This study explores how during the initial outbreak of COVID-19 in Taiwan, mask-wearing emerged as a semiotic register in health communication. Focusing on enregisterment (Agha 2007), I analyze interactional recordings of press conferences by the Taiwanese government, Chinese language lessons offered to international students, and conversations at a convenience store between an Australian student and her Taiwanese friend. The analysis reveals information production and reception on three social scales: public health policies, institutionalized health instruction, and interpersonal-care practices. On each scale, masking is enregistered as a semiotic sign associated with particular social actions, actors, and relations. This enregisterment transpires through an orchestration of verbal and non-verbal resources, conveying ideologies about invisible viruses in everyday life. While inconsistencies exist across scales, masking is consistently overlaid with civic solidarity and moral responsibility. In times of crisis, mask-wearing is an issue of public health and a process of typifying behaviors, identities, and relationships. (COVID-19, enregisterment, scale)*

Ana Roca & M. Cecilia Colombi (eds.), Mi lengua: Spanish as a heritage language in the United States. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press. 2003. 320 pp. $29.95.

The teaching of Spanish to native speakers has been packaged under diverse names, emerging most recently as “Spanish as a Heritage Language.” Whether it is couched as developmental bilingual education, maintenance bilingual education, Spanish for native speakers, or heritage language development, advocates for programs of academic excellence in two languages have been dealt a stunning blow by recent federal school reform measures. The No Child Left Behind Act, passed in 2001, eliminates, for all intents and purposes, the Bilingual Education Act (Title VII), as programs for English language learners have been subsumed under Title III of NCLB. All reference to bilingual education has been expunged from federal parlance, replaced in both form and substance by English language acquisition programs. The former Office of Bilingual Education and Minority Language Affairs (OBEMLA), the repository of research on minoritized languages in the United States, has been transformed into the Office of English Language Acquisition, Language Enhancement, and Academic Achievement for Limited-English-Proficient Students. Needless to say, support for native-language instruction is not found in Title III, as English language acquisition takes center stage. Add to this scenario the referenda passed in California, Arizona, and Massachusetts dismantling bilingual education, as well as the anti-immigrant sentiment sweeping the country, and the prospect of fostering Spanish as a heritage language seems dismal indeed.

In this article, we provide the first quantitative account of the frequent use of embedding in Shawi, a Kawapanan language spoken in Peruvian Northwestern Amazonia. We collected a corpus of ninety-two Frog Stories (Mayer 1969) from three different field sites in 2015 and 2016. Using the glossed corpus as our data, we conducted a generalised mixed model analysis, where we predicted the use of embedding with several macrosocial variables, such as gender, age, and education level. We show that bilingualism (Amazonian Spanish-Shawi) and education, mostly restricted by complex gender differences in Shawi communities, play a significant role in the establishment of linguistic preferences in narration. Moreover, we argue that the use of embedding reflects the impact of the mestizo1 society from the nineteenth century until today in Santa Maria de Cahuapanas, reshaping not only Shawi demographics but also linguistic practices. (Post-colonial societies, Amazonian linguistics, Kawapanan, Shawi, embedding, language variation and change, contact linguistics)*

What is a native speaker? This question has been taken for granted in linguistics, which has frequently taken as its starting point the monolingual community in which the native speaker is one who speaks the language “from the crib” (Singh, 40) throughout his or her life. In the idealized case, even for sociolinguistics, the native speaker has one native language which s/he speaks fluently: s/he is a rather “sedentary” person who is “uncontaminated” in significant ways by speakers of other languages (Salikoko Mufwene, 114).

Tonkin treats a complex and timely set of ideas when she studies the relationships between oracy and literacy, oral narrative performance and written texts, memory and history and society. To discuss these areas of scholarly debate, she employs a multidisciplinary, sometimes contentious variety of studies and assertions. Her efforts mostly succeed in promoting her claims for the necessity of blurring past distinctions and categories in the study of oral history, and for taking a much more performative/interactive view of its construction in a living context.

“Disorders of discourse” – practices that constitute “barriers to communication” – can be subjected to critique, and critique can lead to the suggestion of different practices. Such changes in discourse may contribute to changes in the “structures of organizations.” However, in the absence of such structural changes, changes in discourse may actually result in more subtle, and thus more effective, forms of domination. That is the central problem raised in this book. Interaction between doctors and patients, teachers and pupils, politicians and publics, etc., can change in ways that eliminate the more obvious forms of interactional asymmetry, domination, or manipulation; yet whether such changes contribute to substantive democratization – or only give an appearance of democracy, which can make relations of domination more effective because less obvious – depends on how such new forms of interaction fit within the overall network of practices that constitutes the institution concerned.

The Multiliteracies (ML) Project is a response by eleven prominent literacy researchers, known collectively as the New London Group (NLG), to changes associated with the end of the Cold War and the information economy.1 ML was conceived in 1994 at a meeting in New London, New Hampshire, US, and saw light with the publication of NLG 1996 in the Harvard Educational Review. With the appearance of the volume under review, we can now say that it is walking and has a promising future.

Boyd Davis, Alzheimer talk, text and context: Enhancing communication. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

I picked up Boyd Davis's edited volume with some anxiety. I had let go of my Alzheimer's research for a number of painful reasons in graduate school and had, over the past 10 years, invented myself in the sociopolitics of language learning and teaching. When I spotted the volume at a book exhibit, I thought: Would I be able to connect to any of the work anymore? A lot of research ground gets covered in a decade; would I be able to pick up any of the conversational threads? When a couple of months later the editor of Language and Society contacted me about possibly reviewing it, I took it as a sign beckoning and inviting me back to that space. Needless to say, I was delighted at the array of readings. The volume covers a range from personal accounts (by Jeutonne Brewer), to issues of identity, personhood maintenance, and gender (D. Shenk; E. B. Ryan K. Byrne, H. Spykerman & J. B.Orange; C. Pope & D. N. Ripich), to discourse markers, lexical variation, and bilingualism (Davis, M. Maclagan & P. Mason, Davis & C Bernstein, G. M. J. Nold), to concerns relating to caregiver training (K. Byrne & J. B. Orange; Ryan, Spykerman & A. P. Anas; N. Green; and L. Russell-Pinson & L. Moore) and metaphors by which language and Alzheimer's research can be described (H. E. Hamilton). Each of these areas laminates Alzheimer's talk with feeling and care, thus countering the sedimented psycholinguistic tropes that have typically written about Alzheimer discourse in clinical and cold ways.

This is almost two books in one. More than 100 pages are devoted to a critical review of approaches to the study of facts and descriptions. This review includes the sociology of scientific knowledge, philosophy of science, and constructionist approaches (e.g. Robert Merton, Harry Collins, Thomas Kuhn, Karl Popper); ethnomethodology (Harold Garfinkel, Melvin Pollner); conversation analysis (Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, Gail Jefferson, John Heritage); semiology (Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes); post-structuralism (Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault); and post-modernism (Donna Haraway, Jean-François Lyotard). Potter is a skillful teacher, and I learned much from his discussion of these perspectives. However, even 100 pages are not enough for a thorough description and critique of such a wide range of perspectives; Potter leaves the reader wanting more – which is a pretty good place to leave a reader.

In his Introduction to Volume I of Sacks's Lectures on conversation (1992), Emmanuel Schegloff observes (1992:lviii) that his own effort at overview was “truly daunting,” mostly because of “the extraordinary richness and multi-facetedness of Sacks's corpus … In its variety, depth, and freshness of vision it defies domestication into convenient guidelines to a reader.” Such a statement – indeed, any reading of the two-volume set of Lectures – should give pause to someone attempting a textbook rendering of Sacks and his work. But such a text is precisely what Silverman has produced, and the effort is remarkably successful on its own terms.

This article combines ethnographic and linguistic analysis to illuminate a critical aspect of the US criminal justice system—disciplinary hearings in prison. Focusing on one woman's (Cherry's) hearing, I consider the remaking of power through bureaucratic procedure. The scripted interaction requires the sergeant to read Cherry's ticket out loud in his performance of authority. I explore the intertextual relations motivated by this verbal animation for their ability to construct a unified front of the institution against which Cherry is tried. Cherry, however, manipulates these intertextual relationships, deploying verbal skills gained through her long entanglement with the criminal justice system to mitigate her punishment. The linguistic analysis of Cherry's hearing, positioned in her prison history, reveals the continual remaking of power in prison interactions that are framed by institutional regulations influencing the negotiation of officer authority and possibilities of inmate resistance. (Prisons, intertextuality, resistance, power, legal interactions)*

This book is the result of the project Sociolinguistic and Psycholinguistic Aspects of Linguistic Minority Groups in Spain, started in 1993. After the introductory chapter by the editor, the book is divided into four parts, which contain 16 articles on the sociolinguistic situation of a series of established and migrant communities in Spain, viewed from an interdisciplinary standpoint. There are numerous maps and graphics, but no index.