We examine moments in social interaction in which a person formulates what another thinks or believes. Such formulations of belief constitute a practice with specifiable contexts and consequences. Belief formulations treat aspects of the other person's prior conduct as accountable on the basis that it provided a new angle on a topic, or otherwise made a surprising contribution within an ongoing course of actions. The practice of belief formulations subjectivizes the content that the other articulated and thereby topicalizes it, mobilizing commitment to that position, an account, or further elaboration. We describe how the practice can be put to work in different activity contexts: sometimes it is designed to undermine the other's position as a subjective ‘mere belief’, at other times it serves to mobilize further topic talk. Throughout, belief formulations show themselves to be a method by which we get to know ourselves and each other as mental agents. (Accountability, beliefs, courses of action, formulations, inference, subjectivity, topicalization)*

In this article, I argue that centering multimodal practices is important in the study of human communication and sociality, and becomes particularly relevant in the presence of asymmetries in language access. Using data collected as part of a two-year linguistic ethnography of deaf youth in Iquitos, Peru, I demonstrate how three siblings engage in extended dispute routines even in the face of sensory and communicative asymmetries. The microanalysis of video-recorded sibling interaction sheds light on their use of diverse multimodal resources to navigate the common interactional work of securing an interlocutor, coordinating attention, managing misunderstandings, and establishing shared references (Sidnell 2007, 2009). Not only do the siblings utilize multimodal resources to carry out the interactional project of making an accusation and building alliances, but they also ‘co-operatively’ engage in building a shared semiotic repertoire (C. Goodwin 2018). (Deaf, sign language, linguistic ethnography, multimodality, semiotic repertoire, Peru)*

This article contributes to research on commemorative naming strategies by presenting a comparative longitudinal study on changes in the urban toponymy of Leipzig (Germany) and Poznań (Poland) over a period of 102 years. Our analysis combines memory studies, linguistic landscape (LL) research and critical toponymy with GIS visualization techniques to explore (turnovers in) naming practices across time and space. The key difference between the two localities lies in the commemorative pantheon of referents—events, people, and places inscribed as traces of a hegemonic national past—that are replaced when commemorative priorities change. Other patterns are common to both study sites. Notably, in both Poznań and Leipzig, peaks of renaming occur at the threshold of regime change, after which commemorative renaming activity subsides. We report on our findings and propose methodological guidelines for analyzing street renaming from a longitudinal, transnational, and interdisciplinary perspective. (Collective memory, critical toponymy, memoryscape, linguistic landscapes, encoding of ideology, comparative analysis of Eastern Europe, longitudinal analysis, commemoration, GIS visualization)*

Drawing on the work of Jean-François Lyotard and Mikhail Bakhtin, this study analyzes personal narratives created and performed in American Sign Language (ASL) by three Deaf college students. These narratives can be viewed as “boundary phenomena” in that they reflect themes common to the Deaf oral tradition, yet were deliberately poetically created, extensively rehearsed and publicly performed, based on fact, and created with a specific rhetorical purpose. The texts are examined for literary features and themes, as well as for the key elements of performance and social-cultural context. Discussion centers on the ways in which students' individual styles emerged from exposure to the thematic and stylistic techniques of professional Deaf artists. (American Sign Language, personal narrative, narrative pragmatics, speech genres, intertextuality)

Sociolinguistic approaches to social justice tend to treat the use of interpreters or translators as a remedy to linguistic inequality in multilingual institutional settings. This article challenges this assumption by showing how translation can instead contribute to inequality and discrimination. Drawing on studies of face-to-face interpreting in judicial contexts and of written translation in linguistic landscapes, it explores inequalities found in habitual practices of professional interpreters and in the use of machine translation. It shows how language ideologies about multilingualism motivate translation practices that systematically restrict the participation of speakers of subordinated languages, or that stereotype them as deviant when addressed solely by prohibitions and warnings, a practice I call ‘punitive multilingualism’. The article thus argues that sociolinguistic studies of multilingualism should pay closer attention to translation practices within a wider context of language contact and in relation to phenomena such as translanguaging, mock languages, or language shift. (Translation, interpreting, justice, linguistic landscape, discrimination)*

Aneta Pavlenko & Adrian Blackledge (eds.), Negotiation of identities in multilingual contexts. Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters, 2004. Pp. 312. Hb $44.95.

This is one of the best books I have read this year. The topic is up to date and relevant for many contexts. Each author contributes to the originality of this edited book. The editors, Pavlenko & Blackledge, have done a wonderful job in putting together a series of texts that demonstrate how negotiation of identities is embedded within larger socioeconomic, sociohistoric and sociopolitical contexts. In order to situate their own framework, the editors start by examining different approaches to the negotiation of identities in multilingual contexts. The sociopsychological approach examines the negotiation of identities in second language learning and language use. However, this approach treats learning trajectories as linear and unidirectional, with little acknowledgment of the fact that learning language and identity building are more complex. Interactional sociolinguistics focuses on the negotiation of identities via code-switching and language choice. This approach sees social identities as more fluid and constructed through linguistic and social interaction. However, even though much sociolinguistic research examines the negotiation of languages choices and identities in multilingual contexts, Pavlenko & Blackledge claim that few have tried to theorize it. In this book, they propose a poststructuralist and critical theory approach to negotiation of identities. Based on the work of Gal 1989, Heller 1988, 1992, 1995a, 1995b, and Woolard 1985, 1989, 1998, the editors argue that language choice in multilingual contexts is embedded in larger social, political, economic, and cultural systems. Their interest is in how languages are used to legitimize, challenge and negotiate specific identities, and to open new identity options for groups and individuals who are subjugated. Their framework combines aspects of the social constructionist approach, which focuses on discursive construction of identities, and the poststructuralist emphasis on power relations. The editors explain in detail what they mean by identities embedded within power relations with the work of Bourdieu. They also focus on identity narratives that reconstruct the links among past, present, and future, and they impose coherence where it was missing.

Recent work in linguistics, philosophy, and psychology suggests that the distinction between generic and specific (singular) reference is foundational to concept formation, and hence of special interest to social scientists. Generics provide the first-language learner with external evidence of the integrity of a word/concept cluster, partially filling in the scaffolding of concepts. As such, they are replicators, critical to the transmission of concepts across populations and across time. Generics are tacitly normative. As they refer to the constitutive properties of a concept rather than to its object, they tell us what—in a given social setting—a proper instance of the concept should look like. Generics sustain and reproduce social stereotypes, including—and perhaps especially—ethnoracial, class, and gender stereotypes. (Generics, conceptual formation, ethnography, tokenization, materiality)*