Optimality Theory (OT) has been a major force driving developments in formal linguistics during the past decade. Like parameter-setting accounts, OT seeks to describe the range within which languages can vary; but instead of fixing parameters, OT proposes that languages, and children learning languages, arrange a set of constraints in a hierarchical order of strength that determines specific linguistic characteristics. The constraints proposed by OT are constraints on the well-formedness of the output of a grammar, and they are of two types: (i) markedness constraints, which exert pressure toward unmarked types of structure such as CV syllables or voiceless final obstruents; and (ii) faithfulness constraints, which maintain lexical contrasts such as CV and CVC syllable types, or voicing distinctions in final obstruents. The two types of constraints are in conflict, so that no particular constraint can be satisfied without violating others. In OT, “satisfaction” and “violation” are not absolute but a matter of degree, because all constraints play a role in the grammar of each language, though in a different order of strength or priority within a dominance hierarchy.

The two volumes reviewed here thumb their noses at the 1866 ban by the Linguistic Society of Paris on publications concerning language origins – a ban imposed by those august guardians of public faith in linguistic science because of the disreputable, speculative, nonempirical character of language origins scholarship. Yet nose-thumbing has been on the rise in the past two decades, even alarmingly so. Why? Have we witnessed epochal new empirical or conceptual breakthroughs that would warrant the overturning of that sober 19th-century decision?

Written school advertising in Banaras, a North Indian city, creates correspondences between a language activity and central and peripheral places. In spoken discourse, complex relationships inhere between ways of describing languages as varieties and the sociological value that is said to exist in the fit between a language variety and its domain of use. Education is one such domain because the educational system itself is organized in popular discourse by medium, Hindi or English. In spoken discourse, Hindi- or English-medium schools can indicate central or peripheral dispositions. Advertising, however, includes a meaningful element unavailable to speakers in the flow of interaction – a distinction between lexical designation and its rendering in Devanagari or roman script. Therein lies its power to establish English as central and Hindi as peripheral.

Meant to be challenging, controversial, and even radical, McWhorter's (McW) latest work on creole genesis may well be the most revisionist book on contact languages to appear since Bickerton's Roots of Language (1981) and Thomason and Kaufman's Language contact, creolization, and genetic linguistics (1988). It will therefore be required reading for anyone interested in the ongoing exploration of the origins of plantation creoles and of contact languages in general.

Key terms in language and culture (hereafter Key terms) is an ambitious collection of 75 short essays on concepts central to linguistic anthropology and related fields. This book began as an informational session at the American Anthropological Association meetings in 1998 and was first published as a special issue of the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology (vol. 9, no. 1–2, 1999). Alessandro Duranti, Key terms' chief editor and architect, is an experienced navigator in the varied terrain of language and culture research; he is also the author of Linguistic anthropology, a comprehensive textbook that covers the discipline's major theoretical and methodological contributions. In Key terms, Duranti appeals to the expertise of 74 other scholars working on questions central to language and culture research. The result is a powerful and eclectic volume that brings together core concepts from anthropology, linguistics, folklore, philosophy, sociology, and psychology, among other fields.

In this clearly wrought translation from Italian, the philosopher Patrizia Violi analyzes and criticizes in exacting detail the development of lexical semantics from the classical models through structuralism, prototype theory, and frame semantics, to end at the threshold of cognitive semantics (cf. Violi 1997). Her critique expounds on both well-known and little-known concepts, but she does not innovate theory. Her account could be useful as a handbook to anyone who teaches lexical semantics or who wishes to match his or her overview of this field with that of an accomplished academic who has given it vast thought; the work is too advanced for most students. The reader likely will disagree with some of Violi's explications, all of which, nevertheless, are sufficiently informed to force clarification of any contrary position. The book rivals the main synopses published in English (Durbin & Radden 1987, Hjelmslev 1953, Johnson-Laird 1983, Taylor 1989), but it adds a semiotic facet derived mainly from works of Umberto Eco, Diego Marconi, and Algirdas J. Greimas. Of its references, 248 are in English, 24 in Italian, 24 in French, and 16 in other languages; all but two are generally available. Many of the 277 notes are immediately germane to the text, although others are dispensable distractions. The nine-page index is taxonomic but cryptic; for example, externalism appears under both Linguistics and Meaning, each appearance with different pages, but intension and extension are elusive; because the book is a review of concepts, this handicap is grave.

Following a long tradition in anthropology and linguistics, introductory textbooks typically claim that all languages are equal and have an equal potential for communication and thought. The theoretical model posed in this anthology, as articulated by contributor Angela Gilliam, similarly suggests that “all languages are equal in terms of their expressive potential” (p. 84). However, editor Arthur K. Spears and the contributors aim to situate linguistic relativity within a framework of political, social, economic, and (most centrally) racial inequalities. The key theme of the collection is the centrality of politics, particularly what Spears terms “racial hierarchies of oppression” (13), in the study of language and linguistic diversity. As the contributors provide detailed historical, economic, and social frameworks for their studies, they demonstrate a claim made by Dell Hymes more than two decades ago that linguistic relativity “omits the costs and the constitutive role of social factors” (1973: 64). Thus, this edited volume challenges the tradition of claiming linguistic equality and demonstrates sociolinguistic inequality; it is part of a theoretical movement in this direction also exemplified by Zentella 1995, Hymes 1996, Schieffelin, Woolard & Kroskrity 1998, and Kroskrity 2000.

Written school advertising in Banaras, a North Indian city, creates correspondences between a language activity and central and peripheral places. In spoken discourse, complex relationships inhere between ways of describing languages as varieties and the sociological value that is said to exist in the fit between a language variety and its domain of use. Education is one such domain because the educational system itself is organized in popular discourse by medium, Hindi or English. In spoken discourse, Hindi- or English-medium schools can indicate central or peripheral dispositions. Advertising, however, includes a meaningful element unavailable to speakers in the flow of interaction – a distinction between lexical designation and its rendering in Devanagari or roman script. Therein lies its power to establish English as central and Hindi as peripheral.

Optimality Theory (OT) has been a major force driving developments in formal linguistics during the past decade. Like parameter-setting accounts, OT seeks to describe the range within which languages can vary; but instead of fixing parameters, OT proposes that languages, and children learning languages, arrange a set of constraints in a hierarchical order of strength that determines specific linguistic characteristics. The constraints proposed by OT are constraints on the well-formedness of the output of a grammar, and they are of two types: (i) markedness constraints, which exert pressure toward unmarked types of structure such as CV syllables or voiceless final obstruents; and (ii) faithfulness constraints, which maintain lexical contrasts such as CV and CVC syllable types, or voicing distinctions in final obstruents. The two types of constraints are in conflict, so that no particular constraint can be satisfied without violating others. In OT, “satisfaction” and “violation” are not absolute but a matter of degree, because all constraints play a role in the grammar of each language, though in a different order of strength or priority within a dominance hierarchy.

In this highly ambitious book, Glynn attempts to provide a description of both how the brain works and how it has developed. Taking an interdisciplinary approach (he is a physiologist by training), he relies on insights from a wide number of disciplines, including psychology, neurology, anthropology, linguistics, artificial intelligence, psychiatry, physiology, and even philosophy. He is interested in providing answers to some perennial and interconnected questions that relate to the mind: “What kind of thing is mind? What is the relation between our minds and our bodies and, more specifically, what is the relation between what goes on in our minds, and what goes on in our brains? How did brains and minds originate? Can our brains be regarded as nothing more than exceedingly complicated machines? Can minds exist without brains” (p. 4). Although his arguments are rather technical, the book is intended for a nonscientist audience.

Most of us content ourselves with passing on our alphabetical literacy to others all the while extolling the virtues of both the alphabet and of literacy; but Roy Harris, Emeritus Professor of Linguistics of Oxford University, sets out to challenge our fundamental (mis)conceptions about writing. Rather than extol the virtues of the alphabet, he threatens to reveal the “tyranny of the alphabet.” Arguing about literacy, he says, is likely to be unproductive until writing itself is better understood.

Lynn Messing and Ruth Campbell's Gesture, speech and sign provides an interesting overview of the fields of gesture and sign language research, including work by a number of the best-known names in the field. The strongest chapters have fascinating insights from psychology, neuropsychology, and Deaf studies on the interconnections between language and gesture. Paul Ekman catalogs different kinds of gestures found accompanying speech, including “emblems,” or socially learned gestures with consistent meaning like “the finger”; “illustrators,” like deictic pointing gestures; “manipulators,” which include scratching and fiddling with hair; “regulators,” the gestural equivalents of the “uh-huhs” and “mmms” of the attentive listener; and “emotional expressions” such as smiles and tears.

This book aims to explore discursive representations of childhood and how they contribute to create the social categories of ‘children’ and ‘childhood’. It uses a combination of approaches and methods that range from textual analysis, to elicitation of utterances, to data from natural interactions. Although the title suggests that the study covers general phenomena, it is based exclusively on British English. Some of the findings may resonate in the wider cultural area of the First World, and there may be parallels with more global notions of ‘children’; however, the subtitle should have made clear that the study is restricted to British English.

A major theme of this collection (which first appeared as an issue of Pragmatics, vol. 5, no. 2, 1995; the new publication includes revisions) is the concept of the public sphere, as this stems from early work by Habermas (1989 [1962]). However, the Habermasian notion of the public sphere as a category of bourgeois culture (denoting the site for the emergence of free rational discourse among individuals uncoerced by state-institutional structures) constitutes only one rubric of the thematic unity of the work under review. Contributors to the volume, in addition to being critical of Habermas's opus, continue an earlier concern in linguistic anthropology with a constructionist perspective on languages and publics, on the one hand, and the significance of reflexivity in the very practice of the field, on the other. In these two interrelated respects, the volume is an important contribution to our understanding of how concepts of languages are invented, constructed, and negotiated in historical, power-loaded contexts that also provide for a parallel construction of multiple public spheres.These spheres are partial and skewed, and, most of the time, they operate in such a way that mystifying ideological discourses take over the task of legitimating and institutionalizing inclusions and exclusions, while pretending to speak for all, or to present linguistic entities as natural products having little, if anything, to do with human agency and invested interests.

This study investigates the employment in modern Hebrew of an element having a lexical source involving comparison (k(e)-, ‘like’) that has proliferated over the past decade or so in Israel; ke′ilu ‘like’, lit. ‘as if’. The data come from audio recordings of casual conversations of college-educated Israelis with their friends and relatives, totaling approximately 78 minutes of talk among 72 speakers, transcribed in full and segmented into intonation units. A qualitative analysis of talk-in-interaction reveals four nonliteral functions of this expression: hedging, self-rephrasal, focus-marking, and quotation. A quantitative perspective on the distribution of these functions is presented, and these qualitative and quantitative analyses lead to an examination of the functional itinerary of this word in Hebrew discourse. A comparison with two “equivalents” of ke′ilu, English like and French genre leads to a discussion of functional parallelism across languages and yields further support for Hopper's principle of “persistence” in grammaticization. (Hebrew talk-in-interaction, grammaticization, cross-language pragmatics, discourse particles, hedging, self-rephrasal, focus-marking, quotatives.)* In memory of Suzanne Fleischman

The past decade has seen a remarkable resurgence of interest in the possible influences of language on “thought” – that is, relativism, the “Whorf Theory Complex” (cf. Lee 1996), or the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis (LRH). On the occasion of the Whorf centenary in 1997, a number of international conferences, workshops, and symposia were dedicated to the topic. This volume presents a collection of papers from the 26th International LAUD Symposium held at Gerhard Mercator University in Duisburg, Germany, April 1–5, 1998, under the title “Humboldt and Whorf Revisited: Universal and Culture-Specific Conceptualizations in Grammar and Lexis.

This study investigates the employment in modern Hebrew of an element having a lexical source involving comparison (k(e)-, ‘like’) that has proliferated over the past decade or so in Israel; ke′ilu ‘like’, lit. ‘as if’. The data come from audio recordings of casual conversations of college-educated Israelis with their friends and relatives, totaling approximately 78 minutes of talk among 72 speakers, transcribed in full and segmented into intonation units. A qualitative analysis of talk-in-interaction reveals four nonliteral functions of this expression: hedging, self-rephrasal, focus-marking, and quotation. A quantitative perspective on the distribution of these functions is presented, and these qualitative and quantitative analyses lead to an examination of the functional itinerary of this word in Hebrew discourse. A comparison with two “equivalents” of ke′ilu, English like and French genre leads to a discussion of functional parallelism across languages and yields further support for Hopper's principle of “persistence” in grammaticization. (Hebrew talk-in-interaction, grammaticization, cross-language pragmatics, discourse particles, hedging, self-rephrasal, focus-marking, quotatives.)* In memory of Suzanne Fleischman

The book under review is a special one in regard to both content and form. The rich content of Against essentialism (AE) includes philosophical, linguistic, and social claims as well as the interrelationships between them. The form of AE is a continuation of a respectable tradition of dialogical and argumentative writing from Plato to Feyerabend. However, the focus of Janicki's investigations is not Feyerabend and his iconoclastic principles – for example, “Anything goes,” or the critique of the scientific method that is, Feyerabend's contribution to postmodern thought – but rather Popper's (1945) rejection of Aristotelian essentialism (cf. Janicki 1990). The main goals of AE are clear: first, to show the errors and harmfulness of essentialist thinking, the unjustified belief in the importance and power of definitions (or defining concepts and terms in sciences), and the claim that words and their definitions adequately reflect physical, mental or social reality; and second, to propose language awareness as a remedy that can alleviate the problems produced by the uncritical acceptance of essentialist ideology and philosophy. The main object of Janicki's critique is the social-scientific insistence on providing definitions of all concepts, including those that in reality cannot be defined. The eight dialogues in AE deal with crucial aspects of language use and its consequences for human (mis)communication, interpersonal relations, and various other social phenomena.

Many authors write books and papers about deficits in second language teaching and competence, shining a spotlight on what teachers are doing “wrong” or what students are lacking. In this volume, Diane Belcher and Ulla Connor set out to provide a model that bypasses these negative perspectives and showcases success stories in second (or nth) language learning. The result is a compilation of auto-ethnographies from 18 adults with successful professional careers who were asked to provide their “L1/L2 literacy autobiograph(ies)” (p. 209).

Bilingual speech takes research on code-mixing a step further toward achieving a better understanding of the differences in what in the past has been referred to simply as the mixing of two languages in the sentence (or intrasentential code-switching). In addition, Muysken presents the state of the discipline of language contact in the year 2000 from the perspective of the grammar and structure of language contact phenomena. He brings together and analyzes an extensive set of language pairs from a wide variety of communities and social contexts. Good familiarity with such varied multilingual data provides the author with a strong base on which to support his three-way classification (insertion, alternation, and congruent lexicalization) of code-mixing phenomena at the sentence level.