INPUT AND EVIDENCE: THE RAW MATERIAL OF SECOND LANGUAGE ACQUISITION. Susanne E. Carroll. Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2001. Pp. xviii + 462. $114.00 cloth.

The ambitious goal of this book is the exposition of “a truly explanatory theory of SLA” (back cover). Such a theory is bound to be multifaceted and complex, and indeed, Carroll draws from a variety of theoretical frameworks in exploring the relationship between input—or more precisely, the nature of the mechanisms brought to bear in processing language stimuli—and the nature of the language knowledge that (adult) second language (L2) learners ultimately acquire. In other words, a theory of acquisition must be integrated with a theory of speech processing to explain how language stimuli are transformed into abstract mental representations; this book represents Carroll's attempt to construct just such a model.

SIGN LANGUAGE AND LINGUISTIC UNIVERSALS. Wendy Sandler and Diane Lillo-Martin. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. xxi + 547. $45.00 paper.

Sandler and Lillo-Martin's volume is an incredibly important, powerful, and timely work. That the sign languages used by deaf people around the world are real human languages in every meaningful sense of the term has become a given among linguists over the past 30 years; as Sandler and Lillo-Martin point out, “In sum, the way sign language is acquired and the ease and speed of its transmission strongly support the view that a single cognitive system underlies language in both [spoken and signed] modalities” (pp. 3−4). Furthermore, apart from the psycholinguistic perspective, it is clear that

This six-volume, beautifully bound, boxed set contains 112 reprinted papers covering thehistory and development of modern theoretical pragmatics from its beginnings back in the 1940sand '50s with Charles Morris, Rudolf Camap, Yehoshua Bar-Hillel, via the major works inthe 1970s of those such as Stalnaker, Bach and Hamish, J. L. Austin, John Searle, and PaulGrice, to the more recent contributions of, among many others, Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson,François Recanati, and Anna Wierzbicka. The bulk of the contributions, eitherfree-standing papers or sections from books, come out of what one might term a philosophicalapproach to pragmatics, but toward the end of the collection there is an attempt to cover moreethnographically rooted approaches and even to get into applied pragmatic issues related toaphasia, first language acquisition, second language acquisition (one paper), and politics.

This volume charts the development of contrastive rhetoric (CR) over the past 30 years.Although CR has not attempted to identify developmental stages of L2 writers, it is essentiallythe study of transfer: the influence of L1 writing conventions and cultural and cognitivedimensions on L2 writing. Major strengths of this book are its critical review of the literature,concise definitions, and documentation of the progression of CR from narrow L2 text-basedanalyses to the inclusion of multiple approaches.

This paper summarizes some characteristics of Navajo and Western Apache speakers' tense switching in English and some observations on native English speakers' tense switching. It is suggested to teachers who have Southwestern Indian students in their classes to avoid restricting students to one particular tense in an artificial manner and to approach interlingual tense switching within a contrastive framework.