It is proposed that the response token Right, in one important use, is a marker of epistemic dependency between two units of talk by a prior speaker, and that this talk has progressed the understanding by the Right producer of a complex activity involving much information transfer. Two other Rights as response tokens are considered: as an epistemic confirmation token similar to That's right, and as a change-of-activity token similar to Alright/Okay. In addition, Right is shown to be different from other response tokens, including the news receipt Oh, newsmarkers such as Really?, and continuers and acknowledgment tokens such as Mm hm and Yeah. The primary data consist of a fully transcribed dietetic consultation in an Australian hospital between a dietician and a client.This article has been evolving for nearly ten years, and I wish to thank numerous members of a range of audiences for their stimulating questions. I also wish to thank four anonymous reviewers whose penetrating questions led to two fairly radical rethinks of the arguments and organization. I would particularly like to thank Keith Abbott, who was in the audience for what I hope was the last oral presentation of this paper. He provided extensive written feedback and really put me on the track of epistemic progression marking as being the best characterization of this response token.

This essay interprets the relation between inalienable possessions and personhood among speakers of Q'eqchi'-Maya living in the cloud forests of Guatemala. In the broadest sense, inalienable possessions are things that are inherently possessed by human beings, such as arms and legs, mothers and fathers, hearts and names. The relation between inalienable possessions and human possessors is analyzed across a variety of domains, ranging from grammatical categories and discursive practices to illness cures and life-cycle rituals. While this relation is figured differently in each domain, a strong resonance between such relations is shown to exist across such domains. For example, the gain and loss of inalienable possessions is related to the expansion and contraction of personhood. This resonance is used as a means to interpret Q'eqchi' understandings of personhood in relation to classic ideas from William James and Marcel Mauss: on the one hand, a role-enabled and role-enabling nexus of value-directed reflexive capabilities; and on the other hand, the material, social, and semiotic site in which this nexus is revealed.This essay was presented to the anthropology departments of Case Western University and Barnard College, the Mesoamerica Workshop at SUNY Albany, and workshops on linguistic anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Chicago. It has greatly benefited from discussions with participants in these forums, especially Asif Agha, Anya Bernstein, Thomas Chordas, Courtney Handman, Walter Little, Elizabeth Povinelli, Lesley Sharp, Michael Silverstein, and Greg Urban. Above all, a course I took from John Lucy, entitled “The Self,” was fundamental to the topic choice and theoretical framing.

In the past twenty years the existence of a sense of ethnic belonging among immigrant groups of European ancestry in the United States has become the focus of frequent debates and polemics. This article argues that ethnicity cannot be understood if it is abstracted from concrete social practices, and that analyses of this construct need to be based on ethnographic observation and on the study of actual talk in interaction. This interactionally oriented perspective is taken to present an analysis of how Italian ethnicity is constructed as a central element in the collective identity of an all-male card playing club. Linguistic strategies, particularly code-switching, are central in this construction, but their role becomes apparent only when language use is analyzed within significant practices in the life of the club. Code-switching into Italian is used as an important index of ethnic affiliation in socialization practices related to the game and in official discourse addressed by the president to club members through the association of the language with central domains of activity.I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers and the editor of this journal, Barbara Johnstone, for their insightful suggestions, which have substantially contributed to the shaping of this article.

Modern social theory highlights the role of language in social change/reproduction, yet rarely draws on actual linguistic resources or theory. Equally, sociolinguistics situates linguistic practice within the social domain, but only weakly makes links to social theory. Using a linguistic analysis of policing discourses in Northern Ireland, this article considers how such analyses can both inform and be informed by broader social theories. Policing is a contentious issue for nationalists, and despite recent reforms, many continue to regard the (new) police force with suspicion. Data from nationalist women in Belfast are used to explore the thematic frameworks and interactional/pragmatic strategies (pragmatic blocking) through which the speakers jointly produce a “discourse of resistance,” effectively blocking acceptance of the new service. The analysis is discussed in relation to theories of social change (with particular reference to Bourdieu's habitus). Considered are implications for sociolinguistics, social theory, and policing policy in Northern Ireland.This article derives from an Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC)-funded study (Award No. RES 00-22-0257).

Ronald K. S. Macaulay, Extremely common eloquence: Constructing Scottish identity through narrative. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi, 2005. 299. Pb. $81.

The title frames Macaulay's volume concisely. For British English speakers (but perhaps less so for Americans), the collocation “extremely common eloquence” plays on the negative stereotype that M is challenging: that of working-class people as taciturn and inarticulate. In the subtitle we find clues to the “language in use” orientation of the book, the British regional focus, and the primary data.

Dennis Tedlock (translator and interpreter), Rabinal Achi: A Mayan drama of war and sacrifice. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. vii, 361. Hb $35.00

The Rabinal Achi, a colonial text of the K'iche'-speaking Maya of Rabinal, Guatemala, is an unusual document for a number of reasons. For one, it is a lengthy text of a Maya dance drama concerning historical events before the Spanish conquest. The content is almost entirely pre-Hispanic and concerns such themes as courtly elite behavior and the arraignment and execution of a prisoner, the rebellious K'iche' war leader Cawek of the Forest People. For the colonial period, there is no Maya dramatic text of comparable length and complexity. However, as a dance drama, the Rabinal Achi is as much a performance as it is a text. Although early colonial forms must have existed, the earliest known version dates to 1850, the manuscript recorded by Charles Etienne Brasseur de Bourbourg. Brasseur came to Rabinal in 1855, soon after he acquired the famed K'iche' epic Popol Vuh. While temporarily serving as the parish priest in Rabinal, Brasseur learned of the Rabinal Achi drama. Although he did not obtain the manuscript then owned by Bartolo Sis, he was able to transcribe the K'ichean text. In addition, Brasseur helped revive the dramatic performance, which he witnessed in 1856, the first time it had been played in some 30 years. As it turns out, his 1862 publication of the Rabinal Achi in French and the Achi dialect of K'iche' also helped ensure the continuity of the drama in Rabinal, as Brasseur sent a copy of the book to his assistant in Rabinal, Nicolas Lopez. Transcribed versions of the Achi K'iche' text from the Brasseur edition of 1862 have continued to be used by dance masters in Rabinal to this day.

Wendy Ayres-Bennett, Sociolinguistic variation in seventeenth-century French: Methodology and case studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. xii, 267. Hb $95.00

Wendy Ayres-Bennett (WAB hereafter) is a British French-language scholar, well known to philologists and historical grammarians. She is an authority on 17th-century language matters, in particular on Vaugelas and the remarqueurs (authors of observations on le bon usage, destined for those wishing to speak good French at a time when it was the mother tongue of a minority living in France). In this most recent contribution, she departs from preconceived ideas and typical disciplinary boundaries by using sociolinguistics to look at the history of the language in a project that brings to mind the work of Milroy 1992 on English and Lodge 1993, 2004 on French.

Schneider, Edgar W., Kate Burridge, Bernd Kortmann, Rajend Mesthrie, & Clive Upton (eds.), A handbook of varieties of English: A multimedia reference tool. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2004. Vol. 1, xvii, 1168 pp.; vol. 2, xvii, 1226 pp. Hb/CD-ROM $720.

These two volumes and CD-ROM form an impressive and informative survey of all major English varieties currently spoken. The aim, in the words of the editors, is “documenting and mapping the structural variation among (spontaneously spoken) non-standard varieties of English.” Various standard Englishes, such as Received Pronunciation (RP), are also described, although it is not clear how the editors distinguished a national standard from a national variety. These standard varieties are used as “implicit standard[s] of comparison” for most varieties. Although this perspective might seem surprising in a descriptive work, upon further thought this explicit acknowledgment is refreshing. In many studies, the use of a standard variety for comparison usually remains implicit, rather than being acknowledged at the outset.

Maurice Nevile, Beyond the black box: Talk-in-interaction in the airline cockpit. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. Pp. xvii, 245. Hb $94.95.

Maurice Nevile, from the Australian National University, examines the routine interaction between pilots in the airline cockpit, drawing on several related theoretical approaches to talk-in-interaction, such as ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, and institutional discourse analysis. In chapter 1, “The workplace as social interaction,” Nevile reviews the theoretical background on workplace and institutional discourse as well as some of the most significant articles in the literature about aviation communications, in particular about interaction in the airline cockpit. In this sense, Nevile's work establishes a different orientation since, as he points out, previous work on this type of institutional discourse has focused on critical situations, accidents, and incidents instead of routine interaction, with the result that

Sally Johnson, Spelling trouble: Language, ideology and the reform of German orthography. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2005. Pp viii, 208. Hb $89.95, Pb $39.95.

Since the 1990s language ideology has developed into a field of inquiry of its own. Research on language ideology seeks to investigate how linguistic forms and practices and their conceptualizations are enmeshed in other contextually bound cultural patterns and practices, and how language–culture relations are fraught with moral and political interests. Taking language ideology and Blommaert's (1999) notion of language ideological debates as a point of departure, Sally Johnson sets out to explore the emergence and escalation of a public dispute, involving a variety of social actors (linguists, judges, private citizens, etc.), that broke out in Germany with the introduction of the reform of German orthography in 1996. The focus of the volume is primarily on one aspect of the German debate: the legal battle between those who attempted to challenge the reform on the basis of its alleged incompatibility with some of the principles sanctioned by the German Basic Law (Grundgesetz), on the one hand, and the judges of the Federal Constitutional Court, on the other. However, for a more nuanced understanding of the debate, the role played by linguists and the media is also taken into consideration. As Johnson convincingly demonstrates throughout the volume, the debate on German orthography was definitely not about language alone. Rather, it was about different conceptions of the German language together with their political, moral and aesthetic loading.

Charlotte Burck, Multilingual living: Explorations of language and subjectivity. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005, 218. Hb $75.

What are the pros and the cons of writing a book outside one's main field of expertise? Multilingual living, a book about bilingualism written by a psychotherapist whose previous work has focused on gender and family therapy, offers interesting answers to this question. Among its advantages are a fresh perspective and the considerable body of expertise in the field of family relationships that Burck brings to the table. She asks intriguing questions about living in more than one language and answers them in engaging and compelling ways. Yet her outsider status also carries its price: Scholars who do not take part in an academic conversation within a field do not always have a clear idea of whether their work is truly novel or whether previous work has already attempted to answer the same questions in similar ways. Rather, they are at the mercy of a body of literature they are able to locate through a time-constrained search, without a clear feeling for which sources can be considered central in the field and which are peripheral, or which debates are still going on and where scholars might have reached a consensus.

John Lipski,A history of Afro-Hispanic language: Five centuries, five continents. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. x, 363. Hb. $110.

In the most comprehensive volume to date, John Lipski, one of the top scholars on Afro-Hispanic language varieties, traces the history of African–Iberian linguistic contact from its origins with the importation of black African slaves to Portugal and Spain to the present-day situation of these varieties. The book can be divided into two parts: chapters 1–5 contain the introduction and a detailed review of the data, while chapters 6–9 examine how the data bear on the likelihood of the independent formation of a Spanish-based creole in the Caribbean. In chapter 1 Lipski details the first significant African–Iberian contacts, with sections on the different phases of colonization and slavery, tracing the Portuguese expansion in Africa and Asia, the role of the Spanish, the ascent of Dutch and English in the colonization scene, and the slave trade. He focuses on African slavery in South America, noting that there were fewer blacks than whites until the 19th century, when the big plantations came into their own. At this time, we find a disproportionate number of blacks to whites in some areas of the Caribbean and Latin America.

Carol Myers-Scotton, Contact linguistics: Bilingual encounters and grammatical outcomes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. xiv, 342. Pb.

The scope of Myers-Scotton's new book is far wider than that of her earlier study (1993), which focused exclusively on code-switching. She has now applied her Matrix Language Frame (MLF) model to a much broader range of language contact phenomena, covering areas such as convergence (what others have termed “interference”), language attrition and shift, and creoles and mixed languages. There is no doubt that the model does offer many insights into the dynamics of various types of language contact, and while Myers-Scotton's remarks remain fairly tentative with regard to some of these fields, this book certainly opens up new avenues for exploration in each of them. However, the most substantial and possibly the most controversial part of the book is again that which presents the latest developments in her account of bilingual code-switching, which has already achieved worldwide renown, so for want of space we will focus only on this part of the book.

I thank D & B for their stimulating review that concentrates on the MLF model and code-switching (CS), even though Contact linguistics (CL) discusses other contact phenomena, too. This is a model of “classic code-switching,” which is defined several times in CL (8, 105, 297). This scope was always intended, but not explicit in Duelling languages (Myers-Scotton 1993a). The nub of the definition is that only one of the languages contributing surface morphemes to a bilingual CP (i.e. clause) is the source of that clause's morphosyntactic frame. The Morpheme Order and System Morpheme Principles of the MLF model identify this language as the Matrix Language (ML). Classic CS contrasts with composite code-switching. The difference is that in Composite CS, part of the abstract morphosyntactic structure comes from more than one of the participating languages. Composite CS may be more prevalent than classic CS, but has yet to be studied systematically (CL, 298).

Georgina Heydon, The language of police interviewing: A critical analysis. Houndmills & New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. xii + 229. Hb $69.95.

This book presents a critical analysis of police interviewing in Australia. The author investigates the role of the police in the police–suspect interview in relation to both the negotiation of power relations between participants and the fulfillment of institutional requirements. Combining the analytical tools provided by interactional sociolinguistics and Conversation Analysis (CA), Heydon investigates recordings of police questioning of adult suspects. These findings are compared to findings of a previous study (Heydon 1997), in which Heydon investigated recordings of the training of police for interviewing children. Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) is used to interpret the results of the descriptive analysis.

Niloofar Haeri, Sacred language, ordinary people: Dilemmas of culture and politics in Egypt. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. xvi, 184. Hb $59.95.

Sacred language, ordinary people is an excellent linguistic ethnography of Arabic diglossia in “an attempt at understanding the cultural and political implications of the divide between Classical Arabic and Egyptian Arabic” (p. xi). The passionate debate about Classical Arabic (the language of the Qur'an) as a facilitator of or a barrier to modernization and change is handled intelligently, though provocatively.

Florian Coulmas, Sociolinguistics: The study of speakers' choices. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. 263. Pb $29.99.

In his new textbook, Coulmas provides readers an easy introduction to sociolinguistics, using speaker choice as the central notion for discussion. In a comfortable conversational style, the author slowly introduces topics, using common examples to demonstrate how sociolinguists think about language use. He provides summaries of findings of key sociolinguistic studies that illustrate ideas without overloading readers with unnecessary and cumbersome details of those studies. The book is accessible for beginning sociolinguistics students and is equally engaging for those already familiar with sociolinguistic concepts, largely because the author uses such interesting and global research to illustrate ideas.

Christopher Williams, Tradition and change in legal English: Verbal constructions in prescriptive texts. Bern: Peter Lang, 2005. pp. 216. $46.95.

Christopher Williams analyzes the use of constructions such as modals and semi-modals such as shall and may and the use of the present simple as these constructions appear in English prescriptive legal texts. Using a large corpus of texts from a variety of English-speaking countries and international organizations, Williams focuses primarily on legislative texts, which are often characterized as including archaic or rarely used words and foreign words, the repetition of particular words and phrases, the use of long, complex sentences, and the passive voice (p. 31). Williams's analysis, thoughtfully designed and carried out, is an informative examination of how and why legal language has resisted change. The book also provides an engaging look at the Plain Language Movement and the impact this movement has had on legal texts.

Claudia V. Angelelli, Medical interpreting and cross-cultural communication. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. xiii, 153. Hb $75.00.

Claudia Angelelli's study of medical interpreting, based on her 2001 Stanford dissertation, constitutes a valuable addition to a series of empirical studies of community interpreting (Wadensjö 1992, 1998; Metzger 1999; Bolden 2000; Roy 2000) that make use of discourse analysis to uncover what actually takes place in interpreter-mediated encounters between professionals and their clients (or patients) who do not speak the same language. These studies share a common theme: to reveal the interpreter as an interactive participant in cross-cultural communication rather than a mere relayer of linguistic messages from one language to another. Adopting a primarily ethnographic approach, Angelelli sets out to refute the “myth of invisibility” (p. 2) by showing that medical interpreters are visible, interactive agents in interpreted communicative events.

Anna Trosborg & Poul Erik Flyvholm Jørgensen (eds.), Business discourse: Texts and contexts. Bern: Peter Lang, 2005. Pp. 250, Pb. $55.95.

This book consists of nine chapters analyzing various genres of business discourse, and an introduction written by the editors. All of the chapters in the book would be strengthened by more rigorous data analysis procedures, whether quantitative or qualitative. Nevertheless, there is much of value in the book, parts of which will be of use to a wide range of potential audiences. Okamura interviewed office workers in international businesses about the use of address terms in the workplace, both in English and in their mother tongue, comparing Japanese with Swedish, British, Canadian, American, and Dutch speakers. Interviewees' accommodation to the cultural norms of the group differed according to the power of the speaker: Higher-status employees were less likely to adopt local norms over their own country's addressing conventions. While Okamura acknowledges that his sample size is small, and that transcriptions of actual interactions would be a stronger data source than the interviews he relied on, his findings are interesting and potentially useful for courses on intercultural communication, business communication, or the sociology of language.