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Language Files: Materials for an Introduction to

Language and Linguistics

Article in Language · June 1996

DOI: 10.2307/416684

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458 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 85, NUMBER 2 (2009)

without discrimination, as GUUS EXTRA points out (‘From minority programmes to multilingual
education’), a common referential framework is still lacking. Few connections are made between
immigrant minorities and regional minority languages, and there are no standard designations
for these languages across nations (176–77). Although some experts insist that there should be
no distinction in law between the linguistic rights of autochthonous and allochthonous minorities
in human rights treaties, national ethnic minorities still have many more internationally and
nationally coded rights than immigrants under current international conventions and laws.
One key arena impacted by the problem perspective is education. As COLIN BAKER emphasizes
in ‘Becoming bilingual through bilingual education’, ‘there is no understanding of bilingual
education without understanding local and national politics’ (142). Although in Europe there has
been a certain amount of political support at the supranational level for additive bilingualism
and the maintenance of minority languages in school, policy and planning have been devolved
to the national levels. This has proved difficult for many reasons in most places, however, as
J. NORMANN JØRGENSEN and PIA QUIST show with reference to Denmark in ‘Bilingual children in
monolingual schools’. They contend that attempts at securing nonindigenous minority languages a
place in the education system in Norway, Sweden, and Denmark ‘utterly and totally failed’ (164).
In Sweden so-called mother tongue teaching had whole-hearted political but not always popular
support. In Denmark and Norway it had only half-hearted political and popular support. Denmark
abolished provisions altogether in 2001 after sabotaging it for years.
A number of contributors also underline the ways in which official discourses within nations
are at odds with the real-life views and experiences of multilinguals. PETER MARTIN (‘Multilin-
gualism of new minorities (in migratory contexts)’) and MONICA HELLER (‘Multilingualism and
transnationalism’) show how the UK and Quebec governments respectively valorize language
skills not in terms of the identity functions they serve for speakers, but mainly in instrumental
terms, as commodities in the globalized new economy. In the US too the government’s designation
of a small handful of languages such as Chinese, Arabic, and Korean as critical to national security
leaves the desires of many minority-language communities for maintenance and revitalization
programs unrealized.
This volume serves admirably the need for a critically reflexive problem-solving approach to
multilingualism. It provides a good starting place for anyone looking for a current overview of
issues and approaches.
REFERENCES
BAETENS-BEARDSMORE, HUGO. 2003. Who’s afraid of bilingualism? Bilingualism: Beyond basic principles,
ed. by Jean-Marc Dewaele, Li Wei, and Alex Housen, 10–27. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters.
ROMAINE, SUZANNE. 1995. Bilingualism. 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell.

Merton College
Oxford OX1 4 JD
United Kingdom
[suzanne.romaine@ling-phil.ox.ac.uk]

Language files: Materials for an introduction to language and linguistics.10th edn.

Ed. by ANOUSCHKA BERGMANN, KATHLEEN CURRIE HALL, and SHARON MIRIAM ROSS.
Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2007. Pp. 700. ISBN 0814251633.
$42.95.
Reviewed by KIRK HAZEN, West Virginia University*
Language files (LF) was originally developed as a supplement to undergraduate linguistic
courses at The Ohio State University. This community effort of teachers pooling their re-

* As with teaching in general, my opinions on certain aspects of this book will most likely differ from
that of others. In this review, it should be assumed that statements of what works well and what does not
are cast in the frame of ‘In my opinion . . . ’ or ‘For my students . . . ’.
 REVIEWS 459

sources—to improve classes and ease their workloads—forms the foundation for this book. The
book has since been through nine revisions and twenty-five editors,1 with the first compilers of
the material publishing their efforts between 1977 and 1979, and this latest edition published in
2007.
The chapters in LF can be grouped into three divisions, although they are not grouped in any
manner by the editors: the general descriptions of language (Chs. 1–7), the ways language
interacts with other systems (Chs. 8–12), and the use of language study within other fields (Chs.
13–16). In the first set of chapters, LF takes students through the traditional levels of the mental
grammar.
In Ch. 1, students read about the abstract qualities of language (e.g. distinctiveness, arbitrari-
ness), what humans know or do not know in a language, and modality, especially the contrasts
between signed languages and spoken languages. In Ch. 2, the primary focus is on speech sounds,
although following from the modality discussion, LF does highlight that phonetics is the ‘study
of the minimal units that make up language’ (38) and accordingly the phonetics of signed lan-
guages gets its own file (File 2.7). Ch. 2 details articulatory phonetics through English sounds,
sounds of other languages, and suprasegmental features. Acoustic phonetics gets its own file
(File 2.6), although auditory phonetics does not. Ch. 3 works through phonemic organization, the
phonological rules for rendering allophones, languages’ phonotactic constraints, and implicational
tendencies. For morphology, Ch. 4 begins with the nature of the lexicon, moves through kinds
of morphological processes, introduces types of morphology, presents an argument for the hierar-
chical structure of words, and then provides methods of dissectional morphological analysis.
For syntax (Ch. 5), the basic ideas have been expanded from the 9th edition to include phrase
structure, word order, lexical categories, agreement, and hierarchical structure. The remainder
of the chapter handles how syntax expresses meaning, the nature of lexical categories (divided
into opened and closed), phrase structure rules, constituency tests, and word-order typology.
Ch. 6 sets up the ideas of lexical and compositional semantics, working through ideas of reference,
word relations, truth conditions, and syntactic influences on phrasal meaning. In Ch. 7, pragmatics
is presented as language in conversations, dealing with the effects of context, rules of conversa-
tion, Gricean maxims, inferring from context, the nature of speech acts, and the workings of
presupposition.
Ch. 8 moves from the different parts of the language system itself to language interactions
with other systems as well as the development of language. The different theories of language
acquisition are presented, the levels of the mental grammar are toured during their construction
in first language acquisition, the features of child-directed speech are highlighted, and the varia-
tion of bilingual acquisition is discussed. Ch. 9 tackles language and the brain, including the
realms of psycholinguistics and neurolinguistics. From these areas, LF presents physical features
of the brain, qualities of aphasia, and models of speech production and perception. In File 9.5,
the lexicon is further dissected and viewed from perspectives such as the cohort model. Lastly,
Ch. 9 presents sentence processing and psycholinguistics experimentation.
In Ch. 10, the levels of organization are presented for language variation, including languages,
dialects, idiolects, and registers.2 From the social realms of language variation, LF turns to the
different levels of variation in the mental grammar. Dialectological factors in the US are next,
with the last content file in the chapter introducing sociolinguistic factors affecting language
variation. Contact between languages is the focus of Ch. 11, including borrowings, pidgins,
creoles, multilingual societies, and language death. The venerable study of language change is
introduced and exercised in Ch. 12. Family relations set the stage for a summary of sound
change, morphological change, syntactic change, and semantic change. The art of reconstruction
is presented in File 12.7.

1
Since it is at best difficult to assess which material was written by which editors, I write this review
with LF as the metaphorical agent (e.g. LF discusses . . . ).
2
LF also unquestionably adopts the term ‘bidialectal’ speaker, although no study has demonstrated produc-
tive bidialectalism and the term itself is fraught with complications. See Hazen 2001.
460 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 85, NUMBER 2 (2009)

Ch. 13 puts together various topics associated with the intersection of language and culture,
including various discussions of identity, power, the nature of thought and language, and writing
systems. Ch. 14 covers the communication systems of animals other than humans. It works
through qualities of human language and contrasts them with other animals’ systems, describes
the natural state of animal communications, and then takes up the debates about teaching primates
to use human-like languages. The various fields of computational linguistics are the foci of Ch.
15. These include speech synthesis, speech recognition, dialogue systems, machine translation,
and the use of corpora for linguistic study. Ch. 16 is a practical chapter, providing clean introduc-
tions to the fields of language education, speech-language pathology, audiology, legal linguistic
studies, advertising, and code breaking. Ch. 16 also describes the two main career paths for
linguists: academia and industry.
The book finishes with answers to the example exercises from four chapters, an extensive
glossary, a wide-ranging bibliography, a languages index, and a subject index.
In Figure 1, the number of pages for each chapter is presented. As the graph indicates, the
page distribution is not even. As with any book organically grown, the quantity of coverage is
not predetermined; hence, the chapters in this book are of different lengths. The 10th edition
overall is larger, with a total of 717 pages between the covers, an increase of 28.5 percent (159
more pages). For sheer number of pages, the phonetics chapter takes the prize, with 62, while
the animal and communication chapter is the shortest, at twenty pages.3 Most chapters are around
forty pages and only the last three chapters are lighter in content.

Glossary
Appendix
Practical Applications
Lang. & Computers
Animal Comm.
Lang. & Culture
Lang. Change
Lang. Contact
Lang. Variation
Lang. Storage/Processing
Lang. Acq
Pragmatics
Semantics
Syntax
Morphology
Phonology
Phonetics
Intro

0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70

FIGURE 1. Pages per LF chapter.

In Figure 2, the number of pages for each chapter’s practice file is given. Again, if quantity
of pages is any indication of depth of coverage, the distribution of the practice files does not
indicate equality among the chapters. Morphology wins on quantity for the chapters, with syntax
and semantics appearing slighted by comparison. Before the 10th edition, exercises, activities,
and discussions were at the end of individual files; they are now grouped into a separate file at
the end of each chapter. Hopefully, this change will lead to fewer confused students.

3
Considering this chapter on animal communication used to be a subsection of the introduction, twenty
pages and its own chapter is quite an accomplishment.
 REVIEWS 461

Practical Applications

Lang. & Computers

Animal Comm.

Lang. & Culture

Lang. Change

Lang. Contact

Lang. Variation

Lang. Storage/Processing

Lang. Acq

Pragmatics

Semantics

Syntax

Morphology

Phonology

Phonetics

Intro

0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 18

FIGURE 2. Pages per practice file (located at the end of each chapter).

The editors have worked toward increasing the ‘modularity’ of the book, labeling each subsec-
tion, or ‘file’, in an outlined numbering system. This allows teachers to assign subsections more
easily. Every chapter has its own subfile of exercises, and a selective bibliography has been
added. In addition, a short summary is provided at the beginning of each chapter, and these,
taken together, provide a concise overview of the book. Content in signed languages is now
widely distributed according to its connection to the mental grammar, rather than being segregated
in a single file: for example, the phonetics of signed languages has been added as a separate file
within the phonetics chapter. Similarly, the previous psycholinguistic chapter has been split.
Conversely, several files have been combined (e.g. files on the Whorf hypothesis and color terms
have been consolidated into a file on language and thought). Numerous new files have been
added. For example, the editors have provided new files on presupposition (File 7.5), on bilingual
acquisition (File 8.5), and speech perception (File 9.4). Ch. 10 on language variation has been
restructured so that the information is more evenly distributed in the files. Importantly, the
exercises for this chapter include data from variationist studies. Other sociolinguistic findings
outside of the realm of variationist work has been moved to the chapter on language and culture.
For students, there is a website with materials, sound files, and links (http://www.ling.ohio-
state.edu/publications/files). For teachers, The Ohio State University Press maintains a website
with the instructor’s guide and an answer key accessible via password. All teachers, however,
should discuss answers with their classes after having solved the problems themselves.
In terms of style, LF is direct more than it is eloquent or humorous.4 If one were to imagine
a style scale for books that introduce human language, LF would be at one end and Steven
Pinker’s The language instinct would be at the other.5 This particular style niche is not a negative
feature. When I have used LF, many of my students openly appreciated its straightforward
presentation of complex topics. Along with its overt approach, LF is extremely useful, like a

4
However, there is a comic strip on the title page of every chapter.
5
I often taught from LF and also assigned Pinker’s The language instinct to complement it. Usually
students who like LF did not appreciate The language instinct as much and vice versa.
462 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 85, NUMBER 2 (2009)

pocket knife loaded with tools, although just like other feature-laden devices, not all components
will be used. There is a limit as to what can be done in a term. I suspect that most undergraduate
classes could use eleven of the chapters given the level of the exercises and the complexity of
the ideas.
In my teaching experiences with the book, the single best page is the flowchart for conducting
phonological analysis to determine phonemic status and allophonic distribution (133). This page
has turned on the metaphoric light bulbs over my students’ heads more than any other page.
Anything future editors can do to replicate this kind of flowchart for other chapters would be
greatly appreciated. In this edition, they have a similar flowchart for identifying the status of
morphemes (154) and one for historical reconstruction using the comparative methods (515).
I find the exercises most useful in class. My students and I work through them together during
class time with three goals in sight (and these are explicitly laid out for the students): (i) to
model the most efficient means for conducting the analysis of the language data, (ii) to reinforce
the connections between the exercises at hand and the theoretical goals, and (iii) to demonstrate
and clear up the students’ confusion. For the first goal, there are numerous approaches for
conducting linguistic analysis: helping the students choose among them is part of the teacher’s
responsibility. For example, with the morphology exercises, where students uncover morphemes
from languages such as Zoque and describe the morphophonological processes and allomorphic
variations, students can spend exorbitant amounts of time floundering with the analysis rather
than taking a series of small steps. The LF exercises are well designed for teachers to model the
most efficient approaches. For the second goal, students should understand the larger theoretical
goals for exercises like drawing trees. For the third goal, exercises like discovering phonemic
relations from allophonic data do not come easily to most students; all students have certain
degrees of confusion, yet exercises like the ones in File 3.6 are manageable enough to work
through in class, yet complex enough to present a challenge.
As a small suggestion, An introduction to language (Fromkin, Rodman, & Hymes 2006) has
clearly divided sections that group together several chapters, as do many other introductory texts.
The sectionization of LF should be the next stage in the evolution of this work in order to help
the students better handle the mass of information in this book. The other change I would like
to see is an entire chapter on the lexicon. Discussions of the lexicon have grown rapidly over
the last decade and an adequate description of its characteristics should be a foundational element
of all introductory books. Such a chapter would also be a boon for all the humanities majors in
such a class.
One regular issue with introductory courses, served by a book like LF, is the mismatch between
what we teach our students and what we discuss as researchers: How far behind the current
theories are the stories we are telling our undergraduates? Occasionally in class, I interject, ‘Now
what I am about to tell you was the leading theory a few decades ago. Nowadays, we consider
it at best to be an improbable hypothesis. So this next part of the class is a lie, but a convenient
lie’. For good or for bad, there will always be tension between the desire to keep students up
to date in linguistic research and the desire to present topics clearly. Where does LF fall in this
realm of introductory lag? For most topics, LF falls on the conservative side. The phonetics
chapter is somewhat innovative in discussing the phonetics of signed languages, although it
focuses primarily on the articulatory phonetics of English. For phonology, phonemes and allo-
phones (File 3.1) are the basis for analysis in the phonological rules (File 3.2). For morphology,
identifying morphemes in words from various languages is the primary mode of analysis. It is
within syntax, especially File 5.4, that the lag is perhaps the greatest, with phrase structure rules.
Teachers searching for a cutting-edge introductory book may want to look elsewhere, but most
instructors will feel comfortable with the traditional selection of approaches presented here.
Overall, Language files is a winning introductory book. It provides the basics, illuminates the
diversity of language, and introduces a wide range of fascinating topics in linguistics.
REFERENCE
FROMKIN, VICTORIA; ROBERT RODMAN; and NINA HYMES. 2006. An introduction to language. 8th edn. Orlando,
FL: Harcourt Brace.
 REVIEWS 463

HAZEN, KIRK. 2001. An introductory investigation into bidialectalism. Selected papers from NWAV 29:
Special issue of the University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 7.3.85–100.
PINKER, STEVEN. 2007. The language instinct: How the mind creates language. New York: HarperCollins.

Department of English
137 Colson Hall
1503 University Ave.
P.O. Box 6296
West Virginia University
Morgantown, WV 26506-6296
[Kirk.Hazen@mail.wvu.edu]

WH-movement: Moving on. Ed. by LISA LAI-SHEN CHENG and NORBERT CORVER.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Pp. 369. ISBN 0262532794. $42.
Reviewed by ŽELJKO BOŠKOVIĆ, University of Connecticut
This impressive volume grew out of a 2002 workshop at Leiden University, which took place
to mark the 25th anniversary of the appearance of Noam Chomsky’s seminal paper ‘On WH-
movement’. The papers in the volume examine issues related to WH-movement from the perspec-
tive of the minimalist program.
LUIGI RIZZI’s article, ‘On the form of chains: Criterial positions and ECP effects’, which
investigates the form of chains focusing on A′-chains and freezing effects, is the centerpiece of
the volume. Rizzi argues that A′-chains consist of two unique positions expressing two kinds of
interpretive properties: the s-selection position (typically the θ-position) and the criterial position,
which is responsible for scope-discourse properties. The uniqueness of these positions results in
a ban on movement into θ-positions and movement from a criterial to a criterial position. There
is, however, considerable literature questioning the former ban (see e.g. Bošković 1994, 1997a,
Hornstein 1999, 2001, Lasnik 1999, López 2001, Saito 2001, Stateva 2002, and Watanabe 1999).
To mention just one relevant argument from Bošković 1994 regarding Chilean Spanish, a Juan
‘to Juan’ in 1, which passes usual SpecIP tests, bears both the subject θ-role of querer ‘want’
and the experiencer θ-role of gustar ‘to please’, the inherent case assigned to it by gustar under
θ-role assignment (Chomsky 1986) indicating it has moved into the matrix clause, where it is
θ-marked by querer, from the embedded clause θ-position.
(1) A Juan le quiere gustar Marta.
to Juan CL wants to.please Marta
‘Juan wants to like Marta.’ (Gonzalez 1988)
Regarding the criterial position ban, there is also rather rich literature on this type of freezing
effect; see Bošković 1997b, 2003b, 2008a,b, Epstein 1992, Müller 1998, and Müller & Sternefeld
1993. Rizzi gives a number of empirical arguments for the ban. The relevant examples, however,
turn out to be independently ruled out by Saito’s (1992) ban on WH-phrases occurring outside
the question CP where they take scope. This is the case with 2, where quale RAGAZZA ‘which
girl’ undergoes focus movement after WH-movement.
(2) *Quale RAGAZZAi mi domandavo ti avessero scelto ti , non quale ragazzo
which GIRL I wondered they.had chosen not which boy
Regarding successive cyclic movement, Rizzi suggests such movement involves formal feature
checking. There is actually considerable empirical evidence against this view (see Bošković
2008a and references therein; I in fact argue all feature checking freezes X for further movement,
which means successive cyclic movement cannot involve feature checking), even regarding the
cases where successive cyclic WH-movement appears to have morphological effects on intermedi-

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