This article presents an analysis and review of Ljiljana Progovac's "Negative and Positive Polarity: A Binding Approach" (1994). It concludes that by pushing a syntactic analysis of polarity to, if not beyond, its limits, Progovac has focused attention on the work that remains for any approach to polarity to resolve. Contains 59…

Examines "Grammaticalization" (P. J. Hopper and E. C. Traugott), a linguistics textbook that focuses on the establishment of grammaticalization as both a process and a topic. Argues that the significance of the work is that it offers a genuine attempt to explain linguistic change in terms of a realistic conception of what is actually…

Margaret Speas'"Phrase Structure in Natural Language" is reviewed. It presents three recent innovations in phrase structure research that offer new tools to explain data and solve old problems: the VP-internal subject hypothesis, the layered VP hypothesis, and the articulated IP hypothesis. (Contains 19 references.) (LB)

Maintains that language as humans now produce and comprehend evolved from languagelike precursors in the communication systems of nonhuman primates. The article reviews "Gesture and the Nature of Language" (GNL) (1995) and notes that GNL derives syntax incrementally without diluting it to an element not recognizable as a property of language. (37…

Discusses Victor Henry's innovative presentation of some underlying contradictions in the premises on which linguistics is founded, cast in the Kantian form of antinomies. The review argues that no science remains more strongly contested than linguistics, a science whose origins are paradoxical and that contains outdated concepts. (30 references)…

Reflections on Tobin's "Semiotics and Linguistics" and Shaumyan's "Semiotic Theory of Language" are offered. (23 references) (LB)

Monik Charette's "Condition on Phonological Government" is reviewed. It is the first book-length study written in the framework of Government Phonology (GP), a theory that makes a dramatic break with the classical generative approaches to phonology. (Contains 10 references.) (LB)

The purpose of this review article is to survey and evaluate existing books on quantitative/statistical research in applied linguistics. The article begins by explaining the types of texts that will not be reviewed, then it briefly describes nine books that address how to do quantitative/statistical applied linguistics research. The review then…

Three books are discussed: Andresen's "Linguistics in America 1769-1924: A Critical History," Crowley's "Politics of Discourse: The Standard Language Question in British Cultural Debates," and Crowley's "Standard English and the Politics of Language." (36 references) (LB)

Agrees with King's (1994) scenario of language emerging over a continuum with each step requiring an adaptive motivation. The article explores the major themes in King's work, including information donation and acquisition, gesture and information transmission, the evolution of social information transfer, the beginnings of language, and…

"Analysing Genre," by Vijay K. Bhatia, is a timely addition to the literature on genre analysis in English for specific purposes. It is divided into three parts: the first provides theoretical background; the second explains how genre analysis works in different academic and professional settings; and the third exemplifies the…

NaturalReader (http://www.naturalreaders.com/) is a new generation text reader, which means that it reads any machine readable text using synthesized speech without having to copy and paste the selected text into the NaturalReader application window. It installs a toolbar directly into all of the Microsoft Office[TM] programs and uses a mini-board…

Reviews a collection of articles written on Noam Chomsky. The collection consists of four volumes focusing on Linguistics, Philosophy, Anthropology, and Chomsky's impact on contemporary thought relative to disciplines influenced by generative grammar. (36 references) (CK)

Reviews Tesar and Smolensky's, "Learnability in Optimality Theory" (2000). Discusses the main tenets of the book as well as the different topics included in each chapter. (Author/VWL)

Reviews Gabrielle Maguire's book "Our Own Language: An Irish Initiative" and Joshua A. Fishman's "Reversing Language Shift: Theoretical and Empirical Foundations of Assistance to Threatened Languages." (seven references) (JP)