This book is the second volume of “The collected works of Ruqaiya Hasan,” edited by Jonathan Webster. It is focused on exploring the possibility of an integrated sociolinguistics and investigating the mutual relationship between society and language by analyzing semantic variation in daily conversation. The book is composed of twelve papers divided into four parts. Part 1 investigates the need for an integrated sociolinguistics and defines semantic and sociolinguistic variation, which can reveal the interaction between language and society and how language shapes society. All four papers in Part 2 contribute to a sociolinguistic exploration of speech acts like questions and answers in naturally occurring dyads of mothers and children. Following the Labovian tradition of variation analysis and Halliday's systemic functional linguistics, through analyzing mother-child dyads it is shown that semantic variation is an important sociolinguistic phenomenon and “speakers' semantic choices co-vary with some significant social circumstance of their location in society” (116). In Part 3, the author discusses the limitations of Labov's description of sociolinguistics and the defects in present sociolinguistic theory having to do with its failure to provide an explanation for semantic variation. On the basis of detailed semantic analysis of mother-child dyads, Hasan examines the reasoning employed by mothers when talking to their children and makes a systematic account of the reasoning structure and a system network of choices available to speakers in the process of reasoning. The four papers in Part 4 are concerned with various elements of meaning, including context, social factors, tenor, and ideology. The author believes that communication is the act of meaning characterized by intersubjectivity, and there exists a co-genetic relation between context and linguistic meaning. Social factors like gender and social class influence a speaker's semantic choices and therefore lead to semantic variation. Hasan also argues that language plays a crucial role in the process of children's learning, as adults define young children's world in the words they encounter in early life.

The author critiques current sociolinguistics, holding that the ignorance of meaning in sociolinguistics brings about some serious problems. Almost all of the chapters show readers a way of doing empirical research on mother-child conversations, explore how systematic semantic variation occurs across different social groups and genders, and illustrate that mothers and children have different styles of meaning that are closely related to their social status and the children's gender. In general, the book makes a significant contribution to sociolinguistic theory, especially addressing the need for an integrated sociolinguistics. Thus, it is highly recommended for those with research interests in sociolinguistics, semantics, discourse analysis, and systemic functional linguistics.