MULTILINGUAL COMMUNICATION. Julian House and Jochen Rehbein
(Eds.). Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2004. Pp. vii + 358. $90.00 cloth.
Studies on multilingualism embody a range of theoretical approaches,
research paradigms, and methods. In this book, the third publication in
the Hamburg studies on multilingualism series, the focus is on
the form-function relationship between the languages involved in
multilingual communication and on the mechanisms that relate multilingual
communicative processes to social structures. The volume consists of 11
chapters divided into three sections, and two useful appendixes (author
and subject indexes). The editing is highly competent and the selection of
papers is excellent in quality and scope. Papers mostly emerge from
colloquia on linguistic aspects of multilingualism organized by the
Research Centre on Multilingualism at the University of Hamburg; many
provide access to empirical studies that had previously existed only as
unpublished manuscripts or research reports. Most of the contributions
deal with the creation of differentiated, multilingual communication
systems due to the mutual influence of languages in contact, whereas
others deal with functional explanations of problems in second language
(L2) use.