In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

454 LANGUAGE, VOLUME 74, NUMBER 2 (1998) within this particular context of institutional interaction , showing how they converge in order to accomplish the institutional goal of counselling—getting clients to talk about the difficult issues raised by AJDS. [Ellen L. Barton, Wayne State University.] Western lore and language: A dictionary for enthusiasts of the American West. By Thomas L. Clark. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1996. Pp. xvi, 266. $24.95 Dialect geography has traditionally mapped out regional dialects by investigating patterns of lexical, phonological, and grammatical differences. The DARE data, for example, support subregions such as the Northwest, the Central West, and the Southwest, each with further subdistinctions (see Craig Carver's American regional dialects, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1989). In Western lore and language , Clark takes a different approach to the language of the American West. He offers up a dictionary ofthe language ofthe vast American West and provides a rich collection of vocabulary reflecting both earlier and more recent aspects of Western culture: the cowboy milieu; the Mormon settlement; Native American and Spanish influences; the technologies ofmining, gambling, Hollywood film-making , and Silicon-Valley computing; and the surfing culture of California. C thus takes a broad view of the West—including in it states which are west of an imaginary line from Montana to west Texas (but apparently excluding the western parts of the Dakotas, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma, all of which fall in the mountain time zone). Material is drawn from a range of sources, including such newspapers as the San Jose Mercury News, the Albuquerque Journal, the Arizona Republic , the Denver Post, the Fresno Bee, and the Idaho Statesman; dialect atlases; Mitford Matthews' Dictionary of Americanisms on historical principles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951); the files ofthe DARE project (on which C once worked); and specialized dictionaries of logging, gaming, Alaskan English, and surfing. Entries range from such items as blanket (? unit of value established by the Hudson's Bay Company for trading with the Indians of the Pacific Northwest') to mañana (defined as 'An undesignated time in the indefinite future . A state ofmind in which any chore ortask might be postponed'), to back East ("The eastern part of the United States or Canada, not necessarily the East Coast') to Baja bug (a Volkswagen) and beachparty film. C includes all the western state nicknames and the names of much flora and fauna of the West. While the entries are generally both enlightening and informative, C sometimes provides too little information on pronunciation (e.g., the pronunciations of arapaho and guaco are given but not those of Acoma and grueso), and on occasion he drops an unneeded witticism into an entry (e.g., the entry for absinthe, a kind of sagebrush, includes the comment that it is not 'the kind of absinthe that makes the heart grow fonder'). There also seems to be too little material on some topics (film-making, Native American life) and a great deal on others (things Alaskan). On the positive side, the work is nicely laid out for browsing (as opposed to the small and dense layout ofmany dictionaries) and includes a number ofillustrative black and white photos. Overall, the book is both entertaining and thought provoking. [Edwin Battistella, Wayne State College.] English language scholarship: A survey and bibliography from the beginnings to the end of the nineteenth century. By Helmut Gneuss. (Medieval and renaissance texts and studies, 125.) Binghamton , NY: Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies, 1996. Pp. 152. Undergraduate programs in English generally require a course or two dealing with the English language . Usually these are courses in the history of the English language, a contrastive survey oftraditionalist and descriptivist approaches to grammar, or an introduction to linguistics for nonmajors. Linguists teaching the first two sorts of courses in English departments will greatly benefit from Gneuss' survey of English language scholarship, which fills in some of the background that textbooks are forced to omit. The book begins with an essay titled "The study of English' (pp. 7-70). Divided into six main sections , the essay covers scholarship on the EngUsh language in Anglo-Saxon and Middle English periods (8-13; 14-20...

pdf

Share