Second language acquisition and linguistic variation Ed. by Robert Bayley and Dennis R. Preston (review)

434 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 2 ( 1998) guage in 17th-century England. Amsterdam: Benjamins .) Both are excellent, andthe latest is particularly welcome since, as K notes, many of the essays were published in places difficult to access. As editor, K might have adjusted cross-references among the essays in the volume (rather than leaving them to direct readers to the original places of publication), but the two indices (personal names; subjects, terms, and languages) are a distinct help. S's range as a historian of linguistics and linguistic ideas is breathtaking, and her subjects range from Anglo-Dutch linguistic scholarship to the Irish and Algonquian languages. She demonstrates clearly that good linguistic studies were being carried out in early modern England and that some scholars who went abroad to describe languages were imaginative in coping with the unfamiliar (most especially, perhaps, Thomas Harriot who made himself 'fairly fluent' in Algonquian). As in her earlier essays, S discusses seventeenth-century attempts to design a universal, translmguistic 'real character' m which could be discussed reliable 'things' without regard to fallible 'words'. Only at the end of the century, as she shows, did the idea dawn 'that the whole enterprise, however idealistic, was a sheer absurdity' (110). Implicitly, S shows how much is not readily accessible to the linguistic historian. Thus, to demonstrate the good results of Bathsua Makin's teaching, she describes unpublished letters (both in the British Library ) written by two royal princesses who were Makin's pupils. One Nathaniel Chamberlain, a Dublin physician, wrote a 'quite comprehensive' book on the universal character which, though known by title, was presumed lost; 'all trace of it disappeared until recently' when a copy was discovered in an Irish library (110). Harriot's phonetic alphabet for Algonquian emerged 'when Christopher Stray, looking for something totally unconnected with Harriot, found it in the library of Westminster School, and sent a copy to the present author' (151) who first described it in 1992. Many readers will be interested in the treatment of women and of women scholars. The early modern period was not a good time for women even in the reign of Elizabeth I, and in 1543 an act limited 'the reading aloud of the Bible to nobles, gentlemen and merchant householders Gentlewomen might read the Bible quietly to themselves, but artisans, apprentices and other working people were forbidden to read it at all' (87). Hence the biographical sketch of Bathsua Makin (1600-?1673) is particularly interesting because she, in her outline of education, declared women 'nothing inferior to . . . men' (253). And Makin proved this proposition by having, according to a pupil in her father's school, 'an exact knowledge in the Greek, Latin, and French tongues, with some insight also into the Hebrew and Syriac' (242). She was 'a pioneer linguist and feminist' (239). S's account is deeply informed and a good read. [Richard W. Bailey, University of Michigan.] Second language acquisition and linguistic variation. Ed. by Robert Bayley and Dennis R. Preston. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins , 1996. Pp. xvii, 317. Researchers in second language acquisition (SLA) are well aware that individual learners' outputs are characterized by variation. Explanations for that variation have included first language background, attention, planning time, interlocutor identity, and so on. Yet attempts to tease out the relative importance of these factors statistically, by means of multivariable analysis, are relatively rare. The goal of this volume is to counter that neglect and to encourage SLA researchers to make use of statistical tools developed by sociolinguists, specifically the VARBRUL program. 'Variationist perspectives on second language acquisition ' (1-45). by Dennis Preston, situates these studies within the history of studies of variation and of second language learning, arguing that 'the source of variation is [usually] linguistic, not demographic or stylistic' Each subsequent paper in the volume uses multivariable analysis to test this claim, analyzing classic problems in second language learning. James Emil Fleoe, Murray J. Munro, and Ian R A. Mackay, for example, find age is a significant factor in pronunciation for Italian-born immigrants to Canada in 'Factors affecting the production of wordinitial consonants in a second language' (47-73). Roy C Major ( 'Markedness in second language acquisition of consonant...