Introduction To Multimodal Analysis by D PDF

Journal of Sociolinguistics 12/3, 2008: 359–398
BOOK REVIEWS
NORMAN FAIRCL OUGH. Language and Globalization. London: Routledge. 2006. Pb

(978041531658) £18.99.
AL ASTAIR PENNYCOOK. Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows. London: Routledge.

2007. 189 pp. Pb (9780415374972) £18.99.
Reviewed by NIKOL AS COUPL AND
These are two very impressive but radically different books on language and
globalisation. Each develops critical lines of analysis; each has a broad and
engaging theoretical sweep; each argues that globalisation needs to be understood
in part as the global flow of language itself – genres and discourses. The radical
differences between the books stem from the fact that Norman Fairclough deals
with what we might think of as ‘heavy’ political and economic discourses in
global circulation, while Alistair Pennycook deals with the ‘lighter’ discourses
and styles associated with global hip-hop. Fairclough broadly opposes
globalisation discourses on the grounds that they impose unwanted norms
and assumptions on local environments. Pennycook broadly celebrates the
destabilisation of cultural norms that globalisation encourages. While it would
be easy to overstate the heavy/light, pro/anti oppositions I am sketching here,
reading the two books in close proximity to each other provides a wonderful
opportunity to think through the moral, political and cultural issues that a
sociolinguistics of globalisation confronts.
In two very useful early chapters Fairclough provides a review of social scientific
literatures on globalization and a statement of his own stance. He espouses a
realist position, accepting that there are objective facts of globalization to be
observed and measured, but says that these objectivities are ‘much too complex
to be fully controlled by any human intervention’ (p. 28). Critical attention
therefore needs to be given to how focussing discourses are constructed or selected,
and how discourses have social consequences. The key discourse in question for
Fairclough is ‘the discourse of globalism’ and how it is impacting on patterns of
work, government, politics and personal identification in different social settings.
In fact it is, he says, a new order of discourse – a new structured configuration
of discourses, genres and styles (discussed in detail in Chapter 3) centred on
neo-liberal assumptions.
Fairclough sustains a detailed conceptual apparatus throughout the book,
linking it very explicitly to some of his earlier treatments of critical discourse
analysis (CDA). While it will be daunting for newcomers, I found the overview
in Chapter 2 particularly concise and clear as a summary statement of
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Faircloughian CDA principles and terms. Fairclough’s usual and persuasive

insistence that CDA must incorporate detailed analysis of text is also sustained
through this book, although the wide range of social and geographical contexts
covered here is so great that there are only limited opportunities to carry through
detailed text analysis in these particular pages. In the chapters that follow, readers
are therefore regularly referred out to other published sources explaining ‘how to
do it’ – useful for those with the resources and energy to make those connections.
Fairclough analyses the general discourse of globalism into sets of assumptions
and rhetorical assertions about the ‘inevitable’, ‘autonomous’ and ‘beneficial’
operation of ‘liberalized’ and globally integrated markets, which ‘spread
democracy’ and ‘oppose terror’ (p. 40). (There is no limit to the scare-quoting
needed.) In an analysis of a globalist speech by U.S. Under-secretary of State,
Stuart Eizenstat (p. 42ff.), which Fairclough holds to be ‘typical’, we see that
movements of capital are represented in agentless terms (‘the influx of capital
was reversed’), that processes are evaluated in selective ways that validate neo-
liberalism (‘bad investments’), that inferable meanings of blame are embedded
(e.g. that local rather than transnational agents were at fault), and so on. CDA
is presented as emancipatory, for example, in developing critical perspectives in
successive chapters on how concepts such as ‘the knowledge-based economy’,
‘sustainable growth’, ‘mentoring’, ‘privatization’, ‘deregulation’ and ‘free market
capitalism’ in general are discursively constructed and contextualised.
Social and economic change in Romania and its ‘Europeanization’ and
internationalization is a recurrent topic in the book. Fairclough sheds light,
for example, on new pressures being imposed on Romanian university systems,
where ‘challenges’ and ‘competition’ are elements of the new discourse. U.K.
readers will find plenty of resemblances with their own experiences over the last
decade, which Fairclough attributes at one point to ‘authoritarian and clientelist
university leadership’ (p. 80). ‘Periodic reviews’, ‘performance indicators and
targets’, ‘best practice’ and the ‘culture of quality’ are all ripe for critical
examination in further detail, but an excellent and provocative start is made
here.
Most captivating is Fairclough’s integration of different contexts and effects of
free-marketism, including an illuminating chapter on the role of mass media in
constructing global scales and frames. Media are responsible for repositioning
stories in more global values and settings, for new forms of branding (e.g.
political branding, and again including in Romanian politics), and for a synthetic
personalization of relationships between viewers and on-screen personalities.
Fairclough’s conclusion is that:
Mediatization . . . tends to turn citizens into passive consumers and/or cynics, and
allows both government and corporate business interests to manipulate the public
more effectively. (p. 108)
Globalized media impose particular priorities for gender relationships (e.g. in
Cosmopolitan magazine), relationships between rich and poor (e.g. regimes of

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pity in the coverage of global poverty and suffering), and of course relationships
between states and power groups (e.g. ‘the war on terror’ which is given its own
chapter). Fairclough’s point is always that these discourses and representations
are consequential in the real world of social action – lifestyle change, patterns of
charitable giving, direct military intervention, etc. – he says that ‘there really is a
war on terror’ (p. 142).
Many rich points of Fairclough’s book inevitably fail to get exposure in a short
review, although I should mention a chapter on ‘Globalization from below’,
where we consider how globalization also makes new resources available for
local action, and for co-ordinated resistance to damaging global changes, for
example, in talking back against unemployment trends or ecological threats (e.g.
Greenpeace initiatives). This is an important inclusion if only because it shows that
Fairclough’s stance is not straightforwardly to demonize discourse flows that are
globalized. But it is the ‘heavy’, oppressive discourses that he goes after in the
main, and it is surprising how muted his generalizations against the discourse of
globalism often are. Is this perhaps strategic, when globalist discourse finds ways
to undermine anti-globalists as naı̈ve optimists or old-school reactionaries? For
myself, the book, taken as a whole, is most certainly an anti-globalist treatise –
persuasively and incisively so. I have a reservation about Fairclough’s belief in
the power of textual criticism to effect change or resistance, and one wonders
whether globalist texts will always be as incoherent or as demonstrably fallacious
as Stuart Eizenstat’s. But Fairclough’s wider argument is that discursive change
often presages and facilitates real social change, and his book certainly has that
facilitative potential.
Pennycook is by no means blind to issues of power and oppression hooked
into globalization, as his record of important past contributions on the themes
of colonialism and cultural politics shows. He prefaces the current book with his
‘complex’ vision of globalization:
This view seeks to understand the role of English both critically – in terms of new
forms of power, control and destruction – and in its complexity – in terms of new
forms of resistance, change, appropriation and identity. (p. 5)
But the most common stance we see in later chapters is optimism and appreciation
of the cultural hybridity that results from global flows around hip hop. Pennycook
sees considerable authority and creativity in how majoritarian cultural forms,
like U.S.A.-sourced rap music, are picked up by subordinated or marginal groups
– ‘transculturation’ – and articulate new sorts of cultural expression. Hip hop
in fact is viewed as ‘a springboard to a wider world’ (p.12), as witnessed in
data from Australia, Japan, Korea, Malaysia and elsewhere. Pennycook worries
whether a serious study of DJ-ing and MC-ing in different global contexts
will suffer from being labelled ‘socioblinguistics’, but to me this word-play
captures something of the creatively disrespectful processes that are at issue
here.
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As with Fairclough, Pennycook’s early chapters include a very valuable

literature review, although Pennycook engages most with cultural criticism
sources (Appadurai, Hart and Negri, Mignolo, Anderson, and others) rather
than Fairclough’s mainly sociological sources (Bourdieu, Robertson, Harvey,
Tomlinson, and others). Pennycook’s target is mainly the world Englishes
framework, for its political quietism and its failure to recognise sociolinguistic
dynamism, deterritorialization and hybridization. Pennycook argues that we
need to see creative appropriation of globalizing language styles as a form of
resistance to globalization within its own terms. He construes a critical politics
of ‘postoccidentalism’, which moves beyond the West’s ‘occidentalist’ vision of
itself and its languages. He favours a transgressive perspective – which is at
one point (p. 37) described as an ‘anti-disciplinary’ form of knowledge – that
continually challenges its own assumptions, explores what is possible through
language (‘difference’) and how language performances can be valued (‘desire’).
This approach will better understand the acts of transgression – ‘translation,
transmodality, transculturation and transtextuality’ (p. 56) – that hip hop itself
enacts.
There are rather few sustained empirical analyses of hip hop performances
in these chapters. One that is referred to at various points in the book
is the wonderfully evocative Japanese-English Rip Slyme (metathesizing from
‘Lips Rhyme’) instance, originally published in this journal (2003, Volume 7,
Issue 4). The power of the book is rather in the multiple theoretical perspectives
that Pennycook develops in different chapters. So we have a detailed critical
exploration of performance and performativity (Chapter 4), of language and
popular culture (Chapter 5), and of theory around authenticity (Chapter 6).
These chapters will be of great interest to sociolinguists who are not specifically
socioblinguists, wrestling with these new concepts and paradigms. The writing
strategy of returning to hip hop issues from multiple theoretical perspectives
inevitably leads to some repetition, but the overall result is a nuanced and self-
consciously shifting and multi-perspective account (see ‘transgression’, above).
Chapter 7 is the most data- and context-focussed chapter in the book,
where Pennycook comments on rap ‘flows and mixes’ in Tanzania, Hawaii,
New Zealand, New Caledonia, Gabon, Montreal, Senegal, the Philippines and
elsewhere. Popular culture manifestations of ‘Islam’ in Europe are an important
focus, exploring what ‘keepin it real’ might imply here, and tracking the subtle
admixture of spiritual and commercial values in ‘Islamic rap’, including a rap
song that contains Koran lyrics (p. 125ff.). We need these detailed instances to
appreciate the depth of Pennycook’s commitment to ‘trans’ phenomena, which
can otherwise seem trite and over-stated. In another comment on Rip Slyme
performance data, Pennycook explains how we get
the sense that English and Japanese become so intertwined, and meaning is so
dependent on the mixture of the codes, that the very separability of English and
Japanese becomes an impossibility; the very notion of whether English is invading

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Japanese culture or being used to represent Japanese culture can simply no longer
be asked. (p. 127)
This is another comment on the limitations of the world Englishes perspective.
But Pennycook takes the criticism further into the heart of sociolinguistics when
he says that ‘the hypermixes of hip hop’ push us ‘to think beyond notions of
“language choice”’ (p. 136): ‘Keeping it linguistically real is often a threat to
those who would prefer to keep it linguistically pure’ (p. 137).
Pennycook’s final chapter is a discussion of the potential role of hip hop as a
pedagogic resource, reminding us that despite the interdisciplinary breadth of his
focus, he has not turned its back on the old middle ground of applied linguistics.
Again we are treated to a wide-ranging debate of the interface between popular
culture and education, as well as to some of the particular advantages of rap per se
– stimulating young people’s interest in linguistic creativity, rhyming, linguistic
play, and so on. But it is the political dimension of this association that Pennycook
dwells on, including the possibilities of recognising ‘postliterate orality’ (p. 147),
a ‘post-authorial era’ (p. 149) and validating non-establishment linguistic styles
and practices. This is what he calls ‘teaching with the flow’, and he finishes the
book with the threat that unless we do this, ‘the flow will pass us by’ (p. 158).
So we have two starkly contrasting reactions to global flows around language
in the two books – on the one hand, critique and oppose; on the other hand,
understand and accommodate. The contrast is not a simple matter of personal
commitment or ideology, of course; it comes down to which social contexts and
processes one attends to, and where the balance of oppression and openness in
particular dimensions of social change is seen to fall. But it is by virtue of their
very different concerns and different directions of argument that these two books
take us several large steps forward in understanding what a sociolinguistics of
globalization needs to encompass.
NIKOL AS COUPL AND

Centre for Language and Communication Research, ENCAP
Cardiff University
Cardiff CF10 3EU
Wales, U.K.
coupland@cardiff.ac.uk
SANFORD SCHANE. Language and the Law. London: Continuum. 2006. 228 pp. Pb.
(9780826488299) £19.99.
Reviewed by CHRISTOPHER HUTTON

Widespread dissatisfaction with the intellectual foundations of autonomous
or ‘core’ linguistics make this a critical time in the search by linguists for
an interdisciplinary role in a global academic system increasingly driven by
technocratic visions of applied science. In a brief foreword to Sanford Schane’s
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Language and the Law, Roger Shuy writes that the work is ‘for linguists who want
to learn more about law and for lawyers who want to learn about linguistics’
(p. ix). Like many courtships, the relationship between law and linguistics has
been somewhat one-sided, in that the interdisciplinary project has been arguably
driven more by linguists than lawyers. The situation is an improvement, however,
on the case of Labovian sociolinguistics, which was a theoretical approach within
linguistics of which mainstream sociologists remained largely unaware.
This work is an important addition to the literature on language and the law,
and is particularly to be welcomed for extending discussion of the legal relevance
of theories of metaphor and speech acts. Schane’s analysis is both accessible
and lucid, and he introduces the reader to a range of important cases, the texts
of many of which are included in a useful appendix. Schane elects to focus on
four substantial areas of legal theory and practice where there is a significant
overlap with the concerns of linguistics. These make up the core chapters of
the work: ‘Ambiguity in language and misunderstanding in law’; ‘Linguistic
metaphor and legal fiction’; ‘Speech acts and legal hearsay’; ‘Promise and contract
formation’. The introduction provides a guide to Schane’s approach and academic
background, as well as a useful overview of the topics covered.
In essence, Schane’s method consists in presenting legally contentious
language issues through the lens of linguistics. Thus in Chapter 1, legal usage
in relation to ‘ambiguity’ is analyzed into three distinct types. Firstly, there is the
‘narrow sense of ambiguity’, which arises where a word has two clearly distinct
meanings. This was at issue in Frigaliment Importing Co. v. BNS International Sales
Corp, (1960), where a contract for delivery of chicken led to the dispute. The
question was whether ‘chicken’ in the contract meant ‘a young chicken, suitable
for broiling and frying’ or ‘any bird of the genus’, including so-called ‘stewing
chicken’. The second type, referential ambiguity, is illustrated through a case
where a contract included reference to a named ship, Peerless. It turned out that
there were two ships with this name both sailing out of Bombay within a few
months of each other (Raffles v. Wichelhaus, 1864). This is termed by Schane
‘referential indeterminacy’ (p. 17). The final meaning of ‘ambiguity’ is illustrated
from a case which turned on whether dressed and eviscerated chickens were
‘manufactured’ products (Interstate Commerce Commission v. Allen E. Kroblin, Inc.,
1953). Schane designates this ‘vagueness of categorization’ (p. 17). In Frigaliment,
the linguistic arguments were of about equal strength on both sides. If it could
have been shown that ‘chicken’ was generally understood within the trade as
having a specific meaning (i.e. as being unambiguous), then that would have
been conclusive as to the outcome. However, given contradictory evidence was
given as to trade usage, the judge ruled that the plaintiff seeking to rescind the
contract had the burden of proof, and that this had not been discharged.
In Chapter 2, Schane tackles the fascinating topic of metaphor and legal
fictions, opening with a nice quotation from the legal philosopher Lon Fuller
to the effect that a fiction ‘is frequently a metaphorical way of expressing a truth’
(p. 54). Schane looks at two legal fictions, the doctrine of ‘attractive nuisance’

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and the notion of ‘corporation as person’, and analyzes them through Lakoff
and Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory. The first arose as late nineteenth
century judge-made law created to extend liability to landowners for injuries to
trespassing children who were ‘attracted’ or ‘lured’ onto their property by some
inviting (and dangerous) feature such as a body of water or a piece of machinery.
The landowner was deemed to have invited the child onto the premises, and was
therefore fixed with a duty of care. Schane then gives an insightful overview of
historical background to the personification of corporations in the United States,
particularly in controversies relating to the state ‘citizenship’ of corporations
and problems of federal versus state jurisdiction. For Schane, metaphor theory
offers a way of stating and clarifying the underlying conceptual relations, e.g.
AN ATTRACTIVE NUISANCE IS AN INVITER (p. 79) and THE CORPORATION IS
A PERSON (p. 80). Linguistics brings the insight that ‘law never invented on its
own this linguistic imagery’ but rather ‘has been able to exploit to its advantage’
and ‘maximize for its needs’ underlying conceptual structures ‘already deeply
embedded within the language’ (p. 182).
In Chapters 3 and 4, Schane looks to speech act theory to provide an analytic
framework for discussion of the admissibility of hearsay evidence, i.e. statements
made out of court which are presented as evidence ‘to prove the truth of the
matter asserted’ (p. 101), and to shed light on issues relating to promising in the
context of contract formation. In assessing whether a statement is hearsay or
not, the issue is the legal use to which that statement will be put. If the statement
is presented as going to the truth of what is asserted (‘A said to B that Y killed
Z’), then it is inadmissible. If the statement is merely used to show the effect
of the utterance (perhaps to provoke B into retaliation against Y), then it is
admissible. Reports of statements having legal effect are admissible, such as a
legally enforceable promise or a statement of ownership rights (pp. 102–105).
There are complicated exclusions and exceptions to these rules, notably the ‘state
of mind’ exception, where a statement is offered as evidence of the truth of an
assertion, where that assertion describes the state of mind of the utterer, e.g.
‘I hate my husband’ (p. 107). Schane suggests that we can offer an analysis
of hearsay rules as follows: ‘if a witness offers an out-of-court statement for
its illocutionary value, its perlocutionary effects, its locutional properties or its
associated state of mind’, it will not be hearsay. If offered ‘solely for its propositional
content’, it will be hearsay (pp. 117, 136–137).
A fundamental issue for linguists interested in law is the exact role of linguistic
expertise in cases where language issues are central. On this point, Schane
raises the important question of the difference between the legal approach
and the speech-act approach to hearsay: the latter is ‘more than just an
interesting exercise’ (p. 136). He argues that the traditional legal treatment of
hearsay proceeds inductively, setting up ‘arbitrary classifications for the observed
properties’ of utterances (p. 136), whereas speech-act theory began as ‘an
independent theory whose original purpose was the treatment of a particular
phenomena, but that subsequently handles new facts from another domain’ and
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thus can ‘show itself to be a valuable resource for investigating hearsay issues’
(pp. 136–137). The speech-act theory approach is also said to help students deal
with the complexity and apparent disorder or ‘mishmash’ of the hearsay rules
(p. 183).
This is very much the crux of the matter and it would have been interesting
to see further general discussion of the interface between linguistics and law.
The relevance of linguistics for law might be argued on the strong basis that
linguists can help lawyers deal better with substantive issues of legal relevance.
A weaker though still important claim would be that linguists can present more
clearly underlying questions of language that cause problems in law, and thus can
offer lawyers a meta-language in which to formulate and understand the causes
and nature of their difficulties with language. The Frigaliment case involving the
ambiguity of ‘chicken’ came down to a question of burden of proof, so there was
in the end no linguistic key or answer available, and any linguist offering advice
in that case could have at best given a diagnosis of the underlying linguistic
ambiguity. At issue is a fundamental question in jurisprudence, namely the nature
of law itself. If law is simply a specialized form of general human discourse, then
it is open to analysis by models derived from linguistics; if it is an autonomous
and self-sustaining realm, with its own sui generis forms of reasoning, theories of
meaning and interpretation, models of causality, of psychology, society, etc., then
the role of linguistics is much more problematic.
CHRISTOPHER HUTTON
School of English
The University of Hong Kong
Pokfulam Road
Hong Kong
People’s Republic of China
chutton@hkucc.hku.hk
JOANN SWANN, ANA DEUMERT, THERESA LIL L IS AND RAJEND MESTHRIE. A Dictionary
of Sociolinguistics. Edinburgh, U.K.: Edinburgh University Press. 2004. 368 pp. Pb
(074861691) £16.99.
Reviewed by JANET COTTERIL L

A review of a dictionary is necessarily a rather different undertaking to a
typical book review. The aims and objectives of a dictionary are not the same
as those of a research monograph or edited collection of articles. Dictionaries
are not traditionally read cover to cover, except perhaps by the obsessive and
the reviewer (or indeed the obsessive reviewer) and such texts do not suffer
the same dilemmas of sequencing as do other types of publication. Nor do
they typically reward the reader with a coherent narrative. The criteria for a
dictionary however are no less demanding and comprise the following: any
good dictionary should possess (in no particular order) comprehensiveness

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of coverage, but conciseness too – these two elements sometimes in conflict;

usability, including ease of cross-referencing; and readability, preferably for a
wide range of users. A Dictionary of Sociolinguistics attempts all of these things,
and largely succeeds in achieving them. The dictionary benefits from a plethora
of contributors, both academics and students, and is all the better for this in its
breadth.
A dictionary of sociolinguistics has an initial, fundamental difficulty to face.
Defining the term and its scope is by no means straightforward, and it is
pleasing to see an initial Note to Readers where the authors have outlined
their formulation of the field, taking a fairly broad approach to inclusions and
contributions, with entries from applied and critical linguistics as well as the
more ‘traditional’ variationist and interactional domains. The (surprisingly short)
definition of sociolinguistics itself adopts a relatively holistic approach, referring to
what might be considered elsewhere more peripheral concerns in interaction,
education and ideology as ‘uniting under the banner of sociolinguistics’
(p. 287). As the authors concede, dictionaries in linguistics must be careful
so as not to tread on the toes of other texts which may partially cover similar
ground. Again, the authors have been careful to avoid this, going as far as to
recommend other more general texts such as Crystal’s Dictionary of Linguistics and
Phonetics.
The majority of entries in the dictionary are structured in terms of their
definition, usually with some form of evaluation signalling them as ‘important’,
‘major’ or ‘significant’, although presumably if they were not considered so, they
would not have made the editorial cut. This is followed by one or more of the major
academics who have contributed to the term’s establishment or development,
along with illuminating examples and relevant cross-references/literature.
Rather than simply attributing whole areas to individual linguists, they are instead
referred to as ‘strongly associated’ with them, allowing a more multidimensional
approach to definitions. Some of the more general, and at times confusing terms
which are shared between different subdisciplines of linguistics, such as ‘voice’
and ‘discourse’ are also included in the dictionary with appropriate subcategories
which should help to differentiate their usages.
One particularly nice aspect of these definitions is the neutral stance taken by
the authors in the majority of cases. Thus, the entry on ‘individual’ flags up the
debate within sociolinguistics between idiolectal and societal views of language;
similarly, the entry on ‘critical discourse analysis (CDA)’ includes reference to the
‘considerable debate’ surrounding work within this model of analysis (p. 64). In
this way, the reader is able to gain not only an understanding of the term, but
to get a sense of contextualisation, in other words to see where each particular
approach fits within the bigger picture.
The biographical entries are, of necessity in a dictionary of this length, largely
restricted to the usual suspects of sociolinguistics and, as the authors concede,
these are largely white, male and Anglo. However, these entries do manage to map
out the major theories from the principle academics within the field within each
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relatively short span of text. For further biographical input, readers are referred
to one of the authors’ complementary texts, the more ambitious multi-volume
Concise Encyclopaedia of Sociolinguistics.
The audience for the dictionary is explicitly stated as including students,
teachers and researchers in sociolinguistics, thus a broad group of potential
users. There is a good balance between necessarily technical terms, their
explanation, exemplification and connection to associated concepts. This is
sometimes achieved more easily than at other times. The entries on ‘perceptual
dialectology’ and ‘syntagmatic’, for example manage to achieve their definitions
with relatively few cross-references, relying instead on very effective worked
examples of their usage. In contrast, the entry on ‘language planning’ contains no
fewer than 11 cross-references. For the student of sociolinguistics in particular,
who perhaps needs to consult many of the additional entries, this potentially
poses quite a challenge to fluent reading and comprehensibility. This is probably
inevitable with more complex concepts, but could make reading some of the
entries slightly stilted for the less experienced sociolinguist. For this reader,
the problem was more one of academic curiosity; so interesting were some of
the entries, that I was sometimes seduced away from the original search term
to the entries for cross-references and on occasion lost my original place of
entry, a simple case of attention deficit and not necessarily a criticism of the
book.
The detailed and reasonably extensive bibliography which ends the dictionary
provides an extremely useful resource for both established and fledgeling
sociolinguists in itself. It might have been useful to include references to some
of the more reputable online sources of follow-up material along with the more
traditional resources in this section. However, details of both key books in the field
and significant articles enable readers to follow up their initial investigations with
more focused reading.
Producing a dictionary which treads the delicate territory between brevity and
coverage, detail and summary is a challenging project, but one which Swann
et al. have managed to accomplish with considerable style. Its conciseness, lack
of extraneous technicality and, not least, the fact that it is a single-volume and
reasonably-priced paperback means that lecturers will be able to recommend this
to their students for ownership rather than simply consultation. A Dictionary
of Sociolinguistics is likely to become recommended reading on most if not all
sociolinguistics courses and will certainly remain a regular source of reference
for this reviewer.
JANET COTTERIL L
Cardiff University
Cardiff CF10 3EU
Wales, U.K.
cotterillj@cardiff.ac.uk

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JOSEPH ERRINGTON. Linguistics in a Colonial World: A Story of Language, Meaning

and Power. Malden, Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing. 2008. 199 pp. Pb
(9781405105705) £19.99/€28.00.
Reviewed by LINDSAY BEL L

Errington’s Linguistics in a Colonial World and Talal Asad’s now classic collection
Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (1970) both elaborate their respective
disciplines’ complicities with colonial projects by focusing on ambiguous
relationships between producers, products and purposes of knowledge in, and
of, zones of colonial contact. While a comparative analysis is not the purpose
of this type of review, the three decades that separate these scholars’ critical
reflections raise questions about the types of discursive strategies each discipline
has been able to mobilize in defense of its legitimacy in a post-colonial world.
Following World War II, former colonial subjects demanded increased control
over the representations of their histories and everyday lives. Anthropology, as it
once was, could not maintain its monopoly on the description of ‘Other’ cultures
and societies (Said 1989). This gave way to debates about power and positionality
which continue to be integral to theoretical and methodological concerns in
anthropology today. Linguistics, on the other hand, has not experienced a similar
process of reflexivity. Posited as the science of language, the ‘object’ of study
(language) is defined in abstraction from the social aspects of its production. In
distancing itself from the social, linguistics has, in many ways, circumvented the
productive critiques issued from colonial studies. Linguistics in a Colonial World
seeks to address this disparity.
Described as a language-centred survey of the colonial world from the
sixteenth to the twentieth century, the volume outlines how, why and with
what consequences languages were made ‘objects’ of knowledge. In framing
the development of a science of language in its socio-historical contexts of
production, Errington demonstrates how linguistics changed in and with the
projects of power it served. His first chapter, ‘The linguistic in the colonial’,
places linguistic knowledge squarely (even if un-uniformly) within the projects
and purposes of colonialisms. He suggests that early descriptive work fixed
languages in writing while also serving to ‘fix speakers in colonial yet “natural”
hierarchies’ (p. viii). The remainder of the work is focused on the textual practices
(reducing speech to writing) deployed by (pre)linguistics which helped on the
one hand to legislate differences between speakers while on the other hand,
contributing to a definition of language which organizes how issues of linguistic
difference continue to be understood. He is both asking linguists to recognize
more fully their works’ ‘situated, provisional character’ (p. 169) while including
himself in the search for a different place for linguistics in a post-colonial
world. For Errington, understanding the development of language as ‘object’
is the fundamental component to moving toward what he calls a more ‘holistic
linguistics’.
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In Chapters 3 and 4, Errington makes the case for philology as the ideological
and intellectual precursor to a science of language. Chapter 3 focuses on the
key figures of William ‘Oriental’ Jones and Johann Gottfried Herder. Herder and
Jones, each in their own way, foregrounded notions of a deep linguistic past which
unfolds organically over time. Facts of language history served as proofs of human
inequality, as languages (and their speakers) could be grafted on to various points
of a developmental trajectory. In linking language to human origins/human
nature, Jones’ and Herder’s work made way for ‘telescopic constructions of global
human difference to be based on specious comparisons of microscopic linguistic
facts’ (p. 51). As Chapter 4 races through philology’s key developments and
contributions to a budding linguistics, two key elements are re-emphasized: first,
the development and crystallization of romanticist conceptions of the naturalness
of linguistic sharedness as highlighted by the work of Herder; and second, the
application of biological/evolutionist metaphors and categorizations to questions
of linguistic diversity generated through colonial encounters. Taken together,
these two discursive threads provided the intellectual resources for two different
(sometimes interconnected) projects: asserting colonial authority abroad and
creating national communities at home.
Knowledge about linguistic diversity can in large part be attributed to
missionaries both past and present; therefore, Errington spends a good portion
of the volume on the shifting purposes and values of linguistic descriptive work
completed under the banner of salvation. Attending to the variability of shapes
and scopes of missionary projects, Errington carefully accounts for differences
engendered by faith, status, and nationality of individual missionaries. He begins
with the work of Catholic missionaries in the seventeenth century, specifically
with their description of Nahuatl in Mexico and of Tagalog in the Philippines.
His focus here, as throughout, are the strategies of selection involved in reducing
speech to writing and the interconnection between textual practices, salvation
and domination. For the friar linguists described in Chapter 2, authority for
the dual work of description and conversion derives from the fine-grained
precision of linguistic descriptions. Particular details of ‘alien’ languages (sounds
difficult to imitate, orthographies that pre-dated their arrival) pose a threat
to missionaries’ legitimacy as experts and are therefore managed in different
ways.
In Chapter 5, Errington extends the discussion of the range and intentions
of strategies of selection deployed in linguistic description by detailing efforts
of nineteenth-century Protestant missionaries in sub-Saharan Africa. Protestant
emphasis on salvation through direct engagement with the written gospel in one’s
own language produced a stronger connection between faith and literacy while
fostering a deeper commitment on the part of missionaries to produce accurate
documentation for use in translation. Philological images of languages and the
past shaped what constituted accurate knowledge of a language. Influenced
by the German tradition outlined in Chapters 3 and 4, nineteenth-century
linguists underscored the importance of an intimate knowledge of speakers’

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life-worlds. Based on language-centred ideas about society and identity, this

ideology presupposed a vision of languages as unified, coherent and ‘pure’. The
task of the linguist, then, is to construct/impose homogeneity and unity through
orthographies and grammars, which relied on an expert discourse of ‘science’
for added authority. In Chapter 7, Errington sets out to show how the dual work
of conversion has been carried over from the colonial past to the globalizing
present by looking briefly at the history of the Summer Institute of Linguistics. The
chapter charts the rise of structuralism and subsequent move away from
philological concerns toward universalizing questions about a pan-human
language faculty. This theoretical transition enabled a renewed sense of scientific
neutrality and objectivity for descriptive work which facilitates comparative
analysis in search of universals, while simultaneously remaining linked to the
end goals of (Christian) literacy development and national unity.
Equally important in Chapter 7 are the ways in which the emphasis on
achieving complete descriptions of unified languages has provided the discursive
legitimacy for work falling under the rubric of language revitalization. Errington
poignantly shows how the natural/ecological metaphors used for talking about
languages engenders a developmental understanding of languages wherein the
value of languages transcends that of its speakers (for an elaborated critique,
see Duchêne and Heller 2007). Further, interventions based on documentation
of bounded, unified codes overlooks the very social processes of selection which
deem some linguistic forms more legitimate than others. This rounds out the
illustration from Chapter 6, where Errington shows the powerful shaping effects of
literacy in the Belgian Congo and the Netherland East Indies, where linguists were
involved in the partial description and partial creation of non-European languages
of European power (Swahili and Malay). Languages of the state, even those of
the non-European variety, contribute to new hierarchies of language and by
extension new hierarchies among colonial subjects. In taking up the unintended
consequences of linguistic work, Errington resists the oversimplification of the
relationship between language and colonialism.
It is difficult to do a fair summative service to this work. Linguistics in a Colonial
World is a short yet ambitious volume. It draws on a series of colonial contexts
to set up its argument and adopts a historical materialist approach that captures
the contingency and complexity of relationships heavily traversed by unequal
relations of power. The somewhat hurried contextual shifts can be disorienting at
times and questions about colonial practices within the United States and Canada
vis-à-vis indigenous populations are left unasked (surprising given the strong
history of Yale-trained linguists and anthropologists in producing descriptive
work of North American Indians). Nevertheless, the case made is convincing and
the argument imperative. The volume picks up on key post-colonial references
and begins to bridge two sets of literatures usually kept apart. As such, the
work serves as an invitation to engage with the history of linguistics in order
to understand the tools for enquiry we have inherited and what it is they may
(intentionally or not) be (re)producing and ultimately what their limitations
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might be for how we understand questions of diversity and difference. For

Errington, a more holistic linguistics is one which opens up language’s status
as ‘object’ by taking difference and conflict as facts of linguistic life and which
recognizes that power differences are always in the zones of contact which
linguists create in and for their work. In some ways, the volume is a re-voicing of
Errington’s impressive essay ‘Colonial linguistics’ which appeared in the Annual
Review of Anthropology (2001). The full volume is perhaps better suited than the
article to engage audiences across disciplines. The prose is clear and the theoretical
argument well supported through the unpacking of modes of linguistic analysis
that students in the discipline will readily recognize. The succinctness of the
writing and the importance of the central argument make the reviewed text
likely to appear on many course syllabi in the near future.
REFERENCES
Asad, Talal. 1970. Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter. London: Ithaca Press.
Duchêne, Alexandre and Monica Heller (eds.). 2007. Discourses of Endangerment.
London: Continuum.
Errington, Joseph. 2001. Colonial linguistics. Annual Review of Anthropology 30: 19–39.
Said, Edward. 1989. Representing the colonized: Anthropology’s interlocutors. Critical
Inquiry 15: 205–225.
LINDSAY BEL L
Sociology and Equity Studies in Education
University of Toronto
252 Bloor Street West
Toronto ON, M5S 1V6
Canada
lgbell@oise.utoronto.ca
JOHN MYHIL L . Language, Religion and National Identity in Europe and the Middle
East (Discourse Approaches to Politics, Society and Culture). Amsterdam, The
Netherlands/Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: John Benjamins. 2006. 300 pp. Hb
(902722711X) €115.00/$138.00.
Reviewed by KARYN STAPL ETON

In this book, John Myhill explores the relationship between language and
nationalism, while proposing a framework for understanding the differing
outcomes of nationalist movements. In particular, he aims to explain why certain
applications of nationalist ideology have produced positive outcomes, while others
have led to death, war and destruction. Positive outcomes are here defined as
gaining the right to self-determination and transcending religious differences,
while negative outcomes include fascism, war and internal religious conflicts.
Myhill is centrally concerned with how these outcomes are produced through the
‘composition of the nationality’ (p. 2). However, he rejects the oft-cited distinction

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between ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ nationalisms – where the former are assumed to have
generally positive results and the latter are seen as destructive (e.g. Hobsbawm
1990; Ignatieff 1993) – on the basis of much historical evidence to the contrary
(e.g. failed civic nationalism in fascist Italy and Spain and stable democracies
based on ethnic nationalism in Norway, Finland and Poland). Myhill sets out an
alternative explanatory framework based on the type of linguistic ideology adopted
by a movement and the (inter-related) role of what he terms ‘premodern national
churches’ in the construction of national identity. Hence, he argues that ‘it is
particularly the parameter of the relationship between the constituent parts of a
nationality that is correlated with, and may be argued to account for, the success
or failure of different nationalist movements’ (p. 4).
The book begins with an Introduction, which sets out in some detail the
main claims and assumptions of Myhill’s approach. This provides a crucial
underpinning to the book as a whole and, as such, will be discussed in some
detail below. The Introduction is followed by five chapters, which examine a
range of nationalist movements and their outcomes; and the book ends with
a brief Conclusion. As mentioned above, a central claim advanced by Myhill is
that ‘the particular type of linguistic ideology adopted by a nationalist movement
plays a central role in determining the success or failure of the movement’ (p. 3).
Having provided a brief history of the connection between language and national
identity, Myhill further notes that this relationship is interconnected with the role
of religion as an identity marker; e.g. the extent to which religion or language
serves as a national identity marker and, hence, whether different religious groups
can be united within a common national language/identity.
With this assumption in mind, the pivotal discussion of linguistic ideology
makes two key claims (p.3):
1. The way in which language boundaries are constructed directly affects the success or
failure of nationalist movements based upon that language.
Here a distinction is drawn between what Myhill terms ‘big’ languages and
‘small’ languages. A ‘big’ language has a single standard and is defined as a
single language, despite containing diverse – indeed sometimes unintelligible –
dialects. Examples of ‘big’ languages include German, Italian and Arabic. A ‘small’
language, on the other hand, shows little dialectal diversity, and is defined as a
distinct language, despite being similar to – and sometimes mutually intelligible
with – other languages. Examples of ‘small’ languages include Slavic languages
and Germanic Scandanavian languages (i.e. those spoken in Norway, Sweden
and Denmark).
As applied to issues of identity and nationalism, the distinction between ‘big’
and ‘small’ languages is a crucial one; indeed, it is ‘central to the thesis of
[the] book’ (p. 12). Essentially, Myhill argues that because of the link between
language and identity, then ‘decisions about if, where and how to establish
borders between languages will also determine the identities of individual people’
(p. 12). Many speakers of ‘big’ languages thus believe themselves to be part of
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the same nationality, despite little interaction or shared intelligibility between

those who speak different constituent dialects. Myhill claims that, historically,
nationalist movements based on ‘big’ languages have had negative results,
including world wars and genocides; examples cited include German and Pan-
Turkish nationalism, which led to the Holocaust and the Armenian Genocide,
respectively. In contrast, he sees those movements based on ‘small’ languages
as having produced positive outcomes, examples being the national liberation
movements of the Czechs, and the Norwegians.
2. A ‘national language’ can be interpreted either as the ‘spoken’ language or the
‘sacred/ancestral’ language of the group in question.
This distinction is also central to Myhill’s thesis and, in particular, to delineating,
in modern nationalist movements, the conditions under which language or
religion comes to assume greater relative importance as a marker of national
identity. The argument hinges on the concept of premodern national churches,
which are here defined as ethnic or national churches established before 1600
(e.g. Jewish, Greek). Such churches are to be distinguished from universal
religions such as Catholicism or Islam, which transcend geographical
boundaries. Myhill claims that groups which established premodern churches
interpret their modern identity partly on the basis of religious affiliation; and
that for these groups, the ‘national language’ is generally the ‘sacred/ancestral’
language. Hence, these groups cannot easily be integrated with other religious
groups with whom they share a spoken language. For example, Turkish-speaking
Greeks will continue to see themselves as Greek, rather than Turkish. In contrast,
groups which did not form premodern national churches (e.g. German-speaking
Protestants and Catholics) can successfully integrate and develop a group identity
based on a shared, spoken national language. On the basis of this evidence, Myhill
contends that ‘“premodern national church groups,” and only these groups, have
given religion priority over language in modern times’ (pp. 15–16).
Chapters 1–5 present a range of detailed applications of the ideas outlined in
the Introduction. Chapter 1 provides relevant historical background; Chapters
2 and 3 discuss nationalisms based, respectively, on ‘small’ and ‘big’ language
ideologies; and Chapters 4 and 5 examine the interaction between language and
religion as national identity markers, with particular reference to the influence
of premodern national churches.
Chapter 1, ‘Premodern national churches, Roman Empire and the Caliphate’,
discusses the relationship between religion and identity in premodern times.
Myhill starts by tracing the history of groups such as the Jews, Armenians,
Greeks, Bulgarians and Serbs, which all established premodern churches and later
maintained these (religious) identities rather than combining with other groups
with whom they shared spoken languages. The second part of the chapter looks at
premodern developments associated with the ‘universal religions’ of Catholicism
and Islam, where ‘religion was assumed to be universal in character and national
churches were rejected in principle’ (p. 52). Both religions are shown to have used

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‘big’ languages as the basis for political unification between ethnically divergent
groups, with frequently ‘catastrophic results’ (p. 27).
Chapter 2, ‘Small languages and national liberation’, examines a range of
nationalist movements based on ‘small’ languages, which led to the establishment
of new nation states; particularly in the periods following World War I and the
Russian Revolution (1918–1920) and the disintegration of the Soviet Union
(early 1990s). In these cases, the goal was not national unification, but rather
national liberation and the right to self-determination for linguistically defined
nationalities. Examples discussed here include the Poles, Ukranians, Armenians,
Czechs, Jews, Uzbeks and Norwegians. Myhill evaluates all of these cases of
‘small language’ nationalism as having produced positive outcomes. In contrast,
Chapter 3, ‘Big languages, delusions of grandeur, war, and fascism’, describes
situations in which ‘big’ languages, encompassing many diverse dialects, have
been mobilised for nationalistic purposes. Myhill discusses a number of nationalist
cases here, including the French, Germans, Italians, Spanish, Arabs and Pan-
Turks; all of which, he claims, can be traced directly to historical developments
associated with the Roman Empire and the Caliphate, as outlined in Chapter 1.
Such movements explicitly linked the national language and national identity
with ideologies of a glorious past and a ‘great people’. In Myhill’s analysis,
all of these (‘big language’) ideologies have produced ‘inherently aggressive’
nationalities, and have led to universally negative outcomes, including fascism,
genocide and ‘war on a historically unprecedented level’ (p. 119).
Chapter 4, ‘Language, religion, and nationalism in Europe’, and Chapter 5,
‘Language, religion, and nationalism in the Middle East’, focus on ‘cases in which
language and religion have competed as markers of national identity in modern
times’ (p. 177). Within such contexts, Myhill repeatedly emphasises the role of
premodern churches as a key determining factor in the success or otherwise of
nationalist movements. Citing a range of European examples in Chapter 4, he
shows evidence that only those groups which did not form premodern churches
(e.g. Protestants and Catholics in France, Germany and Czechoslovakia) were able
to successfully form national identities around shared spoken languages. Where
premodern churches existed (e.g. within the U.K. and Yugoslavia), religious
identities prevailed in the face of attempts to unite the different groupings around
a common language/identity. Hence, it has proved impossible to artificially unite
such groups and, in Myhill’s view, ‘the best solution is to simply separate them from
each other as quickly, humanely and fairly as possible’ (p. 178). Similar processes
are noted in the Middle East (Chapter 5). Here, Myhill contrasts cases such as
the integration of Christians and Muslims in Albania (where no premodern
church existed) with conflicts between ‘premodern national church groups
and modern language-based nationalities’ (p. 229). In particular, he considers
Muslim conquests of other religious groups, e.g. Jews, Armenians, Maronites
and Greeks, which have resulted in complex and protracted conflicts (e.g. in
the Lebanon), and/or the disappearance of these groups from Muslim-controlled
territories.
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In the Conclusion, Myhill rearticulates the claim that ‘nationalism in itself is

not inherently good or bad’ and, further, that it is ‘something which is not going
to go away’ (p. 277). Hence, it is important to learn from history which ideas have
produced positive or negative results and to use this knowledge in planning and
managing future situations. The book concludes with a brief discussion of current
movements (both pan-European and pan-Islamic), which seem to be advancing
nationalism based on ‘big’ languages and the extent to which the potential
dangers of such developments are countered by the growth of ‘glocalisation’
(as defined by Robertson 1995; Trudgill 2004).
This book offers a comprehensive, historically detailed and cogent account of
the nature, development and outcomes of a range of nationalist movements in
Europe and the Middle East. Its particular focus on the role of premodern national
churches is both distinctive and illuminating. However, it would have been useful
– particularly in light of his exhortation to ‘learn from history’ – if the author
had teased out in more detail the implications of his analyses for present-day
nationalisms. Additionally, in some of the analyses, more broad contextual detail
(e.g. a fuller discussion of socio-cultural factors) would have been helpful. Overall,
however, the book presents an impressive and engaging thesis, which will be of
interest to a wide audience of linguists and non-linguists, alike.
REFERENCES
Hobsbawm, Eric. 1990. Nations and Nationalism Since 1790. Cambridge, U.K.:
Cambridge University Press.
Ignatieff, Michael. 1993. Blood and Belonging. New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux.
Robertson, Roland. 1995. Glocalisation: Time-space and homogeneity-heterogeneity.
In Mike Featherstone, Scott M. Lash and Roland Robertson (eds.) Global Modernities.
London: Sage. 25–44.
Trudgill, Peter. 2004. Glocalisation and the Ausbau sociolinguistics of modern Europe.
In Anna Duszak and Urszula Okulska (eds.) Speaking from the Margin. Frankfurt,
Germany: Peter Lang. 35–49.
KARYN STAPL ETON
School of Communication
University of Ulster at Jordanstown
Newtownabbey, Co. Antrim
Northern Ireland BT37 0QB
k.stapleton@ulster.ac.uk
MONICA HEL L ER (ed.). Bilingualism: A Social Approach (Palgrave Advances

in Linguistics). Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave Macmillan. 2007. 361 pp. Pb
(9781403996787) £19.99.
Reviewed by DAVID HIL L

Firstly, it is necessary to state from the outset that this is not an especially
thrilling read; indeed it is a positively difficult slog at times. However, this is not

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to say that this book is not worth approaching; it is in fact, a rather edifying
text which provides a large volume of information that is directly relevant to
the study of bilingualism both in an historical context and as a current social
reality. The preface to the text makes the claim that this particular series of
books ‘is designed for postgraduate and research students’ (p. vii). With this in
mind the book is separated into sixteen chapters, fifteen of which (barring the
opening chapter) are categorised into one of four sections: ‘Bilingualism, nation,
state and capitalism’(Chapters 2–6); ‘The state, the economy and their agencies
in late modernity’(Chapters 7–10); ‘Identity practices’ (Chapters 11–12); and
‘Linguistic form and linguistic practice’(Chapters 13–16).
Chapter 1 (Monica Heller) is somewhat of a contextualising chapter that
aims to set the tone for the rest of the book and is thus written by the book’s
editor. It explores bilingualism’s reasons; implications; academic and political
history; and its theories. There is nothing that strikes as particularly revelatory
or revolutionary in the piece, but it does a fairly sound job of providing a strong
background to the subject from a largely historical viewpoint, and it is a rather
good introduction to the subject for those who lack specialist knowledge of the
field.
Chapter 2 (Christopher Stroud) explores the relevance of colonialism and post-
colonialism in bilingualism studies, with particular reference to Mozambique.
The piece looks at the concepts of hierarchical language structures (languages
as value-laden) and at the relationships between language, race, territory and
to the concepts of citizenship. The interplay between Portuguese and the local
languages and dialects is explored and the see-sawing socio-political values of each
are highlighted and discussed. As one might expect, the situations arising from
the colonial (and postcolonial) status of Mozambique, and its associated linguistic
developments, have impacted upon the societal and governmental organisation
of the country and conceptions of citizenship within these structures.
In the third chapter, Alexandra Jaffe provides an examination of minority
language movements or, more specifically, the Corsican language movement.
Jaffe begins by highlighting the two positions of bilingualism either as a cultural
deficit or as added value and briefly comments on the more contemporary trend
of bilingualism as the latter. This then sets up the rest of the chapter to explore the
growing status of Corsican on a largely French-speaking island. This is initiated
with an examination of the language shift away from Corsican and its associated
value judgements, and then followed by a section on language revitalisation. The
chapter also looks at notions of identity and the increasing value placed upon
bilingualism and how such values might affect minority language planning.
Chapter 4 (Joan Pujolar) is an exploration of bilingualism and the nation-state
as it relates to the modern post-national mindset. The chapter looks at the role
that language has and does play in the political and national arenas and the
role of language competency in an increasingly globalised market. Pujolar also
explores ideas of cultural diversity and immigrant communities, as well as the
role of language in the ethereal ‘New Economy’. By far the most emphasised part
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of this piece is the relationship of language proficiency to the all-pervasive aspects

of globalisation and the chapter offers a relatively substantial commentary upon
this.
Following this is a related chapter by Shaylih Muehlmann and Alexandre
Duchêne, which explores the place of bilingualism in international agencies,
both supranational and non-governmental, in a largely post-nation-state era. The
authors examine the history of homogeneity within the nation-state and discuss
how the growth of organisations such as the UN have displaced these ideologies
and provided new and fertile grounds for studies into multilingualism. The
consequences of such shifts are also explored and issues of possible impartiality on
the part of researchers, the linguist as ideological constructor, is also highlighted.
In Chapter 6, Donna Patrick examines language endangerment and rights.
The author looks at bilingualism as it relates to minority groups speaking both
an indigenous and a larger, colonial/colonising language. Some of the opening
ideas are perhaps a little overstated and the ‘one language and one people’ paradox
discussed is perhaps a little questionable (p. 112), but nevertheless the chapter
does offer up some interesting ideas on the relationship between indigenous and
colonial languages, and on the markers of difference between an indigenous
and a colonising group. Passing mention is also made of minority group migrants
and their assertions of ‘language rights’, although this perhaps would be an issue
best discussed in an article with a different focus, as these conditions are not often
comparable. The middle of the chapter sees the discussion of language/linguistic
rights, and how they can be and are employed by minority language users
to garner certain forms of protection and status for said groups. This, quite
naturally, leads into a discussion of the problems arising from language rights,
which include: the romanticisation of languages and their associated cultures;
the lack of context, in a historical, political and economic sense; the sidelining of
considerations of mobility; and the potential for sidelining other language groups,
with one language given priority in, for example, governmental forums, resulting
in a hierarchical perception of languages, even where they are accorded certain
‘rights’. It emerges that there is a certain paradoxical nature to these practices.
In Chapter 7, Melissa G. Moyer and Luisa Martı́n Rojo examine the regulation
of bilingualism in terms of migration and citizenship. The presence of large
population movement is a challenge to such regulation in the current age and
the presence of ever-improving communications technology can certainly offer
a forum for multilingual practices within any monolingual society. With this
in mind, the authors look at data collected from two Spanish sources, one in
Madrid and the other in Barcelona, both of which have a strong history of
bi- and multilingualism, Madrid as the capital of Spain and Barcelona as the
capital of Catalonia. The piece is then split into a number of relatively short
sub-sections looking at the various issues arising. It is in this section of the
article that much of the interesting data is disseminated, including a look at
nation-state ideological discourses and how the EU relates to the issues of bi- and
multilingualism; indeed, discussion of EU policy takes up a significant portion of

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the sub-section entitled ‘Language and languages’. The analysis of the earlier-
mentioned project data follows and a number of relatively interesting examples
are provided, all of which leads to the conclusions that institutional practices
are yet to adequately adapt to multilingualism, language is important in gaining
access to a community, and institutions need to take into account the increasing
prevalence of multilingualism and migrant languages within a population. The
paradoxical nature of language as both a tool of integration and perhaps as an
agent of separation or even segregation is highlighted.
Chapter 8, by Marilyn Martin-Jones, begins by questioning the role of education
in bilingual development. This acts as an outline of many of the major issues in
bilingual education, both historically and in the modern age. Having dealt with
the more long-established beliefs and practices, the chapter outlines a number
of more contemporary approaches from the 1980s onwards, before discussing
critical approaches of bilingual education research, with relevant references and
examples. The impact of globalisation on national education systems is also
tackled, albeit rather briefly.
The next chapter is an examination of the commodification of language and
identity by Emanuel da Silva, Mirielle Mclaughlin and Mary Richards, and once
again raises the spectre of globalisation and how bilingualism sits in relation to
it. Seemingly, globalisation is the cause of the aforementioned commodification,
and is leading to ‘ethnic identity . . . being produced and commercialized for
global markets’ (p. 185). The authors address a surprising array of different
linguistic and social contexts (e.g. call centres and language as commodity), and
provides a number of illuminating examples drawn from the use of French in
Canada. Bearing in mind the target audience for the book, this chapter may
provide inspiration for those seeking a suitable area of research.
The book’s tenth chapter is Jannis Androutsopoulos’ examination of
bilingualism in relation to various media formats, including the internet. It begins
by citing some ‘pop’ culture references and quickly moves on to talk about the
changing faces and foci of sociolinguistics, which proves to be a superbly engaging
but all-too-brief section of the chapter. In the main body of the chapter, the
author clearly outlines the media covered (e.g. print media, broadcasting, music,
movies, and internet debates) and that which is not (e.g. literary fiction, subtitling
and ‘interpersonal computer-mediated’ interaction’). The chapter is divided and
subdivided into bite-size chunks, much like the contemporary media it examines,
and the information is presented in an interesting way. Nevertheless, the author
attempts to cover a significant area in a limited space, and much more could be
made of the subject given a suitable format.
Paul B. Garrett examines language socialisation in Chapter 11. An interesting
parallel is drawn early on between the ‘child or novice (of any age)’ (p. 233), but it
does not seem to form a particularly strong basis for the rest of the chapter, which
is more focused on child language acquisition rather than acquisition through
socialisation by adults.
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Chapter 12 by Benjamin Bailey offers a relatively comprehensive look at code-

switching and at social functions of language. Identity is also discussed during the
course of the chapter whilst in Chapter 13, Lukas D. Tsitsipis takes a rather detailed
look at ‘bilingualism as a social praxis’ (p. 293) with reference to Arvanitika, a
language spoken in modern Greece.
Chapter 14 is an analysis of bilingualism and code-switching in the workplace
by Lorenza Mondada. Using conversational analysis techniques, the author has
determined that code-switching is ‘not the manifestation of bilingual identities’
(p. 315). Whilst the piece is certainly a challenging read, it is also a rewarding one
and might provide an interesting perspective for those involved in bilingualism
research.
Chapter 15, by Peter Auer, looks at monolingual bias in bilingual research. It
opens with statements regarding the apparently confusing issue of multilingual
utterances. The chapter links well to a number of other chapters in the book
and raises some interesting issues for those involved in bilingual/multilingual
research, such as the problems tied into the concept of code-switching, and the
supposed boundaries between the languages utilised.
The final and shortest chapter of the book returns to the opening author and
editor of the book, Monica Heller. It is entitled ‘The future of “bilingualism”’ and
alongside the Post-face, fittingly written in French with an English summary, is
intended as a closing statement for the book.
Whilst I started this review with a comment on the book’s lack of thrills and
spills, it cannot be ignored that this book does in fact contain a significant amount
of useful and well-researched debate, much of which may be the source of some
interesting debates. It is certainly a useable book for the postgraduate researcher
at which it is aimed, as well as for the more established academic.
DAVID HIL L
Cardiff University
Cardiff CF10 3EU
Wales, U.K.
hilldj2@cardiff.ac.uk
MINA GORJI (ed.). Rude Britannia. London: Routledge. 2007. 147 pp. Pb
(9780415382779) £16.99.
Reviewed by JONATHAN CUL PEPER
This book has an impressively snappy title. Indeed, it turns out to have been
a popular newspaper headline. Chapters are relatively short, generally avoid
theory and are accessible (not bogged down in academic claptrap). All of which
supports the idea that it is designed for a relatively popular market. However, it
is in no sense ‘dumbed down’: there are careful analyses, numerous insights and
thought-provoking ideas. The contributors are all associated with Oxford. A cynic
might wonder whether authors were combined on the basis of this link, rather

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than a link to the subject area. Actually, the result of this combination is good
coverage of the area by people with diverse backgrounds, and the chapters are
generally of high-quality. The editor, Mina Gorji, provides a useful introduction
touching on key historical socio-cultural moments in shaping the meanings and
application of ‘rude/rudeness’, culminating in a brief overview of the upcoming
papers. She notes, for example, that although the dominant sense of the word
‘“rude” describes behaviour or language which causes offence’, additionally it is a
‘term of social description’ (p. 3), describing the uneducated and the uncultured
– those of low social class. Both senses are discussed at various points in the
remainder of the book.
Part I, ‘The vulgar tongue’, comprises three contributions which focus on rude
words – taboo words, expletives, slang or dialect. Words in these chapters seem
to be defined in the negative as being non-polite, thus becoming problematic for
people who attempt to engage in ‘polite’ discourses. Lynda Mugglestone’s chapter
explores the representation of rudeness in English dictionaries, both principles
and practice. With her usual erudition, she covers words relating to various taboo
areas (e.g. sex and anatomy), the dilemmas faced by editors (e.g. the tension
between providing an adequate definition and yet not offensive explicitness),
and strategies for polite definitions (e.g. using vagueness, euphemisms, Latin).
Importantly, she points out that some of the strategies, such as using Latin, ‘traded
on an assumed socio-cultural divide by which only the possessors of a privileged
education might possess the linguistic facility to decode the underlying meanings
– even if, by a further socio-cultural stereotype, it was “people” . . . who were often
seen as using such terms in the first place’ (p. 31).
Valentine Cunningham looks at slang or ‘linguistic trash’, the heart of which
is ‘the impolite lexicon for pissing and shitting and fucking’ (p. 37). Much of
this chapter is a celebration of Eric Partridge’s role in codifiying words, bringing
them in from ‘the social, geographical, moral, and lexiographical periphery’
(p. 49). Cunningham argues that the fact that Partridge was Australian was
no trivial coincidence, as his English was that of the ‘colonial margin’ (p. 39).
The same seems to have been true of other key figures in twentieth-century
English philology, such as Robert Burchfield. However, perhaps the contents of
Cunningham’s chapter are comprised of too many lists of words and quotations
from Partridge, and the flamboyant style in which it is couched will not be to
everybody’s taste.
Tom Paulin broadens the notion of a rude word: ‘I don’t mean a word that
has some kind of sexual reference, or that is bad-mannered, but a word that is
not part of a polished, standard English, and which often carries a witty sense of
its unpolished, quirky, less-than-couth qualities’ (p. 57). The bulk of this chapter
comprises a personal list of words which reflect the Ulster English Paulin learned
in the area he grew up, Belfast. However, there appears to have been no attempt
to ascertain whether these items occur in other dialects. The following seem quite
general: ‘dekko, take a – to take a look’, ‘gobshite – someone who talks bullshit’,
‘grip – a soft bag’, ‘ignorant – grossly bad mannered and tactless’, ‘kilter, out of
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– out of line, wrong’, and ‘shut the fuck up – would you really shut up now’. In
fact, one might also wonder why something like ‘out of kilter’ is considered ‘rude’
in any sense. He also lists pronunciation features: ‘eejit – an idiot, but the term
is gentler’, ‘filum – film (often jocose)’ and ‘ould – old’. Apart from the fact that
phonetic transcription would have been invaluable here (perhaps its lack being
a concession to a broad readership), Paulin fails to explain the point about rude
pronunciations – do they work in exactly the same way as words? Perhaps so.
Part II, ‘British bawdy’, comprises three contributions focussing on the
representation of sex, sexuality and the body in popular media – seaside postcards,
comics and the tabloids. One thing all three have in common is that they provide
a careful re-evaluation of the assumption that anything ‘rude’ must necessarily
be without sophistication or indeed art. David Pascoe examines ‘dirty’ seaside
postcards, particularly those of Donald McGill. Whilst providing illuminating
analyses of McGill’s postcards and some biographical details, this chapter dwells
on George Orwell’s evaluation of his work and the obscenity of comic postcards
more generally. This is both a strength and weakness: a strength because Orwell
talks a lot of sense; a weakness because one feels that if one wants to know
more about what Orwell says we need to go and read the original. Pascoe reports
Orwell’s view that McGill’s art ‘only has meaning in relation to a fairly strict
moral code’ (p. 77, citing Orwell 1998, vol. 13: 27). This is a common theme
in these chapters, namely, that rudeness in these contexts works in conjunction
with moral codes applied by the higher ranks of society to the working classes,
resulting in stereotypes which can be creatively exploited.
Theo Tait’s fascinating chapter focuses on the British comic magazine Viz,
which the tabloids dubbed the ‘four-letter comic’. Part of the success of Viz is
due to its characters. Tait reports that Chris Donald, one of the founding editors,
made a distinction between exaggerated ‘real-life’ stereotypes (e.g. The Fat Slags,
Sid the Sexist) and exaggerated ‘comic’ stereotypes (e.g. Buster Gonad, Johnny
Fartpants), the latter drawing upon the classic comic characters of the Beano
and the Dandy. He argues for a third type of character whose ‘primary role is
to be incongruously rude, by behaving badly in a way that ill befits his or her
status, particularly by swearing’ (p. 86), giving us characters such as Tall Vicar,
Roger Mellie the Man on the Telly, Friar Fuck and Rude Kid. However, he points
out that simply being inappropriate is not enough for a successful character –
it also depends on the ‘quality, variety, and ingenuity of the obscenities they
use’ (p. 86). He gives the example of Roger Mellie’s catchphrase ‘Hello, good
evening and bollocks!’, a turn on television presenter David Frost’s catchphrase
(which ends ‘welcome’). Part of the point of Viz’s rudeness is about crossing
lines, poking fun at middle-class institutions and good manners, and representing
the reality of working-class experience. But, importantly, rudeness here is part
of a comic strategy to be amusing, rather than causing ‘genuine offence’. The
targets of rudeness in Viz are often somewhat outmoded and general notions
of decency, rather than particular social groups. Hence, racial stereotypes are
generally avoided.

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Rebecca Loncraine offers an illuminating historical account of ‘page three’, the

topless pin-up page that appeared on the third page of the U.K. tabloid the Sun. She
reveals how perceptions of Page Three have changed over time with shifts in the
boundaries of rudeness, and how the editors of the Sun tested those boundaries
and even exploited them and their enforcers (e.g. middle-class prudes), in order
to generate free publicity. For example, early photographs were accompanied by
stories that justified their appearance – stories about hippie communes, naturism,
and so on. One way of balancing the new permissive liberalism of some readers
against the traditional values of others was to juxtapose stories about moral
decline alongside photographs. This sometimes led to tales of domestic and sexual
violence being printed alongside photographs of topless women. By the late
1970s, however, this juxtaposition was considered inappropriate and offensive,
and so ceased. The final part of the chapter focuses on Labour MP Clare Short’s
attempts to introduce legislation to prevent the publication of demeaning images
of women. Short experienced rudeness of another a sort from other MPs, ‘whose
attacks on her seem to go beyond the customary ya-booing, to become both
gendered and unusually personal’ (p. 107).
Clare Short’s experiences of what is socially unacceptable in a particular
context provide a neat transition into the final part of the book, ‘The limits
of rudeness’, consisting of two chapters. Tony Crowley examines the Saturday
football match, ‘a location where offensiveness, crudity, insulting behaviour and
nastiness constitute not so much the exception as the norm’ (p. 115). He gives
insights into the rules and norms of such behaviour. For example, rudeness about
the opposition is virtually expected, whereas chanting during a minute’s silence
in memory of the dead is unacceptable. Rudeness here, he says, is not simply
about being denied forms of linguistic capital (i.e. not knowing the powerful polite
language of the elite) and thus being represented as ‘ignorant’ and working class;
it is ‘a form of deliberate and circumscribed offensiveness’ (p. 121). Thus, ‘fuck off
X’ is normal and standard here, because it is part of generic chants. That they are
chants is an indication that they are part of a performance of communal acts of
identity, and the point of the performance is to be ‘as conventionally offensive as
possible’ (p. 121). The fact that the rules, the conventions, can change is illustrated
by the case of racism: once, ‘racist rudeness was part of the social competence
of the football fan . . . but the boundaries of rudeness have altered such that the
socially offensive practice of racism is disallowed’ (p. 124).
Deborah Cameron’s chapter considers the norms perceived to govern verbal
interaction – ‘what are considered to be an individual’s rights and obligations
when he or she interacts verbally with other individuals’ (p. 128). Importantly,
she notes that rudeness is not merely the absence of politeness but ‘can be inferred
from the absence of politeness where such politeness would conventionally be
expected’ (e.g. saying nothing after stepping on somebody’s foot) or ‘from the
presence of the kind of politeness that is “wrong” for the cultural context’ (e.g.
saying ‘have a good day, now’ in a British cultural context) (p. 130). As she
says of the latter, ‘[o]ne culture’s politeness may be another’s rudeness’ (p. 130).
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Much of the chapter is taken up with a discussion of how the traditional British
norms upon which politeness is based (avoidance of imposition and keeping one’s
distance) are being confronted by conflicting norms (articulacy, self assertiveness,
‘emotional literacy’, etc.). The stereotype of the reserved British person is being
replaced by a new stereotype which has more to do with therapeutic practice,
traditionally something more associated with North American culture. She goes
on to elaborate on how the new norms and values of ‘therapy-speak’ are being
driven by mass media and education, but above all business and commerce.
Overall, this is a highly readable and stimulating book, from which the linguist,
sociologist, cultural theorist, historian, and academics of other shades will learn
much. The chapters show how rudeness varies according to social context, both
synchronic and diachronic; how it relates to social class, power and (British)
cultural stereotypes; how (in one sense) it is given definition by middle-class
notions of politeness; and how it can be exploited for entertainment. My one
general gripe is that each chapter is written in a vacuum. Although we have
Gorji’s thematic introduction, there is no sense that contributors know what
other contributors are doing. Even more problematically there is little sense that
the contributors are aware of what is happening more widely in the field. Surely
the classic philological works on swearing deserve mention somewhere in Part I.
And nowhere do we see connections with work on ‘impoliteness’ or ‘face-attack’
appearing in the pragmatics and communication literature (though there are
connections with a handful of major works on politeness). Perhaps this lack of
embedding in the literature is a consequence of an aim to make the book have
popular appeal. Still, from my perspective, it is a weakness.
REFERENCE
Orwell, George. 1998. The Complete Works of George Orwell. Edited by Peter Davison.
London: Secker and Warburg.
JONATHAN CUL PEPER
Department of Linguistics and English Language
Lancaster University
Lancaster LA1 4TR
England, U.K.
j.culpeper@lancaster.ac.uk
MERIEL BL OOR AND THOMAS BL OOR. The Practice of Critical Discourse Analysis: An
Introduction. London: Hodder Arnold. 2007. 207 pp. Pb (0340912379) £19.99.
Reviewed by HAYRIYE KAYI

The Practice of Critical Discourse Analysis provides a general introduction to the
study of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA). The social concerns of the discipline
and a range of techniques available to the critical discourse analyst are introduced.

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At the very beginning of the book, in the first chapter, the editors define the scope
of the book and how to use it.
Each of the ten chapters focuses on a different aspect of CDA. In the initial
chapters, the authors present the background and development of CDA as a
field of academic study and the relationship of CDA to linguistic theory and social
issues of power and control. Later chapters demonstrate the use of various analytic
techniques and illustrate how those techniques can be applied to political, legal
and persuasive discourses, concentrating on established areas of social conflict,
such as race, gender and politics.
Chapter 1, ‘Background and theory’, overviews the field and introduces
some basic terms (discourse, text, domain, social practice, genre, speech community,
discourse community, speech act, participant, social role, ideology, and frame). In
answer to the question ‘What makes CDA critical?’ raised at the end of this chapter,
Bloor and Bloor provide the main objectives of CDA:
• to analyze discourse practices that reflect or construct social problems;
• to investigate how ideologies can become frozen in language and find ways to
break the ice; and
• to increase awareness of how to apply these objectives to specific cases of
injustice, prejudice, and misuse of power. (p. 12)
The authors emphasize that a major function of CDA is to investigate how
discourse helps to maintain power structures and support discrimination. The
issue is closely analyzed further in Chapter 6, ‘The construction of identity’,
where the authors start with the question of how individuals become members of
a group or other social community or category. The focus is on the significance of
language for the classification of people within the hierarchy of power structures.
The authors explain how powerful groups use language to maintain social
inequalities and cover a wide range of issues concerning national, racial, ethnic
and gender identities. Power is also the topic of the Chapter 7, ‘Politeness, power
and solidarity’, in relation to non-verbal communication, facework, hedging,
politeness, turn-taking, and topic-control. Those new concepts are all introduced
with a range of examples. While introducing facework, the editors refer to Erving
Goffman (1955) who developed the idea of face and facework in interaction.
Face threatening activity – which is defined as ‘any action or utterance, however
mild, which might conceivably upset the delicate balance of a face maintenance’
(p. 102) – is discussed, but the discussion is restricted to spoken interaction. As
for politeness, the authors refer to the Brown and Levinson (1987) model which
posits two types of face: negative and positive. Another concept, topic control,
which is considered one of the attributes of power, is explained by analyzing two
television news interviews.
What follows the general introduction in the first chapter is the relationship
between context and meaning making in Chapter 2, ‘Discourse and social
context’. The way meaning is created, the relationship between meaning and
context, mutual knowledge, purposeful communication, purpose and context,
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assumptions and the co-operative principle (Grice 1975), the analysis of context,
models of context, and institutional constraints are the main points covered in this
second chapter. While explaining purposeful communication, the authors define
pragmatics but do not go into too much detail, which keeps the reader focused.
An example from a radio broadcast given early in the Second World War by the
English novelist and Cambridge academic E. M. Forster, and two other examples
from the journalist Marion Moral, and the American writer James Baldwin
are used to analyze the pronouns in the construction of identity specifically to
indicate how people tend to identify themselves with their own social groupings
(self) and often place themselves in opposition to other social groupings. The
clear and to-the-point analysis followed by the sample data makes the topic easy
to understand for the reader. The authors prefer simplicity rather than long and
complex descriptions as seen in their treatment of Grice’s Conversational Maxims,
for example.
After talking about discourse and social context, the editors move on to author
stance-taking which is examined in four distinct types of discourse practice in
Chapter 3, ‘Positioning and point of view’: book and film reviews; promotional
business letters; potted biography; and history texts. The main point is to indicate
how to identify the linguistic and discoursal features of language in order to
understand how stance is represented in specific contexts of situation. The
authors use both conceptual and linguistic modes of analysis and apply those
techniques to the four types of discourse in different genres in order to identify
the writer’s positions with respect to the message.
In Chapter 4, ‘Intertexual analysis’, the concept of intertexuality is explained
clearly with useful exemplification at the beginning of the chapter. The authors
draw on Fairclough (2003), who refers to the reiteration and re-creation of texts
as ‘chains of texts’, and Bakhtin’s (1981) notion of intertexuality. Following on
from this work, the editors state that ‘intertextuality involves both the intrusion
of aspects of previous texts into a new text either through citation, attribution
or reference, and also the hybridization of one genre or text type with another’
(p. 52). The rest of the chapter illustrates the analysis of intertextuality within
the context of culture. The authors explain how cultural settings interrelate with
text while creating meaning and provide ample examples drawn from newspaper
headlines, literature and scientific discourse.
Chapter 5, ‘Figurative language, metaphor and message’, is concerned with a
range of rhetorical devices as used in media texts to construct messages. Metaphor,
personification and metonymy are defined and discussed alongside soundbites,
slogans and stock phrases. The concept of metaphorical framing is illustrated with
reference to George Lakoff’s (2004) work on the rhetoric of the U.S. government
in relation to the first Gulf War framing its accounts of going to war as the stories
of ‘Self-Defense’ and ‘Rescue’.
In Chapter 8, ‘The discourse of prejudice’, the authors discuss two reports
on immigration, one liberal (from The Independent) and one conservative (from
The Daily Mail). They indicate how facts and figures are interpreted in different

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ways by two different sources. In this chapter, the editors also discuss the
issue of prejudice. They are interested in prejudice based on perceived racial or
ethnic differences rather than personal prejudice against specific individuals.
Next, they focus on ‘lexical meaning’ with a specific interest in denotation and
connotation and a section on people’s sensitivity and reactions to certain word
usage.
Finally, Chapter 9, ‘The discourse of consumerism’, deals with the discourse of
advertising including the commodification and consumerization of education,
especially at the university level, while Chapter 10, ‘Discourse and the law’,
introduces the key terms and tenets of forensic linguistics. The factors that lead
to disadvantage in court such as sex, education, socio-cultural differences, etc.
are discussed through several examples together in the framework of speech act
theory.
The book is richly illustrated with close analyses of textual examples. While
the dominant framework for linguistic analysis is that of Systemic Functional
Linguistics, it is one of the strengths of the book that it also introduces a range
of other theoretical perspectives and methodologies, e.g. Gricean pragmatics
(Chapter 2), Conversation Analysis (Chapter 7), Appraisal Analysis (Chapter 3)
and Concordance Analysis (Chapter 8). Another strength of the book is the
richness of its data sources which includes various spoken and written genres
derived from TV, newspapers, fiction and non-fiction literature, and other
media.
The book is an excellent introduction to the aims, principles and practices
of CDA. It is written in a reader-friendly, clear style. Each chapter ends with
useful exercises and activities for students, and further study sections. A
glossary and grammar appendix, in which some basic concepts of Systemic
Functional Grammar are explained, complement the useful definitions of key
terms introduced in the main text. In sum, the book serves as an excellent,
introductory level overview of CDA as well as a comprehensive ‘tool-box’ for
anyone wishing to embark on their own critical analysis of discourse.
REFERENCES
Bakhtin, Mikhail. 1981. The Dialogical Imagination. Edited by Michael Holquist,
translated by Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin, Texas: University of
Texas Press.
Brown, Penelope and Stephen C. Levinson. 1987 [1978]. Politeness: Some Universals in
Language Usage. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.
Fairclough, Norman. 2003. Analyzing Discourse: Textual Analysis for Social Research.
London: Routledge.
Goffman, Erving. 1955. On face-work: An analysis of ritual elements in social
interaction. Psychiatry 18: 213–231.
Grice, Paul. 1975. Logic and conversation. In Peter Cole and Jerry L. Morgan (eds.)
Syntax and Semantics: Speech Acts. New York: Academic Press. 41–58.
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Lakoff, George. 2004. Don’t Think of an Elephant! White River Junction, Vermont:
Chelsea Green Publishing.
HAYRIYE KAYI
Foreign Language Education
College of Education
The University of Texas at Austin
1 University Station D6500
Austin, Texas 78712-0379
hkayi@mail.utexas.edu
LOUISE MUL L ANY. Gendered Discourse in the Professional Workplace (Palgrave

Studies in Professional and Organizational Discourse). Basingstoke, U.K.: Palgrave
Macmillan. 2007. 236 pp. Hb (9781403986207) £50.00.
Reviewed by STEPHANIE SCHNURR
Over the last couple of years, interest in workplace discourse has been constantly
increasing with numerous articles, edited books and monographs being published
on this topic. Since people arguably spend most of their time at work, and
because workplaces constitute important sites where they constantly construct
and negotiate their various identities, these settings appear to be prime sites for
investigating the impact of social factors on people’s discursive performance. A
particular focus of much of this research is on the ways in which gender is enacted
and performed in peoples’ daily workplace interactions, and specifically on the
ways in which they grapple with and overcome persisting gender stereotypes and
expectations. Gendered Discourse in the Professional Workplace also falls into this
category. By analysing the gendered discourse of men and women in managerial
positions in two U.K. companies, this book aims at exploring the ways in which
discourse contributes to creating and maintaining gender inequalities in the
workplace.
The first chapter introduces ‘The professional workplace as a research
site’, and highlights the crucial importance of conducting research studies in
actual workplaces in order to address and change gender inequalities. Mullany
emphasises the importance of conducting research with and for rather than on
participants: ensuring that participants’ concerns and agendas are considered in
the research design, and that findings are of relevance for those who take part
in the study, are declared as the key principles of the research. This introductory
chapter further includes a section on workplace inequalities in management,
and uses statistical evidence to illustrate how women in U.K. workplaces are
often disadvantaged.
Chapter 2 outlines the theoretical approach of the study, which is based
within critical sociolinguistics but is also influenced by social theory, sociology,
organizational studies, management studies, and anthropology. Employing
a number of theoretical and practical tools for data analysis, the research
primarily draws on interactional sociolinguistics complemented by what Mullany

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calls ‘a centralist interdisciplinary approach’ with the aim of providing

a multi-dimensional approach to researching gendered discourses. Such a
combination, she argues, allows for ‘a fine-grained, interactional sociolinguistic
analysis’ which ‘examines wider discourses and power structures in society’
(p. 18).
This chapter also provides an overview of developments in language and gender
research with a particular focus on perceptions of gender. In accordance with
recent developments, gender is viewed as a performative social construct which
is impacted to some extent by gender stereotypes. A social constructionist stance
in combination with the Communities of Practice (CofP) approach is employed
as a framework to analyse the ways in which gender is enacted and created in
workplace discourse. This chapter also defines the notion of gendered discourse,
which is understood as a combination of interactional styles that are indexed for
gender as well as gendered social practices. Both aspects reflect the masculinist
hegemony of workplace discourses: not only are dominant speech norms in
most workplaces masculine, but workplaces and managerial positions are also
inherently gendered.
Chapter 3 describes some of the advantages as well as challenges researchers
may encounter when collecting data in workplace settings. It provides a detailed
description of how the author approached various workplaces and negotiated
their potential role in the research, how data was collected, and how participants’
concerns and agendas were considered in conducting this research. Employing a
multi-method approach, the author spent six months collecting data in two U.K.-
based companies (one retail, one manufacturing) via participant observation,
audio-recording of meetings, staff interviews, and consultation of organisational
documents. The rationale for this choice of methodology as well as the various
advantages and problems of these means of gathering data are described in detail.
In particular, minimising the observer’s paradox during data collection, as well
as negotiating issues of confidentiality with the participating organisations were
of major concern.
The fourth chapter discusses the analytical frameworks employed in this
study; while data analysis primarily draws on interactional sociolinguistics,
it is complemented with tools from pragmatics (most notably the concept of
politeness) and Critical Discourse Analysis. The chapter also outlines various
elements of gendered speech styles to be analysed in more detail in the subsequent
chapters. In particular, it explicates the ways of indexing masculinity and
femininity through floor-holding, interruptions and simultaneous talk, a variety
of speech acts (including directives, expressions of approval, criticism, warnings
and challenges), humour, and small talk.
Chapters 5 to 7 constitute the key analytic chapters of the book by addressing
the main objectives of the study. Drawing on almost 70 recorded examples of
spontaneous workplace talk, Chapters 5 and 6 analyse the audio-recorded data,
while Chapter 7 discusses a number of gendered discourses that emerged from
the interviews with staff members.
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Chapter 5, ‘The retail company’, illustrates that although both men and women
in this organisation regularly draw on elements of speech styles which are indexed
for femininity and masculinity, they generally favour feminine strategies when
enacting their power and authority. In particular, members typically employ a
wide range of mitigation strategies when issuing criticisms or directives, and
they often use humour and small talk as repressive strategies to minimise status
differences between interlocutors. An analysis of the discursive performance of
the speech patterns observed in three meetings of two particular working groups
(which form CofPs) further indicates that these patterns of feminine speech styles
constitute normative and unmarked ways of interaction in this workplace.
Chapter 6 provides a similarly detailed analysis of the speech patterns
observed among members of three CofPs in the manufacturing company. As
in the previous case, feminine styles of interaction appear to be the norm. As
a consequence, most members (in particular the chairs) draw predominantly
on elements of a feminine style when enacting their professional identities.
On occasion, however, they also employ masculine speech styles (e.g. such as
when giving unmitigated and aggravated directives, challenging and criticising
superiors, using subversive humour, etc.). Particularly noteworthy is perhaps
the observation that one of the female managers (who is also one of only two
women directors in this company) both breaks as well as draws on stereotypical
expectations of feminine speech behaviours when enacting her authority.
After a detailed analysis of the ways in which members of the various CofPs
make use of gendered speech styles in their regular meetings, Chapter 7 explores
‘the broader overarching gendered discourses’ (p. 105) within which these
CofPs operate. More than 50 data extracts, taken from interviews conducted
with staff members in both companies, provide interesting insights into the
gendered norms and expectations that characterise the two workplaces and that
ultimately have an impact on members’ discursive performance. Five specific
gendered discourses which emerged from the interviews are discussed in more
detail: ‘the discourse of gender difference and the double bind’; ‘the discourse
of female emotionality/irrationality’; ‘discourses of motherhood and the family’;
‘dominant discourses of femininity’; and ‘resistant discourses’. These discourses
bear evidence of a number of disadvantages that women have to face due to
persisting gender ideologies and stereotypes in their workplaces.
Chapter 8 summarises the main findings of the two case studies and links
the normative use of feminine and masculine speech styles with the gendered
discourses prevailing in the two workplaces. It also provides some suggestions on
what can and should be done in order to challenge the hegemony of masculine
discourses and to change persisting gender inequalities in the workplace.
Gendered Discourse in the Professional Workplace is a very stimulating and timely
book which provides valuable insights into the various ways in which gender
is reflected, created, maintained, and challenged in workplace discourse. The
book’s major contribution lies perhaps not so much in the well-argued and
well-supported analysis of gendered speech styles (which seems to thoroughly

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support earlier research, e.g. Holmes 2006), but in the ways in which it links
these observations to the more general overarching gendered discourses that
persist in the specific workplaces. However, in addition to taking into account
gendered norms that characterise individual CofPs, it might have been useful
to further consider the impact of the companies’ workplace cultures. Although
the notion of gendered workplaces is discussed to some extent in the literature
chapters, the analysis of the spoken data does not go far enough in exploring the
link between workplace culture and gendered discourses but primarily focuses
on the ways in which gender is enacted in the various CofPs. But since gender
is an important aspect of workplace culture, and has even been viewed as an
organisational product (Gherardi 1995), I feel its impact on this additional, more
abstract level should have been discussed in more detail. This criticism aside,
the book under review makes an important contribution to the expanding field of
workplace discourse as well as gender studies. It will be of interest and relevance to
scholars interested in workplace communication as well as language and gender.
Moreover, the detailed and insightful discussion of the theoretical frameworks
and the practicalities of collecting data in a workplace setting will be particularly
valuable for postgraduate students starting their own research in a workplace
context.
REFERENCES
Gherardi, Silvia. 1995. Gender, Symbolism and Organizational Cultures. London: Sage.
Holmes, Janet. 2006. Gendered Talk at Work: Constructing Gender Identity through
Workplace Discourse. Oxford, U.K.: Blackwell Publishing.
STEPHANIE SCHNURR
School of English
The University of Hong Kong
Pokfulam Road
Hong Kong
sschnurr@hkucc.hku.hk
LIA LITOSSEL ITI. Gender & Language: Theory and Practice. London: Hodder Arnold.
2006. 192 pp. Pb (0340809590) £14.99.
Reviewed by MARL ENE MIGL BAUER

By covering the development of gender and language research and focussing
on three specific research areas, Lia Litosseliti’s Gender & Language is a valuable
resource book and textbook for scholars and students of all disciplines working
and interested in gender and language. The book is organised in three parts. Part
1 (Chapters 1–3), ‘Theorizations of gender and language’, introduces some of the
key theoretical terms (e.g. ‘discourse’), presents an overview of different stages
of, and approaches to, gender and language research and provides the basis for
Part 2 (Chapters 4–6) – ‘Gender in context’. The three ‘contexts’ chosen by the
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author for discussion of gender issues are education, media and the workplace.
Part 3 (Chapter 7), ‘Researching gender and language’, provides an overview
of the key questions discussed in the earlier parts of the book and a wealth of
data extracts potentially useful to the students and researchers of language and
gender. Each chapter is divided into subsections and finishes with a useful
summary and references to key literature.
Chapter 1 starts off with the discussion of language and world view, which
leads well to the introduction of the book’s main focus and to the detailed
distinction between sex and gender. In a historical sketch, Litosseliti overviews
pre-feminist literature (e.g. Jespersen) and the emergence of feminist linguistics;
she makes a clear connection between early linguistic and feminist movements,
and – in Chapters 2 and 3 – she discusses the three dominant phases, or ‘waves’,
of language and gender research since the 1970s till the present day. Chapter
3 details also the field’s shift to discourse and the vast amount of research on
the construction of gendered discourses. What makes these chapters such a joy
to read is the fact that, not only do they provide a comprehensive and critical
overview of gender and language research, but the author manages to put the
different phases into context instead of presenting them strictly chronologically.
Numerous references and frequent cross-referencing with the following chapters
help immensely to make useful connections and give the reader an idea of what
is to follow. The only quibble here is that it would have been more beneficial to
have page rather than chapter and subsection references.
Chapter 4, ‘Gender and language in education’, discusses such topics as
the dominance and difference approaches to gender-related aspects of teacher-
student and student-student interaction (e.g. with regard to the structure of turn-
taking), more recent research on the construction of gendered identities in the
classroom, interactions in the foreign language classroom, as well as language
assessment and teaching materials. Here, as elsewhere in this section of the book,
numerous data extracts provide a rich and useful illustration of the discussion
and the author usefully asks questions about how some of the older data extracts
could be re-analysed following more recent approaches. One interesting example
is provided by contrasting the traditional, quantitative analysis of turns made
in a conversation with a more nuanced analysis of their linguistic structure
and content. One slight point of criticism considering the data extracts used
throughout the book is that they come from various sources retaining their
original, varying transcription conventions, yet almost no explanation of the
different conventions is provided.
Chapter 5, ‘Gender and language in the media’, is divided into two useful
sections: gender in magazines and gender in advertisements. The traditional
topic of the portrayal of women in advertisements is presented alongside
more recent research on the construction of masculinities in men’s lifestyle
magazines. Both Chapters 4 and 5 present a feminist critique of a range of
social issues such as institutional double standards and the ‘glass ceiling’ for
women.

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Chapter 6, ‘Gender and language in the workplace’, gives an excellent overview

of research, ranging from the dominance and difference approaches to more
‘dynamic approaches’ (p. 127), such as the Community of Practice approach.
It is particularly here that the need to theorise gender-related speaking styles
beyond a simple correlation of speech with sex is highlighted.
As has already been noted, Part 3, consisting of just one chapter – ‘Starting
points for researchers, teachers and students’ – serves as a useful summary and
conclusion to the key issues discussed in the book and offers a number of practical
exercises and methodological pointers towards undertaking sociolinguistic
analyses by novices to the field.
Overall, Gender & Language is an excellent textbook and resource book. It is
relatively short which precludes the author from offering a more comprehensive
treatment of the field. For example, research on language and sexuality is not
discussed here although the omission is acknowledged and some references
provided. From the pedagogical viewpoint, the book succeeds in providing ample
material for students to work with: case studies, study questions, sample data
for analysis, and good lists of references. Although the author admits in the
introduction that only Anglo-American sources have been considered due to
length limitations, a reference section to research in languages other than
English would have been a valuable addition. Besides, as the references are
listed chapter by chapter, there is some confusion in trying to locate a reference
relying on traditional alphabetical listing of authors. However, these are only
minor criticisms and I recommend the book to all scholars, especially students
looking for an excellent introduction and resource book for gender and language
research.
MARL ENE MIGL BAUER

Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration
Nordbergstr.15/5
A-1090 Vienna
Austria
mmiglbau@wu-wien.ac.at
DAVID MACHIN. Introduction to Multimodal Analysis. London: Hodder Education.

2007. 206 pp. Pb (9780340929384) £19.99.
Reviewed by ASTRID ENSSL IN

In the past few years multimodal analysis has become established as a widely
applied methodical tool across discourse studies. Applied linguistics conferences
and publications feature an increasing number of contributions employing and
developing this prolific analytical framework, from sociolinguistics and discourse
analysis through narratology to corpus linguistics. By the same token, attempts
have been made to systematise the field, e.g. in terminological terms (Kress
and van Leeuwen 2001; Constantinou 2005). Arguably the most frequently
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quoted, applied but also challenged theory has been Gunther Kress and Theo van
Leeuwen’s Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design, a second, updated edition
of which has recently been published by Routledge (Kress and van Leeuwen 2006).
Not only has Reading Images inspired numerous studies focusing on particular
analytical and theoretical questions, e.g. possibilities of multimodal transcription
(Baldry and Thibault 2006) and annotation (Bartsch 2007). It has also come
up against a fair degree of criticism, for instance regarding the fuzziness of visual
modality markers (Forceville 1999: 168), and, more generally, the impossibility
of likening images to language due to the lack of clearly identifiable composite
parts in the former (Dillon 2006).
David Machin’s textbook Introduction to Multimodal Analysis provides a
successful attempt at bringing both ‘camps’ together – the visual grammarians
and those who question the feasibility of such an approach to semiotics – by
outlining transparently and succinctly the major tenets of multimodal lexico-
grammar without, however, allowing for ‘linguistic imperialism’ (Mitchell 1986:
63).
The author makes it clear from the outset that his book is inspired by and based
upon Kress and van Leeuwen’s Reading Images. That said, although suggesting
that ‘[a]nyone not familiar with this field should go to their work for a true
appreciation of what they have produced’ (p. v), his book may well be read and
understood by newcomers to the field without prior knowledge of Reading Images.
In fact, the latter may be grasped more systematically and critically against the
theoretical backdrop provided by Machin.
The author begins by outlining his pedagogic trajectory. He aims to provide
an instrumentarium of analytical tools that will allow social semioticians to
establish how meanings are communicated through visual devices, rather than
just describing the emotive effects of an image. In doing so, his emphasis is – along
with Kress and van Leeuwen – on a ‘multimodal’, lexico-grammatical rather than
purely lexical approach. In other words, visual communication happens by way of
combinatory meanings rather than, as assumed by early semioticians, individual
‘lexical’ items. Machin’s theoretical foundation is – again, as in Kress and van
Leeuwen – Michael Halliday’s (1985) functional grammar, with its three major
discoursal metafunctions – ideational, interpersonal and textual – and its three
chief structural components – participants, actions and circumstances.
Machin further establishes right from the beginning that visual codes and
patterns cannot necessarily be likened to linguistic grammar. Although both
share metaphorical association and the discoursal transport of meanings between
signs and comprehensive ideological frameworks, the semiotic processes they
trigger in the receiver differ to such a degree as to render the term ‘visual grammar’
questionable if not paradoxical.
That said, Machin fully subscribes to the methodical relevance of Kress and van
Leeuwen’s analytical inventory. Indeed, he organises his book around the major
elements of their toolkit. After a general introduction to the multimodal, social
semiotic approach, to visual lexico-grammar, metaphorical association, discourse

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and multimodality as a combined, comprehensive approach to communication

analysis in Chapter 1, he goes on to outline, in Chapter 2, the ‘hidden meanings’
of images by looking at the Barthesian notions of denotation and connotation
as well as iconographic symbolism. He makes it clear that images (objects,
settings, poses and photogenia) that are intended to communicate primarily
denotative meanings carry ideological potential through inclusion and exclusion.
Connotative meaning, on the other hand, operates in terms of transporting
meanings from other domains, i.e. discourses, world pictures and scripts of likely
sequences (cf. van Leeuwen and Wodak 1999).
Chapter 3 is dedicated to modality, i.e. the degree of truth or credibility that
is communicated by a representation. Machin uses the continuum ‘less than
real – real – more than real’ and exemplifies how compositions can reveal either
low or high modality by concealing and exaggerating visual devices such as
articulation of background, illumination and colour modulation. As modality
does not necessarily depend on levels of abstraction, Machin outlines Kress
and van Leeuwen’s four ‘coding orientations’, which relate to particular social
groups and how they are likely to ‘read’ truth into images. Naturalistic modality
relates to the realism of an image, although naturalistic modality markers may
be exaggerated so as to create a ‘more-than-real’ impression. Abstract and
scientific modality depict the essence of a phenomenon or a process that is deemed
worth knowing particularly by visual artists and academic communities. Sensory
modality, finally, operates on the basis of visual pleasurability and their emotive,
aesthetic effects upon the viewer.
Chapter 4 looks at the meaning of colour in more detail, starting with an
overview of colour theory across time, moving on to communicative functions
of colour – ideational, interpersonal and textual. A real strength of this chapter
is its rich intertextual make-up, which includes seminal theories by writers on
art (e.g. Kandinsky 1977), cultural theorists (e.g. Eco 1985) and psychologists
(e.g. Arnheim 1969). It discusses the dimensions of colour as combinatory
possibilities, covering brightness, saturation, purity, modulation, differentiation,
luminosity and hue, giving plausible examples from advertising, the film industry,
magazines and newspapers. Unfortunately the short closing section on colour
harmony (complementariness and value) appears somewhat displaced and the
comparison with dissonance and consonance in music vague and questionable.
Another weakness – albeit of an editorial nature – is the failure to print a
number of images discussed in this chapter as colour plates (e.g. the Gardener’s
World cover, p. 95), and even the contrastive depiction of two front covers of
the Liverpool Daily Post (pp. 90–91) does not show quod erat demonstrandum
– the change to whiter paper for improved contrasts in a rebranding
process.
Chapter 5 deals with the metaphorical meaning potential of typography, a
timely engagement not least because it is informed by the latest findings of the
Poynter Institute. As well as explaining the three Hallidayan metafunctions in
relation to typography, Machin discusses aspects of typeface and design, line
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spacing and alignment as well as the full inventory of typographic meaning

potential (weight, expansion, slope, curvature, connectivity, orientation,
regularity and flourishes).
In Chapter 6, Machin looks at the representation of social actors – the portrayal
of people – and the visual grammar of action. This includes the positioning of the
viewer in relation to the depicted and the power structures, as well as emotional
potential resulting from participants’ gaze, angle of interaction and distance. The
author uses recent photographs from the War in Iraq to demonstrate a typology of
participants (individuals vs. groups, categorisation, generic vs. specific depiction,
and non-representation), as well as agency and action in the Hallidayan terms of
‘actor’, ‘goal’, ‘process’ and ‘circumstance’.
In line with the overall logic of the book – from lexis to lexico-grammar –
Machin rounds off his overview of multimodal techniques with an insight into
‘visual syntax’. In Chapter 7 he investigates the way images are composed
in terms of spatial relationships, in other words how elements are positioned
to achieve certain effects in the viewer. He adopts Kress and van Leeuwen’s
three ‘spatial’ systems of salience, information value and framing. Salience
– the communication of central symbolic value – is achieved by size, colour
(e.g. saturation), tone (e.g. directional lighting), focus, foregrounding (fronting)
and overlapping (e.g. of borders, frames and/or page edges). Information value
pertains to given-new structures, which are realised – in the Western hemisphere –
by left-to-right directionality, whereby the given/left carries the bulk of ideological
content. Machin further recapitulates Kress and van Leeuwen’s top-and-bottom
in the sense of ideal-real structure as well as triptych and centre/margin
compositions. He stresses the ideological potential communicated by similar
or parallel structures, e.g. by putting participants of entirely different socio-
cultural backgrounds into identical frames, as they create links ‘where there is
none’ (p. 148). For his further discussion of framing and connectivity Machin
goes back to van Leeuwen’s (2005) inventory, which comprises segregation
(boundaries), separation (spacing), integration (embedding and combination of
various modes), overlap (breaking frames), rhyme (parallelling and repetition)
and contrast. The author closes the chapter with a compelling example of
how compositional structures may be analysed in combination, particularly in
magazine advertisements.
The final chapter forms the theoretical and critical nucleus of the book. In
response to a number of critiques made against Reading Images, it discusses the
question of whether there is actually a visual grammar or whether language
and pictography are in fact entirely different semiotic systems operating on the
basis of diverse sets of rules. Machin phrases his objections to Reading Images
with utter care, never leaving the reader in any doubt as to its ‘analytical power’
(p. 160). Firstly, the author mentions that not every image may fit the multimodal
analytical framework. Second, he points out the ambiguous nature of visual
meaning, which is communicated largely by iconic resemblance rather than
complex, symbolic conventions, and therefore does not rely on the successful

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decoding of complex lexico-grammatic structures to the same extent as language

does.
To further prove the point that ‘grammar’ is a somewhat ill-chosen term for
the way images communicate meaning, Machin investigates whether: (a) the
visual mode provides a repository of paradigmatic1 elements; and (b) there is a
finite system of syntagmatic rules. His ensuing discussion establishes that both
questions have to be answered in the negative. With regard to (a), because
images cannot be broken up into clear-cut components but are understood
on a more holistic, contextual, real-world-knowledge basis. Clearly, there are
identifiable components in pictures. Each of these, however, is likely to activate
any semiotic rule in the viewer, depending on his or her individual socio-
cultural, physico-geographic background. Nor are, with respect to (b), images
realisations of sentences. Note that Machin does not use the ancient rhetorical
term ‘ekphrasis’, which aptly describes the difficulty and, hence, art of verbalising
minutely the impression of an image in a spatio-temporal sequence of words. (To
characterise today’s dominance of the visual, Jay David Bolter [1991] introduces
the opposite concept, ‘reverse ekphrasis’). That said, the author concludes that
the visual mode lacks the specific expressive means of language, particularly
with respect to negation, temporality, illocutionary force and conditionality.
Whereas language operates in terms of ‘constructed’ and ‘composite’ meaning (cf.
Harvey Sacks in Schegloff 1987), combining the decoding of individual elements
with the personal and contextual background knowledge of the reader-listener,
understanding images suspends the former communicative element, thereby
reducing intersubjective semantic consensus.
Machin rounds off his excellent final chapter with a useful tabular illustration
of how language and images differ in terms of constructed vs. composite
meaning. He calls out for further empirical research into predictable patterns
of visual communication and ends with a brief discussion of ‘visual literacy’,
another ambiguous if not paradoxical expression considering the foregoing
conclusion that ‘visual grammar’ does not fit the actual workings of visual
communication. As a tentative alternative, Machin suggests James Elkins’s
(2003) term ‘visual competencies’, sadly failing to mention Sue Thomas et al.’s
(2007) concept of ‘transliteracy’, which is intended to characterise the specific
receptive requirements of the digital age, which not only comprise visual and
verbal but, equally importantly, aural and even haptic communication. To end on
a duly positive note, however, Introduction to Multimodal Analysis overall provides
a superbly structured, highly readable survey of multimodal analysis, which
balances structuralist interests with a broader critical view, enriching discourse
studies with valuable insights from art history, cultural theory and psychology.
NOTE
1. Although Saussurean and Chomskyan concepts are alluded to throughout the book,
Machin refrains from referring explicitly to either. ‘Paradigmatic’ and ‘syntagmatic’
are hence terms used by the reviewer only.
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REFERENCES
Arnheim, Rudolf. 1969. Visual Thinking. Berkeley/Los Angeles, California: University
of California Press.
Baldry, Anthony and Paul J. Thibault. 2006. Multimodal Transcription and Text Analysis:
A Multimodal Toolkit and Coursebook with Associated On-line Course. London: Equinox.
Bartsch, Sabine. 2007. Intersemiotic relations in multimodal text. Unpublished paper
presented at Corpus Linguistics 07, Birmingham, 26–30 July 2007 [online].
Available at: http://www.sabinebartsch.de/data/bartsch2007-corpling.pdf Last
accessed 10 January 2008.
Bolter, Jay D. 1991. Writing Space: The Computer, Hypertext, and the History of Writing.
Hillsday, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Constantinou, Odysseas. 2005. Multimodal discourse analysis: Media, modes and
technologies. Journal of Sociolinguistics 9: 602–618.
Dillon, George L. 2006. Writing with images: Introduction: Imagetext multiples and
other mixed modes [online]. Available at: http://courses.washington.edu/hypertxt/
cgi-bin/12.228.185.206/html/wordsimages/wordsimages.html Last accessed 11
January 2008.
Eco, Umberto. 1985. How culture conditions the colours we see. In Marshall Blonsky
(ed.) On Signs. Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 157–175.
Elkins, James. 2003. Visual Studies: A Sceptical Introduction. London: Routledge.
Forceville, Charles. 1999. Educating the eye? Kress and van Leeuwen’s Reading Images:
The Grammar of Visual Design (1996). Language and Literature 8: 163–178.
Halliday, M. A. K. 1985. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Arnold.
Kandinsky, Wassily. 1977 [1914]. Concerning the Spiritual in Art. New York: Dover
Publications.
Kress, Gunther and Theo van Leeuwen. 2001. Multimodal Discourse: The Modes and
Media of Contemporary Communication. London: Arnold.
Kress, Gunther and Theo van Leeuwen. 2006. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual
Design (2nd edition). London: Routledge.
Mitchell, William J.T. 1986. Iconology: Image, Text, Ideology. Chicago, Illinois: University
of Chicago Press.
Schegloff, Emanuel A. 1987. Some sources of misunderstanding in talk-in-interaction.
Linguistics 25: 201–218.
Thomas, Sue, Chris Joseph, Jess Laccetti, Bruce Mason, Simon Mills, Simon
Perrill and Kate Pullinger. 2007. Transliteracy: Crossing divides. First
Monday 12 [online]. Available at: http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/
index.php/fm/article/view/2060/1908 Last accessed 11 January 2008.
van Leeuwen, Theo. 2005. Introduction to Social Semiotics. London: Routledge.
van Leeuwen, Theo and Ruth Wodak. 1999. Legitimizing immigration control: A
discourse historical analysis. Discourse Studies 1: 83–118.
ASTRID ENSSL IN
National Institute for Excellence in the Creative Industries (NIECI)
Bangor University
Bangor LL57 2DG
U.K.
a.ensslin@bangor.ac.uk

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Journal of Sociolinguistics 12/3, 2008: 359–398

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and multimodality as a combined, comprehensive approach to communication

spacing and alignment as well as the full inventory of typographic meaning

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