A review of A. Suresh Canagarajah, A geopolitics of academic writing. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2002. Pp. x, 332. Pb. $27.95.

R. M. W. Dixon, Australian Languages: Their nature and development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xlii, 734. Hb $95.00.

Australian languages is a typological approach to the description and historical study of the Aboriginal languages of Australia. Together with its planned companion volume, Australian languages: A complete catalogue, a collection of sketches of some 250 languages, it is intended to present non-Australianist scholars with comprehensive information about Aboriginal languages and to offer specialists a summary and an agenda for future research. There are 14 chapters: “The language situation in Australia,” “Modelling the language situation,” “Overview,” “Vocabulary,” “Case and other nominal suffixes,” “Verbs,” “Pronouns,” “Bound pronouns,” “Prefixing and fusion,” “Generic nouns, classifiers, genders and noun classes,” “Ergative/accusative morphological and syntactic profiles,” “Phonology,” “Genetic subgroups and small linguistic areas,” and “Summary and conclusion.”

Deborah Cameron & Don Kulick, Language and sexuality. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xvi, 176. Pb $21.00.

Paul McIlvenny (ed.), Talking gender and sexuality. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2002. Pp. x, 332. Hb $106.00.

Two recent books, Language and sexuality, by Deborah Cameron and Don Kulick, and Talking gender and sexuality (TGS), edited by Paul McIlvenny, seek to elucidate the social construction of gender and sexuality by combining the methods of interactive discourse analysis with the theoretical insights of poststructuralism, feminism, and queer theory. Guided by the basic ethnomethodological question “How are gender and sexuality ‘done’?”, the authors of both volumes are motivated, at least implicitly, by a political commitment to deconstructing and opposing sexism and heteronormativity (the ideologically enforced assumption that all people are or should be straight). In one way or another, therefore, both books also ask, paraphrasing McIlvenny, “By what linguistic-interactional means might normative gender and sexual identities be ‘undone’?” Although McIlvenny's coauthors all share his theoretical concerns at a general level, the chapters in TGS focus primarily on the means whereby gender and sexual categories are positively instantiated and indexed in talk; only a few explicitly engage how these modes of categorization might be resisted or transformed. Cameron & Kulick take their theorizing one step further, questioning the analytical and political utility of the concept of sexual identity itself.

Philip Herbst, Talking terrorism: A dictionary of the loaded language of political violence. Westport, CT & London: Greenwood, 2003. Pp. xvii, 220. Hb $49.95.

Talking terrorism (TT) is not the kind of book typically reviewed in this journal. It is not explicitly about the analysis of language; rather, it is an illustration of the way language can persuade, manipulate, and corrupt. Nor is it written in the expository form expected of scholarly discourse, but instead emulates the form (if not the function) of a dictionary: an alphabetized series of entries, many followed by cross-references.

Peter Garrett, Nikolas Coupland & Angie Williams, Investigating language attitudes: Social meanings of dialect, ethnicity and performance. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003. x + 251 pp. Hb $79.95.

As its title suggests, this book focuses on attitudes to language and dialect production, perception, and use, and particularly on attitudes to language variation, dialect, speech style, language preference, and minority languages as well as their speakers. As we know, an important aspect of the complex social psychology of speech communities is the arbitrary and subjective intellectual and emotional response of a society's members to the languages and varieties in their social environment: Different language varieties are often associated with deep-rooted emotional responses – social attitudes, in short – such as thoughts, feelings, stereotypes, and prejudices about people, about social, ethnic and religious groups, and about political entities. These emotional responses and perceptions of language and dialect phenomena are biased by cultural, social, political, economic, or historical facts or other circumstances within the speech community. Sociolinguistically based research may build a more complete and accurate picture of the speaker's linguistic behavior, in the context of its complex social psychology, as well as of the regard for language use within the community, and may further understanding of the dynamics of speech communities as well as of the subjective life of language varieties.

Douglas Maynard, Bad news, good news: Conversational order in everyday talk and clinical settings. University of Chicago Press. 2003, x + pp. 327. Pb. $25.00.

Maynard's book seeks to make substantive and methodological contributions: the first to describe the social organization of bad news/good news pronouncements, and the second to address and bridge longstanding methodological schisms between ethnography, conversation analysis (CA), and mainline sociology. Of the eight chapters, three (2, 4, and 7) were previously published and have been modified for the book.

A panel at the 1998 International Pragmatics Conference in Reims provided the impetus for the book Telephone calls: Unity and diversity in conversational structure across languages and cultures, edited by Kang Kwong Luke and Theodossia-Soula Pavlidou. Six of its chapters were first presented at that panel. The book covers several languages, including Cantonese, Danish, English, German, Greek, Japanese, Korean, and Persian.

Dedaić, Mirjana N. & Daniel N. Nelson (eds.), At war with words. New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003. Pp. 479, Hb. $94.00.

Silberstein, Sandra, War of words: Language, politics and 9/11. New York: Routledge, 2002. Pp. 224, Hb. $69.95, pb. $16.95.

Daniel Nelson writes that “we talk our way into war and talk our way out of it” (Dedaić & Nelson [henceforth DN], p. 449). Drawing on a diverse array of methodological and theoretical perspectives and an equally wide range of subject matters, Mirjana Dedaić and Daniel Nelson's edited volume on the role of language in war, and the effects of war on language, is a sprawling, perhaps unwieldy collection that opens up a number of important avenues of investigation in this gravely important but as yet undefined field of study. Sandra Silberstein focuses her book much more narrowly on the language of politics and news media in the wake of the September 11 tragedy. Despite their differences, both books address similar themes: (i) declaring war, or the language used by political leaders to justify military action; (ii) propaganda, or the construction of a war narrative by the media, and the use of political discourse to divide populations; (iii) language politics, or how wars shape language policy; and (iv) controlling speech, or the language used to grant or deny legitimacy in political debates. With the exception of language politics, not touched on by Silberstein, these themes are addressed equally by both books.

Elinor Ochs & Lisa Capps, Living narrative: Creating lives in everyday storytelling. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001. Pp. xii, 352. Pb. $20.50.

Imagine a book on conversational narrative that draws from the fields of linguistics, psychology, literary theory, and anthropology. Now, imagine this book as compelling as a favorite novel and as convincing as a well-designed research report. The nexus of these fields and the artful marriage of these vastly varying genres can be found in the profoundly interdisciplinary and genuinely collaborative book Living narrative. In this volume, Elinor Ochs, a linguistic anthropologist, and Lisa Capps, a developmental psychologist, speak both to those who come to narrative with literary concerns, and to those discourse-analytic minded social scientists who understand spoken, personal narrative as a means to link linguistic phenomena to development of culture and society. Through the course of the book, the authors illustrate how these literary and social concerns need not be dichotomous. Living narrative instills a simultaneous appreciation for the aesthetic and the political aspects of everyday conversational narrative.

This book is the second volume of the Handbook of perceptual dialectology. Expanding on the coverage of both regions and methodologies, its aim is to underline the importance of considering folk (i.e., non-linguists') conceptions and perceptions of and responses to dialect phenomena in general, and to language differences in particular. Perceptual dialectology, or even “folk dialectology,” is nowadays understood – thanks to the work pioneered by Dennis Preston over the past two decades – as a multidisciplinary macro-linguistic and micro-sociolinguistic approach within the field of folk linguistics, an enterprise that, in general, gives added prominence to both linguistic structure and details of dialect production and perception differences and attitudes, complementing the more global approach of the social psychology of language. As we know, an important aspect of the complex social psychology of speech communities is the arbitrary and subjective intellectual and emotional response of the members of a society to the languages and varieties in their social environment: Different language varieties are often associated with deep-rooted emotional responses – in short, with social attitudes, such as thoughts, feelings, stereotypes, and prejudices about people, about social, ethnic and religious groups, and about political entities. These non-linguists' emotional responses and perceptions of dialects and dialect divisions may, paradoxically, not coincide with those proposed by linguists, since cultural, social, political, economic, or historical facts or other circumstances within the speech community may lead to the belief that there is a linguistic boundary or a sociolinguistic barrier where in reality there is none, or vice versa. Crucially important, then – as Preston's work has emphasized – is the comparison of scientific and folk characterizations of sociolectal and/or geolectal varieties and areas. Such an approach builds a more complete and accurate picture of the speaker's linguistic behavior, in the context of its complex social psychology, as well as of the regard for language use and variety within the community, in our sociolinguistically based search for an understanding of the dynamics of speech communities.

agency, bricolage, deconstructionism, demystification, demythologization, difference, discursively constructed subject positions, duality of structure, essentialism, anti-essentialism, hybridity, ideology, intertextuality

What do these terms from the discipline of cultural studies mean? Do they have any relevance to the study of language and identity? If these are questions you have found yourself pondering, then Cultural studies and discourse analysis (CSDA) is a book you should read. This work is a productive collaboration between a cultural studies scholar (Barker) and a critical discourse analyst (Galasinski) who hope to “forge a useful interdisciplinary dialogue” (1). Although their book is written with the specific aim of showing cultural studies (CS) scholars how critical discourse analysis (CDA) can be used as an analytical tool in investigating identities, for sociolinguists it is also a good introduction to the way identity is theorized in CS. The identities analyzed in the data-based chapters are masculinity (chap. 4), ethnicity and nationality (chap. 5), and masculinity together with ethnicity (chap. 6).

Jean Aitchison & Diana M. Lewis (eds.), New media language. London & New York: Routledge, 2003. Pp. x, 209. Pb $25.95.

In recent decades, say Jean Aitchison and Diana M. Lewis in their introduction to this volume, the media have seen an unprecedented amount of change. New media modes have appeared; newspapers and radio have been joined by television and the Internet. The speed of transmission has increased, and many more readers/viewers participate both actively and passively in the ongoing process that is the dissemination and consumption of news.

Yet while a flood of publications has attempted to analyze the changing nature of the media – exploring underlying aims and attitudes, or examining ways in which the media might be misleading its readers/viewers – relatively few, Aitchison & Lewis say, have investigated the language of the media in any depth.

Eve V. Clark, First language acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xvi, 515. Hb $90.

Eve Clark's comprehensive book makes an important addition to those works already available on first language acquisition. A commendable feature is the inclusion of many non-English examples, although most are from English. In the field of language acquisition there has been an emphasis on cross-language comparisons over the past few years, as shown by the number of journal articles and chapters published, but there has not been a comprehensive single-authored book which has attempted to incorporate the recent cross-language findings. Clark's work goes a long way to filling this gap.

Mary Talbot, Karen Atkinson & David Atkinson, Language and power in the modern world. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003. Pp. ix, 342. Pb £16.99.

Centered on critical language study, Language and power in the modern world aims to “reveal and challenge aspects of the intense socialization to which we are all subjected, not only through language but also about language” (p. 4). The authors begin with a relatively brief introduction to the concept of power, leaning heavily on Foucault as interpreted by, especially, Norman Fairclough. The introduction, while focused on power, delves into Critical Discourse Analysis and the critical (socio)linguistics literatures to situate a quick overview of the book, which is organized around five chapters: “Language and the media,” “Language and organisations,” “Language and gender,” “Language and youth,” and “Multilingualism, ethnicity and identity.” In each chapter, the authors present an initial review essay of 11 to 20 pages, followed by an “activities” section, which typically presents two or three suggested tasks for students. The bulk of each chapter, however, is the set of four or five (edited) readings of primary sources relevant to the chapter's topic. The readings, regularly addressed in the earlier chapters as “Reading 1.2” or “Reading 2.3,” often with no title or author noted, are the best part of this book. The reading selections are quite recent, with only one title published before 1995, allowing the reader to catch up on some outstanding primary research that takes the five topic areas well beyond the classic studies of the 1970s and 1980s. The authors' choice of readings is well considered and fulfills their goal not to “promote one approach over another, [but] rather to illustrate a variety of approaches to the study of language and power” (4).

Discourse constructions of youth identities is an eclectic collection of 12 papers which examine the language of youth in England, Greece, Turkey, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and Japan. The authors use various methodologies, including narrative analysis, conversational analysis, sociolinguistics, and Critical Discourse Analysis, to look at the language practices of youth ranging in age from nine years to the early twenties. In addition to studies of spontaneous peer group interaction in schools and youth centers, the volume also includes work on various kinds of expressive culture, focus group interactions, and interviews.

Christina Bratt Paulston & G. Richard Tucker (eds.), Sociolinguistics: The essential readings. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003. Pp xviii, 502.

Sociolinguistics, broadly defined as “the study of language in its social contexts and the study of social life through linguistics” (Coupland & Jaworski 1997:1), turns out to be a very lively and popular field of study. Evidence for its popularity is that introductory textbooks and collections of original readings keep appearing on the desks of sociolinguistics students. Among the former we have, for instance, Holmes 1992, Mesthrie et al. 2000, Romaine 2000, and Wardhaugh 2002. Among the latter, we have Coupland & Jaworski 1997 at least. The introductory textbooks, which can serve as a second-hand synopsis of classic seminal work in the field, often cannot satisfy curious students, who feel it compulsory to do first-hand reading of the original works of influential authors.

Myra Macdonald, Exploring media discourse. London: Arnold, 2003. Pp. vi, 213. Pb $24.95.

This book makes for fascinating but challenging reading. It is fascinating in that it covers wide-ranging and controversial topics such as racism; politicians, and their private and public spheres; and risks, covering those associated with children, food, Islam, and September 11.

Kate Beeching's stated purpose is to investigate to what degree men and women differ in the way they render utterances more polite in contemporary spoken French, by means of an in-depth study of the functions and the distributional frequency of four pragmatic particles: c'est-à-dire, enfin, hein, and quoi. The analysis is anchored within Robin Lakoff's theory of politeness as described in Language and woman's place. On balance, and even though the author herself emphasizes the limitations of her corpus and framework, Beeching should be given credit for having put together a much-needed pragmatic study on gender and the French language.

Deuchar & Quay's Bilingual acquisition addresses theoretical issues both of language acquisition in general and of specifically bilingual acquisition through an examination of a case study involving one child's acquisition of English and Spanish in England. Regarding the first issue, the authors attempt to answer questions of phonological differentiation based on acoustic evidence, lexical differentiation in relation to the idea that children avoid lexical synonymy in early stages of language acquisition, and lexical categorization of two-word utterances and the emergence of language choices. Regarding the second issue, they are concerned with the question of whether children possess one or two language systems, and they explore the criteria involved in making such a distinction. Finally, they investigate the factors of the language situation that influence a child's language choice.

Jacques Maurais and Michael A. Morris (eds.), Languages in a globalising world. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xiv, 345. Hb. $75.00.

This is an ambitious volume keyed to some of the most acute concerns of our time in regard to the linguistic condition of the world of late modernity. This collective effort is structured in such a manner as to offer the widest possible coverage of languages, broad geographical areas, and politico-economic blocks. It consists of 21 chapters, including the Introduction and Conclusion. Figures and tables provide useful supplements to the analytical parts of several chapters. It is unfortunate that the bulk and density of this work does not allow for a chapter-by-chapter review here.