Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference of Ethiopian Studies, vol. 5 Edited by Anatoly Gromyko (review)

BOOK NOTICES 399 draws on a range of writers of the last half of the 17th century, many as obscure as Kenelm Digby and Richard Burthogge, who explored not only the nature of language, but the nature of thought as well. Undoubtedly, the principal value of F's book is that it is a comprehensive outline, filled with many references to authors and works that are rarely cited. Yet despite the broad treatment, F never strays too far from her major theme of working out the consequences of Bacon's influence . Remarkably, the work achieves a coherence that never seems contrived or simplistic. Many of her views can be challenged, but they are well supported; and, though her work probably covers more than it should, her book will long serve as a reliable source for any scholar interested in 17th-century British linguistics. [Joseph L. Subbiondo, University of the Pacific] Registers of written English: Situational factors and linguistic features . Ed. by Mohsen Ghadessy. London & New York: Pinter, 1988. Pp. ix, 184. These essays—by researchers in Britain, the USA, Singapore, and Hong Kong—focus on a series of topics: the language of newspapers and magazines, religion, business, compression, and physical science. Each topic is treated in from one to three articles. This structure gives clear signs of having been imposed ex post facto, but is on the whole perfectly workable. At best, the groupings are very effective. For instance, in Part 2, 'The language of religion', there are two essays, both studying complications arising from the use of 'shared terminology ' (89) that may have radically different meanings to members of different speech communities . While Jonathan Webster ('The language ofreligion: A sociolinguistic perspective') approaches this phenomenon largely from the standpoint of explaining the potential for cooperative creation of discourse meaning, Diane Houghton ('Creationist writings') emphasizes the reciprocal potential for conflict and competition . By contrast, some groupings are less satisfactory . For example, Part 4, 'The language of compression', contains two essays directly on aspects of linguistic compression for practical purposes, along with a third essay on poetic composition; the none-too-convincing justification for the third article is that it too in part discusses the need to 'reduce the language' (Ghadessy, p. 129). Also, two parts, 3 and 5, in fact contain only one essay each. To whom is this volume directed? The Foreword targets 'graduate university students in language/ linguistics/ literature or any other person interested in the written varieties of English' (vii). However, readers in the 'any other person' category would need—but probably wouldn't have—considerable familiarity.with the general debate about discourse analysis. As the title suggests, the authors in this collection do all take a more or less Hallidayan view of the interaction between discourse text and functional situation. Thus, the chapters certainly reflect back and forth on each other in a reasonably enlightening manner, so that each article has an orienting context. This trend is reinforced in short but informative introductions to the collection itself and to each subsection (all but one by Ghadessy), and by the presence of comprehensive name and subject indices. Still, a number of basic difficulties with the features/situations approach to discourse description and analysis—centering chiefly on the problem ofjust exactly what items should be counted and precisely what arithmetic is significant when one claims 'a greater-than-random ' (M.A.K. Halliday, cited by Ghadessy on p. 4) recurrence of features in some putatively distinct register—receive little direct attention in this volume. For readers with a background in linguistics, this will not be a problem; for others, it may well be. In all fairness, it must be said that the tentativeness of various analyses and the need for further work are indeed regularly underlined in many of the essays. Moreover, register study is doubtless a highly promising domain for research . Nonetheless, given the very appealingly face-valid insights cautiously advanced here, I would suggest that only readers with a certain degree of experience in linguistic study are likely to give these writers' caveats the attention they deserve. [John Sivell, Brock University.) Proceedings of the Ninth International Conference of Ethiopian Studies, vol. 5. Ed. by Anatoly Gromyko. Prepared by...