During the past 25 years, anthropologists, linguists, and other social scientists have taken a keen interest in delineating the nature (form and function) of play, not only among humans but also among other higher primates. The establishment of the Society for the Study of Play in the1970s, the annual meetings of its members, and the resulting publications clearly manifest this interest. Sherzer's book on speech play and verbal art is a significant addition to the extant literature on the subject. His aim is to delineate “the significance of verbal play in the intersection of language, culture, and society in relation to verbal art” (p. 1). He views speech play as an “implicit and explicit meta-commentary on everyday life and artistic performance” (1).

There are five chapters in addition to the preface. The introductory chapter defines the various relevant concepts and issues, provides ethnographic settings of Sherzer's research, presents a brief history of research on play, and emphasizes its multidisciplinary relevance. Sherzer claims that studying play is relevant to understanding the very nature of language in general since it is “an important component of language structure and language use” (9). Stating that the word “play” has numerous intersecting meanings and uses, Sherzer selectively provides some, chosen from several definitions in Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language. He then compares them with those in French, Spanish, Indonesian, and Kuna, a language spoken in Panama. Sherzer's theoretical perspective is that of a “sociolinguistically informed, discourse-oriented, ethnographic approach to language structure and language use” (9).

In his discussion and analysis, Sherzer juxtaposes many different verbal forms, such as “puns, jokes, riddles, limericks, verbal dueling, proverbs, play languages, code switching, trickster tales, palindromes, anagrams, song lyrics, traditional indigenous chants, and modern European poetry” (10). He views languages and cultures “as open systems with squishes, fuzziness, leaks, inventions, constructions, negotiations, and imaginations, and as constantly emergent” (10).

Chap. 2 focuses on the ways in which some inherent distinctions in the sound-meaning relationship in language structure are manifested – for example, paradigmatic and syntactic axes, signifiers and signifieds, and denotative and connotative meanings. Sherzer quotes Edward Sapir's well-known axiom that “all grammars leak” (13). For Sherzer, this implies that “language structure is not exact, consistent, and fully patterned.” The various components of language are not tightly linked, but are “loosely coupled together” (13), hence the existence of irregularity and ambiguity in language. These aspects, along with others, are fully exploited in speech play, including loose connections among the three types of signs: symbols, icons, and indexes.

Using grammatical categories of person, number, tense, and aspect, Sherzer expands the concept of iconicity and argues that formal linguistic additions representing these categories are iconic in that “grammatical adding on expresses a semantic adding on” (15). I find this extension of the meaning of iconicity somewhat dubious because there is no exact match between linguistic signs and their meanings, except perhaps in onomatopoeic expressions, which constitute only a small part of any language structure. Sherzer's view thus ignores a fundamental aspect of language: the arbitrariness of the relationship between form and content. But Sherzer wishes to stretch the notion of iconicity for his analytical goals. In the rest of the chapter, he discusses the processes of reduplication and onomatopoeia.

Chap. 3 is devoted to describing and analyzing play languages, jokes, put-ons, proverbs, riddles, and so on. Sherzer places these forms of play in ethnographic and interactional contexts, and he examines their “social and cultural roles in different societies” and their “strategic use in face-to-face dialogues and conversations” (26). Examples from several European, Asian, and indigenous American languages are provided. I am not convinced of Sherzer's claim here that his focus on the social and cultural roles of play languages in human interaction is unique (26). Other sociolinguists and anthropologists have analyzed functions of these forms in various intralinguistic and extralinguistic contexts.

Sherzer provides definitions and elaborations of many types of linguistic forms, such as puns, jokes, put-ons, trickster tales, proverbs, and riddles. His discussion of jokes is detailed. He describes different types of jokes, joke-tellings, and performances. He also presents various functions of jokes. All these types of verbal play “are common in everyday conversation, are both playful and verbally artistic” (69). Sherzer claims that when put in sociocultural contexts, the forms of talk he analyzes and discusses “reveal much about a group of people's social, cultural, and personal lives – their systems of beliefs, their daily preoccupations, their relations with others, and the kinds of changes they are undergoing” (69).

Chap. 4 is concerned with discussing the overlapping and intersecting nature of speech play and verbal art and with describing various types of speech play. In Sherzer's view, “Boundaries between speech play and verbal art are hard to delimit and are cultural as well as linguistic” (70). For him, the distinction between speech play and verbal art is contextually determined. However, he attempts to separate them and states that in certain contexts, “forms of speech play constitute the building blocks of verbal art” (70). Sherzer's central premise here is that speech play and verbal art are creative and result from the “stretching and manipulation of linguistic patterns, processes, and practices” (77). Various word games, puzzles, figures of speech, anagrams, palindromes, acrostics and other linguistic forms are analyzed in this chapter. For Sherzer, “Sociolinguistic variation is a source of creativity and vibrance, in everyday speech, in spoken and written poetry, and in song and musical performance” (90). Such variation also provides “an alternative to conventional ways of expressing things by providing constant and ongoing forms of innovation” (91).

Sherzer's sociolinguistic perspective also includes a discussion of linguistic techniques and cultural values and attitudes. In this connection, truncation, code-switching, repetition and parallelism, polite language, and figurative and metaphorical language are some of the techniques described and analyzed. Sherzer claims that these and other techniques and forms constitute “ideological acts and expressions of identity and affiliation” (122).

The last chapter provides cross-cultural contexts for speech play. Sherzer defines context as “both the immediate and concrete situations and settings in which speech play occurs, including the social-interactional strategies involved, and the general assumptions and ideologies underlying the practice of speech play” (123). Examples from the United States, France, Latin America, the Kuna, and the Balinese are provided to support one of the major premises of this book: that speech play and verbal art are “weapons of the weak against the strong” and they also “constitute the quintessential and exuberant expression of just who people are” (154). Speech play and verbal art function as “counterhegemony and resistance to domination” (154–55), but more important, they are a manifestation of human creativity and are appreciated for sheer pleasure and for their own sake. Sherzer believes that speech play and verbal art should be seen as “central and most significant and revealing aspect of the language-culture-society nexus” (155).

Sherzer has done a commendable job of analyzing speech play and verbal art from both theoretical and ethnographic perspectives. The book is a detailed, exhaustive, and insightful account of speech play and verbal art. It is chock-full of linguistic, sociolinguistic, and ethnographic examples from several far-flung languages and cultures. Any scholar interested in the subject of speech play and verbal art will certainly have to take note of Sherzer's book.