Research on languages in contact has shown evidence of structural convergence, as well as internally motivated language change; one language which has been frequently studied in this light is Pennsylvania German (PG). Myers-Scotton 1993 posits that convergence involves a change in the selection of the language which sets the morpho-syntactic frame involved in language production. This is called a turnover in the Matrix Language (ML). Data from PG collected in the 1940s, as compared with data collected in the late 1970s and 1980s, indicate that an ML turnover is underway in the sectarian communities; the language can be characterized as having a composite ML. The primary features of convergence in these data are English lexical-conceptual structures in the tense system, English morphological realization patterns in verb phrases, and the increased syntactization of word order in PG. There is only weak evidence for the introduction of English system morphemes at this stage. The loss of case-marking does not conform to English patterns; this indicates that much of the influence of language contact occurs at the lexical-conceptual level. (Pennsylvania German, convergence, Matrix Language Frame Model, code-switching, borrowing, language contact)

Using the frameworks of the political economy of language, and of language use as acts of identity, this study attempts to describe and analyze the situation of natively anglophone wives living with their Tunisian husbands in Tunisia – a speech community characterized by Arabic diglossia and Arabic/French bilingualism. Particular attention is devoted to these women's beliefs about using Tunisian Arabic (TA), the native language of their husbands, and the ways in which access to TA or the use of it becomes a site of conflict between husbands and wives, or mothers and children, in these mixed marriages. (Gender, identity, political economy of language, ideology, Tunisia, Arabic, francophonie, diglossia, code-switching, bilingualism, multilingualism, family relations)

This article documents discursive and social change currently taking place in contemporary Hong Kong during the transitional period leading up to the change of sovereignty from Britain to China. It does so by means of a detailed analysis of a political meeting, involving the British Hong Kong governor, Chris Patten, and members of the Hong Kong public. The meeting took place in October, 1992, a day after Patten introduced proposals to widen the democratic franchise. Patten used the meeting, the first time a Hong Kong governor had made himself openly accountable to the public at large, to demonstrate the sort of democratic discourse for which the reform proposals were designed to create a framework.

The analysis focuses on two main ways Patten highlighted the democratic nature of the discourse: the use of mise en abyme, or a “play within a play” structure, and the downplaying of overt markers of hierarchy and power asymmetry. Although Patten's aim was to demonstrate openness and accountability, his ultimate control of the discourse belied the democratic agenda he ostensibly promoted. The analysis consequently also focuses on the manipulative dimension of Patten's discourse. The conclusion considers to what extent the meeting might mark a real shift to a more democratic order of public discourse in Hong Kong. (Discourse analysis, power and language, social change, indexicals, involvement, manipulative discourse, mise en abyme, order of discourse, political discourse, turn-taking).

Just as turn-taking has been found to be both context-free and context-sensitive (Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson 1974), the organization of repair is also shown here to be both context-free and context-sensitive. In a comparison of American and German conversation, repair can be shown to be context-free in that, basically, the same mechanism can be found across these two languages. However, repair is also sensitive to the linguistic inventory of a given language; in German, morphological marking, syntactic constraints, and grammatical congruity across turns are used as interactional resources. In addition, repair is sensitive to certain characteristics of social situations. The selection of a particular repair initiator, German bitte? ‘pardon?’, indexes that there is no mutual gaze between interlocutors; i.e., there is no common course of action. The selection of bitte? not only initiates repair; it also spurs establishment of mutual gaze, and thus displays that there is attention to a common focus. (Conversation analysis, context, cross-linguistic analysis, repair, gaze, telephone conversation, co-present interaction, grammar and interaction)