Lindsay Amthor Yotsukura, Negotiating moves: Problem presentation and resolution in Japanese business discourse. Oxford: Elsevier, 2003. Pp. xxi, 370. Hb $85.00.

Negotiating moves contributes to the understanding of typical negotiation strategies shared by Japanese business professionals, with an emphasis on empiricism. Given that only anecdotal evidence is available from prior investigations of Japanese conflict management, Yotsukura conducted her study based on a large number of naturally occurring interactions extracted from more than 540 authentic business calls at companies in the Kanto (eastern) and Kansai (western) regions of Japan. Major thrusts of this study include its ingenious framework of analysis, which goes beyond the traditional “context-free” approach of conversation analysis (CA) (p. 2). It integrates ethnographic dimensions into analyses and interpretations and adapts the Bakhtinian notion of speech genres. Genres are derived from commonalities and shared communicative activities that native speakers are assumed to develop through recurring experiences in their everyday lives. This study also rigorously explores cultural reasons why Japanese people behave linguistically in certain ways, based on some metalinguistic traits unique to the culture. While it may be quite debatable whether all of these theses bear fruit in research outcomes, the actual negotiating processes to which Japanese business professionals typically resort are well documented and described in a manner comprehensible even to a general audience, as well as to learners of Japanese as a foreign language.

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.

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.

Robin Wooffitt, Conversation analysis and discourse analysis: A comparative and critical introduction. London: Sage, 2005. Pp. ix, 234. Hb $69.95, Pb $31.95.

Robin Wooffitt aims to answer a question in his new book: “Analytically, what is the best way to understand everyday communicative activities?” (2). His answer: “Conversation analysis offers the most sophisticated and robust account of language in action” (2). The remainder of the book proceeds, then, not only as an introduction to Conversation Analysis (CA) and Discourse Analysis (DA) as approaches to the study of language and communication in the social sciences (specifically, sociology and European social psychology), but also as a polemic for CA as a methodology superior to DA. The book is marketed as an introductory textbook; thus, each chapter includes periodic bulleted section summaries, and the early introductory chapters conclude with suggestions for further reading. As a textbook, this volume seems best suited for graduate seminars in linguistics or sociology; it deals with theoretical and methodological disputes that go well beyond most undergraduate students' background knowledge or pedagogical needs. As a scholarly volume, it should attract attention from social scientists already engaged in research utilizing CA or DA, as well as those working with other methodologies who are interested in how CA and DA conceptualize and investigate discourse.

Publications received (through 4 October 2005).

Lisa J. Green, African American English: A Linguistic Introduction. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 285 pp. Pb $31.99.

When I first saw Cambridge University Press's announcement of Lisa Green's book, I was quite excited, because a systematic, comprehensive introductory book on African American English had been lacking in the field for quite a while. But now one is available and – to start with my overall impression – it is very good. In what follows I survey the book's contents as well as offer critical assessment of its goals and how they are achieved.

Neil DeVotta, Blowback: Linguistic nationalism, institutional decay, and ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. Pp. 204. Hb $55.00, Pb $22.95.

In this well-argued analysis of linguistic nationalism and ethnic conflict, Neil DeVotta places more weight on language than do most other accounts of conflict and civil war in Sri Lanka. DeVotta's main argument is that language politics informed by linguistic nationalism was not just one among several forces leading to the breakdown of peaceful coexistence of the Sinhalese and Tamil communities of the island, but indeed the single most important cause of the conflict and its later violent manifestations. Accordingly, the 1956 decision by the Colombo government to declare Sinhala the sole national language of Sri Lanka represents the crucial turning point in the relationship between ethnic Sinhalese and Tamils on the island. DeVotta argues that the 1956 Official Language Act was motivated by a desire among leaders of the Sinhalese majority to facilitate socioeconomic mobility among their ethnic constituency, and that it subsequently prompted further ethnocentric legislation openly favoring the interests of the ethnic majority at the expense of the Tamil minority. This inability of Sinhalese leaders to compromise in turn led to a severe loss of confidence in the government and other state institutions among Tamils, who began to experience the Sri Lankan state as an alien entity. Finally, this process of “institutional decay” set off by the 1956 imposition of Sinhala as sole official language in state institutions and education then provoked separatist Tamil nationalism and a spiral of violence culminating in a devastating civil war.

Carlo L. Prevignano & Paul J. Thibault (eds.), Discussing Conversation Analysis: The work of Emanuel A. Schegloff. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2003. Pp. 206. Hb $72.00.

Emanuel Schegloff's life is like the conversations he studies: structures (e.g., graduate school, marriage) and plans (e.g., dissertation topics) blend with and give way to chance encounters (e.g., meeting Harvey Sacks his third year of graduate school at Berkeley), fortuitous and unexpected events (e.g., suddenly losing the data source for his dissertation and luckily finding another one), and tragedy (the premature death of Harvey Sacks). These and other events during the course of his intellectual life have shaped the context in which he made decisions about his work and developed his unique perspective on the study of language and interaction.

Publications Received (Through 28 February 2006).

Walt Wolfram & Erik R. Thomas, The development of African American English. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. Pp. ix, 237. Pb $40.95.

Wolfram and Thomas (W&T) have produced a meticulous study of African American English and its development, based on extensive fieldwork and ensuing linguistic analyses in Hyde County, North Carolina. W&T worked in collaboration with Elaine W. Green, Becky Childes, Dan Beckett, and Benjamin Torbert. Any student of African American English, or of sociolinguistics in general, will find a wealth of knowledge in this volume that reflects advanced studies of African American English that connect synchronic studies with their diachronic relevance.

Maya Hickmann, Children's discourse: Person, space and time across languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp.vii, 392. Hb $55.

This monograph explores the universality and variability of the language acquisition processes. Arguing that universal learning mechanisms, on the one hand, or innate capacities within specific domains, on the other, are incomplete as theoretical explanations, this book addresses two major questions regarding first language acquisition: What structural and functional factors determine the acquisition process? What are the universal and language-specific aspects of this process? (p. 1).

Leelo Keevallik, From interaction to grammar: Estonian finite verb forms in conversation. Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet, 2003. Pp. 270. Hb $57.50.

This book – presented as a Ph. D. thesis at the University of Uppsala, Sweden – comprises analyses of eleven frequently occurring epistemic expressions in present-day spoken Estonian. The constitutive elements in these expressions are finite verb forms in any of the three persons – for example, ma arvan ‘I guess’, ütleme ‘let's say’, kule ‘listen!’, on ju ‘(it) is surely’. In addition to the verb form, which is either in the indicative or imperative mood, there may be another element, typically a personal pronoun or verbal suffix (1st or 2nd person), and even a clitic particle (on+ju). Semantically, most of the verbs denote human cognition or speaking. An exception is the verb olla ‘to be’ (cf. on ju above).

Publications received (through March 31, 2005).

Hubert Devonish, Talking rhythm stressing tone: The role of prominence in Anglo-West African Creole languages. Kingston, Jamaica: Arawak Publications, 2002. Pp. 192. Pb $20.00.

Talking rhythm stressing tone attempts to accomplish two equally significant aims. First, it attempts an exposition of a theory of prominence that provides a coherent synthesis of diverse views on phonological prominence. Second, it attempts an explanation of the structure of some prosodic features of Anglo-West African creoles using this theory. The proposals of the theory of prominence provide fresh insights into issues such as moracity, tone and stress assignment, and syntax-tone interaction. The theory proposes that well-known issues such as the association of stress and tone with moras or positions within a domain in languages result from phonological prominence effects. This is the first time an integrated approach, in the form of prominence theory, has been proposed to look at these issues.

John Aitchison & Harold Carter (eds.), Spreading the word: The Welsh language 2001. Talybont, Ceredigion: Y Lolfa Cyf., 2004. Pp. 160. Pb. £8.95.

For three decades, John Aitchison and Harold Carter (A&C) have shouldered principal responsibility for interpreting the results of the decennial UK census as it relates to the use of the Welsh language in Wales. In this book A&C give their account of the 2001 census data on Welsh. First-level analysis of the 2001 data is available through an excellent government web site – http://www.statistics.gov.uk/census2001/ – but A&C's further, mainly geographically based analyses have become the standard resource for reading patterns of Welsh language maintenance and shift.

Herbert L. Colston & Albert N. Katz (eds.), Figurative language comprehension: Social and cultural influences. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2005. Pp. xi, 347. Hb $89.95.

The field of psycholinguistics has a history of ignoring sociocultural factors and, to a lesser extent, figurative language. By choosing to focus on both, this book deals simultaneously with two relatively marginalized areas of language processing. This fact alone makes the book an important and welcome contribution. Excluding the first chapter (an overview by one of the editors, Herbert Colston), the book contains twelve articles that cover a range of figurative language phenomena and a host of sociocultural variables. The phenomena discussed include irony, metaphor, and proverbs; the variables include gender, occupational roles, and social status.

This is the first issue of Language in Society to go to press under my editorship, though most of the contents of this issue were edited by Jane Hill. I would like to thank Professor Hill for making the editorial transition as smooth as it has been. She has been ready to help and advise at a moment's notice. Readers of the journal, too, owe Professor Hill an enormous debt of gratitude for her work as editor. I hope that Language in Society will continue to be as interesting and up to date during my tenure, but Jane Hill will be a hard act to follow.

Richard Buttny, Talking problems: Studies of discursive construction. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2004. Pp.ix, 214. Hb $45.00.

Richard Buttney's Talking problems: Studies of discursive construction addresses the centrality of ordinary talk as a key site in the construction of human sociality and social reality. He characterizes talk about problems as a linguistic abstraction from actions or events that call for solutions. Such discourses have regular patterns which people routinely deploy as they tell their troubles and seek solutions to problems. How people structure such talk and position themselves and others in it provides insight into how those people identify themselves socially and operate within moral systems. Problems do not exist independently of the ways in which people perceive and evaluate both the problem situation and themselves. People position themselves as good, blameless, likable, and so on through what Buttny calls a “microlevel rhetoric.” Examination of that rhetoric sheds light on the interests at stake, since positioning means casting oneself or another in terms of specific, often moral characterizations (dutiful, realistic, happy, etc.) which are in turn related to one's membership category (social role, ethnic identity, etc.). Buttny thus builds on work in ethnomethodology and conversational analysis to develop a particular set of methods for the analysis of trouble-telling. He focuses, as he puts it, on communicative practices, positionings and constructions: “How problems get interactionally formed and oriented to, and how interlocutors position themselves in the course of such problem talk” (p. 9, italics in original). Buttny examines three areas of trouble-telling: teens talking about being young parents, therapy talk among clients and their therapist, and talk among college students about race relations. The book is organized into eight chapters: an introduction (summarized above) and conclusion, and two main sections of three chapters each, the first focusing on talking about problems, the second on reported speech about race.

Elizabeth Gordon, Lyle Campbell, Jennifer Hay, Margaret Maclagan, Andrea Sudbury & Peter Trudgill, New Zealand English: Its history and evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xix, 370. Hb $85.00.

Between 1946 and 1948, Radio New Zealand established a Mobile Unit that visited many towns throughout the country, seeking out people who were longtime residents of small towns in order to record their oral histories. In 1986 Elizabeth Gordon was told of these archived recordings. The uniqueness of this data corpus is that the speakers, born between 1851 and 1904, were all participants in the formation of a new dialect, New Zealand English (NZE). It is unlikely that other data sets will be found in which tape recording technology and a first generation of speakers come together. English had arrived in 1840 with the original colonizers, who were mainly English, Scottish, and Irish. The story gets complicated by the arrival of many English-speaking immigrants from Australia, descendants from a penal colony founded in 1788, which had formed its own new dialect earlier with input from English, Scottish, and Irish settlers. Moreover, settlers often spent time first in Australia and then moved to New Zealand, and there was considerable contact between Australia and New Zealand from the start. It is within this historical setting and with this database that the Origins of New Zealand English (ONZE) project researchers set out to describe early NZE in order to examine its origins.

Dennis R. Preston (ed.), Needed research in American dialects. Publications of the American Dialect Society, 88. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Pp. vii, 261. Hb $20.00.

This collection is the fourth in a series of volumes titled Needed research in American dialects, published by the American Dialect Society (ADS) in 20-year intervals since 1943. In addition, the book represents the continuing evolution of the state of American dialectology and related sociolinguistics as outlined in Dennis Preston's edited collection, American Dialect Research (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1993), published in commemoration of the ADS centennial in 1989. The current volume is a striking compilation for several reasons. First, it (like the ADS in general) is to be commended for continuing with many of the themes first outlined in the 1943 volume, currently available as part of PADS 31 (1964), which also includes the 1963 Needed Research volume. This commitment to solving research questions and completing research and publication tasks outlined early in the society's history is remarkable in an era when it is all too easy to substitute research on the latest fashionable topic for good solid scholarship on basic questions and sustained research that provides valuable time depth. At the same time, though, the current volume is not fettered by its commitment to historical continuity, and coverage of newer research areas whose importance has been recognized over the past couple of decades is comprehensive as well. Finally, Preston is to be commended for the slate of authors he has brought together in this volume. The chapters are written by leading researchers in the areas covered, and the authors are themselves responsible for some of the chief advances in the field since the publication of the 1983 volume.