Xenolekte: Struktur und Variation im Deutsch gegenüber Ausländern By Jorg Roche (review)

418 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 67, NUMBER 2 (1991) still remains as a useful and necessary supplement . Thus we end up with the somewhat unwieldy use offour volumes instead of the earlier one. [Raimo Anttila, UCLA.) The state of the language. Ed. by Christopher Ricks and Leonard Michaels. Berkeley & Los Angeles : University of California Press, 1990. Pp. xv, 531. Cloth $25.00. This book bears the same title and has the same editors as a publication of ten years ago (Michaels & Ricks 1980). It even duplicates the title page of that book, not only in content but in typography and design. Yet it claims to be neither a new edition nor a second volume of the earlier book. The only allusion to the 1980 volume is a reference in the Prefatory Note which calls it 'this new collection on the state of the language' (xiv). It is indeed a 'new collection'. Of the 63 authors represented in 1980, only 14 (22%) reappear in this collection, in every case with new material, either on a different subject or adding to and continuing the earlier writings. On the whole, the two books cover the same subject matter. Quite a few ofthe articles—which range in length from short poems to substantial essays —deal with a favorite topic among the literati who make up the majority of the contributors: the decay, or at least change for the worse, of present-day English, whether owing to television, business, computers, or theoretical literary criticism. The rest, to quote from the Prefatory Note, 'treat English in its present relation to art, manners, sex, feminism, money, obscenity, violence, law, AIDS, religious values, and other matters that suggest its infinite potential to reveal or betray life's infinite variety' (xv). This could just as well describe the contents of the 1980 volume, with two exceptions . The 1980 book had nothing about AIDS, which in 1980 was unknown, or at least unnamed; this volume has three excellent essays on the vocabulary of AIDS. And 1980 had only a single rather superficial article on language of and about women; this new collection has four, which explore the area with thoroughness and intelligence. The 59 authors who contribute to this collection are quite varied, though they all have in common a special interest in language and English in particular, since all of them are directly or indirectly involved with writing. They are novelists, poets, critics, lawyers, editors, journalists ; there are even a handful of professional Anglists, including Sir Randolph Quirk, Richard Bailey, Robert Burchfield, Seymour Chatman, Sidney Greenbaum, and Suzanne Romaine. But this is not a book expressly for linguists, though reading it might lead them to broaden their understanding about English by encountering the knowledge, opinions , and prejudices of those who use it professionally . No collection of this size and variety can maintain a high standard throughout. But it would be unfair to single out individual contributions for praise or blame. Instead, one can register the impression that all the contributors, each in his/her special way, have been serious and conscientious, and some even passionate, in expressing their feelings about the state of our common language. [W. N. Francis, Brown University.] Xenolekte: Struktur und Variation im Deutsch gegenüber Ausländern. By Jörg Roche. Berlin & New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1989. Pp. xii, 199. DM 112.00. In this work, originally submitted as a doctoral dissertation in 1986, Roche presents an indepth investigation of the linguistic aspects of xenolects, the altered speech patterns that native speakers utilize in communicating with nonnative speakers. Unlike other works on the subject of 'foreigner talk', which commonly break xenolect patterns down into lists of characteristic deficiencies and deviations measured against the structure of the standard language, R's study represents an attempt to describe a structural system for the xenolects themselves (in this study, xenolects of German). After a brief general introduction to the concept of xenolects and the purpose of such a study in this field, R turns to a discussion of the methods, results, and conclusions of previous xenolect studies. He convincingly demonstrates the inadequacies of these earlier investigations and then refutes their hypotheses about xenolect structure. Section 2.7 (18-19) at the end...