Mediated Discourse (MD) reports a longitudinal study of the development of a one-year-old child, focusing on a single, narrowly defined social practice – handing, or “the simple practice of giving an object to another person” (p. 12). In this book, R. Scollon proposes a framework of mediated discourse to address social (practice) theory, which was “badly in need of an ontogenetic view of social practice” (vii).

Although Ron Scollon is an author of both books under review, the second differs from the first, theoretical, work in focusing on practical application. Professional communication in international settings (PCIIS) is an excellent book that is much needed by professionals, researchers, trainers, or anyone else involved in business or professional communication across cultural boundaries. Different from many other books on the same subject, its goal is to offer a method for effective communication, and it can be used as either a textbook or a reference.

This is the first textbook on metaphor to appear after the cognitive linguistic revolution of metaphorical research launched two decades ago by Lakoff & Johnson with their pioneering work, Metaphors we live by. Much scholarship has since been devoted to this paradigm of research. Twenty years have passed, and Kövecses takes this as a good time to summarize the development of the field. Writing a textbook on metaphor certainly reflects the maturation of the study of metaphor within the cognitive linguistic tradition. Targeted readers are undergraduate and graduate students with interests in metaphor and cognitive linguistics. Experienced researchers may also find this book helpful in motivating new ideas.

This book is an important and useful contribution to the literature on language shift, especially for readers interested in this issue in American Indian communities. House focuses on discrepancies between public discourse about what it means to be a Navajo person and “undiscussed, yet highly visible, linguistic and behavioral practices” – that is, between conscious, discursive ideology and more unconscious, behavioral ideology as revealed through social practice. She challenges the widespread claim in the Navajo community for the existence of Navajo cultural homogeneity, arguing that although such essentializing discourse may have political, economic, and spiritual motivations, it is also unrealistic and complicates efforts to reverse language shift.

Readers will observe that this issue has five articles but only three book reviews. This curious ratio is partly the result of my travel schedule, which has required me to submit the issue to the copy editor weeks in advance of when I would normally do so. However, it is also the result of the very slow flow of book reviews into my office. The new five-issue-per-volume format, of course, uses more reviews, and the fault is probably partly mine for not commissioning enough of them. Our founding editor, Dell Hymes, used to write half a dozen book reviews and book notes in each issue; I'm not made of that sort of stuff (although I did contribute a review to this issue, I don't plan to make a habit of it). However, once again, I want to call for book reviewers currently in default to write the reviews that they promised of the excellent volumes that grace their shelves courtesy of this and the past editor! And also, to those who have written offering to do reviews, I thank you and will be in touch with you about your interests. If for some reason I don't reply to your query, please remind me to do so. Readers should watch the “Publications Received” column and request opportunities to review books that look interesting. If the book is not already under review and is appropriate for an LiS review, I'll be delighted to send it to you.

This book combines culture, philosophy and linguistics by examining everyday language. It concentrates on the semantic interrelations between aspects of epistemic, moral and aesthetic values of a person's life in Yoruba society. The book contains six chapters and an appendix of Yoruba-language quotations.

This book primarily addresses the following questions:

(a) What are the features of African American Vernacular English (AAVE), and how is it used?

(b) What is its evolution and where is it headed?

(c) What are its educational implications?

It would be unjust to say that languages of ethnic minorities of Siberia and the Far East of Russia have not received the attention of linguists and anthropologists, yet until now there has been no book that has gathered, classified, and compared data on the sociolinguistic situation of these minorities over the whole Soviet period. This is the topic of Vakhtin's new book. It deals almost exclusively with the exterior aspect of the history of the languages; it does not analyze structural changes in the languages themselves.

Two remarkable books arrived on my desk from quite different sources early in 2003. My purpose in reviewing them is twofold: first, to convince the general reader that the study of culture can no longer ignore the transformative role of written documents in social and mental life in either antique cultures or in contemporary modernizing ones; and second, to introduce the authors of these fine books to each other.

This book presents a semantic study of Chinese physical action verbs from a cognitive perspective. The study seeks to understand the cognitive basis of language by uncovering the relationship between language structure and cognitive structure, and to demonstrate “how cognitive, perceptual, or experiential facts constrain or otherwise determines the linguistic facts” (p. 230). In its semantic analysis of physical action verbs, the study illustrates the role of body parts in the semantic construction of the verbs depicting the physical actions performed by those body parts. In the discussion of relationships between language construction and human body action, the book's central argument is that the event structures of physical action verbs are constructed not arbitrarily but through systematic cognitive processes in relation to both human physical reality and concrete reality in the world. By explicating linguistic structure on the basis of human cognition and human experience, the author attempts to verify that the categorizations of language entities reveal, to a large extent, the nature of human experience and perception of physical reality. The assumption is that the nature of linguistic richness in both semantic and syntactic structures is a reflection of the development of human perception of the experiential reality.

In this well-focused collection of papers, editors Gottlieb & Chen present an overview of language planning and policy issues in East Asia. Given the time-honored emphasis on scholarship and especially on writing that is characteristic of the region, it is not surprising to find that the book is rich in historical information. However, it also provides a wealth of insights regarding recent developments across related yet unique settings. In this sense, the volume fulfills its publicized aim of meeting the needs of students, researchers, and educated readers with an interest in the complex language practices of the region.

Sociolinguistic variation in American Sign Language is the successful result of applying sociolinguistic theory and methodology originally developed for spoken languages to American Sign Language (ASL). The product of several years of study conducted by a team of researchers, this book is more than just an exercise; both expected and unexpected findings are presented, thereby confirming and advancing the sociolinguistics of signed languages in particular and of language in general. Lucas and Valli bring to this work extensive experience with sign language linguistics; they are joined by Bayley, who is known for his work on Tejano English and Spanish variation among immigrants of Mexican descent. The statistical findings provide the necessary bridge between context and environment, on the one hand, and internal constraints, on the other, to explain the range of variation represented at phonological, syntactic, and lexical levels in ASL. Explicitly building on Weinrich, Labov & Herzog's notion of orderly heterogeneity (14, 193–94; cf. Weinrich, Labov & Herzog 1968), the book provides useful examples and analysis for sign language linguists, and it would do well as a source for graduate and advanced undergraduate courses where materials beyond a primer of sociolinguistics are needed. For those more established in the field, the authors respectfully (and graciously) challenge several frequently cited findings concerning variation in ASL, such as Woodward & DeSantis' (1977) claims about negative incorporation and Liddell & Johnson's (1989) explanations for phonological variation in forms of the sign deaf.

This volume, a product of the First National Conference on Heritage Languages in America, held in Long Beach, California, in 1999, opens with the editors' introduction, followed by fourteen chapters within five thematic sections: “Defining the field,” “Shaping the field,” “Educational issues,” “Research and practice,” and “A call to action.” Together, they make a compelling case for the need to preserve and exploit heritage languages in the US as a national resource. The book provides a comprehensive overview of pressing issues and challenges within the growing field of heritage language (henceforth HL) education, and it successfully demonstrates “why those who are involved in the heritage language movement believe that it is important for the United States to preserve its non-English languages” (5). The volume is intended primarily for “educators, community leaders, researchers, grant makers and policymakers” (5), though its clear, nontechnical language makes it accessible to any reader interested in the subject. Its effective thematic organization, likely to appeal to both novice and expert readers, and its overall coherence, accentuated by ample cross-referencing, testify to careful editorial preparation and suggest the desire of all involved to speak with one voice as they build their case and issue a call for action on behalf of heritage languages in the US.

This is the sixth and presumably final volume in an ambitious series. The first four volumes were distinguished chronologically according to the traditional paradigm for the history of English: Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English, and Present Day English. The other two volumes are organized geographically. Volume 5 examined English outside England in most of the expected places (e.g., Scotland, Ireland, Australia), with the exception of North America, to which the present volume is devoted. As the general editor, Richard Hogg, writes (p. xi), the series is designed to offer “a solid discussion of the full range of the history of English” to anglicists and general linguists alike. Readers of the latter category will certainly find this volume accessible. In fact, the inclusion of a glossary of terms extends that accessibility to readers outside linguistics as well. Specialists, however, are likely to be disappointed by the unevenness of the collection.

Since the pioneering work of Labov, Yaeger & Steiner 1972, research in phonological variation has steadily grown more reliant on acoustic data – that is, on data resulting from instrumental measurements rather than from the auditory judgments of the researchers. This book from Erik Thomas demonstrates the fruitfulness (as well as some of the limitations) of this research trend.

In her preface to A place to stand, Julie Lindquist writes, “The experience of class in America is impossible to explain, difficult to render, and dangerous to address.” In spite of these caveats, she has combined her experience as a bartender with her graduate training in theoretical linguistics to render and address, if not to explain, rhetorical performance among the regulars in a working class-bar she calls the Smokehouse.

This book is the revised version of Hazen's 1997 Ph.D. dissertation at the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill). In it, Hazen investigates the linguistic behavior of three ethnic groups in Warren County, North Carolina, both individually and collectively, with respect to copula absence and leveling of past be, with the aim of ascertaining the linguistic boundaries that delineate the ethnic groups. These ethnic groups are African Americans (comprising 57% of the overall population in the 1990 Census), European Americans (38%), and Native Americans (4%). In addition to ethnicity, Hazen considers the influence of age, sex, and cultural identity. He situates his data and findings in the broader sociolinguistic context by discussing, for example, the contributions that they make to the origins debate and the divergence/convergence debate surrounding African American Vernacular English (AAVE). Perhaps the two most significant contributions of the study, however, are the discussion of wont as an innovative variant descended from wasn't, a past-tense corollary of present tense ain't (cf. Hazen 1998), and the discussion of the influence of cultural identity on sociolinguistic variation (cf. Hazen 2002).

A signal event in the history of language policy in France was the recognition in 2000 of French-lexifier creoles as languages that students in secondary schools could select as subject matter. This decision by the ministry of education placed these languages on an equal footing with the heretofore officially recognized regional languages, such as Breton or Corsican. For these languages to be taught in French secondary schools, teachers needed to be certified by an examination, the CAPES (Certificat d'Aptitude au Professorat de l'Enseignement Secondaire). This book by the leading creolist of the French Antilles is part of a series of handbooks for prospective candidates for that diploma.

These three volumes invite a volume in return. They bring Haida to the fore of what is known of oral narrative in Native North America. One finds a dedicated philological sleuth, tracking down original texts and unpublished manuscripts (see A story as sharp as a knife, pp. 221–2; Nine visits to the mythworld, p. 17); a historian of anthropology, reconstructing and relating the story of a young fieldworker who is now largely forgotten (John R. Swanton); a pursuit of detail that enters into a past world, identifying in footnotes and photographs the places and foods and material culture of that world; and a creative writer reimagining Haida men, on islands crumbled by disease and occupation, re-creating in narratives a world their minds could still imagine. Not least, one finds someone for whom the arts are a normal part of life, and for whom the conception and misfortunes of a painting by Velasquez (44–49) can illuminate the relationship between myth time and historical time in Haida. Finally, the writing displays an ease, indeed a gift for words, that befits an established poet, and the books themselves are attractive, as befits a typographer versed in visual arts. (Bringhurst was invited to bring out a new edition, Chappell & Bringhurst 1999, of a standard book. The new edition indeed displays two pages [298–99] in line and verse of Victoria Howard's “Gitskux and his older brother” [Clackamas Chinook]; see Hymes 1983. His book of 1992 has been a bestseller.