BOOK NOTICES 223 in 'Generating explanatory discourse' (75-101), discusses the problem of interactively adapting explanatory discourse to the hearer, illustrating her points with a schema-based generator for describing the properties of electrical components . Kathleen McKeown et al. 's 'Natural language generation in COMET' (103-39) describes a schema-based system using a Functional Unification Grammar formalism to provide multimodal (text and graphics) instructions for equipment repair. The paper discusses collocational constraints and presents a solution based on computer-analyzed corpus data. A second section, dealing with linguistic realization , contains two papers. Gertjan van Noord's 'An overview of head-driven bottomup generation' (141-65) describes a phrasestructure based system in which top-down control is complemented by head-driven lexicallybased bottom-up information. The paper includes a simple DCG grammar of Dutch and sample output. Koenraad De Smedt, in 'An incremental parallel formulator' (167-92), argues that sentence generation is best accomplished in a piecemeal fashion, with conceptualization, formulation, lexical choice, etc., occurring in parallel. Using a Segment Grammar formalism, incorporating upward, downward and breadthward growth of trees, he describes a simple grammar of Dutch. The third section deals with the construction of descriptions and referring expressions. Helmut Horacek's 'The architecture of a generation component in a complete natural language dialogue system' (193-227) describes aspects ofa German-language financial advising program. Noteworthy components include terminological translations at the conceptual level, which select lexical formulations at varying levels of granularity, and a complex mapping from semantic to lexical information. Robert Dale, in 'Generating recipes: An overview of Epicure' (229-55), describes a system that specifies in natural language the steps required to produce particular recipes. An important aspect is its complex semantics of referring expressions, capable of tracking ingredients as they are processed. Ehud Reiter's 'Generating descriptions that exploit a user's domain knowledge ' (257-85) provides a formal description of a system incorporating user models in order to produce utterances that are accurate, valid, and free of false implicatures. The final section presents the relatively new area of connectionist approaches to NLG. George Houghton, in 'The problem of serial order: A neural network model of sequence learning and recall' (287-319), describes a system capable of learning and recalling monosyllabic English words. Lexical items are stored not as discrete units, but as dynamic activity patterns. Output of the system is claimed to be in line with psycholinguistic evidence. Hiroaki Kitano's 'Parallel incremental sentence production for a model of simultaneous interpretation ' (321-51) describes a system whose ultimate goal is to provide real-time speech-tospeech simultaneous interpretation between English and Japanese. As do human interpreters , the system uses concurrent parsing and generation . By its breadth of coverage and its emphasis on empirical data to circumscribe problems or to enrich data sets, this volume is a valuable addition to the NLG field and to linguistic research in general. [Greg Lessard, Queen's University, Kingston.] Conversational competence and social development. By Ioanna Dimitracopoulou. New York & Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Pp. xi, 167. Cloth $44.50. Very few studies have explored the interdependence of language and social development. In this volume Dimitracopoulou attempts just such an exploration with a developmental analysis of conversational behavior, interpreted in the light of children's sociocognitive knowledge . The author's starting point is the premise of pragmatics that language is comprehensible only in terms of its social functions and contexts . Chs. 1 and 2 therefore serve as an introduction to pragmatics, specifically to speechact theory and to H. P. Grice's Cooperative Principle for conversation. Ch. 3 reviews the literature on the acquisition of communicative competence and on sociocognitive development. The linguistic literature is found to lack comprehensiveness in its coverage of speech acts and conversational postulates over different age groups; the sociocognitive literature provides useful parameters for social knowledge states, but fails to explore their interdependence with conversational development. 224 LANGUAGE. VOLUME 68. NUMBER 1 (1992) Ch. 4 describes D's cross-sectional study, which aims to remedy these theoretical deficiencies . The study traces the emergence of speech acts and conversational meanings in the language of 19 children aged between 3;6 and 7;0 years, against the template...