Is language simply a medium for the expression of intentions, motives, or interests, or is it also a site for uncovering the method through which ordered activity is generated? This question has wide-ranging implications for the study of bilingual interaction in particular, and for sociolinguistics generally. This article attempts to explicate the principles behind the Conversation Analysis (CA) approach to bilingual interaction. It addresses some of the criticisms that have been leveled against the CA approach, using both new data and new analyses of previously published examples. (Keywords: Conversation Analysis, bilingual interaction, code-switching).*

This article focuses on adolescents at an inner-London secondary school who are learning German rather reluctantly in a foreign language class, and then using the language to play around elsewhere. I argue that the language teacher's pedagogic methods turned the German lessons into relatively intense institutional rituals, and that the lessons provided symbolic and socio-emotional material that students subsequently inverted in a set of micro-ritual improvisations. There are some endemic problems of evidence in the argument that instructed German was connected to improvised Deutsch by cause-and-effect processes associated with ritual, but the discussion ends by affirming ritual's value as an analytic frame that can be applied both to institutional language learning and to historical shifts in classroom experience.

This article is concerned with understanding situations in which speakers talk in the presence of scientific inscriptions (lectures in science classes, public presentations). Drawing on extensive video materials accumulated in middle and high school science classrooms and university lectures, we develop a framework for the resources speakers make available to their audience for understanding what the talk is about. We distinguish three situations according to the nature of reference to the phenomenon talked about: (i) talk is about phenomenon but mediated by reference to a two-dimensional (2-D) inscription; (ii) talk is about phenomenon but mediated by reference to a three-dimensional (3-D) inscription; and (iii) talk is directly about phenomenon. Associated with these three situations are different body orientations, distances from inscriptions, and types of gestures. When speakers laminate talk characteristic of two different types of situations, the orientation “up” can become “down” and “down” can become “up,” potentially leading to confusing statements.

Although oral histories about the Holocaust are increasingly important sources of public commemoration, as well as data for historians, they also provide opportunities for survivors to recount life stories that describe intensely personal and painful memories. One type of memory concerns relationships with significant and familiar “others.” By analyzing the linguistic construction (through variation in the use of referring terms and reported speech) of two relationships (with mother and friends) in one Holocaust survivor's life story, this article shows how survivors' life stories position “others” within both their own lives and more broadly construed matrices of cultural archetypes and historically contingent identities (victim, survivor, bystander).

The present study's aim is to pinpoint the characteristics of verbal socialization in family interaction in five different sociocultural contexts. Families with early adolescent children (M = 11.5 years) were compared with regard to regulatory comments issued during family mealtimes. Three monocultural groups consisted of 20 Estonian, 20 Swedish, and 20 Finnish families living in their countries of origin; two bicultural and bilingual groups consisted of 20 Estonian and 20 Finnish families residing in Sweden. Regulatory comments were defined as utterances aimed at influencing the conversational partner to behave according to social and conversational rules. Contrary to expectations, cultural differences were not found in discussions dealing with table manners and conversational rules, but the number of comments on perceived violations of moral rules was much greater in the Swedish material. Swedish early adolescents commented significantly more than their Estonian and Finnish counterparts, indicating more asymmetrical communication in Estonian and Finnish families.

A crucial division of linguistic labor is that among metalinguistic labors. Who is authorized to speak about language, how, and where? Language ideologies not only ascribe different functions to different languages; they also ascribe different sorts of metadiscourse to speakers of (or about) those languages. Drawing from archival and field work, this article traces the ways particular Soviet and post-Soviet institutions and actors modeled and regimented metapragmatic discourses, specifically through stage and screen practices and representations that hypercontextualized utterances in Romani. They became so hegemonic that, in public arenas, Romani speakers spoke only about nonreferential functions; only in less well broadcast contexts (and mainly with other Roma) did they articulate metalinguistic and metareferential discourses. These practices reverse and contrast with the mainstream metapragmatics of Russian. Language ideologies commonly rank codes and metadiscourses; this case illuminates not only that they do so, but also how they do so, and it suggests what their social effects may be.

Is language simply a medium for the expression of intentions, motives, or interests, or is it also a site for uncovering the method through which ordered activity is generated? This question has wide-ranging implications for the study of bilingual interaction in particular, and for sociolinguistics generally. This article attempts to explicate the principles behind the Conversation Analysis (CA) approach to bilingual interaction. It addresses some of the criticisms that have been leveled against the CA approach, using both new data and new analyses of previously published examples. (Keywords: Conversation Analysis, bilingual interaction, code-switching).*

Identity-related accounts of language alternation among bilingual speakers have traditionally drawn on the social values of the languages involved in specific communities (Gumperz 1982, Myers-Scotton 1993). However, recently researchers have expressed reservation against this approach (Wootton and Sebba 1998, Li Wei 1998, 2002). Following from this, Gafaranga 2001 argues that, in order to account for the orderliness of language alternation, language preference (Auer 1984) must be seen as a membership categorization device (Sacks 1966, 1974). In developing his argument, Gafaranga draws on instances of ordinary everyday conversation among bilingual speakers. In this paper, we take Gafaranga's argument a step further and look at language alternation in first-time trilingual service encounters collected in the Barcelona area. The languages involved are Catalan, Castilian, and English. Analysis of these data reveals that, in addition to doing service-relevant tasks, participants accomplish “medium-related activities” (Gafaranga 2001) drawing on their various linguistic identities. Therefore, the analysis confirms the need to see linguistic identities as social identities in their own right.

This study investigates framing in discourse while considering spontaneous role-play between a young child (age 2 years 11 months) and her mother, wherein the participants reverse roles from real life and reenact shared prior experiences. Data consist of two tape-recorded naturally occurring pretend-play episodes and the real-life interactions on which they are based, all of which took place at home. Analysis of the role-play episodes illustrates how framing occurs from moment to moment in interaction in this context, showing that the participants use both play and non-play utterances collaboratively to evoke, maintain, and embed multiple play frames with increasingly specific, and at times blended, metamessages. By linking the role-play interactions back to their real-life counterparts, I explore the relationship between framing and “prior text.” This analysis adds to our understanding of framing by showing how frames are layered in discourse. Additionally, it links frames theory to the notion of intertextuality by illustrating how prior text can be used as a resource for framing.

This article investigates how participants in broadcast news interviews display their orientations to a social distribution of knowledge regarding newsworthy events and actors. Interviewers treat the nature, grounds, and limits of interviewees' knowledge as accountable matters. The article employs single-case and quantitative analyses to show that, in and through the design of their questions, interviewers distinguish between (i) interviewees as subject-actors who are responsible for direct, first-hand knowledge of their own conduct; and (ii) interviewees as commentators who, on the basis of indirect, second-hand knowledge, are entitled to opinions about third parties' conduct. This distinction serves as a basis for the production of interviewees' responses as talk that expresses either matters of fact or points of opinion. The article examines how these aspects of question design establish relevancies for interviewees' responses and, ultimately, shape news content.

This article explores one aspect of the many public protests surrounding the 1996 reform of German orthography: the first in a series of legal challenges, which was brought before the Federal Constitutional Court in May 1996. The first section begins by proposing how and why such protests can be usefully theorized in terms of Blommaert's (1999) concept of a “language ideological debate,” and then describes the historical background essential for an understanding of this legal dispute. The second section focuses on a critical analysis of the case brought against the reform, looking at the details of the challenge itself, together with the justification for its rejection by the Constitutional Court. The third section considers what this dispute can tell us about debates over the perceived origin of orthographic norms, with particular reference to the ideological relationship between individual, speech community, and (nation-)state. Finally, there is a brief summary of the way in which the matter was finally – albeit unsatisfactorily – resolved in 1998–1999.

This study examines the types of interactional trouble that arise from narrative variation in institutional interviews. Specifically, we examine protective order interviews in which Latina women tell of domestic violence to paralegal interviewers charged with the duty of helping them obtain a protective order. Victims' narratives are shown to take different shapes, and paralegals respond to them in different pragmalinguistic ways, depending on how they diverge from institutional needs. The factors found most heavily to influence narrative outcomes are contextual ones, related to participant social roles, the type of communicative activity interlocutors perceive themselves to be engaged in, and their interactional goals. An additional finding is that when expectations of what constitutes appropriate speech behavior differ, the interlocutor holding greater institutional power will try to constrain the speech of the other, despite the fact that both appear to share an extralinguistic goal, in this case obtaining a protective order.

The present investigation concerns language ideology and language practices in relation to a language shift – from Quichua-Spanish bilingualism to Spanish monolingualism – that seems to be under way. The analyses are based on fieldwork in an Ecuadorian sierra community characterized by ethnic revitalization. Among adult comuneros, the vernacular is seen as an essential part of their Indian cultural heritage. In the children's daily lives, the adults, particularly women and the elderly, speak Quichua among themselves, yet children are not addressed in the vernacular by either parents or elder siblings, and those under 10 years of age are generally more or less monolingual in Spanish. The paradoxical mismatch between ideology and daily practices – the ethnic revitalization paradox – is analyzed in light of Quichua speaking practices in intergenerational encounters, and in children's play dialogues. Ultimately, being Quichua means something different to members of each generation.

This study examines bilingual discourse markers in a language contact situation. The focus is on how English-dominant, bilingual, and Spanish-dominant New York Puerto Ricans integrate English-language discourse markers into their Spanish-language oral narratives. The corpus comprises 60 Spanish-language oral narratives of personal experience extracted from transcripts of conversations with New York Puerto Ricans. After a review of the study of discourse markers in language contact situations, the use of English-language discourse markers is compared to the use of Spanish-language markers in the texts. The discussion considers the question of whether English-language discourse markers are more profitably identified as instances of code-switching or of borrowing. Finally, the essay explores how bilingual speakers integrate English discourse markers in their narratives with a pattern of usage and frequency that varies according to language proficiency.

Adult speakers constantly offer young children new terms, conventional words for the events and objects being talked about. They make direct offers of unfamiliar words, using deictics or other forms that signal that the upcoming term is new, and they make indirect offers on the assumption that the relevant meaning is computable on that occasion. Adults also present young children with information about how words are related to each other through such connections as is a part of, is a kind of, belongs to, or is used for. These pragmatic directions provide children with essential information about language and language use as they make inferences about possible meanings for unfamiliar words. They also offer support for an alternative to constraints-based accounts of lexical acquisition by providing a conversation-based approach more consistent with the findings from spontaneous speech and from experimental results.

Adult speakers constantly offer young children new terms, conventional words for the events and objects being talked about. They make direct offers of unfamiliar words, using deictics or other forms that signal that the upcoming term is new, and they make indirect offers on the assumption that the relevant meaning is computable on that occasion. Adults also present young children with information about how words are related to each other through such connections as is a part of, is a kind of, belongs to, or is used for. These pragmatic directions provide children with essential information about language and language use as they make inferences about possible meanings for unfamiliar words. They also offer support for an alternative to constraints-based accounts of lexical acquisition by providing a conversation-based approach more consistent with the findings from spontaneous speech and from experimental results.

This study investigates whether there is a relationship between negative attitudes toward non-native speakers and poor comprehension of those speakers. Twelve native English speakers whose attitudes toward Koreans had been assessed were asked to complete an interactional map task paired with native Korean speakers. In the task, some but not all of those who had been assessed as having negative attitudes toward Koreans were found to use either strategies that were described as problematizing their partners' utterances, or strategies that were described as avoidance. All participants completed the map task reasonably successfully except where the native English speaker used avoidance strategies, suggesting that the relationship between attitude and comprehension is mediated by the native speaker's choice of strategies. However, there appeared to be a direct relationship between attitude and perceived success of interactions, which may ultimately have the same consequences for interactants as if the relationship were between attitude and actual success.

The investigation of isolated African American enclave communities has been instrumental in reformulating the historical reconstruction of earlier African American English and the current trajectory of language change in African American Vernacular English (AAVE). This case study examines a unique enclave sociolinguistic situation – a small, long-term, isolated bi-ethnic enclave community in the mountains of western North Carolina – to further understanding of the role of localized dialect accommodation and ethnolinguistic distinctiveness in the historical development of African American English. The examination of a set of diagnostic phonological and morphosyntactic variables for several of the remaining African Americans in this community supports the conclusion that earlier African American English largely accommodated local dialects while maintaining a subtle, distinctive ethnolinguistic divide. However, unlike the situation in some other African American communities, there is no current movement toward an AAVE external norm for the lone isolated African American teenager; rather, there is increasing accommodation to the local dialect. Contact-based, identity-based, and ideologically based explanations are appealed to in describing the past and present direction of change for the African Americans in this receding community.

This article examines an interactive strategy of invited guessing in Chinese telephone conversations. Oriented toward affect bonding between the participants, invited guessing both indexes and strengthens their relationship. Caller identification, typically perceived as a procedural component in telephone conversation, is shown to be constructed as an interactive process serving social functions as well as a discourse-structural function. Its primary purpose is to signify and enhance rapport-building. The observed interactions present patterns of variation from the proposed universal sequence of telephone conversation openings, suggesting that this discourse structure can respond to variables such as the purpose of the interaction and the relationship between participants in the Chinese context. Finally, invited guessing indicates that relationship constitutes an important cultural variable shaping discourse and interaction in Chinese society.

This study investigates the generation and maintenance of multiple personal names in an Anglophone Creole-speaking community of Panama. Nearly every Afro-Panamanian resident of the island of Bastimentos has two given names, one Spanish-derived and the other Creole-derived. The Creole or “ethnic name” is virtually the exclusive name used locally for reference and address. It is argued that these ethnic names are preferred for reference and address because they reflexively define who members of this speech community are in terms of culture and ancestry. A typology of nicknames and pseudonyms as well as a brief cross-cultural presentation of multiple or alternative personal names is provided. Ethnic name usage in Bastimentos is discussed within an acts of identity framework.