Departing from interactionally focused research on the “representations” (cf. “constructions”) of the “other,” including recent dynamic approaches to the sociolinguistics of style/styling, this article looks into the practice of talk about men that resonated in the conversations of four Greek adolescent female “best friends.” The discussion sheds light on the interactional resources that participants draw upon to refer to and identify or categorize men, their local meanings, and their consequentiality for gender identity constructions (in this case, both masculinities and femininities). It is shown that personae and social positions of men are drawn in the data by means of a set of resources (nicknames, character assessments, stylizations, membership categorization devices) that occur in, shape, and are shaped by story lines (intertextual and coconstructed stories that locate men in social place and time). It is also shown that the men talked about are predominantly marked for their gendered identities: Social styles that represent men as “soft” (“babyish,” “feminine”) or “tough” (“hard”) are those that are more routinely invoked. Each mobilizes specific resources (e.g. stylizations of the local dialect for “hard” men), but both are drawn playfully. The conclusion considers the implications of such discursive representations for the gender ideologies at work and the participants' own identity constructions and subjectivities.Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Birkbeck College Applied Linguistics seminars and at the 8th International Pragmatics Association Conference, Toronto, 2003. I am grateful to audiences there for their comments, to Nikolas Coupland for fiercely constructive criticism, to an anonymous reviewer for encouragement, and last but not least, to the sharp editorial eye of Jane Hill.

This article underscores the importance of examining interlocutors' history in studies of intercultural communication. Five historical factors and four contextual factors are proposed and illustrated with interview and videotaped data, showing how each factor predetermines the interactants' power dynamics, thus shaping and influencing the process and outcome of interaction. Analyzing videotaped interactions between Japanese technical supporters and American workers on the production floor also demonstrates the interlocutors' creative utilization of available communicative resources and co-construction of meaning as interactions unfold. This co-construction of meaning occurs despite the severely limited knowledge of the other group's language and sociolinguistic norms.I thank all the study participants at Japan Die Company, who spent their precious time for my research. I am indebted to Miyako Inoue, Elizabeth Keating, Keith Walters, and Tony Woodbury for providing me with useful comments, insights, and encouragement, and Ellen Nakamura for proofreading the text. Thanks also to the School of Asian Studies at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, for supporting my writing of this article. Earlier versions of this project were presented at Stanford University, Nagoya University, and Ritsumeikan Asia Pacific University, and I appreciate the audiences' valuable feedback.

Psycholinguistic attempts to model metaphor processing can be broadly classified as correspondence or class-inclusion in orientation. This article develops a framework for approaching metaphorical discourse by reconstructing these processing models as discourse types that are associated with particular activity types. In doing so, it treats these discourse types as particular strategies of recontextualization, where, depending on the discourse type being used, the metaphor source – and consequently, the status of the discourse itself as metaphorical – is either foregrounded or not. The second part of the article applies the framework to texts embedded in two different activity types: popular science texts which aim to explain technical concepts, and management texts which aim to provide management tips. The former, it is shown, uses the correspondence discourse type, while the latter uses the class-inclusion type.I would like to thank Desmond Allison, Jane Hill, Benny Lee, K. P. Mohanan, Rajendra Singh, Christopher Stroud, and two anonymous referees for valuable comments and suggestions. Special thanks to Lim Cherng Wren for inspiring this article. Needless to say, I alone am responsible for any errors that remain.

The particle one of Singapore English is widely used in Singapore culture, but it is little mentioned and its invariant meaning has not been described, so that not much is known about its meaning and the cultural norms it reflects. This article provides a detailed semantic analysis of this particle, articulates its meaning in the form of a reductive paraphrase using natural semantic metalanguage, and argues that its use reflects Singapore English speakers' tendency to speak definitively and exaggeratedly. The discussion of Singaporean speech norms reflected by this particle includes reference to relevant Anglo English speech norms for comparison and contrast.I am indebted to Anna Wierzbicka for her detailed comments on an earlier version of this article. I am grateful to Jane Hill, Peter Tan and another, anonymous reviewer for their very generous and constructive overall feedback on this paper. I have also benefited from stimulating discussions with Cynthia Allen and Avery Andrews on the topic of relative clauses and the syntax of the nominal one. Jane McGary provided valuable editorial assistance and native Anglo English speaker intuition in regard to some examples. Last but not least, I would like to express my gratitude toward writer Hwee Hwee Tan for giving me a soft copy of her manuscript to do electronic searches.

Deborah Cameron & Don Kulick, Language and sexuality. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xvi, 176. Pb $21.00.

Paul McIlvenny (ed.), Talking gender and sexuality. Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2002. Pp. x, 332. Hb $106.00.

Two recent books, Language and sexuality, by Deborah Cameron and Don Kulick, and Talking gender and sexuality (TGS), edited by Paul McIlvenny, seek to elucidate the social construction of gender and sexuality by combining the methods of interactive discourse analysis with the theoretical insights of poststructuralism, feminism, and queer theory. Guided by the basic ethnomethodological question “How are gender and sexuality ‘done’?”, the authors of both volumes are motivated, at least implicitly, by a political commitment to deconstructing and opposing sexism and heteronormativity (the ideologically enforced assumption that all people are or should be straight). In one way or another, therefore, both books also ask, paraphrasing McIlvenny, “By what linguistic-interactional means might normative gender and sexual identities be ‘undone’?” Although McIlvenny's coauthors all share his theoretical concerns at a general level, the chapters in TGS focus primarily on the means whereby gender and sexual categories are positively instantiated and indexed in talk; only a few explicitly engage how these modes of categorization might be resisted or transformed. Cameron & Kulick take their theorizing one step further, questioning the analytical and political utility of the concept of sexual identity itself.

Douglas Maynard, Bad news, good news: Conversational order in everyday talk and clinical settings. University of Chicago Press. 2003, x + pp. 327. Pb. $25.00.

Maynard's book seeks to make substantive and methodological contributions: the first to describe the social organization of bad news/good news pronouncements, and the second to address and bridge longstanding methodological schisms between ethnography, conversation analysis (CA), and mainline sociology. Of the eight chapters, three (2, 4, and 7) were previously published and have been modified for the book.

Mary Talbot, Karen Atkinson & David Atkinson, Language and power in the modern world. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2003. Pp. ix, 342. Pb £16.99.

Centered on critical language study, Language and power in the modern world aims to “reveal and challenge aspects of the intense socialization to which we are all subjected, not only through language but also about language” (p. 4). The authors begin with a relatively brief introduction to the concept of power, leaning heavily on Foucault as interpreted by, especially, Norman Fairclough. The introduction, while focused on power, delves into Critical Discourse Analysis and the critical (socio)linguistics literatures to situate a quick overview of the book, which is organized around five chapters: “Language and the media,” “Language and organisations,” “Language and gender,” “Language and youth,” and “Multilingualism, ethnicity and identity.” In each chapter, the authors present an initial review essay of 11 to 20 pages, followed by an “activities” section, which typically presents two or three suggested tasks for students. The bulk of each chapter, however, is the set of four or five (edited) readings of primary sources relevant to the chapter's topic. The readings, regularly addressed in the earlier chapters as “Reading 1.2” or “Reading 2.3,” often with no title or author noted, are the best part of this book. The reading selections are quite recent, with only one title published before 1995, allowing the reader to catch up on some outstanding primary research that takes the five topic areas well beyond the classic studies of the 1970s and 1980s. The authors' choice of readings is well considered and fulfills their goal not to “promote one approach over another, [but] rather to illustrate a variety of approaches to the study of language and power” (4).

Christina Bratt Paulston & G. Richard Tucker (eds.), Sociolinguistics: The essential readings. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003. Pp xviii, 502.

Sociolinguistics, broadly defined as “the study of language in its social contexts and the study of social life through linguistics” (Coupland & Jaworski 1997:1), turns out to be a very lively and popular field of study. Evidence for its popularity is that introductory textbooks and collections of original readings keep appearing on the desks of sociolinguistics students. Among the former we have, for instance, Holmes 1992, Mesthrie et al. 2000, Romaine 2000, and Wardhaugh 2002. Among the latter, we have Coupland & Jaworski 1997 at least. The introductory textbooks, which can serve as a second-hand synopsis of classic seminal work in the field, often cannot satisfy curious students, who feel it compulsory to do first-hand reading of the original works of influential authors.

James W. Tollefson (ed.), Language policies in education: Critical issues. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002. Pp. 350. Pb $39.95.

Language policies in education brings together a wide-ranging collection of essays from the United States, Canada, Australia, Yugoslavia, India and East Asia, Eastern Africa, and the Solomon Islands. Editor James Tollefson frames the discussion in his introduction and conclusion on language conflict and language rights in a way that calls our attention to the central questions. How have educational language policies maintained unequal access to teaching and learning resources for language minorities and indigenous language (IL) speakers? What affirmative measures in the realm of language policy can chart the clearest course toward redressing these inequalities? And for political entities in multilingual states in a position of language policy-making authority, what are the guiding principles of a responsible democratic approach to resolving ethnolinguistic conflicts? Though few of the authors take up the questions directly, the editor reminds readers that all discussions of educational language policy must keep in the foreground considerations of effective pedagogical practice and constraints on language learners. These more narrowly circumscribed educational, developmental, and psycholinguistic determinants are subordinated to political-ideological impositions at the risk of undermining basic democratic principles. Multilingual and multicultural accord at the nation-state level is eroded by attempts to utilize official language teaching programs as tools of national or political unification if these programs are not conceived as complementary to individuals' language learning rights and as consistent with sound first and second language pedagogy. Particularly instructive on this point are the chapters by Mary McGroarty, Terrance Wiley, Thomas Donahue, and Teresa McCarty on the current struggle between the forces of pluralism and exclusion in the United States, and surveys of political-language conflicts in the former Yugoslavia and India by Tollefson and Selma Sonntag, respectively.

Nancy H. Hornberger (ed.), Continua of biliteracy: An ecological framework for educational policy, research, and practice in multilingual settings (Bilingual Education and Biliteracy 41). Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2003. Pp. 370. Pb $39.95.

The collection of articles in Nancy Hornberger's edited book Continua of biliteracy provides a notion of historical development and a sampling of research applications for a specific conceptualization of the phenomenon of biliteracy and multiliteracy. The collection reviews 13 years of theoretical and qualitative research generated by Hornberger's (1989) initial presentation of the continua of biliteracy. The book includes three chapters by Hornberger: the original article, the revision and development of the continua of biliteracy in light of developments in literacy research through the 1990s, written with Skilton-Sylvester (Hornberger & Skilton-Sylvester 2000), and finally an extension of the themes developed in the original model through the metaphor of ecology (Hornberger 2002). These three articles function as a theoretical framework consisting of the past, present, and future directions in research generated through this conceptualization. The other chapters report on research that utilizes Hornberger's framework, covering the issues of language policy, literate identities, teacher roles, and pedagogical practice in various locations, such as the United States, Latin America, Wales, South Africa, and India. This range of issues in a variety of settings demonstrates the robustness of the theory and exemplifies for the reader some of the options of application that it offers.

Anna Duszak (ed.), Us and others: Social identities across languages, discourses, cultures. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2003. Pp 517. Hb $162.

This interesting volume, edited and introduced by Anna Duszak, offers a range of perspectives on the construction of identity, particularly the formation and roles of contrasting reference groups, the “us and others” of the title. Disciplines in which the contributing studies are based include social anthropology, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, conversation analysis, intercultural communication studies, cognitive linguistics, translation studies, neurolinguistics, neuropsychology, and social psychology. Contributing scholars present accounts of studies conducted in Africa, the Americas, Asia, Australia, and Europe. The 23 chapters are grouped under the headings “Discourses in space,” “Discourses in polyphony,” “Discourses of transition,” “Discourses of fear,” “Discourses of challenge,” and “Discourses through suppression.”

Rachel Giora, On our mind: Salience, context, and figurative language. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. ix, 259. Hb $55.

The goal of this book is to explore the extent to which salient meanings – meanings that are decoded in our mental lexicon and foremost on our mind – affect our speech production and comprehension. “It aims to shed light, primarily empirically, on how, in addition to contextual information, salient meanings and senses of words and fixed expressions shape our linguistic behavior” (p. 9). According to Rachel Giora's graded salience hypothesis, salient meanings are more accessible than less salient ones. Of the multiple meanings of a given word or expression, the most salient one, which can be either literal or figurative, is always activated first regardless of context.

Anne Curzan, Gender shifts in the history of English (Studies in English language). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xii, 223. Hb $ 55.

In Gender shifts in the history of English, Anne Curzan sets out to analyze how and why the English language came to change its original grammatical gender system, which it shared with all other Germanic languages, into a natural gender system. She also addresses a number of related questions, such as the relationship between this shift and sexist language. The study is based primarily on the Helsinki Corpus, which comprises texts from Old, Middle, and Early Modern English, but the author also makes use of a number of other sources. Curzan's research methodology may be termed eclectic; it includes corpus linguistics, prototype theory, historical syntax, sociolinguistics, and feminist theory, as well as references to a number of other theories and schools. This eclectic mix is, however, composed with wit, elegance, and great learning, which makes it very interesting to readers of any theoretical persuasion.

Mats Deutschmann, Apologising in British English. Umeå, Sweden: Umeå University, 2003. Pp. 262.

One of the most significant problems in speech act research is doubtless the shortage of naturally occurring spoken language in the data under observation. Researchers have applied a battery of techniques to collect examples of speech acts, but the vast majority of the work has been characterized by elicited language, wherein the starting point for the research has been the function of the speech act itself and the aim has been to investigate ways in which it is realized linguistically. Mats Deutschmann's book marks a clear departure from this tradition. His research into apologizing in British English is based solely on data from the spoken section of the British National Corpus (BNC). As a result, his starting point is also different: the form (linguistic realization) of the speech act rather than its function. Furthermore, in addition to conducting a specific investigation of the speech act “apologizing,” he sets himself the more ambitious target of revealing “general characteristics of the use of politeness formulae in British English” (p. 13).

Laura Ahearn, Invitations to love: Literacy, love letters, and social change in Nepal. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001. Pp. xvi, 295. Pb $24.95.

“Sarita, I'm helpless….” Laura Ahearn begins her ethnography with a love letter, 21-year-old Bir Bahadur's first to Sarita, “whose long, black hair, fashionable Punjabi outfits, and demure giggles had caught his eye” (p. 3). Ahearn ponders the increasing use of such letters amid changes in literacy and marriage practices, understandings and expressions of emotions, and efforts of the Nepali state and other organizations to develop places like Junigau, the village in which most of the book's action takes place. By the book's conclusion, Ahearn has provided the means to understand the subtle paradox in Bir Bahadur's letter – that he asserts that he is “helpless” at the same time that he initiates an invitation. Ahearn demonstrates in exquisite detail that such expressions must be considered within the wider, shifting context of practices through which they emerge: that which instantiates the expression, literacy in all of its guises, and that which makes the expression meaningful, the emergence of a discourse of development that characterizes people, places, and activities.

Publications received.

While the current volume, 34, appears under the editorship of Jane H. Hill, I am no longer reviewing new manuscripts. The new editor-in-chief of Language in Society, Barbara Johnstone, is now receiving manuscripts and books for review.