This study explores the social meanings of unfilled pauses, you know, like, and combinations thereof by comparing the evaluation of speech with these features to speech without them. The comparison is based on a set of perception surveys in which participants listened to manipulated audio stimuli and rated them on a series of scales. Unfilled pauses are evaluated differently from all other features: they are rated high on Status and low on Dynamism. Where significant differences emerge, the pragmatic markers you know, like, and combinations of pauses with these are always rated lower than the guises without. They are most sensitive to personal characteristics in the Dynamism dimension, followed by Conversational Skills, Likeability, and Status. The mechanism that adapts the potential social meanings of linguistic features when they are combined hinges on the social salience of the features in question. Various outcomes are possible ranging from additive to non-additive effects. (Like, you know, attitudes, social meanings, prestige, solidarity, dynamism)

This book caps Michael Coe's distinguished career as a Mayanist scholar. In this book, he joins with Justin Kerr to present the formal, technical, and aesthetic characteristics of the art of writing as practiced by the pre-Columbian Maya of Mesoamerica. The collaboration of a renowned archaeologist with an equally illustrious photographer and dedicated student of Maya art has created a readable, highly informative, and well-illustrated text.

Arthur Hughes, Peter Trudgill and Dominic Watt, English accents and dialects: An introduction to social and regional varieties of English in the British Isles. 4th ed. London: Hodder Arnold, 2005. Pp. xiii, 159. Pb and accompanying CD £24.99.

English accents and dialects has been the standard introductory textbook on varieties of English in the British Isles since it first appeared in 1979. It is well known and widely used as the only compact and affordable textbook providing detailed descriptions of a range of accents and dialects, as well as introductory chapters dealing with issues of social and regional variation and change. Although successive editions have expanded the range of varieties included and updated references, this fourth edition has undergone a more thorough overhaul, with a new co-author on board in the sociophonetician Dominic Watt. The new edition is accompanied by a digitally remastered CD with recordings of the transcribed interviews and word lists, and it includes new sections on the varieties spoken in Aberdeen, Galway, and “Leicester,” along with exercises on these.

Critical reflexivity seems expedient in a robust, burgeoning field such as sociolinguistics. Assumptions, principles, and approaches nurture implicit and explicit disciplinary canonization based on our cognitive framing and background experience—and these tenets deserve to be scrutinized judiciously. In fact, I have to admit that some of my own research unwittingly contributed to the construction of a set of ‘sociolinguistic myths’ about the development and status of African American Language (Wolfram 2007) as well as some questionable assumptions about the nature of social engagement (Wolfram 1998; Wolfram, Reaser, & Vaughn 2008). I therefore welcome this critique of the principle of error correction as a theory underlying social change. The study of language in its social context is historically embedded in an ideological struggle that pits ‘popular beliefs’ against ‘expert authority’, thus making it vulnerable to overstatement and overgeneralization—by the sociolinguistic intelligentsia as well as those speaking for popular culture.

This article investigates how new citizens reconfigure dominant indexes of citizenship to claim status as legitimate new citizens of Singapore. New citizens are expected to resolve a tension that underpins public discourses in Singapore society: while the statal narrative of multiculturalism countenances new citizens to have perceivable markers of difference, everyday discourses expect new citizens to assimilate into the ‘Singapore core’—a term used in Singapore that denotes a homogeneous understanding of what it means to be Singaporean. By adopting a metapragmatic approach, this article identifies three common indexes of citizenship that new citizens negotiate to resolve this contradiction: language, loyalty, and legacy. By reconfiguring common markers of citizenship in Singapore, new citizens are able to discursively construct a type of citizenship that they can legitimately claim and contribute to. This expands common understandings of the notion of citizenship in Singapore society. (Citizenship, language ideologies, multiculturalism, metapragmatics, Singapore)*

As Verschueren writes in his preface, this book is an attempt to meet a double challenge: (a) to present a coherent theory of pragmatics, describing research to date and setting parameters for future research; and (b) to serve as a textbook that is accessible to all students with a basic linguistics background. This is no easy task, but Verschueren has managed to write a book that is accessible to the nonspecialist student and also provides a valuable synthesis of the pragmatic perspective for language specialists in a variety of disciplines. Most chapters have detailed summaries and are followed by suggestions for future research and additional reading.

The present research was carried out in Catania, a town of 600,000 inhabitants on the eastern coast of Sicily, and was motivated by the observation of cases of nonreciprocity of address to female teachers in secondary schools. While male teachers were always addressed with their academic, professional titles, which have great, overt prestige in southern Italy, women, on the contrary, were often addressed as signora or signorina ‘Mrs./Miss’ in the vocative form. The main objectives of the research were to find out (a) which schools were involved in this case of nonreciprocity; (b) how many female teachers considered it a sign of respect or an act of discrimination; (c) if the linguistic imbalance reflected a social one; and (d) what were its psychological causes. (Linguistic imbalance, nonreciprocity of titles, asymmetrical address, social imbalance, Italian)

This chapter [of Sociolinguistic patterns – RWF] will deal with the study of language structure and evolution within the social context of the speech community. The linguistic topics to be considered here cover the area usually named “general linguistics,” dealing with phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics (Labov 1972:184). Surely, this is too narrow a conception of the role of sociolinguistic research (Romaine 1982:6).