You know, like the tag question and the parenthetical I think, has been regarded as a linguistic hedging device, and consequently as a “women's language” form. This paper describes a range of forms and functions expressed by you know, as well as its use by women and men in a corpus of spontaneous speech. While there is no difference in this corpus in the total number of occurrences of you know produced by women and men, there are interesting contrasts in the most frequent functions expressed by you know in female and male usage. Finally, the possibility that negative stereotypes may distort perceptions of women's usage is briefly discussed. (Sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, contextual styles, women's and men's speech)

Sex-based differences in the form of English compliments and in the frequencies of various compliment response types are discussed. Based on a corpus of 1,062 compliment events, several differences in the form of compliments used by women and men are noted. Further, it is found that compliments from men are generally accepted, especially by female recipients, whereas compliments from women are met with a response type other than acceptance. These findings are set within a broader discussion of male–female differences in speech and the sociology of compliment work. Parallels are drawn between these sex-based differences and differences in norms for national varieties of English relating to the function and frequency of compliments as speech acts and to different response types elicited by diverse functional exploitations of compliment formulas in discourse. (Sex-based differences in language use, socioprag-matics, compliments/compliment responses, ethnography of speaking)

This paper is a treatment of some patterns of talk that occur in service encounters (and presumably in other conversations as well). It is an attempt to examine the contribution of discourse structures such as the question–answer adjacency pair to the coherence of everyday discourse. The customer-request–server-response sequence is examined as to its adherence to a pattern of question–answer. Though some sequences do adhere to the question–answer pattern, there are many that do not, but rather are manifested as question–question. The question–question patterns are shown to be of several kinds in terms of the relationship of the second question to the first. The analysis demonstrates the relationship of these patterns to the pragmatic interpretation of the customer-request as either a request for information or as a request for service, and leads to a tentative set of generalizations concerning the interpretation of responses to questions in general. (Questions, conversational analysis, discourse analysis, pragmatics, indirect speech acts, coherence, ritual, service encounters, American English.)

The study of language choice and code-switching can illuminate the ways in which, through language, social institutions with ethnolinguistically diverse staff and clients exercise symbolic domination. Using the example of French-language minority education in Ontario (Canada), this article examines the ways in which ethnic and institutional relations of power overlap or crosscut, forming constraints which have paradoxical effects. In an analysis of two classrooms, it is shown how an ideology of institutional monolingualism is supported or undermined by program structure, curriculum content, and the social organization of turn-taking, and how individuals use language choices and code-switching to collaborate with or resist these arrangements. The effect of these processes is to contain paradoxes and to produce new relations of power within the school. (Symbolic domination, choice of language, code-switching, French/English language contact, social institutions, Canada)

This article examines variable usage of intensifiers in a corpus from a socially and generationally stratified community. Using multivariate analyses, the authors assess the direction of effect, significance, and relative importance of conditioning factors in apparent time. Of 4,019 adjectival heads, 24% were intensified, and there is an increase in intensification across generations. Earlier forms (e.g. right and well) do not fade away but coexist with newer items. The most frequent intensifiers, however, are shifting rapidly. Very is most common, but only among the older speakers. In contrast, really increases dramatically among the youngest generation; however, the effects of education and sex must be disentangled. The results confirm that variation in intensifier use is a strong indicator of shifting norms and practices in a speech community. Studying such actively changing features can make an important contribution to understanding linguistic change as well as to discovering current trends in contemporary English.

Preference is treated as a single concept in conversation analysis, but it has in fact developed into an assemblage of loosely related concepts. It has also been construed in a variety of mutually incompatible, and sometimes meth-odologically questionable, ways. This is due, at least in part, to a confusion between preference in its everyday usage and preference as a technical notion. This paper attempts to present a clear and unitary concept of preference and investigate the properties of that concept, differentiate related concepts (including conversational implicature), and reveal common confusions. (Conversation analysis, preference, methodology, implicature)

“Creole Exceptionalism” is defined as a set of beliefs, widespread among both linguists and nonlinguists, that Creole languages form an exceptional class on phylogenetic and/or typological grounds. It also has nonlinguistic (e.g., sociological) implications, such as the claim that Creole languages are a “handicap” for their speakers, which has undermined the role that Creoles should play in the education and socioeconomic development of monolingual Creolophones. Focusing on Caribbean Creoles, and on Haitian Creole in particular, it is argued that Creole Exceptionalism, as a sociohistorically rooted “régime of truth” (in Foucault's sense), obstructs scientific and social progress in and about Creole communities. Various types of Creole Exceptionalist beliefs are deconstructed and historicized, and their empirical, theoretical, and sociological flaws surveyed. These flaws have antecedents in early creolists' theories of Creole genesis, often explicitly couched in Eurocentric and (pre-/quasi-)Darwinian doctrines of human evolution. Despite its historical basis in colonialism and slavery and its scientific and sociological flaws, Creole Exceptionalism is still enshrined in the modern linguistics establishment and its classic literature, a not unexpected state given the social structure of scientific communities and the interaction between ideology and “paradigm-making.” The present Foucauldian approach to Creole Exceptionalism is an instantiation of a well-defined area of the linguistics/ideology interface. The conclusion proposes alternatives more consistent with Creole structures and their development, and more likely to help linguists address some practical problems faced by Creole speakers.This project has been supported by, inter alia, a much-appreciated fellowship from the National Endowment for the Humanities (# FA-37500-02). While I am responsible for the views and errors in this paper, I feel immensely privileged to have benefited from the generous encouragement and judicious comments of editor Jane Hill and two anonymous reviewers at Language in Society, and of many friends and colleagues: Myriam Augustin, Marie-Lucie Brutus, Noam Chomsky, Yves Dejean (Papa Iv), Dominique Fattier, Marilyn Goodrich, Ken Hale, Dimitri Hilton, Tometro Hopkins, Tami Kaplan, Antonia MacDonald-Smythe, Heliana Mello, Miriam Meyerhoff, Salikoko Mufwene, Marilene Phipps, Ella Maria Ray, Faith Smith, Geneva Smitherman, Arthur Spears, and Adrienne Talamas.

Sociologists typically assume that immigrants' acquisition of English as a second language follows the opportunities and motivations to become proficient in English, while many linguists argue that second language acquisition may be governed by maturational constraints, possibly biologically based, that are tied to the age at onset of language learning. In this article, I use U.S. census data to investigate the relationship between age at onset of second language learning and levels of English language proficiency among foreign-born adults in the United States. The overarching conclusion is that proficiency in a second language among adults is strongly related to age at immigration. Part of that relationship is attributable to social and demographic considerations tied to age at entry into a new country, and part may be attributable to maturational constraints. Many colleagues, spread across several disciplines, provided valuable comments on this research. Among them were Cynthia Fisher, Nancy Garrett, Susan Gonzo, John Hagan, Charles Hirschman, Tim F. Liao, Michael Long, John Mardeen, Madonna Harrington Meyer, C. Gray Swicegood, and Jack Veugeler.

Despite ample evidence which proves the existence of stylistic stratification in the speech of monoliguals, little is know about the nature of stylistic variation in everyday settings. Data from a Cardiff travel agency suggest that a speaker's stylistic repertoire can be statistically characterised using a method that combines Labov's frequency-counts of linguistic variants and Hymes' and others' taxonomies of situational components. A second study using subjects' responses to stylistic variation in the original data overcomes certain limitations inherent in the correlational method. It shows how style-shifting can be a dynamic resource for a speaker, not necessarily the automatic correlate of contextual features. (Stylistic variation; sociolinguistic variables in Cardiff English; linguistic repertoire; reactions to style.)

In this paper, children's use of access rituals in peer interaction in a nursery school is examined and a discussion of the implications of the findings regarding the development of communicative competence is presented. The findings show that entry into play is a production of some importance involving considerable time and strategy to accomplish, while leave-taking usually involves unmarked physical movement from play areas. The importance of peer interaction in the acquisition of access rituals and the necessity of studying children's verbal routines in natural settings are discussed. (Developmental sociolinguistics, peer interaction, children's use of access rituals, US English.)

This article describes the development of a data bank of 25 male voices spanning the range from very gay-sounding to very straight-sounding, according to listener ratings. These ratings allowed the researchers to examine the effects of different discourse types (scientific, dramatic, and spontaneous) and listener groups (gay males vs. a mix of males and females of unknown sexual orientation) on how listeners perceived the voices. The effects of lexical and pragmatic content were explored by a comparison of spoken and written presentations of the same spontaneous speech samples. The effect of asking participants to rate the voices using different constructs (e.g., masculine/feminine vs. gay-sounding/straight-sounding) is discussed. The ultimate goal of this research program is to examine correlations between these ratings and a range of phonetic variables in order to shed light on the specific features to which listeners attend when judging whether a man's voice sounds gay or straight.

The ethnolinguistic terms in which the children of Dominican immigrants in Rhode Island think of themselves, i.e. as “Spanish” or “Hispanic,” are frequently at odds with the phenotype-based racial terms “Black” or “African American,” applied to them by others in the United States. Spanish language is central to resisting such phenotype-racial categorization, which denies Dominican Americans their Hispanic ethnicity. Through discourse analysis of naturally occurring peer interaction at a high school, this article shows how a Dominican American who is phenotypically indistinguishable from African Americans uses language, in both intra- and inter-ethnic contexts, to negotiate identity and resist ascription to totalizing phenotype-racial categories. In using language to resist such hegemonic social categorization, the Dominican second generation is contributing to the transformation of existing social categories and the constitution of new ones in the US.

Focus group discussions are now widely used for gathering data, in social science as well as in commercial marketing and public opinion research. One appeal of focus groups is that in some ways they seem like everyday talk, but their effectiveness depends on a tension between the moderator's constraints and participants' interaction. The moderator introduces and defines topics, but participants can shift, close, and interpret them. The moderator elicits disagreement in a way specific to focus groups, but participants manage their disagreement. Thus we see not simple control by the moderator, but a complex collaborative project operating under the shared assumption that the purpose of the discussion is to display opinions to the moderator. These findings extend the analysis of conversation in institutional settings and contribute to a methodological critique of the reification of attitudes and opinions in some social science research. (Focus group techniques, conversation, discourse analysis, interaction, agreement, topic, laughter, environment.)

Samples of speech suitable for sociolinguistic analysis may be sought in several ways. Interviews (either formal or informal), and tape-recorded group sessions, are the methods most used currently. In research on a specific variable, the historical present tense (HP), none of these methods proved neutral or adequate. Although the historical present tense is very widely used in conversational narratives, its occurrence within interviews is so infrequent as to be striking. An explanation was found in the way in which the interview has a specific known place as a speech event in the culture of those whose speech was being studied. The so-called spontaneous interview does not have such a place, and for that very reason is even less satisfactory a source of data. The notion of natural speech is taken as properly equivalent to that of appropriate speech; as not equivalent to unselfconscious speech; and as observable easily, and often best, by simple techniques of participation. (Sociolinguistic methodology; speech events, interviews, observation, natural speech; United States English).

This article is an exploration of how a group of men in the United States create homosocial (as opposed to homosexual) desire through language. In a society in which dominant discourses of masculinity provide competing scripts of male solidarity and heterosexuality, the achievement of closeness among men is not straightforward but must be negotiated through “indirect” means. It is shown how men actively negotiate dominant cultural discourses in their everyday interactions. In addition, a broadened view of indirectness, based on social function as much as denotation, is argued for.This article was initially presented in much shorter and different form at the Second International Gender and Language Association (IGALA) Conference in Lancaster, U.K., in April 2002. I would like to thank the audience there, and in particular Jennifer Coates, for their comments and lively discussion. I would also like to thank Deborah Tannen for her insightful comments and advice, and two anonymous reviewers whose comments strengthened the article considerably. I would also like to thank the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago for inviting me to have conversation about this work in their semiotics workshop, and specifically Lauren Keeler, Jonathan Rosa, and Michael Silverstein. Ultimately, responsibility for the article's contents remains with the author.

The social forces affecting the performance of codeswitching (CS) may be distinguished from those factors controlling its basic structure, with which they interact. The constraints on possible patterns in CS are largely under innately based controls. These constraints are presented here in a model of intrasentential CS, and their validity is tested against findings of CS practices in a number of communities; all options can be accounted for under the model. Thus the options for CS structures seem universally set; but community-specific or group-specific social forces may determine which permissible patterns are preferred. In addition, micro-level, discourse-based factors may prompt individuals to produce certain CS structures. A second model of the social motivations for CS helps explain both the macro- and micro-level preferences. (Bilingualism, codeswitching, language contact, socio-pragmatics)

In his landmark contribution to the field of language shift/maintenance, Fishman maintains that, for language shift to be reversed, “face-to-face, small-scale social life must be pursued in their own right and focused upon directly.” This article responds to this call to examine language shift at the level of face-to-face interaction. It describes a specific interactional practice, referred to as “medium request,” observed in the Rwandan community in Belgium, where language shift is taking place from Kinyarwanda-French bilingualism to French monolingualism. The practice consists in the fact that younger members of the community, when in interaction with adult members, constantly (albeit indirectly) request the latter to “medium-switch” from Kinyarwanda to French. The article therefore describes the practice as a specific type of language/medium negotiation, examines its various strategies, and shows how, through this interactional practice, members of the community actually talk language shift into being. (Medium request, language shift, language maintenance, language/medium negotiation, other-initiated medium repair, embedded medium repair, generalized content repair, targeted content repair, understanding check)

This article examines the interactive import of prosody from a perspective of participants' orientation to talk in interaction, taking advantage of data from institutional discourse to focus on the prosodic packaging of recurring turn sequences of the same discourse activity. The analysis focuses on the third slot of a ubiquitous three-part classroom discourse sequence, the IRF exchange (Sinclair & Coulthard 1975), a site in which teachers make repetitive feedback moves following student responses. Examination of more than 25 hours of classroom discourse and more than 300 third-turn teacher feedback types uncovered a systematic use of prosody for these teacher repetitions that coincides with a teacher's positive assessment of the student response. Further analysis shows that more complex prosodic packaging is used by teachers in their repetitive feedback turns to index other interactive functions.

Assuming the ethnobiological classification evolves as a reflection of cultural development, data are presented which suggest an orderly and predictable temporal appearance of ethnobotanical nomenclatural categories. A general correspondence is seen to exist between the number of categories encoded at any point in time in a particular language's history and degree of sociocultural development. The principles of lexical marking are applied to ethnobiological nomenclature as a means of inferring relative age of the corresponding categories. (Ethnoscience, primitive classification, language universals, cultural evolution.)

“Class relations” will be taken to refer to inequalities in the distribution of power and in principles of control between social groups, which are realized in the creation, distribution, reproduction, and legitimation of physical and symbolic values that have their source in the social division of labor. In terms of the particular problems of the relationships between class and the process of its cultural reproduction, as developed in this thesis, what has to be shown is how class regulation of the distribution of power and of principles of control generates, distributes, reproduces, and legitimates dominating and dominated principles regulating the relationships within and between social groups and so forms of consciousness. What we are asking here is how the distribution of power and principles of control are transformed, at the level of the subject, into different, invidiously related, organizing principles, in such a way as both to position subjects and to create the possibility of change in such positioning. The broad answer given by this thesis is that class relations generate, distribute, reproduce, and legitimate distinctive forms of communication, which transmit dominating and dominated codes, and that subjects are differentially positioned by these codes in the process of their acquisition. “Positioning” is used here to refer to the establishing of a specific relation to other subjects and to the creating of specific relationships within subjects. In general, from this point of view, codes are culturally determined positioning devices. More specifically, class regulated codes position subjects with respect to dominating and dominated form of communication and to the relationships between them. Ideology is constituted through and in such positioning. From this perspective, ideology inheres in and regulates modes of relation. Ideology is not so much a content as a mode of relation for the realizing of contents.