Reviews 341 resemblances to the typical Atlantic ones (e.g. Tok Pisin, where Nicholas Faraclas emphasizes the importance of substrate influence on the features which happen to be shared with Atlantic Creoles) as well as others such as Nagamese or Zamboangueño, where resemblances to Atlantic Creoles are fewer. With its excellent selection of varieties, rich data and, overall, well thought-out design, this will become an important reference work in Creolistics, and Creolists owe a further debt to John Holm for having taken the initiative. Many will share the editors’ hope that it will lead to even more systematic comparisons of Creole syntax (p. xi), but the present volume already offers much information which should be exploited to the fullest. References Holm, John (1988-89). Pidgins and Creoles. 2 vols. Cambridge: CUP. Huber, Magnus (1999). Ghanaian Pidgin English in Its West African Context: A Sociohistorical and Structural Analysis. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Kortmann, Bernd and Edgar W. Schneider (eds.) (2004). A Handbook of Varieties of English. 2 vols. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter. Sebba, Mark (1997). Contact Languages: Pidgins and Creoles. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Dagmar Deuber Englisches Seminar Universität Freiburg Christina Sanchez, Consociation and Dissociation. An Empirical Study of Word-Family Integration in English and German. (Language in Performance 37). Tübingen: Gunter Narr Verlag, 2008. Alwin Fill When Ferdinand de Saussure established his principle of the arbitrariness of the linguistic sign, he admitted that some words show only “degrees of arbitrariness” and are at least “relatively motivated”. In 1946, Walter von Wartburg wrote of the different formal realizations of semantically related concepts, as in aveugle (blind) vs. cécité (blindness). In the French translation of Wartburg’s work, this phenomenon was named ‘dissociation’, a term which gained recognition and wide acceptance through Ernst Leisi’s Das heutige Englisch (first edition 1955), at least in the German speaking world. Leisi’s hypothesis was that English and French have mainly dissociated, German and Italian chiefly ‘consociated’ vocabularies. This was rarely drawn into question, but has rather become a classic statement, particularly concerning English Reviews 342 and German, a statement which has also found its way into language teaching textbooks. Examples such as town vs. urban or king vs. royal and regal have for a long time been an integral part of English vocabulary teaching in schools and university courses. Christina Sanchez, in chapter 1 of her book, meticulously traces the history and the slightly different uses of the terms ‘consociation’ and ‘dissociation’ - a task long overdue. Then (chapter 2) she clarifies her own use of the terms, as well as their relation with ‘motivation’/ ’motivatability’ (Sanchez’ preferred term), ‘transparency’ and ‘expandability’. For Sanchez, words are consociated if “integrated into a synchronic, language-immanent, morpho-semantically related word family” (pp. 37 f.). Consociation is ‘bidirectional’, which means that both analyzability and expandability can make a word consociated. Of the many models of ‘motivation’ (shown in a diagram on p. 39), ‘morpho-semantic’ motivation (i.e. morphological and semantic analyzability) is most relevant for Sanchez’ study. The term ‘transparency’ is reserved for mere morphological analyzability (e.g. of idiomatized words such as understand). A concept complementary to analyzability is ‘expandability’, which comprises both derivation and compounding: thus discipline is consociated because it can be expanded into disciplined and self-discipline. (Here Sanchez’ terminology is not entirely happy, because while admitting that theoretically every word is expandable, for her study she can accept only “words attested in the contemporary language” as the results of expandability, p. 61). Sanchez summarizes her terminology as follows (p. 69): “A word is dissociated if it is neither motivatable nor expandable. Consociation, by contrast, is the fact that a word can be either analysed into motivating constituents or expanded or both.” The main part of the book is devoted to testing Leisi’s hypothesis that “the English and the German language behave differently with respect to their words’ integration into word families” (p. 73), and more precisely to looking at whether it is true that the German vocabulary, because of its chiefly Germanic origin, is more consociated than the English with its Germanic and Romance origins. In contrast to authors writing in the 1980s and before, Sanchez has powerful computer tools at her disposal. In particular, she uses the British National Corpus (100 million words) for English, and for German the roughly equivalent Core Corpus of the Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften (a publicly accessible and balanced core of the project Digitales Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache des 20. Jahrhunderts, DWDS). The two corpora are shown by Sanchez to be sufficiently comparable (in size, proportion of fictional texts, newspaper texts and scientific texts), although the lack of spoken data in the German corpus and the different time spans of the corpora (BNC mainly 1975-1993, DWDS 20 th century as a whole) are admitted to be drawbacks for a precise comparison. Sanchez delimits her study to the most frequent 2,500 words (in both English and German). She includes content words and form words, but excludes acronyms (USA), abbreviations (St.) and proper names. Her very frank and detailed discussion of the decisions she had to take concerning specific categories shows the many questions a computer-assisted (and any other) analysis of complex words poses: how are words derived from numbers to be treated (Dreier)? How should one deal with the words for the days of the week? Or ‘national adjectives’ (Griechisch), and anglicisms in German? Finally, she arrives at twelve types of ‘partial motivatability’. Reviews 343 Thus distribution is only partially motivated from distribute and -ion “due to differences in spelling and pronunciation”, computer from compute and -er “due to constituents that are diasystematically marked in the dictionaries used” (p. 94). It may be acceptable that “synchronic etymological competence is given priority over linguistic correctness”, but this principle somewhat disturbingly leads to the postulation of an agentive suffix -er in father and mother (and German Vater), while brother, sister and Mutter are treated as unmotivatable (p. 98). At this point, it seems justified to ask whether “the analyst’s intuition” (p. 99) should not have been supplemented by the results of informant questioning. To investigate expandability, the author uses a number of monolingual dictionaries and, in order to do justice to the possibility of neologisms, this procedure was supplemented by a search in the corpora. The internet, although the largest possible source, was rejected on various grounds (see the interesting list of reasons for this decision on p. 107). The many parameters introduced by Sanchez would have yielded a vast number of data concerning the comparison between English and German simplex and complex words. Sanchez therefore wisely restricts herself to presenting only a selection of the results. These are given separately for the English and the German corpora in the form of tables (all in all there are 123), which, because of the many “fine-grained distinctions” (p. 151), in some cases extend over several pages. In the tables, the use of the terms ‘tokens’ and ‘types’ is somewhat confusing and does not always agree with common usage. Perhaps it would have been better to make a three-fold distinction such as the following: types (e.g. the suffix -al), representatives (all the adjective types in the corpus ending in -al), and tokens (all the occurrences of these adjectives). In a final section of this chapter, the most important results for English are contrasted with those for German. It turns out that motivatability is indeed higher in German, but by a rather narrow margin: 66.52% of the German words show motivatability (including the different types of partial motivatability); 5.32% are transparent (with no semantic motivation), while only 28.16% are totally unmotivated. For English, the figures are 59.60% for motivation vs. 4.40% for transparency and 36.00% for total lack of motivation (table 105, p. 223). At first, this seems to confirm traditional views, particularly since in German it is the Germanic vocabulary (68.25%), in English the Romance one (63.32%) which provides the majority of motivated words. However, the picture is different when we take expandability into account. According to Sanchez’ figures, English leads here (by 40.12 to 32.64), so that when both directions of consociation are considered, English appears to show a marginally higher degree of consociation than German (p. 230, table 116). Sanchez then sets her results against eight hypotheses which express traditional views about motivation, etymological origin of motivated words, expandability and overall consociation. Some of these hypotheses are confirmed by her data (see previous paragraph); however, the most important one, viz. that English is an essentially dissociated language, is disproved. Particularly if both directions of word family integration are considered, “the English vocabulary does not tend towards dissociation but rather towards consociation - at least in the highest frequency ranges” (p. 237). As compared with previous quantitative studies carried out without the aid of computers, Sanchez’ results make out English to be much more similar to Reviews 344 German as far as consociation is concerned (pp. 246-251). Even alternative approaches to her data (shown in a separate section, pp. 241-245) would not change this overall picture. In the last chapter of the book, the effect of consociation and dissociation on the mental lexicon is discussed, and in particular their effect on language learning processes. After considering a number of studies on this topic, Sanchez arrives at the conclusion that “both motivatability and expandability […] may have a certain degree of influence on the acquisition, storage, comprehension and production of vocabulary items” (p. 279). In order to make use of this influence in a positive way, language learners should be made aware of analyzability, and, moreover, “morphological decomposition can be recommended as a highly effective vocabulary learning strategy” (p. 278). On the whole, Sanchez’ book, the first work using corpus linguistics on word family integration in English and German, can be recommended as a thoroughly researched and very detailed study containing many ideas for future research. If one accepts her theoretical distinctions, her data (which are accessible independently of the book) seem reliable and her results dependable. A particularly striking feature is the frankness with which problems encountered in the project are discussed. In a separate section (pp. 251-258), Sanchez points out the limitations of her study (including researcher-specific ones such as her “awareness of a subconscious bias towards English”). Putting aside the points concerning terminology criticized above, the book can be praised as a study which throws new light on English German vocabulary contrasts. Alwin Fill Department of English Graz University