Despite the relevance of language use in expert testimony, researchers have rarely scrutinized the linguistic and interactional processes of constructing an expert identity. This study, rather than reifying the concept of expert and leaving it as an unproblematic legal argument, examines how this institutional identity emerges in and through discursive interaction between the prosecuting attorney and a physician (who is also the defendant) in trial cross-examination. Using Goffman's notion of footing, the article examines how both prosecutor and defendant mobilize direct and indirect quotes, repetitive parallelism, epistemic modality, counterfactuals, evidentiality, sequencing, and specialized tokens of the medical register to contextualize shifting into and departing from an expert identity. I would like to thank the Office of Social Science Research at the University of Illinois at Chicago for financial help. Don Lance (as always) and Richard Cameron provided detailed comments and guidance throughout the course of writing. Thanks are due to Wayne Kerstetter, Mike Maltz, Pat McAnany, Joe Peterson, and Sarah Ullman for comments at an early presentation. Finally, I deeply appreciate the very detailed comments of Elizabeth Mertz and W. M. O'Barr, which I have tried to incorporate as much as possible.

This article argues that certain aspects of language use may be more resistant to change than is language code. In communities undergoing language shift, researchers have noted ways in which indigenous patterns of interaction may be retained after the language used has shifted to English. It is argued that aspects of a speech community's interaction that are most tacit are also the most resistant to change, and are maintained through mundane routines and forms of everyday interaction. Such contexts for language use typically are the focus in studies of language socialization, which bring the theoretical perspectives of both practice theory and Bakhtinian dialogicality to bear on the question of how interactional and linguistic routines are maintained and transmitted across generations. Analysis here focuses on one particular interactional routine: the giving of directives involving a triadic participation structure, between caregivers and children in a Navajo community.

This article discusses Turkish-German bilingual children's intonation patterns as they relate to processes of contact-induced language change. Bilingual speakers use two distinct rises in both Turkish and German. One rise (L*HH%) resembles a characteristic German rise, while the other (L%H%) resembles a characteristic Turkish rise. The rises pattern pragmatically in ways that are non-normative for both Turkish and German. Although this pattern is not clearly attributable to language interference (either borrowing or shift-induced language change), it is certainly the result of language contact. Fusion is proposed to account for the two-way influence between the two languages.

The most uniform and characteristic variety of Black English is the grammar used by members of the vernacular culture in pre-adolescent and adolescent years: the ‘Black English Vernacular’. Less regular varieties which show the influence of other dialects, are used by isolated individuals within the community (‘lames’) who are less familiar with vernacular norms. Rules that are categorical for the vernacular are often variable for lames. Within the vernacular peer groups, core members show the most regular or frequent use of characteristic rules such as the deletion of is. Since most linguists grow up relatively isolated individuals within their own communities, it is important that they become aware of the linguistic consequences of being lame, and apply this knowledge in their methodology.

Who's the lame who says he knows the game

And where did he learn to play?

– The Fall

In a study of dyadic conversations between four female and four male pairs of friends, the use of the phrase you know and questions are examined within three types of discourse. Women and men are found to use these features with equal frequency; and all speakers, regardless of sex or gender, use them in comparable ways. Although these particular discourse features have been previously associated with a female speech style, the results of this study show that it is the particular requirements associated with the three types of talk that motivate their use, and not the sex or gender of the individual speaker. The problems of generalizing about the characteristics of female or male speech, outside of a particular conversational context, are discussed; and it is shown that a gendered style cannot be adequately defined by counting individual speech variables removed from the specifics of the talk context. (Gender, questions, tag questions, discourse analysis, conversation analysis)

Recent work suggests the importance of integrating prosodic research with research on the sequential organization of ordinary conversation. This paper examines how interactants use prosody as a resource in the joint accomplishment of delivered news as good or bad. Analysis of approximately 100 naturally occurring conversational news deliveries reveals that both good and bad news are presented and received with characteristic prosodic features that are consistent with expression of joy and sorrow, respectively, as described in the existing literature on prosody. These prosodic features are systematically deployed in each of the four turns of the prototypical news delivery sequence. Proposals and ratifications of the valence of a delivery are often made prosodically in the initial turns of the prototypical four-turn news delivery, while lexical assessments of news are often made later. When prosody is used to propose the valence of an item of news, subsequent lexical assessments tend to be alignments with these earlier ascriptions of valence, rather than independent appraisals of the news. (Bad news, good news, conversation analysis, prosody, sequencing).

People sometimes extend invitations they don't intend to be taken seriously. We call these ostensible invitations. From a collection of spontaneous examples, we argue that they require: a pretense of sincerity by the speaker; mutual recognition of the pretense by speaker and addressee; collusion on the pretense by the addressee; ambivalence by the speaker about its acceptance; and an off-record purpose by the speaker. We describe seven techniques speakers use in fulfilling these requirements. We also show that speakers try to achieve their off-record purpose by getting addressees to recognize the expectable effects of the invitation, the situation, and the fact that they chose to extend an ostensible invitation. Finally, we argue that ostensible invitations are part of a class of ostensible speech acts, and these in turn are related to other types of nonserious language use. (Speech acts, pragmatics, off record, pretense, nonserious language use)

Ferguson's concept of diglossia and its later extension and coupling with bilingualism (Fishman et al.) is developed further into the concept of polyglossia with multilingualism by discussion of various speech communities where these phenomena are in evidence. A general model is suggested which could cope with cases of polyglossla by a continuum ranging from H(igh) varieties through M(edium) varieties to L(ow) varieties. Devices for status ranking of speech varieties are discussed and established. The general matrix is then applied to two of the special cases discussed previously, namely the English-educated Chinese communities of Singapore Malaysia.

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.”

After nearly two centuries of contact with Europeans, the Māori language of New Zealand was, by the 1960s, threatened with extinction. Accompanying a movement for ethnic revival, a series of grassroots regeneration efforts that established adult, preschool, and autonomous school immersion programs has over the past two decades increased substantially the number of Māori who know and use their language, but this has not yet led to the reestablishment of natural intergenerational transmission. More recently, responding to growing ethnic pressures, the New Zealand government has adopted a Māori language policy and is starting to implement it. Seen in its widest social, political, and economic context, this process can be understood not as colonial language loss followed by postcolonial reversing language shift activities, but as the continuation of a long process of negotiation of accommodation between autochthonous Māori and European settlers.

To investigate forms and functions of imprecise numerical expressions in biomedical slide talks, tokens were extracted from fifty-two talks presented at the 1979 annual meeting of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology. Imprecise expressions include rounding, extreme rounding (to multiples of five or ten), ranges (both explicit and implicit), common fractions, and common multiples, all of which can be hedged, either simply or multiply. Imprecision can be occasioned by factors such as preliminary nature of results, small number of experimental animals, questionably applicable technique or apparatus, and inability to measure all members of a class. Rhetorically, imprecision foregrounds other, more precise quantities which the experimenter considers important, and thus, it can be seen as modality. Imprecision marks the talks as preinformation in Ziman's model of the social production of science and also as simultaneous popularization and peer communication. (Biomedical slide talks, imprecise numerical expressions, scientific rhetoric, modality, Zimanian social production of science)

Kawaii, an adjective meaning ‘cute’, ‘adorable’, and ‘lovable’, is an important aspect of Japanese material culture and a key affect word used to describe things that are small, delicate, and immature. While “cuteness” has been widely discussed in relation to Japanese society and psychology and the globalization of Japanese culture, there has been little analysis of the word kawaii in interaction. This article explores the use of kawaii in interaction in a Japanese preschool. In particular, it analyzes ways teachers use multimodal resources, including talk, embodied actions, material objects, and participation frameworks, in making assessments of things in the social world and in “glossing” children’s actions as thoughts and feelings, and it examines children’s emerging use of kawaii with teachers and peers. The findings shed light on ways everyday communicative practices shape children’s understandings and use of language in relation to affect, gender, and relationships in preschool.*

The present study demonstrates how prosody – specifically, onset level – is deployed in situated interaction to cue frames of interpretation for talk. It shows not only that final pitch level in intonational contours is a relevant parameter, but also that, under certain conditions, initial pitch level may provide a situationally specific contextualization cue. In calls to radio phone-in programs, for instance, there is a so-called anchor position where callers can be expected to announce the reason for their calls. Close empirical analysis of data from such a program reveals that it is here that the first turn-constructional unit is routinely formatted with high onset. The studio moderator displays an orientation to this kind of prosodic formatting by withholding further talk until the caller has made a recognizably complete statement of the reason for the call. On occasion, turn-constructional units in anchor position are heard to lack a high onset. When this happens, the moderator responds in a way that shows he is not treating callers' talk as the reason for the call, but rather as a preface to the statement of reason.

The distribution of raised, nasalized variants of /æ/ in such words as hat, bag, and back in the speech of many Illinoisans cannot be explained by geographical or historical processes; rather the correlations are nearly isomorphic between raised variants of /æ/ and the size of the community in which the speaker was raised. Generally, the higher the variants, the more urban the speaker's background. Raised variants of /æ/ are discussed as they relate to contemporary sound change, to urban distributions, and to phonological context. (Urban dialects, sound change, American English, Illinois.)

A social dialect survey of a working-class suburb in New Zealand provides evidence that eh, a tag particle that is much stereotyped but evaluated negatively in NZ English, may persist in casual speech because it plays an important role as a positive politeness marker. It is used noticeably more by Maori men than by Maori women or Pakehas (British/European New Zealanders), and may function as an in-group signal of ethnic identity for these speakers. Young Pakeha women, though, seem to be the next highest users of eh. It is unlikely that they are using it to signal in-group identity in the same way; instead, it is possible that they are responding to its interpersonal and affiliative functions for Maori men, and are adopting it as a new facet in their repertoire of positive politeness markers. (Gender, ethnicity, politeness, New Zealand English, intergroup and interpersonal communication)

This article examines the text-metrical (“poetic”) organization of epistemic stance-taking in discourse, focusing on epistemic stance in a form of argumentation, Tibetan Buddhist ‘debate’ (rtsod pa) at Sera Monastery in India. Emergent text-metrical structures in discourse are shown to reflexively map utterance-level propositional stance into larger-scale, fractionally congruent models of interactional stance. In charting the movement from epistemic stance to interactional stance by way of poetic structure, the article argues for and clarifies the place of poetics in the study of stance.

Do linguistic identities formed in high school endure after adolescence? Do age-related linguistic differences represent community trends over historical time, or are they age-graded practices that change over biographical time? Catalan advocates worry that perceived Castilian dominance in adolescents' peer relations and media consumption forecasts the community's sociolinguistic future. To investigate the possibility of change in bilingual repertoires after adolescence, participants in a 1987 ethnographic study of high school students in metropolitan Barcelona were reinterviewed after twenty years. The reinterviews of L1 Castilian-speakers showed increased mastery and use of Catalan even among those who had been functionally monolingual and most resistant to Catalan in high school. Higher education, the workplace, romance, cosmopolitan travel, and parenthood were triggers of such postadolescent change in the linguistic repertoire. Informants produce a common narrative attributing linguistic transformations to maturational processes that reduce the shame and intolerance of difference that inhibit adolescent second language use. (Bilingualism, second language acquisition, longitudinal research, language and identity, adolescence, Catalan, Catalonia)*

Despite the importance of gender differences in the voice, sociolinguists have not paid sufficient attention to the sociolinguistic processes through which phonetic resources are mobilized in the construction of a gendered voice. This article argues that gender differences in the voice—including those influenced by physiology—are best understood as elements of sociolinguistic style rather than static properties. With a focus on transgender speakers in the early stages of masculinizing hormone therapy, the analysis demonstrates the complex interrelationship of the gendered meanings attributable to characteristics like fundamental frequency and /s/. Trans speakers challenge systems for categorizing voices as female or male, which assume that different aspects of the gendered voice will pattern together in normative ways. Yet a voice's gender is not a unidimensional feature, but a cluster of features that take on meaning only in context with one another, leaving them open for recombination and change through stylistic bricolage. (Transgender, style, gender, voice, pitch, sibilants)

This study examines bilingual discourse markers in a language contact situation. The focus is on how English-dominant, bilingual, and Spanish-dominant New York Puerto Ricans integrate English-language discourse markers into their Spanish-language oral narratives. The corpus comprises 60 Spanish-language oral narratives of personal experience extracted from transcripts of conversations with New York Puerto Ricans. After a review of the study of discourse markers in language contact situations, the use of English-language discourse markers is compared to the use of Spanish-language markers in the texts. The discussion considers the question of whether English-language discourse markers are more profitably identified as instances of code-switching or of borrowing. Finally, the essay explores how bilingual speakers integrate English discourse markers in their narratives with a pattern of usage and frequency that varies according to language proficiency.

This study investigates the generation and maintenance of multiple personal names in an Anglophone Creole-speaking community of Panama. Nearly every Afro-Panamanian resident of the island of Bastimentos has two given names, one Spanish-derived and the other Creole-derived. The Creole or “ethnic name” is virtually the exclusive name used locally for reference and address. It is argued that these ethnic names are preferred for reference and address because they reflexively define who members of this speech community are in terms of culture and ancestry. A typology of nicknames and pseudonyms as well as a brief cross-cultural presentation of multiple or alternative personal names is provided. Ethnic name usage in Bastimentos is discussed within an acts of identity framework.