Rhiannon Bury, Cyberspaces of their own: Female fandoms online. New York: Peter Lang, 2005. Pp. x, 242. Pb $29.95.

This is an ethnographic study of two all-female online communities, ostensibly founded to discuss certain television series and the male actors they feature. One of Rhiannon Bury's aims was to make her book accessible to the participants in her research, but although it is written in an accessible style, this is decidedly an academic monograph rather than a popular science book. Bury begins by giving an overview of her object of research, her participants, and her own involvement in the research process as an ethnographer. She goes on to outline her theoretical frameworks. She places herself at the nexus of four interconnected theoretical traditions: poststructuralism, post-Marxism, feminism, and queer theory (p. 5). She then describes in more detail some of the theoretical underpinnings of her work. Judith Butler's Performativity Theory features prominently, as does Stuart Hall's “articulation.” A number of linguists and sociologists are also mentioned: Norman Fairclough, Deborah Cameron, Pierre Bourdieu, and Michel Foucault, among others. Thus, although Bury considers her work to be (broadly) within the field of cultural studies, there is much of interest for readers who identify more with other disciplines.

Elisabeth Le, The spiral ‘anti-Other rhetoric’: Discourses of identity and the international media echo. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2006. Pp. xii, 280. Hb $138.00.

Focusing on an analysis of editorials from The New York Times and Le Monde, as well as of those published in three Russian newspapers (Izvestija, Nezavisimaja Gazeta, and Segodnja) from 1999 to 2001, The spiral ‘anti-Other rhetoric’: Discourses of identity and the international media echo aims to explain how the phenomenon of international media echo (IME) functions. The book is based on an empirical study of interactions between French, American, and Russian media. As Le puts it at the very beginning, its aim is “a linguistic analysis in search of context theory in the domain of CDA, and a media / international relations inquiry in search of a linguistic method of analysis” (xi).

Richard Hogg and David Denison (eds.), A history of the English language. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. xiii, 494. Hb $140.

As languages change and show more flexibility, the need to update histories of languages such as English continues, as the editors of this book, Richard Hogg and David Denison, explain. The editors divide the book into two major parts distributed over nine chapters. One part deals with the fundamental aspects of the internal and structural history of English, and the other with the functions and varieties of the language.

Michael A. K. Halliday, On grammar. London: Continuum, 2002. Pp. x, 442. Hb $49.95.

This is the first volume in a series entitled The collected works of M. A. K. Halliday. Halliday professes to be a “generalist” (p. 7), and this is clearly reflected in the range of titles in the series: The language of early childhood, Computational and quantitative studies, and Language and society, to name just three of the ten. Halliday's introduction in this volume (1–14) serves as an introduction to the whole series. In it, Halliday revisits many of the debates he has had in the past: among others, with followers of Chomsky; with psychologists; with corpus linguists who claim that corpus linguistics is just a tool for analysis; with sociologists such as Pierre Bourdieu who, Halliday claims, sidesteps the need for any linguistic analysis at all. Halliday likes “weak boundaries” (1), and this is reflected in some of the papers reproduced in this volume. Although they are all centered on his evolving notions of “grammar,” anyone familiar with Halliday's work will know that “grammar” for Halliday is not restricted to a traditional or generative conception of syntax, but rather includes phonological, lexical, and other linguistic levels. For anyone not very familiar with Halliday's work, On grammar should not be confused with an overview of Systemic Functional Linguistics. Rather, it is a collection of snapshots, allowing readers to trace the scholarly development of Halliday's ideas over time.

Publications received (through 1 September 2007).

Durk Gorter (ed.), Linguistic landscape: A new approach to multilingualism. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2006. Pp. 1, 89. Hb $54.95.

The four articles in this book adopt the definition of linguistic landscape (LL) offered by Rodrigue Landry & Richard Y. Bourhis (1997:25) as their authors investigate the visual makeup of cities worldwide: “The language of public road signs, advertising billboards, street names, place names, commercial shop signs, and public signs on government buildings combines to form the linguistic landscape of a given territory, region, or urban conglomeration.” The authors categorize signs as either top-down (official signs issued by public bureaucracies) or bottom-up (non-official signs posted by individuals or businesses), and each article examines details such as where the signs appear, the order and relative prominence of languages on multilingual signs, and whether or not multilingual signs contain (full or partial) translations.

Bronwen Martin and Felizitas Ringham, Key terms in semiotics. London & New York: Continuum, 2006. Pp. 288. Pb $19.95.

In Key terms in semiotics, Martin & Ringham more than deliver on their title's promise, situating a well-chosen glossary of key terms and concepts between a brief introduction to semiotic theory and its history, and 12 short essays on key thinkers in, or important to, semiotics. The book also includes a bibliography of key texts in semiotics, along with an example of semiotic analysis.

Editorial work on a volume of this journal typically starts a little over a year before the volume begins to appear with the February issue. Volume 36, which appeared in 2007, was assembled under the guidance of the Editorial Board that was in place in 2006. Thus this is the time to thank the members of the Editorial Board whose terms expired at the end of 2006 and those whose appointments began at the beginning of 2007, when work on the current volume began. Departing are Yolanda Lastra, Anita Pomerantz, Carol Myers-Scotton, Jef Verscheuren, and Don Zimmerman. All served Language in Society for many years, and their many contributions are gratefully acknowledged. New Editorial Board members beginning in January 2007 were Asif Agha (Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania), Geoffrey Raymond (Department of Sociology, University of California at Santa Barbara), Otto Santa Ana (Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies, University of California at Los Angeles), and Jack Sidnell (Department of Anthropology, University of Toronto). All four have already contributed detailed, useful manuscript reviews and advice. Welcome to all!

Helen Sauntson & Sakis Kyratzis (eds.), Language, sexualities and desires: Cross-cultural perspectives. Hampshire & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Pp. xii, 248. Hb $80.00.

This collection of new research, mostly by scholars from the United Kingdom, intervenes in the study of language and sexuality in two important ways. First, as editors Sauntson & Kyratzis note in their introduction, recent work in this field has often theorized gender performance and speech acts apart from their particular sociocultural contexts. The ten scholars in this volume use applied linguistics to study the culturally specific ways that sexuality and desire are constructed through discourse. The second important contribution of this volume is the distinction it makes between the fraught categories of identity and desire. By distinguishing sexual and social identities from enacted desires and practices, the contributors illustrate how “sexuality is linguistically construed as a form of social identity with little or no reference to desire or sexual activity,” and conversely, how desire is linguistically embedded in relations of power and agency not necessarily dependent on sexuality (p. 4).

Wilson McLeod (ed.), Revitalising Gaelic in Scotland. Edinburgh: Dunedin Academic Press, 2006. Pp. xiv, 256. Pb £19.95.

Part academic volume, part manifesto, this 16-chapter collection discusses how – not whether – to revitalize Gaelic in Scotland, from perspectives including law, economics, education, and anthropology. The introduction states that provisions for the use of Gaelic are increasing, in light of the fact that Gaelic is “an essential aspect of Scottish cultural distinctiveness … connected (directly or indirectly) to the movement for Scottish self-government” (p. vii). Seven chapters are in Gaelic – none too subtle a form of status planning – but each ends with an English summary for those whose Gaelic is not up to academic standard.

I am grateful for the support during the past year of the Department of English at Carnegie Mellon University. I am also very grateful to Editorial Assistant Jennifer Andrus, copyeditor Jane McGary, and Morrell Gillette and Pooja Jain at Cambridge University Press. I consult regularly with the journal's associate editors and members of the editorial board, and I value their thoughtful advice and willingness to help.