This a quantitative analysis of a corpus of texts from eight different registers of Scottish Gaelic, an endangered language. Lamb describes how these registers vary with regard to 63 syntactic, morphological, and lexical features. He presents a detailed grammatical description of how Scottish Gaelic is used in different contexts and evidence that despite being endangered, Scottish Gaelic still shows register variation similar to that found in more widely used languages such as English. Included as an appendix to the book is a detailed description of the phonology, morphology, and syntax of Scottish Gaelic. This grammar provides additional information on the linguistic features the author tagged in his corpus, and it also serves as a potentially important resource for anyone interested in studying or learning Scottish Gaelic.
The basic assumption that drives Lamb's work is that different registers will show systematic differences in the frequency of individual linguistic features. Thus, he selected eight different types of texts to analyze: conversations, radio interviews, sports reportage, traditional narratives, fiction, formal prose, news scripts, and popular writing. Of particular interest to Lamb are the differences between spoken and written registers. Because of this, Lamb compares the frequencies of the linguistic features in the spoken texts with the corresponding frequencies in the written texts in addition to comparing the findings for the individual registers.
Lamb's results are divided into three parts. The first is a description of the variation among the texts in terms of the information structure, clause types, morphosyntax, and the lexicon. For each feature analyzed within these categories, Lamb presents an overview of the linguistic form, the quantitative and statistical results for this feature in the different registers, and a comparison of the results with those described in previous works on similar registers in other languages. The second part of the analysis is an even more detailed description of noun phrases and their complexity in the different registers. This section includes such features as case marking, prepositional phrases, relative clauses, and adjectives. Finally, the third part of the analysis describes the identifying features of each of the eight registers. It is this section that will likely be the most useful and the most accessible to non-linguists who are interested in Scottish Gaelic.
Lamb determines that the eight registers he examined showed systematic variation in the frequencies of many of the different linguistic features he tagged. He also argues that his results are consistent with the findings of previous studies of register variation in other languages. This is an important finding in that Scottish Gaelic is endangered, and thus the findings dispute the idea that such a language would show a lack of variation in different contexts when compared to more widely spoken languages. Thus, this book will be of interest not just to researchers in corpus linguistics and Scottish Gaelic but to those who study endangered languages as well.
