This addition to the admirable series of Blackwell Handbooks contains thirty-one articles of about twenty to twenty-five pages by a distinguished set of contributors. The chapters are grouped into five parts: (i) ‘Methodology’, (ii) ‘Syntax’, (iii) ‘Phonetics and phonology’, (iv) ‘Lexis and morphology’, and (v) ‘Variation, discourse, stylistics and usage’. This division of the field is noticeably conservative: part I introduces linguistic theories and discusses how to collect data for grammatical analysis; it is followed by a lot of syntax (ten chapters, nearly a third of the total), a smaller amount of phonology and morphology, and a tiny dose of lexical semantics. Everything else is in the final section, which might indeed have been entitled ‘Everything else’. One could defend this structure on the grounds that most readers of the book will consult a few chapters only, so that the sequence of topics is largely irrelevant. That is true, but the book also functions as a showcase for English linguistics, and as a map of the territory. University applicants may examine the book to see if this area suits them; zealous first-year undergraduates will consult it; and more advanced students will look for material that goes beyond the introductory textbooks. Perhaps, therefore, the book should have opened with a section called ‘English languages’, providing a general survey of English, where it comes from, who speaks it, its main varieties, and its place in the modern world. Some of the chapters that are currently in the last section could then have followed.

Presumably the editors decided instead to foreground and prioritise syntax in order to combat any preconception that ‘English linguistics’ means ‘Linguistics lite’, with its focus on ‘easy’ areas like variation, language in the media, or internet English. They may also have wanted to counteract the view that the widespread use of computer corpora in English language research makes this field more superficial and less intellectually challenging than theoretical linguistics. In their introduction, they are quick to stress the theoretical importance of the field, pointing out that ‘many general linguistic innovations can be traced to research on English’ (2). I have some sympathy with these concerns, but this book is aimed primarily at students, not fellow academics. It is hard to see the value of emphasising syntactic theory in a book of this kind, which will probably be used mostly by second-year students. The articles in the opening section on theory and methodology are almost entirely about grammar, giving the strong impression that this is the core of linguistics. As one among many possible alternatives, suppose that the chapter after the editors' introduction had been about prescriptive versus descriptive approaches to English. This would be an opportunity to problematise the guides to usage, spelling, punctuation, writing and grammar which fill the shelves in bookshops and abound on the internet. The Plain English Campaign and similar advocates for plain language could be analysed and evaluated, stressing the need for rigorous evidence that this kind of activity makes for better communication (compare the criticisms in Sless & Penman Reference Sless and Robyn2001). The use of Controlled English in professional contexts could be examined (cf. Wojcik Reference Wojcik and Keith2006), with detailed scrutiny of examples such as ASD (Aerospace and Defence Industries Association of Europe) Simplified Technical English, used widely in the aerospace industry (Userlab Inc. 2002, ASD 2007). This would be an excellent way to introduce many issues about the relationship between syntax and semantics. Chapters on spelling and punctuation could follow, and the introductory section could conclude with a survey of the literature on the semantics–pragmatics interface, an area of huge debate and major theoretical difficulty. My point is that the traditional emphasis on syntax is not the only possible way to organise a handbook on English linguistics and that a balance between attractive topics and more challenging theoretical ones can be achieved by various means.

Having begun with some critical remarks, let me now turn to the good things in this book, for they are many. The morphology chapters in part IV are excellent: Laurie Bauer's ‘Compounds and minor word-formation types’ and James P. Blevins’ ‘English inflection and derivation’ cover a wide range of issues with great clarity, and they are followed by a discussion of morphological productivity by Ingo Plag (‘Productivity’) which has just the right amount of challenge and rigour. The opening chapter in this section, ‘English words’ by Donka Minkova & Robert Stockwell, is a delightful survey of the size, structure and history of English vocabulary.

Part III contains four very good articles on phonetics and phonology, which similarly balance each other: the articles by Michael K. C. MacMahon (‘English phonetics’) and Francis Nolan (‘Intonation’) are more descriptive, while Ricardo Bermúdez-Otero & April McMahon's ‘English phonology and morphology’ gives an incisive introduction to Optimality Theory, and Michael Hammond's ‘Prosodic phonology’ argues lucidly for the notion of ‘foot’ in phonological analysis.

Most of the seven chapters in the final part are also of high quality. Bernd Kortmann's ‘Syntactic variation in English: A global perspective’ and Paul Foulkes’ ‘Phonological variation in English: A global perspective’ cover exactly what their titles suggest, and do it well. In ‘Gender and the English language’, Deborah Cameron deals carefully with gender as a social construct, gender-based variation in English usage, and how gender is represented in English, for example in pronouns and terms of address. Jim Miller's ‘Spoken and written English’ gives a useful summary of the differences between the two modes, and – like many of the contributors – provides enough unanswered questions to make a good starting point for students to plan research projects of their own in this area. In ‘The grammar of conversation’, Paulo Quaglio & Douglas Biber say explicitly (717) that they will concentrate on ‘typical grammatical characteristics of conversation’, rather than the traditional focus on ‘exchange structure and the overall organization of conversation’. This decision is amply justified by the resulting detailed discussion of grammatical features and their functions in spontaneous talk, which provides numerous cross-references to the corpora and analyses in the Longman grammar of spoken and written English (Biber et al. Reference Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad and Finegan1999). ‘Language and literature: Stylistics’ by Peter Stockwell is another good chapter, beginning with the key issues in the field and moving on to detailed analysis of a poem by Thomas Hardy and a range of excerpts from various novels.

Turning to the syntax section (part II), I was particularly impressed by the two papers which draw on The Cambridge grammar of the English language (Huddleston & Pullum et al. Reference Huddleston and Pullum2002). In ‘Clause types’, Peter Collins looks at the relation between the form and function of declaratives, interrogatives and so forth. He surveys the area expertly, and gives helpful pointers to unresolved issues and to areas where the Cambridge grammar departs from the traditional consensus. In the next chapter, on ‘Coordination and subordination’, Rodney Huddleston & Geoffrey K. Pullum are even more polemical, giving detailed arguments for proposals such as treating before in We left the meeting before the vote was taken as a head taking a clause complement rather than a subordinating conjunction. This is exactly the type of evidence-based argumentation which students need, and it is pitched at just the right level.

Other excellent chapters in this section are those by Robert I. Binnick (‘Aspect and aspectuality’), Ilse Depraetere & Susan Reed (‘Mood and modality in English’) and Betty J. Birner & Gregory Ward (‘Information structure’), each of them well-structured and clearly written summaries of complex subjects. In ‘Current changes in English syntax’, Christian Mair & Geoffrey Leech give an outstanding account of major changes to verbal and nominal constructions, such as the changing uses of progressive aspect and the decline of wh-relative pronouns. I can imagine many good student projects drawing on these chapters.

Among the less successful contributions in this volume are three surveys of reference works, each in a different section: Andrew Linn on ‘English grammar writing’ in part I, Julie Coleman on ‘Lexicography’ in part IV, and Pam Peters on ‘English usage: Prescription and description’ in part V. While including chapters on these topics was a good idea, each of them starts with a lengthy historical survey, leaving relatively little space for recent work. It would have been better to scrap the history and focus on some of the major decisions that face writers of grammars, dictionaries and usage guides. Macro-level issues about scope, intended readership and organisation could be followed by a comparison of how the same item is treated in different works of reference. Coleman does this by looking at how the meaning of the word dictionary has been treated in different dictionaries. Yet more along these lines would have been welcome, including a comparison of grammatical and phonetic information in different dictionaries. Linn has no detailed discussion of this kind at all, and Peters examines several cases to see whether prescriptive pressure has had an impact on actual usage, but does not compare different usage guides in any detail.

Other chapters in the handbook try to cover too much ground in the available space. In her chapter on ‘Lexical semantics’, Kate Kearns devotes the first eleven pages to semantic fields, lexical relations (antonymy, hyponymy, etc.), componential analysis, prototype theory, and thematic roles, with a very brief paragraph on Jackendoff's (Reference Jackendoff1990) theory of Conceptual Structure Representation. The final section on sense variation looks at criteria for deciding whether a word is polysemous. While this part of the chapter is less compressed than what came before, it could have benefited from greater exposition. Arguably it would have been a better use of the chapter if it focussed only on sense variation and excluded the other issues. A similar criticism could be made of the opening chapter, ‘Description and theory’ by Kersti Börjars, which races through Minimalism, Lexical-Functional Grammar and Optimality Theory. With only six example sentences, I think it will be hard for many readers to get much out of the discussion; and, as suggested above, one can imagine more attractive opening chapters.

Some of the syntax chapters suffer from too much theory for the likely readership. The contribution by Adele E. Goldberg & Devin Casenhiser on Construction Grammar, ‘English constructions’, could have surveyed some of the recent corpus-based and lexicographical work on multi-word expressions (cf. Cowie Reference Huddleston and Pullum1998, Stubbs Reference Stubbs2003). Instead we get a brief account of ‘constructionist approaches to syntax’, which does little more than list a large number of references. Two chapters allude mysteriously to the issue of whether tree diagrams should allow only binary branching: Bas Aarts & Liliane Haegeman on ‘English word classes and phrases’, and D. J. Allerton's ‘Verbs and their satellites’. In most other respects these chapters are fine, but here the shadow of generative grammar appears to hang over them, for no good reason that I can see.

Two chapters in the first section look at data sources for English linguistics. In ‘Data collection’, Charles F. Meyer & Gerald Nelson compare introspection, experimentation and corpus construction as methodologies, while Tony McEnery & Costas Gabrielatos (‘English corpus linguistics’) survey the construction, use and availability of various types of computer corpus. Both chapters limit themselves almost entirely to data for the investigation of grammar rather than other types of investigation. Some detailed examples of how to deal with authentic data in different types of investigation would have enriched both of them.

The least successful contribution is probably ‘Tense in English’ by Laura A. Michaelis. I was expecting an overview of time reference in English, with an indication of the main controversies such as the analysis of the present perfect or the status of will as a tense or a modal. Instead, most of the chapter is a summary of the author's work on ‘type shifting’ (cf. Michaelis Reference Michaelis2004), which argues that certain tenses coerce particular aspectual properties onto predicates. This work is surely too specialised for a book like this. Worse still, the chapter has barely begun when we encounter the assertion (221) that ‘there is reason to question whether tense “locates situations”’, the proposed alternative being that ‘tenses express the relationship between speech-time and another interval of interest, which Reichenbach (Reference Reichenbach1947) referred to as reference time (R)’ (emphasis in original). This notion is justified on the basis of examples like the following (ex. (1), 221):

1. (1) I took a cab back to the hotel.

2. (2) The cab driver was Latvian.

Assuming that a speaker says (1) followed by (2), Michaelis asks why the speaker of (2) has chosen the past tense, since presumably the cab driver is still Latvian now. She answers that for stative situations like the one in (2), the speaker is making a claim only for the reference time established in (1). Thus in (2), R is the time of the cab ride. The problem that is not addressed here (Michaelis returns to it on page 228) is why stative sentences like (2) keep the same R as the preceding sentence; whereas if (1) was followed by an event sentence like I read a chapter of my book and went to bed, R moves forward for each event. As it stands, the example merely shows that stative sentences have interesting discourse properties but does not serve as a clear justification for the notion of reference time.

Michaelis goes on to summarise the framework of tenses proposed in Hornstein (Reference Hornstein1990), complete with the ‘constraint on derived tense structures’ (CDTS). I worry firstly that this is too advanced for the book's likely readers, and secondly that Hornstein's justification of the notion of reference time is different enough from the one introduced by Michaelis to be confusing: Hornstein rests his case on complex tenses like the future perfect (1990: 12) which always involve a time given by the context – quite a different conception of reference time from one based on the discourse behaviour of statives. As for the CDTS, the way it forces changes in time reference has a tenuous similarity to the aspectual type-shifting that Michaelis discusses at length later in her chapter, but otherwise it is undoubtedly too abstract for an introductory survey of tense in English – as, indeed, is most of this chapter.

I have recently been reading the literature on prototype theory, and I was struck by the following statements, which occur in the chapters by Huddleston & Pullum and Michaelis:

While there are short summaries of prototype theory at two places elsewhere in the book, neither will help the average reader understand what the word ‘prototypical’ adds here. Kearns (565) outlines the classic work in this area by Rosch (cf. Rosch Reference Rosch, Eleanor and Barbara1978) and links it to mental categories and word meaning, but they are not at issue in these examples. Aarts & Haegeman (123) suggest that the syntactic behaviour of two words can be compared, leading to a decision that one is more prototypical than the other of the class of, say, verbs because it passes more of the tests for verbhood. In the two instances cited here, though, there is no suggestion of a set of tests for ‘prototypical coordination’ or ‘prototypical narrative’. The term ‘prototypical’ in these instances seems to mean nothing more than ‘simple’, and I fail to see the point of using it in this way.

In sum, most of the individual chapters in this book are excellent, with just a few that are less useful. The main weakness of the book as a whole is its emphasis on syntax. Some chapters on pragmatics, text analysis, and the place of English in the world would have been helpful, as well as chapters on other areas like spelling and punctuation, as suggested earlier. The book shows English linguistics as an area with plenty of intellectual weight, but it could have done more to make it look attractive to students.