This article explores how members of small work groups use audible and visible actions to coordinate conversational interaction. The analysis of this activity context includes some methods for re-engaging turn-by-turn talk after it has lapsed, as well as some methods for making relevant a lapse in talk, and dis-engaging it, once it has been engaged. In addition, the actions positioned at conversational boundaries, both pre-re-engaging and post-dis-engaging, show the members' orientation to phases of lapse and phases of turn-by-turn talk. This study is part of a larger dissertation project (Szymanski 1996). I thank Rebecca Simon and her third-graders for welcoming me into their classroom. I also gratefully acknowledge Gene Lerner, John Gumperz, Leslie Jarmon, and Jürgen Streeck for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of this article.

The explanatory model of cross-cultural miscommunication, or crosstalk, is extended here through a multi-feature, multi-dimensional analysis of Soviet and American speakers' discourse in two three-hour audio/video “spacebridge” meetings. The study demonstrates that variation between speakers' uses of co-occurring sets of lexical and syntactic features can contribute to crosstalk. Crosstalk is shown to be functionally motivated by interlocutors' different constructions of the speech-event context and norms of interpretation.

A factor analysis of lexical and syntactic features in spacebridge participants' discourse identifies two main dimensions of stylistic variation; use of the sets of co-occurring features that constitute these dimensions are interpreted as performing different discourse functions, and thereby indexing different aspects of the speech-event context. Soviet floor turns that exhibit the greatest stylistic divergence from American stylistic behavior and expectations are shown to correlate with communicative breakdowns in the spacebridges, and thereby to contribute to crosstalk. The analysis suggests that, at some level, stylistic contextualization cues are quantitatively “analyzed” in real time by discourse participants, and it demonstrates some of the explanatory potential of quantitative modeling of complex indexical processes such as stylistic accommodation, divergence, and opposition. I wish to thank Doug Biber, Elinor Ochs, and Barbara Johnstone for invaluable feedback on this study.

Speakers from a semi-rural community within the Jamaican Creole continuum were asked what kind of linguistic entity they believe the Creole to be, where it is in use, whom they understand to be its users, and which domains they deem appropriate and inappropriate for its use. A language-attitude interview schedule yielding an Attitude Indicator Score (AIS) was developed for use in this community. This schedule contained two sets of questions, attitude and description questions, which were designed to capture information concerning overt and covert language attitudes. Results show respondents' attitude systems to be multi-valued: They were generally ambivalent in their attitudes toward Jamaican Creole, but they judged it appropriate or inappropriate for use in different contexts according to their social distance from or solidarity with an interlocutor. Gender grading and an age × gender effect were found. This paper is considerably expanded from a presentation made at NWAV 24, October 12–15, 1995. Fieldwork for this study was supported by a grant from the University of Michigan, Program in Linguistics. For their advice and insightful comments, I thank Lesley Milroy, John Rickford, an anonymous reviewer, and William Bright. My deepest thanks go to members of the Gordon Town community, particularly the principal and students of the Gordon Town All-Age School, who shared with me their facilities, their ideas, and their interest in the topic. Ken Guire, James Lepkowski, and Rose Venzuela provided assistance in the statistical analysis of data. After all this support and more, any errors and shortcomings of this study are the sole responsibility of this author.

This is almost two books in one. More than 100 pages are devoted to a critical review of approaches to the study of facts and descriptions. This review includes the sociology of scientific knowledge, philosophy of science, and constructionist approaches (e.g. Robert Merton, Harry Collins, Thomas Kuhn, Karl Popper); ethnomethodology (Harold Garfinkel, Melvin Pollner); conversation analysis (Harvey Sacks, Emanuel Schegloff, Gail Jefferson, John Heritage); semiology (Ferdinand de Saussure, Roland Barthes); post-structuralism (Barthes, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault); and post-modernism (Donna Haraway, Jean-François Lyotard). Potter is a skillful teacher, and I learned much from his discussion of these perspectives. However, even 100 pages are not enough for a thorough description and critique of such a wide range of perspectives; Potter leaves the reader wanting more – which is a pretty good place to leave a reader.

The strength of this large volume is its diversity: There is a wealth of papers covering different sociolinguistic and pragmatic topics from different perspectives. The range is such that few researchers in the area of the social use of language will not want, sooner or later, to refer to one of the articles in this book. All of them are by established researchers, but some give overviews of earlier research and important issues, while others report on specific pieces of sociolinguistic research.

Substantial thanks are due to van Dijk for assembling his two-volume “Discourse studies” collection, which introduces this multi-disciplinary field to a wide readership. In this first volume, which focuses on theory and method, linguists, semioticians, communication theorists, and social and cognitive psychologists from the Netherlands, Austria, Germany, the UK, the US, and Australia have contributed to van Dijk's project of promoting dialog and collaboration in the development of discourse studies as an emerging field. Each chapter offers a useful introduction to the literature in its area and an exposition of theoretical perspectives, usually illustrated by one or more examples of text analysis. The volume is a treasure for newcomers to discourse studies, or to discourse analysis methodologies; in addition, it challenges specialists to connect their work more fully with approaches from other perspectives.

This collection aims to offer, in the words of its editor, “a first introduction” to the study of discourse. While its companion vol. 1, Discourse as structure and process, is mainly concerned with cognitive issues, the contributors to vol. 2 focus on social organization and social processes.

Turns at talk in conversation, and in any other form of spoken interaction, are designed to enable speakers to be understood in the way they wish to be understood by their co-participants. Talk is meaningful insofar as speakers design their turns so as to be recognizable as making an offer, closing a topic, agreeing or affiliating, being ironic, finishing their turn, continuing, being surprised or astonished at news, “just” asking a question, reproaching, indicating that there is something problematic about what the prior speaker has just said, and so on. (I take these activities from those that are variously studied in the chapters in this collection.) So “turn design” is at the heart of how we mean what we say, what we communicate, in interaction.

Tonkin treats a complex and timely set of ideas when she studies the relationships between oracy and literacy, oral narrative performance and written texts, memory and history and society. To discuss these areas of scholarly debate, she employs a multidisciplinary, sometimes contentious variety of studies and assertions. Her efforts mostly succeed in promoting her claims for the necessity of blurring past distinctions and categories in the study of oral history, and for taking a much more performative/interactive view of its construction in a living context.

Until the last few years, linguists' interest in the language of the neurologically impaired has been primarily from two orientations: psycholinguistic and neurolinguistic. The former has applied theories concerning the mental processing of language, using acquired language disorders as a test bed for exploring and expanding these theories. The latter attempts to correlate language (disordered or not) with functional lesion sites in the brain; it has recently received a major boost from the technical developments of functional brain imaging, but its main theoretical base remains that of psycholinguistic processing.

This is an important contribution to the growing debate about the close links of polities to language, which is the innermost component of a nation and its culture, and the main support of the latter. Thus the book will be highly attractive to anyone interested in sociolinguistics and nation-building. It contains four parts: a general reflection on how language policy and linguistic culture have been perceived by scholars up to now, followed by studies of three national situations where these problems have been faced – France, India, and the US – with emphasis in each country on an important regional case (Alsace, Tamil Nadu, and California). Schiffman is able to speak about each case through personal experience of living and working on the spot.

Clyne has shown great skill in compiling and editing this volume; it contains a wealth of information on language planning and language policies, and will be widely cited in the future. The book contains fourteen case studies, apparently specially commissioned, on corpus language planning from a wide range of societies in a number of global regions: Southeast and East Asia (China, the Philippines, Vietnam), Western Europe (Belgium, Germany, Norway), Eastern Europe (Hungary, Moldavia, Ukraine), the Balkans (the former Yugoslavia), the Middle East (Turkey, Israel, Jordan), Southern Africa (South Africa), and Central America (Nicaragua), as well as the Jewish diaspora (in the case of Yiddish).

The international march of English is one of the leading sociolinguistic phenomena of our times. There have been internationally dominant languages before – religious languages like Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, as well as Sanskrit and Koranic Arabic – and politico-cultural languages, often linked to the religious cultures with which they propagate: Greek and Latin again, French, and (in the 20th century until the fall of Communism) Russian. In the last years of the 20th century English has established an unprecedentedly powerful position, which has even grown stronger since the more circumspect evaluation of its position by McCrum et al. 1986. The extent of its quantitative and qualitative domination of international geopolitics, science, commerce, communications, technology, politics, and consumer culture is evident in journals like English Today, World Englishes, and English World-Wide. What Crystal aims to do in this book is to capture the big picture, in focus and in perspective, and to assess where English really stands as we enter the 21st century.

This book presents six useful and very informative papers on countries in which English either is the single dominant language or assumes the role of a major language alongside others. The first category of countries includes Australia (discussed by Michael Herriman), Britain (Linda Thompson et al.) and the US (Thomas Ricento). The latter category includes South Africa, now notable for its eleven-language policy (Stanley Ridge) and Canada (Barbara Burnaby), where French has become a major competitor in the sociolinguistic field. New Zealand (Richard Benton) takes a kind of middle position as a predominantly English-speaking country in which Maori has become an official language.

Ó Riagáin has produced the sort of book that many have wished for but doubted they would see: a scrupulously dispassionate, comprehensive account of Irish language fortunes since the late 19th century, and of Irish language policies and outcomes since independence in 1922. Reading his careful, low-key book, one could easily forget that he is writing from and about a country where language issues rouse strong feelings, and also about the single most discussed case of attempted language maintenance and restoration in our time. His meticulous study allows efforts on behalf of Irish to be seen, appropriately, within a broad general framework of national development, in which the effectiveness of language policies is dependent in good part on their fit or lack of fit with the economic and social conditions of a given period.

Originating as a British doctoral dissertation, this work constitutes a meticulous, thoughtful, well-written, and sometimes critical application of variationist methodology to two domains of spoken French syntax: negation and interrogation. The work is of merit not only for the insights it provides into two key areas of French syntax, but also for the more general methodological issues it confronts, often with considerable originality. As is well known, the application of variationist methodology to syntax is controversial, but Coveney has made a convincing case that the Labovian paradigm can indeed be insightfully applied to the realm of syntactic variation.

Pooley sets out in this book to study Chtimi, the drôle de français ‘funny French’ (p. 2) of the Lille area, the northernmost region of France – and to show, through his analysis of two corpora of spontaneous speech, “the transition from patois to accent du Nord” in the speech of the working-class inhabitants of Roubaix and Rouges-Barres. The result, carried out with methodological rigor, is an important addition to the field of French sociolinguistics; it will be welcomed not only by scholars seeking a detailed analysis of the key features of northern Regional French, but also by those interested in ongoing changes in popular French. Pooley is particularly interested in tracing the obsolescence of Chtimi through its convergence with the closely related popular French register; in doing so, he provides a wealth of information about the phonological, morphological, and syntactical features of Chtimi, as used by his sources, and about popular French.

A prevailing fear of ambiguity, coupled with a global business imperative, has given birth to a new readership for the Japan-book trade. This new market, a large and lucrative one, is for general-interest books targeted at those who read about Japan not because they want to, but because they think they must in order to “succeed.” However, another book focused on Japanese and American communication may still hold the potential to teach us something new and valuable. A recent addition to this burgeoning literature is the book under review. Yamada has a lively writing style, a graceful use of metaphor and stories, and a Tannenesque “linguistics for the masses” formula to lead the reader through a few areas of probable communicative misunderstanding. On the basis of anecdotes, fables, TV dramas, samurai movies, proverbs, and some of her own previously published findings on bank contract meetings, Yamada sets out what she sees as the crucial discrepancies between American and Japanese conversational styles. These are easily summarized with her repeated characterizations of each group: Americans are independent and individualistic, and use explicit language, while Japanese are interdependent and group-oriented, and use implicit language.

The Japanese writing system is frequently singled out for the dubious distinction of being the modern world's most complex, and the amount of time and effort that public figures in Japan have spent promoting and resisting script reform in this century seems to have been in direct proportion to the system's complexity. The two books under review are important contributions to the documentation and interpretation of this protracted and acrimonious struggle.

This book is an ambitious attempt to wed a semiotic metatheory with the close analysis of ritual language and ritual exchange on Sumba Island, in eastern Indonesia. Keane explores the paradoxes of ritual formality, which seeks to make social encounters predictable and formulaic but nonetheless faces risks and hazards in performance. At the same time, he examines “the power and value” of the objects exchanged by the Anakalangese people, concluding that “the materiality of objects and the social constraints on circulation prevent even the wealthiest Anakalangese from full mastery over the goods they transact” (24).