This book is so underhyped ‐ no press release, no publisher’s blurb, no dust jacket, no editor’s introduction of scope, purpose or coverage ‐ that I had to go to Walford’s Guide to Reference Material to learn that this bibliography has been published annually since 1939. In its brief preface the Secretary‐General and the President of the Permanent International Council of Linguists apologise for the “considerable delay, due to information processing problems (this is the 1995 volume published in 1999) but we are convinced to be able to begin catching up again as soon as the long‐awaited programme becomes available”. Then comes a puzzle. Any bibliography of 26,091 entries and 200 pages of index must be a candidate for digitisation. The preface writers do promise that “New information technologies will enable us to develop electronic versions of the Linguistic Bibliography in the near future”. Which is odd, for in Stephen Willis’s entry in Walford it is reported that the bibliography for 1994 was available on CD‐ROM as well as in the printed edition. Come on Kluwer, is this edition on CD‐ROM or not? (I did fax and phone, but without success.) It would also have been helpful to be told the aim and scope of this book without having to scan 13 contents pages and the endless lists of journals. And why bury the editors’ “Directions for use” on page lxxxix, after screeds of acronyms and journal references? After a three‐year delay and paying £357 we want better service than this! Given the industry and thoroughness that have gone into the book’s compilation, and the undoubted value of the work to scholarship, more attention to finishing, presentation and marketing were in order. I know content rather than presentation should be what counts, but a touch more pride in the product would do no harm. What is this dumpy heavyweight? Who would want it? Why? We should be told!
The 26,091 entries (up from 21,412 from 1994) compiled by 35 contributors worldwide, come from books, conference proceedings, journals (I estimate some 2,360 titles) and other sources. A classified arrangement is adopted, with a general section followed by linguistic topics and then sections on language groups subdivided by individual languages. Section and subsection headings and prefatory matter are in English and French. There is an author index, a detailed table of contents, but no subject index.
The entries are cryptic, which is probably as well, since the book is already 31/4in. thick and 1,737 pages long! The use of the aforementioned six pages of abbreviations,59 pages of abbreviated journal titles, “Directions of use” (particularly for the significance of typography) and reference librarian’s cunning, were, I found, adequate to de‐crypt the bibliographic code of the entries. I am not being critical here. Given the enormous range of the sources, which cover book reviews, individual entries within composite works (such as conference proceedings and festschriften) besides journal articles and monographs, I praise the editors for their clarity. There are no annotations, though foreign language titles generally carry English translations.
Taking an entry at random, number 5293 (in the section on Pragmatics) is Juraj Dolnik’s article “Preferencny aspekt recovych aktov” [I omit the diacriticals, etc.] which occurs in “JC” [Jazykovedwy casopis, of Belgrade]. The title is translated as “The preference aspects of speech acts”. There follow five cross‐references to other mentions, the first of which is “Word order in discourse” by Pamela Downing. This paper has its own entry in the section on Text linguistics, but for its source we are referred to an entry in the Congresses section. Here we find “Selected papers from a symposium held at the University of Wisconsin‐Milwaukee in 1991”, with the title “Word order in discourse”. So one can see the sophistication in the structure of this volume. It is an impressive structure and indicative of contemporary international scholarship, which is why I am cross that the finishing has been so casual.
Not, I think, a book many libraries will want ‐ a fact doubtless reflected in the extraordinary price ‐ but as a record of endeavour and scholarship in its subject field it is an impressive and instructive work.
