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Reviewed by:
  • The bilingualism reader ed. by Li Wei
  • Susan Meredith Burt
The bilingualism reader. Ed. by Li Wei. London & New York: Routledge, 2000. Pp. xv, 541. $29.99.

The editor’s goal for this volume is to present ‘a selection of the most important research papers on bilingualism’ (ix) and to make them available to students. The papers, with original publication dates ranging from 1959 to 1997, give an overview of how the field of bilingualism has developed and acquaint readers with current issues. Eighteen chapters are divided among three major sections, with two subdivisions each. Two introductory articles, the editor’s ‘Dimensions of Bilingualism’ (3–25) and William F. Mackey’s ‘The description of bilingualism’ (26–54), orient readers to the rest of the volume.

Part 1 covers the sociolinguistic issues of language [End Page 806] choice and bilingual interaction. Classic articles such as Charles Ferguson’s ‘Diglossia’ (65–80), Joshua Fishman’s ‘Bilingualism with and without diglossia; Diglossia with and without bilingualism’ (81–88) and ‘Who speaks what language to whom and when?’ (89–106) introduce basic notions such as ‘diglossia’ and ‘domain’. A variety of sociolinguistic approaches to bilingual interaction are illustrated by four subsequent articles. Jan-Petter Blom and John J. Gumperz’s ‘Social meaning in linguistic structure: Code-switching in Norway’ (111–36) introduces situational and metaphorical codeswitching. An explicitly sociopragmatic approach to code choice is explained in Carol Myers-Scotton’s ‘Codeswitching as indexical of social negotiations’ (137–65), while J. C. Peter Auer provides ‘A conversation analytic approach to code-switching and transfer’ (166–87) in his discussion of Italian-speaking children in Germany. Social network analysis informs the approach of Li Wei, Lesley Milroy, and Pong Sin Ching in ‘A two-step sociolinguistic analysis of code-switching and language choice: The example of a bilingual Chinese community in Britain’ (188–209).

Part 2 first focuses on the issue of grammatical constraints in codeswitching. Shana Poplack’s ‘Sometimes I’ll start a sentence in Spanish y termino en español’ (221–56) proposes the free morpheme constraint and the equivalence constraint. Michael Clyne (‘Constraints on code-switching: How universal are they?’, 257–80) questions these and other constraints on the basis of German-English and Dutch-English data. Data from numerous pairs of languages support the matrix language frame model of Carol Myers-Scotton and Janice Jake (‘Matching lemmas in a bilingual language competence and production model’, 281–320), in which congruence (or a lack of it) between languages at conceptual, functional, or positional levels can explain the varieties of intrasentential codeswitching. In the second part of Part 2, Fred Genesee (‘Early bilingual language development: One language or two?’, 327–43) and Juergen M. Meisel (‘Early differentiation of languages in bilingual children’, 344–69) bring evidence against the hypothesis that bilingual children initially have only one grammatical system.

Similarly, two articles in Part 3 demonstrate the lack of evidence for language-specific lateralization in bilinguals: Loraine K. Obler, Robert J. Zatorre, Linda Galloway, and Jyotsna Vaid (‘Cerebral lateralization in bilinguals: Methodological issues’, 381–93) caution about the numerous parameters involved, while Michel Paradis (‘Language lateralization in bilinguals: Enough already!’, 394–401) reviews the lack of evidence. Three final papers propose models of bilingual speech processing. David W. Green (‘Control, activation and resource’, 407–19) proposes a model for bilingual functioning that accounts for data from both normal and brain-damaged speakers. Kees De Bot (‘A bilingual production model’, 420–42) adapts Willem Levelt’s monolingual model for bilingual speakers. François Grosjean (‘Processing mixed language: Issues, findings, models’, 443–69) reviews the pitfalls of psycholinguistic research in this area.

Each major section is followed by study questions, research activities, and suggestions for further reading. The end of the volume features a short discussion by W on the effects of researcher identity and bias; a resource list of reference works, textbooks, and journals...

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