Investigators have found in Arabic-speaking communities that men's speech, and not women's, approximated the standard variety. More recent studies have challenged the assumption that prestige and standard spoken Arabic are one and the same. These studies have found that there are, in some Arab communities, prestige varieties of spoken Arabic which are not in the direction of standard Arabic, and that, contrary to what had been previously concluded, it is mostly women who speak the prestige dialects. This article, based on an investigation of the speech of a group of Baghdadi men and women, shows that in Baghdad the prestige variety of spoken Arabic is in the direction of the standard, and that women, more than men, tend to favor this variety. Using the findings of a previous research project in Baghdad, the article also draws attention to the fact that in the past, when Baghdadi women did not have the same access to standard Arabic as men, it was men, and not women, who spoke a dialect approximating the standard variety. (Standard literary Arabic, dialectal Arabic, linguistic prestige norms, style shifting)

Doctor–parent–child interaction is analyzed in terms of Brown and Levinson's (1978) theory on facework and politeness. The determinism of the Brown and Levinson (B & L) model is discussed in terms of the present data, which show how discourse is a matter of continuous negotiation between participants. For instance, it is shown how the on record/off record distinction is best understood sequentially. When doctors seem to sense that respectful indirectness does not work, they tend to phrase their requests in an increasingly direct fashion. Hence, the full meaning of doctors' directives is revealed only via the outcome of social interaction, regulated by both parties (doctor and patient/spokesperson). This means that utterances must be analyzed sequentially (and not in a mechanistic, static fashion). Moreover, discourse cannot be understood in terms of any unidirectional social determinism. It is also shown here how doctors can talk to parents through children, as it were. Within a joking relationship format with the child, it is possible for a doctor to convey potentially offensive information to the child's parent. Doctors' moves can thus be seen as direct or indirect depending on type of addressee perspective (parent as participant or as side-participant). The pediatric multiparty setting thus highlights the impossibility of a more formalistic application of the B & L model. (Politeness, facework, negotiations, medical discourse, child discourse)

The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is often implicitly assumed to be true independent of its empirical status. Feminist attempts to eliminate the generic he must assume that language somehow affects thought, since there is no intrinsic harm in the word itself. Research to date has, in fact, shown that generic he tends to suggest a male referent in the mind of the reader. This study asks whether people's interpretation of a generic sentence varies depending on whether or not they have followed feminist proposals and reformed their own language. Fifty-five college students read sex-indefinite paragraphs involving either the generic he, he or she, or they, and made drawings to represent the mental images evoked by what they read. The sex of the figure drawn was the dependent variable. Students' term papers were used to determine whether their own language was “reformed” or “traditional.” He was found to be least likely to evoke female referents, he or she most likely, and they in between. However, regardless of the pronoun, men drew more male and fewer female pictures than women. Moreover, whereas men did not differ in their imagery, whether their language was reformed or traditional, women did. Traditional-language women had more male images than female. Reformed-language women showed the opposite. Results are discussed in terms of the theory of social identity (Tajfel 1981), and it is concluded that the weak, correlational form of Whorf's thesis applies to women, the group that initiated the reform in the first place. (Gender and language, pronouns, social psychology of language, Sapir–Whorf hypothesis)

This article investigates differences in telephone behaviour in England and Greece in the light of Brown and Levinson's model of interaction. It focusses upon differences both in verbal telephone call behaviour and in the attitudes and values attached to telephone usage. Explanations are placed within a broad framework of cultural differences in the preferred interactional strategies of the two societies. (Sociolinguistics, culturally determined variations in telephone behaviour, politeness phenomena, Greece versus England)

This article examines the descriptive power of the adjacency pair as a basic unit of conversational organization. It applies the notion to the analysis of conversational data and points out that there are utterances which are important contributions to the conversation and yet for which the notion fails to account. They are utterances which are not the component parts of an adjacency pair and yet form a bounded unit with it. This raises the question of which is more adequate as a basic unit of conversational organization: a three-part exchange or an adjacency pair? This article proposes that it is the former, based on the observation that the third part of an exchange is a very important element of conversational interaction, and that when it does not occur, it is often withheld for social or strategic reasons. The article argues for the nontrivial absence of the third part by showing its relevance of occurrence (Sacks 1972:342). An investigation is made of its functions by examining where, when, and why it does not occur, and where, when, and why it does occur in conversation. The discussion is exemplified by face-to-face and telephone conversation data. (Sociolinguistics, ethnomethodology, discourse analysis, pragmatics)