It has been claimed that gossip allows participants to negotiate aspects of group membership, and the inclusion and exclusion of others, by working out shared values. This article examines instances of gossipy storytelling among young friends during which participants negotiate self- and other-identities in particular ways. Participants are found to share judgments not only about others' behavior but also about their own behavior through particular processes of othering. A range of discursive strategies place the characters in gossip-stories (even in the category called “self-gossip”) in marginalized, liminal, or uncertain social spaces. In the gossipy talk episodes examined, social “transgression” might be oriented to as a serious matter and thus pejorated, or oriented to in a playful key and thus celebrated. This ambiguity – “Do we disapprove or approve, of this ‘bad’ behavior?” – means that in negotiating the identity status of “gossipees” liminality is constant. It is argued that othering, as an emergent category, along with the particular discursive strategies that achieve it, is an aspect of gossip that deserves further attention.We thank Jane Hill, two anonymous reviewers, and especially Nik Coupland for their most helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. To clarify the title, from ex.(1), you can pull is British English; in American English perhaps the closest expression to pull is get with, proactively set up a link with someone, probably a sexual one, probably only for one evening or night.

The integration of 66 black Detroit inner-city residents (33 males and 33 females) into their neighborhood is measured quantitatively by a Vernacular Culture Index (VCI) constructed from the respondents' responses to 10 statements, each with values ranging from 1 to 4. The speech behaviors of these respondents with respect to variants of six linguistic variables (each with a black English [BE] and a colloquial Standard English variant) are quantified and the statistical relationships between the VCI scores and linguistic behavior are determined. The results of the study reveal that respondents in the older age groups (40–59, 60+) are more likely to choose BE variants than respondents in the younger age groups (18–25, 26–39), and that there are consistent statistically significant correlations between high scores on the VCI and the choice of BE variants of the linguistic variables. This is taken to support the proposal that the Social Network Theory approach, of which the VCI concept is a part, is capable of explaining intracommunity linguistic variation in socioeconomically homogeneous areas such as the black community studied. (Sociolinguistics, sociolinguistic theory, black English)

French native speakers' reactions to phone calls in the United States are an indication of a difference in the norms of interaction between the two countries. This difference, in turn, is understood when one realizes that the phone call, constituting a speech event, is open to different cultural interpretations, in spite of a similarity in the physical conditions of the interaction between the caller and the answerer. (Sequencing conventional opening; cultural variability; telephone calls; France and United States.)

This study explores how agency emerges and is negotiated moment by moment in interaction by applying Erving Goffman’s notion of production format to an extended sequence of discourse that revolves around accomplishing a conjoint action: the rewriting of an official letter. Deconstructing the participants into the social roles they undertake in accomplishing this task illustrates what is involved in exercising agency: interactively negotiating production format roles and footing shifts through several linguistic strategies aimed at either claiming, ratifying, or rejecting the participants’ agency. These include providing options, negotiating production format roles, asking questions, speaking for another, questioning and asserting expertise, providing counter-arguments, and asserting past agentive selves. This study, thus, contributes to an understanding of agency as co-constructed, mediated, and continually negotiated, while also identifying specific linguistic strategies through which agency is negotiated in interaction. (Agency, disability, production format, social actor, conjoint action, linguistic strategies)*

This article explores the linguistic practices of Japanese men and women giving directions to subordinates. Previous research on language and gender across a number of languages has equated the speech of women with powerlessness. The literature on Japanese women's speech would support this notion. It characterizes Japanese female speech as soft, polite, indirect, in sum, as powerless. This presents problems for women who must command. The present study, an extension of my previous work on Japanese female speech (Shibamoto 1985, 1987) centered on women in more typically female roles, examines the directives of women in positions of authority in traditional and nontraditional domains and compares them with the directive forms chosen by men in similar positions. Explanations for the differences found are placed within the frameworks of a general theory of politeness and the culturally specific, gendered strategies for encoding politeness and authority in Japanese. (Sociolinguistics, language and gender, politeness)

Identity-related accounts of language alternation among bilingual speakers have traditionally drawn on the social values of the languages involved in specific communities (Gumperz 1982, Myers-Scotton 1993). However, recently researchers have expressed reservation against this approach (Wootton and Sebba 1998, Li Wei 1998, 2002). Following from this, Gafaranga 2001 argues that, in order to account for the orderliness of language alternation, language preference (Auer 1984) must be seen as a membership categorization device (Sacks 1966, 1974). In developing his argument, Gafaranga draws on instances of ordinary everyday conversation among bilingual speakers. In this paper, we take Gafaranga's argument a step further and look at language alternation in first-time trilingual service encounters collected in the Barcelona area. The languages involved are Catalan, Castilian, and English. Analysis of these data reveals that, in addition to doing service-relevant tasks, participants accomplish “medium-related activities” (Gafaranga 2001) drawing on their various linguistic identities. Therefore, the analysis confirms the need to see linguistic identities as social identities in their own right.

This article examines gender and language in post-Soviet Ukraine, where language laws and turbulent socioeconomic changes are affecting language use. It discusses ideologies of gender, language, and ethnicity in Ukraine and assesses the significance of gender in shaping stances toward three competing languages, Ukrainian, Russian, and English. The analysis focuses on language ideologies and attitudes, based on survey and matched-guise language attitude test data. Two kinds of explanations for the gendered patterning are considered: first, how socialization and cultural ideologies of women's relationship to language shape the attitudes documented; and second, how political/economic forces (differences in possibilities for social power and social advancement linked to language use) lead men and women to benefit from different strategies in their use and valuation of linguistic capital. It is shown that, while sociocultural and political/economic forces reinforce each other in some cases, in others they contradict each other, with economic motives prevailing over cultural paradigms of traditionalism.

Children's play activities are widely perceived as developing from primitive to increasingly complex forms of social organization, as children mature and acquire interactional competency. Research following this traditional, developmentally oriented approach postulates that sports and games with rules are the most advanced and complex form of play activity; activities involving fantasy and pretend-play are viewed in comparison as considerably less complex. This article argues that fantasy play encounters exhibit complex features in their own right, and that long-held distinctions between higher-order games and fantasy play are conceptually overdrawn. The argument is grounded in a conversation analytic study of the play activities of a cross-sex, mixed-age neighborhood play group. This analysis focuses on the endogenous social organization of a fantasy play encounter. (Conversation analysis, children's play, socialization, social psychology)

Requests, offers, invitations, complaints, and greetings are some of the many action types routinely invoked in the description and analysis of interaction. But what is the ontological status of, for instance, a request? In what follows I propose that action is conduct under a description. Thus, for the most part, interaction is organized independently of any action description or categorization of conduct into discrete action types. Instead, participants in interaction draw on the details of the situation in which they find themselves in order to produce conduct that others will recognize and to which they are able to respond in fitted ways. ‘Action’ still plays a key role in the organization of interaction, however, because accountability attaches not to raw conduct but only to conduct under some particular, action-formulating description. (Action, interaction, description, conversation analysis, Anscombe)*

It is widely reported that women use more prestige speech forms than men, and style-shift more dramatically than men. This article puts forward the view that this behavior of women is not a matter of self-promotion, but of avoidance. Evidence from a survey of New Zealand middle-class speakers shows that their stereotype of a lower-class female speaker includes potential sexual immorality. Because of society's double standard regarding men's and women's sexual behavior, the stereotype affects women more than men, and could be an explanation for middle-class women's use of prestige forms as a way of avoiding association with the lower-class stereotype. (Women's speech, social class, speech varieties, sex and language, stereotypes, New Zealand)

This study extends Goffman's idea that frames are laminated in various ways in interaction by demonstrating how work and play frames are interrelated in two distinct ways in naturally occurring family conversations. An analysis of excerpts from everyday interactions between parents and young children in three families illustrates how frames of play and parenting are laminated (i) by using language to sequentially transform interaction from a literal frame to a play frame (reframing), and (ii) by creating two definitions of the social situation simultaneously through language and sometimes through physical actions as well (blending frames). It identifies linguistic and paralinguistic features by which these laminations are accomplished and shows how the parents in each family use the two different types. Finally, the analysis demonstrates in what ways play constitutes “work” for parents, contributing to our understanding of play as both ambiguous and “paradoxical.”

This study investigated whether preschoolers would spontaneously say thank you in a familiar context without their parents' presence. Two hundred and fifty 3 1/2- to 4 1/2-year-olds played a game with their teachers and received a reward from either an unfamiliar peer or adult. Across conditions, 37 percent of the children said thank you spontaneously, more than in previous studies. The frequency of the spontaneous use of thank you was assessed as a function of sex, socioeconomic status, and listener status. Preschool-aged girls said thank you spontaneously more than boys, χ2(1) = 7.95, p < .01. Also, children from families of low economic status said thank you spontaneously more than children from middle income families, χ2(1) = 7.17, p < .01. This finding does not appear to be due to racial differences. Finally, the preschoolers said thank you spontaneously more to the adult than to the peer, χ2(1) = 4.27, p < .05. These results are discussed in terms of their implications for pragmatic socialization and the acquisition of politeness formulas such as thank you. (Routines, politeness formulas, pragmatic socialization, sex differences, socioeconomic differences, language and status)

This article critically examines contemporary interactional studies of the cultural specifity of human language, conducted mostly in modern, multiethnic, industrialized societies (e.g., Clyne 1979; Gumperz 1982a, 1982b; Valdés & Pino 1981). What is often presented as the “linguistic evidence” for miscommunication in such contexts is in fact, we argue, the locus of the violations of the cooperative principles of discourse and human interaction, such as the Principle of Charity (Davidson 1974) and the Principle of Humanity (Grandy 1973). The conclusions these studies arrive at are vitiated by the fact, for which considerable empirical evidence exists, that the native speaker's repairability threshold depends crucially on nonlinguistic variables (Hackman 1977). Only a cross-cultural analysis of how or whether these misconstruals entail analogous consequences, regardless of who is being misunderstood by whom, can, we argue, produce the sort of evidence these studies claim to unearth.

This article explores the intertwining semiotics of language and embodiment in performances of Californian personae. We analyze two actors’ performances of Californian characters in parodic skits, comparing them to the same actors’ performances of non-Californian characters. In portraying their Californian characters, the actors use particularized jaw settings, which we link to embodied stereotypes from earlier portrayals of the Valley Girl and Surfer Dude personae. Acoustic analysis demonstrates that both actors also produce features of the California Vowel Shift in their Californian performances, aligning their linguistic productions with sound changes documented in California. We argue that these embodied stereotypes and phonetic realizations not only co-occur in parodic styles, but are in fact semiotically and corporeally intertwined, one occasioning the other. Moreover, the performances participate in the broader process of enregisterment, packaging these semiotic resources with other linguistic and extralinguistic features to recontextualize Californian personae in the present day. (Parody, performance, California, California Vowel Shift, embodiment, embodied stereotype, enregisterment)*

Mobility raises specific issues with regard to what we understand by ‘context’, and in this commentary I suggest that Bakhtin's concept of chronotope could be a useful instrument enabling a precise and detailed, mobile, unit of ‘context’. This unit connects specific time-space arrangements with ideological and moral orders, projecting possible and preferred identities. The articles in this issue offer rich material in this direction.

This article analyses phonetic variation among young people who have learned a minority language in immersion schooling as part of revitalisation measures. Such speakers are increasingly referred to as ‘new speakers’ in an expanding body of literature. The variable phonetic features analysed are vowels, laterals, and intonation in the speech of new Gaelic speakers from Glasgow and the Isle of Lewis. Results support previous work suggesting that new speakers will sound different from ‘traditional speakers’. These results are discussed in terms of language contact, modes of acquisition in revitalisation situations, and the differing perceptions and ideologies surrounding how new speakers use Gaelic. The data also necessitate an examination of some of the assumptions in sociolinguistic models of change and their applicability to contexts of rapid social evolution. (New speakers, language revitalisation, minority languages, Scottish Gaelic, laterals, vowels, intonation)*

This article analyzes multilingual practices in interactions inside European Union (EU) institutions. On the basis of our fieldwork conducted in EU organizational spaces throughout 2009, we explore different types of communication in order to illustrate how Members of the European Parliament (MEPs) and officials at the European Commission practice and perform multilingualism in their everyday work. In our theoretical and methodological framework, we draw on existent sociolinguistic ethnographical research into organizations and interactions, and integrate a multilevel (macro) contextual and sequential (micro) analysis of manifold data (observations, field notes, recordings of official and semi-official meetings, interviews, etc.). In this way, a continuum of context-dependent multilingual practices becomes apparent, which are characterized by different patterns of language choice and which serve a range of both manifest and latent functions. By applying the Discourse-Historical Approach (DHA) of Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), the intricacies of the increasingly complex phenomenon of multilingualism in transnational-organizational spaces, which are frequently characterized by diverse power-related and other asymmetries of communication, can be adequately coped with. (Code-switching, multilingualism, power, institutional spaces, European Union, ethnography, discourse-historical approach, critical discourse studies)*

This study explores the formulation of requests in an American English-speaking shoe repair shop. Taking prior work on request formats as our starting point, we explore the two primary syntactic moods (declarative and interrogative) in our collection and two of the commonly noted subtypes of these moods, need/want-declaratives and can-interrogatives. While our findings in very general terms match those of previous studies, we also find significant grammatical variation within each of these formats, and note interactional uses for each variation. Our examination yields insight into facets of requesting that were previously undescribed. We offer an Emergent Grammar perspective on the complexity of lexicosyntax in the social action of requesting. (Requests, formats, Emergent Grammar, Conversation Analysis, American English, service encounters)*

Rape jokes are a contentious topic on the internet; arguments over whether “rape is funny” unfold in a diverse range of forums, but they generally take the same predictable form. In this article, I analyze the text of a variety of disputes on American websites over the funniness of rape jokes. I show not only that both sides of these arguments are premised on the same underlying assumptions about the ways that humor and language function, but more importantly that these shared assumptions make it possible for rape humor (and humor more generally) to carry social and political valence—and that in order to understand the significance of the debate over rape jokes, we need to understand the identity work that people are doing when they tell rape jokes, laugh at them, or frown and shake their heads. (Humor, language ideologies, rape, joking)*

This article provides a descriptive analysis of the entire system of address forms in Yoruba, a Defoid language of the Niger-Congo phylum, spoken principally in the western part of Nigeria and to a lesser extent in the Republics of Benin and Togo. With data from short radio and TV plays, unobtrusive observation of actual usage, and introspection, it was discovered that the choices made by interlocutors are guided by the perceived social relationship that exists between them. The principal indices of this among the Yoruba are age, social status, and kinship. Nevertheless, certain peculiarities are noticeable. For instance, the dichotomy of power vs. solidarity (Brown & Gilman 1960) becomes blurred with respect to Yoruba kinship terms of address; thus solidarity does not necessarily imply equality among the Yoruba. (Politeness, address, kinship, Africa, Yoruba)