This article examines variable usage of intensifiers in a corpus from a socially and generationally stratified community. Using multivariate analyses, the authors assess the direction of effect, significance, and relative importance of conditioning factors in apparent time. Of 4,019 adjectival heads, 24% were intensified, and there is an increase in intensification across generations. Earlier forms (e.g. right and well) do not fade away but coexist with newer items. The most frequent intensifiers, however, are shifting rapidly. Very is most common, but only among the older speakers. In contrast, really increases dramatically among the youngest generation; however, the effects of education and sex must be disentangled. The results confirm that variation in intensifier use is a strong indicator of shifting norms and practices in a speech community. Studying such actively changing features can make an important contribution to understanding linguistic change as well as to discovering current trends in contemporary English.

This volume, dedicated to Martin Braine, is the outcome of a conference held at the Max Plank Institute in Nijmegen in 1995. The first of four parts covers general theoretical issues; part 2 focuses specifically on word learning, particularly nouns; in part 3, entities, individuation and quantification are examined; and in part 4, relational concepts in form-function mapping, with a focus on the influence of language-specific properties. Two main issues link the nineteen chapters: whether concepts are language-independent or constructed through language, and the role of experience in conceptual development. As emphasized by the editors in the introduction, past attempts to relate cognitive and linguistic development have not been too successful, possibly because of the focus on language structure within theoretical linguistics. Recent research on the domain-specific cognitive abilities of infants and on semantic and cross-linguistic aspects of language acquisition have provided new insights, and thus it is timely to reexamine the links.

In this extraordinary book, Jackendoff proposes nothing less than a new way to understand the architecture of language and a new way to view the relation of language to the brain, to the mind, to behavior, and to the evolution of our species. It is, among many other things, an invitation for cooperation from one of the world's leading formal syntacticians to linguists of diverse orientations and to those from adjacent fields, including sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. If we don't want to be left behind, we had better pay close attention.

Mesthrie's Concise encyclopedia of sociolinguistics (hereafter, CESO) is a newly edited, condensed, and updated offshoot of the Encyclopedia of language and linguistics, originally published in ten volumes in 1993. This laudable volume aims to “give a comprehensive overview of the main topics in an important branch of language study, generally known as Sociolinguistics” (p. 1). As theoretical background, the branch is traced from the Sanskrit scholar Pānini to more recent origins in historical linguistics, anthropology, rural dialectology, and the study of mixed languages. The field is further presented as the most proper of all branches for language study today, as Mesthrie – updating Labov's (1972) famous claim about the implications of the term sociolinguistics – writes that “having ‘human communication’ as part of the definition of language makes it impossible to study language comprehensively without due regard to social contexts of speech” (1). CESO is an attempt to catalog the relevant components of those social contexts.

This volume contributes to the study of language ideology by focusing on the historical processes through which ideological positions about the relationship of language and society are produced and reproduced. Specifically, the contributors seek to contextualize the ways that language ideologies are contested in particular, often well publicized debates about language and its relationships to society. While ostensibly about linguistic issues, these debates, at one level or another, also address questions of power and national identity.

This book's manifest aim is “to bring to the non-specialized reader a substantial selection that reflects the … regional and disciplinary variations in views toward and experiences with ethnicity” (3). To be more precise, the book is about issues of ethnicity and language, as the title correctly suggests. It will certainly be of interest to nonspecialists and less advanced students, and useful as a resource for teaching and seminar work. I will comment on it on the basis of this declared intention, globally – that is, I will not go into the details of individual contributions.

This is the second edition of a very impressive handbook that was published first in French in 1983, and subsequently in English in 1989. This new edition was prepared directly in English. Josiane Hamers is Professor of Psycholinguistics and Bilingualism at the Université de Laval, Québec, and Michel Blanc is Emeritus Reader of Applied Linguistics and Bilingualism at Birkbeck College, University of London.

This volume revisits, as its title states, the theory and practice of reversing language shift (RLS) first proposed by Fishman in 1991. A dozen of the original case studies are reanalyzed and several more are added, producing a rich source of detail on some of the specific situations of language shift and efforts to reverse it. Fishman contributes introductory and concluding chapters as well as one of the case studies (Yiddish); other authors cover Navajo, New York Puerto Rican Spanish, Québec French, Otomí, Quechua, Irish, Frisian, Basque, Catalán, Oko, Andamanese, Ainu, Hebrew, immigrant languages in Australia, indigenous languages in Australia, and Maori. The resulting book provides a wealth of information about language shift and public policy directed toward RLS, but its aims are broader than that.

Tsitsipis's valuable and sophisticated linguistic-anthropological study reports on research conducted over a number of years in two Albanian-speaking communities in southern Greece, Spáta in the district of Attika, and Kiriáki in the district of Biotia. These towns historically spoke Arvanítika, a Tosk dialect of Albanian. Although both communities date at least to the fourteenth century, they contrast sharply in that the first is very close to Athens, while the second is in a mountainous, isolated area. Kiriáki has a younger generation of fluent Arvanítika speakers, but language shift to Greek is advanced in both communities – shaped, according to Tsitsipis, not only by economic changes involving improved transportation and communication, the mechanization of agriculture, and urbanization, which have accelerated since the 1950s, but also by the ideological formations associated with the consolidation of the Greek nation-state, dating from the mid-19th century. The latter process focused symbolically on the exaltation of the heritage of the Greeks, and especially of their language. While adding considerable nuance to our understanding of the situation, Tsitsipis confirms the findings of Eric Hamp (1978:161–62; quoted by Tsitsipis on p. 11) that Arvanítika speakers “unflinchingly and happily accept the axioms that Greek is the oldest culture, Greek literature the first … and the Greek language the oldest, the richest … the only one with a true grammar.

There is little doubt that critical applied linguistics is one of the most controversial and contentious areas in linguistics today. This new book, Critical applied linguistics: A critical introduction, is an attempt to provide a much-needed detailed and comprehensive introduction to this emergent approach. It is written by Alastair Pennycook of the University of Technology, Sydney, who has been one of the major proponents of critical applied linguistics during the past decade.

At first glance, the title of this book seems to index major themes of linguistic anthropology; however, it is published as volume 6 in a cultural studies series. Its contributors' interests range from linguistics through the expanse of humanities, illustrating how eclectic and interdisciplinary contemporary research in area of language and culture has become. The editor, Magda Stroinska, begins this volume with a brief overview of several themes recurring throughout: linguistic relativity, the search for universals, cross-cultural identity, globalization, and translatability. The research presented here analyzes interactions among language, behavior, and context as they emerge in several areas of current concern. These include metaphors and their use in speech, as well as discourses on topics such as gender and marriage, science versus postmodernism, internationalized business, politics, nationalism, study abroad experiences, emotion, and religion. The authors examine data from various sources, including original speech data, data first discussed elsewhere, literature, and media. Five thematic sections of two chapters each comprise this edited volume.

One of the virtues of David Herman's Story logic lies in its attempt to bring together literary and linguistic approaches to the study of narrative. The attempt results in a synthesis that promotes a better understanding of discourse for literary scholars and a deeper grasp of basic narratology tools for discourse analysts. The title of the volume reflects one of the main points of the book: that “stories both have a logic and are logic in their own right” (p. 22) because they constitute a powerful instrument for understanding the world. The more general objective of the analyses presented in the volume is to work toward a cognitive approach to narrative in which narrative understanding is explained as a process of creating and updating mental models of particular storyworlds. Thus, Herman looks at language theory and narrative theory as theoretical frames that not only can enrich each other, but that also constitute a resource for cognitive science in general.

This book, it must be said from the outset, is a remarkable addition to the literature on pidgin and creole languages. It is particularly important because it investigates the diachrony and synchrony of an English-lexicon contact language on which very little has been previously published, and whose very existence has been called into question by some.

Although it is easy to do so, The sociolinguistics of sign languages (henceforth SSL) is not to be confused with Ceil Lucas's other books, The sociolinguistics of the deaf community (1989) and its sequels, the Sociolinguistics in Deaf Communities series. Whereas the latter volumes aim to present new research in the area of sociolinguistics pertaining to Deaf people and other users of sign languages, the book under review presents almost no new (to those already familiar with this field) information on aspects of sociolinguistic research on members of this language community. Instead, this book should more accurately be seen as a companion volume to her book (with Clayton Valli) Linguistics of American Sign Language: An introduction (2000; henceforth LASL). Like LASL, SSL is intended as a textbook for use in college-level courses dealing with linguistics (or a stand-alone course in sociolinguistics, as was Lucas's intention) of sign languages and Deaf communities.

In this book, author Salikoko Mufwene offers a chronology of his views on language evolution as they have developed over the past 12 years. Mufwene understands the linguistic evolutionary process in terms of a language's external ecology – that is, its position relative to other languages with which it moves in and out of contact, the power relations among groups of different language varieties in the setting, and so on – as well as its internal ecology, or the coexistence in a given setting of the linguistic features, and their relative weight. Although Mufwene uses creole languages as a starting point, his purpose is to highlight general characteristics of language evolution; he argues that, in the essentials of language change, varieties such as pidgins and creoles differ little if at all from non-pidgins and non-creoles. To build his case, Mufwene draws from population genetics, seeing any given language not as an organism but rather as its own “species.”

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.

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.

The Concise encyclopedia of language and religion is distilled from the Encyclopedia of language and linguistics, published in ten volumes in 1994. In their preface, editors John F. A. Sawyer and J. M.Y. Simpson note that more than 110 new articles have been written for this concise edition, presumably to shift the focus from language alone to the nexus of language and religion. Unfortunately, the book reads like a philological encyclopedia that has seen a monk scribbling in the margins, adding “religion” bits copiously but not integrating them fully into the corpus on language.

Glenn Hinson, in Fire in my bones, creatively and accurately captures the essence of Holy Spirit influence on belief and experience among members of the “spirit-filled” or “sanctified” African American community. Much ethnographic work tends to highlight researchers' analytical and supposedly “objective” reports of observed behavior; Hinson, however, takes an ingenious phenomenological approach in which the lived selves of sanctified members are presented through their own individual voices. To the author's credit, attempts to “shape” or refine participants' expressions, observations, analyses, summaries, and so on do not appear in this work.

This is an exceptionally interesting collective work put together by Camille C. O'Reilly in two volumes, the first focusing on minority languages and problems of nation and ethnicity in western Europe, and particularly in the European Union (EU), and the second taking as its main focus languages and nationalizing discourses in eastern Europe. A large part of the discussion in vol. 2 concentrates on issues related to the fate and ongoing processes of nation formation, citizenship, linguistic ideologies, and minority languages in the successor states of the former Soviet Union. In both volumes, some chapters focus more narrowly on language, whereas others give emphasis to macro processes of a political nature. And, of course, no article in the collection is indifferent to the politics of minoritization, ethnic-national boundaries, and the restructuring of the European national map as a whole. Thus, variation in theme and method of analysis should be considered as a positive element of this endeavor, even though the overall treatment is neither exhaustive nor radically critical, as I will argue below.