The Handbook of Linguistics (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The handbook of linguistics ed. by Mark Aronoff, Janie Rees-Miller Susan Steele The handbook of linguistics. Ed. by Mark Aronoff and Janie Rees-Miller. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2001. Pp. xvi, 824. My generation of linguists came of age when much of our literature was unpublished papers, reproduced by mimeo or ditto; when thinking beyond syntax and phonology was an act of [End Page 177] imagination; and when some said that within six months or so of beginning training a linguist could be producing work on the field’s cutting edge. For these linguists of a certain age, The handbook of linguistics will underscore how things have changed. Designed to serve as a nontechnical ‘repository for what is known about language as we enter the twenty-first century’ (xiv)—and successful in its design—this volume should also cause members of the discipline to think about how far we have come and to reflect on the breadth and the depth of what is now known about human language. Each of the 32 chapters is intended to provide a free-standing description of the current state of our knowledge of one aspect of human language. However, the chapters are grouped by larger themes. Ten chapters cover the traditional core of linguistics, broadly construed, beginning with phonetics (by John Laver), phonology (by Abigail Cohn), morphology (by Andrew Spencer) and the lexicon (by D. A. Cruse), and concluding with semantics (by Shalom Lapin) and pragmatics (by Ruth Kempson). Because of the ‘dominance of syntactic research in linguistics over the last half century’ (xvi), syntax takes pride of place in this section, with four chapters devoted to it: ‘Syntax’ (by Mark C. Baker), ‘Generative grammar’ (by Thomas Wasow), ‘Functional linguistics’ (by Robert D. Van Valin, Jr.) and ‘Typology’ (by William Croft). Beginning with an introductory chapter (by Janie Rees-Miller), another seven address various aspects of applied linguistics: educational linguistics (by James Paul Gee), linguistics and reading (by Rebecca Treiman), clinical linguistics (by David Crystal), forensic linguistics (by Roger W. Shuy), translation (by Christoph Gutknecht), and language planning (by Frank Anshen). Six of the remaining fifteen chapters offer an interesting collection of overviews that ‘consider the origins of language as species-specific behavior [by Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy] and describe the raw material with which linguists work (languages of the world [by Bernard Comrie], historical linguistics [by Brian D. Joseph], and writing systems [by Peter T. Daniels]), frame the discipline within its historical context [by Lyle Campbell], and look at how linguists acquire new data from previously undescribed languages (field linguistics) [by Pamela Munro]’ (xv). Finally, there is a set of topical chapters, many covering linguistic areas that have come into existence only fairly recently: discourse analysis (by agnew Weiyun He), linguistics and literature (by Nigel Fabb), first and second language acquisition (by Brian Macwhinney and Vivian Cook respectively), multilingualism (by Suzanne Romaine), sign languages (by Wendy Sandler and Diane Lillo-Martin), sociolinguistics (by Florian Coulmas), neurolinguistics (by David Caplan), and computational linguistics (by Richard Sproat, Christer Samuelsson, Jennifer Chu-Carroll, and Bob Carpenter). As the editors intended, each chapter can indeed be read independent of the rest. But each of the organizational chunks—with the possible exception of the set of topical chapters—guides the reader in making connections among the chapters. And, clearly, the sum provides the comprehensive coverage that the volume’s title promises. While the chapters are of uniformly high quality, they vary a bit in their effectiveness. They can be quite good in handling chronic presentational problems, issues that we all struggle with in making our exposition clear even to other linguists. Wasow’s chapter on generative grammar, for example, is a model in making accessible the abstractions upon which...