Michael Clyne, Dynamics of language contact: English and immigrant languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2003 Pp. xv, 282. Hb $65.00, pb $24.00.

Ever since Thomason & Kaufman 1988 reawakened linguists to the role of external contacts in language change, and the origin and development of creoles became a major research topic (largely after Bickerton 1981), the field of contact linguistics has burgeoned. Sociolinguists have always been interested in the social side of language contact, but today the grammatical side of contact also is attracting researchers. Books published just since 2000 give some idea of the research activity. Three monographs exemplify the wide interest in grammatical aspects of codeswitching: Hlavac 2003 deals with codeswitching among second-generation Croatian speakers in Australia; and Kovács 2001 treats Australian Finnish and Hungarian in contact with English; and Canut & Caubet 2001 is a collection of articles on codeswitching involving French in various francophonie communities.

Discourse analysts come from a variety of intellectual traditions (systemic-functional linguistics, American descriptive linguistics, ethnomethodology, and critical theory among them) and work in a variety of ways. As a result, there is recurring discussion among practitioners about the boundaries that constitute discourse analysis as a field/theory/method in relation to other fields/theories/methods. The following reviews all take up this discussion in treatments of discourse analysis in recent textbooks and other programmatic work. Readers should note that this collection is the result of happy editorial coincidence – Ruth Wodak proposed a review article that came to press about the same time as other book reviews fitting this theme arrived at LiS. It is not the result of a systematic attempt to cover the field, which would require the kind of intellectual boundary-work these reviews report on and represent.

Barbara Johnstone, Editor

Miriam A. Locher, Power and politeness in action: Disagreements in oral communication. Language, Power and Social Process, 12. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2004. Pp. xvi, 365. Pb.

This is a study of the interface between power and politeness as manifested in verbal disagreements. It begins with a number of chapters devoted to a discussion of the key concepts that define the author's theoretical conceptualization of social interaction. These concepts are power, communication, relational work, and politeness. The author then applies the model to four (transcribed) interactions. The first, and most extensively analyzed, is a dinner conversation among friends and acquaintances. The second is an organizational meeting in a physics laboratory. The final two come from official transcripts of a radio interview of President Clinton and Supreme Court proceedings relating to the vote count in the U.S presidential elections of 2000. Common to them all, in the author's view, are instances of disagreement.

John Kirk & Dónall Ó Baoill (eds.), Language and politics: Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, and Scotland (No. 1 in the series Belfast Studies in Language, Culture and Politics). Béal Feirste: Cló Ollscoil na Banríona, 2000. Pp. xxii + 147. Pb £9.50

John Kirk & Dónall Ó Baoill (eds.), Language links: The languages of Scotland and Ireland (Belfast Studies in Language, Culture and Politics, no. 2). Béal Feirste: Cló Ollscoil na Banríona, 2001. Pp. xx + 289. Pb £13.50

John Kirk & Dónall Ó Baoill (eds.), Linguistic politics: Language policies for Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, and Scotland (Belfast Studies in Language, Culture and Politics, no. 3). Béal Feirste: Cló Ollscoil na Banríona, 2001. Pp. xvi + 258. Pb £13.50

John Kirk & Dónall Ó Baoill (eds.), Travellers and their language (Belfast Studies in Language, Culture and Politics, no. 4). Béal Feirste: Cló Ollscoil na Banríona, 2002. Pp. x + 196. Pb £19.50

Simone Zwickl, Language attitudes, ethnic identity and dialect use across the Northern Ireland border: Armagh and Monaghan (Belfast Studies in Language, Culture and Politics, no. 5). Béal Feirste: Cló Ollscoil na Banríona, 2002. Pp. xx + 281. Pb £29.95

John Kirk & Dónall Ó Baoill (eds.), Language planning and education: Linguistic issues in Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, and Scotland (Belfast Studies in Language, Culture and Politics, no. 6). Béal Feirste: Cló Ollscoil na Banríona, 2002. Pp. xiv + 326. Pb £19.50

Edna Longley, Eamonn Hughes & Des O'Rawe (eds.), Ireland (Ulster) Scotland: Concepts, contexts, comparisons (Belfast Studies in Language, Culture and Politics, no. 7). Béal Feirste: Cló Ollscoil na Banríona, 2003. Pp. xvi + 254. Pb £19.50

Maolcholaim Scott & Róise Ní Bhaoill (eds.), Gaelic-medium education provision: Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man (Belfast Studies in Language, Culture and Politics, no. 8). Béal Feirste: Cló Ollscoil na Banríona, 2003. Pp. viii + 144. Pb £12.50

Dónall Ó riagáin (ed.), Language and law in Northern Ireland (Belfast Studies in Language, Culture and Politics, no. 9). Béal Feirste: Cló Ollscoil na Banríona, 2003. Pp. xii + 175. Pb £12.50

John Kirk & Dónall Ó Baoill (eds.), Towards our goals in broadcasting, the press, the performing arts and the economy: Minority languages in Northern Ireland, the Republic of Ireland, and Scotland (Belfast Studies in Language, Culture and Politics, no. 10). Béal Feirste: Cló Ollscoil na Banríona, 2003. Pp. xxii + 308. Pb £19.50

J. Derrick McClure (ed.), Doonsin' emerauds: New scrieves anent Scots an Gaelic/New studies in Scots and Gaelic (Belfast Studies in Language, Culture and Politics, no. 11). Béal Feirste: Cló Ollscoil na Banríona, 2004. Pp. x + 114. Pb £12.50

Neal Alexander, Shane Murphy & Anne Oakman (eds.), To the other shore: Cross-currents in Irish and Scottish studies (Belfast Studies in Language, Culture and Politics, no. 12). Béal Feirste: Cló Ollscoil na Banríona, 2004. Pp. x + 166. Pb £12.50

Stephen C. Levinson, Space in language and cognition: Explorations in cognitive diversity. Series in Language, Culture and Cognition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xxiii, 389. Pb $27.99.

This is an important book that makes basic arguments of real consequence for current understanding of the relation among language, gesture, and mind. Convincing new experimental and field data from a wide range of languages are used to argue that human spatial cognition is organized into a limited set of types, that cross-linguistic variation in spatial categorization is far more extensive than previously known, and that language structure has a profound, if mediated, influence on thought, gesture, and other modalities of nonlinguistic cognition. Levinson carefully separates linguistic from cognitive analyses in order to trace the relations between them. His book is also an exercise in comparative linguistics, and a strong proposal for a typology of linguistic systems of spatial representation. The scope and strength of the arguments ensure the significance of the book and the debates it has already begun to provoke (see Gallistel 2002, Levinson et al. 2002, Li & Gleitman 2002, Majid 2002).

Ruth Wodak & Paul Chilton (eds.), A new agenda in (critical) discourse analysis: Theory, methodology and interdisciplinarity. Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society, and Culture, 13. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2005. Pp. xi, 322. Hb $138.00.

The title of this book implicitly raises a number of important questions about the relationships among discourse analysis (DA), critical discourse analysis (CDA), and interdisciplinarity: Is CDA one approach to analyzing text and talk, or is it (by implication of the ambiguous parenthetical reference in the book's title) somehow merging with (an increasingly more critical) DA? To what extent does or should (C)DA embrace interdisciplinary approaches to treating language in use? Finally (and perhaps most compelling of all), what is this new agenda, what is wrong with the old agenda, and why is a new agenda needed at this time? Overall, the book does a fair to good job of addressing these questions.

In his review of Power and politeness in action: Disagreements in oral communication (2004), Douglas J. Glick raises two important points: (i) the issue of identifying politeness in language, and (ii) the ideological framework employed in language analysis. Before explicating my understanding of politeness, I need to clarify that in chap. 5 on disagreements, as Glick has noted, I do indeed focus on linguistic strategies to express different points of view without discussing politeness. For example, I deliberately refrain from labeling strategies such as boosting or hedging as more or less polite. In other words, I do not wish to imply that I have already witnessed manifestations of politeness by simply identifying hedged utterances (or indirectness), nor that I have witnessed impoliteness by identifying unmitigated linguistic strategies (or directness). In this way, my approach to politeness differs significantly from the more classical view, initiated by Brown & Levinson 1987 and followed by many others, which equates mitigation with politeness and directness with impoliteness. Conversely, in my understanding, I use “mitigation” as a purely technical term, and I make no claim that any given linguistic form is inherently polite or impolite.

John M. Kirk & Dónall P. Ó Baoill (eds.), Travellers and their language (Belfast Studies in Language, Culture and Politics, no. 4). Béal Feirste: Cló Ollscoil na Banríona [Belfast: Queen's University], 2002. Pp. 196. Pb £19.50.

The language of the Travellers in Ireland is in many respects shrouded in mystery, and its study filled with dilemmas and contradictions. It is a secret language, but quite a bit is available in print about it. Some speakers consider the mere existence of the language as secret, and they would deny having a language of their own. Whereas secret languages are mostly used to convey messages to other group members in the presence of outsiders, some of these Travellers would not use it in the presence of outsiders at all. Yet however secret it may be, or may have been, language researchers are welcomed today as the speakers see the use of the language declining. The present book is the result of cooperation between academics and Travellers. Six contributors are Travellers and eight chapters are written by academics, with no overlap.

John Holm, Languages in contact: The partial restructuring of vernaculars. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xx, 175. Hb $75.00.

The title of this book immediately puts the reader in mind of Weinreich's (1953) classic of the same name, a volume which (a little surprisingly) is not mentioned in the book under review. Though this similarity of title is misleading, both books are notable for their combination of first-hand observation based on solid descriptive work and their impressively well informed accounts of further case studies which illuminate the phenomena their respective authors discuss. It will be understood by any reader who goes beyond the front cover, however, that Holm's focus in this book is more specialized than the title may suggest.

Rick Iedema, Discourses of post-bureaucratic organization. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2003. Pp. ix, 234. Hb $82.00.

Discourses of post-bureaucratic organization represents an ambitious effort by Rick Iedema to synthesize the fields of discourse studies and organization studies. Not since Deirdre Boden's The business of talk (1994) has this feat been attempted in such depth by a scholar whose starting point is linguistics (as opposed to management theory). Of course, each of the two fields being synthesized includes a large number of diverse perspectives. Iedema develops his theoretical paradigm primarily by highlighting and intertwining the strands of social semiotics and conceptualizations of the “post-bureaucratic organization.” He weaves these together with the aid of Foucauldian notions of discourse and governmentality. In this review, I will first summarize Iedema's argument and then offer an assessment of its strengths and limitations. My description of the book will go into some detail as a service to potential readers, because, in fact, this volume is not easy to read.

Aneta Pavlenko & Adrian Blackledge (eds.), Negotiation of identities in multilingual contexts. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2004. Pp. 312. Hb $44.95.

This is one of the best books I have read this year. The topic is up to date and relevant for many contexts. Each author contributes to the originality of this edited book. The editors, Pavlenko & Blackledge, have done a wonderful job in putting together a series of texts that demonstrate how negotiation of identities is embedded within larger socioeconomic, sociohistoric and sociopolitical contexts. In order to situate their own framework, the editors start by examining different approaches to the negotiation of identities in multilingual contexts. The sociopsychological approach examines the negotiation of identities in second language learning and language use. However, this approach treats learning trajectories as linear and unidirectional, with little acknowledgment of the fact that learning language and identity building are more complex. Interactional sociolinguistics focuses on the negotiation of identities via code-switching and language choice. This approach sees social identities as more fluid and constructed through linguistic and social interaction. However, even though much sociolinguistic research examines the negotiation of languages choices and identities in multilingual contexts, Pavlenko & Blackledge claim that few have tried to theorize it. In this book, they propose a poststructuralist and critical theory approach to negotiation of identities. Based on the work of Gal 1989, Heller 1988, 1992, 1995a, 1995b, and Woolard 1985, 1989, 1998, the editors argue that language choice in multilingual contexts is embedded in larger social, political, economic, and cultural systems. Their interest is in how languages are used to legitimize, challenge and negotiate specific identities, and to open new identity options for groups and individuals who are subjugated. Their framework combines aspects of the social constructionist approach, which focuses on discursive construction of identities, and the poststructuralist emphasis on power relations. The editors explain in detail what they mean by identities embedded within power relations with the work of Bourdieu. They also focus on identity narratives that reconstruct the links among past, present, and future, and they impose coherence where it was missing.

R. A. Lodge, A sociolinguistic history of Parisian French. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xi, 290. Hb $70.

Detailed longitudinal studies of urban sociolinguistic change are few and far between. They are intrinsically difficult and of vast scope and pose severe theoretical and methodological problems concerning the availability and reliability of data. Lodge's survey of how the speech of Paris “has evolved hand in hand with demographic and socio-economic change” (p. 250), over some 800 years, is a largely convincing attempt to overcome these problems.

Gabrielle Hogan-Brun and Stefan Wolff (eds.), Minority languages in Europe: Frameworks, status, prospects. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. Pp. xiii, 238. Hb $69.95.

This volume continues and extends an interest in the dynamics of minority languages in Europe which has already appeared in related works in which some of this volume's participants have been contributors or editors. The major theoretical framework that unifies and offers coherence to the contributions is that of a macro-sociological, macro-sociolinguistic perspective with links to political theory, and detailed discussions of policy in the context of European power structures. Against this emphasis, micro-interactional processes and linguistic ideologies emerging from within the local communities are not afforded the same degree of attention, even though they are not entirely absent from some at least of the volume's chapters.

Shi-Xu, A cultural approach to discourse. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Pp. x, 233. Hb $69.95.

This book presents Shi-xu's theoretical and methodological framework for discourse analysis, which he terms the Cultural Approach to Discourse (CAD), and critiques what he sees as the predominantly “Western” canon of social science research so far. Shi-xu argues, often convincingly and engagingly, that culture has a far more important role to play than it has hitherto enjoyed in Western approaches to discourse. He positions himself as a researcher operating from “in-between” cultures. After critiquing Western theories and methodologies of discourse research such as representationalism, universalism, and foundationalism, Shi-xu sets out the theoretical and methodological framework for CAD, and then proceeds to give practical examples of how the approach can be applied to research. Unfortunately, there are a few incongruities between the claims the author makes about his book and more generally about his approach, and what the book actually contains and what CAD is shown to have achieved. I will highlight these in the course of describing the different sections of the book. As a whole, however, A cultural approach to discourse contains much that will interest “Western” social scientists; it could serve as a guide to those who have previously ignored “culture” in their research (at least, in the author's estimation of the term), and will perhaps lead to interesting debates with those who have already incorporated some conception (perhaps an opposing one) of “culture” in their theoretical frameworks.

Diana Boxer, Applying sociolinguistics: Domains and face-to-face interaction. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2002. 244 pp. Hb $108.00, Pb $47.95.

This book has many fine qualities, including careful attention to what is meant by applying linguistics as opposed to applied linguistics. The author's goal is to show readers how research findings in micro-sociolinguistic interaction can be applied to several domains of public and private life: family, education, religion, the workplace, cross-cultural encounters, and so on. Application, in this case, involves awareness of subtleties that go unnoticed in face-to-face interaction, particularly those that create or sustain a power imbalance between participants. That awareness, in turn, sets the stage for “transform(ing) the social order” (p. 22, italics omitted) by empowering “individual speakers in their ordinary day-to-day interactions in all spheres of life and in all stages of life” (222). Instead of a social or political agenda, the book suggests in each domain what would constitute more “humane” interaction: stories would be addressed to children, as well as told about them; collaborative ways of speaking associated primarily with women would be given more status in the workplace and used more often by both women and men; gatekeepers who deal with international students (and other U.S. Americans who interact with speakers for whom English is a second language) would be more sensitive to the potential for face threat to arise from misunderstanding.

Colin B. Grant (ed.), Rethinking communicative interaction: New interdisciplinary horizons. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2003. Pp. 325. Hb, $95.

Reading Rethinking communicative interaction (henceforth RCI), I realized that the final word of the subtitle, “horizons,” is an accurate allusion to the main difficulty and contribution of the book: the quest for interdisciplinarity. RCI advances the idea of communication as a fiction; the same applies to interdisciplinarity, a commonplace in the social sciences to which RCI at least contributes a “programme,” as Colin Grant suggests in his Introduction, acknowledging the difficulties of “pluri-disciplinariety.” A wealth of sources to advance such an ambitious project is presented. RCI develops key methods to fulfill the interdisciplinary endeavor: ways of bridging the macro and micro gap by studying the connection of the self's participation in the social construction of the communicative process and the interplay between linguistic and biological facts in human evolution and language acquisition, among others.

Roberta Facchinetti, Manfred Krug, & Frank Palmer (eds.), Modality in contemporary English. Topics in English Linguistics 44. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2003. Pp. xvi, 396. Hb. $132.30.

This volume is a collection of sixteen papers, mainly arising from a conference in Verona, Italy, in 2001. There is a nine-page preface, though no concluding section, by the editors. The preface is mostly devoted to summaries of the individual chapters, except for an initial introduction of about one page. In it the editors aver that “all of these papers offer fresh methodological impetus to a variety of current linguistic debates” but also refer to “differences in theoretical perspectives, terminology and topics.” Differences in topics are of course desirable, but differences in core terminology are less so. An attempt on the part of the editors to comment on differences in terminology in studies on modality in general, or at least in those of the present volume, would have been welcome and might have enhanced the “methodological impetus” of which the editors speak. It would also have increased the interest of the volume for the reader wishing to gain a sense of the state of the art in the well-researched field of modality at the beginning of the new century.

Norman Fairclough,Analyzing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. London: Routledge, 2003. Pp. vii + 270. Hb $135.00, Pb $31.95.

This latest book by Norman Fairclough is an extension of his earlier work on critical discourse analysis (CDA) (e.g., Fairclough 1989, 1995, 2001). Relying on systemic functional linguistics (SFL) as his linguistic theoretical standpoint on one hand, and on social theoretical themes presented by critical theorists like Bourdieu and Habermas on the other, the author attempts to present a detailed framework of linguistic analysis that links the “micro” analysis of texts to the “macro” analysis of social relations (p. 16). In his introductory chapter, Fairclough specifies two types of audience for the book who may find this framework relevant to their own research: students and researchers in social sciences and humanities with little or no knowledge of language analysis, and those specializing in language studies.

Adam Jaworski, Nikolas Coupland and Dariusz Galasiński (eds.), Metalanguage: Social and ideological perspectives. Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 2004. Pp 324. Pb Euro 30,79.

It is commonplace in linguistics to argue that human language is unique in being able to represent itself, an insight that has underpinned much of the early work undertaken by sociolinguists in the area of language attitudes and folk linguistics. However, the increasingly interdisciplinary nature of sociolinguistics, informed not least by recent work in (critical) discourse analysis and language ideology studies, has highlighted the extent to which this central metalinguistic function represents more than a mere cognitive ability to reflect on language “as object.” This is because it is through metalanguage (ML) that we are able to convey our ideas not only about what language is, but what we think it ought to be. As such, ML shows itself to be more than simply self-serving: It is inherently ideological. Seen in conjunction with an increasing awareness of the nature of language as not only socially contextualized but also contextualizing, the notion of metalinguistic competence is therefore closely bound up with hegemonic struggle at a particular point in history (late modernity) when many traditional social boundaries might well be being dismantled but where new ones are constantly emerging in their stead – a process to which language and discourse are indisputably central.

Paul Chilton, Analysing political discourse: Theory and practice. London & New York: Routledge, 2004. Pp. xiv, 226. Hb $125.00, Pb $35.11.

Analysing political discourse does not merely address issues concerning either politics of language or languages of politics; it offers practical analyses of actual specimens of political text and talk. The discourses analyzed, in both the British and international arenas, include political interviews, parliamentary language, politicians' speeches, and discourses that concern foreigners and religion. The analysis is linguistically oriented, grounded in a theory of language and politics. In this review, I shall first give an overview of the linguistic theory on which the author bases his analysis and then select two actual analyses for illustration. Finally, I shall say a few words about the style of this volume.