Old English poetic metre By B. R. Hutcheson (review)

866LANGUAGE, VOLUME 73, NUMBER 4 (1997) Part 3, 'Contingent practices and emergent selves', consists of seven essays that explore in detail the role of linguistic strategies in a complex web of practices employed by women to construct and reconstruct identity. They introduce a variety of cultural and situational contexts that operate within the dominant American culture. Michèle Foster (329-50) shows how the performance of codeswitching from Standard English to African American discourse by middle class African American women enables them 'to communicate cognitive, affective content not available in the standard form' (347). Mary Bucholtz's study of women of ambiguous or mixed identity (351-74) explores theoretical and pragmatic issues related to the notion of 'passing'. She contends that the notion of passing as performance applies to a range of social categories, including gender, class, ethnicity, and sexuality, and that these categories 'are not separable . . . from language, ... for identity in all its facets is largely constructed through language' (369). The concepts of performance and boundary crossings cited in these essays may also be seen as central to others in this section: María Dolores Gonzales Velasquez describes language use among rural New Mexican chicanas (421-46); Jenny Cook-Gumperz analyzes play narratives of three-year-old girls (401-20); Tara Goldstein (375-400) studies the role of Portuguese among women factory workers in Canada (this essay would benefitby omitting the section onESL curriculum ); and Penelope Eckert and Sally McConnell-Ginet (469-507) describe and interpret language use by high school students. Birch Moonwomon's discourse analysis ofa women's graffiti text (447-68) deals with written performance in 'a border case of race and gender' ; she explores the convergence in the text of these two social categories and the ideologies associated wim them. Eckert and McConnell-Ginet's important essay, 'Constructing meaning, constructing selves', is a fitting conclusion for this volume. They examine the interrelation of social class and gender and their expression in language use both at the semantic level (labels that delimit the groups 'burnouts' and 'jocks') and at the level of phonetic innovation. They also take up the notion of communities of practice and their flexible and shifting nature. In a real sense, all of the studies in this book respond to these authors' earlier call to 'think practically and act locally' (Eckert and McConnell-Ginet, 1992). The editors have selected essays of consistently high quality, including some that are truly outstanding. All are firmly grounded in relevant theory and previous research, are well written, and provide useful bibliographies. Although the essays employ an array of different methodologies , they do, in Gal's words, 'speak ... to each other' (170). Sociolinguists and scholars from related disciplines interested in feminist research concerning language will want to own a copy of this book. Those teaching in related areas will find many of the essays suitable for use in their courses. Language and gender research has come a long way in the two decades since Lakoffs Language and woman's place first appeared. This volume is an important milestone and serves as a valuable introduction to a promising third decade of feminist scholarship on language in its social context. REFERENCES Lakoff, Robin. 1975. Language and woman's place. New York: Harper & Row. Eckert, Penelope, and Sally McConnell-Ginet. 1992. Think practically and act locally: Language and gender as community-based practice. Annual Review of Anthropology 21.461-90. Program in Linguistics & Cognitive Science University at Albany, SUNY Albany, NY 12222 [fwf@cnsvax.albany.edu] Old English poetic metre. By B. R. Hutcheson. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1995. Pp. xv, 351. Cloth $89.00. Reviewed by R. D. Fulk, Indiana University This long-anticipated revision of Hutcheson's 1991 doctoral dissertation aims primarily to devise an improved system for classifying Old English verse types, and it brings some new tools REVIEWS867 to the enterprise. One is a really useful 13,044-line electronic corpus of scanned verse painstakingly coded for almost any metrical variable one might care to isolate—a corpus that helps appreciably to decenter Beowulf. Another is a handy, simplified method of representing scansion: in place of the array of symbols that nonspecialists complain renders the field of early...