In a study of dyadic conversations between four female and four male pairs of friends, the use of the phrase you know and questions are examined within three types of discourse. Women and men are found to use these features with equal frequency; and all speakers, regardless of sex or gender, use them in comparable ways. Although these particular discourse features have been previously associated with a female speech style, the results of this study show that it is the particular requirements associated with the three types of talk that motivate their use, and not the sex or gender of the individual speaker. The problems of generalizing about the characteristics of female or male speech, outside of a particular conversational context, are discussed; and it is shown that a gendered style cannot be adequately defined by counting individual speech variables removed from the specifics of the talk context. (Gender, questions, tag questions, discourse analysis, conversation analysis)

Speakers' Corner is a multicultural setting in a London park at which the general public can actively participate in popular debate. A successful “soap-box” orator should attract and keep an audience, elicit support from the crowd, and gain applause; indeed, a mastery of the crowd, the discourse, and the message is highly valued. However, although talk resources are deployed sensitively by speakers to elicit group affiliation and response, they are also exploitable by hecklers as resources for launching heckles and disaffiliative responses. Audiences at Speakers' Corner are not passive receivers of rhetorical messages; they are active negotiators of interpretations and alignments that may support, resist, or conflict with the speaker's and other audience members' orientations to prior talk. Using transcribed examples of video data recorded at Speakers' Corner, the timing, format, and sequential organization of heckling are described and analyzed with the tools and methods of conversation analysis. (Conversation analysis, audience response, popular public discourse, political speech, heckle)

The Functional Compensation Hypothesis (Hochberg 1986a, b) interprets frequent expression of pronominal subjects as compensation for frequent deletion of agreement marking on finite verbs in Puerto Rican Spanish (PRS). Specifically, this applies to 2sg. tú where variably deleted word-final -s marks agreement. If the hypothesis is correct, finite verbs with agreement deleted in speech should co-occur more frequently with pronominal subjects than finite verbs with agreement intact. Likewise, social dialects which frequently delete agreement should show higher rates of pronominal expression than social dialects which less frequently delete agreement. These auxiliary hypotheses are tested across a socially stratified sample of 62 speakers from San Juan. Functional compensation does show stylistic and social patterning in the category of Specific tú, not in that of Non-specific tú. However, Non-specific tú is the key to frequency differences between -s-deleting PRS and -s-conserving Madrid; hence the Functional Compensation Hypothesis should be discarded. (Functionalism, compensation, null subject, analogy, Spanish, Puerto Rico)