This article employs conversation analysis to explore the interpenetration of grammar and preference organization in English conversation in comparison with a previous study for Japanese. Whereas varying the word order of major syntactic elements is a vital grammatical resource in Japanese for accomplishing the potentially universal task of delaying dispreferred responses to a range of first actions, it is found to have limited utility in English. A search for alternative operations and devices that conversationalists deploy for this objective in English points to several grammatical constructions that can be tailored to maximize the delay of dispreferred responses. These include the fronting of relatively mobile, syntactically “non-obligatory” elements of clause structure and the employment of various copular constructions. A close interdependence is observed between the rudimentary grammatical resources available in the two languages and the types of operations that are respectively enlisted for the implementation of the organization of preference.

This work concerns structural outcomes of contact between Mexican Sign Language (LSM) and American Sign Language (ASL). A brief description of the social environment that leads to contact between LSM and ASL along the U.S.–Mexico border is provided, and two claims are advanced: (i) Contact between sign languages can exhibit characteristics of contact between spoken languages (e.g., interference), but there are also unique features of signed-language contact due to the ability to produce elements from a signed and spoken language simultaneously; and (ii) examples of interference from one sign language in the production of the other are sometimes systematic and predictable based on the signer's linguistic background, but cases of lack of interference also provide evidence that some signers are able to employ subtle articulatory differences, either consciously or not, when producing signs from the sign language that was learned after they acquired their first sign language.This work was supported by a National Institutes of Health/National Institute on Deafness and other Communication Disorders grant (F31 DC00352) to the author. I would also like to thank two anonymous reviewers and Barbara Johnstone for their comments on an earlier draft of this article, and Claire Ramsey and Sergio Peña provided input about the Mexican Deaf situation as well. Any errors are, of course, my own.

This article examines divergent listener perceptions with an expanded form of the Matched Guise Technique, using 32 matched pairs of short recordings of natural speech. Social evaluations were collected in open-ended interviews (N = 55) and an online experiment (N = 124). Three speakers are described who prompted disagreement about the English variable (ING). One's -ing use is seen by some as more intelligent and by others as annoying, less intelligent, and trying to impress. Another's -in guise is seen as compassionate by some and as condescending by others, while a third, when using -in, is seen by some as annoying and less masculine, while others describe him as a masculine “jock.” These findings show that listeners shift their interpretations of a linguistic resource, highlighting the ambiguous role intention plays in social meaning and calling into question long-held assumptions about the need for conscious introspection in sociolinguistic perception.

This study extends Goffman's idea that frames are laminated in various ways in interaction by demonstrating how work and play frames are interrelated in two distinct ways in naturally occurring family conversations. An analysis of excerpts from everyday interactions between parents and young children in three families illustrates how frames of play and parenting are laminated (i) by using language to sequentially transform interaction from a literal frame to a play frame (reframing), and (ii) by creating two definitions of the social situation simultaneously through language and sometimes through physical actions as well (blending frames). It identifies linguistic and paralinguistic features by which these laminations are accomplished and shows how the parents in each family use the two different types. Finally, the analysis demonstrates in what ways play constitutes “work” for parents, contributing to our understanding of play as both ambiguous and “paradoxical.”

Korowai of West Papua practice a register of transgressive vocabulary substitutions in which a referent's normal designation is replaced by another expression with independent semantic meaning. Uttering a substitute term in the presence of its referent is thought to damage the referent. Usually the terms are carefully avoided, but they can also be deliberately uttered in anger. Substitutions highlight uncanny iconic resemblances between entities that are otherwise mutually incongruous. Substitutions often involve grotesque imagery of bodily disintegration, and they focus on strange margins close to humans' positions. Speakers use the register to portray uncertainty about the categorial integrity not just of referents but also of language users themselves. Through the register's core idea of avoiding damaging effects of iconic connections beneath fragile surface appearances, Korowai express a reflexive sensibility about language, in which transparently affirmative semantic relations between words and referents are a contingent pragmatic possibility, not a natural certainty.A draft of this article was presented in June 2006 at a conference on “Honorification and Enregisterment” at the University of Chicago. I thank Sue Philips, Sue Gal, and Michael Silverstein for inviting me to speak, and I thank all participants for their generous comments. Additional crucial and detailed help was given by Courtney Handman, Laura Hendrickson, Steve Hibbard, Barbara Johnstone, Webb Keane, Anne Lorimer, and Alan Rumsey. Fieldwork in 1995–1997 and 2001–2002 was made possible by Fulbright-IIE, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, Reed College, the Luce Foundation, the Australian National University (RSPAS), the Indonesian Institute of Sciences (LIPI), and Universitas Cenderawasih. I am grateful to all Korowai I have met for their patience and humor.

This article investigates the academic speech of humanities and natural science instructors and students in 32 lectures and interactional classes at a U.S. university. It examines how structural markers, questions, question tags, and turn-initial response tokens contribute to variations of style in response to academic division, context, gender, and communicative role in academic discourse. Data analysis couples qualitative discourse analytic methods with a quantitative sociolinguistic analysis. The quantitative analysis shows the factors of communicative role, academic discipline, and speech mode – not gender – to be the most influential in the use of the structures investigated. It is argued that the lack of significant results for gender arise from global discourse restrictions in academic speech. However, despite the global restrictions shown by quantitative analysis, qualitative analysis suggests that such restrictions can be overridden, especially in contexts of structural breaks and disruptions of information flow, and that features that contribute to more interactional and cooperative speech styles, frequently linked to females, can emerge.

This article treats a place-naming genre among residents of the White Mountain Apache reservation in which people use English-language mass media discourse to name newly constructed neighborhoods on the reservation, usually with humorous effect. It is argued that these names do not represent simple assimilation to mainstream discursive norms. Instead, they represent the deployment of media discourse according to locally defined speech genres and language ideology to comment on social changes brought about by the new housing developments. As a strategy for engaging with the dominant society, these names are acts of community self-definition that confound mainstream expectations for place names generally, and for Native American place names in particular. They celebrate participation in media discourse, but in terms that privilege reservation insiders. Use of these names constitutes the reservation as an interpretive community in which participation is defined not along nationalistic models of citizenship, but in terms of locally established idioms of sociality.I gratefully acknowledge financial support for this research provided by the Wenner Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, the Phillips Fund for Native American Research of the American Philosophical Society, and the Jacobs Research Fund of the Whatcom Museum. I thank Eva Lupe, Everett Lupe, Leo Cruz, Cline Griggs, Arlene Lupe, Annette Tenejieth, Gary Lupe, and John Welsh for helping me understand the meaning and use of the names. Particular thanks are due to Barbara Johnstone and two anonymous reviewers for Language in Society for suggesting revisions that substantially improved the argument of this article and its articulation with other work in linguistic anthropology. Earlier versions of this article were presented in a session organized by David Samuels at the 2002 annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association, to the anthropology departments at Hamilton College and the University of Nevada, Reno; and to the University of Virginia Linguistic Anthropology Seminar. I am grateful for the critical contributions of Dell Hymes, Thomas J. Nevins, David Samuels, Margaret Field, Allexandra Jaffe, Ellen Contini-Morava, Eve Danziger, Phillip Greenfeld, Bonnie Urciuoli, and Charles Kaut. Any shortcomings, of course, are my own.

The literature on “small talk” has not described the way in which this talk, even as it “oils the social wheels of work talk” (Holmes 2000), enables disattending to the instrumental tasks in which one or both participants may be engaged. Small talk in simultaneity can disattend to the movements, bodily invasions, and recording activities functional for the instrumental tasks of medicine. Small talk in sequence occurs in sensitive sequential environments. Surgeons may use small talk to focus away from psychosocial or other concerns of patients that may focus off the central complaint or treatment recommendation related to that complaint. Patients may use small talk to disattend to physician recommendations regarding disfavored therapies (such as exercise). Overall, small talk often may be used to ignore, mask, or efface certain kinds of agonistic relations in which doctor and patient are otherwise engaged. We explore implications of this research for the conversation analytic literature on doctor–patient interaction and the broader sociolinguistic literature on small talk.

This article explores a public debate that took place in Sweden in 2002 in relation to the Swedish Liberal Party's proposal to introduce a language test for naturalization. On the basis of textual analysis of relevant policy documents and newspaper articles, it examines the explicit and implicit facets of an ideology of language testing. It is argued that a seemingly liberal, anti-racist, and anti-discriminatory ideology is emerging, which, in its explicit facet, calls for the introduction of a language test for citizenship as a practical way of diminishing social differentiation. However, drawing upon Bourdieu's notion of rites of institution, it is shown that such a test would actually contribute to, rather than challenge, the reproduction of social differentiation, thereby legitimizing the exclusion of certain groups from both the civic and symbolic domains of Sweden as a nation-state.I want to acknowledge that the research that resulted in the present article was conducted at the Centre for Research on Bilingualism, Stockholm University. However, my current affiliation and address for correspondence is Department of Linguistics and Phonetics, School of Modern Languages and Cultures, University of Leeds, LS2 9JT, UK; email: T.Milani@leeds.ac.uk. I also want to take the opportunity to thank Kenneth Hyltenstam, Sally Johnson, Barbara Johnstone, Ingrid Piller, and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on previous drafts of this article.

McWhorter challenges the validity of the limited access model for creole formation, noting that “the mainland Spanish colonies put in question a model which is crucial to current creole genesis.” His thesis is that in the Spanish mainland colonies the disproportion between the Black and White populations was enough for the emergence of a creole language. This article focuses on one colony, Venezuela, and argues that Africans there had as much access to Spanish as they did in islands such as Cuba. Based on this fact, the relevant linguistic evidence is analyzed. The most important contribution of this study is the discussion of the Spanish crown's monopolization of the slave trade, which kept the Black/White ratio relatively low in certain Spanish colonies until the end of the 18th century. Until now, this part of the puzzle has been absent in the discussion of the missing Spanish creoles.

This study provides a linguistic perspective on the structure and the interpretation of a key historical narrative in Umpithamu (a Pama-Nyungan language of Cape York Peninsula, Australia), against the background of a larger corpus of narrative texts in Umpithamu. The analysis focuses on the role of participant tracking devices in the macro-structure of the narrative, and the role of case marking in the build-up of narrative motifs. It is argued not only that marked types of participant tracking serve to mark the boundaries of episodes, as often noted in the literature, but also that some types have additional functions within episodes, which leads to a proposal for refinement of Fox's (1987) Principle of Morphosyntactic Markedness. On a micro-structural level, it is shown how a rare system of case marking is used by the narrator to construe white–Aboriginal interactions as events in which the Aboriginal participants experience an extreme lack of control.The first author would like to thank Mrs. Florrie Bassani and Ms. Joan Liddy, who so patiently taught him about their language, their life, and their history, and Bruce Rigsby, who introduced him to the Lamalama people and generously shared his earlier recordings of Umpithamu and his vast knowledge of Princess Charlotte Bay languages. Fieldwork on Umpithamu was sponsored by the Fund for Scientific Research-Flanders, which funded two research stays at the University of Melbourne, and the Australian Department of Communication, IT and the Arts (DCITA), which funded another fieldtrip. Many thanks to Nick Evans and the Department of Linguistics in Melbourne for hosting the first author's stays, and to Clair Hill for organizing the DCITA grant. A previous version of this article was presented at the 2nd European Workshop on Australian Aboriginal Languages in Somlószőlős, and at a workshop on Australian Aboriginal Narrative at the Max Planck Institut für Psycholinguistik. We would like to thank the members of the audience, especially Nick Enfield, Nick Evans, Clair Hill, Judit Horváth, Danièle Klapproth, Stephen Levinson, Bill McGregor, Adam Saulwick, Gunter Senft, Peter Sutton, and Michael Walsh, for very useful comments. We are also grateful to the reviewers and the editor for very detailed comments on a previous version.

A framing analysis of family interaction during dinnertime demonstrates that the mother and father linguistically create gendered identities through the number and types of discursive positions they take up within the frames they create and maintain. The mother accomplishes numerous tasks and activities by taking up multiple discursive positions within several interactional frames, whereas the father takes up fewer positions within fewer frames. Furthermore, the positions they take up are gendered, reflecting a sex-based division of labor, even though both parents work full-time outside the home. Through these gendered patterns of participation, the parents create gendered parental identities and negotiate their parental authority with their daughter and with each other. The attention to speech acts, footings, positioning, and framing reveals the intricate and dynamic details of interaction. Furthermore, this discourse model captures and explicates the process through which individuals create gendered identities as they enact and constitute other social identities.

Referential practice – the variety of ways in and through which speakers refer to things in social interaction – involves a range of very different methods. When referring to physical objects or processes in face-to-face interaction, people may choose from a variety of resources, including verbal categories, names, pointing, verbal descriptors, depictive gestures, and prop demonstrations. This raises the question: Under what circumstances do speakers choose particular resources over others? To address this question, this study examines referential practice in a particular kind of face-to-face workplace setting, the service counter of a quick print shop. At the service counter, not only do customers use alternative resources in referring to the document services they want, but these resources appear to be ordered relative to one another in terms of a preference for minimization. In referring to document services, customers first try the most minimal form, the official name, but if that fails or is unknown, customers fall back on more expanded forms of reference, such as pointing or depicting.

This article is concerned with understanding and analyzing the role of the individual in Navajo poetry performances, in particular, three performances of putatively the same poem by the Navajo poet Laura Tohe. One performance is the written orthographic poem, and the other two are oral performances that have been recorded and analyzed. It is argued that a focus on the individual performer and on multiple performances can provide insight into the relationship between social constructions of self and identity within the constraints and opportunities particular media and contexts provide. It also reveals the importance of studying individual creativity in language and culture research.I would like to thank Andy Hofling, Barbara Johnstone, David Samuels, and Laura Tohe for comments on various versions of this article. Jonathan Hill, as usual, has been a sounding board for many of the ideas that finally found their way into this article. Thanks also to Jane Adams for some useful advice at a critical moment. I also want to thank Elizabeth Keating, Scott Rushforth, Joel Sherzer, Pauline Turner Strong, and Anthony Woodbury for comments on a much earlier draft. The research for this study was made possible by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the University of Texas at Austin. I want to thank the Navajo Nation for granting me a permit to do research on the emergence of poetry on the Navajo Nation. Thanks also to Leighton Peterson for his help during fieldwork. I also want to thank all the Navajo poets who allowed me to record and interview them. I further want to thank the various people of the Navajo Nation who in one way or another aided in my research. Views expressed in this article are my responsibility, as are any mistakes that remain.

Using conversation analysis as methodology, this article provides a link between the local organization of talk and larger societal issues by investigating specific conversational sequences in which French speakers from different speech communities interact. It is argued that in addition to dealing with problems of speaking, hearing, and understanding, repair can simultaneously be used to negotiate linguistic membership. Repair can be used to establish, confirm, or insist on speakers' belonging to one particular speech community over another. Moreover, participants can use repair to express affiliation and disaffiliation with each other. The implications of this research are discussed, linking the organization of conversation with issues of language and identity, specifically with the social meaning of dialect variety in the Francophone world. Thus, this article demonstrates how phenomena commonly discussed on the macro level are realized and negotiated on the micro level.

This article examines the text-metrical (“poetic”) organization of epistemic stance-taking in discourse, focusing on epistemic stance in a form of argumentation, Tibetan Buddhist ‘debate’ (rtsod pa) at Sera Monastery in India. Emergent text-metrical structures in discourse are shown to reflexively map utterance-level propositional stance into larger-scale, fractionally congruent models of interactional stance. In charting the movement from epistemic stance to interactional stance by way of poetic structure, the article argues for and clarifies the place of poetics in the study of stance.

Based on evidence from a French-Wolof phrase book published in Senegal in 1864, this article makes the case that urban Wolof, a variety of the language characterized by significant lexical borrowing from French, is a much older variety than scholars have generally claimed. Historical evidence suggests that urban Wolof emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries in the coastal island city of Saint-Louis du Sénégal, France's earliest African settlement and future capital of the colonial entity that would be known as French West Africa. The intimate nature of early contact between African and European populations and the later role played by the métis or mixed-race population of the island as linguistic brokers contributed to a unique, urban variety of Wolof that has important links to today's variety of urban Wolof spoken in Dakar and other cities throughout the country.

Focusing on Black Francophone migrants in Cape Town, it is argued that a locally based Francophone identity has emerged in South Africa that questions the institutional discourse of La Francophonie as the organization of French-speaking states. The new identity has little to do with the organization's ideology of a transnational community of people united by a common language and culture. This is shown by deconstructing the category of passeurs de Francophonie (literally ‘smugglers of la Francophonie’ as practice) to which the organization assigns migrants in non-Francophone countries who allegedly spread the French language and Francophone culture. It is argued that the notion of “Francophone” must be grounded empirically and approached in relation to the social environment of the relevant speakers. The post-apartheid South African setting assigns it a meaning different from what it has in Francophone states.

This article combines textual, videotape, historical, and ethnographic evidence to describe the Bangla psychiatric register and its enregisterment. Enregisterment is a process “through which a linguistic repertoire becomes differentiable [and] … socially recognized” (Agha 2003:231). The emergence of psychiatric registers in Europe and, later, Bangladesh bore the particular burden of psychiatry's “magic complex” – its need to convince a skeptical public that its perceived associations with magic and religion were finished, vanquished in part by discursive measures, focused on a scientizing drive. Psychiatric Bangla appears to involve the sort of pervasive use of parallelism normally associated with ritual texts. This indicates a profound hybridity that may contribute to the psychiatric unease epitomized in the magic complex.The author gratefully acknowledges suggestions and comments from Carol Berkenkotter, Dan Conrad, Laurence Kirmayer, Barbara Johnstone, Greg Matoesian, and two anonymous reviewers for Language in Society. Sayeed Ahmed provided enormous help with transliterating most of the letters analyzed, and with translating some. Anna Corwin and other students in my Linguistic Anthropology Lab (fall 2006) helped with figures. Naturally, the author is responsible for all flaws that remain.

It is often supposed that dialect contact and dialect mixture were involved in the development of new colonial varieties of European languages, such as Brazilian Portuguese, Canadian French, and Australian English. However, while no one has denied that dialect contact took place, the role of dialect mixture has been disputed. Among those who do not accept a role for it, some have also considered the role of identity, especially new national identities, to be self-evident. This article argues for the role of dialect mixture and against the role of identity. It presents case studies from pre-16th-century colonial expansions of European languages, an era when any role for national identities would be very hard to argue for. Instead, it suggests that dialect mixture is the inevitable result of dialect contact, and that the mechanism which accounts for this is quasi-automatic accommodation in face-to-face interaction.NOTE: Very many thanks for help with this article go to David Britain, Brian Joseph, Lesley Milroy, James Milroy, and especially Max Wheeler.