this were true of children in the UK, who remain, for the most part, largely ignorant of English grammarthroughout their school lives.

In the fourth and final section, attention shifts to learning in the home and four case studies are reported.All are different and fascinating in their own ways. For example, Junko Iwasaki tries to pin down the acqui-sition of a limited number of structures in Japanese by a 7-year-old boy over 21 months using Pienemann’s(1998) processability framework. The context is more intriguing than the rather limited findings in the end.I would love to have known more about the effects of the L1 (English) on the L2 (Japanese) and to what extentthe stages of acquisition described were a function of the schooling context. In contrast, no such questions areleft open in Mitchell and Lee’s thorough coverage of the experiences of three, bright young Korean children inthe UK with their English-speaking student mother and (non-English-speaking) grandmother. In the follow-ing chapter, Lynn Wright Fogle takes a more ethnographic approach to analysing talk at mealtimes in familieswho have adopted Russian children. Again, there are valuable insights into the effects of the different strategiestaken by the adoptive parents on the children’s language production, though applied linguists will certainly beunhappy at the over-analysis and interpretation of the discourse.

In the last chapter, Eun-Young Kwon and ZhaoHong Han look at the L1 transfer which takes place inchild L2 acquisition, in this case, a Korean girl who arrived in the United States at the age of three and spent26 months there, apart from a short break in Korea in the middle of her stay. Not surprisingly, there is a greatdeal of evidence of transfer between the two languages as Sooji moves between the Korean-speaking homecontext and the English-speaking pre-school and Kindergarten (Reception) contexts. The interest for the read-er lies in Sooji’s development in both her L1 and her L2 and how the developments in each language interactwith one another.

The value of this collection lies in bringing together research, some of it previously published, in a numberof areas to provide support for a thesis involving differential second language development in early, middleand older childhood, which has increasing relevance in terms of language learning policy and practice. Notonly should this book be read by all those involved in SLA teaching and research, but also by teachers of for-eign languages and those who decide on foreign and second language learning policy in our schools.

Reference

Pienemann, M., 1998. Language Processing and Second Language Development: Processability Theory. John Benjamins PublishingCompany, Amsterdam/Philadelphia.

Robert VanderplankOxford University Language Centre,

12 Woodstock Road,

Oxford OX2 6HT,United Kingdom

E-mail address: robert.vanderplank@lang.ox.ac.uk

doi:10.1016/j.system.2009.08.005

750 Book reviews / System 37 (2009) 741–752

Contemporary Corpus Linguistics, Paul Baker (Ed.). Continuum, London (2009). 357 pp

Perhaps more than other texts, books that include the inherently synchronic word ‘contemporary’ in theirtitles (like ‘new’ and ‘modern’) set an inescapable course towards anachronism. However, despite its appar-ently ephemeral nature, there seems to be no title more appropriate to a volume that attempts to provide asnapshot of so mutable a subject as today’s poly-disciplinary and burgeoning field of corpus linguistics.For better or worse, any book published on corpus linguistics in 2009 will simply not be as relevant as a similarbook on corpus linguistics published in 2010 – the discipline is just too new (relatively speaking), and changing

Book reviews / System 37 (2009) 741–752 751

too fast. Although Contemporary Corpus Linguistics lacks a potentially useful thematic organization, its over-all thrust is nonetheless clear: corpus linguistics, once predominantly the domain of computational and corpuslinguists, is now equally and increasingly an integral part of just about any pursuit that involves the study oflanguage.

This edited volume is composed of 17 chapters, each providing an up-to-date review of the literature per-tinent to the specific area being written about, followed by specific examples of each author’s own research.The book starts with a corpus-informed study of metaphor by Alice Deignan (p. 9), using the word ‘speed’to illustrate how ‘chunking’, rather than or in addition to cognitive mechanisms, may be a main driver of met-aphorical patterning. Gerlinde Mautner follows with a chapter on how a corpus can help reveal semantic pros-odies in critical discourse analysis (p. 32), such as how ‘the elderly’ tends to co-occur with words like ‘frail’ and‘handicapped’.

What Deignan’s and Mautner’s chapters have in common is how computerized analyses of corpora can high-light certain patterns in text, particularly collocation. This aspect of corpus linguistics, well established since theearly work of John Sinclair, is a common thread that runs through a number of chapters. Michaela Mahlberg inChapter 4 (p. 47), for example, shows how running a concordance against a reference corpus of an author’scomplete works can help shed light on idiosyncratic literary devices in the field of stylistics. Likewise, JonathanCulpepper in his chapter on ‘the metalanguage of impoliteness’ (p. 64) uses the 2-billion word Oxford EnglishCorpus to demonstrate how Sketch Engine – a relatively new concordancing package – can provide novel co-textual insights by integrating collocational and grammatical information, as in the difference between ‘rude’and ‘impolite’ (never before has the word ‘synonym’ seemed so inadequate). Another new (and free) softwarepackage is discussed in Chapter 6, with Laurence Anthony explaining how AntConc can be used to search for anumber of different kinds of collocations and how it is an example of how, and why, the design of corpus anal-ysis software should be shaped by an ongoing collaboration with numerous software developers and end-users.This advocacy of collaboration is echoed in the following chapter on corpus annotation by Adam Meyers, whosuggests that a greater amount of coordination among research groups working on corpus annotation couldhelp improve the accuracy of current schemes by merging systems.

The Meyers and Anthony chapters seem to want to point to a way forward for corpus linguistics, and this isyet another common strand in the book. In Chapter 8, for instance, Irina Dahlmann and Svenja Adolphs writeabout going beyond the written word in corpus analysis to incorporate such paralinguistic phenomena aspauses, which the authors show play a crucial role in the identification multiword expressions (i.e. pauses tendto precede or follow them). In Chapter 9, a way forward in corpus design itself is proposed by David Oakey,who looks at fixed collocation patterns from eight different academic disciplines and presents evidence in favorof using isotextual (i.e. an equal number of texts from each discipline) comparison rather than one purely iso-

lexical (equal number of tokens in each discipline). This issue of corpora heterogeneity and how it may affectthe ultimate outcome of resulting data is picked up again in the next chapter. Arithmophobics may feeltempted to skip Chapter 10, written by Michael Oaks, who stands out in the book as a specialist in informa-tion retrieval and statistics, but they would then deprive themselves of a deeper understanding of how anyanalysis is necessarily an artifact of the methodology implemented, and how a way forward in studies of cor-pus variation may exist in using the right information retrieval methods (i.e. statistics) to more effectively pin-point linguistic features which best identify sources of linguistic variation.

Chapter 11 continues on the theme of statistics, but also roughly marks a segue in the book into more ped-agogic applications of corpus linguistics. Yukio Tono explores how multifactorial analytical techniques andBayesian modeling, using learner corpora (i.e. language produced by learners of an L2), should inform con-temporary formal theories of language acquisition. Randi Reppen continues on the theme of language acqui-sition in Chapter 12, but with a focus on the extent to which corpus-based activities can and should be used inthe L2 classroom, while in Chapter 13, the impact of corpora on dictionaries is reviewed by Patrick Hanks,who discourages the use of corpora just to develop dictionaries that are more inclusive and exhaustive of lex-ical items than ever before, and who, instead, supports the use of corpus analyses to improve the selection ofwords and examples that will best suit the user of the dictionary. Hanks also discusses how pragmatics,phraseology and grammar can be more usefully incorporated into modern dictionaries through corpus explo-ration and exploitation.

752 Book reviews / System 37 (2009) 741–752

Most of the chapters in this volume describe studies which utilize English-language corpora (e.g. the BritishNational Corpus, the American National Corpus). However, Chapters 14 and 15 provide a welcome departurefrom the anglocentricity. Richard Xiao and Ming Yue present a corpus-based case study, which comparedChinese fiction with Chinese translations of English-language fiction to explore the extent to which so-calledtranslation universals (e.g. explicitation, simplification) apply to languages that are genetically distinct. InChapter 15, Andrew Hardie discusses how he used Hindi and Urdu corpora to help identify where the twooverlap and where they diverge.

The final two chapters in the book concern how texts not designed for corpus linguistic analysis can benonetheless gainfully employed as corpus linguistic tools, specifically the ‘corpora’ that exist today in cyber-space. Robert Lew in Chapter 16 sheds light on the pros and cons of the various tools for using texts in theWorld Wide Web as a corpus, including both specialist applications (i.e. web concordancers) and widely-usedsearch engines, such as Google. In the final chapter, Brian King reports on the unique challenges of compiling,annotating and analyzing a corpus comprised of Internet chat-room banter.

This book shows itself to be true to its title, reflecting current trends in the field and providing corpus lin-guistic researchers, both novice and veteran, with a comprehensive overview of the state of the art and a hint atwhat may lie ahead. As mentioned by the book’s editor, Paul Baker, in addition to a trend of corpus analysesbeing incorporated by an increasingly broad gamut of researchers and applied linguists, the chapters in thebook are also suggestive of an increasing sophistication of those analyses. For example, Oaks shows the effec-tiveness of a multifactorial approach, Hanks argues for more nuanced methods of corpus-informed lexicog-raphy, and Oakey discusses the need for careful selection of the texts that comprise corpora. Anotherovertone of the book is a need for more integrated approaches in corpus linguistics, such as the inclusionof pause phenomena in the Dahlmann and Adolphs multimodal study, and the persuasive case for more di-verse input when developing corpus tools presented by Anthony. What perhaps is not dealt with sufficiently ishow the increasing sophistication and integration should not lead to complication (e.g. for the end-user). Thisissue is given a nod by Lew in the chapter which deals with using the Web as a corpus, mentioning that, espe-cially for language learners, ‘maximally simplified tools will continue to hold the greatest attraction’ (p. 298).Overall, however, this is a valuable and timely contribution to the field, and should probably remain ‘contem-porary’ for some time.

Ron MartinezSchool of English Studies,

University of Nottingham,

University Park,

Nottingham NG7 2RD,

United Kingdom

E-mail address: ronmartinez@yahoo.com

doi:10.1016/j.system.2009.08.005