This article presents an analysis of gender differences in the use of compliments in one genre of written discourse. The data base is a set of 47 peer reviews of academic papers written by graduate students in the form of letters. Drawing on work from several theoretical perspectives, we analyzed the forms, strategies, and discourse functions of compliments in these papers. We found that women made significantly greater use of compliment intensifiers and personal referencing than did men. In using compliments to structure discourse, women more often framed the text with both opening and closing compliments. Consistent patterns suggested that women writers accommodated to the gender of their addressee more than did men, resulting in a discernible female-female complimenting style. The study illustrates specific ways that gender is involved in being polite and in creating and sustaining a sense of involvement in written discourse. (Complimenting, politeness, sociolinguistics, gender, discourse strategies, cross-sex communication, English)

Speakers' Corner is a multicultural setting in a London park at which the general public can actively participate in popular debate. A successful “soap-box” orator should attract and keep an audience, elicit support from the crowd, and gain applause; indeed, a mastery of the crowd, the discourse, and the message is highly valued. However, although talk resources are deployed sensitively by speakers to elicit group affiliation and response, they are also exploitable by hecklers as resources for launching heckles and disaffiliative responses. Audiences at Speakers' Corner are not passive receivers of rhetorical messages; they are active negotiators of interpretations and alignments that may support, resist, or conflict with the speaker's and other audience members' orientations to prior talk. Using transcribed examples of video data recorded at Speakers' Corner, the timing, format, and sequential organization of heckling are described and analyzed with the tools and methods of conversation analysis. (Conversation analysis, audience response, popular public discourse, political speech, heckle)

In this study we address ethnolinguistic identity using Bakhtin's (1981) notion of chronotope. Taking an ethnographic approach to linguistic data from Azerbaijani and Uzbek communities, we trace the impact of various chronotopes on our participants’ acts of ethnolinguistic identification. Building on Blommaert & De Fina (2017), we illustrate how ethnolinguistic identification is an outcome of the interaction between multiple levels of large- and small-scale chronotopes. Furthermore, we argue that chronotopes differ in terms of their power, depending on the ideological force behind them. We demonstrate how power differentials between chronotopes can account for certain interactional and linguistic patterns in conversation. The power inherent in chronotopes that link nationhood with specific languages makes the notions of discrete languages and static identities ‘real’ for our participants. Therefore, discussions of language and identity as flexible and socially constructed, we argue, must not obscure the power of these notions in shaping the perceptions of sociolinguistic subjects. (Chronotope, ethnolinguistic identity, power, Uzbek, Azeri/Azerbaijani, nationalism, language mixing, language ideology)*

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)

This study investigates cases of language ‘policing’ as educational language policies, and the way that these are represented across different policy levels. Focusing on UK schools and using discursive approaches to language policy as a theoretical framework, I critically examine the motivations and justifications that institutions provide for designing and implementing policies whereby nonstandardised forms are ‘banned’, and how these are reported in metalinguistic discourse. Drawing on a range of data including media discourse, policy documents, teacher interviews and linguistic landscapes, I textually trace how educational language policies (re)produce prescriptive and linguicist ideologies, often using metaphors of crime, and often using language as a proxy for social factors such as academic achievement, employability, and standards. Overall, I argue that micro- and meso-level language policies are a partial product of the linguistic conservatism as found within current macro-level educational policy. (Language policy, language policing, schools, language ideologies)*

Since linguistic and anthropological study of sign languages began in the 1960s, most research has focused on national sign languages, with scant attention paid to indigenous and original sign languages. Vulnerable to extinction, the latter varieties can expand our understanding of language universals, language typologies, historical comparative linguistics, and other areas. Using Thailand as a case study and drawing on three examples – a rare phonological form, basic color terminology, and baby talk/motherese – from Ban Khor Sign Language, an indigenous signed code, this article describes the problem of benign neglect of sign languages in current discussions of language endangerment and argues for the importance of expanding such discussions to include codes expressed in the manual-visual channel.The linguistic field research upon which this article is based was funded by the Endangered Language Fund, the Explorers Club, IIE Fulbright, Sign Language Research Inc., the Thai-U.S. Educational Foundation, the UCLA Department of Anthropology, the UCLA Office of International Studies and Overseas Programs, the UCLA Wagatsuma Memorial Fund, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. I wish to thank the following individuals and groups for their assistance in various phases of the project: Alexis Altounian, Poonpit Amatyakul, Jean Ann, Wendy Belcher, Ursula Bellugi, Steve Bickler, Ken Kamler, Peter Ladefoged, Tuanvu Le, Chettah Madminggao, Nutjaree Madminggao, Marina McIntire, Carmella Moore, Pam Munro, Carol Padden, Diana Pash, Nilawan Pitipat, Claire Ramsey, Chip Reilly, Olga Solomon, Kelly Stack, Laura Sterponi, Viphavee Vongpumivitch, and Akira Yamamoto. Special thanks belong to Vien Champa, Lahsee Khammee, Jintala Anuyahong, Anucha Ratanasint, Khwanta Sukhwan, Nipha Sukhwan, Phaiwan Sukhwan, Kampol Suwanarat, Thanu Wongchai, James C. Woodward, the Ratchasuda Foundation, the National Association of the Deaf in Thailand, and, of course, the community of Ban Khor.

Aboriginal Australians are celebrated for their use of linguistic devices to mark the subtleties of social situation and relationship. Three sorts of phenomenon are widely reported (see Capell 1962; Dixon 1972: 19): (1) special vocabulary is often associated with male initiation (see, for example, Hale 1971); (2) there is often extensive word tabooing, usually involving strict prohibition on names of deceased people, as well as on words that sound like such names (for examples of such practices across Cape York Peninsula, see Roth 1903); and (3) many societies have so-called ‘Mother-in-law’ languages – special vocabularies that replace all or part of the normal lexicon in speech between kin who stand in certain avoidance relationships to one another. Prototypically across the continent, a man must avoid his own mother-in-law. Such vocabularies have been reported from widely separated areas, but the most detailed and best-known descriptions involve languages of North Queensland (see Thomson 1935; Dixon 1971, 1972). The material I discuss in this paper is of the last type and comes also from Cape York Peninsula.

The relationship between linguistic processes, cognitive activities, and social structures is explored by examining the decision making of committees of educators as they decide to place students into special education programs or retain them in regular classrooms. Often, different committee members enter committee meetings with different views of the student's case and its disposition, e.g., classroom teachers and parents provide accounts of the student's performance that compete with the view of the psychologist or district representative. Yet by the meeting's end, the version of the student's case provided by the psychologist or the district representative prevails.

In urban American telephone conversations, we propose, the final exchange of goodbyes doesn't terminate the conversation per se but brings to completion a process of leave-taking in which the two parties reaffirm their acquaintance before breaking contact. This process is optional, so that if the two parties are not acquainted, they should omit the process and not exchange goodbyes. We tested this proposal by examining goodbyes offered to operators in routine inquiries to a university switchboard. In requests for a single number, callers offered goodbye only 39 percent of the time. This percentage increased, however, (1) when callers asked for more personally revealing information, (2) when callers felt more appreciation for the information they received, as indicated by their use of thank you very much instead of thank you, and (3) when operators revealed more about themselves by making and then correcting their own mistakes. These and other findings suggest that the more closely acquainted the caller and operator feel they have become, the more likely the caller is to want to reaffirm acquaintance and say goodbye.

This article examines the interactional construction of language competence in bilingual immigrant communities. The focus is on how participants in social interaction resolve problems of understanding that are demonstrably rooted in their divergent linguistic and cultural expertise. Using the methodology of conversation analysis to examine mundane video-recorded conversations in Russian-American immigrant families, I describe a previously unanalyzed communicative practice for solving understanding problems: by one participant enacting the role of a language broker in a repair sequence. The article thus contributes to the existing research on the interactional construction of language competence, on the one hand, and on the organization of repair and its relationship to social epistemics, on the other. (Language brokering, repair, conversation analysis, social epistemics, multiparty conversation, Russian, immigrant families, intercultural communication)*

This article examines how so-called ordinary or casual conversational practices in the contemporary United States are constrained and structured in terms of where, when, how, and with whom people choose and are able to interact socially. The focus of analysis is the middle-class sociolinguistic practice of “coffeetalk” – a term borrowed from U.S. popular culture to signal the naturalized conflation of conversation with the commercialized consumption of coffee, space, and other commodities. The discussion of coffeetalk involves research methods including critical analyses of the marketing rhetoric of coffeehouse corporations; informal interviews with coffeehouse owners, employees and patrons; and the author's observations as a “native” participant in coffeetalk and other commodified modes of middle-class social interaction. By situating coffeetalk within its spatial, temporal and social contexts, this analysis challenges the claim of some sociolinguists that conversation is a “naturally occurring” phenomenon that is ontologically prior to other speech genres. A systematic investigation of the material and social dimensions of seemingly ordinary conversational practices demonstrates that these are inextricably implicated in the political, economic, and cultural-ideological processes of global capitalism, as symbolized by the increasingly ubiquitous Starbucks Coffee Company.

A general address term in Communist China, the Chinese word tongzhi ‘comrade’ was appropriated by gay rights activists in Hong Kong to refer to members of sexual minorities. It has positive connotations of respect, equality, and resistance. This article focuses on the reappropriation of this word by a mainstream newspaper in Hong Kong. The parodic use of tongzhi allows journalists to ridicule gay rights activists so as to increase the entertainment value of news stories. At the same time, it mocks activists' demand for equality and may lead to the pejoration of the term. This study provides synchronic evidence for sociolinguistic accounts that explain how lexical items may undergo pejoration because of the context of their use. It shows that because the meaning potential of a word is not bounded by the intentions of its users, words that marginalized groups have appropriated can be resignified yet again in hateful contexts.An earlier version of this article was presented at the First IGALA (International Gender and Language Association) Conference at Stanford in May 2000 and was published in the proceedings of that conference. I would like to thank Penny Eckert, Jane Hill, Miyako Inoue, Don Kulick, Sally McConnell-Ginet, John Rickford, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions.

Proper names have often been discussed by philosophers of language without the benefit of anthropological insights. This article combines research from these two fields in order to move toward a theory of naming as social practice – emphasizing the nature of naming and nicknaming as it is crucially attached to cultural history, social context, and individual experience. To exemplify this notion, the article outlines naming and its various functions as described by and used in the narratives of one young man from the “Diamond Street” gang who goes by the nickname “Little Creeper.” A discussion of outsiders' interpretations of gang names indicates how the meaning of a name can be transformed in different social contexts without losing its association with the initial referent. (Naming practices, proper names, ideology and language, at-risk youth)

This paper attempts to demonstrate direct links between Australian language and other aspects of Australian culture. The existence of such links – intuitively obvious and yet notoriously hard to prove – is often rejected in the name of scientific rigor (“if they can't be proved then it is better either to assume that they don't exist or at least not to talk about them”). Nonetheless, the problem continues to exercise fascination over scholars, as it does over the general public. The author proposes ways in which the linguist's methodological tools can be sharpened so that the apparently untractable and yet fundamental issues of “language as a guide to social reality” can be studied in ways which are both linguistically precise and culturally revealing. Linguistic phenomena such as expressive derivation, illocutionary devices, and speech act verbs are related to the literature on the Australian society, “national character,” history, and culture. (Ethnolinguistics, Whorfian hypothesis, Australian English, speech acts, expressive derivation, names)

Doctor–parent–child interaction is analyzed in terms of Brown and Levinson's (1978) theory on facework and politeness. The determinism of the Brown and Levinson (B & L) model is discussed in terms of the present data, which show how discourse is a matter of continuous negotiation between participants. For instance, it is shown how the on record/off record distinction is best understood sequentially. When doctors seem to sense that respectful indirectness does not work, they tend to phrase their requests in an increasingly direct fashion. Hence, the full meaning of doctors' directives is revealed only via the outcome of social interaction, regulated by both parties (doctor and patient/spokesperson). This means that utterances must be analyzed sequentially (and not in a mechanistic, static fashion). Moreover, discourse cannot be understood in terms of any unidirectional social determinism. It is also shown here how doctors can talk to parents through children, as it were. Within a joking relationship format with the child, it is possible for a doctor to convey potentially offensive information to the child's parent. Doctors' moves can thus be seen as direct or indirect depending on type of addressee perspective (parent as participant or as side-participant). The pediatric multiparty setting thus highlights the impossibility of a more formalistic application of the B & L model. (Politeness, facework, negotiations, medical discourse, child discourse)

On the basis of data collected during a year-long study of a Congressional campaign in California in the mid-1990s, this article uses semantic, pragmatic, and narrative analysis to show how candidates for political office construct and defend the coherence of their actions, including their choice to run for office. First, semantic and pragmatic analysis is used to discuss two charges of lack of coherence against one candidate. Second, three discursive strategies used by candidates for building existential coherence are identified: (i) constructing a narrative of belonging; (ii) casting the present as a natural extension of the past; and (iii) exposing potential contradictions in order to show how to solve them. After examining the extent to which each strategy is common across candidates and situations, it is shown that candidates who frame themselves as “independent” tend to use these strategies more than those who choose to identify more closely with a party's platform and ideology.The research on which this article is based was in part supported by two small grants from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1996–1997 and 1997–1998, and by a John Simon Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship supplemented by funds from UCLA during the 1999–2000 academic year. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Discourse Lab in the Department of Anthropology at UCLA on 2 June 2004. I thank my colleagues and students for their generous feedback and comments. Among my research assistants over the years, special thanks go to Jeff Storey, Sarah Meacham, and Jennifer Reynolds for their help in transcribing the talk in dozens of videotapes I recorded. I am also indebted to Anjali Browning for her careful reading of the first draft of this article. Some of the data and ideas presented in this article were first introduced in a number of seminars, workshops, and conferences at the University of Rome “La Sapienza,” the University of Florence, and the University of California at Santa Barbara. I would like to thank the participants in those events for their engagement with this material and their comments. I am also grateful to Jane Hill, former editor of Language in Society, and three anonymous reviewers for specific suggestions on how to improve the organization and content of the article. A number of people made the project on which this article is based possible and a rewarding experience. First and foremost, I am deeply indebted to the late Walter Capps and to his wife Lois Capps – now Rep. Lois Capps (D-California) – and to their extended family for letting me enter their home and giving me access to their lives as they experienced an extraordinary series of events. I am also very grateful to Walter's brother, Doug Capps, who was Walter's campaign manager in 1996 and has continued over the years to be my liaison with the rest of the Capps family. Others members of the Capps-for-Congress campaign staff I could rely on for information include Bryant Wieneke, always most generous with his time, Steve Boyd, Thu Fong, and Lindsey Capps. After Walter Capps's death, I benefited from conversations with Capps's colleague and friend Richard Hecht, professor and former chair of the Department of Religious Studies at UCSB. I am also grateful to the 1995–1996 Independent candidate Steven Wheeler, who, in June 1998, consented to meet with me and to being interviewed. This project was born out of conversations with Walter Capps's daughter Lisa while she was a graduate student at UCLA. She remained a strong supporter of my efforts to capture her father's adventure in politics after she accepted a position in psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, and even during the last year of her life, as she struggled with cancer. This article is dedicated to her memory.

The analysis of videotaped naturally occurring adult—child interaction led to the isolation of the clarification request as a consistent feature of adult interactive styles. The analysis of the form and function of adult clarification requests demonstrated the importance of the interactive demands adults encounter when interacting with young children. The nature of these interactive demands and how adults deal with them are discussed in regard to Cicourel's (1970) notion of interpretive procedures. Finally, a discussion of the possible effects of adult interactive style on the child's development of communicative competence is presented. (Developmental sociolinguistics, conversational analysis, adult—child interaction, US English.)

Storytelling is among the most common forms of discourse in human communication. The increasing influence of technology in our life is having a significant impact on the types of narrative that are told and on the way they are produced and received. In order to understand such impact we need to approach the discursive study of narrative from a perspective that privileges participant practices rather than texts. This is the approach taken in the present article, which analyzes a specific aspect of storytelling practice: audience participation within a blog open to comments. Using the notions of participation frameworks and frames as starting points, the analysis examines the frame focus of comments, the interactional dynamics established by participants among themselves, the tone of messages, and the media used in messages. Among the most important findings is a significant enhancement of reflexivity in comments as participants engage with the storytelling world much more than with the taleworld. (Narrative, story, storytelling, social media, participation frameworks, computer-mediated communication)*

Two hypotheses associated with Benjamin Lee Whorf, W1, or the linguistic relativity hypothesis, and W2, or the linguistic determinism hypothesis, have overshadowed a third, W3, that champions ethnolinguistic diversity for the benefit of pan–human creativity, problem solving and mutual cross-cultural acceptance. With respect to W3, Whorf is a disciple of Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803) with whom he shares many themes and basic perspectives. It may be that different basic methodologies and philosophies of science, particularly those that distinguish linear, quantitative experimentalism from the reborn holistic and ethnographic stress on meaning, will ultimately make it just as difficult to conclude what has been empirically demonstrated with respect to W3 as it already is with respect to W1 and, particularly, W2. Nevertheless, W:3 has a valuable humanizing and sensitizing effect on the language-related disciplines. Indeed, in that respect it may well have value above and beyond its scientific validity. (Whorfian hypothesis, Johann Gottfried Herder, multilingualism/multiculturalism, methodology–theory relationships in the language sciences.)

In the past five years, there has been much interest in the question of whether women are really as concerned about politeness and status as they have been made out to be by such writers as Baroni and D'Urso (1984), Crosby and Nyquist (1977), Lakoff (1973), Spender (1980), and Trudgill (1972). Despite the commonly held perception that it is only males who bandy about derogatory and taboo words (Bailey 1985; Flexner 1975), Risch (1987) provided counterevidence based on data obtained in the United States. The results of the present study, based on data obtained in South Africa, strongly support her findings and challenge the assumption that women stick to standard speech, citing evidence that young females are familiar with, and use, a wide range of highly taboo/slang items themselves. In particular, attention is devoted to the question of pejorative words applicable to males and females, respectively, and the view that there are only a few pejorative terms commonly used to describe males (particularly by females) is challenged. (Women's language, politeness, linguistic taboo, stereotypes, slang, expletives, prestige forms).