This book is a pleasure for the second language (L2) researcher to read, and a challenge for the teacher of second language acquisition (L2A) theory to use. It offers an extremely clear and engaging introduction and overview of current L2A research from the generative 380 Reviews perspective. It successfully brings classical older findings to bear on the contemporary research issues. It highlights the most important issues in the field with admirable intellectual precision and honesty. At the same time, it is an introductory text that also has another agenda, namely, presenting and arguing for the author's own theory of second language development. Thus, it is not clear whether the text is intended exclusively as a teaching aid or as a research book. I am afraid the combination of the two is daunting for the unsuspecting reader.

Word prosodic systems in the languages of Europe (WPS), edited by van der Hulst, is the fourth in a nine-volume series titled EUROTYP, which is the twentieth work of the series “Empirical Approaches to Language Typology,” the aims of which are to put to use the intellectual capital of the European Union, and to catalog the characteristics of a European Sprachbund (vi).The reader who is curious as to why word level prosody should have a thousand pages devoted to it, and why it is the only remotely phonological topic of the nine EUROTYP topics indicating a Sprachbund and representative of the intellectual capital of Europe, will find by scanning the published papers from the Workshop on Typology of Languages in Europe (Bechert et al. 1990) that only one real reference to accent/intonation/stress appears in Bechert's (1990) article on nominal morphology. In short, WPS is about metrical structure. As such, WPS will be an influential resource to anyone working on prosody because metrical structure in general provides compelling empirical support to classical generative arguments in favor of an unconscious grammar and facilitates insight into other aspects of phonology (vowel length and tone placement, to note just two examples). Nespor reminds readers that although this book and topic are supposed to be limited to word level phenomena, the “word” domain has no privileged status with respect to prosody (117). That is, the principles of prosody do not begin or end with the word (although the notion of “word” holds social and pragmatic importance outside of the community of generative linguists). Thus, notions regarding word accent preclude antecedent notions about smaller and larger domains. Nevertheless, the task of metrical theory, and WPS specifically, is the elucidation of a simple notational device that can predict complex verbal behavior (Hayes 1982). This is in line with EUROTYP's purpose to “study the patterns and limits of variation” (v).

Regionale Sprachgeschichte erhebt den Anspruch, die Entwicklung des Deutschen nicht bloß teleologisch im Hinblick auf die moderne Gemeinsprache darzustellen, sondern die je eigenen Entwicklungen in den Regionen nachzuzeichnen, auch jene, die sich vom neuhochdeutschen Standpunkt aus als “Umwege” oder “Irrwege” herausgestellt haben. Zurecht machen die Herausgeber des anzuzeigenden Buchs aber schon in ihrem Vorwort klar, dass letztlich auch regionale Sprachgeschichte auf die Gemeinsprache ausgerichtet ist: Sie ist eine Geschichte der Gemeinsprache, in der die Regionen ihr Wort mitzureden haben, und sie wird deshalb auch die mündlichen Sprachformen systematischer einbeziehen, in denen das Sprachregionale sozusagen inkarniert ist. Für die älteren Zeiten können die gesprochenen Sprachformen jedoch nur über die Schrift unvollständig erschlossen werden.