Slang and sociability: In-group language among college students By Connie Eble (review)

860LANGUAGE, VOLUME 73, NUMBER 4 (1997) on the differences between theories with and without reanalysis as the basic change. But usually he only provides broad-stroke guidance through the chronologically ordered—cross-cut by generativity vs. nongenerativity—theories that follow thereafter in his presentation. The book is intended for use in classes on the history of the English language as well as a reference tool for researchers in historical syntax. The main text is supplemented by a glossary oftechnical terms, a list ofreferences (i.e. secondary sources), a list oftexts from which examples have been taken (i.e. primary sources, with very detailed identification and by itself worth the price of admission), an index of verbs that appear in the examples, and a genuinely conscientious index. Each chapter ends with questions for discussion or further research, and these are frequently brilliant. D's book will likely be used only as a (very) secondary source in American undergraduate classes, even many graduate courses, more's the pity, because it is a more relentless survey than such classes require. Nonetheless, as a reference tool it is a work of such high quality that the same ground need never be covered again, and I expect that it will be used widely by scholars. No one can in the future write about English syntactic change without extensive reference to it. Department of Linguistics University of California Los Angeles, CA 90095 [Stockwel@Humnet.Ucla.edu] Slang and sociability: In-group language among college students. By Connie Eble. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996. Pp. x, 228. Reviewed by Timothy C. Frazer, Western Illinois University This book nicely crystallizes Eble's work on collegiate slang, a series of surveys begun in 1972 which was reported and analyzed over the years in conference papers, in articles, and in one monograph (Eble 1989). Here E discusses the processes which produce slang as well as other words, reveals the close relationship between slang and the subcultures which produce it, and examines the changes in collegiate slang over the past century. Of greatest interest is her ethnographic study isolating precisely the types ofinterpersonal relationships which slang signals. As Dumas and Lighter noted in 1978, a formal definition of slang seems forever evasive, although lexicographers, poets, linguists, and others continue to try to define it. A few examples range from 'a body of words accepted as intelligible, ... but not accepted as good, formal usage' (Wentworth & Flexner 1960: xvii), to 'that portion of the vocabulary which changes most freely' (Gleason 1961:6), or even to 'the wholesome fermentation or eructation of those processes eternally active in language' (Whitman 1885: 573). These and similar efforts either fail to define at all or else are easily contradicted by example; elsewhere, slang has been variously confused withjargon, dialect, or nonstandard usage. Not surprisingly, dictionaries disagree on which words are labelled 'slang' and which are not. Reflecting the impossibility of finding a formal definition for this term, William Labov (1972) condemned research on slang to 'an outer, extra-linguistic darkness' (97), while Lighter's own widely heralded Random House historical dictionary of American slang (1994) explicitly avoids a formal definition. Labov's frustration notwithstanding, the concept of slang does indeed have a psychological reality; like dialect, it seems to be a useful term even if no one can agree precisely on what it means. E's book addresses the issue by seeking a functional rather than a formal definition, a direction earlier suggested by Sledd (1965) as well as by Dumas and Lighter. After calling in the introduction for a pragmatic approach to context, E discusses the source of slang in wordbuilding (Ch. 2, 'Form'); the social implications ofslang's 'Meaning' (Ch. 3); and further sources in 'Borrowing and allusion' (Ch. 4). The next three chapters ('Use', 'Effects', and 'Culture') examine the function of slang in interaction—the role slang actually plays in discourse, the social conse- REVIEWS861 quences of its use, and the relationship between the semantic fields of slang and the subcultures in which they flourish. The various processes by which slang arises include compounding (dough + brain = doughbrain), affixation (mega + bitch — megabitch), clipping (parents > rents), blending (screw + bump = scrump). But these processes...