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.

The verbal style of middle-class and lower-class ten-year-old children was assessed in a descriptive communication task using three different types of stimulus items: standard visual, tactual, and items embedded in a narrative. In a partial replication of Heider's (1971) work it was found that lower-class children used a global descriptive style to communicate information about standard visual (abstract) stimuli, whereas middle-class children used an analytic style. Group differences also were observed with tactually input stimuli, although the lower-class responses shifted toward an analytic style. However, both middle-class and lower-class children used an analytic style to describe stimulus items when they were embedded in a narrative context. In addition, order effects were observed, suggesting that lower-class children use an analytic style with standard visual stimuli if they perceive this style as situationally appropriate. Social class differences in verbal style are not only a function of type of stimulus item, but are also a function of strategies applied in the communicative situation.

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.

Well known for its creation and adoption of modern Hebrew as its national language, Israel is still one of the most linguistically heterogeneous societies in the world. Bernard Spolsky and Elana Shohamy delve into this complex reality and describe a coherent picture of it, drawing from an updated model of linguistic policy which they elaborate. I found no few weaknesses in the book in regard to the sociological interpretation of sociolinguistic facts, but its major interest resides in the description of Israel's linguistic diversity and evolution. It is one of the very few attempts to date to do that, and it merits attention.

Building on recent work supporting a sociolinguistic approach to orthographic choice, this study engages with paratextual language use in yuri, a subgenre of Japanese shōjo manga ‘girls’ comics’ that centers on same-sex romantic and/or erotic relationships between female characters. The comic magazine Comic Yuri Hime has been the dominant, if not only, yuri-oriented published magazine in Japan since its inception in 2005. Though both written and consumed by a primarily female audience, the magazine has undergone numerous attempts to rebrand and refocus the target audience as a means to broaden the magazine's readership. This change in target demographic is reflected in the stylistic representation of paratextual occurrences of the second-person pronoun anata, indicating the role of the textual landscape in reflecting, and reifying, an imagined target audience. (Script variation, manga, popular media, Japan, yuri manga)