This book reviews studies that have utilized corpus analysis of oral Spanish, in order to introduce the field of oral discourse. The work focuses on social and contextual varieties, emphasizing an approach that tackles the analysis of linguistic blocks restricted to an interactional unit. The plan of action is explained in chap. 1. Chap. 2 deals with the 1950–1965 period (dialectology and stylistics); chap. 3 discusses the 1966–1979 period and focuses on quantitative studies (social dialectology, sociolinguistics, and developmental psycholinguistics); chap. 4 corresponds to 1980–1989 and deals with discourse analysis; and finally, chap. 5 treats the 1990–1999 period and examines the different types of oral discourse, genre, registers, social dialects, and textual models. The works collected for this study cover 4,241 bibliographical entries that are cross-referenced with the CD-ROM, which displays the bibliography as a Microsoft Word document. The types of analysis are (A) intraenunciativo, (B) enunciativo, and (C) superenunciativo. We believe that by A, the author refers to components of the sentence within the sentence or intrasentential; by B he may refer to discourse at the level of the utterance, which is the result of the speech act; and by C he may refer to the level of the discourse, which is made of turns.

Kay McCormick, Language in Cape Town's District Six. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. xv + 253 pp.

Kay McCormick's book is a multifaceted analysis of language norms and language practices in the bilingual District Six of Cape Town (South Africa). District Six is probably the best-known inner city neighborhood of Cape Town: In the 1980s the eyes of the world witnessed the forced removal of many of its inhabitants and the brutal demolition of homes in yet another attempt by the apartheid government to get rid of a cosmopolitan and ethnically mixed area. The area is relatively well defined, and its language contact situation makes it an excellent site for the study of language alternation and code-switching.

Peter Ladefoged, Phonetic data analysis: An introduction to fieldwork and instrumental techniques. Malden, MA, & Oxford: Blackwell, 2003. Pp. xi, 196. Pb. $34.95.

This book teaches readers how to conduct phonetic fieldwork, from planning through data collection to analysis. Peter Ladefoged is eminently qualified to write this book, as probably the world's top phonetician, and as someone with an astounding quantity of phonetic fieldwork experience.

James W. Tollefson (ed.), Language policies in education: Critical issues. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002. Pp. 350. Pb $39.95.

Language policies in education brings together a wide-ranging collection of essays from the United States, Canada, Australia, Yugoslavia, India and East Asia, Eastern Africa, and the Solomon Islands. Editor James Tollefson frames the discussion in his introduction and conclusion on language conflict and language rights in a way that calls our attention to the central questions. How have educational language policies maintained unequal access to teaching and learning resources for language minorities and indigenous language (IL) speakers? What affirmative measures in the realm of language policy can chart the clearest course toward redressing these inequalities? And for political entities in multilingual states in a position of language policy-making authority, what are the guiding principles of a responsible democratic approach to resolving ethnolinguistic conflicts? Though few of the authors take up the questions directly, the editor reminds readers that all discussions of educational language policy must keep in the foreground considerations of effective pedagogical practice and constraints on language learners. These more narrowly circumscribed educational, developmental, and psycholinguistic determinants are subordinated to political-ideological impositions at the risk of undermining basic democratic principles. Multilingual and multicultural accord at the nation-state level is eroded by attempts to utilize official language teaching programs as tools of national or political unification if these programs are not conceived as complementary to individuals' language learning rights and as consistent with sound first and second language pedagogy. Particularly instructive on this point are the chapters by Mary McGroarty, Terrance Wiley, Thomas Donahue, and Teresa McCarty on the current struggle between the forces of pluralism and exclusion in the United States, and surveys of political-language conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and India by Tollefson and Selma Sonntag, respectively.

The title of Neil Smith's book (Language, bananas and bonobos) suggested to me a book focusing on the issue of nonhuman primate language, and the title attracted me to the book for this reason. While Smith deals with that issue in one chapter, the range of issues explored in this book is much wider than I expected, which made it a more interesting read for me. Smith suggests an audience of non-linguists, and I agree that the book would make an interesting excursion for an academically minded reader with only a passing knowledge of linguistics. I also think there are many linguists who would find the book a catalyst for debate and reexamination of linguistic theory and practice.

Marcel Danesi, My son is an alien: A cultural portrait of today's youth. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2003. Pp. 240, Pb $22.95.

Marcel Danesi's My son is an alien is a concise, informative guide for parents and teachers seeking to understand adolescent behavior. In what is largely a descriptive account of the teenage experience, the author touches on a range of topics from adolescent sex to gang involvement and drug abuse. Danesi and his research assistants interviewed 200 young people in nine North American cities between 1999 and 2002 to explore their attitudes toward sex, music, drugs, school, and a range of other subjects. The participants ranged in age from 12 to their early 20s and were evenly divided along gender lines and among early, middle, and late teens.

Esma Gregor, Russian-English code-switching in New York City. Frankfurt/M. & Berlin: Peter Lang. Pp. 195. Hb $32.95

This doctoral dissertation focuses on Russian-English bilingualism and code-switching in New York City, applying the main functional models in code-switching research to data gathered in a field study the author conducted between 1998 and 2000. The data are quantified, and an attempt is made to correlate the linguistic competence of the speakers with their code-switching behavior.

The U.S. government tested 67 atomic and thermonuclear bombs in the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958, one hundred times more megatonnage than was detonated at the Nevada test site. While these facts are relatively well known, the numerous and varied effects of these experiments on the Marshallese people are not. Holly Barker's book Bravo for theMarshallese: Regaining control in a post-nuclear, post-colonial world addresses the medical, social, economic, linguistic, and psychological impact that America's nuclear testing program had and continues to have on the lives of the Marshall Islanders. Barker bases her discussion on a rich assortment of ethno-historical data that include extensive interviews, fieldwork, and recently declassified documents. Probably the greatest strength of this book is that it gives voice to the radiation survivors. Her ability to convey the survivors' most intimate and tragic experiences with sensitivity and clarity can, in part, be attributed to her 15-year collaborative relationship with the people of the Marshall Islands. Barker frames the ethnographic material within a historical and descriptive discussion that gives context to the narratives and grounds the data. Yet, despite the many strengths of this book, Barker's analysis of the data presented falls short of its promise.

The thesis advocated by Wexler in this book challenges traditional views of the makeup and genesis of Yiddish and Modern Hebrew. Traditional views assumed that “Yiddish was either a ‘deformation’ or a ‘creative Jewish outgrowth’ of High German, with attrition of Germanisms and acquisition of Slavicisms resulting from prolonged contact with the Slavic languages, while all historical attestations of Hebrew were regarded blindly as instantiations of Classical Semitic Hebrew” (3). Wexler's counter-proposal is twofold: On the one hand, Yiddish is Upper Sorbian relexified (in the 12th century) on the basis of High German phonetic strings, and Kiev-Polessian relexified on the basis of Yiddish and German (15th century); in this view, Yiddish is typologically a Slavic language with a German lexicon. On the other hand, Modern Hebrew is Yiddish relexified on the basis of Classical Hebrew phonetic strings; in this view, Modern Hebrew is typologically Slavic, like Yiddish, with a Classical Hebrew lexicon; hence, it is not genetically related to Old Semitic Hebrew. The aim of the book is to document this twofold proposal.

Nancy H. Hornberger (ed.), Continua of biliteracy: An ecological framework for educational policy, research, and practice in multilingual settings (Bilingual Education and Biliteracy 41). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2003. Pp. 370. Pb $39.95.

The collection of articles in Nancy Hornberger's edited book Continua of biliteracy provides a notion of historical development and a sampling of research applications for a specific conceptualization of the phenomenon of biliteracy and multiliteracy. The collection reviews 13 years of theoretical and qualitative research generated by Hornberger's (1989) initial presentation of the continua of biliteracy. The book includes three chapters by Hornberger: the original article, the revision and development of the continua of biliteracy in light of developments in literacy research through the 1990s, written with Skilton-Sylvester (Hornberger & Skilton-Sylvester 2000), and finally an extension of the themes developed in the original model through the metaphor of ecology (Hornberger 2002). These three articles function as a theoretical framework consisting of the past, present, and future directions in research generated through this conceptualization. The other chapters report on research that utilizes Hornberger's framework, covering the issues of language policy, literate identities, teacher roles, and pedagogical practice in various locations, such as the United States, Latin America, Wales, South Africa, and India. This range of issues in a variety of settings demonstrates the robustness of the theory and exemplifies for the reader some of the options of application that it offers.

Publications received.

Publications received.

Patricia Mayes, Language, social structure, and culture: A genre analysis of cooking classes in Japan and America. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2003. Pp. xiv, 228. Hb. $102.00.

In 1979, I attended a Sunday afternoon cooking class in Osaka with a small group of Japanese friends and coworkers. There were fewer than 10 people present in the kitchen showroom to learn how to make chanko nabe, a hearty one-pot stew. I do not remember the recipe, or much else about the occasion, except that we traded casual jokes and asides with the instructor, some of them playing off the fact that the dish is well known as standard fare used to bulk up sumo wrestlers. It is astonishing yet gratifying that scholarship on language and culture has advanced to the point that there is now a book entitled Language, social structure and culture: A genre analysis of cooking classes in Japan and America. The reader looking for insights into Japanese or American culture, social structure, or cooking classes as cultural events, may be frustrated or disappointed with this book, but for scholars interested in reading a forthright essay about genre theory, supported with transcripts and exhaustive counting of clause types, it will offer useful and stimulating reading.

Anna Duszak (ed.), Us and others: Social identities across languages, discourses, cultures. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2003. Pp 517. Hb $162.

This interesting volume, edited and introduced by Anna Duszak, offers a range of perspectives on the construction of identity, particularly the formation and roles of contrasting reference groups, the “us and others” of the title. Disciplines in which the contributing studies are based include social anthropology, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, intercultural communication studies, cognitive linguistics, translation studies, neurolinguistics, neuropsychology, and social psychology. Contributing scholars present accounts of studies conducted in Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australia, and Europe. The 23 chapters are grouped under the headings “Discourses in space,” “Discourses in polyphony,” “Discourses of transition,” “Discourses of fear,” “Discourses of challenge,” and “Discourses through suppression.”

This is a very beautiful and useful book. It gives a lot of information which leads to a better knowledge of a linguistic area of major interest to typologists, sociolinguists, ethnolinguists, creolists, and all kind of theoreticians, but nevertheless largely underestimated in this respect. At the same time, the authors manage to avoid excessively technical references and terminology, so that beyond the linguistic point of view, the layman as well as the specialist should be able to understand what a country like Suriname, with its complex history and population, can bring to a better understanding of human societies in general.

Publications received

Rachel Giora, On our mind: Salience, context, and figurative language. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. ix, 259. Hb $55.

The goal of this book is to explore the extent to which salient meanings – meanings that are decoded in our mental lexicon and foremost on our mind – affect our speech production and comprehension. “It aims to shed light, primarily empirically, on how, in addition to contextual information, salient meanings and senses of words and fixed expressions shape our linguistic behavior” (p. 9). According to Rachel Giora's graded salience hypothesis, salient meanings are more accessible than less salient ones. Of the multiple meanings of a given word or expression, the most salient one, which can be either literal or figurative, is always activated first regardless of context.

This is the last issue of Language in Society for which I have exclusive editorial responsibility. In this issue I've exploited my editorial privilege to publish a book review out of order received. Normally I publish book reviews in the order that they come in (with minor deviations when a short review will fit into an issue and a longer one won't). In the last few months I have accumulated a backlog of book reviews, which will be forwarded to Barbara Johnstone for editing. Only a few days ago, however, Barry Alpher submitted an exemplary scholarly review of a very important publication by R. M. W. Dixon. Alpher and Dixon have fundamental theoretical differences that go to the heart of our understanding of the modes of language change. This is a controversy that I find especially exciting, and I have taken the liberty of jumping Alpher's review to the front of the queue, reflecting my own interest in issues and languages that some might find to lie at the margins of sociolinguistics, and bringing these issues and languages forward for an appearance on center stage under my editorship.

From 1 January 2005, manuscript submissions and books for review should be sent to:

Barbara Johnstone

Editor-in-Chief

LANGUAGE IN SOCIETY

Department of English

Carnegie Mellon University

Pittsburgh PA 15213-3890

E-mail: [email protected]

Fax: 412-268-7989

Publications received.