & Molina 1987. Their Uto-Aztecan language is closely related to that of the Mayo, in Sinaloa, and the two varieties are known collectively as Cáhita. Descriptive studies of Yaqui, including partial lexicons, have been published by writers including Johnson 1962, Lindenfeld 1973, Lionnet 1977, and recently by Molina et al. 1999; but no detailed reference grammar exists. The work by Molina et al. was, surprisingly, repudiated by one of its coauthors (Shaul 1999); yet, in spite of its shortcomings, it has been a useful reference for Yaqui lexicon. Now we also have the volume under review, by Zarina Estrada and coworkers, which contains no grammatical sketch but provides a substantial two-way dictionary plus a collection of texts.

As eighth-grade students of English in a “periphery” community school in India, we were assigned to discuss and to appreciate a piece of prose, from our textbook, called “On not answering the telephone”; it was a satirical piece demonizing telephones because their existence and use flouted all tenets of British English linguistic etiquette. None of us in that class had a phone in our homes, and none of us had any desire to learn the alien etiquette. We were interested only in learning the language to the extent that it could help us realize our immediate and, perhaps, future goals. This was our tacit response, and resistance, to English linguistic imperialism: awareness of the pragmatic rewards of English-language acquisition and use, but negation and denial of the cultural hegemony of English. This dynamic of ideological imposition and resistance (and appropriation) forms the core of Canagarajah's book, Resisting linguistic imperialism in English teaching.

This study focuses on the tensions around Portugal's language policies and citizens’ perceptions of their linguistic rights in the context of the current orthographic reform. Unlike other linguistic rights studies, this enquiry does not focus on endangered languages or linguistic minorities. Instead, there are three major ingredients that embody linguistic-rights claims by European Portuguese speakers: the right to be heard on orthographic reform in a democratic society, ownership and authenticity of the Portuguese language, and the need for protection against external (or, more specifically, Brazilian) hegemony. A critical discourse analysis approach to the arguments put forward by European Portuguese opponents of the orthographic reform shows that the ongoing discussion: (i) is neither about language nor about rights, but about competition; (ii) is based on linguistic dichotomies and recategorization of speakers and languages; (iii) manipulates the rhetoric of threat, endangerment, linguistic rights, and democracy; and (iv) opens up intra-linguistic and inter-variety spaces for conceptualizing linguistic rights claims. (Language ideological debate, public understanding, language planning, linguistic rights, orthographic reform)

Mark Lewis asks that socially engaged linguists go beyond Labov's (1982) principle of error correction (PEC) so that we can enlist critical race theory (CRT) to address ‘more difficult and fundamental questions of the sociohistorical conditions of a representation of language, challenging its premises and showing its connections to racial, economic, or other forms of violence’ (Lewis, this issue, p. 341). The ultimate goal is the actual transformation of the socioeconomic structures responsible for structural violence against speakers of stigmatized languages.

Michael Bamberg and Molly Andrews (eds.), Considering counter-narratives: Narrating, resisting, making sense. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004. Pp. x, 381. HB $126.00.

Growing out of two special issues of the journal Narrative Inquiry, this volume assembles six chapters that “contemplate the meaning of counter-narratives and their relationship to master or dominant narratives” (p. x). The book also contains six clusters of commentaries written in response to each of the focal chapters, along with rejoinders by the six “primary” authors. As the editors point out in their introduction to the book, the format of dialogue and contestation is meant to synergize with the main subject of the volume, since the concept “counter-narrative” is itself “a positional category, in tension with another category” (x). By and large, the organization of the volume is effective and makes for stimulating reading; occasionally, however, commentators treat the chapter to which they are ostensibly responding less as an opportunity for dialogue than as a platform for showcasing their own explanatory frameworks or descriptive nomenclatures (see, e.g., the commentary by Jaan Valsiner, 245–76). More generally, the range of issues explored by the 29 different contributors to the volume – the range of contexts in which the authors and commentators show narrative and narrative analysis to be pertinent concerns – suggests the extent to which the “narrative turn” has taken hold in fields such as social psychology, gender studies, sociolinguistics, public health, and the other domains of research represented in the book. But by the same token, the volume raises the question of whether the contributors share a sense of what narrative is and how it functions – that is, whether they are in fact investigating a common object (or set of common objects: narrative, master narrative, counter-narrative), or rather operating with more or less distinct conceptions of stories and methodologies for studying them.

Pfaff (1973, 1975) reports on 81 low- and middle-income first-grade Black children who produced multiple instances of linguistic variables by answering questions about a set of pictures and telling the story of Goldilocks and the three bears. No models were given of the linguistic variables under investigation, which included a number of third person singular present-tense verb forms: -s inflection of regular verbs, auxiliary and main verb be, auxiliary and main verb have, auxiliary do and possessive marking on nouns. Standard marking of all of these linguistic variables has been shown by previous studies of free conversation to be variably lacking in Black English (Labov, Cohen, Robins & Lewis 1968; Fasold 1972).