American Dialect Research Articles

Hamlet (review)

Hamlet at the South Coast Repertory Theatre, May 25-July 1, 2007 Daniel Sullivan's production of Hamlet, presented by South Coast Repertory Theater in Costa Mesa, California, signaled an effort to present a thoroughly contemporary staging of the play while still avoiding modern dress and/or a conceptual setting. Best known as the director of the Broadway productions of Rabbit Hole and Proof, Sullivan seemed to approach the Bard's greatest tragedy as if it were a new play, encouraging the actors (particularly the younger ones) to speak the lines the way they themselves would in real life, avoiding any kind of inherited ideological baggage, and lending the language a hip, conversational quality. the same time, Sullivan and his costume designer Ilona Somogyi dressed his actors in Elizabethan and Medieval costumes, while set designer Ralph Funicello placed the action on a mostly bare, wooden platform--the same rustic and unvarnished type of surface the Lord Chamberlain Men's themselves might're acted on. To lend some visual excitement, the entire background of the stage was covered by a giant folding panel featuring a reproduction of Pieter Bruegel the Elder's painting of Dulle Griet (Mad Meg). With its famously surreal (and oddly contemporary) representation of a peasant woman's descent into a hell of screaming faces and headless bodies, the painting stood as a potent metaphor for Sullivan's central conceit: a Hamlet set within its own historical moment, but imbued with the same kind of seemingly anachronistic details and immediacy as Bruegel's painting. Early press accounts of the production, which ran through July 1, 2007, focused on the casting of two sitcom actors in the show, Hamish Linklater of CBS-TV's New Adventures of Old Christine as Hamlet and Michael Urie of ABC-TV's Ugly Betty as Horatio. Some newspaper reviewers took the obvious approach of criticizing the production for its apparent stunt casting, ignoring the fact that both actors have considerable theater credits; Linklater, for one, recently played Hamlet in a 2004 Long Wharf Theater production in Connecticut, and acted in Peter Hall's 1999 Los Angeles productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream and Measure for Measure at the Ahmanson Theater. Interestingly, when Linklater performed Lysander for Hall, he delivered a fairly traditional performance in terms of his use of language; in Sullivan's production, on the other hand, Linklater's Hamlet spoke in a deliberately naturalistic manner, delivering oblique line readings free of iambic pentameter and with an almost Seinfeldian, ironic detachment. The closest equivalent might be found in Michael Almereyda's 2000 film version of Hamlet starring Ethan Hawke, in which iambic pentameter is entirely done away with, replaced with the jarring clips and rhythms of modern-day Americanized English. Linklater and Urie deemphasized the poetic beats of the play for the sake of a more immediate and relatable sense of speech, sometimes even mumbling or racing through speeches. This approach largely paid off, eliminating any possibility that the production would become a museum piece. Sullivan appeared to reject the potentially colonialist notion that Shakespeare must be done with faux-British accents, with actors enunciating every precious word clearly and loudly. Sullivan embraced the American accents, focusing more on the larger meaning of each scenes. However, for those for whom the poetry is the thing, the production had the potential to frustrate. Linklater also exploited the comic potential in the play, especially in the moments where Hamlet pretends to be mad. In his scene with Polonius, in 2.2, Linklater played up the physical gags, continually thrusting his hips into the air for the conception is a blessing line, and then walking onstage with his legs spread apart for the line, like a crab you could go backward. Linklater also drew laughter from the audience with his sharp comic timing, as in the scene after Hamlet kills Polonius, where Hamlet tells Claudius that the dead man is At supper. …

How the American Dialect Society Chooses its Words of the Year

How the American Dialect Society Chooses its Words of the Year o; Wayne Glowka Reinhardt College I? aJanuary morning when the temperature in the North Georgia mountains was down to around 10 degrees Fahrenheit, I stood in a dark parking lot at Reinhardt College and searched up and down GA route 140, looking for a limousine. The car was to be sent fifty miles to Waleska, GA to pick me up at 6:00 am for a live interview at 7:45 am in Atlanta on Fox Business News. The subject of the interview was to be the word subprime, the American Dialect Society 's Word of the Year (ADS WOTY) for 2007.1 The limousine was late because the New York television producer had insisted on a street address for the pick up. But a description of the flag plaza in front of the administration building two hundred yards on the right past the only blinking red light in Waleska would have been a more efficient way of finding me. As I stood shivering in the dark, I worried that I would miss my interview, and I longed for the warm bed I had left nearly two hours earlier . I also wondered if I was putting myself out to be on television once more to discuss die word of the year with reporters who were going to offer me to their millions of viewers as some kind of bizarre specimen from academe. Soon enough, however, the black Lincoln Continental with very comfortable leather seats arrived to deliver me to Atlanta. One can see the complete list of WOTYs on the website of the ADS: . Dictionaries:Journal oftheDictionary Society ofNorth America 29 (2008), 23-34. 24Wayne Glowka In the intervals among exchanges of small talk with the driver, I practiced the sound-bite answers the producer had instructed me to develop after a practice interview on the telephone on the day before. The hardest answer to reduce to television-appropriate size had to do with how the ADS chooses its WOTYs. I had explained on the telephone that I and others collected terms throughout the year that we think might make good candidates for words of the year; that we did research on the words to see how old they were and how widely they were used; that we circulated these words among ourselves and members of the press before the annual meeting, where words of the year are chosen; that we held a meeting to review lists of possible nominations , decided on categories for the nomination, and then placed the nominations in categories; that we then prepared a slate of nominees for distribution; that we met in a larger setting and allowed members of the audience to make speeches about the words on the slate and to nominate others; that we determined the winners by a show of hands; and that we then took nominations for the WOTY from winners or losers in the categories and also entertained nominations that had not succeeded in being included in the list. The producer bluntly told me that such an answer was acceptable for National Public Radio, but it certainly would not do for television. He needed a short and direct answer to the question. I told him that I would work on such an answer. As I was perched in the Atlanta television studio under hot lights on a stool in front of a shelf of books meant to give my answers authority, I practiced that answer until the interview began with the lively morning crew of Fox Business News. When I was asked about the process of choosing the words of the year, I answered with all the succinctness I could muster: "Well, I and others collect new words throughout the year. We present our nominees to a committee at our annual meeting. We prepare a slate of candidates in categories like 'Most Likely to Succeed' or 'Most Outrageous.' At a larger meeting the next day, we allow audience members to make funny speeches in support of words, and then we vote by a show of hands. The word of the year comes from a list of nominees taken from...

NOTES

Research Article| December 01 2007 NOTES Publication of the American Dialect Society (2007) 92 (1): 259–262. https://doi.org/10.1215/-92-1-259 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation NOTES. Publication of the American Dialect Society 1 December 2007; 92 (1): 259–262. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/-92-1-259 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Dialect SocietyThe Publication of the American Dialect Society Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. American Dialect Society2007 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Chapters You do not currently have access to this content.

CHARLESTON AND THE SOUTHERN SHIFT

Research Article| December 01 2007 CHARLESTON AND THE SOUTHERN SHIFT Publication of the American Dialect Society (2007) 92 (1): 149–170. https://doi.org/10.1215/-92-1-149 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation CHARLESTON AND THE SOUTHERN SHIFT. Publication of the American Dialect Society 1 December 2007; 92 (1): 149–170. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/-92-1-149 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Dialect SocietyThe Publication of the American Dialect Society Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. American Dialect Society2007 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Gender shifts in the history of English (review)

Reviewed by: Gender shifts in the history of English by Anne Curzan Terttu Nevalainen Gender shifts in the history of English. By Anne Curzan. (Studies in English language.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xii, 223. ISBN 0521820073. $85 (Hb). Anne Curzan begins her monograph by telling how she was voted the ‘Word of the millennium’ at the American Dialect Society’s annual meeting in 2000. This piece of recent history is a fitting introduction to her book highlighting the role of anaphoric personal pronouns in the fundamental change that English underwent from grammatical to natural gender in the course of the last millennium. C takes a broad view of gender in chronological and linguistic terms, including the topic of language and gender in public debates in the English-speaking world over the last few decades. This concern for current relevance makes the book informative not only for language professionals but also for the general reader interested in language. Starting from the present, C places issues such as the generic use of the masculine pronoun he in the bigger picture of linguistic gender in the history of English. She does this by approaching the topic from three interrelated angles: (i) the development of personal pronoun reference to animate beings, (ii) the loss of grammatical gender and the concomitant rise of natural gender in personal pronouns referring to inanimate objects, and (iii) the semantic shifts in the lexical fields of words that clearly retain gender in a natural gender system, that is, the words for ‘man’, ‘woman’, ‘girl’, and ‘boy’ (6). Ch. 1 introduces the theoretical terms in which the shift from Old English grammatical gender to natural gender in Middle English and its manifestations today can be accounted for. C’s approach crosses disciplinary boundaries by including social and cultural considerations besides linguistic ones. Charles Hockett’s definition (cited in Corbett 1991:1) provides the umbrella term for linguistic gender ‘as a system of noun classification reflected in associated words’. This definition covers both semantic and grammatical gender, based on whether the semantics of a noun defines its gender (semantic or natural gender) or not (grammatical gender). C’s study focuses on the loss of grammatical gender as it is reflected in personal pronoun anaphora, that is, outside the noun phrase rather than inside it, in patterns of agreement between nouns and their determiners and modifiers. This perspective is informed by the agreement hierarchy proposed by Corbett (1991), which provides a principled tool for tracing the erosion of grammatical gender (19). Moving from left to right, the hierarchy marks an increasing likelihood of semantic gender agreement in a language. At all times third-person personal pronouns stand out as the category most likely to show semantic rather than grammatical agreement with their antecedents. (1) attributive < predicate < relative pronoun < personal pronoun The modern natural gender system in English can thus be viewed as the endpoint of a crosslinguistically attested diachronic development, not a historical anomaly. But this scalar framework can entail problems for the traditional view that gender is a fixed property of the word. The issue is connected with the fact that gender is a covert category even in languages with natural gender such as Modern English and that ‘the English people are consistently inconsistent in [End Page 880] their choice of gendered pronouns according to strict natural gender rules’ (20). Inconsistency particularly occurs in gender assignment to inanimate nouns. C therefore advocates a more dynamic view of gender as a cultural construct to account for both synchronic variation and historical changes. Ch. 2 shows that coming to grips with the notion of gender has not always been easy in histories of English. C’s discussion here as elsewhere is balanced and comprehensive, painting a broad picture of the history of the discipline from prescientific accounts to standard reference works and more specific treatments, including the controversy over Middle English being a creole (a view C rejects). Tracing back earlier uses of the term ‘gender shift’, one could add Poussa (1992:408), who launched the term ‘Great gender shift’ in her study of the demonstratives this and that. How can a historical linguist then document this shift from grammatical to...

Editorial: Community Informatics with a Latin American Accent

Editorial: Community Informatics with a Latin American Accent

Alas for Volapük

<h2>Summary</h2> Dr Johnson deplored the loss of any language, for ‘languages are the pedigrees of nations'. Is there then cause for regret in the evanescence of everything but English from the literature of science? Has the culture of science been impoverished by an erosion of long and proud traditions? At intervals throughout the last century national academies, afflicted by chauvinistic tremors, would undertake to cleanse their language of alien contamination. A notorious case was the attempt in Nazi Germany to expunge all words with Greek and Latin stems from the language of chemistry. Thus chemistry itself was to become ‘separation craft' (<i>Scheidekunst</i>), a microscope a smallseetool (<i>Kleinsehwerkzeug</i>), capillarity hairtubulepower (<i>Haarröhrchenkraft</i>), and so on. This was taking to an extreme the literal character of the language in general (invented, Mark Twain thought, by a maniac), in which a vacuum cleaner is a dustsucker, a bra a bosomholder and braces (or, in the North American dialect, suspenders) are trouserbearers. Needless to say, though, the prescriptions were resolutely ignored by the scientists, and the attempt was never repeated. The French academy underwent its own, more decorous, linguistic convulsions, as when in the 1960s, after long deliberation, it affirmed that an enzyme was indisputably feminine (<i>une enzyme</i>), even if to all biochemists it was masculine, and has apparently remained so. There was also a kind of social distinction between those — the traditionalists, content that the French for DNA should be ADN and NMR RMN — and the modernists, who had done time in America and would refer to ‘<i>le DNA</i>'. In England there has been less concern over such abstractions, but some biologists, such as Peter Medawar, inveighed against the absurdity of complicated Latin locutions, where Anglo-Saxon would have done — pseudopodium was one of many that irked him.

AMERICAN DIALECTS RENDERED ACCESSIBLE

AMERICAN DIALECTS RENDERED ACCESSIBLE

AMONG THE NEW WORDS

Research Article| November 01 2007 AMONG THE NEW WORDS Wayne Glowka; Wayne Glowka Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Sarah Wyatt Swanson; Sarah Wyatt Swanson Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Susan Presley; Susan Presley Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google David K. Barnhart; David K. Barnhart Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Grant Barrett Grant Barrett Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Speech (2007) 82 (4): 420–437. https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-2007-026 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Wayne Glowka, Sarah Wyatt Swanson, Susan Presley, David K. Barnhart, Grant Barrett; AMONG THE NEW WORDS. American Speech 1 November 2007; 82 (4): 420–437. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00031283-2007-026 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search Books & JournalsAll JournalsAmerican Dialect SocietyAmerican Speech Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright 2007 by the American Dialect Society2007 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

A Comparison of the Attitudes of Learners, Instructors, and Native French Speakers About the Pronunciation of French: An Exploratory Study

The stereotype has it that native French Speakers are annoyed by foreign Speakers' errors in pronunciation. The purpose of this pilot study was to assess beliefs about the importance of accurate pronunciation in French held by three afferent groups: (1) 73 second‐ and third‐semester students of French at a large midwestern research university in the United States, (2) 16 nonnative‐speaker instructors of French at the same institution, and (3) 24 native Speakers of French living in France. In a fall Semester, each of the three groups received near mirror‐image versions of a questionnaire, ranging from 33 items (for the learners) to 29 items (for the instructors) to 26 items (for the native French Speakers) in true/false format. Acknowledging that attitudes toward foreign accents might be language‐ and nationality‐specific, all questions pertained to Americans speaking French. Percentages were calculated, and corresponding questions on all three questionnaires were grouped according to theme, then compared and cross‐referenced with participants' backgrounds. Generally, this study revealed a gap between the attitudes of hypothetical native Speakers, promoted in teaching on the one hand, and the attitudes professed by real native Speakers on the other hand. The results of this study discredit the myth that native French Speakers have a low tolerance for an American accent in French. Instructors, and nonnative Speaker instructors specifically, need to project more realistic goals and refrain from misinforming their students that a perfect native‐like pronunciation is vital to successful communication with native Speakers.

The accents of outsourcing: the meanings of “neutral” in the Indian call centre industry

ABSTRACT: This is an ethnographic study of an agency which handles “accent training” for major call centres in Bangalore, South India. It investigates (1) the requirements of call centres in terms of accent training, (2) agency staff's interpretation of these requirements, and (3) trainees' response to the expectations of the agency and their future employer. Call centres which may have initially demanded accents as close to the L1 variety as possible now formulate their need as one for a “neutral” accent, which in some corporate circles is considered to be a regionless international variety. “Neutral”, however, is interpreted quite differently among the staff of the training agency. Older staff with a background in ELT saw their role as one promoting a shift in the direction of “educated Indian English”. This group positively evaluated British accents and emphasized the British origins of IE. Younger staff, on the other hand, without this professional background, were more oriented towards American accents. Trainees, too, reflected this diversity of accent attitudes in their self‐presentation in mock telephone calls. Some showed an accommodation to callers with American accents, and others not at all.

On the status of low back vowels in Kentucky English: More evidence of merger

In an effort to provide greater understanding of the mechanisms of the diffusion of the low back vowel merger in American English, this study presents a detailed acoustic analysis of low back vowel systems in the speech of 114 native nonurban Kentucky speakers of English. The study reveals unexpected instances of merger in areas of the state that cannot be explained by current theories of merger. In this respect, it argues that these instances of low back vowel merger, while they may be an expansion of an existing merger, result from a distinct mechanism of merger, that is, merger by glide loss. It is predicted that as elements of traditional Southern phonology recede, similar merger will be widespread across the South.This research has been supported by grants from the Kentucky NSF EPSCoR Research Enhancement Grant Program and the Institute for Regional Analysis and Public Policy at Morehead State University. An earlier version of this work was presented at the South Atlantic American Dialect Society session at SECOL 72.

The Gondwanan and South American Episodes: Two Major and Unrelated Moments in the History of the South American Mammals

The first steps in the history of South American mammals took place ca. 130 Ma., when the South American plate, still connected to the Antarctic Peninsula, began to drift away from the African-Indian plate. Most of the Mesozoic history of South American mammals is still unknown, and we only have a few enigmatic taxa (i.e., a Jurassic Australosphenida and an Early Cretaceous Prototribosphenida) that pose more evolutionary and biogeographic questions than answers. The best-known Mesozoic, South American land-mammal fossils are from Late Cretaceous Patagonian beds. These fossils represent the last survivors of non- and pre-tribosphenic Pangaean lineages, all of them with varying endemic features: some with few advanced features (e.g., ?Eutriconodonta and “Symmetrodonta”), some very diversified as endemic groups (e.g., ?Docodonta Reigitheriidae), and others representing vicariant types of well known Laurasian Mesozoic lineages (e.g., Gondwanatheria as vicariant of Multituberculata). These endemic mammals lived as relicts (although advanced) of pangeic lineages when a primordial South American continent was still connected to the Antarctic Peninsula and, at the northern extreme, near the North American Plate. By the beginning of the Late Cretaceous, the volcanic and diastrophic processes that finally led to the differentiation of the Caribbean region and Central America built up transient geographic connections that permitted the initiation of an overland inter-American exchange that included, for example, dinosaurian titanosaurs from South America and hadrosaurs from North America. The immigration of other vertebrates followed the same route, for example, polydolopimorphian marsupials. These marsupials were assumed to have differentiated in South America prior to new discoveries from the North American Late Cretaceous. The complete extinction of endemic South American Mesozoic mammals by the Late Cretaceous-Early Paleocene, and the subsequent and in part coetaneous immigration of North American therians, respectively, represent two major moments in the history of South American mammals: a Gondwanan Episode and a South American Episode. The Gondwanan Episode was characterized by non- and pre-tribosphenic mammal lineages that descended from the Pangeic South American stage (but already with a pronounced Gondwanan accent, and wholly extinguished during the Late Cretaceous-Early Paleocene span). The South American Episode, in turn, was characterized only by therian mammals, mostly emigrated from the North American continent and already with a South American accent obtained through isolation. The southernmost extreme of South America (Patagonia) remained connected to the present Antarctic Peninsula at least up until about 30 Ma., and both provided the substratum where the primordial cladogenesis of “South American” mammals occurred. The resulting cladogenesis of South American therian mammals followed Gould's motto: early experimentation, later standardization. That is to say, early cladogenesis engendered a great variety of taxa with scarce morphological differentiation. After this early cladogenesis (Late Eocene-Early Oligocene), the variety of taxa became reduced, but each lineage became clearly recognizable distinctive by a constant morphologic pattern. At the same time, those mammals that underwent the “early experimentation” were part of communities dominated by archaic lineages (e.g., brachydont types among the native “ungulates”), whereas the subsequent communities were dominated by mammals of markedly “modern” stamp (e.g., protohypsodont types among the native “ungulates”). The Gondwanan and South American Episodes were separated by a critical latest Cretaceous-earliest Paleocene hiatus, it is as unknown as it is important in which South American land-mammal communities must have experienced extinction of the Gondwanan mammals and the arrival and radiation of the North American marsupials and placentals (with the probable exception of the xenarthrans, whose biogeographic origin is still unclear).

Afro-Yungueño speech

The pidginized Spanish learned by millions of Africans in Latin America had a profound but as yet underexplored impact on the formation of Spanish American dialects. Literary imitations from previous centuries are questionable, and few vestiges of actual Afro-Hispanic language remain. This paper reports on a unique Afro-American speech community in highland Bolivia, possibly the oldest surviving Afro-American variety of any language. The Afro-Yungueño dialect, now spoken in contact with regional Andean Spanish, differs systematically from any other Spanish dialect, and provides empirical evidence of the earliest stages of Afro-Hispanic language in the Americas. It also provides key evidence in the debate surrounding the possible creolization of Spanish and Portuguese in other Afro-American contexts.

Analysis and Synthesis of Formant Spaces of British, Australian, and American Accents

In this paper, the probability distribution functions (pdf's) of the formant spaces of three major accents of the English language, namely, British Received Pronunciation (RP), General American, and Broad Australian, are modeled and compared. The statistical differences across the formant spaces of these accents are employed for accent conversion. An improved formant tracking method, based on linear prediction (LP) feature analysis and a two-dimensional hidden Markov model (2-D-HMM) of format trajectories, is used for estimation of the formant trajectories of vowels and diphthongs of each accent. Comparative analysis of the formant spaces of the three accents indicates that these accents are partly conveyed by the differences of the formants of vowels. The estimates of the probability distributions of the formants for each accent are used in a speech synthesis system for accent conversion. Accent synthesis, through modification of the acoustic parameters of speech, provides a means of assessing the perceptual contribution of each formant parameter on conveying an accent. The results of perceptual evaluations of accent conversion illustrate that formants play an important role in conveying accents

WALT WOLFRAM &amp; NATALIE SCHILLING-ESTES, American English: Dialects and variation

Walt Wolfram & Natalie Schilling-Estes, American English: Dialects and variation. (Language in Society, 25). 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2006. Pp. xv, 452. Pb $36.95.American English, an introductory textbook about dialect variation, is a revised version of the textbook that first appeared in 1998 and represents another addition to the array of educational materials about American dialects that the first author has been producing for over three decades. It is a versatile textbook with an intended audience of any student who takes a “course on dialects” (p. x). Its lack of linguistic formalism and statistics makes it accessible to students with no linguistics background, and its continued emphasis on the relevance of dialect awareness to American society will help non-linguists apply the material effectively. Owing to its wide scope, it cannot delve too deeply into any of the theoretical issues; however, its succinct overviews of the debates, annotated bibliographies at the end of each chapter, and copious examples from a range of dialects make it a useful reference for experienced linguists.

Language learning

Language learning

The Yale Book of Quotations (review)

Reviews203 The Yale Book of Quotations. Edited by Fred Shapiro. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006. Pp. 1104. i; [n recent years, the composition of dictionaries on historical principles has been radically transformed by die rapid growth of digitized archives of texts. Fred Shapiro's Yale Book of Quotations (YBQ) officially ushers in a similar transformation in the world of quotation dictionaries. Shapiro has set a very high bar for any future reference work of this kind: no longer will a book of quotations with pretensions to comprehensiveness be able to throw around such vague words as "attributed to..." and "anonymous" with reckless abandon. Under FUQstandards, those are terms of last resort, used only when all other avenues of research have been exhausted. Shapiro, a law librarian at Yale University, has been a trendsetter in exploring the possibilities (and the pitfalls) of tracking the usage of words, phrases, and sayings via digital corpora of historical texts. As early as the 1980s, he was blazing the trail by exploiting databases such as LexisNexis for the purposes of discovering antedatings and other citations of interest for projects in historical lexicography (most notably the Oxford English Dictionary) . For YBQ Shapiro applies his formidable research skills to create a quotation dictionary unlike any other. The book is rife with gems of detective work, based on the latest investigations by Shapiro and other devoted researchers. (Many of those researchers, including this reviewer, made contributions that eventually entered FUQvia the American Dialect Society mailing list.) Who first said, "No man who hates dogs and children can be all bad"? Most quotation dictionaries would simply attribute the line to W.C. Fields, or perhaps Leo Rosten speaking about Fields, and go no further. Shapiro tells us that Harper's Magazine quoted the journalist Byron Darnton as saying this classic bit of cynicism in 1937, trumping claims by Fields and Rosten. What about the saying popularly attributed to Horace Greeley, "Go West, young man"? In a typically enlightening note, Shapiro calls this "one of the great examples of the prevalence of misinformation about famous quotations" (322). Some sources claim that Greeley used it in an 1850 book, while others give credit to an 1851 editorial byJohn Babson Lane Soule that supposedly inspired Greeley. The latest historical research has determined, however, that Soule actually had nothing to do with the quote, and attributions to Greeley only begin showing up in 1870. Besides being at the forefront of attribution sleuthing, FUQ is also noteworthy for expanding the usual boundaries of quotation dictionaries, which, for the most part, have been heavily skewed toward prose and literature of the nineteenth century and earlier, especially from British writers. Shapiro has created a reference work in tune with die times, with more Groucho Marx Dictionaries. Journal ofthe Dictionary Sodety ofNorth American (2007), 203-205 204Reviews than Karl Marx, more Bob Dylan than Dylan Thomas, more Monty Python than Montaigne. Its particular forte is American popular culture of the twentieth century, and in this regard it is unmatched by any reference work that I have seen. This is most evident in the special sections on categories of quotations typically neglected by quotation dictionaries, such as advertising and political slogans, television and radio catchphrases, and film lines. What makes these special categories of quotations particularly compelling is that Shapiro has enriched them with historical background and intricate cross-references. To take one example, an item listed in the section on radio catchphrases is the original opening narration for Superman, broadcast in 1940. In the explanatory note, Shapiro also provides the more familiar variation from later broadcasts ("It's a bird! It's a plane!"), along with crossreferences from the Superman canon (the superhero's first appearance in Action Comics no. 1, the opening of the television series Adventures of Superman ), as well as literary echoes (Nietzsche on the Übermensch or George Bernard Shaw's "Man and Superman") . This intertextual layering is so impressive that it is surprising to find occasions where Shapiro has missed a potential cross-reference. For instance, though FUQ lists both Buddy Holly's 1957 song "That'll Be the Day" and the appearance of that catchphrase in the John Wayne movie "The...

Polysemy: A Neglected Concept in Wordplay

T he members of the American Dialect Society annually select a of the Year, broadly interpreted as not just words but phrases. The words need not be new, but they must be newly notable. Most winners are examples ofpolysemy, literally many senses. Polysemy is the workhorse of the English language, so teachers would do well to help students understand how words acquire many senses. The 2005 Word of the Year was truthiness, as popularized by Stephen Colbert on Comedy Central's mock news program, The Colbert Report. Truthiness is preferring concepts or facts one wishes to be true over concepts or facts known to be true. Most speakers understand that the added suffixes mark the term as different by giving it a sense of smallness or wishy-washiness. Other nominated terms included brown-out (an allusion to former FEMA director Michael Brown) for the poor handling of an emergency, whale tail for the appearance of thong underwear above someone's waist band, and muffin-top to describe the bulge of flesh hanging over the top of low-rider jeans. These terms have a playful sense, but a word that sounds playful in its inaugural year can become a serious part of the language. In 1998, eas a prefix to stand for electronic was unusual enough to be chosen as the Word of the Year. Less than ten years later, we accept such terms as e-mail, e-signature, and e-submission as Standard English. Current events, developments, and attitudes cause speakers to devise new sound combinations and to add new senses to ordinary terms. They clip and combine sounds as with blog (from Web log), they change parts of speech as with to google, and they mark new senses with affixes as in truthiness or with

Language Learners' Perceptions of Accent

This study analyzed the accent perceptions of a group of 37 English language learners and 10 American undergraduate students. Each subject listened to a one-minute passage read by four speakers with different accents of English: General American, British English, Chinese English, and Mexican English. Participants then attempted to identify the different accents and stated their preferences and opinions about each. They also provided background information, including reasons for studying English and pronunciation goals. Additionally, 11 participants were individually interviewed about the different accents. Although more than half (62%) of the learners stated that their goal was to sound like a native English speaker, only 29% were able to correctly identify the American accent. No strong correlations were found between the ability to identify accents and the amount of time spent in the United States nor time studying English. However, an almost perfect correlation was found between the accent voted easiest to understand and the one that participants preferred. The lack of consistency in identifying accents may reflect an idealized conception of what the native accent aspired to actually sounds like. This finding and the priority placed on listening comprehension suggest a need for more thorough consideration of accent in ESOL programs.