book review about Bloomart

BOOK REVIEWS

JAN BLOMMAERT. Discourse: A Critical Introduction (Key Topics in Sociolinguistics) .Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2005. 299 pp. Hb (0521828171)»40.00/Pb (052153531X) »18.99.

Reviewed by MARTIN J. MALONE

This is a book I wish I had read in graduate school. It is exciting, interesting,and highly readable. In an advanced undergraduate, or a graduate seminar, itwould provide wide opportunities for discussion. It covers far more intellectualterritory than most sociolinguistic or discourse analysis texts and it ties microand macro topics together in an intellectually satisfying fashion. It shows theinfluences of not only John Gumperz, Dell Hymes, Michael Silverstein,Norman Fairclough, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Mikhail Bakhtin,but more surprisingly, those of Ferdinand Braudel, Immanuel Wallerstein,Raymond Williams, E.P. Thompson, and Louis Althusser as well. It is not atrendy listing of en vogue theorists, but a real integration of ideas from a broadrange of disciplines.

The book is organized into nine chapters. Chapter1establishes Blommaert’sapproach. Chapter 2 critiques other approaches to the field, principallyCritical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Conversation Analysis (CA) . Chapters3 through 8 are substantive discussions of a set of analytic concepts followedby their application to examples. Chapter 9 is a brief conclusion summarizingeach chapter and what Blommaert believes he accomplished overall. The bookcontains an extensive bibliography, a useful glossary of technical terms, andan index.

Chapter1,‘Introduction’, lays out what the book is. Blommaert’s first word inthe chapter is ‘power’, the work’s central topic. He is interested in power’seffects, its outcomes, ‘what it does to people, groups, and societies, and howthis impact comes about’ (pp. 1^2) . He situates this study within the contextof the current world system. His own background in African sociolinguisticsprovides him with good cross-cultural examples and allows him to show howthe movement of people, especially between Africa and Europe, requires amore sophisticated understanding of discourse issues. His critical analysis ofthe social nature of discourse is a study of power. His approach, much indebtedto Foucault, includes both linguistic pragmatics and non-linguistic approachesfocusing on ‘social, cultural, and historical patterns and developments ofuse’ (p. 3). Blommaert claims that ‘voice’, meaning ‘the way people manageto make themselves understood or fail to do so’ will be his ‘object of criticalinvestigation’ (p. 4) .

Journal of Sociolinguistics 10/1, 2006:123^143

# The authors 2006Journal compilation# Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 20069600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden MA 02148, USA.

Blommaert’s approach is synthetic rather than original, attempting to bringtogether ‘insights and approaches’ from awide variety of areas. He draws fromthree principal sources: the largely European tradition of CDA, of which he isalso frequently critical; American linguistic anthropology, whose emphasison ethnography proves to be his most influential method (the book is dedicatedto Dell Hymes and John Gumperz) , and sociolinguistics, with its general inter-est in language forms and varieties. The chapter ends with a quick and usefulpreviewof what each following chapter will cover.

Chapter 2, ‘Critical Discourse Analysis’, summarizes this approach, with ahistory, an outline of its program, a discussion of the theory and methodologyof Norman Fairclough, as an example of one of its principal practitioners, anda critique of its methods and analytic approaches. Blommaert reviews variouscriticisms of CDA, and ends the chapter with a consideration of its potentialand limitations. He sees CDA as hampered by three problematic biases. It isoverly linguistic, it is ahistorical, and it relies almost exclusively on FirstWorldexamples, ignoring discourse from societies very different from the industrialwest.

Chapter 3, ‘Text and context’, makes clear Blommaert’s preference for anethnographic approach to discourse. He critiques both CDA and CA, claimingthat ethnography provides a more adequate foundation for understandingwhat is going on in discourse. He uses Bauman and Briggs’ concept of‘entextualization’ to point out that analysis is a process of decontextualizationand recontextualization in which the analytic object becomes a text. There isno avoiding the fact that a bit of talk transcribed and worked over, regardless ofthe methods used, must be appreciated as a new discourse in a new context.

As with all the chapters that follow, he then provides an example that heexamines frommultiple perspectives. In this case, he examines a narrative pro-duced by an African asylum seeker in Belgium. He investigates three aspectsof what he refers to as ‘forgotten contexts’: Hymes’notions of ‘linguistic meansand communicative skills’ (p. 58); ‘translocal contexts’, meaning ‘the shiftingof discourse across contexts’; and finally ‘text trajectories’, or the importanceof ‘the origin and situatedness of data’ (p. 64) . Blommaert concludes, as hedoes in most chapters, with a consideration of power; not as a predefinedanalytic object, nor simply as a purely internal aspect of talk-in-interaction,but rather as ‘sedimented in language and . . . through language’, treatinglanguage itself as ‘an object of inequality and hegemony’ (p. 67).

Chapter 4, ‘Language and inequality’, develops ideas from Dell Hymes onfunction, Mikhail Bakhtin on ‘orders of indexicality’, and Michael Silversteinon ‘centring institutions’. Blommaert provides two examples. The first arethree texts produced in English or French, by native speakers of African lan-guages. He attempts to show the variable relations of forms and functions byshowing how competence in a prestige language that may provide social statusat home (in the world system’s periphery), confers no such advantages and infact stigmatizes the speakers when used in their European context. His second

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# The authors 2006Journal compilation# Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2006

example, from South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings,is the testimony of a young man who, as a member of the armed wing of theANC, was arrested, tortured, and harassed for many years. His analysis showsthat this man’s way of telling his story undercuts what the commission expectsto hear. By portraying himself as a warrior rather than a victim, with an‘absence of explicit suffering markers’, his narrative fails to convey thepresence of any pain or suffering.

Chapter 5, ‘Choice and determination’, introduces Foucault’s notion of ‘thearchive’, and Raymond Williams’ ideas on creativity, followed by an examin-ation of a set of documents produced by an African asylum seeker thatBlommaert translated into Dutch for the Belgian Immigration and AsylumServices. Foucault’s concept of the archive refers to the historically situatednature of discourse and to the (‘largely invisible’) rules of what can be said.Orders of indexicality (Chapter 4) are the ‘empirical side of an archive’.Blommaert introduces this term to indicate the ‘constraints on choice andcreativity’ within which discourse operates (p. 103). People are not free to beinterpreted in any way they choose. There are always historical, political,social, and cultural constraints on meaning and interpretation.

This leads into a discussion of RaymondWilliams’ historical account of thenature of creativity fromMarxism and Literature (1977). ForWilliams, creativityis a struggle against hegemony, against ‘inherited practical consciousness’(p. 105). For that reason, creativity always risks being misunderstood becauseit attempts to change the received understandings of discourse (Foucault’sarchives) . He illustrates this relationship with another set of texts from anasylum seeker. I found this example under-analyzed and not adequately used.

Chapter 6, ‘History and process’, is a far more interesting and nuanceddiscussion of history than is usually found in discourse or sociolinguistic con-texts. The key ideas come from Ferdinand Braudel and Michael Silverstein.Braudel’s notion of layered time-scales ^ the longue dure¤ e or long term,intermediate time, (the time of cyclical patterns) , and event time (the time ofeveryday life) ^ is used to suggest how discourse events exist within ‘severallayers of historicity’, what Blommaert calls ‘layered simultaneity’ (p. 130) . Notall of these contexts are consciously available to all speakers and hearerssimultaneously but they yield multiple layers of meaning within a single event.

Blommaert uses the idea of layering to discuss four examples. The firstconcerns the meaning of varying forms of address in a university setting. Thesecond is a brief reference to Silverstein’s entertaining analysis of politicalrhetoric (Talking Politics:The Substance of Style from Abe to ‘W.’, 2003). A longerexample works through a widely circulated email letter that appeared on theeve of the 2003 Iraq invasion. Blommaert uses Braudel’s three orders of time toshow how the author collapses long history, episodic time and event time intoa synchronic account of how countries helped by the United States are nowengaged in betrayal by their refusal to support the war plans, and how this actof synchronization is really a claim about power.

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The longest and most fascinating example in the chapter results from adiscourse analytic workshop in which a set of texts commemorating the 50thanniversary of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising were analyzed from multipleperspectives all focused on the uses of history. Blommaert raises questions notpart of those attendees were asked to consider, such as the assumed equationof Soviets with post-1990 Russians, an assumption no more justified thanequating post-World War II Germans with Nazis. And he provides competing(Soviet) accounts of the Uprising events in contrast to the Polish accountoffered by workshop organizers. Blommaert makes the case for multiple layersof historical meanings by showing that a post-1990, post-Soviet reading of theevents of WorldWar II looks very different than one from an earlier era wouldhave.

Chapter 7, ‘Ideology’, discusses the various meanings of the term, brieflyreviews basic work (Althusser, Gramsci, Lenin, Mannheim, etc.) , and thenapplies concepts introduced earlier, including voice, polycentric systems,layering, and indexicality. His examples in this chapter are likely to prove lessinteresting to readers outside of Belgium and also lack sufficient context tomake them useful. The first contrasts changes in the Flemish Socialist Partybased on differences in texts written in 1974 and 1998. The second concernsthe Belgian political debate on the integration of immigrants. This materialdraws Blommaert’s published contributions to this debate. I came away fromthis discussion feeling that it was too short to make it interesting for anoutsider but too long to hold my interest given its lack of broader context.

Chapter 8, ‘Identity’, is largely about macro-issues of identity such as raceand ethnicity, gender, class, culture, language community, and nation.Whileit mentions Goffman and identity work, and notes that ‘identities areconstructed in practices that produce, enact or perform identity’ (p. 205), itcompletely ignores micro or interactional studies of identity. This may reflectmyAmerican and English language bias, but the entire schools of Americanand British symbolic interaction, as well as CAwork on identity in conversationare not even mentioned, and I think the chapter is poorer for this omission.Despite this deficiency, the chapter does interesting work on thesemacro-issues and how people rely on‘forms of semiotic potential, organized ina repertoire’ (p. 207) to build identity.

Blommaert applies his ideas about inequality, indexicality, and theworld-system to the movement of people from the peripheries to the core, forinstance how a middle class identity in Nairobi may not convert into a middleclass identity in London or New York. His analysis of the various dialectvarieties used by a South African deejay to achieve different styles andidentities is a nice application of his semiotic apparatus. But I think it pointsup his lack of attention to micro issues because this whole transcript is aboutshifting inter-relations within a single interaction. Blommaert’s analysisfocuses on shifts between the macro identities implied by the use of StandardEnglish, Black English,Township English, and Rasta Slang, but what I found

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potentially more interesting is that these shifts reflect interactional changes inthe relation between the deejay and his caller.What we see is how fluid identityis in interaction and how language varieties provide a repertoire that allowsspeakers to signal changing stances (Goffman’s ‘footings’) in what Blommaerthimself calls the ‘infinitely small’ features of talk. I don’t think Blommaertwould disagree with my claims, and his reading of the fine details of thisinteraction ( pp. 228^232) shows his sensitivity to these issues. I just believethere is another literature he could have turned to enrich this analysis.

Chapter 9, ‘Conclusion: Discourse and the social sciences’, briefly sums upthe book’s key points, discussing the main ideas of each chapter and thennoting how he dealt with three problems he had hoped to cover. His first wasto argue against the localism of most discourse work which tends to operatepurely from FirstWorld models. His examples provide readers with a productiveway to think about how he brought ‘discourse analysis in line with globaliza-tion’ (p. 235). Secondly, this work broadens discourse analysis beyond a purelylinguistic approach and shows how it can be about ‘any form of meaningfulsemiotic conduct’ (p. 236) . Finally he encourages an explicitly interdisciplinaryapproach, both urging discourse analysts to broaden their own tool kits, andencouraging scholars in other areas to use discourse analytic methods andfindings. He ends where he began, with obeisance to Dell Hymes, who calledfor a far more interdisciplinaryapproach to linguistics over thirty years ago.

Despite small carping on my part, I believe this is an excellent, fascinating,wide-ranging and highly readable book. I recommend it for graduate seminarsand for broadening the perspectives of long established professionals. Blommaertsuccessfully draws a broad array of intellectual contributions into the study ofmeaningful symbolic behavior. I believe that his sensitivity to issues of power andglobalization, and his practical suggestions for their incorporation will go a longway to making discourse analysis a more fruitful intellectual approach. Manyyears ago, Roman Jakobson said ‘No monolingual linguists’. Blommaert’s textapplies this manifesto to discourse analysis and sociolinguistics.

MARTIN J. MALONE

Mount Saint Mary’s UniversityEmmitsburg, MD 21727

[email protected]

RON SCOLLON AND SUZIE WONG SCOLLON. Nexus Analysis: Discourse and the EmergingInternet. London and New York: Routledge. 2004. 198 pp. Pb (0415320631)»16.99.

Reviewed by STANTON WORTHAM

This ambitious and rewarding book combines aspects of several genres. It isa methodological guidebook, offering strategies for doing ethnography,

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discourse analysis and action research. It is an empirical report, describing theauthors’ use of email and other resources to improve Native Alaskans’ accessto higher education from1978^1983. It is a theoretical account of how ‘people,places, discourses and objects’ come together to facilitate action and socialchange. It also offers a theoretical sketch and empirical illustration of compu-ter mediated communication.The book does not provide a full methodological,empirical or theoretical account, but focuses instead on the nexus of thesecomponents. The theory of social action undergirds the methodologicalsuggestions, and the empirical material illustrates both the theory and themethodology.

The theoretical account is highly interdisciplinary and creative, drawing onsociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, literary criticism, social semioticsand cultural psychology. This account addresses a venerable problem. Sociallife takes place only through individual actions, but any action is afforded byand becomes intelligible only with respect to various potentially relevantaspects of the context ^ from sociohistorical institutions and discourses, to inter-actional organizations, to individual histories. Analysts face the challenge ofdetermining what is in fact relevant. Scollon andWong Scollon avoid many ofthe usual mistakes, like opting for ‘macro’at the expense of ‘micro’, or vice versa,or declaring a ‘macro-micro dialectic’ while gesturing vaguely toward theprocesses actually involved in such a dialectic. They insist that processes ofmany sorts can be relevant to analyzing social action, and they offer a strategyfor identifying relevant processes and their interconnections. Their accounttakes change as basic, instead of static objects or neat homeostatic processes.The contexts potentially relevant to social action involve often unpredictabletrajectories of change across different timescales. ‘Nexus analysis’ maps theintersections of these various trajectories as they collectively facilitate action.

A ‘nexus’ is a repeated site of engagement where a type of social action isfacilitated by a relatively consistent set of social processes. As a heuristic,Scollon and Wong Scollon describe three types of processes that generallyplay a role: ‘discourses in place’, the sociohistorically developing discourses,organizations and procedures that constrain and facilitate action; the ‘inter-action order’, in which people organize events; and the ‘historical bodies’ ofindividuals, in which social and idiosyncratic habits are sedimented. Manyother resources and constraints can also play a role, like the layout of physicalspace and the affordances of physical tools, specific conventions developed in alocal setting, and so on. Scollon andWong Scollon show how such resourcescontribute, for instance, to the lack of interactional synchrony that occurredin an interview between a parole officer and a Native Alaskan client. Theydescribe the historical bodies of the two participants, who had developed verydifferent expectations and habits for regulating behavior, responding toauthority and handling social stigma. They describe relevant sociohistoricaldiscourses and institutions, including parole officers’ then-acute fear ofviolence from some clients and the American legal system’s expectations

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about expressing remorse. And they describe the interactional asynchrony inthe interview itself, as the parole officer asks more and more explicitly forinformationwhile the client becomes increasingly ashamed and unresponsive.

Each of these relevant processes, or ‘cycles’, as Scollon andWong Scollon callthem, has a relatively autonomous existence. The embodied habits of theindividuals have been developed over ontogenetic time, for instance, and theychange slowly. The social genres and cultural expectations established by thelegal system have developed over even longer timescales. The various relevantcycles travel their circuits, as it were, following their own trajectories cominginto this nexus and their own trajectories going into the future. Nonetheless,each cycle has an effect on the social action in question only as they jointlymediate that action.The book represents this ‘nexus’visually as a small square,with sections of several intersecting ovals overlapping in the space of thatsquare.Within the space of an action ^ say, the client’s unresponsiveness andthe parole officer’s resulting judgment ^ the cycles become interdependent.We can analyze the action only by exploring how the various relevantcycles interconnected in this instance. And if we want to change the typicalcourse of actions like this, we must intervene by acting to change how thesecycles interrelate.

Scollon and Wong Scollon give several useful examples of ‘nexus’ and the‘cycles’ implicated in them, ranging from biological ecosystems to events ofintercultural communication to genres of computer mediated discourse. Mostof the examples come from their work in Alaska, in which they identifiedbarriers that Native Alaskan students experienced at institutions of highereducation. They have a remarkable data set: transcripts of electroniccommunication done for educational, administrative and other purposes;fieldnotes from participant observation in university teaching and life, ingovernmental and legal proceedings, and in visits all over Alaska to consultwith service agencies and others; interviews with Native Alaskans andEuropean Americans in various contexts; plus historical and institutionalrecords of many sorts. They use these data to describe how they and manyothers responded to opportunities presented in the 1970s by the new oilmoney and the recognition of Native Alaskans’ rights to access educational,medical, legal and other institutions. They focus on their use of early emailtechnology to teach both distance learning and local classes and on their workto help universities lower barriers to many NativeAlaskan students.

These empirical accounts are engaging, if a bit fragmentary, providingglimpses into institutions and communities, into frustrations and interven-tions that will be unfamiliar to many readers. In some ways the accounts forman abbreviated ethnography of communication, showing how problems inintercultural communication created barriers for Native Alaskan universitystudents. Scollon andWong Scollon use the ‘gatekeeping’metaphor to describehow university faculty and staff judged and sorted Native and non-Nativestudents. They do not rely simply on a mismatch of cultural styles as an

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explanation, however. Their attention to many relevant cycles allows themto explore how processes from various timescales constituted the barriersconfronted by Native Alaskan students. They also describe their efforts todismantle or mitigate these barriers. Scollon and Wong Scollon lecturedand presented workshops that informed Native and non-Native Alaskansabout various barriers. They also changed their own college teaching, usingemail and other resources. As they describe these pedagogical changes,they illustrate the different affordances of computer mediated educationalcommunication and how these affordances can empower some students whiledisempowering others who are typically more comfortable.

The book uses these empirical accounts to illustrate the methodologicalapproach of ‘nexus analysis’. By giving their approach this name, Scollon andWong Scollon suggest that simple ‘discourse analysis’will not suffice. Differentapproaches to discourse analysis focus on different types of cycles that can berelevant to explaining social action, but each focuses on a limited set and failsto attend to various cycles that could be relevant in any given case. Discourseanalysis also focuses on discourse, which is of course crucial but which leavesout the material objects, non-verbal signs, bodily habits and other resourcesthat contribute to relevant cycles. Scollon and Wong Scollon describeprocedures for mapping out relevant people, places, discourses and objects, foridentifying the various cycles and timescales that might be relevant to thefocal phenomenon and then for analyzing these cycles and their interrelationsin detail. They include a 27 page ‘fieldguide’as an appendix, and this providesuseful, concrete questions and suggestions for the researcher at various stagesof the analysis.

Nexus Analysis does not provide detailed, concrete methodological guidelines^ about what linguistic categories to examine in a text, or how to structure aninterview, for example. It provides a theoretical and methodological frameworkwithin which more concrete methodological guidance can be given. The bookwould be useful for experienced researchers who already know specific meth-odological techniques, or as a text to orient and guide students who are learningmore specific techniques for discourse and/or sociolinguistic analysis. The bookis not specifically linguistic ^ as it uses ‘discourse’ mostly in the broader senseand offers only a few brief empirical analyses that focus on language ^ and itcould thus serve as a useful orienting text for a course on ethnography as well.Students reading the book would have to be cautioned, however, that not alldata sets are as comprehensive as this one. In practice, researchers rarely havethe time, resources and expertise to follow all potentially relevant cycles thatemanate from their focal interest. Students also need guidelines for how to cutacceptable pieces out of a full nexus analysis.

Scollon and Wong Scollon do not intend the book to provide a script forresearchers to generate warranted conclusions, however. In fact, they arguethat research should be as much about opening up new questions as providingdefinite answers. They also emphasize that all research is action, and that all

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action is itself positioned at the nexus of various relevant cycles. They do notmake this point to undercut the validity of research or to paralyze researchers,but to show that researchers can make a difference in the processes they study.Nexus analysis is action research. Nexus analysts embrace their embedded-ness in the places they study and try to improve those places. The book isrefreshing for its optimism, as well as for its innovative theoretical stance andinsightful methodological suggestions. Scollon and Wong Scollon do notlament the intransigence of social facts (though they certainly acknowledgeit) or the difficulties of research. Instead, they provide an upbeat reminderthat researchers are already out there acting in the world and a useful guidefor how we can learn interesting things, open up important questions andmake a difference in that world.

STANTON WORTHAM

University of Pennsylvania3700Walnut Street

Philadelphia, PA19104U.S.A.

[email protected]

JOHN E. JOSEPH. Language and Identity: National, Ethnic, Religious. Basingstoke:Palgrave Macmillan. 2004. pp. 268 pp. Pb (0333997530) »18.99.

Reviewed by SUSANNE STADLBAUER

In his book, Language and Identity: National, Ethnic, Religious, John E. Josephpresents an eclectic approach to the study of language and identity by drawingon a wide range of academic fields. Fully aware of the various interpretationsof ‘identity’ that have materialized in the social sciences and humanities overthe past few decades, Joseph focuses his discussion on observable roles oflanguage in people’s experiences and interactions. He argues that identityis at the core of linguistic analysis because language is shaped by the identityof the speaker and by others’ interpretations of the speaker’s identity withinthe context of continuously shifting, socially constructed roles.

In Chapter 1, the author introduces the idea that linguistics should be‘rehumanized’ by asserting the ways in which language is shaped by cultural,national, ethnic, and religious identities. He argues for departing from themethodological inflexibility of traditional linguistic approaches, which do notaccount for the construction of identity through language in interaction.

In Chapter 2, Joseph composes a brief survey of the foundations of languagepractice within theories of the evolution of language. Chapters 3 and 4 discussa wide range of linguistic and social theories on identity construction. InChapters 5 through 8, the author devotes special attention to identity form-ation within national, ethnic, and religious discourses, which he skillfullyexemplifies in reference to case studies of national languages in Hong Kongand religious discourses in Lebanon.

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Joseph references theories on the evolution of language in Chapter 2 tosupport his claim that identity is constructed dynamically in discourse, atheme that runs throughout the book. In line with an evolutionary socio-linguistic perspective, the author states that interpretation within languageis primordial and universal because the cerebral structures that are involvedin language production are connected with structures of general intelligenceand perception, constituting the faculty of interpretation. The capacity tointerpret can be seen in phatic communication, which is defined as bothlinguistic and non-linguistic communication, and involves the sharing offeelings and attitudes. According to the author, all elements of phaticcommunication are shaped through the lens of culture, society, and politics,which together form social identities.

The author then discusses identity formation in interaction in a theoreticalreview of diverse literature. Chapter 3 reviews early linguistic perspectivesby researchers such asVoloshinov, Saussure, Sapir, and Labov. Chapter 4 con-cerns theories from adjacent disciplines, such as sociology, illustrated in theworks of Goffman, Bourdieu, and Foucault, amongst others. Both chaptersassess the accomplishments and limitations of such theories for an under-standing of identity formation. Joseph makes several important claims aboutidentity in these chapters. First, he argues that identity is more than aby-product of linguistic communication. Second, he suggests that our focusshould not only be on self-identity, but on interpretations others make of aperson’s or group’s identity. Finally, he asserts that essentialism needs to bereplaced with social constructionism so that linguistic identity is analyzed assomething changeable, negotiated, and performed.

Chapter 5 offers a theoretical account of the ways in which identities areconstructed and interpreted in terms of nationhood. Acknowledging that‘nation’ is an inherently ambiguous concept, Joseph uses a constructionistapproach to argue for the arbitrariness of national languages and nationalidentities. He engages in extensive discussions about the emergence of nation-alism, tracing its origins to the book of Genesis, the Renaissance, and theAmerican and French Revolutions. His discussion includes Karl Marx’scommunist internationalism and Hans Kohn’s voluntaristic and organicnationalisms, amongst others. Joseph’s goal in this chapter is to define nationallanguages as cultural constructs. He demonstrates that contemporaryscholarship draws either on the approach of Ernest Gellner, who seeslanguage as the foundation of national identity, or on the alternative approachprovided by Elie Kedourie, who renders language as just one ideological site ofnationalism. He further brings into play Benedict Anderson’s imaginedcommunities and Michael Billig’s banal nationalism to show that nations areimagined and that the original image is reproduced in often-unconscious,daily cultural practices. National languages are spread from nationalistintellectuals to the masses and then become national property throughenforced norms. Joesph concludes the chapter with a survey of literature

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on national languages in Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas, Australasia, andOceania.

Chapter 6 is a case study of national languages in Hong Kong and of thewavering interpretations of ‘Chinese’ identity formation. Joseph discusses thelinguistic, cultural, and political history of Hong Kong in order to clarify whypeople identify as ‘Southern Chinese’ as opposed to ‘Chinese’ or ‘British’. ForJoseph, this self-identification is a reaction against both the oppressiveChinese government in Beijing and past British colonizers. Although Englishis perceived to be in decline, the author states that it is actually the statusof Hong Kong English that is declining. Hong Kong English is syntacticallydistinct from ‘proper’ American or British English due to its incorporationof Cantonese features, such as the flattening out of the count-mass distinction.Joseph states that the future of Hong Kong English heavily depends onBeijing’s possible opposition to the autonomy of Hong Kong. Should Beijingoppose its autonomy, Hong Kong residents might perform resistance to a‘Chinese’ identity by preserving English.

Joseph investigates theories on ethnic, racial and religious identities inChapter 7, which are in part established through language choice and code-switching. The author rightly claims that ethnic or racial identification can bea double-edged sword that either works unjustly against individuals or bindsthem together in cultural unity counteracting oppression. Similarly, languagecan act as both a unifying and divisive force with respect to religion, evendetermining in-group and out-group status. For instance, Latin has beenassociated with Christians, Arabic with Muslims, and Hebrew with Jews.

The case study in Chapter 8 focuses on Christian identity formation inLebanonwhere bilingualism is an important signifier. In reaction to centuriesof Islamic domination, Lebanese Christians construct their identities by claim-ing an ancient Phoenician ancestry and therefore a history that authenticatestheir presence in Lebanon. But Christian identity formation also points toEurope, with Arabic-French bilingualism being an important signifier. Josephcalls the Christians’ claim for a Phoenician ancestry a cultural fiction. Thesetypes of cultural fictions are pervasive because they are abstractions. InLebanon, for instance, a shared national language is an abstraction that couldnot establish a unified society because the linguistic battleground is comprisedof spoken languages, ancient languages, and foreign languages. For a nation-state to realize the fiction of a national language, it must establish institutions,such as schools and editorships, which reinforce the alignment of the idealand the powerful. In the author’s view, this is dangerous because realizingutopian visions is inherently essentialist.

This book is a constructive and wide-ranging analysis of diverse linguisticand social theories as they apply to the study of identity. But common towide-ranging approaches is a tendency to produce broad surveys of linguisticresearch as opposed to in-depth analyses of specific topics. This becomes evi-dent when Joseph gestures toward the provocative frameworks of community

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of practice and shared habitus, yet never develops these perspectives in thecontext of his larger argument. In addition, a consideration of multilingualismand code-switching could have been beneficial in the previously mentionedcase studies to show how language choice enables different kinds of identitypositioning. Joseph also mentions the importance of personal names to thesubject of identity, in that they index complex personal and social histories,as well as the importance of linguistic leveling, which is mainly a result ofglobalization. However, his interest in both personal names and linguisticleveling is never incorporated into his discussion of specific linguistic examples.

Apart from these minor shortcomings, Language and Identity offers anenlightening synopsis of the research on language and identity across diversedisciplines. The case studies provide invaluable access to the role of languagein the nation-states of Hong Kong and Lebanon through ethnographicresearch. I recommend this book for readers within or outside academia whoseek an overview of the intimate connection between language and identityfrom theoretical as well as empirical perspectives. The combination of thesetwo perspectives makes this book an excellent introduction to the study oflanguage and identity for both teaching and research.

SUSANNE STADLBAUER

Department of LinguisticsUniversity of Colorado

295 UCBBoulder, CO 80309

[email protected]

ROBERT D. GREENBERG. Language and Identity in the Balkans. Oxford: OxfordUniversity Press. 2004.188 pp. Hb (0199258155) »40.00.

Reviewed by BRIGITTA BUSCH

The disintegration of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in the 1990s, the warand the armed conflicts on the territory of former Yugoslavia have beenmirrored by language policies and language planning efforts aiming at theaffirmation of (so far) three new standard languages ^ Bosnian, Croatian andSerbian. The ‘language issue’ was much debated inside the space of formerYugoslavia, within Slavic studies, in literary works and in current affairs inthe past years. Robert Greenberg’s book Language and Identity in the Balkansmakes insights into these ongoing and still passionately led debates aroundlanguage policies nowaccessible to an English speaking audience. In the intro-ductory chapter the author makes his own involvement visible; he explainshow he experienced the first signs of the disintegration of the Serbo-Croatianlanguage when he came toYugoslavia to gather data for a dialectological studyin the late 1980s. And how, almost ten years later when he returned to thearea, he was addressed very naturally as a speaker of Bosnian in Sarajevo, and

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as a speaker of Serbian only some twenty kilometres further away in theRepublika Srpska, despite his status as a second language speaker from the‘outside’. In both situations he experienced different attitudes, while some ofhis interlocutors insisted on emphasizing language differences, others rejectedsuch endeavours as ethnicising policies. Robert Greenberg stresses that in hisaccount on language policies in the Balkan he is cautious ‘to write about thistopic without offending one side or another’ (p. x) .

The book provides a detailed and comprehensive survey of the history of theSerbo-Croatian language, starting from the birth of the common standardlanguage which came through the Vienna LiteraryAgreement signed in 1850by intellectuals from what is today Serbia or Croatia respectively, to theadoption of constitutions in the successor states of former Yugoslavia, whichput a formal end to the language unity and established Croatian, Serbian andBosnian as new national, official or state languages. Greenberg’s historicalaccount depicts the development around the Serbo-Croatian language not inthe form of a tragic rise and fall myth, but rather as complex interplaybetween centrifugal and centripetal forces. He identifies different phases andmilestones; from the late nineteenth century up to the 1920s the unifiedlanguage evolved without much controversy, but when ethnic relationsdeteriorated during the1930s, the foundations for a common language eroded.The chauvinist ideology of the Croat fascist regime between 1941 and 1945affirmed a separate Croatian language, inwhich differences were accentuated.In the second Yugoslav state under Tito the renewed language unity aimed atsupporting the ideology of ‘brotherhood and unity’. Centripetal tendenciesbecame already apparent in the 1960s and found their legal embodiment inthe1974 constitution, which recognized the right of eachYugoslav constituentpeople or nation to use its own language at the republican and provinciallevels. As a result the Socialist Republics of Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina andMontenegro declared their own ‘standard linguistic idioms’ to be the officiallanguages in their territories, but they were explicitly understood as idioms ofone single Serbo-Croatian/Croato-Serbian literary language.Theauthorconcludesthat the ‘chronology puts in doubt recent assertions that the unified languagenever trulyexisted, orhadbeen imposedagainst thewill of its speakers’ (p.54) .

The introductory chapter on the history of Serbo-Croatian is followed bydiscussions of the present situation concerning language policy and languageplanning for the Serbian, the Montenegrin, the Croatian and the Bosnianlanguage. Robert Greenberg’s study is based on close readings of recentlypublished works, many of which are still not available in libraries outsidethe space of former Yugoslavia. In particular, he considers instruments ofcodification (dictionaries, orthographic manuals, grammars and handbookspublished since 1991), articles and monographs by linguists from Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia (mainly articles on the languagecontroversies, in particular on orthographic controversies, debates on literarydialects, disagreements on vocabulary and issues related to the constitutional

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status of the successor languages) as well as metalinguistic discourses in thepopular press (language columns, commentaries) . In these four sections onBosnian, Croatian, Serbian and Montenegrin, the author highlights ongoingdiscussions elaborating on the position of different factions among linguists inthe successor states of former Yugoslavia. In this otherwise comprehensiveand detailed representation of the present situation, important voices (V. Anic¤or D. S� kiljan) are possibly somewhat under-represented, especially asDubravko S� kiljan’s recent book on language and the nation (2002) has dealtwith issues of language and identity in general and in Croatia in particular.It is striking that Robert Greenberg devotes an entire chapter to the possiblecoming into being of a Montenegrin language as he asserts himself that theofficial emergence of a Montenegrin language has not occurred and that it willdepend above all on political developments which will determine whetherMontenegro becomes an independent state or not.

The author concludes his analysis of the present linguistic situation in thespace of the former Serbo-Croatian area on the rather pessimistic note that‘the separating function of language has reached nearly absurd proportions’and that in the near term this policy seems irreversible as language plannersare ‘bent on reducing mutual intelligibility as much as possible’ (p. 167).Nevertheless, he concedes that in the future, when ‘ethnic reconciliation ispossible, language convergence would once again be in order’ (p. 167).Greenberg’s historical account and analysis of recent language developmentsin the Balkans represents consistently the position of a well informed voicefrom outside, of a concerned external observer who is not involved in dailyactions on issues of language policy. Therefore it is an important contributionto the current controversial debate within Slavic language studies on thefuture of the South Slavic languages. For linguists interested in questionsof language policy and language planning it offers a useful and elaboratedintroduction to an area which is still too little known. The recent experiencesin language policy and identity politics in the space of former Yugoslaviaare certainly relevant for different situations in other parts of the world, wherequestions related to the development of language policy meeting the needs ofheteroglossic societies are on the agenda.

REFERENCE

S� kiljan, Dubravko. 2002. Govor nacije: Jezik, nacija, Hrvati. Zagreb: Golden Marketing.

BRIGITTA BUSCH

Institut fu« r SprachwissenschaftUniversita« tWien

Bergg.111090Wien

[email protected]

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GABRIELLE HOGAN-BRUN AND STEFAN WOLFF (eds.). Minority Languages in Europe:Frameworks, Status, Prospects. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2004. 238 pp.Hb (1403903964) »45.00.

Reviewed by MELISSA ROY WARNOCK

Gabrielle Hogan-Brun and StefanWolff ’s edited volume Minority Languages inEurope: Frameworks, Status, Prospects gives insight into and constructively cri-ticizes the political management of linguistic diversity in a variety ofEuropean contexts. In the introductory chapter, the editors say that the aim ofthe volume is ‘to examine how language policy has developed in different andoften changing social, legal and political frameworks in Europe’ (p. 7). Theyachieve this goal admirably by bringing together chapters on law and policywith case studies illustrating the implications of such frameworks. Yetthe contributors’ goals are not simply descriptive. In addition to analysis andassessment, the authors ‘make recommendations as to how language policyand/or context in which it happens need to be improved in order to accommo-date and support linguistic and cultural diversity in different countries inwhich language minorities exist and articulate their demands’ (p. 7). Theeditors organize the different approaches to the issue into four sections:‘Introduction’,‘Legal and policy frameworks’,‘Case studies’, and ‘Conclusion’.

In one of the introductory chapters, ‘When a language is ‘‘just symbolic’’ ’,Camille C. O’Reilly argues for the value of examining what she calls symboliclanguages in order to better understand the relationship between languageand ethnicity in multilingual societies. When O’Reilly characterizes a lan-guage as ‘just symbolic’, she means a language marginal to public and privatelife that comes to represent a group associated with it, such as Irish. O’Reillyargues that when scholars dismiss a language as ‘just symbolic’and thereforeundeserving of study, they miss the language’s association with politics andnationalism that can elucidate the complexities of conflict. Throughout thechapter, she poses fundamental questions and criticisms regarding the valueof symbolic languages. In doing so, O’Reilly also problematizes the notions ofsymbolic, ethnicity and culture in part by questioning the ways in which theseterms often involve essentialist understandings amongst a language, itsspeakers and the nation-state. In exploring the questions: ‘How important islanguage to ethnic identity, symbolic or otherwise? And how much attentionshould we pay to language as part of the politics of identity? (p. 19), O’Reillycomes to the conclusion that language is fundamental to identity and stressesthe importance of context. She cites the example of the Irish language, whichis strongly associated with ethnic identity, religious differences and politicsdespite pessimistic statistics about actual language use and attitudes.Moreover, she discusses how arguments over official English, Ebonics andEnglish-Spanish bilingual education in the U.S. stand in for tensions over race,culture and immigration. A number of well-documented conflicts further

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illustrate the role of language essentialism as it reflects and perpetuates ethnictensions and fears of division: Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian in the formerYugoslavia; French and English in Quebec; Latvian, Ukrainian and Russianin the Soviet successor states; Catalan and Basque in Spain; and finally,Bulgarian and Romanian in Eastern Europe. Ultimately, O’Reilly diffuses theexplosive question: ‘. . . to what extent, and under what conditions, can theprotection and support of minority languages lead to political separatism?’(p. 28) . By the end of the chapter, readers motivated to defend minoritylanguage projects such as documentation, revitalization or activism will leaveloaded with arguments legitimizing yet complicating their missions.

Kristin Henrard’s chapter ‘Devising an adequate system of minorityprotection in the area of language rights’ starts off the section ‘Legal andpolicy frameworks’. Henrard begins by giving a working definition of the termminority. She then equates an adequate system of minority protection withappropriate accommodation of population diversity in multinational states.Henrard argues that accommodation ‘can be achieved when policy makersacknowledge the interrelation between individual human rights, minorityrights and the right to self-determination’ (p. 39). The basic principles ofminority protection are broken down into ‘the prohibition of discrimination’and ‘measures designed to protect and provide the separate identity of theminority groups’ (p. 40) . In bringing language into the discussion, Henrardpoints to policies on official languages as revealing the inequality of languagesin terms of political power. She compares the establishment of minority lan-guage rights to finding balance between national unityand linguistic diversity.To assist planners in achieving this equilibrium, Henrard delineates the issuesto be considered when developing policy that regulates language use in thepublic sphere, including limitations on state resources and the legitimate needfor a lingua franca. Henrard also evaluates the amount of protection given tominority language speakers under the umbrella of individual human rightsand minority rights, reviewing the effectiveness of international policyguidelines: the European Convention on Human Rights; Article 27 of theInternational Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; the1992 UN Declarationon Minorities; the UNESCO Convention on the Elimination of Discriminationin Education; the 1990 Copenhagen Document of the Organisation forSecurity and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) ; the Council of Europe (CoE)Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities; and theEuropean Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (ECRML) of the CoE.Henrard concludes that advances in individual human rights and currentminority rights are insufficient for the protection of language rights.To remedythis deficit, she argues for internal self-determination for minorities, claimingthat such a right could assist conflict prevention. Henrard then acknowledges,without specifying instances, that forms of internal self-determination havebeen granted to minorities, and she suggests that adding linguistic policy toself-government would further accommodation. Overall, Henrard gives an

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organized and accessible introduction to minority protection and languagerights.

The other two chapters in this section of the volume draw from personalexperience and offer in-depth examinations of legal frameworks. Ma¤ ire¤ ad NicCraith’s ‘Facilitating or generating linguistic diversity’ explores the potentialimpact of the ECRML on non-official languages, focusing on Ulster-Scots as acase study. John Packer’s ‘The practitioner’s perspective’ gives expert insightinto the work of the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities.

The chapters in the section Case studies offer a refreshing variety of contextsthrough which to evaluate legal and policy frameworks. StefanWolff and KarlCordell’s ‘Ethnic Germans as a language minority in Central and Eastern’compares the situation and uncertain future of German speakers in Poland,Hungary and Romania, taking into account territorial concentration, age,forced migration and language policy involving official status, use, education,media and assimilation. Gabrielle Hogan-Brun’s ‘Baltic national minorities ina transitional setting’ examines the various approaches taken to nationalminorities by the Baltic Republics. In the chapter ‘Politics and language rights:A case study of language politics in Croatia’, Vanessa Pupavac predicts thatquestions of language rights in Croatia will continue to be politicized in thenear future. She argues the controversial position that international minoritylanguage rights have actually worked to aggravate conflict: ‘It is time to revisitinternational minority rights approaches and to examine how they may beunwittingly fuelling the ‘‘Thucycdidean movement’’ and legitimizing ethnicdivision’ (p. 153). The next chapter by Carmen Milla¤ n-Varela, ‘‘‘Minor’’ needsof the ambiguous power of translation’, focuses on Galician and brings issuesof translation practices into the discussion of language policy and planning.In the chapter ‘On policies and prospects for British Sign Language’, GrahamH. Turner calls attention to the effect of social and public policy frameworkson minority languages, both signed and spoken.

The final chapter in the section Case studies, Dieter W. Halwachs ‘Thechanging status of Romani in Europe’, traces the improvement of Romani interms of internal and external attitudes, increased domain of use, codificationand lexical expansion. Halwachs describes how the process of self-organization in Roma groups is a form of assimilation in which the groupadopts dominant concepts and values non-autochthonous to the Roma. Thisself-organization leads to conscious consideration of Romani as a marker ofthe group’s identity and as important to the survival of the group. Hence, thedevelopment of Romani as a marker of identity is not the result of languageendangerment but rather the effect of organizational assimilation. Using theRoma of Burgenland in Austria as an example, Halwachs clearly outlines theinspiring internal and external efforts that have given some enhanced securityto Burgenland-Romani. Although the self-organization and resultinginstitutional recognition have helped the status of Romani, its future isuncertain. Halwachs concludes that it is ‘vital that its speakers will finally be

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granted equal rights and treatment, which theyhave been denied for centuries’(p. 206) .

In the volume’s concluding chapter, ‘Language, nationalism and democracyin Europe’, Stephen May contextualizes the previous contributions in adiscussion of the notion of nation-state, challenging planners and scholars torethink the concept in more inclusive and diverse terms. May envisions minoritylanguages legitimized and institutionalized by complementary policies oncivic, supranational and international levels. May’s optimistic vision ties thebook together by echoing the other contributor’s practical concerns and goals.

Suitable for undergraduate and graduate-level readings in disciplines suchas sociology, anthropology, international studies and linguistics, MinorityLanguages in Europe is at its best inspiring, elucidating and accessible. Thevolume is a welcomed resource, offering an array of perspectives on currentlanguage policies around the world.

MELISSA ROYWARNOCK

Department of LinguisticsUniversity of Colorado

Campus Box 295Boulder, CO 80309-0295

[email protected]

H. G. WIDDOWSON. Text, Context, Pretext: Critical Issues in Discourse Analysis(Language in Society, 35). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. 2004. 185 pp. Hb(0631234519) »50.00/Pb (0631234527) »16.99.

Reviewed by HAILONG TIAN

Being ‘critical’, Critical DiscourseAnalysis (CDA) itself ‘is being attacked everynowand then by its detractors’ (Rajagopalan 2004: 261), and one such detrac-tor is undoubtedly H. G.Widdowson, who, after life-long consideration (seethe Preface) , has developed his critical discussion into the present new book:Text, Context, Pretext: Critical Issues in DiscourseAnalysis. This book consists often chapters, the first five being concerned with critical issues in the enterpriseof discourse analysis in general, and the next five addressing specifically thework of CDA.

Widdowson begins the first chapter with his concerns about the relation-ship between text and discourse. ‘Unless it is activated by this contextualconnection, the text is inert. It is this activation, this acting of context oncode, this indexical conversion of the symbol that I refer to as discourse’ (p. 8) .Thus, the relation between discourse and text is that of process and its product.By identifying the distinction and relation between text and discourse,Widdowson actually groups two sets of concepts involved in the book, oneincluding text and co-text associated with ‘analysis’, the other includingdiscourse and context associated with‘interpretation’.

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In Chapter 2, the author develops his discussion of text in relation toSystemic Functional (S/F) grammar. This grammar, unlike Chomsky’sTransformation Generative grammar, accounts for textual relations, but, toWiddowson’s disappointment, it never goes beyond a model that ‘classifies andcategorizes, makes divisions and distinctions which separate aspects oflanguage out from each other’ (p. 26) . One of the difficulties about this modelidentified by Widdowson is its two levels: the level of understanding and thelevel of evaluation. For example, understanding the text ‘CLOSED’ in a shopwindow does not require a linguistic analysis (p. 23), but, as Widdowsonargues, this does not preclude the text from being evaluated.

Another difficulty is with the model’s textual metafunction. Consideringtheme and rheme,Widdowson recognizes that the organization of informationin the clause can be motivated either by ideational or interpersonal purposes.This challenges S/F grammar’s categorization of the three metafunctions asdistinct and separate strands. Another weakness identified in S/F grammar byWiddowson is that it cannot account for actual language use. The point beingmade is that analysis is confused with interpretation in S/F grammar: theprocess of identifying what semantic features are made manifest in a text istreated without any difference from the process that involves recognizinghow a text functions as discourse by discriminating which features arepragmatically activated and how.

In Chapter 3,Widdowson critically reviews various studies of context. Forexample, Firth’s schematic construct, like Malinowski’s ‘context of situation’, isnot seen as clearly distinguishing the notions of context and situation. Equallyunsatisfying is context as a psychological construct (as in the work of Hymes,and Sperber and Wilson) , which turns out to be a mere inferential processwhereby contextual effects are derived from given contextual assumptions.Instead,Widdowson proposes that context be taken as an unfixed, schematicconstruct, whose socio-cultural conventions provide the basis for the onlinepragmatic processing of language. In this way,Widdowson sets up interactionbetween text and context.

In Chapter 4, the author distinguishes co-text from context.‘The inspectionof co-text involves a consideration of the textual product as such withoutregard to the discourse that gave rise to it’ (p. 58) . Thus, co-textual relation isassociated with text while contextual relation is associated with discourse. Inhis examination of Halliday and Hasan’s exhaustive compendium of deviceswhich ‘relate text to general features of the language’,Widdowson makes thepoint that semantic features, ‘are relevant only to the extent that they havepragmatic point, their co-textual patterns only relevant to the extent that theykey into contextual factors’ (p. 69). In this way, it is emphasized that ‘a textonly exists for the user in association with discourse. It has no reality other-wise’ (p. 68) . If one isolates a text and analyses it as a linguistic object, notesco-occurrences and traces co-textual semantic connections, then the textceases to be a product of discourse.

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In Chapter 5, Widdowson introduces an additional factor in the generalinterpretative process ^ pretext, which generally refers to ‘an ulterior motive:a pretending to do one thing but intending to do something else’ (p. 79). Indyadic communication, the recognition of the writer’s/speaker’s purposelargely depends on contextual factors that regulate the focus of attention ofthe reader/listener. In situations where a third party (e.g. an analyst) isinvolved,Widdowson believes the recognition of the writer’s purpose dependsnot only on contextual factors, but also on pretextual factors. These pretextualfactors regulate the analyst’s focus of attention on the textual features to beanalyzed and the contextual factors to be considered.

The notion of pretext actually serves as a starting point for the author’scriticism of CDA. In Chapter 6, Widdowson argues that it is precisely outof its socio-political pretext that CDA makes the expedient selections of textualfeatures for analysis. A possible solution to this partiality seems to be corpusanalysis, which is the focus of Chapter 7. Corpus analysis aims to find patternsof systematic co-occurrences across a range of texts, but it is not without itsproblems for CDA. As examined by Widdowson, Fairclough’s and Stubbs’scorpus analyses of textual features are not systematic, and, in addition, corpusanalysis does not account for context. As argued by Widdowson, ‘corpuslinguists cannot read process from product in an analogous manner: theycannot, as we have seen, directly infer contextual factors from co-textualones, and use textual data as conclusive evidence of discourse’ (p.126) .

In Chapter 8,Widdowson brings into focus the distinction between analysisand interpretation, and emphasizes his point that CDA, whether it is Wodak’sversion or Fairclough’s, is not an analysis of textual features and contextualfactors, but interpretation regulated by pretextual socio-political commit-ment. It is argued that CDA, like its precursor literary criticism, does not resultin precise linguistic analysis. Even where contextual factors are taken intoconsideration, as inWodak’s discourse-historical approach which is centrallyconcerned with the ‘contextualizing and historicizing’of texts (p.138) , there isno ‘specification of setting and context as a necessary precondition on inter-pretation, but ready-made interpretations which, in effect, serve as a kind ofpretextual priming, designed to dispose us to read this text in a particularway’ (p. 142) . Similar criticism is repeated in Chapter 9, but this time in termsof approach and method, whereWiddowson argues that CDA,‘is not actually amethod of analysis but an approach to interpretation’ (p. 159). It is not amethod simply because of what Widdowson believes to be the shortage ofexplicit demonstration of how the abundant references to theories andmodels in CDA literature are drawn on in any principled way.

Text, Context, Pretext covers much ground in discourse analysis rangingfrom its early precursors (e.g. B. Malinowski, Z. Harris) to its contemporarypractitioners. The notion of pretext provides a new approach to the discussionof critical issues in (critical) discourse analysis. However, CDAwork selectedfor critical comment in this book comes mainly from the 1990s and, as

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observed by Blommaert (2005: 22) ,‘there is always a danger of objectificationwhen we discuss a dynamic and developing movement such as CDA as a‘‘school’’, locked in time and space’. This reader would have also appreciateda greater emphasis on more positive suggestions. At present, they are onlyformulated as brief proposals made in passing in the concluding Chapter10.

REFERENCES

Blommaert, Jan. 2005. Discourse: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press.

Rajagopalan, Kanavillil. 2004. On being critical. Critical Discourse Studies1: 261^263.

HAILONG TIAN

School of Foreign LanguagesTianjin University of Commerce/Nankai University

Tianjin 200134P. R. China

[email protected]

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