This article offers discourse analysis of young transgender people's interaction, in which they describe being rendered powerless through misgendering or misrepresentation. It argues that the young people's collective responses to these moments enable them to challenge the ideologies underpinning their marginalisation, and to recontextualise the language used by others to describe their bodies. Stance-taking, the production of affect, and constructed dialogue are shown to be key tools in their production of an agentive, mutual identity. The article thus provides close analysis of dialogic embodiment, a process by which the body is quite literally spoken into being. By critiquing the cisnormative structures which inform and enable the young people's marginalisation, the article responds to the call for a trans linguistics (Zimman 2020) and reflects upon the author's positionality as a cisgender researcher. (Embodiment, affective stance, agency, trans identity, cisnormativity, trans linguistics)*

Most explanations for the scarcity of Spanish-based creoles have appealed to sociological factors. This article shows that, on the contrary, three historical factors determined the current distribution. First, the Spanish only began cultivating sugar after a century of concentrating on crops requiring smaller plantations; this allowed fuller acquisition of Spanish by the slaves, who then served as models for later arrivals. Second, the Spanish often took over areas formerly occupied by the Portuguese, thus encountering a previously existent pidgin. Third, the Spanish did not establish trade settlements in West Africa, where a Spanish pidgin could have emerged and been transported to the New World. These factors together manifested Spain's low commitment to establishing vigorously capitalistic enterprises in its possessions until the 19th century, which can be seen as the ultimate impediment to the pidginization of Spanish. (Pidgins and creoles, Spanish, Spain, diachronic linguistics, lexical diffusion, language transmission)

Hypercorrection is always a function of rule generalization, though the converse does not hold. It is therefore a sociolinguistic term, not definable in purely linguistic terms. What is generalized is not necessarily the original rule of the grammar. It may be an added rule symmetrical to it. These symmetrical rules are not necessarily ‘Last rules’, for their output may undergo further non-hypercorrect rules. (Hypercorrection, sociolinguistics, phonological theory, historical phonology.)

This variationist analysis investigates the development and spread of innit as an invariant tag in London English. The sociolinguistic distribution of innit in a socially stratified corpus of vernacular speech suggests that the form's emergence and spread were initiated and propelled system-internally through changes associated with grammaticalization. Frequency triggered phonetic reduction of isn't it to innit; loss of syntactic-semantic usage constraints and growing functional versatility enabled innit to seize the range of contexts and functions of grammatically-dependent tags (e.g. didn't you, weren't we), virtually ousting these from the system of negative-polarity interrogative tags. Examination of cross-linguistic data and comparisons with relevant pre- and non-contact varieties indicate multiple language contact and grammatical replication may have played an ancillary role. I flag some challenges of establishing contact effects in discourse-pragmatic change, and propose that the promotion of innit for invariant use was governed by its low salience and social indexicality of localness. (Innit, question tags, (Multicultural) London English, grammaticalization, language contact, grammatical replication)*

The variable rule method of accounting for linguistic variability suffers on two counts: (1) it is insensitive to social context; (2) it regards meaning as irrelevant (variability being treated as different ways of “saying the same thing”). Given these shortcomings, an alternative approach sensitive to social context and the relevance of meaning is recommended. The proposed alternative approach, scaffolded on an ethnography of communication base, is then used to support an analysis of -ing/in' variability in some North American industrial workers' speech. The analysis indicates that instances of morphophonemic variation, contrary to what proponents of the variable rule method have suggested, may express a number of various meanings that express, reflect, and reproduce speakers' life experiences. The analysis also enables us to develop a set of theoretical statements that explain the motivations of workers' selections of a low prestige variant and why workers' reliance on a low prestige variant persists. (Ethnography of communication, variable rule methodology, social class dialect, morphophonemic variation)

Children acquiring sociolinguistic knowledge in transnational migration settings must learn to evaluate multiple languages and dialects in a fluid, multifaceted social landscape. This study examines the sociolinguistic development of local and expatriate children in Singapore and investigates the extent to which they share sociolinguistic knowledge and norms. One hundred fourteen children ages five to nineteen completed a region identification task and an occupation judgment task, focusing on their perception of four regional English varieties: Australian English, Northern-China-accented English, Filipino English, and Singapore English. While all groups performed well on the region identification task, expatriate children outperformed locals within the youngest age group. Singaporean and expatriate children attending local schools showed greater familiarity with local norms than international school students in their occupation ratings. Participants mapped speakers to occupations by general prestige level, suggesting that children rely on indirect knowledge of social status rather than direct experience with speakers in their development of sociolinguistic evaluation. (Children's sociolinguistic development, transnational migration, language attitudes)*

This article investigates the effect of computer activity on talk during collaboration at the computer by two pairs of high school students during a web-based task. The work is located in relation to research in the wider world of the workplace and informal settings where multitasking involving talk and the operation of artifacts is known to occur. The current study focuses on how, when two students are working at the computer, talk continues or is disrupted during multitasking. Five examples are described in detail, beginning with a relatively straightforward case of serial multitasking and leading up to an example of complex simultaneous multitasking. Overwhelmingly in our data, only routine on-screen actions accompany talk, whereas complex actions occur with hitches or restarts in the talk, and true simultaneous multitasking happens on just three occasions in the data set. (Collaborative activity, computers, Conversation Analysis, interaction, language and technology, multimodality, multitasking)*

Discourse markers (like, I don't know, etc.) are known to vary in frequency across English dialects and speech settings. It is difficult to make meaningful generalizations over these differences, since quantitative discourse-pragmatic variation studies ‘lack [a] coherent set of methodological principles’ (Pichler 2010:582). This has often constrained quantitative studies to focus on the form, rather than the function of discourse-pragmatic features. The current article employs a novel method for rigorously identifying and quantifying the referential function (set-extension) of general extenders (GEs), for example, and stuff like that, or whatever. We apply this method to GEs extracted from three corpora of contemporary North American English speech. The results demonstrate that, across varieties, (i) referential GEs occur at a comparable proportional rate in vernacular speech, and (ii) referential GEs are longer than nonreferential GEs. Collectively, these findings represent a step towards comparative quantitative studies of GEs' functions in discourse. (Discourse-pragmatic variation, general extenders, methodological approaches, American English, Canadian English)

I shall begin this brief contribution with a small amount of self-justification, since I appear to have become picked out as one of the “bad guys” in Trudgill's thesis. I shall then go on to agree with some of Trudgill's points, but not with all. In particular, I shall conduct a small thought experiment on the link between accommodation and the development of new dialects.

This article reports on one aspect of an ongoing study of language contact in the American deaf community. A kind of signing that results from the contact between American Sign Language (ASL) and English exhibits features of both languages. The ultimate goal of the study is a linguistic description of contact signing and a reexamination of claims that it is a pidgin. Ten dyads and two triads of native ASL signers (6 white dyads, 4 black dyads, 2 black triads) were videotaped with a deaf interviewer, a hearing interviewer, and alone with each other. The different interview situations induced switching between ASL and contact signing. This article (1) reviews the pattern of language use during the interviews with the white dyads and describes the judgments of selected videotaped segments by 10 native signers; (2) examines the role of demographic information in judgments. For each segment, half of the judges were given one set of demographic information, and the other half were given another set. Indications are that this information does affect judgment, even though the linguistic forms viewed were identical. (American Sign Language, language contact, language judgments, deaf community)

Popular song lyrics constitute an exception to dominant, standard language ideologies of English: nonstandard grammatical forms are common, relatively unstigmatized, and even enregistered in the genre. This project uses song lyrics to test whether genre cues can shift linguistic expectations, influencing how speakers process morphosyntactic variants. In three self-paced reading experiments, participants read sentences from pop songs. Test sentences contained either ‘standard’ NPSG + doesn't or ‘nonstandard’ NPSG + don't. In Experiment 1, some participants were told that the sentences came from lyrics, while others received no context information. Experiment 2 eliminated other nonstandardisms in the stimuli, and Experiment 3 tested for the effect of stronger context information. Genre information caused participants to orient to the sentences differently, which partially—but not straightforwardly—mitigated surprisal at nonstandard don't. I discuss future directions for understanding the effects of context on sociolinguistic processing, which I argue can inform concepts like genre and enregisterment, and the processes underlying language attitudes. (Morphosyntactic variation, genre, invariant don't, language ideology, pop songs, experimental sociolinguistics, sentence processing)*

Multimodal Discourse offers a theoretical framework for the study of communication in the modern world of multimedia. The book helps students of linguistics, cultural studies, and communication as well as journalists, photographers, designers, and others who work practically in the field of communication and design, to understand and differentiate the distinct levels of mass communication and their interaction. The authors also give an overview of the development of communication and discourse and show how this development is influenced by overall changes in society and social life. All the definitions of theoretical concepts and notions are further explained and illustrated by a great variety of examples. Linguists have shown that discourse is not only used and expressed in and/or by language; Kress & van Leeuwen also apply the term to music, architecture, and many other domains of culture. The notion of modes, however, is explained only in a very abstract way as “semiotic resources which allow the simultaneous realization of discourses and types of (inter)action” (p. 21). Media, on the other hand, are described as the material resources being used for the production. Examples of modes mentioned by the authors are music, language, and images. The medium is supposed to be the material, such as a book (6).

This year, undergraduates in my class ‘Language, race, and ethnicity’ carried out collaborative sociolinguistic activism projects addressing a range of issues in our community, such as racist street signs and California's ban on diacritics in personal names on official documents. Despite my and my teaching assistants’ explicit instructions that the projects should aim to effect some tangible change—the replacement of the street signs, the legalization of diacritics—many students focused instead on the more amorphous goal of ‘raising awareness’ of these issues on our campus and in the local community. As we explained, while raising the public profile of a social injustice is a necessary step toward changing it, this act alone cannot bring about change.

This paper addresses the relevance of a functional approach to the study of speech genres. The range of variation found in spontaneous performances of a traditional genre of Samoan speechmaking (lāuga) can be explained and partly predicted by referring to the social and cultural context of speaking. Particular features of variation are attributed to the following factors: (1) the purposes of the social events, (2) the temporal setting of its performance, (3) the range and social identities of the participants, and (4) the weight given to performance as a key for delivering and interpreting speechmaking. (Oratory, ethnography of communication, cross-contextual variation, performance, Samoan language and culture.)

We observe that mediatization (Agha 2011b) creates and maintains the conditions by which some messages and uptake formulations remain unavailable to larger audiences while others are continuously recycled and increasingly accessible. We argue that the maintenance of the unequal divisions of semiotic labor in ways that mirror socioeconomic inequalities at an increasingly global scale can be facilitated by mediatization as currently practiced. An analysis of the way that the uptake formulations of a mediatized fragment of a register-shifting event varied in its pre- and postmediatized contexts reveals how premediatized value projects can be systematically replaced during mediatization, limiting the availability of premediatized value projects for wider uptake. We observe that value projects attached to mediatized fragments work to maintain the hierarchy of perduring semiotic registers (Goebel 2010) in US public discourse in which Standard English repertoires continue to dominate all others. (Mediatization, Standard, semiotic register-shifting, black preaching style)

This longitudinal study examines the construction of the apprenticeship relationshiP between professor (expert) and graduate student (novice) during office-hour interactions. The findings demonstrate that apprenticeship is constituted by the strategic use of affect-indexing linguistic markers in discourse. By indexing stances of cooperativeness, interdependence, and shared Discourse membership, professor and student create a positive affect bond which provides a linguistic means of negotiating miscommunication arising from the student's incomplete socialization to the target Discourse. The socialization process is shown to proceed through a series of interim Discourses where quantifiable shifts in the participants' discourse strategies reveal the student's increasing mastery of the target Discourse. Constraints imposed by the institutional setting are also shown to structure the discourse strategies which characterize the interim Discourses. The results of this study strongly suggest that affect plays a measurable role in the process of language socialization, and is essential for defining “trusf”-based apprenticeship relationships. (Affect, language socialization, discourse analysis, apprenticeship)

Language has long been recognized as an important marker of ethnic identity. The identification is usually made in terms of some specific language or dialect, the use of which coincides more or less well with the boundaries of some particular ethnic group. This relationship obtains perfectly in present-day East Sutherland (Scotland), where the East Sutherland Gaelic mother tongue is almost the sole marker of fisherfolk ethnic identity. It can be shown, however, that this is only a very recent development and that the long-standing linguistic component of fisherfolk ethnicity is rather a lag in linguistic behavior vis-à-vis the rest of the population. The lag has taken four different forms over the past century or so, but the presence of such a lag is itself the actual ethnic marker. (Language and ethnicity, linguistic norms, language maintenance and shift; Scotland, Scottish Gaelic.)

This article examines the blunt conceptual instrument of dehumanizing American military terms for the enemy in the context of the Vietnam War and the Global War on Terror. I examine language that dehumanizes American service members themselves, who are semiotically framed as expendable. Next, I explore the essentialist, semi-propositional qualities of derogatory epithets for the enemy and the affectively charged, deadly stances they encourage. I examine how generic references to the enemy during training make totalizing claims that risk encompassing civilians in their typifications. And I show that, in the context of war, the instability of derogatory epithets can manifest itself when the servicemember is confronted with the behavioral idiosyncrasies and personal vulnerabilities of actual ‘enemies’ on the ground. The putative folk wisdom found in generic references to the enemy can thus fall apart when confronted with countervailing experience; in such cases, service members may shift stance by renouncing military epithets. (Military language, epithets, slurs, generics, othering, dehumanization, necropolitics)*

This article examines how communicative resources affect the construction of credible texts and identities in a public debate on Australia's treatment of a refugee. It centres on two key written statements—one from the Immigration Minister, and another from a Somali refugee. The analysis is divided into four levels, exploring the parties’ respective linguistic, material, identity, and platform resources, and how these impact their statements’ creation and reception, and their participation in discourse creation more generally. The article finds that there are inequalities on all four resource levels that largely undermine the refugee's ability to present a credible text and identity and challenge mainstream discourse on refugees. The article demonstrates how a multi-level analysis of communicative resources can challenge assumptions about participation and uncover inequalities invisible in the prevailing discourse. (Asylum, Australia, communicative resources, discourse, intercultural communication, media, power, refugee)*

This article provides a global survey of categorical gender indexicality that reveals the near exclusive presence of the phenomenon in the languages of the Native Americas, a fact for which a historical rationale is offered. The survey is helpful in contributing to our understanding of social indexicality in three ways. First, while two-place (or relational) social indexicals, like honorifics, have been well studied, one-place (or absolute) social indexicals have not. Systems of gender indexicality, overwhelmingly of the absolute type, thus help flesh out the typology of social indexicality. Second, the survey illustrates the remarkable complementarity of semantic gender, as a category of denotation, and social gender, as an aspect of identity indexed in discourse, in particular as these overlap in cases of gender deixis. Finally, the study of gender indexicality in the Native Americas reveals that not all gender indexicality is equally gender performative. A number of diagnostics of a categorical type—from ubiquitous rule-governed regularity of patterning to quotability—illustrate that in the cases discussed, forms are highly presupposing, not performative, of the social gender of the speech participants they index. (Gender, indexicality, deixis, Native Americas)*