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664 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 3 (1998) pers presented here revolve closely around a single subject: language teaching and education. Within that realm, however, the scope is quite broad. The collection is divided into four sections. The first, 'Language acquisition: Politics and policies ', consists of four papers that discuss different aspects of high level foreign language or bilingual education program organization. These papers concentrate in particular on what the goals of such programs should be (Reinhold Freudenstein, Ross Steele), and on what kinds of programs or curricula are most effective at achieving their goals (Donna Christian, Stephen Krashen). Six papers on 'Language acquisition: Learning and the learner' make up the second section ofthis collection . These papers focus more tightly, choosing as their scope the classroom, or, even tighter, the student. Topics range from the theoretical psycholinguistic model ofthe learner (Michael Breen) and the role of bilingualismin developing one's awareness ofthe nature of language (Renzo Titone) to the importance and practical difficulties of teaching phonetics, phonology , and accent (Joan Morley) and the effect of classroom participation organization on success in foreign language acquisition (Mary Ann Christison ). The third section, 'Language variation', contains case studies ofJamaican Creole (Peter Patrick) and Hawaiian Pidgin (Theodore Rodgers)—the second looking very closely at the choice of language used for subject matter instruction in Hawaiian public schools. The three remaining papers include a concrete discussion of dialect death and sociolinguistics centered on the Ocracoke dialect of English of the Outer Banks (Walt Wolfram), a look at cultural, social, and linguistic variation in world Englishes (Yamuna Kachru), and considerations of the theoretical implications of L2 variation in second language acquisition (Cristina Sanz). The final paper (Andrea Tyler & Donna Lardiere ), comprising the entirety of the 'Linguistics and teacher education' section of the book, ties together the threads of linguistics and language education by seeking to refute the claim that modern linguistics is irrelevant to language teaching and thus properly omitted in foreign language teacher training . [Trey Jones] Semantic syntax. By Pieter A. M. Seuren . London: Blackwell, 1996. Pp. 379. $59.95. This is a very well presented and remarkably detailed description of English, French, Dutch, German , and Turkish at the sentence level. It exemplifies a long-standing theoretical claim which has gained ground nowadays, namely that the structural descriptions of linguistic objects should stand for both semantic and syntactic information. This contrasts with the widely adopted practice of analyzing sentences in syntactic terms only. However, 'meaning', the distinguished component of structural representations in semantic syntax, is not a well understood notion; it is only described as nontruth conditional. Furthermore , it is often stated that the theoretical constructs proposed are syntactic molds for rather than representations of meaning. Semantic syntax employs trees at all levels ofanalysis discussed. There are at least three such levels: semantic analysis (SA), shallow structures (ShS), and surface structures (SS). Grammar, which consists of a set of often universal operations on trees, takes SAs first to ShSs and then to SSs. Operations on trees are sensitive to categorial information and to various features attached to nodes. Some of the features take numerical values. SAs, which are not part of the grammar, are specified by the occasionally languagespecific SA formation rules which are sensitive to lexical information. SAs encode both syntactic and semantic information concerning the auxiliary system and the predicate-argument relations, represented by the so-called argument functions which form the nucleus of SAs. The auxiliary system is built around two tense nodes, the first one encoding a relation between the pragmatically given time of speaking and the reference time and the second one a relation between the reference time and the event time. It provides apromising grammatical mold to accommodate phenomena which vary notoriously across languages such as tense and modality as well as adverbials, logical operators , and scope phenomena. The argument functions are three—su(bject), Do(direct object), and»(indirect object). They cannot be reduced to thematic relations and serve functional rather than semantic purposes. The potentials of semantic syntax are demonstrated by providing detailed analyses of a series of phenomena including valency, tense, modals, datives , passivization, negation, adverbs, quantification and scope, control structures, clitics, word order, and conjunction. A list...

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