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BOOK NOTICES 601 Margaret E. Winters & Geoffrey S. Nathan , 'First he called her a philologist and then she insulted him"; and Arnold M. Zwicky, 'Jottings on adpositions, case inflections, government , and agreement'. Unfortunately, there are two imperfections in this worthy volume. The first is that the Preface is very brief, and there is no introductory chapter . It would have been very useful if the editors had expanded more on McCawley's intellectual evolution as a linguist and on his influence on our field. Second, this volume would have been a good place to provide a list of McCawley's publications. However, these relatively minor imperfections are outweighed by three very helpful indices (language, name, and subject) and by the smorgasbord of ideas contained in the articles. For McCawley, a man who savors the taste of linguistic ideas and data, this volume must be a real treat. [Maher Awad. University of Colorado at Boulder.] Women, men and language: A sociolinguistic account of gender differences in language. 2nd edn. By Jennifer Coates. (Studies in language and linguistics.) London & New York: Longman, 1993. Pp. xi, 228. The first edition was published in 1986: in this one the author, who is Reader in English Language and Linguistics at the Roehampton Institute in London, has made several changes. First, additions were made to incorporate new material, especially in Chs. 6 and 7, dealing with gender differences in communicative competence and the acquisition of gender-differentiated language. Second, the perspective that governs this edition is that there is an interplay between language and social structure rather than that either language or gender divisions in society are responsible for the other. The book's nine chapters are divided equally among three parts. In Part 1 ('Introductory', 1-57) Coates discusses some of the basic concepts that appear throughout the work, and contrasts two major views of women's status as a group: one considers women as an oppressed group and interprets the differences between the speech of women and that of men in terms of male dominance; the other accounts for the differences by the existence of distinct male and female subcultures. According to C, both approaches are needed. What follows next is a brief historical overview of writings concerning gender differences in language from the Middle Ages to modern times, citing observations by folk linguists, early grammarians, recent philologists , anthropologists, and dialectologists. C believes that the major weakness of anthropologists has been their failure to see 'that gender differences in language were not exclusively a feature of "primitive" people and of distant exotic cultures' (44). And as for traditional dialectology , 'it selected informants on ... an unscientific basis ... because ... women have been largely ignored' (55). In Part 2 (The sociolinguistic evidence', 59-140) C first looks at gender differences in speech as supported by the quantitative studies of Peter Trudgill, William Labov, and others. Next she recommends the use of the concept of social network to explain linguistic variation. One of the strengths of this approach is its sensitivity to differences in both small groups and individuals. In Ch. 6 (106-40) C offers a useful survey of findings concerning gender differences in communicative competence: conversational interaction, conversational style, politeness, and language as a means of expressing one's power or lack of it. In Part 3 ('Causes and consequences', 141-205) the point is made that the acquisition of gender-differentiated language is a result of differences in the linguistic environment of boys and girls. Then C considers to what extent gender differences in language are involved in linguistic change. According to her, research has shown that neither women nor men may be said to be the linguistically innovative sex, but that 'male/female differences in language seem to be intimately involved in the mechanism of linguistic change' (185). The last chapter examines how gender differences in language cause miscommunication between men and women. Among the problem areas are differential meanings of questions, the nature oftopic shifts, attitudes toward listening, simultaneous speech, and verbal aggressiveness . An extensive bibliography (206-21) and an index conclude the work. This relatively small book is very rich with information concerning an important contemporary sociolinguistic topic. It takes the reader from the...

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