Boyd Davis, Alzheimer talk, text and context: Enhancing communication. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

I picked up Boyd Davis's edited volume with some anxiety. I had let go of my Alzheimer's research for a number of painful reasons in graduate school and had, over the past 10 years, invented myself in the sociopolitics of language learning and teaching. When I spotted the volume at a book exhibit, I thought: Would I be able to connect to any of the work anymore? A lot of research ground gets covered in a decade; would I be able to pick up any of the conversational threads? When a couple of months later the editor of Language and Society contacted me about possibly reviewing it, I took it as a sign beckoning and inviting me back to that space. Needless to say, I was delighted at the array of readings. The volume covers a range from personal accounts (by Jeutonne Brewer), to issues of identity, personhood maintenance, and gender (D. Shenk; E. B. Ryan K. Byrne, H. Spykerman & J. B.Orange; C. Pope & D. N. Ripich), to discourse markers, lexical variation, and bilingualism (Davis, M. Maclagan & P. Mason, Davis & C Bernstein, G. M. J. Nold), to concerns relating to caregiver training (K. Byrne & J. B. Orange; Ryan, Spykerman & A. P. Anas; N. Green; and L. Russell-Pinson & L. Moore) and metaphors by which language and Alzheimer's research can be described (H. E. Hamilton). Each of these areas laminates Alzheimer's talk with feeling and care, thus countering the sedimented psycholinguistic tropes that have typically written about Alzheimer discourse in clinical and cold ways.

Helen Kelly-Holmes, Advertising as multilingual communication. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Pp. xiv, 206. Hb $69.95.

Language choices in advertising are never random. They represent an attempt to use language to achieve a particular goal. In commercial advertising the goal is, ultimately, to sell. The words that are present in advertisements are the product of a very conscious decision to put those particular words there rather than other words. Helen Kelly-Holmes in her fascinating book examines choices that have resulted in the use, non-use or, as it turns out, abuse of features from more than one language in commercially driven discourses. The object of her study is multilingual advertising communication, defined as the appearance of a number of different languages or voices in a market-discourse situation. For Kelly-Holmes, the market-discourse situation, deliberately chosen as the context of analysis instead of more narrow frames like the speech act, covers a range of possibilities from advertising texts to TV channels and Internet sites. The manifestations of languages or voices in these situations can range from single words to entire texts. Thus, taking examples from my own everyday context, a Finnish-language TV advertisement for a car ending in the English slogan Fresh thinking – better cars would count as a multilingual market-discourse situation, as would a setting where a TV ad entirely in Finnish is followed by an all-English advertisement for a particular cider, a perfume ad with only one word of French in an otherwise Finnish publication, or an advertisement where the “language” is an accent or a dialect, such as the use of Italian-accented Finnish to advertise pasta sauce.

Edward Finegan & John R. Rickford (eds.), Language in the USA: Themes for the twenty-first century. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xiii, 502. Hb $85.00.

Language in the USA: Themes for the twenty-first century, edited by Edward Finegan and John R. Rickford, consists of 26 articles commissioned from prominent language scholars. The collection offers brief chapters covering a wide variety of issues relevant to the sociolinguistic situation of the 21st-century United States. The chapters are organized into three sections: Part 1, “American English,” Part 2, “Other language varieties,” and Part 3, “The sociolinguistic situation.” The editors hope that the volume's “perspectives will launch inquiries into the topics of interest among student readers, policy makers, and the educated public” (p. xviii). The primary intended audience seems to be undergraduate students who have some background in linguistics. However, despite some use of IPA and a small amount of field-specific terminology, the editors and contributors have created a volume that is accessible to a wider audience that includes the general public.

Joel Walters, Bilingualism: The sociopragmatic-psycholinguistic interface. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2005. Pp. xi, 323. Pb. $37.50.

In the Preface to this volume, Joel Walters explains why we need “yet another model of bilingual processing” (p. viii): The field of bilingualism is divided between researchers focused on the social situating and functions of bilingualism and those concerned with mental structures of bilingualism. Yet bilingual speakers function linguistically at the intersection of these two realms; Walters is concerned to construct a map of cognitive processes at that intersection. In other words, Walters takes on an enormous task: to construct a psycholinguistic model of bilingual processing that includes the wealth of social and pragmatic information that plays a role in bilingual speech and interaction.

Carol Myers-Scotton, Contact linguistics: Bilingual encounters and grammatical outcomes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. xiv, 342. Pb.

The scope of Myers-Scotton's new book is far wider than that of her earlier study (1993), which focused exclusively on code-switching. She has now applied her Matrix Language Frame (MLF) model to a much broader range of language contact phenomena, covering areas such as convergence (what others have termed “interference”), language attrition and shift, and creoles and mixed languages. There is no doubt that the model does offer many insights into the dynamics of various types of language contact, and while Myers-Scotton's remarks remain fairly tentative with regard to some of these fields, this book certainly opens up new avenues for exploration in each of them. However, the most substantial and possibly the most controversial part of the book is again that which presents the latest developments in her account of bilingual code-switching, which has already achieved worldwide renown, so for want of space we will focus only on this part of the book.

I thank D & B for their stimulating review that concentrates on the MLF model and code-switching (CS), even though Contact linguistics (CL) discusses other contact phenomena, too. This is a model of “classic code-switching,” which is defined several times in CL (8, 105, 297). This scope was always intended, but not explicit in Duelling languages (Myers-Scotton 1993a). The nub of the definition is that only one of the languages contributing surface morphemes to a bilingual CP (i.e. clause) is the source of that clause's morphosyntactic frame. The Morpheme Order and System Morpheme Principles of the MLF model identify this language as the Matrix Language (ML). Classic CS contrasts with composite code-switching. The difference is that in Composite CS, part of the abstract morphosyntactic structure comes from more than one of the participating languages. Composite CS may be more prevalent than classic CS, but has yet to be studied systematically (CL, 298).

Uta M. Quasthoff & Tabea Becker (eds.), Narrative interaction. (Studies in Narrative, 5.) Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2005. Pp. v, 305. Hb $126.

This edited volume, the fifth in the Studies in Narrative series published by John Benjamins, brings together international studies conducted on spoken narratives in everyday and institutional settings, and in several languages (English, German, Greek, Italian, and Hungarian). The collection is united by a focus on the interactive nature of narrative in context. Following an introduction by the co-editors, there are eleven chapters organized into three parts concentrating on (I) narrative development, (II) the co-construction of narrative, and (III) narrative retellings.

Kees de Bot and Sinfree Makoni, Language and aging in multilingual contexts. (Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 53.) Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2005. Pp.vi., 162. Hb. $99.95.

This book raises many questions. Depending on one's disciplinary perspective, this slim volume could be seen as uneven in its coverage and, as one reviewer has commented, its intended audience is not always clear (Chen 2006). Notwithstanding, it is an important book, on two levels. Its ostensible purpose is to present a contextualizing summary of language and aging, designed to tug readers away from a monolingual, Eurocentric focus. Beneath and through its chapters runs its second stream of thought, an effort to push readers to understand that many older people, and especially those speaking more than one language, are aging out-of-place, dis-placed, cut off by new caretaking venues and other-languaged caregivers, from their own places, those sites once indexed by their language (Lamb 2000, Neilson 2003). As Arjun Appadurai comments in an interview, “Sites, in the sense of secure locations for the practices of everyday life, may have largely vanished” (Baldauf & Hoeller 1999). What we have previously assumed about adult language, and about language and aging processes, may also need to change.

Catherine E. Travis, Discourse markers in Colombian Spanish: A study in polysemy. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2005. Pp. x, 327. Hb US$128.00.

Pragmatics, the study of language use in context, has largely been positioned as an autonomous branch of linguistics that has little or nothing to do with semantics. However, it seems counterintuitive to me to attempt to understand language use without at the same time trying to understand what it means. Catherine Travis's publication is in this sense an important piece of work; it showcases how language use may be more fruitfully studied through focusing on language meaning. The aim of Travis's book is to identify the “conversational conditions” under which a set of discourse markers is used in Colombian Spanish, and, on the basis of those “conversational conditions,” to “determine and explicate the meanings of these markers” (2). In particular, it attempts to “demonstrate that the pragmatics of use of the discourse markers under consideration is semantically driven: the use of discourse markers is determined by their inherent meanings, which interacts with context-driven features to give rise to different pragmatic functions” (2).

Deborah Levine Gera, Ancient Greek ideas on speech, language and civilization. Great Clarendon, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. vii-xii, 252. Hb $94.88.

In her Preface to this book the author calls it a survey, and it is indeed a survey, but a very welcome one. Even though the sources on which Gera builds are numerous and heterogeneous, suggesting that there has been work done in this direction previously, we have not had in the past a book-length treatment focused exclusively on linguistic ideologies in ancient Greece. The book is useful and timely in helping us reexamine and deconstruct some inherited ideas concerning the role that we imagine ancient Greek ideas have played in shaping a large part of Western thinking. But a basic value of this work is also its major implication, and not merely what is explicitly stated on its pages, for the simple reason that the author does not make a commitment to any large-scale theory or paradigm. This way of approaching the subject is a warning against crediting ancient Greeks with an internally coherent philosophical scheme, which has been frequently imagined as lying at the roots of later rationalist thinking prioritizing reference and leading to Cartesian and modern linguistic rationalism-positivism. Not that such lines of theorizing are absent from ancient Greek thinking, but they do not stand alone, and the actual situation must have been more complex. The situation described by Gera resembles the one put forward by Dodds (1951:180) in his treatment of the rational and irrational elements of Greek thought with regard to the “soul” or “self”: “On questions like that [pictures of soul, self, shadowy image in Hades, etc.] there was no ‘Greek view’, but only a muddle of conflicting answers.” In Gera's book the same holds true for matters linguistic and ideological, implying that later treatments of the subject have constructed Greek thought as being of this or that kind, reading in it a more monolithic and internally coherent content than it actually had. The powerful process of erasure, a selective ideological reading (Gal & Irvine 1995), has played a decisive role in giving shape to what Greek metalinguistic thought has been or should have been, according to the historical contingencies and interests of each era and each individual thinker. Nevertheless, even though Gera deserves a credit for not allowing homogenizing readings to influence a realistic assessment of the variety of ancient Greek views of language, one would expect her to provide at least a basic understanding of her own of what kind of social species linguistic ideologies are.

Catherine E. Travis, Discourse markers in Colombian Spanish: A study in polysemy. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2005. Pp. xiii, 327.

This book sets an excellent example of how a semantic focus may enrich a theme usually identified as belonging to pragmatics. Discourse markers are usually considered to be discourse support resources (fillers). They are known in Spanish as muletillas ‘crutches’, with a negative evaluation. Because they are independent from the syntactic core structure, their presence seems arbitrary and optional. It is also generally believed that they do not contribute to the referential content of the clauses they are used in. Their use, however, is far from random; it is governed by precise conversational conditions and discourse criteria. Furthermore, they play an important pragmatic role in the verbal interaction associated with negotiation between speaker and hearer. This book with its detailed study is an excellent contribution to the field.

Neal Hutcheson (producer and director). Mountain talk. Raleigh, NC: North Carolina Language and Life Project, 2003. DVD $20.

Twenty years ago, I met many of my grandmother's fifty-odd cousins for the first time. Born in Panther Hollow, North Carolina (pronounced “Painter Holler”), my grandmother moved to the nearest town, Asheville, when she was a child. On the occasion of her seventieth birthday, many of the cousins she left behind came down out of the mountains to celebrate with her. A few of them spoke in a unique dialect, a “brogue” riddled with odd turns of phrase and vocabulary.

Robin Lakoff and Sachiko Ide (eds.), Broadening the horizon of linguistic politeness. Amsterdam & Philadelphia :John Benjamins, 2005. Pp. 342. Hb $144.

The essays in this collection were first presented at a conference held in Bangkok in 1999. The strength of the essays as a whole is that they concentrate on analyzing politeness in a range of different languages: Chinese, Japanese, Thai, Greek, Australian English, Spanish, Irish, and Swedish.

Mike Baynham and Anna de Fina (eds.), Dislocations/relocations: Narratives of displacement. Manchester, UK & Northampton, MA: St. Jerome, 2005. Pp. 262. Pb. £19.99.

Clearly announced in the title, the topic of this collection of essays is the experience of spatial displacement conveyed through narrative by the individuals who undergo it. The authors approach it as a theoretical and methodological problem in narrative studies, as well as an opportunity for reflecting on a social and political phenomenon – the (forced or freely chosen) movement of people – that has come to be seen as central to the experience of modernity (2). The project is very ambitious. It not only seeks to make a conceptual contribution to the already vast and multidisciplinary literature on narrative, but also hopes to address enough instances of discursive practices that involve migrants and minorities around the world to be able to claim that it sheds light on the general phenomenon of displacement. Overall, the book is stronger when it addresses its second objective, and it offers a multi-layered and comprehensive analysis of the phenomenon of dislocation as captured through narrative practices. What contributes to the success of the book are, in addition to the quality of the individual contributions, its rigorous organization in parts that cohere conceptually and thematically, the clear justification of the project offered by the two editors in an excellent introduction, and the concluding remarks by James Collins, which leave the reader with a sense of a consistent intellectual product.

Georgina Heydon, The language of police interviewing: A critical analysis. Houndmills & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. xii + 229. Hb $69.95.

This book presents a critical analysis of police interviewing in Australia. The author investigates the role of the police in the police–suspect interview in relation to both the negotiation of power relations between participants and the fulfillment of institutional requirements. Combining the analytical tools provided by interactional sociolinguistics and Conversation Analysis (CA), Heydon investigates recordings of police questioning of adult suspects. These findings are compared to findings of a previous study (Heydon 1997), in which Heydon investigated recordings of the training of police for interviewing children. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is used to interpret the results of the descriptive analysis.

Juan Manuel Hernández Campoy & Manuel Almeida, Metodología de la investigación sociolingüística. Málaga: Comares, 2005. Pp. xv, 349.

In the Prologue (pp. ix–x), Peter Trudgill rightly acknowledges the authors as “highly experienced” in carrying out sociolinguistic research and as “first-class practitioners.” In the Introducción (xi–xiv), Hérnandez Campoy and Almeida (HC&A) state that their work is an attempt to compensate for the scarcity of “introductory manuals dedicated to present the methodology and procedures in sociolinguistic research” (xi), as opposed to the large number of theoretical books on the discipline.

Niloofar Haeri, Sacred language, ordinary people: Dilemmas of culture and politics in Egypt. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. xvi, 184. Hb $59.95.

Sacred language, ordinary people is an excellent linguistic ethnography of Arabic diglossia in “an attempt at understanding the cultural and political implications of the divide between Classical Arabic and Egyptian Arabic” (p. xi). The passionate debate about Classical Arabic (the language of the Qur'an) as a facilitator of or a barrier to modernization and change is handled intelligently, though provocatively.

Joanna Thornborrow & Jennifer Coates (eds.), The sociolinguistics of narrative. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2005. Pp. vi, 299. Hb $126.00.

What do we mean by “narrative”? How is it used as descriptive term? What are its theoretical limits? What social and contextual variations can determine the production and form of situated stories? What are the core components of narrative as a discursive unit and interactional resource? How are related narrative discourse and social context articulated in the building of cultural identities? These questions – related to theoretical, contextual, and cultural issues – underlie this collection, The sociolinguistics of narrative, co-edited by Joanna Thornborrow and Jennifer Coates. The volume includes the latest achievements in theory and practice in narrative analysis from a sociolinguistic viewpoint, aiming to help us to understand “the ways in which narrative constitutes a fundamental resource in social interaction” (p. 2).

Arthur Hughes, Peter Trudgill and Dominic Watt, English accents and dialects: An introduction to social and regional varieties of English in the British Isles. 4th ed. London: Hodder Arnold, 2005. Pp. xiii, 159. Pb and accompanying CD £24.99.

English accents and dialects has been the standard introductory textbook on varieties of English in the British Isles since it first appeared in 1979. It is well known and widely used as the only compact and affordable textbook providing detailed descriptions of a range of accents and dialects, as well as introductory chapters dealing with issues of social and regional variation and change. Although successive editions have expanded the range of varieties included and updated references, this fourth edition has undergone a more thorough overhaul, with a new co-author on board in the sociophonetician Dominic Watt. The new edition is accompanied by a digitally remastered CD with recordings of the transcribed interviews and word lists, and it includes new sections on the varieties spoken in Aberdeen, Galway, and “Leicester,” along with exercises on these.

Ousseina Alidou, Engaging modernity: Muslim women and the politics of agency in postcolonial Niger. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005. Pp. xxi, 235. Hb. $45.00.

Challenging conventional discourse about African Muslim women as passive victims of religious, ethnic, economic, and cultural oppression, Alidou analyzes the lives and discourse of three prominent women of Niger. She focuses on these women's agency, understood as a capacity to realize one's aspirations in spite of obstacles. More broadly, she discusses the meaning of modernity for Muslim women in Niger today. Alidou is self-reflexive as she incorporates her own voice in the study – the voice of a Muslim female linguist and cultural critic from Niger who now resides and teaches in the United States. The book's qualitative data comprise Niger-based participant observations, interviews, and literary texts (poems, songs, fairytale). A chapter on Niger's political economy of education is supplemented with quantitative sociological data on educational achievement.