The ability of narrative to verbalize and situate experience as text (both locally and globally) provides a resource for the display of self and identity. This article focuses on two stories told by Jewish-American women about troublesome issues in their families. Analysis of the language of the stories shows how they reveal aspects of the storytellers' agentive and epistemic selves; how they construct positions in their families (pivoting between solidarity and distance, the provision of autonomy, and the exercise of power); and how they display their social identities as mothers. The view of identity offered through narrative analysis is briefly compared with other methodological and theoretical perspectives on identity. (Narrative, self, identity, gender, family, speech acts)

Close examination of a segment of classroom discourse permits definition of a set of linguistic devices and rhetorical structures that characterize the primary speaker's repertoire. As the discourse moves from dialog to monolog, and the teacher's roles and ideological assumptions come into conflict, these discourse patterns are seen to reveal the shifting contexts of talk and social personae that the teacher must use language to reconcile. The analysis claims that, under such conditions of discourse stress, opposing contexts can be temporarily harmonized through discourse structure, even though propositional content is contradictory. (Linguistic anthropology, education, coherence, discourse analysis)

Proper names have often been discussed by philosophers of language without the benefit of anthropological insights. This article combines research from these two fields in order to move toward a theory of naming as social practice – emphasizing the nature of naming and nicknaming as it is crucially attached to cultural history, social context, and individual experience. To exemplify this notion, the article outlines naming and its various functions as described by and used in the narratives of one young man from the “Diamond Street” gang who goes by the nickname “Little Creeper.” A discussion of outsiders' interpretations of gang names indicates how the meaning of a name can be transformed in different social contexts without losing its association with the initial referent. (Naming practices, proper names, ideology and language, at-risk youth)

This study continues an investigation of lexical acculturation in Native American languages using a sample of 292 language cases distributed from the Arctic Circle to Tierra del Fuego (Brown 1994). Focus is on the areal diffusion of native language words for imported European Objects and concepts. Approximately 80% of all sharing of such terms is found to occur among closely genetically related languages. Amerindian languages only distantly related, or not related at all, tend to share native labels for acculturated items only when these have diffused to them from a lingua franca, such as Chinook Jargon (a pidgin trade language of the Pacific Northwest Coast) or Peruvian Quechua (the language of the Inca empire). Lingua francas also facilitate diffusion of terms through genetically related languages; but sometimes, as in the case of Algonquian languages, these are neither familiar American pidgins nor languages associated with influential nation states. An explanatory framework is constructed around the proposal that degree of bilingualism positively influences extent of lexical borrowing. (Amerindian languages, bilingualism, language contact, lexical acculturation, lexical diffusion, lingua francas)