Lexical structures and language use, and: Vol. 1: Plenary lectures and session papers, and: Vol. 2: Session papers Ed. by Edda Weigand and Franz Hundsnurscher (review)

226 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 1 (1998) and it also can serve as a handy reference for specialists in the field. [William R. Schmalstieg, The Pennsylvania State University.] Organization in discourse: Proceedings from the Turku conference. Ed. by Brita Wàrvik, Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen , and Risto Hiltunen. (Anglicana turkuensia, 14.) Turku: University of Turku, 1995. Pp. 558. This volume contains 52 papers presented at the conference on Organization in Discourse held in Turku, Finland, 10-14 August 1994. The broad range of topics is gathered under the main theme of discourse structure and organization. Scholars from fields including linguistics, communication studies, and literary theory have joined their efforts in the volume. The term discourse covers both spoken discourse and written text. The volume brings together studies from such genres of written texts and spoken interaction as academic and scientific texts, literary works, business texts, modern and old narratives, institutional discourse, telephone conversations, courtroom testimonies, and classroom discourse. Several ofthe papers discuss cross-cultural or contrastive studies in fields ofrhetoric and writing. Ulla Connor (15-28) looks at methodological issues in contrastive rhetoric and problems deriving from such issues as ethnocentrism and establishing ajoint basis for comparisons for contrastive studies. Nils-Erik Enkvist (41-57) discusses similar issues on methodological problems of cross-cultural rhetoric. Enkvist suggests that the contrastive study of discourse organization should widen its perspectives to include discoursal efficacy, macropatterns, and culturally determined rhetoric. EiJA Ventola (109-28), along with several other contributors, discusses the issues of academic text writing. Academic writing by nonnative speakers of English frequently shows problems with reference, theme-rheme patterns, and the organization of discourse . Ventola emphasizes the importance of intertextuality of the academic text genre, the importance of 'tumng-in' the text to a particular audience and field. Ines Busch-Lauer (175-86) addresses issues of different text organization principles of English and German medical abstracts, while Bo Andersson and Britt-Louise Gunnarsson (139-48) discuss cultural differences of conference abstract writing. Discourse organization is analyzed from various perspectives. Some contributors, such as Jan Firbas, look at layers, dimensions, paragraphs, or other 'chunks' of discourse. Firbas (59-72) concentrates on the communicative functions of sentence constituents and the assignment of information to thematic and nonthematic layers of a text. Frantisek Danes (29-40) analyzes the thematic and compositional relations within a paragraph as well as connections between components of a paragraph. Helena Halmari (273-81) looks at spoken discourse and especially the organization of episode structures in business telephone conversations. Several papers concentrate on issues of cohesion, coherence, and intertextuality. Michael Hoey (73-94) discusses coherence and mutual relevance created by bonding between sentences and texts. He addresses issues of nets of connections in the mind and bonding of sentences as products of the way the human mind stores and utilizes information. A. P. Berber Sardinha (157-61) looks at how bonding relates to the distance between bonding sentences in business reports. Said El-Shiayb (241-48) discusses cohesive devices and chains in Arabic narratives , while Eniko Németh T. (393-402) concentrates on Hungarian pragmatic connectives. Other papers in the volume concentrate on comparisons and parallels between spoken and written discourse. Douglas Biber (1-13) addresses the questions of cross-linguistic patterns of register variation in English, Korean, and Somali. He concludes that written language provides potential for certain forms oflanguage production that are not possible for spoken language. Deborah Du Bartell (231-39) finds characteristics similar to both written and spoken discourse from computer-mediated communication . Jan-Ola Östman (95-108) reviews the history of research on pragmatic particles during the last twenty years. From a study of hesitational phenomena the field has developed into a discourse-functionally oriented study. Ostman emphasizes the importance of pragmatic particles as main organizers of discourse. Uta Lenk (341-52) looks at the discourse marker anyway in establishing conversational coherence, and Teija Multisilta (381-92) looks at Russian pragmatic particles nu and vot that are used mainly for different types of textual transitions. This volume may be of value to scholars interested in various fields of discourse analysis as a source for ideas and for a glance at current research. Unfortunately , the large number...