In the preface to this book, Laurie Bauer (henceforth B) states that ‘it is a book which the tertiary student of linguistics will need at hand for continual reference while they are studying’ (vii). In this review, I will attempt to evaluate the extent to which I believe this goal has been attained. Anticipating my discussion, I believe that this book will fill a void that has existed in the study materials available to students of linguistics, and I expect a second edition to be published which will fill in some of the gaps still remaining, after feedback from students and reviewers.

In this review I give an outline of the book, including comments on the style and layout, followed by a necessarily selective discussion of the benefits and potential problems for students in using it, including mention of some improvements that I think should be included in a second edition. I finish with a brief conclusion. My comments are addressed to linguists working on Nordic languages, and will primarily be of interest to this group of people. In addition, given the British and American English-oriented selection of examples in the book, I offer some commentary from the viewpoint of Australian English.

The book is divided into six parts, covering three distinct types of information. Part I (chapters 1–15) contains useful background information that students will encounter throughout their degree, but that might be only briefly mentioned in class as ‘assumed knowledge’ or that might be assumed in one class to be covered in another class. The chapters in this part include among others ‘The Saussurean dichotomies’, ‘Chomsky's influence’, ‘Trees’ and ‘The data of linguistics’. Parts II–V (chapters 16–35) cover aspects of being a student of linguistics engaged in reading, conducting and writing up academic work. These chapters cover topics such as ‘Notation and terminology’, including a list of common abbreviations; ‘Reading linguistics’, including a useful chapter on the pronunciation of some linguists’ names and their sex; ‘Writing and presenting linguistics’, including how to spell some commonly-used terms; and ‘Bibliographies’. The final part of the book (part VI) contains a language file, with brief linguistic and sociolinguistic information on 280 languages.

The book is arranged logically and neatly. The short chapters mean that it takes very little time to find the information one is looking for, which is a bonus for students who will probably need to refer back to what they have read in the handbook more than once. The style is informative and clear, and reads as one expects of a manual, rather than a textbook or research article. I find B's writing style very clear and very concise, to the point that the sentences flow in a lovely manner through the paragraphs, and the book is generally very enjoyable to read or browse through.

Given that this book is meant as a look-up resource, it is a little frustrating that page numbers are hidden on the insides of each page near the binding, with only the outside edge of each odd-numbered page showing the chapter title. This makes the usual method of finding a topic by using the table of contents to find the page number, then flicking through to that page number, very difficult. It also makes it difficult to flick back and forth in search of a particular chapter, since the chapter name appears only on odd-numbered pages. Since page numbers do not take up much space, I wonder whether, in a subsequent edition, both the page number and the chapter heading might appear on the outside edge of both odd- and even-numbered pages.

There are very clear benefits to students in owning and reading this manual, although there are also some potential problems too. The very first sentence of the text throws down a challenge to the student, at least to the thinking student: ‘Because we have a word language, we assume that there must be some corresponding entity for the word to denote’ (1). The rest of this chapter outlines some of the problems with the term language, and could foreseeably prompt discussion by the student, either in class or with friends, and I think is a clever way to open such a book. It sets up the role of the book – not as that of providing answers to all possible questions about linguistics, but rather as that of raising awareness of the fundamental questions linguists face, and showing how these questions could be responded to, even when no perfect answer exists.

The question of whether or not linguistics is a science is raised in chapter 3, ‘Linguistics’. To my mind, a useful response is given here, namely a description of the way in which linguistics must be approached in order for it to be ‘scientific’. This involves ‘careful observation of the relevant real-world phenomena, classification of those phenomena, and the search for useful patterns in the phenomena observed and classified’ (17). B further defines an ‘advanced’ version of this, which involves ‘seeking explanations for the phenomena of language and building theories which will help explain why observed phenomena occur while phenomena which are not observed will not occur’ (17). Both of these explanations will be useful for the student, as they also describe the approach that the student should take in their own work as a budding linguist, and the kinds of results they should endeavour to achieve. An understanding of what linguistics is is essential for the student in helping to define their own object of learning. However, this descriptive approach to linguistics does not always appear to be clearly adhered to throughout the handbook, something which I think is its greatest weakness.

For example on page 49, B states that, while ‘it would be preposterous to deny the value of the variationist programme’, Chomsky's idea that linguists study the grammatical system of the ‘ideal speaker-listener’ is generally followed. Thus, according to B, a lexicographer who attempted to include anenome in the dictionary ‘on the grounds that many people are heard to say that’ would be ‘mocked’, since the real word is actually anemone. According to B, just because some people regularly or occasionally mispronounce a word does not make it part of the language, which is a valid point. However, I think this is an unfortunate choice of example, for two reasons. Firstly, I have only ever heard the first (apparently ‘incorrect’) version, while the second (apparently ‘proper’) version sounds to me completely ridiculous. I note that Wikipedia calls anenome ‘a common misspelling and mispronunciation of anemone’, in agreement with B. However Wikipedia's reference given for this ‘mispronunciation’ also states that Australians (and the English, apparently) consistently use anenome. My quick survey of a score of friends and family has turned up only one Australian who uses the ‘correct’ form, but several non-Australians who do. Thus, B appears to be saying that all Australians use the incorrect form of this word, something that I strenuously object to.

The second, and somewhat more serious problem with this example is that it seems at this point that B's goal is to provide a prescriptive rule as to the pronunciation of this word. This is unfortunate, as it gives the student the impression that linguists study ‘correct’ English. As a teacher, it is difficult enough teaching students (at least native English speakers) that how they and their friends speak is a fine object of study, and that we do not wish to either a) investigate how well they learned ‘grammar’ at school, nor b) tell them how to speak (although we do wish them to acquire different styles of speech and writing!). Thus, even though B states that modern linguistics is a descriptive discipline, he does not seem to be applying that approach here. But there are certainly some interesting issues here – when do lexicographers want to accept mispronounciation or embiggened as words,Footnote ¹ and when are they merely speech errors or idiosyncratic expressions? And just where do the limits of ‘Standard English’ lie?

B states later that linguists view ‘a language like German [as] being made up of such agreement as there is between those people who believe that they are speaking and listening to German’ (192). This seems to contradict his earlier statement that a lexicographer should not include anenome in the dictionary, and that neither should a syntactician include an account of How come is the Wellington gas twice the price of the Hutt Valley's? In fact, I have trouble understanding B's point with the syntactic example here. The sentence How come is the Wellington gas twice the price of the Hutt Valley's? is a perfectly acceptable sentence in Australian English (based on my own intuitions and those of my aforementioned family and friends), and, as such, a grammar of English should be able to generate it.Footnote ² I know that my mother objects to me saying ‘how come’ instead of ‘why’, but I fail to see why B says that syntacticians would not be interested in it.

Chapter 9, ‘Form and function’, is a little confusing. It seems to be a discussion of word classes and the difficulty of defining the term adjective. This is based on the observation that the ‘obvious set of words’ which can occur in the frame the __ bracelet is that of adjectives, although nouns referring to materials such as copper, amber, etc. also appear here (59). Thus, the difference between the form of the adjective and the function of the pre-modifier is blurred here. The idea of function is stated in terms of the grammatical functions of subject and object, using examples including The mouse ran away, I've caught the mouse, I gave the mouse a piece of cheese (58), but the forms given are prepositional phrases e.g. in the park, noun phrases e.g. red onions, adjective phrases e.g. extremely unusual and the verb form run (57). It would seem to me to be clearer to state explicitly that, for example, give and given are ‘different forms’ of the same word, as are mouse and mice, (in keeping with the examples given above). Furthermore, while examples are given of the same form having different grammatical functions (ie, the mouse can be both a subject and an object), no examples are given of the reverse. So, for example, it should be shown that, in English, the same verb form is used in all persons and numbers except for the third person singular. Thus, different forms may have the same function and the same form may have different functions.

The final chapter of part I, ‘The data of linguistics’ offers an interesting viewpoint, when B states that ‘dictionaries given [typo: ‘give’] no direct information on word frequency’ (83). However, while this is certainly true of many dictionaries, the Collins Cobuild dictionaries stand out with their method of indicating the most frequently used words in English with 1–3 diamonds, as based on actual usage. In addition, given that most students nowadays know how to use Google (and apparently some use other search engines too), accessing word frequencies does not require special skills or methods. Using B's examples of fiacre and fiancé, the relative frequency of these expressions is given indirectly, through the numbers of pages containing each word (fiacre returns around 800,000 hits, and fiancé an order of magnitude greater, at over 10 million). Even using the define: function in Google returns only two dictionary definitions for fiacre and six definitions for fiancé. This gives another indication of the relative frequency of the words. Thus, word frequency information is easily available, even if B is correct in stating that it is somewhat indirect.

Concerning the use of naturally-occurring data, the existence of ready-made corpora eliminates, or at least minimises, the need for linguists to compile their own collections. This in turn lessens the difficulties of data collection as expressed by B on page 85, such as the time-consuming nature of transcribing spoken data, the need for large amounts of data to investigate rare linguistic phenomena, dealing with ethical and legal matters, etc. Ready-made corpora include Scandinavian corpora, some of which are already freely available (to researchers) online (e.g. http://uit.no/scandiasyn, or direct access to the Norwegian corpora at http://www.tekstlab.uio.no/nota/oslo/, the Swedish corpus at http://www.ling.gu.se/projekt/tal/index.cgi? PAGE=3&SUBPAGE=4 and so on), and which provide instant access to natural conversational data, with easily searchable transcriptions and accompanying video. The International Corpus of English (http://www.ucl.ac.uk/english-usage/ice/) and many other linguistic corpora provide much data in an instantly usable format. Thus, I think that B's concern with the difficulties of naturally-occurring data collection, while valid, may be too negative towards this kind of data, and his mentions of electronic corpora (e.g. pages 86–87 of ‘standard corpora’ including ‘most newspapers’ and ‘the world-wide web’) are a little too brief.

On page 92, B comments that some linguistic experiments demand ‘sophisticated technical equipment’, which he says is a disadvantage to conducting experiments. However, this ignores the fact that many students nowadays have ready access to much ‘sophisticated technical equipment’, including recording equipment, digital playback, and digital analysis software. The free tools Audacity (http://audacity.sourceforge.net/; for recording, converting, playing and doing basic waveform and spectrographic analysis of sound files) and Transcriber (http://sourceforge.net/projects/trans/; for transcribing and playing sound and video files) are very simple to use, and Praat (http://www.fon.hum.uva.nl/praat/; for phonetic analysis), while more complicated, is also freely available.

In parts II–V, B very helpfully covers terminological issues in some detail, with a chapter each on ‘Notational conventions’ (chapter 16), ‘Frequent abbreviations’ (chapter 17), ambiguous terminology (chapter 18) and synonymous terminology (chapter 19). These chapters are generally in the form of tables, which present the material very concisely and simply, but there are small omissions throughout that could easily be filled in. In chapter 16, on notation, table 16.1 seems to be missing a couple of frequent ‘single character notations’, namely phi φ, which is commonly used in syntax for person, number, gender features, and lower-case sigma σ, which commonly represents semantics. The single full-stop in discourse transcriptions to indicate an intonational phrase boundary is also omitted.

I particularly like chapter 18, ‘Terminology: Ambiguity’. Many of the disambiguations will be useful for the student, such as that of expletive, which is defined as both ‘pragmatics: a swear-word’ and ‘syntax: an element seen as carrying no meaning, a dummy word’ (110). However, there is the problem of the text contradicting what students learn in class. In the study of semantics, most first-years will learn how fundamentally unsatisfactory circular definitions are, as Wierzbicka (Reference Wierzbicka1972) famously pointed out. Thus, B's definition (or ‘disambiguation’) of the term inflection as ‘morphology: an inflectional affix’ (constrasting with ‘phonetics: an intonation pattern’ and ‘morphology: one of the major branches of morphology’) (111) seems to fall foul of this observation, which students will likely notice. Some reference to an opposition with derivational affixes, along with a comment like ‘such as verbal person markers and nominal case markers’ would give the student more useful information.

Also in this chapter, the syntactic definition of free as ‘syntax: of a pronoun, not bound in its construction’ (110) is more usually phrased as ‘not bound in its domain’, which to me sounds clearer. Alternatively, the term ‘clause’ or ‘phrasal constituent’, or similar might be clearer. (The other definitions of free include ‘morphology: of a morph, with the potential to stand alone as a word form’, ‘phonology: of stress, not constrained so as to fall on a particular syllable in the word’, ‘syntax: of word order, in which the order of elements is determined by pragmatic and stylistic factors rather than by strictly grammatical ones’, and ‘translation: determined by the requirements of the target language, rather than sticking literally to the source language’. The conciseness and clarity of the definitions generally makes the few I note here more visible.)

Finally in this chapter, I would add a syntactic definition for blocking (in addition to the morphological and psycholinguistic ones given, on page 108), to include ‘syntax: a blocking node in a phrase structure tree does not permit movement, checking or coreference through it’. (The definition of ‘double articulation’ is given as ‘duality of structure’, but the linguistic field for this definition is omitted.)

Chapter 19, ‘Terminology: Synonymy’, contains a useful table of synonymous terms, such as Aryan and Indo-European; baby-talk, caregiver language, child-directed speech and motherese; and Grimm's Law and the First Germanic Consonant Shift. Some terms are marked as obsolete (such as Aryan), although the opposite information (i.e. highly frequent) is not marked, presumably because all of the terms are in fact quite common (as can be seen from the list given above). I would like to see the triplet anaphor, pronoun, pronominal reflexive included here, since these are used as synonyms by some linguists in at least some contexts, and with distinct meanings by others.

In chapter 23, ‘Letters, accents and diacritics’, which helpfully gives names to the most commonly occurring non-English characters, B notes that ß is called ‘Eszett’ and ‘beta-ess’, but omits ‘schafes-ess’. B also describes the letter æ as ‘a vowel intermediate between <a> and <e>. Used thus in Old English, Danish, Norwegian and Icelandic’ (141). While this is true for Danish, Norwegian and Old English, modern Icelandic probably should not be in this list, since this vowel is a diphthong in Icelandic, which can have a open central-backish onset and a very high front off-glide. Also in this chapter, ø (‘slashed o’) is described as being ‘used for a front rounded vowel, e.g. in Danish’ (141), without its use in syntax to refer to an empty word slot or to represent a morpheme which has no phonetic content being mentioned. These omissions should be corrected in a second edition. Finally, a pronunciation key for Ȝ, ȝ (capital and small) yogh would be useful here.

In the very useful chapter 25, on linguists’ names (and their sexes), there is a footnote explaining that there are two ways of pronouncing Labov, following the American and British ‘traditions’ (149, fn. 3), as either /ləˈbəʊv/ or /ləˈbɒf/. I would like to add a third variant, /ləˈbɒv/, which follows the traditional Australian phonological rules, which pronounces the name with a short vowel followed by a voiced fricative, which is a combination of the American and British variants. Since the British variant is acceptable, and the Australian pronunciation is closer to the American than the British, I presume that this is an acceptable variant as well. Also, Randy LaPolla does accept a short vowel in the middle of his surname, as it is pronounced in Australian English: /laˈpɒla/ (provided the following /l/ is also short! – Randy LaPolla, p.c.), as well as the version given by B with a diphthong: /laˈpoʊla/.

Chapter 26, ‘Laws and principles’, in which many frequently-cited statements about linguistic phenomena are gathered, is an excellent idea. It includes statements of such fundamentals as Binding Theory, the Empty Category Principle (ECP), Grimm's Law, the semantic Is-a [kind of] Condition, the Obligatory Contour Principle (OCP), and Ockham's Razor, among the 39 conditions, constraints, hypotheses, principles and laws (including six additional synonymous expressions, such as the Linguistic Relativity principle, which refers the reader to the definition under Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) covered in this chapter, spanning many different areas of linguistics. I am unsure how many students would understand the formulation of the Elsewhere Condition as it is presented in Kiparsky (Reference Kiparsky, Anderson and Kiparsky1973:94) but B very usefully gives a plain-English clarification, in the words of Anderson (Reference Anderson1992:12): ‘Application of a more specific rule blocks that of a more general one’. However, the omission in this chapter of Grice's Maxims is a little surprising, and, while a full paragraph is given to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, no hint is given of the ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ versions of this hypothesis.

In chapter 29, ‘Essay writing’, along with general essay-writing tips, a particularly helpful pointer is given (183) to the sil.org website for downloading free linguistic fonts, which currently includes the unicode-based (and thus ‘universal’) IPA font Doulos SIL, as well as fonts for Greek, Hebrew, Burmese, African Vai and other languages. Another site is suggested for fonts for Mac users (even though the sil.org website also provides Mac fonts). Chapter 30, on glossing, gives very clear guidelines on how to write (and read) linguistic examples, although B uses the symbol · instead of the more usual. to join words/morphs together.

I particularly like chapter 33, on spelling, and was pleased to see complementary in the list, as the collocation complimentary distribution, frequently found in students’ writing, is a personal pet peeve. Vocal cords is another pleasing inclusion in an altogether rather short list. This should please teachers of phonetics who are frequently confronted with the collocation vocal chords, which, as with complimentary distribution, also verges on the malapropistic.

The rationale presented at the beginning of chapter 34, ‘Citation etiquette’, is very clear, explaining the difference between using someone else's words or ideas when the reader or hearer can be expected to ‘get’ the reference, and giving an exact citation when the reader might not be able to locate the source themselves. However, the subsequent chapter 35, ‘Reference lists’, strikingly omits any reference to bibliographic software such as EndNote or Biblioscape. Given the difficulties most students have with correctly providing a reference list, this is a rather serious omission; especially since EndNote is often made freely available by universities for students’ use (especially post-graduates). In addition, a light-weight bibliographic tool such as BiblioExpress (biblioscape.com), designed specifically for students, is available freely. These (and other) tools make most of the job of including a list of references in an essay trivial. Nonetheless, the coverage given in this chapter as to what a reference list should look like will be extremely useful for all students. This chapter also includes a list of Latin abbreviations that students may encounter, such as ibid. and loc. cit. (207).

Part VI of the handbook contains the Language File. Scanning through the list of 280 languages included reveals that most of the languages that university students are likely to encounter in their lectures and textbooks are included in this file. A very brief, tabulated overview of each language is given, including the language family, where the language is spoken, approximate number of speakers, the writing system, some phonological, morphological and syntactic features, some ‘points of interest’ (although not all languages have one), and a couple of references to lead students on to further investigation. These language overviews provide students with some basic information about languages without being overwhelming.

The information given on each language is necessarily very brief and, at least for the languages I can check, is occasionally outdated or even inaccurate. For example, the entry for Icelandic gives an outdated spelling of the Icelandic autonym using z instead of s, and omits the accent on the first letter, thus ‘izlenska’ instead of ‘íslenska’ is given for ‘Icelandic’.

The entry for Norwegian is refreshingly complete for a non-Scandinavian source, in terms of mentioning both official forms/languages, nynorsk and bokmål, although it makes no reference to the multitude of dialects. This means that Norwegian is said to ‘[contain] following rare consonant types: retroflex’ (315) implying that all dialects have this feature, something that is obviously not true, in particular those western and southern dialects which have a velar or uvular /r/. In contrast, the entry for English states that there are said to be ‘approx. 20 [vowels] including diphthongs, depending on variety’ (259), so the indication of variation is not fully consistent or rigorous. To be fair, B cautions the reader about this in the introduction to the Language File, advising the reader that ‘where any particular piece of information becomes crucial in the testing of some hypothesis it is suggested that it should be thoroughly rechecked’ (222).

Stress is said to be word-initial in Norwegian (315), although this is not true for many loan-words, while it is generally true of loan-words in Icelandic. That the Scandinavian languages have affixal definiteness is not mentioned in the descriptions of Icelandic, Norwegian, Danish, Faroese or Swedish, something which I consider one of the more interesting features of these languages. Faroese is said to have infixes generally (262), which is inaccurate according to the Faroese Overview and Reference Grammar (Thráinsson et al., Reference Thráinsson, Petersen, Jacobsen and Hansen2004), where ‘suffixation’ and ‘prefixation’ are indexed and in the table of contents, but ‘infixation’ is not. Finally, the Scandinavian languages are classified as ‘Indo-European – Germanic’, following the two-tiered system of classifying language families. I think that, where the information is available, as is the case with the Scandinavian languages, an extra tier of classification should be included in the next edition.

Lastly, there is the small issue of the choice of transcription symbols. In the ‘Abbreviations and conventions used in the text’, the word comma is given as an example of a word containing a schwa. However, in Australian English, when this word is pronounced in isolation, the final vowel in this word is quite open, and would not be considered a schwa. Furthermore, I would expect this same problem for Scandinavian students, given that this word is pronounced with a rather open vowel in most, if not all, varieties of Scandinavian. For such a handbook, with a wide intended audience, it would be helpful to choose a word that contains a schwa in more than just Standard British English, such as the usual examples of the first vowel in ‘about’ or ‘above’, or the vowel in ‘the’ in an expression such as ‘the herd’.

In conclusion, I will be strongly recommending this book to students, and I am sorry it did not exist when I was a student. However, I believe that the second edition (and I am fairly sure there will be one, given the usefulness of such a text) will be a better reference. Parts II–V alone contain material that every student needs to know, while the first 15 chapters (comprising part I) could almost form the basis for an end-of-undergraduate-course test of basic knowledge. I have yet to refer to this book in the classroom, but I am very pleased that it exists, and I expect it to be a useful addition to every linguistics student's bookshelf.