This paper reviews the work on sociolinguistic aspects of the recent immigration of foreign workers and their families from Southern Europe and the Mediterranean countries of the Middle East and North Africa to West Germany. The continued presence of these foreigners presents almost laboratory conditions for the investigation of the initial and subsequent stages of contact-induced linguistic development in adults and children. The situation is particularly interesting here because many of the languages involved (Turkish, Arabic, Greek, Serbo-Croatian, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese) are typologically different from each other and from German.

In this paper, a preschool children's game is analyzed with reference to patterns of address used by intimates in beginning utterances. The findings reveal that the alternation between real and pretend names functions to mark context shifts in the nature of the activities, and to delineate role relationships among the participants along the dimensions of power and affiliation. It is suggested that variations in how children address one another provide insight into their understanding of a system of social relations. (Peer interaction; developmental sociolinguistics; social behavior, children's address patterns; American English).

The verbal style of middle-class and lower-class ten-year-old children was assessed in a descriptive communication task using three different types of stimulus items: standard visual, tactual, and items embedded in a narrative. In a partial replication of Heider's (1971) work it was found that lower-class children used a global descriptive style to communicate information about standard visual (abstract) stimuli, whereas middle-class children used an analytic style. Group differences also were observed with tactually input stimuli, although the lower-class responses shifted toward an analytic style. However, both middle-class and lower-class children used an analytic style to describe stimulus items when they were embedded in a narrative context. In addition, order effects were observed, suggesting that lower-class children use an analytic style with standard visual stimuli if they perceive this style as situationally appropriate. Social class differences in verbal style are not only a function of type of stimulus item, but are also a function of strategies applied in the communicative situation.

Opinions assume a paradoxical character in many speech events. The speaker, by sincerely presenting his views on a topic, is expressing his belief in a proposition, and this belief must be regarded as indisputable. If a speaker says that marijuana should be legalized, one cannot deny the speaker's belief in this proposition. He has expressed an opinion. The proposition, however, may itself be the topic of dispute. Another speaker may disagree by expressing his belief that marijuana should remain illegal, and a dispute regarding the validity of each of these propositions may ensue. Neither of these propositions is subject to proof or disproof, but the speakers may attempt to support them in order to add to the validity of the propositions and substantiate their beliefs.

An illocutionary act presupposes not only a speaker, but also an other who is the intended recipient of the utterance's illocutionary force. Thus every illocutionary act has an intersubjective component; it connects two centers of experience in a particular way. This article proposes that the intersubjective illocutionary force of an utterance depends on (1) whether it concerns the speaker's or other's experience, (2) whether it takes the speaker's or other's viewpoint, and (3) whether or not the speaker must presume specific knowledge of the other to make the utterance. These three dichotomous principles of classification are called source of experience, frame of reference, and focus, respectively. The eight possible combinations of “speaker” and “other” values define a mutually exclusive and exhaustive set of families of intersubjective illocutionary acts – Disclosure, Advisement, Edification, Confirmation, Question, Interpretation, Acknowledgment, and Reflection – which I have elsewhere called “verbal response modes.” The modes are associated with characteristic grammatical forms, which retain a “formal” portion of their illocutionary force even when used to express a different intent, yielding a taxonomy of 64 distinct form-intent combinations. Differences between this taxonomy and other taxonomies of illocutionary acts are partially traceable to the present system's roots in the study of psychotherapeutic processes and the previous systems' roots in the study of explicit performatives.

A recent issue of this journal carried an analysis of the theoretical status of variable rules by the present authors (Kay & McDaniel 1979) together with a response by D. Sankoff and W. Labov (1979). The central issue with which Kay and McDaniel dealt was the following: which (if any) of the mathematical assumptions embodied in variable rules may reasonably be attributed to the linguistic abilities of speakers? The Sankoff and Labov response has gone some distance toward clarifying their position in this matter, though problematical issues remain. The basic question divides naturally into two related, though distinct, parts: (1) which (if any) of the mathematical assumptions comprised in the variable rule method are to be taken as substantive claims (versus conveniences for the data analyst)? (2) of the mathematical assumptions which are held to make substantive claims, what is the empirical locus of these claims – that is, what are the claims about (e.g., speakers' linguistic abilities)?

In Suzanne Romaine's article, “The relative clause marker in Scots English” (vol. 9, no. 2, August 1980), table 7 on page 234 should not indicate a W in the genitive column for text C. On page 246, footnote 31 was inadvertantly omitted. It is:

The development of WH relatives is of course motivated in pars by purely syntactic principles; WH relative pronouns do not require stranding. The typological split between those Germanic languages which have invariant relative particles and those which do not also coincides with the incidence of proposition stranding. It appears that an indeclinable relative particle is a necessary precondition for stranding in relative clauses (cf. also Allen 1977: 355–56).

Susan Gal's review of Howard Giles & Robert St. Clair(eds.), Language and social psychology was published in a first version (vol. 9, no. 3. December 1980) and not as she revised it. The main substantive changes are these:

On page 372, the sentence beginning in line 14 of paragraph 2 should read:

Unfortunately, although the social psychological theories discussed in this collection are potentially quite interesting for studies of language use, most of the analyses offer little that is enlightening.

In the same paragraph, line 8 from the bottom should include “(e.g., Fishman 1972, Trudgill 1974)” after the words “class dialects.”

On page 373, paragraph 2, the passage beginning with line 12 should read:

Very briefly, this view holds that individual motives and moods are communicated in speech by momentary deviations from the expected regularities. Unusual or marked stylistic choices must be heard and interpreted by participants in light of the expected or unmarked choices which are ordinarily taken to be appropriate to the particular context (e.g., Brown & Gilman 1960, Blom & Gumperz 1972). This view of marking as crucial to speech interpretation is not without its problems. A formal theory of this process has also been proposed (Geoghegan 1973). Nevertheless, it is part of a widely held conception of the cognitive processes involved in stylistic variation.

The references are:

Blom, J. P. & Gumperz, J. J. (1972). Social meaning in linguistic structures: code-switching in Norway. In J. Gumperz and D. Hymes (eds). Directions in sociolinguistics. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston. 407–35.

Brown, R. & Gilman, A. (1960). The pronouns of power and solidarity. In T. A. Sebeok (ed.). Style in language. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 253–76.

Fishman, J. (1972). Language maintenance and language shift as fields of inquiry: Revisited. In A. S. Dil (ed.). Language in sociocultural change: Essays by Joshua A. Fishman. Stanford: Stanford University Press. 76–134.

Geoghegan, W. (1973). Natural information processing rules: Formal theory anil application to ethnography. Monograph 3, Language Behavior Research Laboratory, Berkeley, California.

Trudgill, P. J. (1974). The social differentiation of English in Norwich. Cambridge University Press.

Einar Haugen's review of Papers from the fourth Scandinavian, conference of linguistics. Kirsten Gregersen et al., eds. (vol. 9, no. 3, December 1980), should have the last complete sentence on page 392 read as follows:

Only two additional papers follow: a valuable discussion by Stig Eliasson of the need to recognize that some phonological rules are bidirectional, contrary to the generative view of them as all unidirectional; and a detailed study (Lyche) of the deletion of French schwa as seen in natural generative phonology.