“Class relations” will be taken to refer to inequalities in the distribution of power and in principles of control between social groups, which are realized in the creation, distribution, reproduction, and legitimation of physical and symbolic values that have their source in the social division of labor. In terms of the particular problems of the relationships between class and the process of its cultural reproduction, as developed in this thesis, what has to be shown is how class regulation of the distribution of power and of principles of control generates, distributes, reproduces, and legitimates dominating and dominated principles regulating the relationships within and between social groups and so forms of consciousness. What we are asking here is how the distribution of power and principles of control are transformed, at the level of the subject, into different, invidiously related, organizing principles, in such a way as both to position subjects and to create the possibility of change in such positioning. The broad answer given by this thesis is that class relations generate, distribute, reproduce, and legitimate distinctive forms of communication, which transmit dominating and dominated codes, and that subjects are differentially positioned by these codes in the process of their acquisition. “Positioning” is used here to refer to the establishing of a specific relation to other subjects and to the creating of specific relationships within subjects. In general, from this point of view, codes are culturally determined positioning devices. More specifically, class regulated codes position subjects with respect to dominating and dominated form of communication and to the relationships between them. Ideology is constituted through and in such positioning. From this perspective, ideology inheres in and regulates modes of relation. Ideology is not so much a content as a mode of relation for the realizing of contents.

This study examines the functions of the bilingual discourse strategy of language alternation in the process of marking boundaries of continuous discourse. The focus is on switched discourse markers – employed, it is argued, to metalanguage the frame of the discourse. The corpus is comprised of audio recordings of over 20 hours of Hebrew-English bilingual conversation. The strategy of language alternation at discourse markers is illustrated, and the switched discourse markers are classified according to Becker's approach to context (1988b) as a source of constraints on text. This classification is then related to the phenomenon of clustering of discourse markers at discourse unit boundaries in both bilingual and monolingual discourse. Finally, cross-linguistic differences in discourse markers are related to a theory of metalanguage. (Discourse analysis, bilingual discourse, discourse markers, languaging, metalanguage, Hebrew/English comparative discourse)

The popularity of interviewing as a method of data collection in the social sciences is a recognized fact. In their survey of qualitative research paradigms and methods, Denzin and Lincoln (2004:353) declare that “the interview is the favorite methodological tool of the qualitative researcher.” And, describing data-collection techniques in sociolinguistics and dialectology, Fuller (2000:388) argues that “much of the data in the field comes from interviews.” These assertions are hardly surprising given the central role that interviews have assumed as an essential part of the toolkit of the qualitative researcher since the early decades of the twentieth century (Fontana & Frei 2004). Interviews are the most common cross-disciplinary research instruments since they are widely used by investigators in fields as diverse as education, anthropology, sociology, social psychology, and social history, where they serve as vital research methods alone or in combination with other techniques such as participant observation. Given the centrality of interpretive and qualitative research paradigms in sociolinguistics, ethnography, linguistic anthropology, and narrative studies, the interview has acquired an even more prominent place for investigation in these disciplines. However, this research method and tool for collecting data has been the object of extremes of confidence and criticism. On one side there are those who try to erase the interactional context of the interview, believing that it is both possible and desirable to make participants forget about the event so that interviewers can access their “natural” behavior. On the opposite side there are those who argue that interviews are “inauthentic” and “artificial” contexts for data collection and therefore it is best to avoid them completely. In both extremes, the interview ends up being a problem to overcome. One unfortunate result of these attitudes has been that the interview as a real communicative event has been understudied. Our objective with this special issue is to contribute to redressing this tendency by drawing attention to the need for, and advantages of, the research interview as a legitimate interactional encounter, and taking narrative as our focus. In doing this we build on a small but significant cross-disciplinary body of mostly recent scholarship that has analyzed a variety of issues related to the use of semi-structured and open-ended interviews in qualitative research, and that has recognized the crucial importance of placing interview data in context.

Sociolinguists (e.g. Swacker 1975) and anthropologists (e.g. Hall 1959) are increasingly aware of the fact that sex, like social class or subcultural group, is a variable which strongly affects speech (Thorne & Henley 1975). While sexexclusive differentiation (i.e. separate male and female languages) now appears to be an almost nonexistent phenomenon, sex-preferred differentiation seems to be widespread across a number of languages and language families (Bodine 1975). In particular, recent studies indicate that syntax (Labov 1966), intonation (Brend 1972), and pronunciation(Trudgill 1972) in spoken English all vary as a function of the sex of the speaker.

This article proposes the adoption of Goffman's concept of “framing” to characterize irony across its forms; the suggestion that this framing is achieved by a shift of footing reveals links between verbal irony and other forms of talk. Examination of irony in conversation shows how the shift of footing allows for detachment, enabling the ironist to make evaluations in response to perceived transgressions with reference to common assumptions. It is both the construction of an ironic turn and its placement in a sequence that make for the discernible shift of footing, and thus the visibility of the frame; with irony, conversational expectations of what constitutes a next turn are fulfilled on the level of form, but undermined on the level of content. This analysis shows the extent to which irony is affiliative, and reveals its hitherto unacknowledged subtlety of effect and range of attitude. I am most grateful to David Britain, Anita Pomerantz, Ad Putter, and Andrew Spencer for helpful discussions and useful comments on an earlier version of this article. Paul Drew, David Good, and Rachael Harris also read versions of my work, when it formed part of a Ph.D. thesis on conversational misunderstandings, and offered invaluable guidance. I am, in addition, deeply indebted to an anonymous referee from Language in Society whose observations on an earlier draft prompted me to reconsider my presentation of certain issues, particularly with regard to the work of John Haiman. Many ensuing improvements in clarity are owed to this referee. The study would have been impossible without the conversational data; the extent of my debt to those who supplied them will be evident to anyone reading this. My thanks to all.

The language of sports casting is analyzed in terms of register variation. First the register is “located” by successive approximations to a characterization of its occasions of use, then selected syntactic characteristics are identified: simplification (deletion of copula and sentence initial nominals), inversions, heavy modifiers, result expressions (for + noun, to + verb), routines (e.g., giving the “count”). Some of these are discussed in relation to possible communicative functions, but all are seen as register markers. Sports announcer talk (SAT) is described as a promising topic for comparative, historical, and acquisitional studies of register variation. (Register, mass media, performance; American English, Japanese.)

The term “koine” has been applied to a variety of languages, only some of which are analagous in form and function to the original Greek koinē. The term “koineization” has more recently been applied to the process of levelling which may result in a koine. This article examines various definitions and usages of these terms in the literature and proposes a more precise utilization in the context of contact and resultant mixing between linguistic subsystems. (Languages in contact, language mixing, pidgin and creole studies, social psychology)

The authors investigate Robin Lakoff's dual claim that women use tag questions in more conversational situations than do men and that such questions signify an avoidance of commitment, causing the speaker ‘to give the impression of not being really sure of himself, of looking to the addressee for confirmation, even of having no views of his own’. They find that in an at least one genuine social context, men did, and women did not, use tag questions, both formal and informal, so the claim is open to serious doubt. (Sex differences in speech; sociolinguistic method.)

The frequency of listener responses, called backchannels, was studied in English conversations within and across two cultural groups: Americans from the midwestern United States and Japanese who were born and raised in Japan. The findings reveal that backchannels of several types are displayed far more frequently by Japanese listeners. This appears to be related to the greater use by Japanese of certain discourse constructions that favor backchannels, and to the Japanese culture. The Japanese listening style remains unchanged in cross-cultural conversations, but Americans alter listening style in the direction of their non-native interlocutors. The study found no evidence for the hypothesis that backchanneling conventions that are not shared contribute to negative personality attributions or stereotyping. (Conversational analysis, intercultural communication, Japanese and American English discourse)

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.

This article investigates the enregisterment of an internet-specific language variety and its features. The enregisterment of internet language is explored through several sites of metadiscourse: academic scholarship about computer-mediated communication, uses of the metalinguistic terms netspeak and chatspeak in print media, and online comment threads about language and the internet. This metadiscourse provides evidence of a shared concept of internet language as comprising distinctive written features, primarily acronyms, abbreviations, and respellings. Internet language's enregisterment emerges from standard language ideology and deterministic views of technology, where the construal of these features as both nonstandard and internet-specific articulates the perceived distinctiveness of internet interactions. Yet empirical evidence shows that these features are relatively rare in instant messaging conversations, one form of interaction to which internet language is attributed; this discrepancy has implications for the application of indexical order to enregisterment. (Enregisterment, language ideology, computer-mediated communication, internet, metadiscourse, indexical order, Standard English, technological determinism, mass media)*

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.

As Coupland and others show, Bauman’s account of “performance” provides a valuable perspective on speech stylization across a range of public contexts. This article explores the limitations of performance as a window on crossing and stylization in everyday practice, and although recognizing other frames as well, it dwells on Goffman’s interaction ritual, cross-referring to two studies of adolescents in England. In the first, race and ethnicity were controversial, and the performance of other-ethnic styles was risky. But interaction ritual constructed crossing and stylization as urgent responses to the exigencies of the moment, and this made them more acceptable. In the second, performance implies a reflexive composure that is hard to reconcile with informants’ experience of social class as an uncomfortable but only half-articulated issue, whereas interaction ritual provides a sharp lens on how youngsters used stylized “posh” and Cockney varieties to register their apprehension of ongoing stratification. (Interaction ritual, stylization, crossing, performance)1

In this paper we discuss miscommunication in exchanges between native speakers and nonnative speakers of a language, focusing on an analysis of a service encounter telephone conversation between a nonnative speaker and a native speaker television repair shop employee. We present a goal-based model of conversation and a coding system for interpreting utterances, both of which are necessary for understanding the type of miscommunication which occurred in the conversation described herein. We argue that the lack of shared background on the part of the interlocutors interacted with their lack of shared linguistic code. In general, such interactions hinder successful communication and increase the probability that the miscommunication will not be recognized and thus not easily resolved. We show that a complete analysis of native/nonnative conversations must minimally invoke notions of correct interpretation, confidence in interpretation, goals of a conversation, shared beliefs, and linguistic as well as cultural systems. (Sociolinguistics, nonnative interactions, conversational analysis, American English)

This article describes linguistic features used to depict fictional American Indian speech, a style referred to as “Hollywood Injun English,” found in movies, on television, and in some literature (the focus is on the film and television varieties). Grammatically, it draws on a range of nonstandard features similar to those found in “foreigner talk” and “baby talk,” as well a formalized, ornate variety of English; all these features are used to project or evoke certain characteristics historically associated with “the White Man's Indian.” The article also exemplifies some ways in which these linguistic features are deployed in relation to particular characteristics stereotypically associated with American Indians, and shows how the correspondence between nonstandard, dysfluent speech forms and particular pejorative aspects of the fictional Indian characters subtly reproduce Native American otherness in contemporary popular American culture.I would like to thank the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and the University of Michigan for their support. This manuscript has also benefited from the following individuals' comments and suggestions: Gerald Carr, Eve Danziger, Philip Deloria, Joseph Gone, Jane Hill, Judith Irvine, Webb Keane, William Leap, Bruce Mannheim, and the anonymous reviewer. For their time and effort, I am truly grateful. All errors are my own.

In many bilingual and multilingual communities, certain communicative practices are code-specific in that they conventionally require, and are constituted in part through, the speaker's use of a particular code. Code-specific communicative practices, in turn, simultaneously constitute and partake of code-specific genres: normative, relatively stable, often metapragmatically salient types of utterance, or modes of discourse, that conventionally call for use of a particular code. This article suggests that the notions of code specificity and code-specific genre can be useful ones for theorizing the relationship between code and communicative practice in bilingual/multilingual settings, particularly those in which language shift and other contact-induced processes of linguistic and cultural change tend to highlight that relationship. This is demonstrated through an examination of how young children in St. Lucia are socialized to “curse” and otherwise assert themselves by means of a creole language that under most circumstances they are discouraged from using.The fieldwork on which this article is based was supported by the Fulbright Program, the National Science Foundation, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research; immediate post-fieldwork support was provided by the Spencer Foundation. The work time necessary for writing this article was made possible by a Temple University Presidential Research Incentive Summer Fellowship, a Temple University Research/Study Leave, and a Wenner-Gren Foundation Richard Carley Hunt Fellowship. For their comments on a much briefer earlier version (presented at the 2003 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association), I thank Bambi Schieffelin, Patricia Baquedano-López, and Leslie Moore. For comments on this version, I am grateful to Jane Hill and two anonymous reviewers. I am solely responsible for any and all shortcomings.

The concept of plagiarism, as used both in considerations of academic writing and in international negotiations over intellectual copyright, assumes a model of communication based on autonomous, rational, individuals who behave as originators of their own discourses. But studies of communication, beginning with Goffman's concepts of production format and footing – and also including the concepts of enactment, social role, face, politeness pragmatics, metaphors of self and communication, and innatist/social concepts of knowledge – indicate that such a unified, autonomous, and original communicative identity presupposes an oversimplified model of communication, centrally based in the ideology of the rational, autonomous individual which has been dominant in Europe since the Enlightenment. The concept of plagiarism masks the assertion of this ideological position. (Plagiarism, ideology, identity, intercultural discourse)

This article explores the concept of relational practice, the wide range of off-line, backstage, or collaborative work that people do which goes largely unrecognized and unrewarded in the workplace (Fletcher 1999). The analysis identifies a range of different ways in which people do relational practice in workplace discourse, and critically examines the proposal that, as subtle support work, relational practice is considered “women's work.” Drawing on the large Wellington Language in the Workplace database, it explores a variety of ways in which such relational work is manifested in workplace discourse; the analysis focuses on specific instances of relational practice, illustrating how such support work is backgrounded and typically discounted in New Zealand workplaces. The implications of the analysis for the gender/power dynamic are explored. Discussed in particular is the hypothesis that manifestations of relational practice differ in distinct communities of practice, and the validity of the equation of relational practice with “feminized” discourse is questioned.This article is based on a plenary paper presented at IGALA2, the second International Gender and Language Conference, held at Lancaster University in April 2002. It has benefited from comments received there as well as from other colleagues. We are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers and to the editor for helpful suggestions for improving it. We express our appreciation to other members of the Language in the Workplace team who have been involved with the project's development, data collection, processing, and transcription, including Maria Stubbe (research fellow), Bernadette Vine (corpus manager), and a number of research assistants. We also thank those who allowed their workplace interactions to be recorded. This research is supported by a grant from the New Zealand Foundation for Research Science and Technology. More information on the project can be viewed on our website, 〈www.vuw.ac.nz/lals/lwp〉.

It is well documented that the same sociolinguistic feature can be used as a sociolinguistic resource with different indexical potentials in different linguistic as well as social contexts. Often, however, indexical meanings of a specific feature are related to or derived from one another. In this article we present the results of a perceptual study of indexical meanings of alveolar versus fronted (s)—[s] versus [s+]—in different registers. The data consist of responses to male speakers' use of [s] and [s+] respectively, in two different registers that may be labelled “modern Copenhagen speech” and “street language.” Results show that the [s+] indexes femininity and gayness when it occurs in “modern Copenhagen,” whereas the (s)-variation has a different and less significant effect when occurring in “street language.” We discuss the implications for theories of indexical fields and the relation between features and clusters of features in speakers' perceptions. (Indexical meaning, phonetic variation, fronted /s/, perception of sexual orientation and ethnicity, matched guise technique).

In recent years, research has increasingly pointed toward the universality of three linguistic constraints on code-switching: (1) an equivalence of structure constraint, (2) a size-of-constituent constraint, and (3) a free morpheme constraint. The evidence derived from this study challenges the universality of the first two of these constraints, and argues instead that their claim to universality is largely a function of the coincidental relative similarity in the syntactic structure of Spanish and English, the two languages upon which most code-switching studies have been based. The present study breaks out of the Spanish-English mold and draws upon data from a language contact situation in which the two languages are syntactically very different from each other, namely, Spanish and Hebrew. The evidence presented also challenges the frequently made assertion that type of code-switching, namely, intra- versus intersentential code-switching, is correlated with degree of bilingualism of the speaker. Finally, the evidence suggests that intrasentential code-switching ability cannot, as some have argued, universally be considered a measure of bilingualism nor a mark of the balanced bilingual. (Code-switching, Spanish, Hebrew, bilingualism, syntactic constraints)