Aspects of nineteenth-century American life are crucial to the understanding of the history and nature of American prescriptivism. The story is not merely one of continuity from eighteenth-century Britain. An examination of linguistic thought of the nineteeth-century reveals that the prescriptive doctrine met with significant intellectual challenge from 1820 through the 40s. This reaction grew partly out of a specific revolt against rote learning, partly out of the development of national consciousness, and partly out of the ‘boundless’ intellectual tenor of the times.

The thought of the period 1850 through the 70s was a significant source of the doctrine's subsequent vigor which was to exhibit a curious and remarkable continuity into and throughout the present century. During the latter half of the century the doctrine of correctness revived with new vehemence in a new drive for uniformity and conformity. This was facilitated and accommodated in general by the intellectual milieu of the time: national integration and consolidation. The single most important specific factor was the development of the genteel cultural apparatus, as manifested linguistically by an interest in language, especially in ‘linguistic etiquette’ in genteel publication; in the reaction against innovation; in the application of intellect and logic to language; in the high premium placed by the genteel on books and authority; in the anglophile tendency of the genteel; and in the desire for a responsible, stable community.

We examine how other-repetitions in Finnish are used for repairing interactional problems in hearing and understanding and for registering what another has just said, describing how prosody and grammar interact in accomplishing these goals. In the repair-initiating repetitions, the pitch contours build a continuum of different degrees of falling pitch from moderate to steep, the latter being associated with some type of an affective stance. In the registering repetitions, the pitch fall is generally narrower than in the repair-initiations, the pitch span of the repetition turn typically matching that of the original turn. A notable feature of other-repetitions in Finnish is the use of particles (mostly ai and vai), which deal specifically with the informational aspects of other-repetitions, thus contributing to the design of both repair-initiating and registering repetitions. The article illustrates the complex layering of actions that Finnish as a ‘particle language’ affords. (Conversation analysis, other-repetition, prosody, grammar, Finnish, repair, registering, affectivity, response particle)

While the sociolinguistic variable is often deemed the carrier of social meaning, recent work reveals that the strength of social meaning can interact with linguistic environments. This study provides additional evidence that the same sets of variants can index drastically different social meanings across linguistic environments. Specifically, we present two cases of linguistic stylization in Taiwanese singer Jay Chou's performance in different genres: the ‘Chinese Flavor’ ballad and hip hop. Focusing on two socially salient variables in Mandarin—rhotacization and retroflex sibilants—we argue that while in both cases, Chou adopts variants associated with standard and mainland Mandarin, they index different social meanings. The conforming linguistic use in the ‘Chinese Flavor’ ballad indexes a sense of tradition, whereas the hypercorrected forms in the hip-hop song construct an unconventional stance. The study also addresses the connections between linguistic and non-linguistic stylizations and calls for more research on the multimodal construction of style. (Social meaning, linguistic constraint, multimodal, high performance, Mandarin)*

This paper is about turn exchanges, the structure of speaking turns and the relationship of nonverbal behavior to both exchanges and turns. Its purpose is to present a conceptual framework for analyzing and interpreting turn exchange and speaking turns, and data are cited when possible. First discussed are specific forms of exchange such as “smooth” and “simultaneous.” The Praguean concept of functional differentiation is invoked to argue that forms of turn exchange have indexical value. The relationship of nonverbal behavior to turn exchange is then discussed. An analysis of videotaped, dyadic interactions between strangers, “getting acquainted” conversation, is reported in order to demonstrate that the nonoverlapping exchange has structurally, hence indexically. distinct forms. These forms, defined by both verbal and nonverbal elements, are ordered in a hierarchy of pragmatic markedness. It is concluded that differentiating pragmatic markedness in conversational patterns is a powerful device for determining indexical features of conversation and thus of relevance for a semiotic understanding of everyday speech.

In this article, I explore the notions of indexicality and stancetaking practice through the analysis of a single lexical item embedded in the speech act of complimenting among young Japanese speakers. After revisiting prominent frameworks of indexicality and stance, I illustrate the ways in which the lexical item sugoi ‘amazing’ performs multiple pragmatic functions: as a marker of praise, surprise, or mock impoliteness; an intensifier; or silence-filler in the act of complimenting. On the basis of extensive sociolinguistic interviews and ethnographic metadata, I discuss how and why Japanese speakers use the variants sugoi and sugee to build intricately on their indexical field in the context of complimenting. I argue that sugoi and sugee, canonically assumed to index speaker gender, are used as a linguistic resource to perform larger interactional functions and stancetaking practice among young Japanese speakers. (Compliments, indexicality, stance, interactional analysis, Japanese, pragmatic function)*

A micro-discourse-based approach is employed to examine the usage of nonparticle questions (e.g., ii? ‘{Is that} okay?’) in Japanese university orchestra meetings. Women appear to ask such questions more often than men do there. It is shown that a detailed discourse analysis, including participants' talk, nonvocal behaviors, and the use of documents, can uncover how superficially sex-linked usage arises from differences in speakers' activities at the moment. By means of both sequential and quantitative analyses of 140 nonparticle questions, it is demonstrated that their use with different frequencies by women and men is not a direct consequence of the sex of the speaker per se. Rather, the speakers' engagement in activities specific to particular discourses (e.g., note-taking) affects their opportunities to ask nonparticle questions.I would like to express my appreciation to my former academic adviser, Amy Sheldon of the University of Minnesota, and to the other members of my dissertation committee, Junko Mori, Betsy Kerr, Jeanette Gundel, and Bruce Downing, for their invaluable comments on earlier versions of this article. I am also grateful to the editor of the journal and two anonymous reviewers of this article who helped me to refocus the argumentation. I also appreciate the help of Anthony Backhouse, Marjorie Harness Goodwin, Jane Hill, Noël R. Houck, Hiroaki Ishiguro, Etsuko Oishi, and Tomoharu Yanagimachi, who gave me useful and insightful suggestions. I also thank Anne-Marie Cusac and Jane McGary, who made many stylistic changes. I am solely responsible for any problems that remain in this article. An earlier version of this article was presented at the 2001 annual meeting of American Association for Applied Linguistics in St. Louis, Missouri. A related but different article concerning functions of nonparticle questions appeared as Okada 2005 in the Bulletin of Fuji Women's University 42 (Series I).

This article provides an insight into the heteroglossic and intersectional construction of fatherhood in the self-recorded, spontaneous talk of a group of young men from ethnically and racially mixed working-class backgrounds in southeast London. By adopting an interactional sociolinguistic approach, informed by Bakhtin's (1981, 1984, 1986) work on dialogicality and Tannen's (1989, 2004) notion of constructed dialogue, this article explores the young men's use of voices for their positioning in a range of fathering discourses which are shaped by and shape intersectional and hegemonic masculinities. Intersections of race, ethnicity, and social class inform many of the young men's positions, especially in their talk about the influences of hip hop on their children. This polyphony of voices allows the group to balance traditional discourses of fathers as providers, protectors, and moral guides with contemporary models of intimate and involved fatherhood, but also competing discourses of virile masculinity and bad boy identity. (Dialogicality, discourse, ethnicity, fatherhood, hegemony, heteroglossia, intersectionality, identity, masculinity, race, social class, voice)*

In the early 1970s, a strange piece of whimsy circulated orally in the United States. The modern joke in question concerned a ‘wide-mouth’ frog who evidently lacked the knowledge of what to feed its newborn babies. In the course of his or her attempts to question other animals about their normal regimes of infant diet, the wide-mouth frog is eventually put in the position of having to radically alter its customary speech pattern. This piece of folklore thus contains an explicitly metalinguistic aspect. Let me present representative texts of the story before discussing its possible significance.

The title of this edited volume leads one to expect a timely contribution to the literature on language socialization, which has become increasingly concerned with bilingual and multilingual settings over the past decade or so. Some readers with general interests in bilingual and multilingual situations, or with special interests in education in such settings, may find this collection worthwhile. Those with a particular interest in language socialization, however, will be disappointed – and perhaps irritated to have been misled by the title. The volume's 16 chapters present a broad variety of interesting case studies, but very few among them can accurately be characterized as language socialization studies.

This study illustrates how speech features that emerged from language contact and acquisition in a pluralistic society can accrue diverse social-indexical meanings over time. The social perceptions towards three variants of coda /l/ in Singapore English—namely dark-l, the variant associated with prescriptive norms, and clear-l and vocalised-l, which are variants that arose through language contact—are examined. The findings show that clear-l and vocalised-l are associated with specific ethnic groups and have equally diverse meanings, but their meanings have evolved differently; vocalised-l is an emerging local standard, whereas clear-l remains largely stigmatised. Their diverse meanings are shown to be connected by social factors within a network of interrelated signs, and their interpretations are dependent on the hearer's experiences, such that we are observing different parts of the sociolinguistic reality. Restricted experiences with the social world and regulation of social perception are also shown to potentially contribute to accent-based prejudices. (Indexicality, language contact, ethnolect, lateral consonant, new Englishes, social perception)*

Membership categories such as ‘doctor’, ‘customer’, and ‘girl’ can form a set of alternative ways of referring to the same person. Moreover, speakers can select from this array of correct alternatives that term best fitted to what is getting done in their talk. In contrast, self-references alone ordinarily do not convey category membership, unless the speaker specifically employs some sort of category-conveying formulation. This report investigates how speakers manage the categorical relevance of these simplest self-references (e.g. ‘I’, ‘me’, ‘my’) as a practical means of self-presentation. We first describe how speakers forestall recipient attribution of membership categories. We then consider cases where simple self-references are subjected to subsequent elaboration—via self-categorization—in the face of possible recipient misreading of the speaker's category membership. Thereafter, we introduce the practice of contrastive entanglement, and describe how speakers employ it to fashion tacitly categorized self-references that serve the formation of action. (Person reference, conversation analysis, membership categorization devices, race, gender)*

This article addresses recent calls in sociolinguistics to accommodate the agentive role of material objects in communicative interactions. The study explores how agency is shared between humans and objects, and how the latter may influence and shape the semiotic repertoires in a professional interaction. We adopt interactional sociolinguistics to analyze video recordings from the research group meetings (RGM) of a team of multinational microbiologists in a midwestern American university to demonstrate how the door plays an important role in the RGM genre of discourse. The door serves as a contextualization cue for the opening and composition of the interaction, indexes the participant identities, constructs the interactional space into an ‘ecological huddle’, and frames the ‘professional vision’ by bringing into salience the relevant semiotic resources, footing, participation frameworks, and ethos. (Objects, embodied sociolinguistics, interactional sociolinguistics, ecological huddle, research group meetings)*

Although the importance of linguistic simultaneity has long been recognized (Woolard 1998), the concept is underexamined in recent analyses of language use in globalized, digital contexts such as social media. Drawing from an analysis of everyday Facebook posts from youth in Belgrade, Serbia, the article proposes that recognizing four types of simultaneity—of linguistic features, indexical operations, effects, and scale—is key for making sense of social media utterances in political and historical context. On Facebook, Serbian youth mix languages and writing systems in complex ways, adhering to dominant ideologies of language and identity in some ways and flouting them in others. Using the Serbian case as a springboard, along with the four types of simultaneity proposed, I suggest a framework for analyzing language and identity on social media. (Serbia, indexicality, simultaneity, social media, superdiversity, bivalency, youth)*