This article demonstrates how cultural ideologies of language, and the semiotic processes that mobilize them, manifest in contemporary American drug treatment. Drawing from an ethnographic study of an outpatient program in the Midwestern United States, it focuses on therapists' claims about what constitutes “healthy language.” It is argued that these claims both stem from and actively reproduce an “ideology of inner reference,” which presumes that “healthy” language refers to preexisting phenomena, and that the phenomena to which it refers are internal to speakers. By formally discouraging talk that could point outside the parameters of the individual psyche, the treatment program effectively insulates itself from clients' critiques and challenges. A broad attempt is made to elucidate the connection between a language ideology that enjoys wide cultural circulation as well as significant currency in contemporary clinical practice, and a particular political effect called “institutional insulation.”My thanks to Barbara Johnstone and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful, critical comments on an earlier version of this article. I am especially grateful to James Wilce for his keen advice on how to refine central elements of the argument and his guidance toward relevant, fruitful literature. The following people contributed significantly to the essay's development (though its remaining flaws are very much my own): Giorgio Bertellini, Webb Keane, Daniel Listoe, Beth Reed, Douglas Rogers, Michael Sosin, and Sarah Womack. I'd also like to thank the University of Chicago Anthropology Department, Center for Gender Studies, Committee on Human Development, and School of Social Service Administration for opportunities to present (and rethink) earlier versions. The research reported here was conducted with the support of a training fellowship from the National Institute of Mental Health and various grants from the Department of Anthropology, the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, the Program in Women's Studies, Rackham Graduate School, and the School of Social Work, all at the University of Michigan. This essay is for “Lila.”

This article examines data drawn from a 2001 Ontario (Canada) provincial inquiry into the deaths of seven people as a result of water contamination in a small Ontario town. The examination focuses on question-answer sequences in which the premier of Ontario, Michael Harris, attempted to resist lawyers' attempts to control and restrict his responses. In particular, on the basis of the data it is argued that the power of cross-examining lawyers does not reside solely in their ability to ask controlling and restrictive questions of witnesses, but rather is crucially dependent on their ability to compel witnesses to produce straightforward, or “type-conforming,” answers to these controlling and restrictive questions. The witness whose testimony is analyzed was not compelled to produce answers that logically conformed to the form of the lawyers' questions (i.e., “yes” or “no”) and, as a result, often usurped control over the topical agenda of the proceedings. In this sense, the present work builds on Eades's conclusion that “we cannot rely on question form to discover how witnesses are controlled.”A previous version of this article was presented at Sociolinguistics Symposium 15, Newcastle, U.K., in April 2004. We thank audience members at that conference and two reviewers for Language in Society for comments on previous versions. The research on which this article is based was funded in part by a SSHRCC Regular Research Grant (#410-2000-1330) to the first author.

Scholars have long understood that linkages between the identities of actors and the design of their actions in interaction constitute one of the central mechanisms by which social patterns are produced. Although a range of empirical approaches has successfully grounded claims regarding the significance of various forms or types of identity (gender, sex, race, ethnicity, class, familial status, etc.) in almost every form of social organization, these analyses have mostly focused on aggregated populations, aggregated interactions, or historical periods that have been (in different ways) abstracted from the particulars of singular episodes of interaction. By contrast, establishing the mechanisms by which a specific identity is made relevant and consequential in any particular episode of interaction has remained much more elusive. This article develops a range of general analytic resources for explicating how participants in an interaction can make relevant and consequential specific identities in particular courses of action. It then illustrates the use of these analytic resources by examining a phone call between two friends, one of whom relevantly embodies “grandparent” as an identity. The conclusion offers observations prompted by this analysis regarding basic contingencies that characterize self-other relationships, and the role of generic grammatical resources in establishing specific identities and intimate relationships.

This article examines some issues facing the fieldworker attempting to observe and record “natural” conversations, and it reconsiders the long-held sociolinguistic notion of the observer's paradox by recasting it within Allan Bell's framework of audience design theory. Style shifting in observed and recorded speech events is seen to be influenced by speakers' perception of the fieldworker's social role, and by the fieldworker's participant role in the speech event.An earlier and much briefer version of this article was presented at the 2002 Berkeley Linguistics Society conference. I am most grateful to Barbara Johnstone, Jane Hill, and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful and helpful comments. Funding for this fieldwork was provided by grants from the International Research and Exchange Board, the Academy for Educational Development, and the Berkeley Program in Post-Soviet Studies.

Miriam A. Locher, Power and politeness in action: Disagreements in oral communication. Language, Power and Social Process, 12. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2004. Pp. xvi, 365. Pb.

This is a study of the interface between power and politeness as manifested in verbal disagreements. It begins with a number of chapters devoted to a discussion of the key concepts that define the author's theoretical conceptualization of social interaction. These concepts are power, communication, relational work, and politeness. The author then applies the model to four (transcribed) interactions. The first, and most extensively analyzed, is a dinner conversation among friends and acquaintances. The second is an organizational meeting in a physics laboratory. The final two come from official transcripts of a radio interview of President Clinton and Supreme Court proceedings relating to the vote count in the U.S presidential elections of 2000. Common to them all, in the author's view, are instances of disagreement.

In his review of Power and politeness in action: Disagreements in oral communication (2004), Douglas J. Glick raises two important points: (i) the issue of identifying politeness in language, and (ii) the ideological framework employed in language analysis. Before explicating my understanding of politeness, I need to clarify that in chap. 5 on disagreements, as Glick has noted, I do indeed focus on linguistic strategies to express different points of view without discussing politeness. For example, I deliberately refrain from labeling strategies such as boosting or hedging as more or less polite. In other words, I do not wish to imply that I have already witnessed manifestations of politeness by simply identifying hedged utterances (or indirectness), nor that I have witnessed impoliteness by identifying unmitigated linguistic strategies (or directness). In this way, my approach to politeness differs significantly from the more classical view, initiated by Brown & Levinson 1987 and followed by many others, which equates mitigation with politeness and directness with impoliteness. Conversely, in my understanding, I use “mitigation” as a purely technical term, and I make no claim that any given linguistic form is inherently polite or impolite.

Aneta Pavlenko & Adrian Blackledge (eds.), Negotiation of identities in multilingual contexts. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2004. Pp. 312. Hb $44.95.

This is one of the best books I have read this year. The topic is up to date and relevant for many contexts. Each author contributes to the originality of this edited book. The editors, Pavlenko & Blackledge, have done a wonderful job in putting together a series of texts that demonstrate how negotiation of identities is embedded within larger socioeconomic, sociohistoric and sociopolitical contexts. In order to situate their own framework, the editors start by examining different approaches to the negotiation of identities in multilingual contexts. The sociopsychological approach examines the negotiation of identities in second language learning and language use. However, this approach treats learning trajectories as linear and unidirectional, with little acknowledgment of the fact that learning language and identity building are more complex. Interactional sociolinguistics focuses on the negotiation of identities via code-switching and language choice. This approach sees social identities as more fluid and constructed through linguistic and social interaction. However, even though much sociolinguistic research examines the negotiation of languages choices and identities in multilingual contexts, Pavlenko & Blackledge claim that few have tried to theorize it. In this book, they propose a poststructuralist and critical theory approach to negotiation of identities. Based on the work of Gal 1989, Heller 1988, 1992, 1995a, 1995b, and Woolard 1985, 1989, 1998, the editors argue that language choice in multilingual contexts is embedded in larger social, political, economic, and cultural systems. Their interest is in how languages are used to legitimize, challenge and negotiate specific identities, and to open new identity options for groups and individuals who are subjugated. Their framework combines aspects of the social constructionist approach, which focuses on discursive construction of identities, and the poststructuralist emphasis on power relations. The editors explain in detail what they mean by identities embedded within power relations with the work of Bourdieu. They also focus on identity narratives that reconstruct the links among past, present, and future, and they impose coherence where it was missing.

Colin B. Grant (ed.), Rethinking communicative interaction: New interdisciplinary horizons. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2003. Pp. 325. Hb, $95.

Reading Rethinking communicative interaction (henceforth RCI), I realized that the final word of the subtitle, “horizons,” is an accurate allusion to the main difficulty and contribution of the book: the quest for interdisciplinarity. RCI advances the idea of communication as a fiction; the same applies to interdisciplinarity, a commonplace in the social sciences to which RCI at least contributes a “programme,” as Colin Grant suggests in his Introduction, acknowledging the difficulties of “pluri-disciplinariety.” A wealth of sources to advance such an ambitious project is presented. RCI develops key methods to fulfill the interdisciplinary endeavor: ways of bridging the macro and micro gap by studying the connection of the self's participation in the social construction of the communicative process and the interplay between linguistic and biological facts in human evolution and language acquisition, among others.

Lindsay Amthor Yotsukura, Negotiating moves: Problem presentation and resolution in Japanese business discourse. Oxford: Elsevier, 2003. Pp. xxi, 370. Hb $85.00.

Negotiating moves contributes to the understanding of typical negotiation strategies shared by Japanese business professionals, with an emphasis on empiricism. Given that only anecdotal evidence is available from prior investigations of Japanese conflict management, Yotsukura conducted her study based on a large number of naturally occurring interactions extracted from more than 540 authentic business calls at companies in the Kanto (eastern) and Kansai (western) regions of Japan. Major thrusts of this study include its ingenious framework of analysis, which goes beyond the traditional “context-free” approach of conversation analysis (CA) (p. 2). It integrates ethnographic dimensions into analyses and interpretations and adapts the Bakhtinian notion of speech genres. Genres are derived from commonalities and shared communicative activities that native speakers are assumed to develop through recurring experiences in their everyday lives. This study also rigorously explores cultural reasons why Japanese people behave linguistically in certain ways, based on some metalinguistic traits unique to the culture. While it may be quite debatable whether all of these theses bear fruit in research outcomes, the actual negotiating processes to which Japanese business professionals typically resort are well documented and described in a manner comprehensible even to a general audience, as well as to learners of Japanese as a foreign language.

Neil DeVotta, Blowback: Linguistic nationalism, institutional decay, and ethnic conflict in Sri Lanka. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004. Pp. 204. Hb $55.00, Pb $22.95.

In this well-argued analysis of linguistic nationalism and ethnic conflict, Neil DeVotta places more weight on language than do most other accounts of conflict and civil war in Sri Lanka. DeVotta's main argument is that language politics informed by linguistic nationalism was not just one among several forces leading to the breakdown of peaceful coexistence of the Sinhalese and Tamil communities of the island, but indeed the single most important cause of the conflict and its later violent manifestations. Accordingly, the 1956 decision by the Colombo government to declare Sinhala the sole national language of Sri Lanka represents the crucial turning point in the relationship between ethnic Sinhalese and Tamils on the island. DeVotta argues that the 1956 Official Language Act was motivated by a desire among leaders of the Sinhalese majority to facilitate socioeconomic mobility among their ethnic constituency, and that it subsequently prompted further ethnocentric legislation openly favoring the interests of the ethnic majority at the expense of the Tamil minority. This inability of Sinhalese leaders to compromise in turn led to a severe loss of confidence in the government and other state institutions among Tamils, who began to experience the Sri Lankan state as an alien entity. Finally, this process of “institutional decay” set off by the 1956 imposition of Sinhala as sole official language in state institutions and education then provoked separatist Tamil nationalism and a spiral of violence culminating in a devastating civil war.

Maya Hickmann, Children's discourse: Person, space and time across languages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp.vii, 392. Hb $55.

This monograph explores the universality and variability of the language acquisition processes. Arguing that universal learning mechanisms, on the one hand, or innate capacities within specific domains, on the other, are incomplete as theoretical explanations, this book addresses two major questions regarding first language acquisition: What structural and functional factors determine the acquisition process? What are the universal and language-specific aspects of this process? (p. 1).

Hubert Devonish, Talking rhythm stressing tone: The role of prominence in Anglo-West African Creole languages. Kingston, Jamaica: Arawak Publications, 2002. Pp. 192. Pb $20.00.

Talking rhythm stressing tone attempts to accomplish two equally significant aims. First, it attempts an exposition of a theory of prominence that provides a coherent synthesis of diverse views on phonological prominence. Second, it attempts an explanation of the structure of some prosodic features of Anglo-West African creoles using this theory. The proposals of the theory of prominence provide fresh insights into issues such as moracity, tone and stress assignment, and syntax-tone interaction. The theory proposes that well-known issues such as the association of stress and tone with moras or positions within a domain in languages result from phonological prominence effects. This is the first time an integrated approach, in the form of prominence theory, has been proposed to look at these issues.

Herbert L. Colston & Albert N. Katz (eds.), Figurative language comprehension: Social and cultural influences. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2005. Pp. xi, 347. Hb $89.95.

The field of psycholinguistics has a history of ignoring sociocultural factors and, to a lesser extent, figurative language. By choosing to focus on both, this book deals simultaneously with two relatively marginalized areas of language processing. This fact alone makes the book an important and welcome contribution. Excluding the first chapter (an overview by one of the editors, Herbert Colston), the book contains twelve articles that cover a range of figurative language phenomena and a host of sociocultural variables. The phenomena discussed include irony, metaphor, and proverbs; the variables include gender, occupational roles, and social status.

Elizabeth Gordon, Lyle Campbell, Jennifer Hay, Margaret Maclagan, Andrea Sudbury & Peter Trudgill, New Zealand English: Its history and evolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xix, 370. Hb $85.00.

Between 1946 and 1948, Radio New Zealand established a Mobile Unit that visited many towns throughout the country, seeking out people who were longtime residents of small towns in order to record their oral histories. In 1986 Elizabeth Gordon was told of these archived recordings. The uniqueness of this data corpus is that the speakers, born between 1851 and 1904, were all participants in the formation of a new dialect, New Zealand English (NZE). It is unlikely that other data sets will be found in which tape recording technology and a first generation of speakers come together. English had arrived in 1840 with the original colonizers, who were mainly English, Scottish, and Irish. The story gets complicated by the arrival of many English-speaking immigrants from Australia, descendants from a penal colony founded in 1788, which had formed its own new dialect earlier with input from English, Scottish, and Irish settlers. Moreover, settlers often spent time first in Australia and then moved to New Zealand, and there was considerable contact between Australia and New Zealand from the start. It is within this historical setting and with this database that the Origins of New Zealand English (ONZE) project researchers set out to describe early NZE in order to examine its origins.

Alan Davies & Catherine Elder (eds.), The handbook of applied linguistics. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. Pp. viii, 866. Hb $139.95.

The Handbook of Applied Linguistics is the latest in the Blackwell Handbooks in Linguistics Series, which covers the major subdisciplines within linguistics. The previous 16 volumes have provided an extensive state-of-the-art overview of areas ranging from Child Language to Morphology, and from Contemporary Semantic Theory to Language and Gender. This latest volume collects 32 articles within the field of applied linguistics, adding to the list of recent major publications in applied linguistics (e.g., Cook 2003, Gass & Makoni 2004, Kaplan 2002, McCarthy 2001) that, with varying emphases, demonstrate the broad range of the discipline as well as indicating some of the different ways in which it can be conceptualized.

Philip Glenn, Laughter in interaction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xi, 190, Hb $75.00.

Drawing on extant research in conversation analysis (CA) and other fields, Glenn's entry in the “Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics” series is both an excellent introduction to CA for those outside the field and an interesting exploration of the social phenomenon of laughter. The first chapter gives a general survey of the research, which has often focused on the physicality of laughter and its relation to humor. Ultimately, however, the chapter suggests a function of laughter beyond expressing amusement: affiliation with co-participants in social interaction. In chap. 2, Glenn provides a helpful outline of CA. He emphasizes CA's focus on participants' perspectives and provides a cogent explanation for CA's meticulous transcription conventions with the example of silences, marked on CA transcripts in tenths of seconds. To leave them out, he argues, would be to assume from the beginning that silences in talk mean nothing (p. 37) – an idea that most competent talkers, let alone CA researchers, would reject out of hand.

Stuart Greene & Dawn Abt-Perkins (eds.), Making race visible: Literacy research for cultural understanding. New York & London: Teachers College Press, 2003. Pp. xi, 220. Hb $52.00, Pb $24.95.

Making race visible: Literacy research for cultural understanding (2003) reveals that racialized ways of thinking, relating, and teaching continue to be integral aspects of our society and our schools. An important task for researchers and practitioners concerned with social justice is the examination of race and racism, and this is the primary undertaking of the authors who contributed to this volume. It presents research conducted both by university-based scholars and by practitioners (teachers who are doing research), providing rich insights from a variety of perspectives. In examining issues of race and racism in literacy instruction, the authors included have four main objectives: to study local literacy practices through long-term commitments to communities; to acknowledge and theorize their own racialized positions as literacy researchers; to examine the ethics of their research agendas; and finally, to use literacy research for positive social change.

Darrell T. Tryon & Jean-Michel Charpentier, Pacific pidgins and creoles: Origins, growth and development. (Trends in Linguistics, Studies and Monographs 132). Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter, 2004. Pp. xix, 559. Hb $123.20.

The authors of this substantial volume each have more than 30 years of research experience in the Pacific region, primarily in Melanesia – especially Vanuatu (formerly the New Hebrides). This focus is reflected in the content. Despite the title, the book deals only with Pacific pidgins and creoles that are lexified by English, thus leaving out, for example, Tayo (a French-lexified creole of New Caledonia). Furthermore, it concentrates almost entirely on the three dialects of Melanesian Pidgin: Tok Pisin (Papua New Guinea), Pijin (Solomon Islands), and Bislama (Vanuatu), with an emphasis on the latter.

Gene Lerner (ed.), Conversation analysis: Studies from the first generation. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004. Pp. 300. Hb $138.00, Pb $65.95.

Conversation analysis developed in the mid to late 1960s in a collaboration initially between Harvey Sacks and Emanuel Schegloff and, somewhat later, with the addition of Gail Jefferson. By the early 1970s, several students joined the group, by this point based at the University of California campuses at Irvine and Los Angeles, to form what Lerner calls “the first generation.” Conversation analysis has continued to grow, indeed has flourished, in the years since. Today conversation analysts are to be found not only in the United Stated, Canada, and the United Kingdom, but also Japan, Korea, Germany, Finland, the Netherlands, and many other countries. There are conversation analysts in departments of sociology, linguistics, anthropology, communication, and psychology, as well as in many modern language and applied programs. The widespread success of conversation analysis is largely attributable to three characteristics of its research program:

Ho Wah Kam & Ruth Y. L. Wong (eds.), English language teaching in East Asia today: Changing policies and practices. 2nd ed. Singapore: Eastern Universities Press, 2004. Pp. 474. Hb $30.00.

Ho Wah Kam & Ruth Y. L. Wong (eds.), Language policies and language education: The impact in East Asian countries in the next decade. 2nd ed. Singapore: Eastern Universities Press, 2004. Pp. 384. Hb $30.00.

These two volumes, edited by two distinguished scholars in language education from Singapore, provide basic, essential, up-to-date information about the language situations and development of English language teaching in East Asian countries. Together they form a valuable encyclopedic reference work that will give scholars, teachers, and language policy makers a bigger picture of the Asian region through which they can better understand the position of their own countries and learn from the experience of others. Although the two volumes can be read independently, it is more logical to sequence Language policies and language education before English language teaching in East Asia today because the former provides an overview of language policies and language education in the region from a macro perspective, which helps to set out the necessary contextual background for a micro exploration into issues of English language teaching in the second volume. The editors take pride in the fact that the two books provide an “insiders' perspective,” meaning that all the country-based chapters were written by scholars who have lived in the given country for a long time. Indeed, this helps to establish high credibility for the information provided. On the good foundation that these two volumes have laid, comparative studies across countries in the region can be conducted more easily and efficiently.