This list acknowledges recent works (except offprints of single articles) that appear to bear on the scientific study of language. The receipt of individual books cannot be separately acknowledged and no book can be returned to the publisher. Note especially that by accepting a book the Editor implies no promise that it will be reviewed in this journal. Reviews are printed as circumstances permit.

This article examines the ways in which explanation has been achieved in scientific work on language change over the last two hundred years. Explanations have come in many forms and at many levels and are greatly influenced by what are taken as the leading questions, which themselves have varied significantly since the early nineteenth century.

This article investigates the distribution of the negative polarity item (NPI) syn leven (lit. ‘his life’) ‘ever’ between 1550 and 1800 in West Frisian using the Frisian Language Corpus. Phonological and syntactic evidence is presented in order to argue that the expression was borrowed from Dutch. An overview of the syntactic contexts in which it is found is presented, and these contexts are characteristic of those in which NPIs are found. The distribution of syn leven is shown to conform only partly to Haspelmath's (1997) theory of the semantic map. Furthermore, the extent to which the original expression syn leven was grammaticalized as an NPI is investigated. Its distribution is compared to that of the near synonyms and rival expressions ea and oait ‘ever’, which turn out to have a broader context of usage. It is argued that syn leven failed to become the unmarked way of expressing the semantic content ‘ever’ for syntactic, semantic, and sociolinguistic reasons.