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The conclusion draws together trends observed in the dictionaries discussed, noting particularly the difference in perspective between British historical dictionaries and American contemporary dictionaries. In Britain, Australia, and the United States slang had a different social meaning, and this is reflected in the dictionaries. The Conclusion also summarizes developments in slang lexicography and looks forward to developments to be discussed in Volume IV of the series.

The Introduction explains some of the terms used in the study, explains the principles underlying the selection of dictionaries, and summarizes the scope of each chapter. It then provides an account of the historical setting for the late 19th-century dictionaries of British slang.

This chapter investigates phonetic and phonological aspects of rising tunes, and to a lesser extent, pitch accent realization in certain varieties of English, namely, General Australian English, New Zealand English, Glasgow English, and other Northern British English varieties. Differences among the varieties are also described relative to the typological framework outlined in Ladd (1996), whereby intonational differences are either semantic, systemic, phonetic, and phonotactic. The chapter also examines how transcription systems can deal with sociophonetic aspects of tonal variation within and among these varieties, focusing in particular on the ‘rising’ tunes that often accompany declarative statements in many of the above mentioned varieties. An example of one of these rising tunes is what is often referred to as the characteristic ‘HRT’ (high rising terminal) of Australian English and New Zealand English. Two approaches to the transcription of these differences are discussed.

This chapter explores the relationship between stance and sociolinguistic style. It argues that stance is the basis of style in sociolinguistic variation: sociolinguistic variants are initially associated with interactional stances, and these stances become reified in a speech community over time and repeated use. The chapter thus evaluates the possibility that stance is the main explanation for patterns of sociolinguistic variation, such that any choice of linguistic form made by speakers is made ultimately because of the interpersonal or epistemic stances they wish to take with their various interlocutors, the content of their talk, and nonpresent¹ others. The chapter argues that these stance indexicalities become “short-circuited,” so that ways of speaking become associated with situations and speaking roles in which certain stances are customarily taken. Styles of speaking are thus shorthand for bundles of habitually taken stances. The chapter thus connects the everyday use of language variation in discourse to the ways that it patterns on larger social scales, and to test the hypothesis that this connection can be made through the concept of stance. After a short discussion of the concepts of style, stance, and indexicality, the chapter demonstrates the importance of stance in variation patterns through three examples.

The European settlement of New Zealand is usually dated from 1840, which was the year that Maori and Europeans signed the Treaty of Waitangi. New Zealand English (NZE) has, therefore, developed and evolved over a period of about 150 years. The date is significant because the beginning of European settlement in New Zealand is recent enough for the early stages of NZE to be studied in a way that was impossible for those studying other earlier varieties of native-speaker English, such as American English or Australian English. This chapter discusses NZE and Cockney, NZE and Australia, NZE and new-dialect formation, early written records, spoken NZE data, four early New Zealand speakers from the Mobile Unit archive, evidence from spoken data, and theories about the origins and development of NZE.

This chapter draws on informal or slang usage to look for parallels with child template use. Three sets of data are analysed in some detail. Clippings with suffixation are illustrated with both French and Estonian short forms and hypocoristics; similar patterns are cited for Australian English. The short forms in each case adhere to the minimal word constraints of the language in question, with French forms in -o fitting into one or two iambic feet while the Estonian forms, ending in obstruent+s, largely constitute a single heavy (monosyllabic) foot. Rhyming compounds are analysed for English. A strong bias is identified for the second word to begin with a labial, with parallels also cited in Hungarian. All of these adult template patterns are shown to stipulate both prosodic and segmental elements.