An encyclopaedia of language Edited by N. E. Collinge (review)

200LANGUAGE, VOLUME 68, NUMBER 1 (1992) An encyclopaedia of language. Edited by N. E. Collinge. London & New York: Routledge, 1990. Pp. xvii, 1011. Cloth $79.95. Reviewed by Jane H. Hill, University ofArizona In contrast to the late sixties, when I first began to teach and write, and had regularly to warn students against 'dictionaries' and 'encyclopedias' of linguistics , we live currently in a Golden Age of basic reference works. The present single-volume work contains relatively long articles accessible to beginners. Its niche lies between two recent Cambridge University Press publications, David Crystal's lively coffee-table Cambridge Encyclopedia of Linguistics (1987) and the rather advanced, state-of-the-art, four-volume Linguistics: The Cambridge Survey edited by Frederick Newmeyer (1988). Its coverage also does not overlap much with the Oxford International Encyclopedia of Linguistics (1992), edited by William Bright and dominated by very short articles in the (old) Britannica style. Collinge's introduction expresses the purpose of An Encyclopedia of Language as a 'testing review; acquainting with all that is valuable but selling nothing'. The volume 'presupposes intelligent interest', but is clearly a relatively nontechnical introduction; even quite fundamental concepts are carefully defined. The professional linguist will find useful surveys here of specialized fields, but the work should also occupy a place on the basic reference shelves of schools from the high-school level on up. While I don't always agree exactly with authors' choices about coverage, I would unhesitatingly refer students to any of its articles, and have already assigned one (Geoffrey Leech & Jenny Thomas's 34-page survey of pragmatics) to a graduate-level introduction to linguistic anthropology. The volume contains twenty-six articles, an index of topics and technical terms, a separate index ofnames, and a list ofnotes on the contributors. Articles average 30-40 pages in length; each is accompanied by a list of references, and nearly all provide up-to-date suggestions for further reading. The articles, which are extensively cross-referenced to one another, are divided into three sections. The first, 'The inner nature of language', includes articles on phonetics , phonology, morphology and syntax, semantics, pragmatics, textuality, conversation and interaction, and universals and typology. This section also contains an article on the thought of Chomsky, by P. H. Matthews (this is the only 'intellectual biography' in the volume). The second section, 'The larger province of language', includes articles on psycholinguistics, neurolinguistics, language pathology, anthropological linguistics, sociolinguistics, second-language learning and teaching, language in education, language and literature, and language and computation. The last section, 'Special aspects of language', has papers on lexicography, writing systems, sign language, the history of linguistics , 'special languages' (Esperanto and its cousins), historical linguistics, dialectology, and a brief survey of the languages of the world. The authors are mainly at British universities, but scholars in Australia, the United States, Germany, and Switzerland are also represented. There is too little space in REVIEWS201 this review to list all the authors, but all are well-known in their respective areas and many have previously published textbooks or major review articles. While a brief review does not permit detailed critical assessment, I give a few caveats here. Some American linguists may feel that the coverage in the first section, especially in the articles on phonology (by Eric Fudge) and morphology and syntax (by D. J. Allerton), errs a bit on the side of conservatism. However, these two articles do cite recent theoretical work. For instance, Allerton concludes with a brief discussion of formalism that includes references to GPSG, categorial grammar, and dependency grammar. The magisterial chapter on textuality, by János Petofi, is formidably technical (although carefully written and certainly accessible to 'intelligent interest') and is overwhelmingly text-linguistic in its perspective (although there is reference to, for instance, the work of Stanley Fish). The reader who requires more attention to literary or folkloristic perspectives on text might want to consult William Hanks' recent review in Annual Review of Anthropology (1989). The chapter on 'Language and computation', by Christopher S. Butler, is a very general survey including such matters as the use of computers in linguistic applications of statistics and word processing, with relatively brief coverage of 'computational linguistics' in the strict...