Contemporary linguistics: An introduction. 3rd ed. By William O'Grady (review)

470 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 76, NUMBER 2 (2000) She does not recognize a separate class for adjectives since all verbs may be used attributively and no morphology exists to distinguish adjectives from verbs. Adverbs are distinguished as words that cannot function as predicates or arguments and cannot take pronominal clitics. Other minor word classes include prepositions, clause-initial conjunctions, and articles that mark definiteness and number. Interesting things to be found in this grammar include numeral classifiers which are obligatory with most quantified nouns and specific verbalizing morphology used with ideophones, a term K borrows from African linguistics to discuss roots that cannot be used predicatively that describe motions, sounds, or visible properties. [Carl Rubino, University of California, Santa Barbara and Panasonic Technologies .] Contemporary linguistics: An introduction . 3rd edn. By William O'Grady, Michael Dobrovolsky, and Mark Aronoff. New York. St. Martin's Press, 1997. Pp. xxiv, 710. This textbook comprises everything expected in a general linguistics overview plus a few unexpected bonuses. Coverage follows the traditional order, starting with phonetics, moving through phonology, morphology, syntax, semantics, and then a series of 'hyphenated' areas: historical; comparative; psycho-, neuro-, and sociolinguistics; acquisition; writing; animal communication; and computational linguistics. Unusual features include a chapter devoted to interfaces (i.e. problems in morphophonology, morphosyntax , and phonosyntax) and one on second language acquisition. The chapters on SLA and psycholinguistics are new; the others are updated and revised from the second edition. The seventeen chapters range in length from 13 to 63 pages. Most of them could be covered in a week, making the book a rather full semester's worth of material. Each chapter ends with a summary, a listofkey terms, sources, recommended reading, and a useful set of exercises. In addition, most chapters have as their last word a boxed section titled 'For the student linguist'. This unique feature, written by a student, presents humorous and thought-provoking illustrations ofa conceptfrom the chapterin abreezy, personal tone. Several chapters also contain an appendix which gives condensed instructions for how to approach problems in that area, e.g. 'How to identify morphemes in unfamiliar languages' or 'Hints for solving phonology problems'. Unusually for a textbook, different sections of the book have different authors. Ten chapters, including all of the basic 'core' areas, are written by O'Grady and/or Dobrovolsky, sometimes with another coauthor . But the 'hyphenated linguistics' chapters are generally authored by individual experts in each field. Videa de Guzman, Robert W. Murray, Aleksandra Steinbergs, Gary Libben, Sook Whan Cho, John Archibald, Ronald H. Southerland , and Judith Klavans are each responsible for at least one chapter. This multi-author approach inevitably leads to some small differences in style from one section to another, but it also has the advantage of unusually detailed and authoritative coverage of such areas as computational linguistics and language acquisition. The chapter on writing systems, written by Dobrovolsky and O'Grady themselves, also has depth and detail well beyond that of most introductory textbooks. Most chapters successfully balance the need for a broad summary with an attempt to provide an awareness of reasonably up-to-date theories . The syntax chapter, for instance, takes a rather traditional transformational approach but with recent terminology where useful ('move Infi to C) and with asides on relational andfunctional approaches to constructions like the passive. IPA is used for all transcriptions . A detailed table of contents, index, language index, and glossary contribute to the usability of this excellent textbook. [Catherine Rudin, Wayne State College.] Reading and writing the Lakota language : Lakota Iyapi ut| Wowapi ?^3? Yawapi. By Albert White Hat, Sr. Ed. by Jael Kampfe. Salt Lake City, UT: University ofUtah Press, 1999. Pp. xiv, 226. This is a textbook for learning Lakota (Lakhota). Although its title suggests otherwise, the book covers not just reading and writing but pronunciation, vocabulary , morphology, sentence formation, and communicative skills such as appropriate greetings and slang usage, with strong emphasis on Lakota culture, society, and 'thought' . Written by a native speaker, the book offers insights into subtleties of the language and culture, and the discursive, personal style of the text is appealing. Unfortunately, weaknesses of organization and content make it less useful than it could have been. The book includes...