This study examines how deadlines and time limits for conference talks organize the discourse of consensus among collaborating experimental and theoretical physicists in a university laboratory Six months of videotaped observations, including two cycles of conference talk preparation, indicate that, as the date of an upcoming conference nears, several things happen (a)Co-authoring physicists usually have not achieved agreement on all aspects of the findings (b)They nevertheless direct their energies to constructing a hybrid presentation rhetoric that satisfies the co-authors and fits the talk to the official conference talk time limit (c) In the process of working through matters of rhetoric – what to say, what to display visually, what to leave out, and in what order the information should be presented – the physicists construct a working consensus on matters of physics theory and experimental data explaining the properties and dynamics of the physical universe (Scientific discourse, consensus, temporal organization, rhetoric )

The first section of this article argues for an approach to interruption as a participant's, not an analyst's, phenomenon. For analysts, interruption is best treated as a topic, not a resource. The second section examines how participants go about making interruptions OBSERVABLE events in the flow of interaction - in particular, the ways in which they claim violations of speaking rights. The third section considers some of the ways in which such claims are responded to. In the final section, it is suggested that there is a general need for a more systematic approach to the methods through which acts are constituted in terms of the responses they receive. (Interruption, conversation analysis, interaction)

A gap exists between studies of gender and language and studies of bilingualism. The considerable attention given by studies of discourse style to gender differences in friendship patterns is not reflected in research on bilingual communities. This ethnographic case study of high school students in the Barcelona area shows that gender differences in peer group structure can affect the use of the bilingual repertoire, even when there are no apparent sex differences in second language acquisition. In this setting, girls' friendship circles are more solidary and cohesive than boys'. Moreover, girls' groups are ethnically and linguistically homogeneous, while boys' social circles can be ethnically mixed and internally differentiated linguistically. Girls' friendships set stronger constraints on language behavior. In turn, boys and girls reap different social benefits and costs for their linguistic choices, with more serious consequences for girls' social identities and acceptance by peers. (Gender, sex differences, bilingualism, peer groups, language acquisition, social networks, language shift)

The speech of native speakers of Indian English has generally been neglected in studies of English in South Asia. This article describes a variety of Indian English used by a section of the Anglo-Indian community in Madras, South India. A comparison of this variety to available descriptions of “General” or “Educated” Indian English shows that the two are substantially similar, but that the Anglo-Indian variety differs in two features: deletion of/h/ (h-dropping) and the distribution of r-lessness. The community shows classbased variation in the phonological feature of h-dropping and in one syntactic feature: auxiliary movement in questions. Sources for features of Anglo-Indian English are discussed, including possible inheritance from both standard and non-standard BrE dialects as well as transfer from Tamil, the likely substrate Indian language for this section of the Anglo-Indian community.(South Asia, Indian English, language variation)