"Drop me a fax, will you?": A study of written business communication By Leena Louhiala-Salminen (review)

Abstract

BOOK NOTICES 897 research with women reported for child abuse. She outlines the legal, ethical, and moral implications of state mandated reporting of child abusers. Edna Lomsky-Feder (Ch. 16, ? woman studies war', 232-44) describes her personal and gender struggles as a female Israeli researcher interviewing male Israeli soldiers. Part V concludes this volume with two chapters on the conceptualization of ethics and its integration with narrative. The chapter by George Rosenwald ('Making whole', 245-74) critiques 'the mainstream ' of narrative ethics, while Guy Widdershoven and Marie-Josee Smits (Ch. 18, 'Ethics and narratives', 275-88) examine the parallels and overlaps between the studies of narrative and ethics from an ethicist's perspective. In summary, this volume could be a useful addition to any course on narrative or discourse analysis as well as a course on qualitative research methods. It is valuable as well as enjoyable for any individual interested in narrative and life history. [Pamela A. Saunders, University of Kansas.] Bantu phonology and morphology. Ed. by Francis Katamba. Munich & Newcastle : Lincom Europa, 1995. Pp. v, 111. The Bantu languages have provided a rich source of data for the development and evolution of formal linguistic theory, primanly in the area of phonology but increasingly in other areas as well. The editor has collected here a set of articles on the importance of Bantu for these enterprises. This rather slim book contains five articles mostly on the formal-theoretical side of Bantu grammar and a sixth article describing the phonological features of a single word class. This last, 'Chitumbuka ideophones' (Lupenga Mphande & Curtis Rice, 93-9), richly illustrates how tone, nasality, phonological phrasing, and vowel length uniquely characterize the word class known as 'ideophones ', a highly expressive word class with members roughly comparable to phonologically odd English adverbs such as lickety-split. The basic theme of the rest of the papers is how phonology interacts with the morphology and syntax, chiefly in determining the domains of rule application. The first article in the volume, 'Tone shift, accent and domains in Bantu: The case of Chichewa' by Al Mtenje (1-27), deals with tone. Mtenje finds no need for an accentual analysis in Chichewa, a common approach in related languages, questions the universality of association conventions, and details the domains of rule application in the language. The second article, 'The metrical domain of tone raising in Jita' by Laura Downing (28-39), similarly considers domains, looking at register raising in yes-no questions. Downing contrasts formal treatments of a process that raises the register in yes-no question formation up to the penultimate high tone but only if there is a high tone in the statement form of the question. David Odden ('Phonology at the phrasal level in Bantu', 40-68) considers the phonologysyntax interface more generally in Bantu to look at phonological phrasing, a recurrent issue in these papers . With wide exemplification Odden demonstrates many of the ways in which quantity and tonal rules are sensitive to syntactic structure. The following article ("The phonological word in Shona', 69-92) by Scott Myers further considers the topic, contrasting the phonological word with other syntactic constituents and noting the lack of isomorphism between the two in Shona. The last article, by Ngessimo M. Mutaka (100-11), also considers the domains of rule application, arguing that the facts of Kinande require that some morphemes be 'prosodically circumscribed ' or invisible to rules in whose domains they would otherwise be expected to appear. Readers should be forewarned there are some irritating editorial oversights (the first one to strike the reader is the misspelling of an author's name in the table of contents, and there are others, e.g. a sentence on page 105 that does not continue on page 106), and the book is not made to last. [G. Tucker Childs, Portland State University.] "Drop me a fax, will you?": A study of written business communication. By Leena Louhiala-Salminen. Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä, 1995. Pp. 115. This book is the result of Louhiala-Salminen' s licentiate study and as such is presented in familiar thesis format, beginning with discussion of earlier studies and proceeding to its theoretical frame of reference , methodology...