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BOOK NOTICES 421 tonomous University of Mexico, measures the impact of a computer-mediated cultural exchange program on Mexican high school students' perceptions of American culture. This project is interesting on many counts, most notably because studies of whether computer-mediated communication facilitates cross-cultural communication have tended to focus on what such communication does for Americans with regard to their views and beliefs about other cultures rather than the other way around. Meagher and CastaƱos instead examine the impression such computer-mediated communication makes on members of another culture (and in this case high school students, a group we might assume to be most easily impressed by American technology and lifestyles), with the surprising outcome that Mexican students' impressions of American culture were less positive following the computer-mediated exchange than before . Although the volume may seem overly detailed to people who are not regular users of computermediated communication, people who do use these forms ofcommunication regularly will appreciate the accurate descriptions of electronic forums such as chat-rooms, bulletin boards, and the Usenet. In addition , lots of nice data complement the thorough technical descriptions and often compelling theoretical arguments. Individuals interested in this area of research are likely to come away from the collection with altered opinions and new ideas for investigation based on the steps these researchers take toward answering diverse and relevant questions about computer-mediated communication. [Heather Bortfeld, State University of New York, Stony Brook.] Information structure. Ed. by Michael Herslund. (Copenhagen studies in language 18.) Copenhagen: Samfundslitteratur , 1995. Pp. 114. Despite the unifying title, the three main contributions in this slim volume are very different in scope, topic, and approach and thus need to be treated separately . Lars Fant (11-40) argues for a new foundation for the analysis of information structure in terms of a 'dialogic language theory' based on Bakhtin's idea ofpolyphony in texts, neo-Vygotskyan interactionist thought, Wittgenstein-inspired game theory, and Oswald Ducrot and Jean Claude Anscombre's theory of pragmatics. Each text, be it dialogue or monologue , can be analyzed in terms of questions and answers interpolated in the text surface to yield a Dstructure of the text. Within this framework, Fant claims, the traditional problematic notions of theme and rheme can be given precise definitions. Fant's ideas are not exactly new: interpolations have been used heuristically from the very beginning of text linguistics. The question remains how interpolations can be methodically controlled. But the article provides interesting analyses worth discussing, and its theoretical foundations certainly deserve further looking into. Anne Marie Bulow-Moller (41-73) analyzes the choice of theme by native and nonnative speakers of Danish and English in a small corpus of recorded business negotiations. (In contrast to the previous article, in which theme is understood as 'given', theme here is the first element in a sentence, in accordance with Halliday's well-known model.) AU themes in the corpus are classified by means of a detailed grid, and significant differences between Danish and American speakers, and between native and nonnative speakers, are noted and commented upon. This article should be read as an exercise in contrastive discourse analysis, with the choice of theme by speakers as a research variable. It shows how lack of appropriate linguistic strategies and different cultural norms add up to put nonnative negotiators at a disadvantage in intercultural encounters. Henning Nolke (75- 1 08) tries to lay a foundation for a theory of focus within information structure. He introduces some new arguments and notions into the discussion. Focus analysis 'should be made at the utterance level and should notbe part ofthe structural description of the sentence' (86). N0lke makes a distinction between three aspects of the notion of focus: syntagmatic (concerning the extension of a focus), paradigmatic (concerning what the focus contrasts with), and intentional (concerning the intention lying behind the focalization). He also distinguishes different kinds of focus, such as neutral and specialized. He argues for a multilevel approach to problems of information structure, characterizing the latter as a 'cocktail' (102f) rather than a dichotomous givennew configuration. Although it does not become entirely clear what the ingredients of the cocktail are and what determines their use, N0lke...

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