Book Reviews New Guinea and Neighboring Areas: A Sociolinguistic Laboratory 
New Guinea and Neighboring Areas: 
A Sociolinguistic Laboratory 
Stephen A. Wurm, Editor 
Mouton Publishers, The Hague, 1979, 
289 pp., DM 65, ISBN 90-279-7848-4. 
(Dist: Walter de Gruyter & Co., New York) 
The computational linguist who manages to worm 
his way through this volume should come away im- 
pressed, at the very least, by the size of the linguistic 
universe that has not yet been explored by Turing 
machines. That universe includes the chief themes of 
this book: the phenomena of language contact and 
change, of language planning, of multilingualism and 
code-switching, of pidgin/creole continua, of social 
variation--in short, all the phenomena that have been 
treated in the past 10-15 years under the rubric of 
sociolinguistics. 
West of the New Guinea mainland itself, east of 
the Solomon Islands, and south through the New He- 
brides stretches the territory known as the New Guin- 
ea area. Over 1000 separate or separable languages 
are spoken here, making it the most diversified linguis- 
tic region, for its size, in the world. Research in the 
area, as presented in this book, has taken three tracks: 
grouping and categorizing (genetic and geographical 
relationships); reporting on events of sociolinguistic 
concern (grouped roughly under "Ethnography of 
Speaking"); and more detailed investigation into one 
major sociolinguistic phenomenon, the advent and 
development of pidgins and creoles. 
Most of the papers presented here are long on doc- 
umentation and short on programming: that is, they 
can be scanned for research ideas but not translated 
easily into computational terms. Warm notice should 
be taken of the possible exceptions to this generaliza- 
tion: for example, Mike Olsen's work on the social 
significance of possessive markers in the Barai lan- 
guage presents three morphological systems and their 
set-theoretical interpretation in a fashion that would 
lend itself interestingly to computer grammar construc- 
tion. Other papers that might stimulate research ideas 
include Graham Scott on lexical expansion in the Fore 
language (for those interested in learning, here is a 
description of how speakers expand their vocabulary 
by (a) using the available vernacular and (b) borrow- 
ing loanwords with attendant semantic and phonologi- 
Cal shifts) and the papers by Johnston, Muhlhauser, 
and Wurm and Muhlhauser on stylistic and dialectal 
comparison (for those interested in language genera- 
tion). 
Readers of this collection will probably wish that 
the editor had done a better mapping job in every 
sense of the termmthe book could have included more 
geographical maps for the non-initiated, more precise 
grammatical descriptions for the computationally- 
minded, and a properly detailed index for everyone. 
Much of the hesitation with which non-sociolinguists 
will approach the book might have been dispelled by 
taking this more scrupulous path. 
The appearance in this AJCL issue of a paper by 
Weber and Mann on "Prospects for Computer- 
Assisted Dialect Adaptation" (pp. 165-177) may point 
the way to a fresh consideration of the possibilities for 
computational research in these fuzzier areas of lin- 
guistic theory and action. At any rate, the Weber and 
Mann paper is an early bird in the field, suggesting 
interest in the book reviewed here, and partially de- 
scribing a territory from which we have, one hopes, 
not heard the last word. 
Karen Jensen, IBM Research 
