Geoffrey Sampson, The “language instinct” debate. Revised edition. London and New York: Continuum, 2005. Pp. xiii, 224. Pb $30.00.

First published in 1997 under the title Educating Eve but now revised and expanded and with a useful foreword from Paul Postal, this book presents and critiques all the main arguments that have been offered in support of the thesis that a body of language-specific knowledge is innate in the human child. Sampson finds the thesis unproven on detailed grounds of logic or evidence, and proceeds to sketch an alternative basis for first-language development, rooted in Popperian science and nurture. As the new title indicates, the book purports specifically to respond to Steven Pinker's The language instinct, but somewhat surprisingly Pinker's book isn't extensively debated here: It seems that the publishing demigod is mostly objected to for having renewed the intellectual standing of the nativist stance in the 1990s, and matters are certainly further confused by Sampson's frank admiration for Pinker's more recent The blank slate.

This volume contains the contributions presented at the first plenary conference on Integrational Linguistics held in London in 2000, an event at which I participated. The basic tenets of Integrational Linguistics were developed by Roy Harris at Oxford in the 1980s and 1990s; while many aspects of this approach remain a matter of debate, its assumptions and practices have become sufficiently firm to be the subject of a couple of introductory texts (Harris 1998, Toolan 1996). Harris's agenda has been “to challenge the monumental complacency of mainstream linguistics” (p. 3) by pointing out that the discipline is no more than an elaborate edifice built on a myth.

Christopher Williams, Tradition and change in legal English: Verbal constructions in prescriptive texts. Bern: Peter Lang, 2005. pp. 216. $46.95.

Christopher Williams analyzes the use of constructions such as modals and semi-modals such as shall and may and the use of the present simple as these constructions appear in English prescriptive legal texts. Using a large corpus of texts from a variety of English-speaking countries and international organizations, Williams focuses primarily on legislative texts, which are often characterized as including archaic or rarely used words and foreign words, the repetition of particular words and phrases, the use of long, complex sentences, and the passive voice (p. 31). Williams's analysis, thoughtfully designed and carried out, is an informative examination of how and why legal language has resisted change. The book also provides an engaging look at the Plain Language Movement and the impact this movement has had on legal texts.

Headlines reporting the outcomes of professional and college football games for an entire football season from two major newspapers were analyzed in an attempt to answer three questions: (1) What kind(s) of language do sportswriters use in attempting to be playful or humorous? (2) Is there a pattern to the number of ways winning and losing can be described? (3) What effects might creative use of language in such headlines have on the English language in general? Of the 930 headlines collected, there were 222 different transitive verbs (e.g., ambush, batter, burn, flog, maul, smash) and 81 intransitive verbs (e.g., breeze, cruise, lose, rally, win). On a descriptive linguistic level, most headlines (a) were in the form of subject–verb–object; (b) used alliteration and punning (Rice Burns Baylor); and (c) used almost any action verb to denote winning. On a psycholinguistic level, an argument is presented for semantic generativity, the ability of the context and the metaphorical possibilities of words to have almost any verb make sense in a headline. Finally, on a historical linguistic level, it is suggested that continued use of a verb for winning and losing (such as maul and pulverize) may lead to a change in their meaning. (Semantics, language change, language of sports)

This issue of Language in Society is the final issue in the first volume of the journal to have appeared under my editorship. I am grateful for the support of the Department of English at Carnegie Mellon University. I am also very grateful to editorial assistant Craig O. Stewart and copyeditor Jane McGary, as well as to Barbara Chin, Morrell Gillette, and Robert Dreesen at Cambridge University Press.