This study contributes to the body of cross-linguistic research on repetition, repair, and action-formation more generally. Using conversation-analytic and interactional-linguistic methods to analyse both position and composition in the formation of actions accomplished by other-repetitions in French, the study underscores the interplay between linguistic design, sequential organisation, and territories of knowledge and accountability in interaction. The actions conveyed by other-repetitions, and the responses made relevant, are affected by both (i) the design of the repetition turn itself—involving various features of prosody (e.g. intonation contour type and pitch span), grammar, and lexis—and (ii) the sequential location of the repetition, including the particulars of the talk that gets repeated and the relevancies set up by that previous talk. The study concludes with a discussion of its significance for research on action-formation as well as for research on the pragmatics of intonation. (Repair-initiation, surprise, acceptability, registering, intonation, epistemics, agency)*

Children's first school books contain a considerable amount of reported talk among characters in the stories. This is a central aspect of the characterization of these books as transitional from the conventions of oral language to the conventions of written prose, that is, as introductions to literacy. The nature of the written representation of conversation in such books has not previously been examined. This paper presents a partial analysis of this feature of beginning school readers, focussing on “question-answer sequences.” We show how these representations of talk compare with naturalistic research on child-adult interaction at home and in classrooms, and we propose that the model of child-adult talk portrayed in “home” and “school” scenes in the books appears to endorse some of the conventions for participation in instructional talk, and in this respect is implicitly a source of socialization into classroom culture. At the same time, we find that the texts give child speakers far more initiative in conversation than typically obtains in classroom talk, and this is seen also to be a feature of the social constitution of the child in these texts. Thus an image of childhood which combines conversational initiative and conversational competence as a member of the classroom community is conveyed. The paper also points out possible difficulties for child readers in interpreting the talk-on-paper, arising both from textual formats and from the particular version of the child as conversationalist which the books describe (Child-adult conversation, question-answer sequences, first school books, literacy acquisition).

Starting from the idea that all social life is characterized by contact between those who do not have the same trajectories of socialization, this article draws on insights from work on narrative, normativity, and social value to examine how contact is discursively policed. Building on scholarship on diversity talk and translingualism I propose the concept contact discourse to refer to the discursive work that constructs and evaluates those who inhabit contact zones. While both streams of scholarship cover the discursive policing of social life to greater and lesser extents, they cover very different participation and authorization frameworks. Contact discourse and the three associated terms—models of contact, contact commentary, and contact talk—highlight the importance of participation and authorization frameworks for understanding the policing of social life in contact zones. My empirical focus is on discursive data from television, social media, interviews, and everyday talk. (Contact, discourse, diversity talk, normativization, translingualism, value)*

It has been claimed that women and men use language quite differently in social interaction. Combining a functional and cognitive approach to grammar, this article explores the ways in which men and women use the optional pronominal form of the Spanish verb salir(se) ‘to leave’ in Mexican Spanish. It is found that women use the pronominal form notably more than men, and that, diachronically, this form has traditionally been applied to women's behavior. It is hypothesized that these patterns demonstrate both the relative expressive freedom of women's speech and the socially constrained nature of expectations for female behavior in colonial and contemporary Mexican society. It is shown how culturally shaped conventional construals of gender can both be reflected in and influence morphosyntactic phenomena.I would like to thank Melissa Axelrod, Kathy McKnight, Language in Society editor Jane Hill, and two anonymous referees for their helpful suggestions on this article.

This article draws on ethnographic fieldwork in two Irish towns to examine the mobilisation of the Irish language as a resource for business by new speakers of Irish. We examine how local community-level Irish language advocacy organisations have implemented initiatives to specifically promote the use of Irish in business, primarily as visual commercial engagement with the language paired with the use of the cúpla focal. The article explores how new speakers of Irish understand what might be perceived as the tokenistic mobilisation of Irish and what value they invest in their efforts to use the cúpla focal. We explore tensions over language ownership that emerge as more fluent proprietors of ‘bilingual businesses’ position themselves in relation to the ‘newness’ of these speakers. (Irish, commodification, language ownership, language advocacy, language policy, commercialisation, language in business, new speakers)*

The address terms in China are largely based on the two-class distinction (the two classes being the proletariat and the bourgeoisie). The rules governing the use of address terms in China were strictly followed before the Cultural Revolution and are still followed to a certain extent now The Cultural Revolution has brought about the “depreciation” of certain address terms, and the new situation that has appeared since China opened its doors has changed some people's mental outlook and has caused some other address terms to “go up in value.” The author shows that the use of address terms and cultural values are closely interrelated. (Sociolinguistics, address terms, cultural values)

Two hours of conversation among three children were examined for oral disputes concerning use of beds in their bedroom. Examination of transcript segments revealed that the children signaled a social order governing use of property and objects. The children were found to negotiate such use on an ongoing basis, and the form and content of the disputes differed dramatically according to whether the beds were being claimed for the purpose of play or sleep. The conversations reflected the ongoing construction and negotiation of social representations, within shared frames or finite provinces of meaning, for use of space and objects. (Ethnomethodology, conversation analysis, property, ownership)

This article, based on 984 interviews with bearers of French names in the city of New Orleans, investigates the use of the notion of pronunciation as a device by which speakers manage their talk. The investigation proceeded primarily by eliciting ways in which people employ devices for talking about talk in everyday communicative interactions, as a means to manage various types of communicational phenomena and to deal with communication difficulties emerging from a clash of phonetic traditions. The result is a definition of pronunciation in terms which are used by a majority of speakers. An appendix gives a list of names, with comments by their bearers concerning ways in which those bearers would attempt to convey to mispronouncers the correct pronunciation of their names. (Pronunciation, lay metalanguage, folk-linguistics, phonology, phonetics, New Orleans, French names)

Almost forty years ago, the “Whorf Hypothesis” was one of the things that attracted me to linguistic anthropology. George Orwell's 1984, with its dark vision of a world made safe for power by bureaucratic euphemism, was one of my favorite books, and Whorf's claim that novel and valuable ways of understanding the world might be encoded in small stateless languages struck me as a particularly telling and precise statement of a large anthropological commitment. But my own Whorfianism, and everybody else's as well, was soon to be seriously challenged. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, new scholarship on language universals and linguistic typology undercut the theory of linguistic relativity. Whorf's own best-known descriptive claims, especially those about Hopi, were challenged by knowledgeable field workers (Voegelin et al. 1979, Malotki 1983). By the early 1990s, Steven Pinker could confidently write that Whorfianism was “wrong, all wrong” (1994:57), “outlandish” (63), and “bunk” (65) – and this is a mere subsample of Pinker's characterizations.

The influence of social knowledge on speech perception is a question of interest to a range of disciplines of language research. This study combines experimental and qualitative approaches to investigate whether the various methodological and disciplinary threads of research on this topic are truly investigating the same phenomenon to provide converging evidence in our understanding of social listening. This study investigates listeners’ perceptions of Spanish and Quechua speakers speaking Spanish in the context of a contact zone between these two languages and their speakers in central Bolivia. The results of a pair of matched-guise vowel discrimination tasks and subsequent interviews demonstrate that what people perceive, as measured by experimental tasks, is not necessarily what they believe they hear, as reported in narrative responses to interview prompts. Multiple methodological approaches must be employed in order to fully understand the way that we perceive language at diverging levels of sociolinguistic awareness. (Perception, sociophonetics, sociolinguistics, awareness, Andean Spanish)

Adult speakers constantly offer young children new terms, conventional words for the events and objects being talked about. They make direct offers of unfamiliar words, using deictics or other forms that signal that the upcoming term is new, and they make indirect offers on the assumption that the relevant meaning is computable on that occasion. Adults also present young children with information about how words are related to each other through such connections as is a part of, is a kind of, belongs to, or is used for. These pragmatic directions provide children with essential information about language and language use as they make inferences about possible meanings for unfamiliar words. They also offer support for an alternative to constraints-based accounts of lexical acquisition by providing a conversation-based approach more consistent with the findings from spontaneous speech and from experimental results.

In his review of Power and politeness in action: Disagreements in oral communication (2004), Douglas J. Glick raises two important points: (i) the issue of identifying politeness in language, and (ii) the ideological framework employed in language analysis. Before explicating my understanding of politeness, I need to clarify that in chap. 5 on disagreements, as Glick has noted, I do indeed focus on linguistic strategies to express different points of view without discussing politeness. For example, I deliberately refrain from labeling strategies such as boosting or hedging as more or less polite. In other words, I do not wish to imply that I have already witnessed manifestations of politeness by simply identifying hedged utterances (or indirectness), nor that I have witnessed impoliteness by identifying unmitigated linguistic strategies (or directness). In this way, my approach to politeness differs significantly from the more classical view, initiated by Brown & Levinson 1987 and followed by many others, which equates mitigation with politeness and directness with impoliteness. Conversely, in my understanding, I use “mitigation” as a purely technical term, and I make no claim that any given linguistic form is inherently polite or impolite.

This analysis focuses on the institutional talk of sea-kayak guides and their clients in order to understand how guides negotiate the interactional balance of giving orders to maintain a safe and timely excursion while facilitating a fun and recreational experience. Using a mixed-method analysis including Conversation Analysis, ethnography, and statistics, this study examines 576 instances of directives found in video recordings of twenty-five Alaskan kayaking ecotourism excursions and explores the practices guides use in their talk to maintain control of an excursion while not coming across as domineering. By systemically examining directives’ design, directives are found to reveal both their temporal urgency in addition to the precipitating events that necessitate them, such as client behaviors or environmental stimuli. This study's analysis contributes to our understanding of how interactants mitigate face-threatening actions and focuses attention on the interactional work that directives and their accounts achieve in an institutional setting currently underinvestigated (Directives, mixed-methods, Conversation Analysis, ethnography, ecotourism)*

This discussion is a response to Richard Hudson's response to my article, ‘The policy and policing of language in schools’ (Cushing 2019). Hudson argues that current education policy in England generally rejects and avoids prescriptivism and sets out to illustrate this in reference to a number of policy documents. As in my original article, I conceive of language policy as p/Political and one way in which language ideologies get turned into practices, through a series of policy mechanisms such as curricula, tests, and guidance for teachers. I show how these mechanisms do not ‘reject’ prescriptivism, but explicitly perpetuate it, and thus act as a system of coercion which can lead teachers into reproducing these ideologies in their practice. I argue that Hudson's argument is limited because of its depoliticised stance and understanding of key sociolinguistic concepts and issues, such as ‘Standard English’, ‘linguistic correctness’, and language education itself. (Language education policy, language ideologies, critical applied linguistics, schools, England)*

Analysis of two versions of a long fairy tale, “The Green Man of Knowledge,” as narrated by the same storyteller on two separate occasions, shows considerable variation in the use of performance features, especially the historic present tense. One narration is in “additive” style, with the historic present as the norm; the other shows a gradual “breakthrough to performance,” with the historic present dominant in certain segments. There are more patterns in the use of this tense, and more factors affecting it, than have hitherto been acknowledged; it may be instructive to see how it co-occurs with other performance features. The discussion raises questions about the usefulness of quantitative analysis, and about issues of meaning, genre, audience, and the individuality of the storyteller. (Folklore; Scots; narratology; genre; rhetoric; qualitative analysis)

Explicit generalisations are statements that attribute a characteristic to all members of a social category (e.g. drug users). This article examines the tensions and negotiations that the use of generalisations prompts within support group interactions. Generalisations are practices for the cautious implementation of delicate actions. They can be used to convey perspectives on group members’ experiences by implication (without commenting on them directly), by virtue of those members belonging to the category to which a generalisation applies. At the same time, generalisations can misrepresent some individual cases within that category. Using conversation analysis, the article investigates how generalisations are deployed, challenged, and then defended in support group interactions. These analyses identify a tension between utilising the sense-making resources that category memberships afford, and the protection of its members from unwelcome generalisations. Data consist of recorded support-group meetings for people recovering from drug addiction (in Italy) and for bereaved people (in the UK). (Bereavement, conversation analysis, delicacy, drug addiction, generalisation, individuality, membership categorisation, morality, support groups)*

This study examines other-repetitions in Finland Swedish talk-in-interaction: their sequential trajectories, prosodic design, and lexicogrammatical features. The key objective is to explore how prosody can contribute to the action conveyed by a repetition turn, that is, whether it deals with a problem of hearing or understanding, a problem of expectation, or just registers receipt of information. The analysis shows that large and upgraded prosodic features (higher onset, wider pitch span than the previous turn) co-occur with repair- and expectation-oriented repetitions, whereas small, downgraded prosody (lower onset, narrower pitch span than the previous turn) is characteristic of registering. However, the distinguishing strength of prosody is mostly gradient (rather than discrete), and because of this, other concomitant cues, most notably the speakers’ epistemic positions in relation to the repeated item, are also of importance for ascribing a certain pragmatic function to a repetition. (Repetition, other-repetition, action ascription, prosody in conversation, repair, epistemics, conversation analysis, interactional linguistics, Finland Swedish)*