Freeman claims this volume “marks the first step in establishing a formal researchbase for language teacher education” (p. 352). The direction in which the editorsapparently believe language-teacher education needs to move, as stated in the chapter byRichards and his coauthors, is “away from an ‘applied linguistics’orientation toward one which focuses on teaching in its own terms” (p. 243).

Most of the 14 papers in this volume were presented at the 1992 conference on Discourseand the Professions in Sweden. The collection focuses on diverse professional contexts anddiscourses (law, medicine, social work, mediation, teaching, economics, and science) as well aswritten, spoken, and nonverbal communication in European languages. The papers range fromspeech-act analyses of legal documents such as wills, patents, and contracts to the sociopoliticalcritique of the discursive practices surrounding doctors, patients, and the recipients of socialassistance. The volume is held together thematically by each researcher's effort todemonstrate how professional ways of speaking are constantly being enacted, reenacted, andadapted in society.

Who speaks English? For what purposes? What kind of language has English become? Thesequestions are addressed in the collection of articles under review.

The Design of Language is a comprehensive introduction to general descriptivelinguistics and the typology of language. The book is divided into nine chapters, which discusslinguistic levels, sounds and phonemes, more abstract phonology, grammatical categories,morphemes, morphophonemics, morphosyntax, syntax, and more abstract syntax. The chapterson abstract phonology and syntax introduce slightly more advanced issues (such as underlyinglevels, transformational rules, and Universal Grammar); otherwise, the book covers topicsintroduced at the undergraduate level. The supplementary readings at the end of most sectionsrefer students to other textbooks and primary literature.

In this provocative book, six coauthors, representing cognitive psychology, connectionism,neurobiology, and dynamical-systems theory, synthesize a new theoretical framework forcognitive development with special focus on language acquisition. In the Emergentistperspective, interactions occurring at all levels, from genes to environment, give rise to emergentforms and behavior. These outcomes may be highly constrained and universal, but they are notthemselves directly contained in the genes in any domain-specific way. The human bodycontains perhaps 5 × 1028 bits of information in its molecular arrangement,but our genome contains only about 105 bits of information. Thus, we are over 20orders of magnitude short of being mosaic organisms, where development is prespecified in thegenes. Our development is under regulatory control, where precise pathways to adulthood reflectnumerous interactions at the cellular level occurring throughout development. The human cortexis plastic, its architecture reflects experience; innate specification of synaptic connectivity in thecortex is highly unlikely. Theories of language must reflect this—they must bebiologically, developmentally, and ecologically plausible. Linguistic representational nativism isjust not tenable. It is so implausible that UG could be directly encoded in the genotype that wemust explore the alternatives. So the answer is not “Nature.” Nor, as the authors soclearly argue, is it “Nature or Nuture.” Rather, it is “Natureand Nurture.”

This study deals with the simultaneous acquisition of Portuguese, Spanish, and Hebrew bytwo children and compares this with the historical development of Iberian-based contact-inducedvernaculars (“creole,” koine, and fusion languages).

Professor Schwarz is the most recent contributor to the John M. MacEachran MemorialLecture Series. In this timely essay, Schwarz takes a position critical of traditional psychologicalresearch asserting that: “Our [psychologists'] focus on individual thought processeshas fostered a neglect of the social context in which individuals do their thinking and this neglecthas contributed to the less than flattering portrait that psychology has painted of humanjudgment” (p. 1). He posits that “fallacies of human judgment” reported instudies of cognition and communication are actually fallacies of theresearch—specifically, the researchers' failure to take into account the humanmind's capacity to make sense of things, particularly through communication embedded insocial context. His point is an important one. When involved in conversation (even in theresearch laboratory), humans may suspend their abstract knowledge of the logic of language andattend to irrelevant and misleading information—especially if they assume that thespeaker's intentions are to convey information and to make sense. Schwarz reports that“ordinary kinds of talk” build on Gricean conversational implicatures, inferencesthat “go beyond the semantic meaning of what is being said by determining the pragmaticmeaning of the utterance” (p. 11). Researchers underestimate the power of theseinferences and, by presenting decontextualized, at times absurd, information, they fail toaccurately measure their subjects' “human judgment,” but instead observetheir subjects' diligent, and often expert, attempts to make sense of the message.