In sociolinguistics, approaches that use the variables of socioeconomic class and social network have often been thought to be irreconcilable. In this article, we explore the connection between these variables and suggest the outlines of a model that can integrate them in a coherent way. This depends on linking a consensus-based microlevel of network with a conflict-based macrolevel of social class. We suggest interpretations of certain sociolinguistic findings, citing detailed evidence from research in Northern Ireland and Philadelphia, which emphasize the need for acknowledging the importance of looseknit network ties in facilitating linguistic innovations. We then propose that the link between network and class can be made via the notion of weak network ties using the process-based model of the macrolevel suggested by Thomas Højrup's theory of life-modes. (Sociolinguistics, sociology, quantitative social dialectology, anthropological linguistics)

This article presents an analysis of gender differences in the use of compliments in one genre of written discourse. The data base is a set of 47 peer reviews of academic papers written by graduate students in the form of letters. Drawing on work from several theoretical perspectives, we analyzed the forms, strategies, and discourse functions of compliments in these papers. We found that women made significantly greater use of compliment intensifiers and personal referencing than did men. In using compliments to structure discourse, women more often framed the text with both opening and closing compliments. Consistent patterns suggested that women writers accommodated to the gender of their addressee more than did men, resulting in a discernible female-female complimenting style. The study illustrates specific ways that gender is involved in being polite and in creating and sustaining a sense of involvement in written discourse. (Complimenting, politeness, sociolinguistics, gender, discourse strategies, cross-sex communication, English)

This article explores the linguistic practices of Japanese men and women giving directions to subordinates. Previous research on language and gender across a number of languages has equated the speech of women with powerlessness. The literature on Japanese women's speech would support this notion. It characterizes Japanese female speech as soft, polite, indirect, in sum, as powerless. This presents problems for women who must command. The present study, an extension of my previous work on Japanese female speech (Shibamoto 1985, 1987) centered on women in more typically female roles, examines the directives of women in positions of authority in traditional and nontraditional domains and compares them with the directive forms chosen by men in similar positions. Explanations for the differences found are placed within the frameworks of a general theory of politeness and the culturally specific, gendered strategies for encoding politeness and authority in Japanese. (Sociolinguistics, language and gender, politeness)

Five examples are presented of how native speakers may try to explain a grammatical point to a linguist, and, in the absence of a suitable metalanguage, adopt some “lateral” way of demonstrating the point. They may, for instance, give another paradigmatic form of a word under scrutiny to show its word class; they may switch to another dialect to clarify some ambiguity; they may add some extra sentence constituents to each noun in a lexical elicit, to reveal its gender class. (Field methods, grammatical explanation, use of informants/consultants, Australian Aboriginal languages, Amazonian languages)

The integration of 66 black Detroit inner-city residents (33 males and 33 females) into their neighborhood is measured quantitatively by a Vernacular Culture Index (VCI) constructed from the respondents' responses to 10 statements, each with values ranging from 1 to 4. The speech behaviors of these respondents with respect to variants of six linguistic variables (each with a black English [BE] and a colloquial Standard English variant) are quantified and the statistical relationships between the VCI scores and linguistic behavior are determined. The results of the study reveal that respondents in the older age groups (40–59, 60+) are more likely to choose BE variants than respondents in the younger age groups (18–25, 26–39), and that there are consistent statistically significant correlations between high scores on the VCI and the choice of BE variants of the linguistic variables. This is taken to support the proposal that the Social Network Theory approach, of which the VCI concept is a part, is capable of explaining intracommunity linguistic variation in socioeconomically homogeneous areas such as the black community studied. (Sociolinguistics, sociolinguistic theory, black English)