The politics of language in Australia By Uldis Ozolins (review)

REVIEWS559 venience is the tendency to gloss fully only the first statement of each example. When examples are repeated later in the text, the reader is forced to turn back to the original presentation of the example for the gloss. Even when the gloss is given, no care was taken to prevent page breaks from separating the gloss (or translation) from the rest of the example, and the glosses frequently are not properly aligned with the example. There are also a number of typographical errors in subscripting which can be confusing. These are minor annoyances, but attention to such details can go a long way in improving readability. A more significant problem is H's tendency to wander off on long excursions discussing numerous earlier analyses and tangentially related matters. I often found it hard to keep track of where the discussion and arguments were headed. However, the data presented and the questions raised in this book are extremely interesting , and I would urge anyone with a serious interest in comparative Germanic syntax to make the effort to read past these difficulties. REFERENCES Besten, Hans den, and Jerold A. Edmondson. 1983. The verbal complex in Continental West Germanic. On the formal syntax of the Westgermania, ed. by Werner Abraham, 155-216. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Evers, Arnold. 1975. The transformational cycle in Dutch and German. Bloomington: Indiana University Linguistics Club. Goodall, Grant. 1987. Parallel structures in syntax. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haegeman, Liliane, and Henk van Riemsdijk. 1986. Verb projection raising, scope, and the typology of rules affecting verbs. Linguistic Inquiry 17.417-66. Rizzi, Luigi, and Ian Roberts. 1989. Complex inversion in French. Probus 1.1-31. Zubizarreta, María-Luisa. 1987. Levels of representation in the lexicon and in the syntax. Dordrecht: Foris. Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics[Received IO January 1994.] Morrill Hall Cornell University Ithaca, NY 14853 [diesing(â cornell.edu] The politics of language in Australia. By Uldis Ozolins. New York & Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1993. Pp. xv, 287. Cloth $59.95. Reviewed by G. Richard Tucker, Carnegie Mellon University This volume should be particularly welcomed by social scientists and federal as well as state policy makers who are currently involved in a continuing debate over possible Constitutional reform to declare English the official language of the United States (e.g. Baron 1990, Crawford 1992, Nunberg 1989). Similarly, the book will provide informative and stimulating material for language educators and policy makers concerned by the pervasive and seemingly normative monolingualism which characterizes such a large percentage of English mother tongue speakers in the U.S. (e.g. Tucker 1993). In the present book, Ozolins examines the interaction among a variety of economic, historical, political, and social factors in post-World War II Australia which culminated in the adoption and promulgation of a broad National Policy on Languages (NPL) in 1987. 560LANGUAGE, VOLUME 70, NUMBER 3 (1994) Briefly, the NPL promotes (1) the learning of English by all, (2) the learning of a language other than English by all, (3) support for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island languages, and (4) access to equitable and widespread language services throughout the country (Eggington 1994). The book is divided into eight chapters: 1 , 'Australia, languages and the world at the end ofWorld War ?G (1-16); 2, 'Language, ethnicity and politics' (17-35); 3, 'The coming ofthe "New Australians" and their languages' (36-78); 4, 'From assimilation to integration 1960-72' (79-108); 5, 'Disadvantage, language and cultural heritage: From Grassby to Galbally 1973-8' (109-55); 6, 'Multiculturalism and language policy from the late 1970s' (156-205); 7, ? national policy on languages' (206-49); and 8, 'Language policy in contemporary Australia' (250-61). The book concludes with a particularly useful bibliography comprising three sections: I, 'Australian government reports and publications' (262-64); II, 'State government reports and publications' (264-65); and III, 'Other publications ' (266-79). (Some of the Australian government reports previously not easily available to North American researchers are now retrievable through the internet.) In the opening chapters, O traces the evolution of Australian immigration policy from one which excluded non-British (and non-English-speaking) migrants , particularly those from neighboring Asian countries, to one which eventually...