Particles of the modal particle type—also referred to as flavoring, toning, or discourse particles—are a phenomenon in the West-Germanic languages that is well known for its descriptive complexity and its considerable demands on second language (L2) learners. High among the descriptive challenges ranks the fact that these particles cannot be adequately captured by structurally oriented theories of language because they cross syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and discursive domains and nonuniquely express assumptions, intentions, judgments, and affective stances among the partners in communication. Along with real and imagined co-texts, these are highly contextualized and interpreted aspects of the languaging event. High among their acquisitional challenges ranks the fact that, in addition to their culturally and interpersonally situated and dialogic nature, they are formally ambiguous because all belong to other functional classes with divergent distributional and meaning characteristics. Small wonder that their competent use serves as a strong indicator of advanced levels of L2 ability. Small wonder, too, that researchers and instructors of German continue to explore more effective approaches to describing and teaching them.

In this high-stakes environment, Möllering's volume on the acquisition of German modal particles advances the claim that corpus linguistics, with its capacity to provide and analyze large amounts of representative data in an appropriately contextualized and targeted fashion, can both enhance descriptive adequacy and foster learning and teaching. She endeavors to substantiate this position in five chapters and a nearly perfunctory conclusion. In the course of the volume, the author presents issues that arise in conjunction with the identification and functional description of German modal particles; explores their treatment in naturalistic and instructed L2 acquisition, including their treatment in three textbooks; and considers the consequences of applying a corpus-based perspective to particular data sources in a fashion that combines both quantitative (primarily frequency-driven) and qualitative (disambiguating and functionally oriented) analyses. Most important, Möllering offers an extensive treatment of the nine most high-frequency particles in her corpus of oral, personal language that is drawn from an existing corpus of transcribed telephone conversations: the particles ja, auch, aber, mal, doch, schon, denn, nur, and eben.

The volume's chapters illustrate well the complexity of the issues at hand. Yet, ultimately, they deliver an unsatisfying treatment inasmuch as Möllering is unable to overcome the weight of much previous, essentially form-focused work: She extends unnecessary attention and credence to treatments of formally homonymical adverbs and conjunctions that—as she rightly states—really are not modal particles at all, but makes little use of the function and meaning-driven approach of Hallidayan systemic-functional linguistics, a theory of language that is clearly amenable to her interests and of which she provides a useful summary. Inasmuch as modal particles can be positioned between the social environment and the text—what Halliday calls the context of situation—they constitute a particularly rich resource for foregrounding aspects that the interactants choose as salient for their intended meaning-making in a particular communicative event. That yet-to-be-realized meaning potential is at the heart of the matter in analysis, teaching, and learning, and in language production or comprehension, the focus of Möllering's work. Thus, lengthy treatment of particles as time adverbials or conjunctions is not only analytically problematic, it is acquisitionally questionable. The targeted learners are long familiar with the temporal use of schon “already” or the conjunctive use of denn “because” or nur “only,” but have considerable difficulty construing those communicative contexts of situation that, for example, call for the use of denn in interrogatives as a way of establishing extralinguistically motivated cohesion. In the case of Warum denn das?, for example, surprise at a particular stance is signaled, which might be rendered as “So why that, of all things!” Also, the one-line excerpt common in corpus linguistic data presentation rarely provides information sufficient for construing the context of situation for analytical and pedagogical purposes. Reductions characteristic of oral production that pervade such transcriptions only add to the learners' difficulties. When worksheet activities for each of the language forms range from answering the obvious to matching previously provided categories to offering no more than nice discourse-oriented explanations of the data, then a projection that they should enhance L2 acquisition is more hopeful than real. If that reality is not subsequently ascertained in acquisitional data, then the reader is less convinced of the claims of the book and more reminded of the pervasive power of isolated forms over contextualized meanings that characterizes so much theorizing, research, and pedagogical practice.