What is a native speaker? This question has been taken for granted in linguistics, which has frequently taken as its starting point the monolingual community in which the native speaker is one who speaks the language “from the crib” (Singh, 40) throughout his or her life. In the idealized case, even for sociolinguistics, the native speaker has one native language which s/he speaks fluently: s/he is a rather “sedentary” person who is “uncontaminated” in significant ways by speakers of other languages (Salikoko Mufwene, 114).

The Multiliteracies (ML) Project is a response by eleven prominent literacy researchers, known collectively as the New London Group (NLG), to changes associated with the end of the Cold War and the information economy.1 ML was conceived in 1994 at a meeting in New London, New Hampshire, US, and saw light with the publication of NLG 1996 in the Harvard Educational Review. With the appearance of the volume under review, we can now say that it is walking and has a promising future.

Ana Roca & M. Cecilia Colombi (eds.), Mi lengua: Spanish as a heritage language in the United States. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. 2003. 320 pp. $29.95.

The teaching of Spanish to native speakers has been packaged under diverse names, emerging most recently as “Spanish as a Heritage Language.” Whether it is couched as developmental bilingual education, maintenance bilingual education, Spanish for native speakers, or heritage language development, advocates for programs of academic excellence in two languages have been dealt a stunning blow by recent federal school reform measures. The No Child Left Behind Act, passed in 2001, eliminates, for all intents and purposes, the Bilingual Education Act (Title VII), as programs for English language learners have been subsumed under Title III of NCLB. All reference to bilingual education has been expunged from federal parlance, replaced in both form and substance by English language acquisition programs. The former Office of Bilingual Education and Minority Language Affairs (OBEMLA), the repository of research on minoritized languages in the United States, has been transformed into the Office of English Language Acquisition, Language Enhancement, and Academic Achievement for Limited-English-Proficient Students. Needless to say, support for native-language instruction is not found in Title III, as English language acquisition takes center stage. Add to this scenario the referenda passed in California, Arizona, and Massachusetts dismantling bilingual education, as well as the anti-immigrant sentiment sweeping the country, and the prospect of fostering Spanish as a heritage language seems dismal indeed.

The music of everyday speech (hereafter MES) is a book for discourse analysts interested in incorporating a theoretically grounded account of sound production, or, prosody, into their research. Readers of Language in Society will find MES to be the first book of its kind. It includes an overview of phonological, discourse analytical, and interactional approaches to the analysis of prosody, as well as model prosodic analyses of the major research areas in discourse analysis. MES is a thorough presentation of how prosodic analysis can inform discourse analysis, unique in its coverage of material, excellence of presentation, and theoretical and analytical depth.

Christopher Williams, Tradition and change in legal English: Verbal constructions in prescriptive texts. Bern: Peter Lang, 2005. pp. 216. $46.95.

Christopher Williams analyzes the use of constructions such as modals and semi-modals such as shall and may and the use of the present simple as these constructions appear in English prescriptive legal texts. Using a large corpus of texts from a variety of English-speaking countries and international organizations, Williams focuses primarily on legislative texts, which are often characterized as including archaic or rarely used words and foreign words, the repetition of particular words and phrases, the use of long, complex sentences, and the passive voice (p. 31). Williams's analysis, thoughtfully designed and carried out, is an informative examination of how and why legal language has resisted change. The book also provides an engaging look at the Plain Language Movement and the impact this movement has had on legal texts.

This volume contains the contributions presented at the first plenary conference on Integrational Linguistics held in London in 2000, an event at which I participated. The basic tenets of Integrational Linguistics were developed by Roy Harris at Oxford in the 1980s and 1990s; while many aspects of this approach remain a matter of debate, its assumptions and practices have become sufficiently firm to be the subject of a couple of introductory texts (Harris 1998, Toolan 1996). Harris's agenda has been “to challenge the monumental complacency of mainstream linguistics” (p. 3) by pointing out that the discipline is no more than an elaborate edifice built on a myth.

In 1971, women students at the Harvard Divinity School began protesting the use in their classes of BOMFOG (“brotherhood of man, fatherhood of god”) talk, the equation of the universal with the masculine exemplified by apparently generic uses of forms like he and man. Responding to reports of these protests in the Harvard Crimson, Harvard's linguistics faculty wrote a letter to the editor explaining that English masculine forms were linguistically “unmarked” for gender and patronizingly assuring the protestors that “there is no need for anxiety or pronoun envy” (quoted in Livia, p. 3). Once launched, that phrase begged to be a title, and Anna Livia's enlightening book is a most suitable bearer. This is a volume from which linguists and others interested in the linguistic encoding of gender can learn much.

In his Introduction to Volume I of Sacks's Lectures on conversation (1992), Emmanuel Schegloff observes (1992:lviii) that his own effort at overview was “truly daunting,” mostly because of “the extraordinary richness and multi-facetedness of Sacks's corpus … In its variety, depth, and freshness of vision it defies domestication into convenient guidelines to a reader.” Such a statement – indeed, any reading of the two-volume set of Lectures – should give pause to someone attempting a textbook rendering of Sacks and his work. But such a text is precisely what Silverman has produced, and the effort is remarkably successful on its own terms.

This is almost two books in one. More than 100 pages are devoted to a critical review of approaches to the study of facts and descriptions. This review includes the sociology of scientific knowledge, philosophy of science, and constructionist approaches (e.g. Robert Merton, Harry Collins, Thomas Kuhn, Karl Popper); ethnomethodology (Harold Garfinkel, Melvin Pollner); conversation analysis (Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, Gail Jefferson, John Heritage); semiology (Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes); post-structuralism (Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault); and post-modernism (Donna Haraway, Jean-François Lyotard). Potter is a skillful teacher, and I learned much from his discussion of these perspectives. However, even 100 pages are not enough for a thorough description and critique of such a wide range of perspectives; Potter leaves the reader wanting more – which is a pretty good place to leave a reader.

For more than a decade, Americanists have been working in the shadow of Greenberg's Language in the Americas (1987) and the hemisphere-wide classification of American Indian languages proposed there. Greenberg's work, based for the most part on naïve comparisons of lexical data with which he was largely unfamiliar, was met with considerable skepticism by scholars familiar with the problems of American linguistic classification. But Greenberg, a senior linguist who is widely recognized as the father of modern linguistic typology, aggressively defended his methods and results, and he made allies among geneticists and archeologists who found that his tripartite classification (Eskimo-Aleut, Na-Dene, and “Amerind”) dovetailed with some of their own ideas. Moreover, his book was published by a leading university press. Mainly for these reasons – certainly not for its critical acceptance – Language in the Americas has become a standard reference work. It is in most academic libraries in North America, and in many it is given a place of honor on the reference shelf – together with Merritt Ruhlen's Guide to the world's languages, I: Classification (published by the same press, 1987), which, at least for the Americas, does little more than uncritically recapitulate Greenberg.

This book is the result of the project Sociolinguistic and Psycholinguistic Aspects of Linguistic Minority Groups in Spain, started in 1993. After the introductory chapter by the editor, the book is divided into four parts, which contain 16 articles on the sociolinguistic situation of a series of established and migrant communities in Spain, viewed from an interdisciplinary standpoint. There are numerous maps and graphics, but no index.

Headlines reporting the outcomes of professional and college football games for an entire football season from two major newspapers were analyzed in an attempt to answer three questions: (1) What kind(s) of language do sportswriters use in attempting to be playful or humorous? (2) Is there a pattern to the number of ways winning and losing can be described? (3) What effects might creative use of language in such headlines have on the English language in general? Of the 930 headlines collected, there were 222 different transitive verbs (e.g., ambush, batter, burn, flog, maul, smash) and 81 intransitive verbs (e.g., breeze, cruise, lose, rally, win). On a descriptive linguistic level, most headlines (a) were in the form of subject–verb–object; (b) used alliteration and punning (Rice Burns Baylor); and (c) used almost any action verb to denote winning. On a psycholinguistic level, an argument is presented for semantic generativity, the ability of the context and the metaphorical possibilities of words to have almost any verb make sense in a headline. Finally, on a historical linguistic level, it is suggested that continued use of a verb for winning and losing (such as maul and pulverize) may lead to a change in their meaning. (Semantics, language change, language of sports)