Personal reference is the use of an expression to pick out a person, as in When did John eat the cookies? or Tell Dr. Elwood that I need to see him. This article explores the social factors involved in how speakers choose a referring expression in a given situation. Five experiments were conducted which presented speakers with scenarios and asked them how they would refer to a particular person in that situation. The results showed that speakers were sensitive to the level of intimacy between the speaker and referent, between the addressee and referent, and between a nonparticipating audience and the referent. To a lesser degree, the relation between the speaker and the addressee also influenced choice of referring expression. The results can be explained by a theory that posits that speakers are attempting to preserve their faces and the faces of their addressees in choosing these terms, and so they avoid references that could be face threatening. This theory can be integrated with current theories of object reference and the choice of address terms. (Reference, address, politeness, personal reference)

This article demonstrates that our descriptions of orality and literacy – from the traditional dichotomy to the more recent continuum – are inadequate, largely because they are grounded in the Western positivist tradition and use as their typical texts casual conversation and academic writing. The introduction of a new medium of communication, the computer, into the workplace clearly demonstrates that medium of communication is itself a linguistic choice, depending on the context of situation. The article presents a case study identifying those aspects of the context of situation that affect both choice of mode/medium and mode/medium-switching. The article then proposes a framework that expands on previous work that has sought to describe the dimensions involved in the choice of language (e.g., Halliday 1973; Hymes 1972; Jakobson 1960). This framework suggests an integrated approach for examining oral and written language, an approach grounded in the view that literacy and orality are social practices whose forms and functions vary for different social groups. (Literacy, dimensions of sociolinguistics, discourse)

Sociolinguistics has never been a closed or autonomous discipline, but rather has considered relations between linguistic variables and so-called real-world variables, such as age, sex, and social class. Developments in discourse analysis now permit the analysis of the effectiveness of utterances in their real-world context. This study of communicative success uses as its data transcripts of eight aviation accidents, as well as transcripts of fourteen flight simulator sessions. The linguistic variable considered is mitigation; the real-world variables are success or failure of the individual communication, and peer judgments of the overall effectiveness of the simulator crews. To quantify the use of mitigation, a four-degree scale was established by using the judgments of several linguistic analysts and was validated against the judgments of members of the aviation community. Using this scale, a number of hypotheses were confirmed: (1) Utterances going up the chain of command are more mitigated than those going down, showing that mitigation is sensitive to social rank. (2) Utterances introducing a new topic are more likely to fail if they are mitigated than if they are direct. (3) Suggestions by a crew member to the captain are more likely to fail if they are mitigated than if they are direct. These results show a strong effect of mitigation on several measures of communicative success. This study shows that a quantitative study of communicative success is possible and suggests the necessity for further studies of this type as a necessary direction for discourse analysis. (Pragmatics, discourse analysis, communicative effectiveness, politeness, mitigation, perlocutionary force, man-machine interface)

The British news interview turn-taking system operates through a simple form of turn-type preallocation. This article shows that a large number of the systematic differences between the news interview and mundane conversation are a product of these constraints on the production of types of turns. It then explores the relationship of turn-type preallocation in news interviews to the background legal and institutional restrictions on British broadcast journalists. In so doing, it notes how the organisation of turn-taking in two other types of broadcast interview can differ from that in the news interview due to differences between the institutionalized footings that the interviewers are conventionally required to maintain within them. (Conversation analysis, mass communication, British speech, turn-taking systems, institutional talk)