Language and Revolutionary Magic in the Orinoco Delta. Juan LuisRodriguez, London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, Bloomsbury Studies in Linguistic Anthropology. 2020. 216 pp. Hb (9781350115750) $115.00, Pb (9781350185029) $39.95, Ebk (9781350115774) $103.50, PDF Ebk (9781350115767) $103.50.

Kuipers' book is based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in the Weyewa Highlands of western Sumba, an island in eastern Indonesia. His initial fieldwork in 1978 resulted in his work Power in performance (1990), about Weyewa “ritual speech” (tenda) – a set of political, religious, and personal verbal genres utilizing a large stock of traditional couplets, in which the two lines are parallel in both rhythm and meaning. Returning to the field in 1989, 1990, and 1994, Kuipers discovered that the obvious loci of change – new schools, roads, economic activities, and religious ideas – could not by themselves account for the direction of change in Weyewa language practices. Stimulated by a recent body of literature in linguistic anthropology dealing with “linguistic ideology,” Kuipers attempts in the present volume to show that changes in ritual speech genres – reinterpretations, erasures, refunctionalizations, and condensations – cannot be explained without taking into account local and imported beliefs about the nature of language.

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INTERACTION AND GRAMMAR.Elinor Ochs, Emanuel A. Schegloff, & Sandra A. Thompson (Eds.). New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xii + 468. $74.95 cloth, $29.95 paper.

Studies in Second Language Acquisition ◽

10.1017/s0272263199211059 ◽

1999 ◽

Vol 21 (1) ◽

pp. 149-150

Author(s):

Helena Halmari

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

Social Interaction ◽

Conversation Analysis ◽

Real Time ◽

Linguistic Anthropology ◽

Interactional Sociolinguistics ◽

Functional Grammar ◽

Cambridge University ◽

Direct Relevance ◽

Naturally Occurring

Interaction and grammar is a valuable addition to the Cambridge “Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics” series. The book is a collection of papers that all, in one way or another, and within the frameworks of linguistic anthropology, functional grammar, or conversation analysis, investigate the interface, or rather the essential interrelatedness, of language and real-time social interaction. The value of the book for the L2 researcher or practitioner is perhaps not direct; however, because much of L2 research focuses on interaction and draws its data from naturally occurring discourse, the indirect contribution is notable. In particular, the chapter by Fox, Hayashi, and Jasperson beautifully underscores those typological differences between English and Japanese that lead to different interactional strategies—an issue of direct relevance to L2 studies.

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Daniel Nettle, Linguistic diversity. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. xi, 168. Hb $65.00, pb $19.95.

Language in Society ◽

10.1017/s0047404501211051 ◽

2001 ◽

Vol 30 (1) ◽

pp. 97-100

Author(s):

Patrick McConvell

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

Social Behavior ◽

Multidisciplinary Approach ◽

Linguistic Diversity ◽

Linguistic Anthropology ◽

Ecological Situation ◽

Oxford University ◽

Oxford University Press

Why does linguistic diversity exist? This is the question to which this book is addressed. Nettle argues that, although aspects of the diversity of languages have been studied, the reason for this diversity has not been a subject of attention. To answer the question, he suggests that a multidisciplinary approach is necessary – a broad linguistic anthropology in which the linguistic map is explained by people's social behavior, which in turn arises largely from their ecological situation.

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Elinor Ochs, Emanuel A. Schegloff & Sandra A. Thompson (eds.), Interaction and grammar. Cambridge & New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Pp. xii, 468. Pb. $29.95.

Language in Society ◽

10.1017/s0047404500213043 ◽

2000 ◽

Vol 29 (3) ◽

pp. 409-412

Author(s):

Don H. Zimmerman

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

Conversation Analysis ◽

Linguistic Anthropology ◽

Cambridge University ◽

Functional Linguistics

This volume encompasses work by researchers from three distinct but related areas of inquiry: functional linguistics, linguistic anthropology, and conversation analysis. Edited collections sometimes strain to provide a unifying theme connecting diverse contributions into a coherent whole. Happily, the editors and contributors to Interaction and grammar (the list of authors is impressive) have to a large extent solved this problem; and in the process, they have provided an important contribution that should have major impact in all three areas.

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Magda Stroinska (ed.), Relative points of view: Linguistic representations of culture. New York: Berghahn Books, 2001. Pp.xii, 228. Hb $69.95, Pb $25.00.

Language in Society ◽

10.1017/s0047404503231055 ◽

2002 ◽

Vol 32 (1) ◽

pp. 112-114

Author(s):

Debra J. Occhi

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

Cultural Identity ◽

Linguistic Anthropology ◽

Language And Culture ◽

Business Politics ◽

Linguistic Representations ◽

Language Behavior ◽

Current Concern ◽

Points Of View ◽

Original Speech

At first glance, the title of this book seems to index major themes of linguistic anthropology; however, it is published as volume 6 in a cultural studies series. Its contributors' interests range from linguistics through the expanse of humanities, illustrating how eclectic and interdisciplinary contemporary research in area of language and culture has become. The editor, Magda Stroinska, begins this volume with a brief overview of several themes recurring throughout: linguistic relativity, the search for universals, cross-cultural identity, globalization, and translatability. The research presented here analyzes interactions among language, behavior, and context as they emerge in several areas of current concern. These include metaphors and their use in speech, as well as discourses on topics such as gender and marriage, science versus postmodernism, internationalized business, politics, nationalism, study abroad experiences, emotion, and religion. The authors examine data from various sources, including original speech data, data first discussed elsewhere, literature, and media. Five thematic sections of two chapters each comprise this edited volume.

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Ray Jackendoff, Foundations of language: Brain, meaning, grammar, evolution. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 2002. Pp. xix, 477. Hb $40.00.

Language in Society ◽

10.1017/s0047404503213051 ◽

2003 ◽

Vol 32 (3) ◽

pp. 415-418

Author(s):

Robbins Burling

Keyword(s):

New York ◽

Linguistic Anthropology ◽

Close Attention ◽

Oxford University ◽

Left Behind ◽

The Mind ◽

The Brain ◽

Oxford University Press

In this extraordinary book, Jackendoff proposes nothing less than a new way to understand the architecture of language and a new way to view the relation of language to the brain, to the mind, to behavior, and to the evolution of our species. It is, among many other things, an invitation for cooperation from one of the world's leading formal syntacticians to linguists of diverse orientations and to those from adjacent fields, including sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology. If we don't want to be left behind, we had better pay close attention.

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