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

BOOK REVIEWS

JAN B LOMMAERT. Discourse: A Critical Introduction (Key Topics in Sociolinguistics) .

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2005. 299 pp. Hb (0521828171)
»40.00/Pb (052153531X) »18.99.
Reviewed by M ARTIN J. M ALONE

This is a book I wish I had read in graduate school. It is exciting, interesting,

and highly readable. In an advanced undergraduate, or a graduate seminar, it
would provide wide opportunities for discussion. It covers far more intellectual
territory than most sociolinguistic or discourse analysis texts and it ties micro
and macro topics together in an intellectually satisfying fashion. It shows the
influences of not only John Gumperz, Dell Hymes, Michael Silverstein,
Norman Fairclough, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, and Mikhail Bakhtin,
but more surprisingly, those of Ferdinand Braudel, Immanuel Wallerstein,
Raymond Williams, E.P. Thompson, and Louis Althusser as well. It is not a
trendy listing of en vogue theorists, but a real integration of ideas from a broad
range of disciplines.
The book is organized into nine chapters. Chapter 1 establishes Blommaert’s
approach. Chapter 2 critiques other approaches to the field, principally
Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Conversation Analysis (CA) . Chapters
3 through 8 are substantive discussions of a set of analytic concepts followed
by their application to examples. Chapter 9 is a brief conclusion summarizing
each chapter and what Blommaert believes he accomplished overall. The book
contains an extensive bibliography, a useful glossary of technical terms, and
an index.
Chapter 1,‘Introduction’, lays out what the book is. Blommaert’s first word in
the chapter is ‘power’, the work’s central topic. He is interested in power’s
effects, its outcomes, ‘what it does to people, groups, and societies, and how
this impact comes about’ (pp. 1^2) . He situates this study within the context
of the current world system. His own background in African sociolinguistics
provides him with good cross-cultural examples and allows him to show how
the movement of people, especially between Africa and Europe, requires a
more sophisticated understanding of discourse issues. His critical analysis of
the social nature of discourse is a study of power. His approach, much indebted
to Foucault, includes both linguistic pragmatics and non-linguistic approaches
focusing on ‘social, cultural, and historical patterns and developments of
use’ (p. 3). Blommaert claims that ‘voice’, meaning ‘the way people manage
to make themselves understood or fail to do so’ will be his ‘object of critical
investigation’ (p. 4) .
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124 BOOK REVIEWS

Blommaert’s approach is synthetic rather than original, attempting to bring

together ‘insights and approaches’ from a wide variety of areas. He draws from
three principal sources: the largely European tradition of CDA, of which he is
also frequently critical; American linguistic anthropology, whose emphasis
on ethnography proves to be his most influential method (the book is dedicated
to Dell Hymes and John Gumperz) , and sociolinguistics, with its general inter-
est in language forms and varieties. The chapter ends with a quick and useful
preview of what each following chapter will cover.
Chapter 2, ‘Critical Discourse Analysis’, summarizes this approach, with a
history, an outline of its program, a discussion of the theory and methodology
of Norman Fairclough, as an example of one of its principal practitioners, and
a critique of its methods and analytic approaches. Blommaert reviews various
criticisms of CDA, and ends the chapter with a consideration of its potential
and limitations. He sees CDA as hampered by three problematic biases. It is
overly linguistic, it is ahistorical, and it relies almost exclusively on First World
examples, ignoring discourse from societies very different from the industrial
west.
Chapter 3, ‘Text and context’, makes clear Blommaert’s preference for an
ethnographic approach to discourse. He critiques both CDA and CA, claiming
that ethnography provides a more adequate foundation for understanding
what is going on in discourse. He uses Bauman and Briggs’ concept of
‘entextualization’ to point out that analysis is a process of decontextualization
and recontextualization in which the analytic object becomes a text. There is
no avoiding the fact that a bit of talk transcribed and worked over, regardless of
the methods used, must be appreciated as a new discourse in a new context.
As with all the chapters that follow, he then provides an example that he
examines from multiple perspectives. In this case, he examines a narrative pro-
duced by an African asylum seeker in Belgium. He investigates three aspects
of what he refers to as ‘forgotten contexts’: Hymes’ notions of ‘linguistic means
and communicative skills’ (p. 58); ‘translocal contexts’, meaning ‘the shifting
of discourse across contexts’; and finally ‘text trajectories’, or the importance
of ‘the origin and situatedness of data’ (p. 64) . Blommaert concludes, as he
does in most chapters, with a consideration of power; not as a predefined
analytic object, nor simply as a purely internal aspect of talk-in-interaction,
but rather as ‘sedimented in language and . . . through language’, treating
language itself as ‘an object of inequality and hegemony’ (p. 67).
Chapter 4, ‘Language and inequality’, develops ideas from Dell Hymes on
function, Mikhail Bakhtin on ‘orders of indexicality’, and Michael Silverstein
on ‘centring institutions’. Blommaert provides two examples. The first are
three texts produced in English or French, by native speakers of African lan-
guages. He attempts to show the variable relations of forms and functions by
showing how competence in a prestige language that may provide social status
at home (in the world system’s periphery), confers no such advantages and in
fact stigmatizes the speakers when used in their European context. His second
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example, from South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings,

is the testimony of a young man who, as a member of the armed wing of the
ANC, was arrested, tortured, and harassed for many years. His analysis shows
that this man’s way of telling his story undercuts what the commission expects
to hear. By portraying himself as a warrior rather than a victim, with an
‘absence of explicit suffering markers’, his narrative fails to convey the
presence of any pain or suffering.
Chapter 5, ‘Choice and determination’, introduces Foucault’s notion of ‘the
archive’, and Raymond Williams’ ideas on creativity, followed by an examin-
ation of a set of documents produced by an African asylum seeker that
Blommaert translated into Dutch for the Belgian Immigration and Asylum
Services. Foucault’s concept of the archive refers to the historically situated
nature of discourse and to the (‘largely invisible’) rules of what can be said.
Orders of indexicality (Chapter 4) are the ‘empirical side of an archive’.
Blommaert introduces this term to indicate the ‘constraints on choice and
creativity’ within which discourse operates (p. 103). People are not free to be
interpreted in any way they choose. There are always historical, political,
social, and cultural constraints on meaning and interpretation.
This leads into a discussion of Raymond Williams’ historical account of the
nature of creativity from Marxism and Literature (1977). For Williams, creativity
is a struggle against hegemony, against ‘inherited practical consciousness’
(p. 105). For that reason, creativity always risks being misunderstood because
it attempts to change the received understandings of discourse (Foucault’s
archives) . He illustrates this relationship with another set of texts from an
asylum seeker. I found this example under-analyzed and not adequately used.
Chapter 6, ‘History and process’, is a far more interesting and nuanced
discussion of history than is usually found in discourse or sociolinguistic con-
texts. The key ideas come from Ferdinand Braudel and Michael Silverstein.
Braudel’s notion of layered time-scales ^ the longue dure¤ e or long term,
intermediate time, (the time of cyclical patterns) , and event time (the time of
everyday life) ^ is used to suggest how discourse events exist within ‘several
layers of historicity’, what Blommaert calls ‘layered simultaneity’ (p. 130) . Not
all of these contexts are consciously available to all speakers and hearers
simultaneously but they yield multiple layers of meaning within a single event.
Blommaert uses the idea of layering to discuss four examples. The first
concerns the meaning of varying forms of address in a university setting. The
second is a brief reference to Silverstein’s entertaining analysis of political
rhetoric (Talking Politics: The Substance of Style from Abe to ‘W.’, 2003). A longer
example works through a widely circulated email letter that appeared on the
eve of the 2003 Iraq invasion. Blommaert uses Braudel’s three orders of time to
show how the author collapses long history, episodic time and event time into
a synchronic account of how countries helped by the United States are now
engaged in betrayal by their refusal to support the war plans, and how this act
of synchronization is really a claim about power.
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The longest and most fascinating example in the chapter results from a
discourse analytic workshop in which a set of texts commemorating the 50th
anniversary of the 1944 Warsaw Uprising were analyzed from multiple
perspectives all focused on the uses of history. Blommaert raises questions not
part of those attendees were asked to consider, such as the assumed equation
of Soviets with post-1990 Russians, an assumption no more justified than
equating post-World War II Germans with Nazis. And he provides competing
(Soviet) accounts of the Uprising events in contrast to the Polish account
offered by workshop organizers. Blommaert makes the case for multiple layers
of historical meanings by showing that a post-1990, post-Soviet reading of the
events of World War II looks very different than one from an earlier era would
have.
Chapter 7, ‘Ideology’, discusses the various meanings of the term, briefly
reviews basic work (Althusser, Gramsci, Lenin, Mannheim, etc.) , and then
applies concepts introduced earlier, including voice, polycentric systems,
layering, and indexicality. His examples in this chapter are likely to prove less
interesting to readers outside of Belgium and also lack sufficient context to
make them useful. The first contrasts changes in the Flemish Socialist Party
based on differences in texts written in 1974 and 1998. The second concerns
the Belgian political debate on the integration of immigrants. This material
draws Blommaert’s published contributions to this debate. I came away from
this discussion feeling that it was too short to make it interesting for an
outsider but too long to hold my interest given its lack of broader context.
Chapter 8, ‘Identity’, is largely about macro-issues of identity such as race
and ethnicity, gender, class, culture, language community, and nation. While
it mentions Goffman and identity work, and notes that ‘identities are
constructed in practices that produce, enact or perform identity’ (p. 205), it
completely ignores micro or interactional studies of identity. This may reflect
my American and English language bias, but the entire schools of American
and British symbolic interaction, as well as CAwork on identity in conversation
are not even mentioned, and I think the chapter is poorer for this omission.
Despite this deficiency, the chapter does interesting work on these
macro-issues and how people rely on ‘forms of semiotic potential, organized in
a repertoire’ (p. 207) to build identity.
Blommaert applies his ideas about inequality, indexicality, and the
world-system to the movement of people from the peripheries to the core, for
instance how a middle class identity in Nairobi may not convert into a middle
class identity in London or New York. His analysis of the various dialect
varieties used by a South African deejay to achieve different styles and
identities is a nice application of his semiotic apparatus. But I think it points
up his lack of attention to micro issues because this whole transcript is about
shifting inter-relations within a single interaction. Blommaert’s analysis
focuses on shifts between the macro identities implied by the use of Standard
English, Black English, Township English, and Rasta Slang, but what I found
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potentially more interesting is that these shifts reflect interactional changes in

the relation between the deejay and his caller.What we see is how fluid identity
is in interaction and how language varieties provide a repertoire that allows
speakers to signal changing stances (Goffman’s ‘footings’) in what Blommaert
himself calls the ‘infinitely small’ features of talk. I don’t think Blommaert
would disagree with my claims, and his reading of the fine details of this
interaction ( pp. 228^232) shows his sensitivity to these issues. I just believe
there is another literature he could have turned to enrich this analysis.
Chapter 9, ‘Conclusion: Discourse and the social sciences’, briefly sums up
the book’s key points, discussing the main ideas of each chapter and then
noting how he dealt with three problems he had hoped to cover. His first was
to argue against the localism of most discourse work which tends to operate
purely from First World models. His examples provide readers with a productive
way to think about how he brought ‘discourse analysis in line with globaliza-
tion’ (p. 235). Secondly, this work broadens discourse analysis beyond a purely
linguistic approach and shows how it can be about ‘any form of meaningful
semiotic conduct’ (p. 236) . Finally he encourages an explicitly interdisciplinary
approach, both urging discourse analysts to broaden their own tool kits, and
encouraging scholars in other areas to use discourse analytic methods and
findings. He ends where he began, with obeisance to Dell Hymes, who called
for a far more interdisciplinary approach to linguistics over thirty years ago.
Despite small carping on my part, I believe this is an excellent, fascinating,
wide-ranging and highly readable book. I recommend it for graduate seminars
and for broadening the perspectives of long established professionals. Blommaert
successfully draws a broad array of intellectual contributions into the study of
meaningful symbolic behavior. I believe that his sensitivity to issues of power and
globalization, and his practical suggestions for their incorporation will go a long
way to making discourse analysis a more fruitful intellectual approach. Many
years ago, Roman Jakobson said ‘No monolingual linguists’. Blommaert’s text
applies this manifesto to discourse analysis and sociolinguistics.
M ARTIN J. M ALONE
Mount Saint Mary’s University
Emmitsburg, MD 21727
U.S.A.
malone@msmary.edu

RON SCOLLON AND SUZIE WONG SCOLLON. Nexus Analysis: Discourse and the Emerging
Internet. London and New York: Routledge. 2004. 198 pp. Pb (0415320631)
»16.99.
Reviewed by STANTON WORTHAM

This ambitious and rewarding book combines aspects of several genres. It is

a methodological guidebook, offering strategies for doing ethnography,

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discourse analysis and action research. It is an empirical report, describing the

authors’ use of email and other resources to improve Native Alaskans’ access
to higher education from 1978^1983. It is a theoretical account of how ‘people,
places, discourses and objects’ come together to facilitate action and social
change. It also offers a theoretical sketch and empirical illustration of compu-
ter mediated communication. The book does not provide a full methodological,
empirical or theoretical account, but focuses instead on the nexus of these
components. The theory of social action undergirds the methodological
suggestions, and the empirical material illustrates both the theory and the
methodology.
The theoretical account is highly interdisciplinary and creative, drawing on
sociolinguistics, linguistic anthropology, literary criticism, social semiotics
and cultural psychology. This account addresses a venerable problem. Social
life takes place only through individual actions, but any action is afforded by
and becomes intelligible only with respect to various potentially relevant
aspects of the context ^ from sociohistorical institutions and discourses, to inter-
actional organizations, to individual histories. Analysts face the challenge of
determining what is in fact relevant. Scollon and Wong Scollon avoid many of
the usual mistakes, like opting for ‘macro’at the expense of ‘micro’, or vice versa,
or declaring a ‘macro-micro dialectic’ while gesturing vaguely toward the
processes actually involved in such a dialectic. They insist that processes of
many sorts can be relevant to analyzing social action, and they offer a strategy
for identifying relevant processes and their interconnections. Their account
takes change as basic, instead of static objects or neat homeostatic processes.
The contexts potentially relevant to social action involve often unpredictable
trajectories of change across different timescales. ‘Nexus analysis’ maps the
intersections of these various trajectories as they collectively facilitate action.
A ‘nexus’ is a repeated site of engagement where a type of social action is
facilitated by a relatively consistent set of social processes. As a heuristic,
Scollon and Wong Scollon describe three types of processes that generally
play a role: ‘discourses in place’, the sociohistorically developing discourses,
organizations and procedures that constrain and facilitate action; the ‘inter-
action order’, in which people organize events; and the ‘historical bodies’ of
individuals, in which social and idiosyncratic habits are sedimented. Many
other resources and constraints can also play a role, like the layout of physical
space and the affordances of physical tools, specific conventions developed in a
local setting, and so on. Scollon and Wong Scollon show how such resources
contribute, for instance, to the lack of interactional synchrony that occurred
in an interview between a parole officer and a Native Alaskan client. They
describe the historical bodies of the two participants, who had developed very
different expectations and habits for regulating behavior, responding to
authority and handling social stigma. They describe relevant sociohistorical
discourses and institutions, including parole officers’ then-acute fear of
violence from some clients and the American legal system’s expectations
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about expressing remorse. And they describe the interactional asynchrony in

the interview itself, as the parole officer asks more and more explicitly for
information while the client becomes increasingly ashamed and unresponsive.
Each of these relevant processes, or ‘cycles’, as Scollon and Wong Scollon call
them, has a relatively autonomous existence. The embodied habits of the
individuals have been developed over ontogenetic time, for instance, and they
change slowly. The social genres and cultural expectations established by the
legal system have developed over even longer timescales. The various relevant
cycles travel their circuits, as it were, following their own trajectories coming
into this nexus and their own trajectories going into the future. Nonetheless,
each cycle has an effect on the social action in question only as they jointly
mediate that action. The book represents this ‘nexus’ visually as a small square,
with sections of several intersecting ovals overlapping in the space of that
square. Within the space of an action ^ say, the client’s unresponsiveness and
the parole officer’s resulting judgment ^ the cycles become interdependent.
We can analyze the action only by exploring how the various relevant
cycles interconnected in this instance. And if we want to change the typical
course of actions like this, we must intervene by acting to change how these
cycles interrelate.
Scollon and Wong Scollon give several useful examples of ‘nexus’ and the
‘cycles’ implicated in them, ranging from biological ecosystems to events of
intercultural communication to genres of computer mediated discourse. Most
of the examples come from their work in Alaska, in which they identified
barriers that Native Alaskan students experienced at institutions of higher
education. They have a remarkable data set: transcripts of electronic
communication done for educational, administrative and other purposes;
fieldnotes from participant observation in university teaching and life, in
governmental and legal proceedings, and in visits all over Alaska to consult
with service agencies and others; interviews with Native Alaskans and
European Americans in various contexts; plus historical and institutional
records of many sorts. They use these data to describe how they and many
others responded to opportunities presented in the 1970s by the new oil
money and the recognition of Native Alaskans’ rights to access educational,
medical, legal and other institutions. They focus on their use of early email
technology to teach both distance learning and local classes and on their work
to help universities lower barriers to many Native Alaskan students.
These empirical accounts are engaging, if a bit fragmentary, providing
glimpses into institutions and communities, into frustrations and interven-
tions that will be unfamiliar to many readers. In some ways the accounts form
an abbreviated ethnography of communication, showing how problems in
intercultural communication created barriers for Native Alaskan university
students. Scollon and Wong Scollon use the ‘gatekeeping’ metaphor to describe
how university faculty and staff judged and sorted Native and non-Native
students. They do not rely simply on a mismatch of cultural styles as an
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explanation, however. Their attention to many relevant cycles allows them

to explore how processes from various timescales constituted the barriers
confronted by Native Alaskan students. They also describe their efforts to
dismantle or mitigate these barriers. Scollon and Wong Scollon lectured
and presented workshops that informed Native and non-Native Alaskans
about various barriers. They also changed their own college teaching, using
email and other resources. As they describe these pedagogical changes,
they illustrate the different affordances of computer mediated educational
communication and how these affordances can empower some students while
disempowering others who are typically more comfortable.
The book uses these empirical accounts to illustrate the methodological
approach of ‘nexus analysis’. By giving their approach this name, Scollon and
Wong Scollon suggest that simple ‘discourse analysis’ will not suffice. Different
approaches to discourse analysis focus on different types of cycles that can be
relevant to explaining social action, but each focuses on a limited set and fails
to attend to various cycles that could be relevant in any given case. Discourse
analysis also focuses on discourse, which is of course crucial but which leaves
out the material objects, non-verbal signs, bodily habits and other resources
that contribute to relevant cycles. Scollon and Wong Scollon describe
procedures for mapping out relevant people, places, discourses and objects, for
identifying the various cycles and timescales that might be relevant to the
focal phenomenon and then for analyzing these cycles and their interrelations
in detail. They include a 27 page ‘fieldguide’ as an appendix, and this provides
useful, concrete questions and suggestions for the researcher at various stages
of the analysis.
Nexus Analysis does not provide detailed, concrete methodological guidelines
^ about what linguistic categories to examine in a text, or how to structure an
interview, for example. It provides a theoretical and methodological framework
within which more concrete methodological guidance can be given. The book
would be useful for experienced researchers who already know specific meth-
odological techniques, or as a text to orient and guide students who are learning
more specific techniques for discourse and/or sociolinguistic analysis. The book
is not specifically linguistic ^ as it uses ‘discourse’ mostly in the broader sense
and offers only a few brief empirical analyses that focus on language ^ and it
could thus serve as a useful orienting text for a course on ethnography as well.
Students reading the book would have to be cautioned, however, that not all
data sets are as comprehensive as this one. In practice, researchers rarely have
the time, resources and expertise to follow all potentially relevant cycles that
emanate from their focal interest. Students also need guidelines for how to cut
acceptable pieces out of a full nexus analysis.
Scollon and Wong Scollon do not intend the book to provide a script for
researchers to generate warranted conclusions, however. In fact, they argue
that research should be as much about opening up new questions as providing
definite answers. They also emphasize that all research is action, and that all
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action is itself positioned at the nexus of various relevant cycles. They do not
make this point to undercut the validity of research or to paralyze researchers,
but to show that researchers can make a difference in the processes they study.
Nexus analysis is action research. Nexus analysts embrace their embedded-
ness in the places they study and try to improve those places. The book is
refreshing for its optimism, as well as for its innovative theoretical stance and
insightful methodological suggestions. Scollon and Wong Scollon do not
lament the intransigence of social facts (though they certainly acknowledge
it) or the difficulties of research. Instead, they provide an upbeat reminder
that researchers are already out there acting in the world and a useful guide
for how we can learn interesting things, open up important questions and
make a difference in that world.

STANTON WORTHAM
University of Pennsylvania
3700 Walnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19104
U.S.A.
stantonw@gse.upenn.edu

JOHN E. JOSEPH. Language and Identity: National, Ethnic, Religious. Basingstoke:

Palgrave Macmillan. 2004. pp. 268 pp. Pb (0333997530) »18.99.
Reviewed by SUSANNE STADLBAUER

In his book, Language and Identity: National, Ethnic, Religious, John E. Joseph
presents an eclectic approach to the study of language and identity by drawing
on a wide range of academic fields. Fully aware of the various interpretations
of ‘identity’ that have materialized in the social sciences and humanities over
the past few decades, Joseph focuses his discussion on observable roles of
language in people’s experiences and interactions. He argues that identity
is at the core of linguistic analysis because language is shaped by the identity
of the speaker and by others’ interpretations of the speaker’s identity within
the context of continuously shifting, socially constructed roles.
In Chapter 1, the author introduces the idea that linguistics should be
‘rehumanized’ by asserting the ways in which language is shaped by cultural,
national, ethnic, and religious identities. He argues for departing from the
methodological inflexibility of traditional linguistic approaches, which do not
account for the construction of identity through language in interaction.
In Chapter 2, Joseph composes a brief survey of the foundations of language
practice within theories of the evolution of language. Chapters 3 and 4 discuss
a wide range of linguistic and social theories on identity construction. In
Chapters 5 through 8, the author devotes special attention to identity form-
ation within national, ethnic, and religious discourses, which he skillfully
exemplifies in reference to case studies of national languages in Hong Kong
and religious discourses in Lebanon.
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Joseph references theories on the evolution of language in Chapter 2 to

support his claim that identity is constructed dynamically in discourse, a
theme that runs throughout the book. In line with an evolutionary socio-
linguistic perspective, the author states that interpretation within language
is primordial and universal because the cerebral structures that are involved
in language production are connected with structures of general intelligence
and perception, constituting the faculty of interpretation. The capacity to
interpret can be seen in phatic communication, which is defined as both
linguistic and non-linguistic communication, and involves the sharing of
feelings and attitudes. According to the author, all elements of phatic
communication are shaped through the lens of culture, society, and politics,
which together form social identities.
The author then discusses identity formation in interaction in a theoretical
review of diverse literature. Chapter 3 reviews early linguistic perspectives
by researchers such as Voloshinov, Saussure, Sapir, and Labov. Chapter 4 con-
cerns theories from adjacent disciplines, such as sociology, illustrated in the
works of Goffman, Bourdieu, and Foucault, amongst others. Both chapters
assess the accomplishments and limitations of such theories for an under-
standing of identity formation. Joseph makes several important claims about
identity in these chapters. First, he argues that identity is more than a
by-product of linguistic communication. Second, he suggests that our focus
should not only be on self-identity, but on interpretations others make of a
person’s or group’s identity. Finally, he asserts that essentialism needs to be
replaced with social constructionism so that linguistic identity is analyzed as
something changeable, negotiated, and performed.
Chapter 5 offers a theoretical account of the ways in which identities are
constructed and interpreted in terms of nationhood. Acknowledging that
‘nation’ is an inherently ambiguous concept, Joseph uses a constructionist
approach to argue for the arbitrariness of national languages and national
identities. He engages in extensive discussions about the emergence of nation-
alism, tracing its origins to the book of Genesis, the Renaissance, and the
American and French Revolutions. His discussion includes Karl Marx’s
communist internationalism and Hans Kohn’s voluntaristic and organic
nationalisms, amongst others. Joseph’s goal in this chapter is to define national
languages as cultural constructs. He demonstrates that contemporary
scholarship draws either on the approach of Ernest Gellner, who sees
language as the foundation of national identity, or on the alternative approach
provided by Elie Kedourie, who renders language as just one ideological site of
nationalism. He further brings into play Benedict Anderson’s imagined
communities and Michael Billig’s banal nationalism to show that nations are
imagined and that the original image is reproduced in often-unconscious,
daily cultural practices. National languages are spread from nationalist
intellectuals to the masses and then become national property through
enforced norms. Joesph concludes the chapter with a survey of literature
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on national languages in Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas, Australasia, and

Oceania.
Chapter 6 is a case study of national languages in Hong Kong and of the
wavering interpretations of ‘Chinese’ identity formation. Joseph discusses the
linguistic, cultural, and political history of Hong Kong in order to clarify why
people identify as ‘Southern Chinese’ as opposed to ‘Chinese’ or ‘British’. For
Joseph, this self-identification is a reaction against both the oppressive
Chinese government in Beijing and past British colonizers. Although English
is perceived to be in decline, the author states that it is actually the status
of Hong Kong English that is declining. Hong Kong English is syntactically
distinct from ‘proper’ American or British English due to its incorporation
of Cantonese features, such as the flattening out of the count-mass distinction.
Joseph states that the future of Hong Kong English heavily depends on
Beijing’s possible opposition to the autonomy of Hong Kong. Should Beijing
oppose its autonomy, Hong Kong residents might perform resistance to a
‘Chinese’ identity by preserving English.
Joseph investigates theories on ethnic, racial and religious identities in
Chapter 7, which are in part established through language choice and code-
switching. The author rightly claims that ethnic or racial identification can be
a double-edged sword that either works unjustly against individuals or binds
them together in cultural unity counteracting oppression. Similarly, language
can act as both a unifying and divisive force with respect to religion, even
determining in-group and out-group status. For instance, Latin has been
associated with Christians, Arabic with Muslims, and Hebrew with Jews.
The case study in Chapter 8 focuses on Christian identity formation in
Lebanon where bilingualism is an important signifier. In reaction to centuries
of Islamic domination, Lebanese Christians construct their identities by claim-
ing an ancient Phoenician ancestry and therefore a history that authenticates
their presence in Lebanon. But Christian identity formation also points to
Europe, with Arabic-French bilingualism being an important signifier. Joseph
calls the Christians’ claim for a Phoenician ancestry a cultural fiction. These
types of cultural fictions are pervasive because they are abstractions. In
Lebanon, for instance, a shared national language is an abstraction that could
not establish a unified society because the linguistic battleground is comprised
of spoken languages, ancient languages, and foreign languages. For a nation-
state to realize the fiction of a national language, it must establish institutions,
such as schools and editorships, which reinforce the alignment of the ideal
and the powerful. In the author’s view, this is dangerous because realizing
utopian visions is inherently essentialist.
This book is a constructive and wide-ranging analysis of diverse linguistic
and social theories as they apply to the study of identity. But common to
wide-ranging approaches is a tendency to produce broad surveys of linguistic
research as opposed to in-depth analyses of specific topics. This becomes evi-
dent when Joseph gestures toward the provocative frameworks of community
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of practice and shared habitus, yet never develops these perspectives in the
context of his larger argument. In addition, a consideration of multilingualism
and code-switching could have been beneficial in the previously mentioned
case studies to show how language choice enables different kinds of identity
positioning. Joseph also mentions the importance of personal names to the
subject of identity, in that they index complex personal and social histories,
as well as the importance of linguistic leveling, which is mainly a result of
globalization. However, his interest in both personal names and linguistic
leveling is never incorporated into his discussion of specific linguistic examples.
Apart from these minor shortcomings, Language and Identity offers an
enlightening synopsis of the research on language and identity across diverse
disciplines. The case studies provide invaluable access to the role of language
in the nation-states of Hong Kong and Lebanon through ethnographic
research. I recommend this book for readers within or outside academia who
seek an overview of the intimate connection between language and identity
from theoretical as well as empirical perspectives. The combination of these
two perspectives makes this book an excellent introduction to the study of
language and identity for both teaching and research.

SUSANNE STADLBAUER
Department of Linguistics
University of Colorado
295 UCB
Boulder, CO 80309
U.S.A.
susanne.stadlbauer@colorado.edu

ROBERT D. G REENBERG. Language and Identity in the Balkans. Oxford: Oxford

University Press. 2004. 188 pp. Hb (0199258155) »40.00.
Reviewed by BRIGITTA B USCH

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

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as a speaker of Serbian only some twenty kilometres further away in the

Republika Srpska, despite his status as a second language speaker from the
‘outside’. In both situations he experienced different attitudes, while some of
his interlocutors insisted on emphasizing language differences, others rejected
such endeavours as ethnicising policies. Robert Greenberg stresses that in his
account on language policies in the Balkan he is cautious ‘to write about this
topic without offending one side or another’ (p. x) .
The book provides a detailed and comprehensive survey of the history of the
Serbo-Croatian language, starting from the birth of the common standard
language which came through the Vienna Literary Agreement signed in 1850
by intellectuals from what is today Serbia or Croatia respectively, to the
adoption of constitutions in the successor states of former Yugoslavia, which
put a formal end to the language unity and established Croatian, Serbian and
Bosnian as new national, official or state languages. Greenberg’s historical
account depicts the development around the Serbo-Croatian language not in
the form of a tragic rise and fall myth, but rather as complex interplay
between centrifugal and centripetal forces. He identifies different phases and
milestones; from the late nineteenth century up to the 1920s the unified
language evolved without much controversy, but when ethnic relations
deteriorated during the 1930s, the foundations for a common language eroded.
The chauvinist ideology of the Croat fascist regime between 1941 and 1945
affirmed a separate Croatian language, in which differences were accentuated.
In the second Yugoslav state under Tito the renewed language unity aimed at
supporting the ideology of ‘brotherhood and unity’. Centripetal tendencies
became already apparent in the 1960s and found their legal embodiment in
the 1974 constitution, which recognized the right of eachYugoslav constituent
people or nation to use its own language at the republican and provincial
levels. As a result the Socialist Republics of Croatia, Bosnia-Herzegovina and
Montenegro declared their own ‘standard linguistic idioms’ to be the official
languages in their territories, but they were explicitly understood as idioms of
one single Serbo-Croatian/Croato-Serbian literary language.The author concludes
that the ‘chronology puts in doubt recent assertions that the unified language
never truly existed, or had been imposed against the will of its speakers’ (p.54) .
The introductory chapter on the history of Serbo-Croatian is followed by
discussions of the present situation concerning language policy and language
planning for the Serbian, the Montenegrin, the Croatian and the Bosnian
language. Robert Greenberg’s study is based on close readings of recently
published works, many of which are still not available in libraries outside
the space of former Yugoslavia. In particular, he considers instruments of
codification (dictionaries, orthographic manuals, grammars and handbooks
published since 1991), articles and monographs by linguists from Bosnia-
Herzegovina, Croatia, Montenegro and Serbia (mainly articles on the language
controversies, in particular on orthographic controversies, debates on literary
dialects, disagreements on vocabulary and issues related to the constitutional
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status of the successor languages) as well as metalinguistic discourses in the

popular press (language columns, commentaries) . In these four sections on
Bosnian, Croatian, Serbian and Montenegrin, the author highlights ongoing
discussions elaborating on the position of different factions among linguists in
the successor states of former Yugoslavia. In this otherwise comprehensive
and detailed representation of the present situation, important voices (V. Anic¤
or D. Skiljan) are possibly somewhat under-represented, especially as
Dubravko Skiljan’s recent book on language and the nation (2002) has dealt
with issues of language and identity in general and in Croatia in particular.
It is striking that Robert Greenberg devotes an entire chapter to the possible
coming into being of a Montenegrin language as he asserts himself that the
official emergence of a Montenegrin language has not occurred and that it will
depend above all on political developments which will determine whether
Montenegro becomes an independent state or not.
The author concludes his analysis of the present linguistic situation in the
space of the former Serbo-Croatian area on the rather pessimistic note that
‘the separating function of language has reached nearly absurd proportions’
and that in the near term this policy seems irreversible as language planners
are ‘bent on reducing mutual intelligibility as much as possible’ (p. 167).
Nevertheless, he concedes that in the future, when ‘ethnic reconciliation is
possible, language convergence would once again be in order’ (p. 167).
Greenberg’s historical account and analysis of recent language developments
in the Balkans represents consistently the position of a well informed voice
from outside, of a concerned external observer who is not involved in daily
actions on issues of language policy. Therefore it is an important contribution
to the current controversial debate within Slavic language studies on the
future of the South Slavic languages. For linguists interested in questions
of language policy and language planning it offers a useful and elaborated
introduction to an area which is still too little known. The recent experiences
in language policy and identity politics in the space of former Yugoslavia
are certainly relevant for different situations in other parts of the world, where
questions related to the development of language policy meeting the needs of
heteroglossic societies are on the agenda.

REFERENCE
Skiljan, Dubravko. 2002. Govor nacije: Jezik, nacija, Hrvati. Zagreb: Golden Marketing.

BRIGITTA BUSCH
Institut fu« r Sprachwissenschaft
Universita«tWien
Bergg.11
1090 Wien
Austria
brigitta.busch@univie.ac.at

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GABRIELLE HOGAN-BRUN AND STEFAN WOLFF (eds.). Minority Languages in Europe:

Frameworks, Status, Prospects. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. 2004. 238 pp.
Hb (1403903964) »45.00.
Reviewed by M ELISSA ROY WARNOCK

Gabrielle Hogan-Brun and Stefan Wolff’s edited volume Minority Languages in

Europe: Frameworks, Status, Prospects gives insight into and constructively cri-
ticizes the political management of linguistic diversity in a variety of
European contexts. In the introductory chapter, the editors say that the aim of
the volume is ‘to examine how language policy has developed in different and
often changing social, legal and political frameworks in Europe’ (p. 7). They
achieve this goal admirably by bringing together chapters on law and policy
with case studies illustrating the implications of such frameworks. Yet
the contributors’ goals are not simply descriptive. In addition to analysis and
assessment, the authors ‘make recommendations as to how language policy
and/or context in which it happens need to be improved in order to accommo-
date and support linguistic and cultural diversity in different countries in
which language minorities exist and articulate their demands’ (p. 7). The
editors organize the different approaches to the issue into four sections:
‘Introduction’,‘Legal and policy frameworks’,‘Case studies’, and ‘Conclusion’.
In one of the introductory chapters, ‘When a language is ‘‘just symbolic’’ ’,
Camille C. O’Reilly argues for the value of examining what she calls symbolic
languages in order to better understand the relationship between language
and ethnicity in multilingual societies. When O’Reilly characterizes a lan-
guage as ‘just symbolic’, she means a language marginal to public and private
life that comes to represent a group associated with it, such as Irish. O’Reilly
argues that when scholars dismiss a language as ‘just symbolic’ and therefore
undeserving of study, they miss the language’s association with politics and
nationalism that can elucidate the complexities of conflict. Throughout the
chapter, she poses fundamental questions and criticisms regarding the value
of symbolic languages. In doing so, O’Reilly also problematizes the notions of
symbolic, ethnicity and culture in part by questioning the ways in which these
terms often involve essentialist understandings amongst a language, its
speakers and the nation-state. In exploring the questions: ‘How important is
language to ethnic identity, symbolic or otherwise? And how much attention
should we pay to language as part of the politics of identity? (p. 19), O’Reilly
comes to the conclusion that language is fundamental to identity and stresses
the importance of context. She cites the example of the Irish language, which
is strongly associated with ethnic identity, religious differences and politics
despite pessimistic statistics about actual language use and attitudes.
Moreover, she discusses how arguments over official English, Ebonics and
English-Spanish bilingual education in the U.S. stand in for tensions over race,
culture and immigration. A number of well-documented conflicts further

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illustrate the role of language essentialism as it reflects and perpetuates ethnic

tensions and fears of division: Bosnian, Croatian, and Serbian in the former
Yugoslavia; French and English in Quebec; Latvian, Ukrainian and Russian
in the Soviet successor states; Catalan and Basque in Spain; and finally,
Bulgarian and Romanian in Eastern Europe. Ultimately, O’Reilly diffuses the
explosive question: ‘. . . to what extent, and under what conditions, can the
protection and support of minority languages lead to political separatism?’
(p. 28) . By the end of the chapter, readers motivated to defend minority
language projects such as documentation, revitalization or activism will leave
loaded with arguments legitimizing yet complicating their missions.
Kristin Henrard’s chapter ‘Devising an adequate system of minority
protection in the area of language rights’ starts off the section ‘Legal and
policy frameworks’. Henrard begins by giving a working definition of the term
minority. She then equates an adequate system of minority protection with
appropriate accommodation of population diversity in multinational states.
Henrard argues that accommodation ‘can be achieved when policy makers
acknowledge the interrelation between individual human rights, minority
rights and the right to self-determination’ (p. 39). The basic principles of
minority protection are broken down into ‘the prohibition of discrimination’
and ‘measures designed to protect and provide the separate identity of the
minority groups’ (p. 40) . In bringing language into the discussion, Henrard
points to policies on official languages as revealing the inequality of languages
in terms of political power. She compares the establishment of minority lan-
guage rights to finding balance between national unity and linguistic diversity.
To assist planners in achieving this equilibrium, Henrard delineates the issues
to be considered when developing policy that regulates language use in the
public sphere, including limitations on state resources and the legitimate need
for a lingua franca. Henrard also evaluates the amount of protection given to
minority language speakers under the umbrella of individual human rights
and minority rights, reviewing the effectiveness of international policy
guidelines: the European Convention on Human Rights; Article 27 of the
International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights; the 1992 UN Declaration
on Minorities; the UNESCO Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination
in Education; the 1990 Copenhagen Document of the Organisation for
Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) ; the Council of Europe (CoE)
Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities; and the
European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages (ECRML) of the CoE.
Henrard concludes that advances in individual human rights and current
minority rights are insufficient for the protection of language rights. To remedy
this deficit, she argues for internal self-determination for minorities, claiming
that such a right could assist conflict prevention. Henrard then acknowledges,
without specifying instances, that forms of internal self-determination have
been granted to minorities, and she suggests that adding linguistic policy to
self-government would further accommodation. Overall, Henrard gives an
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organized and accessible introduction to minority protection and language

rights.
The other two chapters in this section of the volume draw from personal
experience and offer in-depth examinations of legal frameworks. Ma¤ ire¤ad Nic
Craith’s ‘Facilitating or generating linguistic diversity’ explores the potential
impact of the ECRML on non-official languages, focusing on Ulster-Scots as a
case study. John Packer’s ‘The practitioner’s perspective’ gives expert insight
into the work of the OSCE High Commissioner on National Minorities.
The chapters in the section Case studies offer a refreshing variety of contexts
through which to evaluate legal and policy frameworks. Stefan Wolff and Karl
Cordell’s ‘Ethnic Germans as a language minority in Central and Eastern’
compares the situation and uncertain future of German speakers in Poland,
Hungary and Romania, taking into account territorial concentration, age,
forced migration and language policy involving official status, use, education,
media and assimilation. Gabrielle Hogan-Brun’s ‘Baltic national minorities in
a transitional setting’ examines the various approaches taken to national
minorities by the Baltic Republics. In the chapter ‘Politics and language rights:
A case study of language politics in Croatia’, Vanessa Pupavac predicts that
questions of language rights in Croatia will continue to be politicized in the
near future. She argues the controversial position that international minority
language rights have actually worked to aggravate conflict: ‘It is time to revisit
international minority rights approaches and to examine how they may be
unwittingly fuelling the ‘‘Thucycdidean movement’’ and legitimizing ethnic
division’ (p. 153). The next chapter by Carmen Milla¤ n-Varela, ‘‘‘Minor’’ needs
of the ambiguous power of translation’, focuses on Galician and brings issues
of translation practices into the discussion of language policy and planning.
In the chapter ‘On policies and prospects for British Sign Language’, Graham
H. Turner calls attention to the effect of social and public policy frameworks
on minority languages, both signed and spoken.
The final chapter in the section Case studies, Dieter W. Halwachs ‘The
changing status of Romani in Europe’, traces the improvement of Romani in
terms of internal and external attitudes, increased domain of use, codification
and lexical expansion. Halwachs describes how the process of self-
organization in Roma groups is a form of assimilation in which the group
adopts dominant concepts and values non-autochthonous to the Roma. This
self-organization leads to conscious consideration of Romani as a marker of
the group’s identity and as important to the survival of the group. Hence, the
development of Romani as a marker of identity is not the result of language
endangerment but rather the effect of organizational assimilation. Using the
Roma of Burgenland in Austria as an example, Halwachs clearly outlines the
inspiring internal and external efforts that have given some enhanced security
to Burgenland-Romani. Although the self-organization and resulting
institutional recognition have helped the status of Romani, its future is
uncertain. Halwachs concludes that it is ‘vital that its speakers will finally be
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granted equal rights and treatment, which they have been denied for centuries’
(p. 206) .
In the volume’s concluding chapter,‘Language, nationalism and democracy
in Europe’, Stephen May contextualizes the previous contributions in a
discussion of the notion of nation-state, challenging planners and scholars to
rethink the concept in more inclusive and diverse terms. May envisions minority
languages legitimized and institutionalized by complementary policies on
civic, supranational and international levels. May’s optimistic vision ties the
book together by echoing the other contributor’s practical concerns and goals.
Suitable for undergraduate and graduate-level readings in disciplines such
as sociology, anthropology, international studies and linguistics, Minority
Languages in Europe is at its best inspiring, elucidating and accessible. The
volume is a welcomed resource, offering an array of perspectives on current
language policies around the world.
M ELISSA ROY WARNOCK
Department of Linguistics
University of Colorado
Campus Box 295
Boulder, CO 80309-0295
U.S.A.
melissa.warnock@colorado.edu

H. G. W IDDOWSON. Text, Context, Pretext: Critical Issues in Discourse Analysis

(Language in Society, 35). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. 2004. 185 pp. Hb
(0631234519) »50.00/Pb (0631234527) »16.99.
Reviewed by H AILONG T IAN

Being ‘critical’, Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) itself ‘is being attacked every
now and then by its detractors’ (Rajagopalan 2004: 261), and one such detrac-
tor is undoubtedly H. G. Widdowson, who, after life-long consideration (see
the Preface) , has developed his critical discussion into the present new book:
Text, Context, Pretext: Critical Issues in Discourse Analysis. This book consists of
ten chapters, the first five being concerned with critical issues in the enterprise
of discourse analysis in general, and the next five addressing specifically the
work of CDA.
Widdowson begins the first chapter with his concerns about the relation-
ship between text and discourse. ‘Unless it is activated by this contextual
connection, the text is inert. It is this activation, this acting of context on
code, this indexical conversion of the symbol that I refer to as discourse’ (p. 8) .
Thus, the relation between discourse and text is that of process and its product.
By identifying the distinction and relation between text and discourse,
Widdowson actually groups two sets of concepts involved in the book, one
including text and co-text associated with ‘analysis’, the other including
discourse and context associated with‘interpretation’.

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In Chapter 2, the author develops his discussion of text in relation to

Systemic Functional (S/F) grammar. This grammar, unlike Chomsky’s
Transformation Generative grammar, accounts for textual relations, but, to
Widdowson’s disappointment, it never goes beyond a model that ‘classifies and
categorizes, makes divisions and distinctions which separate aspects of
language out from each other’ (p. 26) . One of the difficulties about this model
identified by Widdowson is its two levels: the level of understanding and the
level of evaluation. For example, understanding the text ‘CLOSED’ in a shop
window does not require a linguistic analysis (p. 23), but, as Widdowson
argues, this does not preclude the text from being evaluated.
Another difficulty is with the model’s textual metafunction. Considering
theme and rheme,Widdowson recognizes that the organization of information
in the clause can be motivated either by ideational or interpersonal purposes.
This challenges S/F grammar’s categorization of the three metafunctions as
distinct and separate strands. Another weakness identified in S/F grammar by
Widdowson is that it cannot account for actual language use. The point being
made is that analysis is confused with interpretation in S/F grammar: the
process of identifying what semantic features are made manifest in a text is
treated without any difference from the process that involves recognizing
how a text functions as discourse by discriminating which features are
pragmatically activated and how.
In Chapter 3, Widdowson critically reviews various studies of context. For
example, Firth’s schematic construct, like Malinowski’s ‘context of situation’, is
not seen as clearly distinguishing the notions of context and situation. Equally
unsatisfying is context as a psychological construct (as in the work of Hymes,
and Sperber and Wilson) , which turns out to be a mere inferential process
whereby contextual effects are derived from given contextual assumptions.
Instead, Widdowson proposes that context be taken as an unfixed, schematic
construct, whose socio-cultural conventions provide the basis for the online
pragmatic processing of language. In this way,Widdowson sets up interaction
between text and context.
In Chapter 4, the author distinguishes co-text from context.‘The inspection
of co-text involves a consideration of the textual product as such without
regard to the discourse that gave rise to it’ (p. 58) . Thus, co-textual relation is
associated with text while contextual relation is associated with discourse. In
his examination of Halliday and Hasan’s exhaustive compendium of devices
which ‘relate text to general features of the language’, Widdowson makes the
point that semantic features, ‘are relevant only to the extent that they have
pragmatic point, their co-textual patterns only relevant to the extent that they
key into contextual factors’ (p. 69). In this way, it is emphasized that ‘a text
only exists for the user in association with discourse. It has no reality other-
wise’ (p. 68) . If one isolates a text and analyses it as a linguistic object, notes
co-occurrences and traces co-textual semantic connections, then the text
ceases to be a product of discourse.
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In Chapter 5, Widdowson introduces an additional factor in the general

interpretative process ^ pretext, which generally refers to ‘an ulterior motive:
a pretending to do one thing but intending to do something else’ (p. 79). In
dyadic communication, the recognition of the writer’s/speaker’s purpose
largely depends on contextual factors that regulate the focus of attention of
the reader/listener. In situations where a third party (e.g. an analyst) is
involved, Widdowson believes the recognition of the writer’s purpose depends
not only on contextual factors, but also on pretextual factors. These pretextual
factors regulate the analyst’s focus of attention on the textual features to be
analyzed and the contextual factors to be considered.
The notion of pretext actually serves as a starting point for the author’s
criticism of CDA. In Chapter 6, Widdowson argues that it is precisely out
of its socio-political pretext that CDA makes the expedient selections of textual
features for analysis. A possible solution to this partiality seems to be corpus
analysis, which is the focus of Chapter 7. Corpus analysis aims to find patterns
of systematic co-occurrences across a range of texts, but it is not without its
problems for CDA. As examined by Widdowson, Fairclough’s and Stubbs’s
corpus analyses of textual features are not systematic, and, in addition, corpus
analysis does not account for context. As argued by Widdowson, ‘corpus
linguists cannot read process from product in an analogous manner: they
cannot, as we have seen, directly infer contextual factors from co-textual
ones, and use textual data as conclusive evidence of discourse’ (p. 126) .
In Chapter 8,Widdowson brings into focus the distinction between analysis
and interpretation, and emphasizes his point that CDA, whether it is Wodak’s
version or Fairclough’s, is not an analysis of textual features and contextual
factors, but interpretation regulated by pretextual socio-political commit-
ment. It is argued that CDA, like its precursor literary criticism, does not result
in precise linguistic analysis. Even where contextual factors are taken into
consideration, as in Wodak’s discourse-historical approach which is centrally
concerned with the ‘contextualizing and historicizing’of texts (p. 138) , there is
no ‘specification of setting and context as a necessary precondition on inter-
pretation, but ready-made interpretations which, in effect, serve as a kind of
pretextual priming, designed to dispose us to read this text in a particular
way’ (p. 142) . Similar criticism is repeated in Chapter 9, but this time in terms
of approach and method, where Widdowson argues that CDA,‘is not actually a
method of analysis but an approach to interpretation’ (p. 159). It is not a
method simply because of what Widdowson believes to be the shortage of
explicit demonstration of how the abundant references to theories and
models in CDA literature are drawn on in any principled way.
Text, Context, Pretext covers much ground in discourse analysis ranging
from its early precursors (e.g. B. Malinowski, Z. Harris) to its contemporary
practitioners. The notion of pretext provides a new approach to the discussion
of critical issues in (critical) discourse analysis. However, CDA work selected
for critical comment in this book comes mainly from the 1990s and, as
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observed by Blommaert (2005: 22) ,‘there is always a danger of objectification

when we discuss a dynamic and developing movement such as CDA as a
‘‘school’’, locked in time and space’. This reader would have also appreciated
a greater emphasis on more positive suggestions. At present, they are only
formulated as brief proposals made in passing in the concluding Chapter 10.

REFERENCES
Blommaert, Jan. 2005. Discourse: A Critical Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Rajagopalan, Kanavillil. 2004. On being critical. Critical Discourse Studies 1: 261^263.

H AILONG TIAN
School of Foreign Languages
Tianjin University of Commerce/Nankai University
Tianjin 200134
P. R. China
thailong@public1.tpc.tj.cn

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