Although the topic is little words, the scope of this book is quite large. It is a collection of 19 papers from the 2007 Georgetown University Round Table on Language and Linguistics, a conference devoted to the examination of little words (from determiners to clitics to discourse markers, among others). Eleven languages are considered from a range of theoretical perspectives. The book is organized into six sections that correspond to the linguistic subdisciplines named in the subtitle, with two chapters on history, two on phonology, five on syntax, three on semantics, three on pragmatics, and four on acquisition.

The breadth of topics of inquiry is impressive—from language evolution and the potential origins of complex syntax to the careful analysis of surface realizations of auxiliaries by French-speaking children. Although only two chapters are devoted to SLA, readers who engage in SLA research will likely find other chapters at least tangentially relevant to their own work.

Both SLA chapters investigate Spanish instruction. Focusing on differential object marking, Bowles and Montrul examine the effectiveness of online training modules that offer explicit explanations and opportunities for practice with corrective feedback. De la Fuente compares the effects of explicit versus implicit tasks on learners’ noticing and acquisition of discourse markers.

A major shortcoming of the volume is the length of chapters. With each contribution limited to approximately 10 pages, the authors are restricted in what they report and discuss. Chapters feel like summaries, and readers may finish the book with a desire to know more about the individual studies. Of course, brevity may also be considered a strong point. Because the authors succinctly present the main points of their work, the book would serve well as a source for assigned readings in a survey course of linguistics or applied linguistics.