Reviews

As a comprehensive survey of what must be top of the agenda for any socially and environmentally committed linguist or student of linguistics, this book is second to none.
Professor Andrew Goatly, Department of English, Lingnan University, Hong Kong

The breadth of humanities disciplines covered in the book is phenomenal: philosophers, (social) psychologists, humorologists, sociologists, discourse analysts of every possible hue, psychotherapists, not to mention innumerable linguists, hyphenated or otherwise, perform on his adroitly erected stage. The diverse scholarly sources tapped and incorporated into this well argued book are very aptly chosen. The overall rhythm and chain of argument together with the examples and quotations given to illustrate the phenomenon of language and discourse’s variegated impact are extremely persuasive. Both beginning students of language and linguistics and also common readers will be able to benefit from its not inconsiderable insights and erudition, as well as committed fellow researchers.
Professor Richard Alexander, Wirtschafts Universität Wien

Since the book accommodates insights from various scholarly paradigms, readers from all disciplines related to the Humanities (“Geisteswissenschaften”) will benefit from the ideas collected and discussed by the author. Linguists will particularly appreciate the perspective from which Fill looks at their object of study: The Language Impact does not primarily show what language users do with language (pragmatics) and to language (grammar), as standard linguistic research does, but reverses the perspective and explores what language does to its users. The book is theoretically precise and well-structured and thus also serves as a solid overview for advanced students on how language changed human existence on this planet (both in a positive and negative way) and, moreover, how the different views on its function and use changed through time with each new school or prevalent “-ism” (e.g. British empiricism, structuralism, constructivism, or functionalism). Finally, it is of crucial interest to those concerned to help develop impact linguistics into an established scholarly discipline.
ANGLIA, Volume 130, Number 2, 2012