Ohne Zweifel ist das vorliegende Buch die umfassendste Einführung in die Dialektologie des Deutschen bzw. in die Dialektologie allgemein, die derzeit auf dem deutschsprachigen Markt ist. Sie beschränkt sich nicht nur auf den Teilbereich der Dialektgeographie, sondern bezieht auch die Dialektsoziologie, Teile der historischen Dialektologie und sogar eine Übersicht über die verschiedenen deutschen Dialektland-schaften mit ein. Es stellt sich jedoch die Frage, ob die sicherlich begrenzte Seitenzahl, die durch die Publikation in der Niemeyer-Reihe “Germanistische Arbeitshefte” vorgegeben ist, überhaupt ausreicht, einen so komplexen Gegenstandsbereich auf einer Einführungsstufe zu vermitteln.

The book is divided into three major sections with some excursuses. The first section is on runic inscriptions as a source for early Norse, the second is on syllable division and i-umlaut in Germanic, and the third is on the earliest distinctions among Germanic languages.

Adverbs, their placement, and their licensing conditions have been the focus of a number of recent (language-specific and crosslinguistic) studies (e.g., Alexiadou 1997, Ernst 1998, Laenzlinger 1998, and Cinque 1999, among others). Pittner's book complements these studies by offering a detailed investigation of adverbials in German. The book is divided into six main chapters. In what follows I give a brief critical overview of the contents of the study, and I finish my discussion by addressing some general theoretical issues treated by Pittner.

This volume brings together a collection of twelve papers originating from a workshop entitled “Phonology and Morphology of the Germanic Languages,” which the editors organized at the Philipps-Universität Marburg, Germany, in August 1997. It is divided into three sections: phonology, prosodic morphology, and morphology. A variety of languages and topics are treated, ranging from Icelandic vowel length and Scandinavian accent to Old English, Dutch, and German nominal inflection. There is some treatment of earlier stages of languages and historical topics do come up, but the emphasis is decidedly synchronic. Almost all the papers adopt a constraint-based approach, and a number are developed within the framework of optimality theory (OT; Prince and Smolensky 1993). A brief overview of each of the papers follows.

Stefan Müller has written an extensive study of a large range of German constructions from the perspective of head-driven phrase structure grammar (HPSG). For a theoretical work, it is notable for its scale, for its extensive use of current material from corpora, and for its welcome attention to the descriptive literature. Furthermore, the analyses can be tested on Müller's prolog implementation of HPSG, which runs at http://www.dfki.de/~stefan/. This is a very extensive fragment of German, involving thousands of words of different classes, raising and control verbs, passives, verb particle constructions, the “third“ construction, modal flip (Oberfeldumstellung), several sorts of relative clauses, extraposition, complex fronting, semifree word order in the Mittelfeld, scope ambiguities, and more. It is unusual to find this all in a single implementation, and the work is unique in being made available on the web. Müller's web page also contains errata for this book and examples.

Magnús Snædal has chosen a modest and understated title for this significant work. The thought of a published concordance often brings to mind earlier times, a volume of reproduced computer printout with endless pages of KWIC (Key Word in Context) format, usually arranged without regard to proper lemmatization or disambiguation. But Snædal has not chosen the easy path. Instead he has used state-of-the-art technology and labored long and hard to make a valuable contribution to Germanic studies in general and Gothic scholarship in particular.

This book sets itself the ambitious aim of assessing the relative merits of two fundamentally different approaches to the analysis of discourse: “grammatical research” and “conversational analysis.” The latter, derived from the work of ethnomethodologists in the 1960s and 1970s (Garfinkel 1967), is concerned with the analysis of the principles involved in such phenomena as turn-taking in conversation (Sacks, Schlegloff, and Jefferson 1974); the former is not a specific theory nor a single approach, but appears to cover standard linguistic methods in the description of discourse, focusing on features of language itself and their role. The evaluation of the relative value of these approaches is potentially a rather wide-ranging enterprise; however, the book is in fact clearly focused, and is firmly grounded in the practical analysis of data, which gives its findings an authority that could not be achieved by more abstract and theoretical reasoning alone. These findings could certainly be seen as a vindication of the “grammatical” approach at the expense of the “conversational”; however, it is not a polemical demonstration of its superiority, but rather a balanced and sympathetic assessment. Using data from recorded conversations, the author examines three marginal linguistic features that might be said to have a conversational role, and concludes that this role can be seen as linguistic, as opposed to purely conversational. Since linguistic structure itself can thus be demonstrated to have interactive relevance, the author concludes that, in effect, at least some of the claims made for conversational analysis are to be rejected. Whether an issue of this general and ultimately theoretical kind can really be decided in this practical way may be open to question, as it seems to depend more on the overall approach to the phenomenon than on the analysis of data, but there can be no doubt that the detailed analysis of specific features of conversation from this perspective makes the book a valuable contribution to the study of the linguistics of conversation, regardless of how we evaluate its theoretical conclusions.