In this article, I introduce the aims and scope of a project examining other-repetition in natural conversation. This introduction provides the conceptual and methodological background for the five language-specific studies contained in this special issue, focussing on other-repetition in English, Finnish, French, Italian, and Swedish. Other-repetition is a recurrent conversational phenomenon in which a speaker repeats all or part of what another speaker has just said, typically in the next turn. Our project focusses particularly on other-repetitions that problematise what is being repeated and typically solicit a response. Previous research has shown that such repetitions can accomplish a range of conversational actions. But how do speakers of different languages distinguish these actions? In addressing this question, we put at centre stage the resources of prosody—the nonlexical acoustic-auditory features of speech—and bring its systematic analysis into the growing field of pragmatic typology—the comparative study of language use and conversational structure. (Repetition, conversation, prosody, pragmatics, typology)*

This study places conversational performance, or speakers' attempts during everyday talk to draw attention to the aesthetic form of their utterances, at the center of an analysis of linguistic ideology. It examines, in particular, the ways in which two white, middle-class, U.S. university students use performance strategies to construct as Other an English-speaking man whom one student encounters on a flight from Saudi Arabia. Drawing on a socially and ideologically situated theory of verbal art, this article proposes five interconnected relations between performance and ideology. Together, these relations constitute a step toward an integrated theory of an inextricable link between the ideological structure of performance and the potential for performance in ideological discourse.I wish to thank Jane Hill, Kimberly Jones, Douglas Adamson, and two anonymous reviewers for their perceptive and helpful comments on earlier versions of this article and on the dissertation from which it comes. I also greatly appreciate Jane McGary's careful editing.

The purpose of this review is two-fold. First of all, to move toward greater clarity with respect to a number of basic terms revealing less consensus in the language planning literature (e.g. planning, traditional, development, modernization, Westernization) than in the social sciences more generally. Secondly, but more importantly, to introduce into the language planning field a large number of concepts, questions and dimensions which have not yet found their way there from planning theory and planning research in other-than-language fields. In many (but not all) respects it would seem, on logical and impressionistic grounds, that language planning and other- than-language planning face similar burdens and benefit from related social and organizational circumstances.

The ethnographic analysis of categories is still largely based on assumptions of cultural uniformity, although, during the past decade, the significance of variation has become increasingly evident as attempts have been made to measure it. Delineation and measurement are themselves complex tasks, however. In a single body of data there may be variation according to many criteria which are often cross-cutting and reinforce each other irregularly. These issues are discussed in this paper in relation to different types and contexts of variation evident in animal classifications of the Nuaulu of eastern Indonesia. Yet, the kinds of assumptions made in formal studies of individual variation are as problematic as those concerning cultural uniformity. It is important to appreciate that the techniques and representations employed to describe classifications and their variation are often inadequate, concealing those things that are operationally of most significance and reifying ‘classifications’ which do not always exist in practice. The products of classifying behaviour inevitably reflect the immediate social conditions of the situations in which they are used. (Analysis of categories, cultural variability, ethnozoology, social context; Nuaulu of eastern Indonesia.)

This article uses the concept of stance to examine a series of activities and plurilingual heteroglossic performances and improvisations in a Corsican language-planning event. It focuses on how stances taken by performers attribute stances to the audience, as well as how stance objects (language, community, heritage) are construed in performance. This analysis is used to examine how these language-planning events mediate ideological tensions in Corsican language planning, specifically between traditional monolingual/purist ideologies and plurilingual, polynomic ones. (Stance, Corsica, performance, ideology, heteroglossia)*

This article investigates how variation across different levels of linguistic structure indexes ideological alignments in political talk. We analyse two political speeches by Ed Miliband, the former leader of the UK Labour Party, with a focus on the use of /t/-glottalling and the types of verb processes that co-occur with the pronouns we and you. We find substantial differences in the production of /t/ between the two speeches in words such as Britain and government, which have been argued to take on particular salience in British political discourse. We contextualise these findings in terms of metalinguistic discourse surrounding Miliband's language use, as well as how he positions himself in relation to different audiences via verb process types. We show that phonetic variation, subject types, and verb processes work synergistically in allowing Miliband to establish a political persona that is sensitive to ideological differences between different audiences. (Social meaning, indexicality, political discourse, verb processes, phonetic variation, /t/-glottalling)*

This article investigates the role of script choice in bilingual writing, drawing on classified advertisements and other texts written for and by Russian-speaking immigrants in New York City. The study focuses on English-origin items that appear in Russian texts, which are found to be written either in roman or Cyrillic script. Through an investigation of categorical and variable constraints on this variation, it is found that script choice relates to the distinction between lexical borrowing and single-item codeswitching. It is argued that writers may, consciously and on a token-by-token basis, choose the Cyrillic script to mark a word as borrowed or the roman script to mark it as foreign. However, they may also avoid this choice, as hybrid forms attest, especially when the use of characters shared by both alphabets allows ambiguous readings. The findings thus have implications for understanding notions of language boundaries in bilingual language use.Versions of this article were presented at two conferences: “Alphabetics: Interpreting letters” at Harvard University, 26–27 April 2003, and NWAVE 32, Philadelphia, 9–12 October 2003. I thank the audiences for their valuable insights and observations, especially Erika Boeckeler and Daniel Kokin. I also owe thanks to Katya Korsunskaya, Vladislav Rapoport, Doris Stolberg, Mario Geiger, and Tobias Kuhn. I am grateful to John Victor Singler, Mark Sebba, and Jannis K. Androutsopoulos, as well as to Jane H. Hill and to two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions. All errors and omissions remain my own.

According to a widespread view, people or experiences that evoke painful feelings of empathy, anxiety, or fear can be dealt with by giving them humorous, derogatory, or evasive names. Such terms allow the release or avoidance of unpleasant emotion. At first glance, hospital slang expressions for patients appear to provide numerous examples of this, but closer inspection suggests very different conclusions. Patient conditions which may be expected to create particular anxiety or distress do not lead to slang labels. Slang terms for patients fall into four categories, three of which characterize types of patients who claim more attention for their conditions than is warranted. The fourth category is made up of positive or neutral descriptive terms.

Hospital slang for patients serves social as well as expressive functions. Rapport within a group and rapport between individuals are distinct phenomena. When embedded in contexts that avoid individualized expressions of emotion or experience, hospital slang may promote group rapport at the same time that it maintains individual distance. In this respect is is similar to other kinds of slang, and other discourse devices. (Slang, discourse negotiation and contextualization, medical anthropology, rapport, expressive function of names and labels.)

Conversations about serious life changes in old age may be expected to sound painful, but data of conversational narratives by elderly Japanese women even on topics related to illnesses or the death of a husband show highly engaging, lively exchanges, frequently accompanied by humor and laughter among the participants. The common feature in the conversations recounting psychologically intense experiences is a shift to detailed depictions of specific scenes from the quotidian perspective. This phenomenon, which I call quotidian reframing, is signaled by linguistic and paralinguistic quotidian framing cues. Quotidian reframing can function as a useful discourse strategy to relieve tension and let the participants regain the feeling or stance of quotidian self, the identity that they consider “normal.” A detailed account of the quotidian frame draws on such ideas as frame, footing, lamination, and positioning. (Discourse analysis, frame, identity, humor and laughter, older Japanese women)*

Ain't occurs as a sociolinguistic variable in working class speech in the town of Reading, England. The phonetic realizations of ain't in Reading English do not accord with traditional etymologies, depending more on the syntactic environment in which ain't occurs than on the standard English forms from which they are usually assumed to derive. The phonetic variants are also marked for semantic function in tag questions. Variation in the use of ain't can be explained as reflecting an ongoing linguistic change (sociolinguistics, dialectology, language change, theoretical linguistics).

This study describes the language situation of Sri Lanka (Ceylon) and examines the factors governing the language choice of Sinhalese bilinguals while attempting to correlate such factors with domains and role relations. It also examines the way in which such correlations reflect social differences in Sri Lankan society. The use of two languages by the same speakers almost inevitably affects the forms of the languages so used. The use of English by Sinhalese speakers has led to the functional elaboration of both English and Sinhala. Bilinguals show varying degrees of proficiency in the languages they use. Such disparities in performance have led to differing patterns of bilingualism manifested in different phonological and grammatical features. Materials are drawn from the English of newspapers, fiction, drama, poetry etc. and personal knowledge. (Language as a class indicator; bilingualism; conflict of speech norms; Sri Lankan English.)

This article investigates how participants in broadcast news interviews display their orientations to a social distribution of knowledge regarding newsworthy events and actors. Interviewers treat the nature, grounds, and limits of interviewees' knowledge as accountable matters. The article employs single-case and quantitative analyses to show that, in and through the design of their questions, interviewers distinguish between (i) interviewees as subject-actors who are responsible for direct, first-hand knowledge of their own conduct; and (ii) interviewees as commentators who, on the basis of indirect, second-hand knowledge, are entitled to opinions about third parties' conduct. This distinction serves as a basis for the production of interviewees' responses as talk that expresses either matters of fact or points of opinion. The article examines how these aspects of question design establish relevancies for interviewees' responses and, ultimately, shape news content.

Studies of linguistic variation in communities ought to be able to capture variable patterns of discourse. But there are problems in quantitatively studying variable realisations of functional units, because it is impossible to list variants exhaustively. A more abstract approach to discourse variation can examine the distribution of variants which are themselves functional units, tied to higher-order functions. This form of analysis is exemplified in a travel agency setting, where education groups are differentiated by the levels of explicitness with which they manage their encounters: in the identifying of purposes and roles and in the marking of closing transactions and other transaction boundaries. (Discourse variation, discourse analysis, communicative explicitness, travel agency talk)

Parallels between female communication strategies in the West and Japanese communication strategies are striking. Power figures prominently in descriptions of male-female behavior in the West and, by implication, in descriptions of Japanese linguistic behavior. Similarities between Western female and Japanese communication styles are taken not as an indication that Japanese linguistic behavior is feminine, but as indicative of the problems inherent in analyzing linguistic behavior in culturally bound-terms such as power. (Japanese sociolinguistics, language and the sexes, inter-cultural communication)

Supported by contemporary evidence, this study discusses the revival of Hebrew a century ago (within two or three decades), with a focus on the actual total shift of pre-Israel Palestine's Jewish community from Yiddish and several other languages to Hebrew as an all-purpose means of communication. First, four “factors” that prevailed prior to and during the revival are discussed: the “communicative”, “political”, “religious”, and “literary.” The study then proposes schematically that the shift to Hebrew evolved in a cycle consisting of four consecutive albeit partially overlapping “steps”: (1) The children are instilled with desired language attitudes. (2) The children acquire the code, Hebrew. (3) The children transfer Hebrew, now a second language, out of the schools. (4) With these children now adults, their newly born receive Hebrew as a first language. Finally, the study suggests that, in the absence of a central authority, the revival can be seen as a case of “micro language planning,” in which potential speakers constituted “language planning agents” active in “language planning cells.” (Language revival, Hebrew, language planning, language shift, vernacular)

In sociolinguistics, where identity tends to be our first explanatory resource, Peter Trudgill's claim that identity is “irrelevant” as a factor in his area of interest is particularly striking. There are at least three questions here. The first is Trudgill's direct concern: whether identity considerations impinged on the development of new national colonial varieties. The second is the underlying question of whether identity, in itself and in general, can stand as a motive for sociolinguistic action and change. The third is whether face-to-face linguistic accommodation, which Trudgill invokes as the core process through which new dialects come to be, can and does function in the absence of identity considerations.

People often begin stories in conversation by referring to person, time, and place. We study story beginnings in three societies and find place reference is recurrently used to (i) set the stage, foreshadowing the type of story and the kind of response due, and to (ii) make the story cohere, anchoring elements of the developing story. Recipients orient to these interactional affordances of place reference by responding in ways that attend to the relevance of place for the story and by requesting clarification when references are incongruent or noticeably absent. The findings are based on 108 story beginnings in three unrelated languages: Cha'palaa, a Barbacoan language of Ecuador; Northern Italian, a Romance language of Italy; and Siwu, a Kwa language of Ghana. The commonalities suggest we have identified generic affordances of place reference, and that storytelling in conversation offers a robust sequential environment for systematic comparative research. (Storytelling, place, narrative, conversation analysis, interactional linguistics)*

This article examines how the social meanings of phonetic variation in a British adolescent community are influenced by a complex relationship between ethnicity, social class, and social practice. I focus on the realisation of the happy vowel in Sheffield English, which is reported to be a lax variant [ε̈] amongst working-class speakers but is undergoing change towards a tense variant [i] amongst middle-class speakers. I analyse the acoustic realisation of this vowel across four female communities of practice in a multiethnic secondary school and find that the variable's community-wide associations of social class are projected onto the ethnographic category of school orientation, which I suggest is a more local interpretation of class relations. Ethnographic evidence and discourse analysis reveal that local meanings of the happy vowel vary further within distinctive community of practice styles, which is the result of how ethnicity and social class intersect in structuring local social practices. (Intersectionality, indexicality, social meaning, identity, ethnicity, social class)*

Discourse analysts come from a variety of intellectual traditions (systemic-functional linguistics, American descriptive linguistics, ethnomethodology, and critical theory among them) and work in a variety of ways. As a result, there is recurring discussion among practitioners about the boundaries that constitute discourse analysis as a field/theory/method in relation to other fields/theories/methods. The following reviews all take up this discussion in treatments of discourse analysis in recent textbooks and other programmatic work. Readers should note that this collection is the result of happy editorial coincidence – Ruth Wodak proposed a review article that came to press about the same time as other book reviews fitting this theme arrived at LiS. It is not the result of a systematic attempt to cover the field, which would require the kind of intellectual boundary-work these reviews report on and represent.

Barbara Johnstone, Editor

This article investigates public discourses of multilingualism in Britain. In contrast to previous research focusing on specific languages or varieties of language, we examine multilingualism as a metalinguistic construct and are interested in what is frequently said about multilingualism, and how it is said. More specifically, we explore the extent to which media discourses are consonant or diverge from the attitudes of lay people. Media discourses are investigated using a corpus-assisted discourse-study approach to the analysis of large-press corpora. Results from the corpus study are then incorporated in an attitude survey distributed to 200 participants living in a large superdiverse town in Britain. Our study shows that while positive media discourses are mostly shared by the general public, some of the negative themes, especially those relating to immigration, are either reinforced or challenged. The article demonstrates the usefulness of triangulating corpus-linguistic methods with a survey to provide a more comprehensive understanding of public discourses about language matters, and offers some implications for promoting multilingualism in society. (Multilingualism, metalanguage, corpus-assisted discourse study (CADS), attitude survey, triangulation)