The final chapter conceptualizes the characteristics of scientific discourse as manifested in this context, mak-ing a valid distinction between the forward-looking ‘professional’ scientific discourse and backward-looking‘pedagogical’ scientific discourse. The former aims at using discourse to find plausible explanations of phe-nomena in the real world while the latter deals with the presentation of accepted knowledge. To conclude,Hanauer offers a revised definition of scientific inquiry as simulated ‘guided’ science, which he considers tobe a practical educational solution to the question of how one may teach science to early elementary schoolstudents. Nevertheless, he emphasizes that the success of his multiliteracy approach to teaching science to chil-dren in elementary schools depends heavily on the ability of the teacher to mediate the science inquiry learningprocess.

While the title of book is appealing, it is also the book’s Achilles’ heel. That is to say, in terms of content,David Hanauer’s work is more of a resource book that provides advice to literacy practitioners on how toimplement ‘science teaching’ than a book on ‘scientific discourse’ as it is understood from the perspectiveof applied linguistics. Therefore, I feel I have no hesitation in recommending this book to science teachers,science teacher training departments, literacy educators, and researchers in the field of science education.However, with reference to the applied linguistics framework that Halliday and Martin (1993) offer to describescientific discourse, this book contributes little of special significance to researchers of applied linguistics, dis-course analysis, or English as a second/foreign language.

Reference

Halliday, M.A.K., Martin, J.R. (Eds.), 1993. Writing Science: Literacy and Discursive Power. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh.

Hasan AnsaryIslamic Azad University (IAU),

Qazvin,

Iran

E-mail address: ansary2877@yahoo.com

doi:10.1016/j.system.2009.11.005

152 Book reviews / System 38 (2010) 142–156

Formulaic Language, Vols. 1 and 2, Roberta Corrigan, Edith A. Moravcsik, Hamid Ouali, Kathleen M.Wheatley (Eds.). John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam (2009). 638 pp.

If recent publications in the area are any indication, the study of formulaic language is now in its heyday.The current trend seems to have begun with the publication of Alison Wray’s Formulaic Language and the

Lexicon in 2002, and since then has gone from strength to strength, with books on the same subject and ofequally high quality, such as Schmitt (2004), Granger and Meunier (2008), and Wray (2008), to name afew. Joining their ranks, and sure to be of profound influence, is the two-volume Formulaic Language, a col-lection of selected papers first presented at the 25th University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee Linguistics Sympo-sium on Formulaic Language in 2007.

Volume 1, subtitled Distribution and historical change, takes a bird’s eye view of the field, looking at What is

formulaic language? (Part 1), Structure and distribution (Part 2), and Historical change (Part 3), preceded by apersuasive introduction by Corrigan and company, explicating why formulae ‘must be assumed to be one ofthe basic units of linguistic description’ (p. xxiii).

Part 1 appropriately starts with a paper on the place of formulaic language in linguistics by the person whoarguably touched off modern interest in phraseology, Andrew Pawley (cf. Pawley and Syder, 1983). In addi-tion to providing some unique background into what motivated Pawley to begin investigating formulaic lan-guage, he argues effectively that what was once considered the ‘periphery’ in language is in fact a sine qua non

of it, underscoring the inadequacies of spurious attempts at purely grammatical accounts of languagestructure.

Book reviews / System 38 (2010) 142–156 153

Alison Wray follows Pawley, writing on the complexities involved in the identification of formulaic lan-guage. As in Wray (2008), she illustrates the necessity of carefully thought-out, bespoke definitions of formu-laicity in research, and reiterates the operationalization of ‘morpheme equivalence’, that is, strings of wordsthat for various reasons – like morphemes – have an internal composition that is not normally broken downduring storage and retrieval.

Part 2 begins with Andreea S. Calude demonstrating how cleft sentences such as ‘that’s what I mean’ rep-resent a good example of the highly formulaic nature of spoken discourse, exhibiting properties of fixedness,phonological fluency and reduced salience (or transparency) in discourse, as in the example, ‘well that’s whatit’s all about’ (p. 73). In support of her arguments, Calude cites Jean Hudson’s work on the relationship be-tween salience and fixedness, and Hudson herself presents a paper in the following chapter with Maria Wik-torsson on the formulaic patterning of the word ‘about’. Hudson and Wiktorsson’s account adds furthersupport for Pawley’s stance regarding the inadequacies of purely grammatical accounts of language.

The line-up of widely-recognized names in the area of formulaic language continues in Part 3, with a paperby Joan Bybee and Rena Torres Cacoullos on how frequent formulaic forms can become ‘grammaticized’ overtime, or lose their original lexical meanings. The Bybee and Cacoullous paper cites the ‘estar + V-indo’construction in Spanish as an example, and another example from Spanish, that of ‘quedar(se) + adjective’,is used in the final paper in the volume. Damian Vergara Wilson provides very clear complementary evidencefor Bybee and Caracollous’ arguments by showing how the original meaning of ‘quedarse’ (literally, ‘to stay’)evolved over time to become more akin to ‘become’ in English (e.g. ella se quedo embarazada = she becamepregnant).

Volume 2, with the subtitle, Acquisition, loss, psychological reality, and functional explanations, deals withformulaicity from a more applied linguistics standpoint and is organized into parts that correspond to thesubtitle.

Part 1 is called Acquisition and loss, but the focus is especially on role of formulaic language in acquisition –in both the L1 and L2. Colin Bannard and Elena Lieven, for example, contribute an invaluable paper on howrecurring word strings contribute to novel utterances produced by two-year-old children. Building on the basicpremise that people ‘prefer to use words that have been used by others before’ (p. 301), the authors show thatup to 40% of the utterances produced by the children in their study were exact repetitions of multiword stringspreviously heard (p. 313). Later in the same section, Ann Peters shows how children can ‘connect the dots’ ofsuch formulaic utterances and integrate them into an emergent language system.

Regarding formulaic language in the L2, Britt Erman reviews key concepts in the notion of collocation asthey concern the written production of English by Swedish students at Stockholm University. She concludesthat although the data show that the idiom principle is indeed largely the default mechanism for language pro-duction among the participants, learners tended to produce fewer and less native-like collocations. This tendsto be the case even when there is an attempt at awareness raising prior to the writing task, as is shown in Sus-anne Rott’s paper ‘The effect of awareness-raising on the use of formulaic constructions’. The practical impli-cations of this phenomenon are many. In Aaron Ohlrogge’s paper on the formulaic expressions produced inintermediate-level EFL learner’s writing, for example, there is evidence that proficient use of formulaic expres-sions correlates positively with higher assessments of students’ language production.

Part 2 explores the Psychological reality of formulaic language, beginning with a contribution by Nick Ellisand Eric Frey on affective priming. The researchers used a list of verbs having either a strong positive or neg-ative semantic prosody (e.g. achieve, ease; suffer, lack) and recorded participants’ speed in judging the seman-tic properties of target words (e.g. success, battle) when primed by the various verbs. The results show that theaffective value of the verbs used in the study was generally activated automatically, thus providing evidence forthe psychological reality of the collocations focused on.

Finally, in Part 3, Functional explanations, formulaic language is discussed in terms of functional exponents,or phraseological realizations of pragmatic needs. Heidrun Dorgeloh and Anja Wanner, for example, illustratehow the construction ‘This paper argues. . .’ has become more prevalent in scientific journals and discuss thepragmatic forces behind the trend. A specific construction is also the focus of the paper by Joanne Scheibmanwho writes on the sequence ‘for me’ as functioning as everything from a discourse marker (e.g. ‘for me it’s justa question of. . .’) to expressing evaluation (‘it might be hard for me’).

154 Book reviews / System 38 (2010) 142–156

Formulaic Language is a formidable collection of papers written by an impressive selection of authors.Equally impressive is the sheer breadth of issues related to formulaicity covered across the two volumes. How-ever, although the editors’ organization of the sub-topics is generally good, there are a few that perhaps mer-ited conflation, or at least more interrelation. For example, Kerz and Haas’ paper, ‘The function ofprefabricated chunks in academic texts’ is in the Structure and distribution section of Volume 1. Surely, though,the paper also would fit well under the Functional explanations section of Volume 2. The same could be as-serted for the Szerszunowicz paper ‘Some remarks on the evaluative connotations of toponymic idioms ina contrastive perspective’ in the first volume. Nonetheless, this somewhat ambiguous – even arbitrary – orga-nization is less the fault of the editors and more an insight into the nature of formulaic language itself. It isperhaps evidence of the complexity inherent in formulaic language described by Andrew Pawley in the paperthat opens the two volumes, and that complexity appears to both defy compartmentalization and reflect theessentialness of formulaicity to language as a whole.

References

Granger, S., Meunier, F., 2008. Phraseology: An Interdisciplinary Perspective. John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam andPhiladelphia.

Pawley, A., Syder, F.H., 1983. Two puzzles for linguistic theory: nativelike selection and nativelike fluency. In: Richards, J.C., Schmidt, R.(Eds.), Language and Communication. Longman, New York and London, pp. 191–226.

Schmitt, N., 2004. Formulaic Sequences. John Benjamins Publishing Company, Amsterdam and Philadelphia.Wray, A., 2002. Formulaic Language and the Lexicon. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Wray, A., 2008. Formulaic Language: Pushing the Boundaries. Oxford University Press, Oxford.

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.2009.11.006

Origin and Evolution of Languages: Approaches, Models, Paradigms, Bernard Laks, S. Cleuziou, J.-P. Demoule,

P. Encreve (Eds.). Equinox, London (2008). 345 pp.

Everybody knows that the Societe Linguistique de Paris included in its 1864 statutes a prohibition on de-bates about the origins of language. I had always assumed that this prohibition was part of an attempt toput the study of language on a scientific footing, a way of avoiding discussion of untestable theories, bornout of exasperation rather than politics. It came as a surprise, then, to learn that the prohibition was specif-ically aimed against creationist scholars, who believed that language was a divine gift, rather than an evolvedhuman trait, and that the concerns of the Societe were political and ideological as well as scholarly. It wasobviously not just a coincidence that the foundation of the Societe took place in the same year as the publi-cation of Darwin’s origin of Species. This book is full of similar surprises.

The collection consists of fourteen chapters dealing with the philosophical and historical background to the19th century debates about the origins of language, the more recent links between linguistic evolution andgenetics, formal methods of establishing whether extant languages are related, cognition and the evolutionof language, archaeological evidence relevant to the origins of language, and pidgins and creoles. Each ofthe chapters is written by different authors. There is no editorial introduction or overview, however, andfor obvious reasons this makes it difficult to place the book. It seems to assume a fairly high degree of famil-iarity with both linguistics and archaeology, so the book is clearly not intended as a text book, or a method-