Olmsted, D. L. (1971). Out of the mouth of babes. The Hague: Mouton.

On the origin of language: tracing the evolution of the mother tongue. This welcome volume illustrates once more how important historical data can be in linguistic argumentation and how exciting work on the diachronic innovation of linguistic phenomena can be. Several of the volume's twelve chapters address key issues in contemporary linguistic theory and the light that diachronic data can shed on them ; others make original contributions to our understanding of the innovation and diachrony of specific linguistic phenomena. The volume is multi-authored and contains eleven original articles and an introduction, which I refer to here as chapters 1 to 12. The introductory chapter 1, written by the editor, is an interesting piece, if something of a missed opportunity. It does not summarize the following chapters or explain how they connect with each other or in what way they engage with the notions of analogy and markedness. In fact, the volume is not completely coherent in terms of the theoretical issues or the types of data discussed, and several of the papers do not obviously deal with analogical change or even with notions of markedness. Given the nature of the introduction , the only real way to discover this is to read through all the articles. This is, indeed, no bad thing to do, but it is likely that different readers will be interested in different articles, as should become clear from the chapter descriptions below. The introduction provides a brief historical overview of the notions of ' analogy ' and 'markedness ', tracing the former through usages in other