Leonie Cornips and Karen P. Corrigan (eds.), Syntax and variation: Reconciling the biological and the social. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2005. Pp. vi, 312. Hb $144.00.

Cornips & Corrigan's Syntax and variation: Reconciling the biological and the social presupposes that we have a biological and a social dimension to linguistics, that the biological dimension is represented by generative syntax, and that the two dimensions require reconciliation. Cornips & Corrigan (C&C) consider this reconciliation possibly to be “the initial phase in the creation of a mature scientific community” (p. 2). These presuppositions should be questioned. In the first place, it is questionable whether linguistics really has a biological dimension, at least if generative syntax is that dimension. Second, it is far from clear that reconciliation is necessary for linguistics to be considered a mature science.

Raymond Hickey (ed.), Legacies of Colonial English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp xx, 713. Hb. £90.

This copious volume deals with the development of English at various overseas locations (the “New World,” the Southern Hemisphere, and Asia) during the heyday of British colonialism between the early 17th and late 19th centuries. The 21 studies in the volume demonstrate the legacies of both standard and nonstandard varieties of English from this period. At the same time they show how 17th to 19th century linguistic forms remain influential in characterizing “transported” Englishes to the present day. Not that the volume attempts to straitjacket its contributors: As Hickey emphasizes in the Foreword (p. xix), there are as many scenarios as there are locations in the study of transported Englishes, with each variety arising from different degrees of exposure to different English dialects, and differential influences from indigenous languages and cultures. The main area to which this book belongs is therefore historical dialectology, though it is certainly of relevance to language contact and general sociolinguistics, as well as the specific sociolinguistics of migration.

Viv Edwards, Multilingualism in the English-speaking world: Pedigree of nations. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. Pp. viii, 253. Pb $29.95.

Amid widespread talk about the dominance of English across the world, this volume is a reminder that even at the core of the English-speaking world, English monolingualism is not as universal as is often assumed. The book's subtitle, Pedigree of nations, conveys that, in fact, multilingualism is not only an important element of contemporary daily life in the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand, but also an essential thread in these nations' ancestral lines, indeed part of what has made them what they are today. In this comprehensive effort to dispel the “myth of monolingualism” (p. 3), Viv Edwards has assembled copious evidence of the use and significance of minority languages in English-dominant countries. Readers will find themselves better equipped to counter not only this general misconception but also the pervasive corollaries that position other languages and their speakers as problematic, outside the mainstream, and therefore outside the range of what is valued.

Maurice Nevile, Beyond the black box: Talk-in-interaction in the airline cockpit. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Pp. xvii, 245. Hb $94.95.

Maurice Nevile, from the Australian National University, examines the routine interaction between pilots in the airline cockpit, drawing on several related theoretical approaches to talk-in-interaction, such as ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and institutional discourse analysis. In chapter 1, “The workplace as social interaction,” Nevile reviews the theoretical background on workplace and institutional discourse as well as some of the most significant articles in the literature about aviation communications, in particular about interaction in the airline cockpit. In this sense, Nevile's work establishes a different orientation since, as he points out, previous work on this type of institutional discourse has focused on critical situations, accidents, and incidents instead of routine interaction, with the result that

David W. Samuels, Putting a song on top of it: Expression and identity on the San Carlos Apache Reservation. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2004. Pp. x, 324. Hb. $39.95.

David W. Samuels's Putting a song on top of it is at once an explication of current Western Apache practices and a study of how Western Apaches imagine and evoke “history” through music. Samuels's purpose is to describe and at times explain the multifaceted ways Western Apaches index continuity through music and talk about music. Samuels is interested in the “ambiguities” and “creative” uses of indexicality (p. 10). Crucial to his project is understanding the “feelingful iconicity” of discourses of and about expressive forms (11). This “feelingful iconicity” is based on the “emotional attachment to aesthetic forms” (11).

Roger W. Shuy, Creating language crimes: How law enforcement uses (and misuses) language. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Pp. xiv, 194. Hb $29.95.

Legal process, whether civil or criminal, depends heavily on the medium of language. It is the glue that runs through all of legal process, the medium of all interactive communication prior to, during, and after trial process. In criminal law, it is also the spoken medium of police investigations, prisons, and consultations among lawyers and between lawyers and their clients. It is also the medium through which the innocent are sometimes convicted of crimes that they did not, in fact, commit. Creating language crimes explores the use of conversational strategies by cooperating witnesses, by law enforcement officers, and as trial evidence in a book that will serve to introduce many to the goals and methods of forensic linguistics in the criminal context, as well as to the specific conversational strategies sometimes used to convict innocent individuals.

Sally Johnson, Spelling trouble: Language, ideology and the reform of German orthography. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2005. Pp viii, 208. Hb $89.95, Pb $39.95.

Since the 1990s language ideology has developed into a field of inquiry of its own. Research on language ideology seeks to investigate how linguistic forms and practices and their conceptualizations are enmeshed in other contextually bound cultural patterns and practices, and how language–culture relations are fraught with moral and political interests. Taking language ideology and Blommaert's (1999) notion of language ideological debates as a point of departure, Sally Johnson sets out to explore the emergence and escalation of a public dispute, involving a variety of social actors (linguists, judges, private citizens, etc.), that broke out in Germany with the introduction of the reform of German orthography in 1996. The focus of the volume is primarily on one aspect of the German debate: the legal battle between those who attempted to challenge the reform on the basis of its alleged incompatibility with some of the principles sanctioned by the German Basic Law (Grundgesetz), on the one hand, and the judges of the Federal Constitutional Court, on the other. However, for a more nuanced understanding of the debate, the role played by linguists and the media is also taken into consideration. As Johnson convincingly demonstrates throughout the volume, the debate on German orthography was definitely not about language alone. Rather, it was about different conceptions of the German language together with their political, moral and aesthetic loading.

Nanette Gottlieb, Language and society in Japan. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. ix, 169. Hb $70, Pb $27.99.

If Japanese sociolinguistics can be likened in range and complexity to a forest, this book by the sociolinguist and Japan specialist Nanette Gottlieb would best be described as a Kyoto rock garden. It is cool and calm. It lies within a circumscribed landscape and gives pause for thought.

Greg Myers. Matters of opinion: Talking about public issues. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2004. Pp xvii, 258.

Public opinion clearly matters very much to a great many people. We are constantly being given figures from the results of the latest survey and the most recent opinion poll; the losses and gains in popularity of our political leaders make headline news. Our opinions are solicited on the doorstep, on the phone, in the street; pollsters, market researchers, government departments – “they” – want to know what we think. But the mass of data collected is quantitatively processed. It is compiled as statistics, presented in percentages, reported as numerical values. In this book, through his analysis of focus group discussions and mediated opinion giving, Greg Myers takes a very different approach to what counts as an opinion on an issue. Using the findings and methods of interactional sociolinguistics and Conversation Analysis, he investigates the production of opinion as a locally emerging, interactive and above all, contextualized phenomenon.

Ronald Carter, Language and creativity: The art of common talk. London: Routledge, 2004. Pp. xiii, 255. Hb $99.95, Pb $29.95.

The central idea of Carter's wonderful new book is that “Creativity is a pervasive feature of spoken language … a key component in interpersonal communication, and … is a property actively possessed by all speakers and listeners” (p. 6). Carter is a scholar with a long history of solid work, both as one of the leaders of the CANCODE corpus effort (the Cambridge and Nottingham Corpus of Discourse in English), and as the author of two books on English grammar (Carter, Hughes, & McCarthy, 2000; Carter & McCarthy, 2006). During countless hours reviewing transcripts from the CANCODE corpus of spoken English (5 million words, collected between 1993 and 2001), he repeatedly noticed that “patterns and forms of language which as a student of literature I had readily classified as poetic or literary can be seen to be regularly occurring in everyday conversational exchanges” (10).

Geoffrey Sampson, The “language instinct” debate. Revised edition. London and New York: Continuum, 2005. Pp. xiii, 224. Pb $30.00.

First published in 1997 under the title Educating Eve but now revised and expanded and with a useful foreword from Paul Postal, this book presents and critiques all the main arguments that have been offered in support of the thesis that a body of language-specific knowledge is innate in the human child. Sampson finds the thesis unproven on detailed grounds of logic or evidence, and proceeds to sketch an alternative basis for first-language development, rooted in Popperian science and nurture. As the new title indicates, the book purports specifically to respond to Steven Pinker's The language instinct, but somewhat surprisingly Pinker's book isn't extensively debated here: It seems that the publishing demigod is mostly objected to for having renewed the intellectual standing of the nativist stance in the 1990s, and matters are certainly further confused by Sampson's frank admiration for Pinker's more recent The blank slate.

Charlotte Burck, Multilingual living: Explorations of language and subjectivity. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 218. Hb $75.

What are the pros and the cons of writing a book outside one's main field of expertise? Multilingual living, a book about bilingualism written by a psychotherapist whose previous work has focused on gender and family therapy, offers interesting answers to this question. Among its advantages are a fresh perspective and the considerable body of expertise in the field of family relationships that Burck brings to the table. She asks intriguing questions about living in more than one language and answers them in engaging and compelling ways. Yet her outsider status also carries its price: Scholars who do not take part in an academic conversation within a field do not always have a clear idea of whether their work is truly novel or whether previous work has already attempted to answer the same questions in similar ways. Rather, they are at the mercy of a body of literature they are able to locate through a time-constrained search, without a clear feeling for which sources can be considered central in the field and which are peripheral, or which debates are still going on and where scholars might have reached a consensus.

Glenn Martínez, Mexican Americans and language/Del dicho al hecho! Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press, 2006. ix, 128 pp. Pb. $15.95.

This slender volume is offered as an introductory text on this topic, presumably to university undergraduates. In the Introduction, Martínez states: “Mexican Americans and language offers a linguistic overview of some of the central issues in the Mexican American language experience [emphasis in original], giving students the background needed to respond to the multiple social problems that interface with the language differences that exist in the Mexican American minority population” (p. ix). The goals of the book thus explained, in the final paragraph of the Introduction the author reveals the conversational style that he will take for the rest of the chapters, using second person for the reader and first person for the author: “After reading this book I hope you will be able to bridge the gap between el dicho (saying) and el hecho (doing) and will be able to look at the Mexican American language experience in a way that will encourage you to seek out change and improvement for the Mexican American communities that exist throughout the United States” (xi). On the face of it, this style may intend to make the academic content to follow less intimidating to students unused to reading challenging texts and academic jargon. However, it also makes for a very personalized approach to the issues that he addresses, a type of “critical discourse” in effect, in which his interpretation of the research presented appears not to be open to dissension or debate.

Elise Kärkkäinen, Epistemic stance in English conversation: A description of its interactional functions, with a focus on I think. (Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 115). Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2003. Pp. ix, 207. Hb $102.00.

In this innovative study of epistemic stance marking in English conversation, Elise Kärkkäinen attempts to cross-fertilize discourse-functional linguistics with conversation analysis, and her effort bears fruit. She moves deftly between quantitative and qualitative methods, juxtaposing frequency tables with conversational transcripts, and comes out with a bold thesis in hand: “Showing commitment to the status of the information that one is providing, i.e. marking epistemic stance … [is] an essentially interactive activity” (p. 183).

Eija Ventola, Cassily Charles, & Martin Kaltenbacher (eds.), Perspectives on multimodality. (Document Design Companion Series.) Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 2004. Pp. x, 250. Hb eur. 95.00/$114.00.

This sixth volume in the Document Design Companion Series, like its predecessors, is devoted to issues of written, spoken, and visual (electronic) discourse as a contextual undertaking. While other volumes have roots in social semiotics, this one is unique for the breadth of its multimodal curiosity. Its cross-section of essays emerged from discussions that took place during the First International Symposium on Multimodal Discourse at the University of Salzburg. The symposium's organizers, who are also this book's editors, hope their work will foster discussion encompassing theory, method, and an eclectic array of applications, from the multisemiotic construction of mathematics to visual/verbal humor in comics. From their point of view, this work suggests possibilities for future study rather than fully realized principles in a field where nonlinguistic meaning making is only beginning to be incorporated into linguistic analysis. Therefore, one can often forgive the uneven nature of this undertaking. Stronger concerns arise when problematic or missing information affects a central claim.

Anna De Fina, Identity in narrative: A study of immigrant discourse. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2003. Pp. xiv, 251. Hb $102.00.

Narrative has now won its spurs within the social sciences, as evidenced by the number of publications, by the diversity of disciplinary approaches (e.g., linguistic, sociological, and psychological), and by the wide range of theoretical frameworks applied to its study. Similar remarks apply to studies of identity issues focused on the individual or a group, as shown by the range of foci such as social, ethnic, gender, national, racial, and institutional identity. Anna De Fina's Identity in narrative appears to be a useful resource for students of these topics and, more specifically, for anyone interested in the study of immigration.

Thomas Ricento (ed.), An Introduction to language policy: Theory and method. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006. Pp. xii, 371. Pb $34.95, Hb $69.95.

Excellent textbooks are hard to find, and with An Introduction to language policy: Theory and method, Thomas Ricento delivers one for language policy and planning (LPP). Ricento has assembled an extraordinary collection of carefully crafted introductory essays on core issues in LPP. Each contribution is written by the leading researcher(s) in a given area. In all, the book includes 19 chapters divided into three sections, each with an overview by Ricento: “Theoretical perspectives in language policy,” “Methodological perspectives in language policy,” and “Topical areas in language policy.”

Terrence G. Wiley, Literacy and language diversity in the United States. 2nd ed. Washington, DC: Center for Applied Linguistics, 2005. Pp. x, 267. Pb $19.95.

Literacy and language diversity in the United States (henceforth, Literacy) combines perspectives from diverse linguistic disciplines, primarily studies of English as a second/foreign language (EFL) and English dialectology. Literacy investigates challenges faced by “language minorities” (people who speak as a first or only language a language other than English, and those who speak vernacular English dialects) in schools and communities, and the pedagogical and societal implications of these challenges. The primary focus is summarized in the introductory chapter: Literacy “explores the major issues that scholars and educators face concerning fair and effective educational policies and practices for language minority learners” (p. 4). Chap. 1 surveys several of these issues, including defining and measuring literacy; ideological beliefs about and attitudes toward literacy; and the political, social, and educational implications of such ideologies.

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.

John Lipski,A history of Afro-Hispanic language: Five centuries, five continents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. x, 363. Hb. $110.

In the most comprehensive volume to date, John Lipski, one of the top scholars on Afro-Hispanic language varieties, traces the history of African–Iberian linguistic contact from its origins with the importation of black African slaves to Portugal and Spain to the present-day situation of these varieties. The book can be divided into two parts: chapters 1–5 contain the introduction and a detailed review of the data, while chapters 6–9 examine how the data bear on the likelihood of the independent formation of a Spanish-based creole in the Caribbean. In chapter 1 Lipski details the first significant African–Iberian contacts, with sections on the different phases of colonization and slavery, tracing the Portuguese expansion in Africa and Asia, the role of the Spanish, the ascent of Dutch and English in the colonization scene, and the slave trade. He focuses on African slavery in South America, noting that there were fewer blacks than whites until the 19th century, when the big plantations came into their own. At this time, we find a disproportionate number of blacks to whites in some areas of the Caribbean and Latin America.