This article demonstrates the potential for phonological variables to be a resource for the expression of ideology and identity in historical circumstances such as those experienced recently in the Catalonian procés. Based on a corpus consisting of communicative events from sixteen leading Catalan politicians, four Spanish linguistic variants are analyzed. Apart from a handful of structural predictors, the mixed-effects logistic regression analysis shows the robustness of (only) two extralinguistic factor groups: the social origin and the identification of the politicians as Catalan nationalist (mainly pro-independence) or not nationalist. As regards the latter, the most significant of all predictors, the analysis shows how nationalist politicians always favor the sounds mainly associated with vernacular pronunciation in eastern Catalan speech communities ([-ɫ] and [-t]), but at the same time also favor other sounds associated with more canonical and pan-Hispanic prestige variants ([-ð] and [-ð-]). These apparently contradictory results can be explained if the social meaning of all variants is considered around the same indexical field, that of authenticity. In this sense, nationalists seem to ‘appropriate’ the Spanish language by tingeing its expressive habits with uses closer to their language. (Phonological variation, nationalism, ideology, languages in contact, Spanish, Catalan)*

This article links the use of you know in a group of mostly working-class London adolescents (WCG) and I know in a mostly middle-class group (MCG) to Foucault's notion of power/knowledge and, by extension, to group-specific (re)production of dominant discourses and power relations. Speakers in WCG use you know clause-finally to mark the information in that clause, which tends to be about the deviance of others, as dominant. Speakers in MCG use I know either clause-initially or as a stand-alone item in reaction to the previous speaker's utterance and to mark that utterance as dominant. Thus, the use of you know shows relatively active identity construction while the use of I know shows relatively reactive identity construction, but both groups construct their identities indirectly: WCG because they talk about others, and MCG because they react to others. Relations between these processes and class and gender identities are discussed.

Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen & Cecilia E. Ford (eds.) Sound patterns in interaction: Cross-linguistic studies from conversation. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2004. Pp. 404. Hb $156.00.

A successor to Couper-Kuhlen & Selting 1996, this volume contains a similar collection of papers at the interface between phonetics and conversational interaction. There is a lengthy introductory essay by the editors, followed by 12 chapters grouped into three broad sections: “Turn-taking,” “Projecting and expanding turns,” and “Connecting across turns.” Each chapter has a separate bibliography, and the volume has a general index. Seven of the contributions describe British or American English, while a further five address the features of German, Finnish, and Japanese. All the contributions represent work carried out strictly within the theoretical framework of Conversation Analysis (CA), an approach that lends itself well to the study of turn-taking.

Optimality Theory (OT) has been a major force driving developments in formal linguistics during the past decade. Like parameter-setting accounts, OT seeks to describe the range within which languages can vary; but instead of fixing parameters, OT proposes that languages, and children learning languages, arrange a set of constraints in a hierarchical order of strength that determines specific linguistic characteristics. The constraints proposed by OT are constraints on the well-formedness of the output of a grammar, and they are of two types: (i) markedness constraints, which exert pressure toward unmarked types of structure such as CV syllables or voiceless final obstruents; and (ii) faithfulness constraints, which maintain lexical contrasts such as CV and CVC syllable types, or voicing distinctions in final obstruents. The two types of constraints are in conflict, so that no particular constraint can be satisfied without violating others. In OT, “satisfaction” and “violation” are not absolute but a matter of degree, because all constraints play a role in the grammar of each language, though in a different order of strength or priority within a dominance hierarchy.

This article analyzes the use of metapragmatic description in the ethnoclassification of language by native speakers on the Franco-Antillean island of Saint Barthélemy. A prevalent technique for metapragmatic description is facilitated by the differential formation of honorific registers in the island's indigenous languages, so that speakers essentialize honorific pronouns as tropes of whole languages and classify the languages in such terms. This process reflects the varied geolinguistic and generational attributes of these speakers, whose register or social-dialectal calculations are all based ultimately on folk ideologies of honorification. (Classification, language ideology, French Creole, metapragmatics, Caribbean sociolinguistics)

Many casual observers outside Asia believe that everyone in Hong Kong, owing to its British colonial past, speaks English as fluently as the queen (or, at least, George Bush). Others, hearing the grunts of martial artists like Jackie Chan, might think that English is truly a foreign entity to the people of Hong Kong, as unknown to them as, say, pizza or hamburgers. Both assumptions, as Kingsley Bolton shows in this fascinating new collection of essays, are quite wrong. Instead, the place of English in Hong Kong is probably unique in the world: It is neither simply a variety poorly mimicking the language of the UK, nor an imperial tongue imposed on a subservient populace. It is these dynamics of culture, identity, economics, globalization, education – and, indeed, politics – that are addressed in this stimulating book.

Enfield's The anatomy of meaning is a pathbreaking exploration of multimodal communication based on Lao video recordings and fieldwork. Of special interest is his notion of composites, through which he addresses the question of cross-modal integration—how it is that signs in different modalities cohere, speech and gesture being his focus. For whom, to what degree, and through what means do composites coalesce? Does this notion denote a kind of cross-modal orderliness or the achievement of orderliness—perhaps through heuristics and inference-making? As I detail the book's engagement with this issue and compare it with others—especially recent discussions of “textuality” in linguistic anthropology and older structuralist approaches to behavioral events—I suggest that Enfield's notion is best viewed as a methodological operator. It is a notion that performs a kind of methodological displacement, pushing against an entrenched logocentrism while spurring us to view communicative events as multiplex, cross-modal assemblages. (Multi-modal, cross-modal, gesture, interaction, video, Lao)

This article describes the range of discursive strategies in the socializing messages of a mother and daughter interaction. The analysis draws on the work of Bakhtin (1981) and Tannen (2007) to interrogate the role of a physically absent but discursively present sister-in-law, ‘Mami Ji’, across three speech events. Following Tannen, we show how the characterisation of the sister-in-law, Mami Ji, has chronotopic value that connects mother and daughter in the present and makes links across family histories. Through the discursive strategies of repetition, dialogue, detail, and translanguaging, ‘Mami Ji’ becomes an iconic benchmark of how not to speak, how not to dress, and how not to behave. Drawing on material from a linguistic ethnography approach, we present three discourse analyses from a much larger international project that also looked at classroom interaction and break-time conversations. The article contributes to the under-researched topic of the representation of sisters-in-law in discourse, theorises the chronotope in everyday conversation, and demonstrates how mother and daughter solidarity is achieved through opposition to another female family member. (Chronotope, linguistic involvement strategies, translanguaging, socialisation, sister-in-laws, mothers and daughters)

Hong Kong has received much world attention in recent years. After a century and half of colonial occupation, it was returned to China in 1997. Before British rule, it was an unremarkable seaside outpost of Guangzhou (Canton), the premier city in South China. Thus, the speech of its overwhelming majority is called “Cantonese” in English. In fact, Hong Kong and Guangzhou share essentially the same speech, the primary differences being lexical choices.