Marbles games (“pitch”), perhaps the most widely played of all traditional boys' games in Trinidad and Tobago, have declined precipitously in the last two decades. This article documents close to 200 marbles terms found in Trinidad and Tobago English Creole. Although most are British in origin, there are East Indian, French Creole, and possible African influences on this lexicon. An analysis of the discourse of marbles talk in its sociocultural context was prompted by its high affect for men who had played pitch as boys. Using frameworks from the sociology of games and from studies in language and gender, marbles talk is shown to demonstrate features of ”masculine“ gender-linked use of language and games, including highly elaborated rules and strategies, and competitive and confrontational use of language. (Caribbean, change, Creole, discourse, games, gender, marbles, obsolescence)

In this study, two groups of students were asked to listen to recordings made of Senegalese Wolof speakers and make deductions about their social and caste status. The responses of the first group, made up of Senegalese students, did not go beyond the threshold of chance with regard to caste status, but were 65.7% correct regarding the speakers' social status. The second group, who were European students with no prior knowledge of the Wolof language, achieved percentages of correct answers similar to those of the Senegalese listeners with regard to social status. The imposed norm hypothesis, which predicts that sociolinguistic features cannot be gauged by those who have had no previous contact with the community, should thus be reconsidered and enlarge its scope to include a more general, and therefore nuanced, view of language. (Imposed norm hypothesis, inherent value hypothesis, social stratification of language, social identification, Wolof, Senegal, castes)*

Recent studies documenting minority linguistic space in urban settings have focused on cities' linguistic landscapes, and external signage is often taken to index linguistic practices within businesses, government offices, and other establishments. To shed light on linguistic practices in culturally significant spaces of this sort, it is helpful to consider social actors' discursive construction of the spaces themselves. This article describes discourses of minority francophone space elicited from members and associates of Moncton, New Brunswick's Centre culturel Aberdeen. The data are analyzed according to Lefebvre's (1974/1991) conceived, perceived, and lived spaces and Heller & Labrie's (2004) modernizing and globalizing discourses. The present findings demonstrate that, while Aberdeen's conceived space is francophone, other languages are spoken in Aberdeen's perceived space. Participants also describe Aberdeen's lived space as bilingual, mediating between anglophones and francophones. These discourses, coupled with changes in the Centre's charter, suggest an emergent, plural conception of minority francophone space. (Francophone, minority, Canada, Acadian, discourse, social space)*

This article is a case study on how Singaporean intellectuals articulate resistant language ideologies by enregistering the local vernacular, Singlish. The case in point is Gwee Li Sui's 2018 companion Spiaking Singlish, lauded as the first book to be written in Singlish about Singlish. It is argued that in tactically leveraging Singlish in a folk-lexicographical project, Gwee takes the vernacular to the third indexical order; and in so doing, he performs a ludic and extreme form of Singlish through which an everyday tongue turns into a fetish object. Contextualising Gwee's polemics within his tension with the language establishment in Singapore, the article highlights the ethical dilemma implicit in the celebration of languages speaking to an egalitarian ethos, suggesting that in enunciating a vernacular on the order of reflexive performance, intellectuals may inadvertently fashion it into a more elitist language than that which is spoken on the streets. (Singlish, Singapore, enregisterment, performativity, indexicality)

agency, bricolage, deconstructionism, demystification, demythologization, difference, discursively constructed subject positions, duality of structure, essentialism, anti-essentialism, hybridity, ideology, intertextuality

What do these terms from the discipline of cultural studies mean? Do they have any relevance to the study of language and identity? If these are questions you have found yourself pondering, then Cultural studies and discourse analysis (CSDA) is a book you should read. This work is a productive collaboration between a cultural studies scholar (Barker) and a critical discourse analyst (Galasinski) who hope to “forge a useful interdisciplinary dialogue” (1). Although their book is written with the specific aim of showing cultural studies (CS) scholars how critical discourse analysis (CDA) can be used as an analytical tool in investigating identities, for sociolinguists it is also a good introduction to the way identity is theorized in CS. The identities analyzed in the data-based chapters are masculinity (chap. 4), ethnicity and nationality (chap. 5), and masculinity together with ethnicity (chap. 6).

This paper describes some cases of inter- and intra-informant variability which cannot be explained in terms of social and contextual factors, and which do not seem to require probabilistic models to account for them. Analysis of several Zinacanteco speech taxonomies suggests that what are called variant responses are often only incomplete responses, and that if the cognitive system is represented as a taxonomy, then it is a taxonomy which is made up of a number of partial taxonomies, each of which is produced by a different informant or group of informants or by the same informant on different occasions. A frequently used method of ‘controlled eliciting’ is shown to be inherently incapable of guaranteeing the elicitation of complete taxonomies in every interview. For this reason, it is urged that before constructing a model of a cognitive system it is first necessary to establish what is ‘real’ cognitive variation by recognizing and eliminating that variation which results from methodological indeterminacy. (Ethnoscience, cognition, variability, methodology, controlled eliciting, folk taxonomy, speech, Maya languages.)

Previous work has shown that stance—the way speakers position themselves with respect to what they are talking about and who they are talking to—provides powerful insights into why speakers choose certain linguistic variants, beyond correlations with macro-social categories such as gender, ethnicity, and social class. However, as stancetaking moves are highly context-dependent, they have rarely been explored quantitatively, making the observed variable patterns difficult to generalize. This article seeks to contribute to this methodological gap by proposing a formal guide to coding stance and demonstrating how it can be operationalized quantitatively. Drawing on a corpus of eight individuals, self-recorded in three situations with varying levels of social distance, we apply this method to variation between English complementizers that and zero (i.e. no overt complementizer), providing a replicable and theoretically grounded protocol that incorporates both quantitative and qualitative analyses in a variationist sociolinguistic study. (Stance, complementizers, that, English)*

The HOLLYWOOD sign is arguably the world's most famous language object. Emblematic of prestige and cultural capital, the sign can be found not just in Los Angeles, but in citations all over the world. Beginning with the history of its valorization, HOLLYWOOD is shown to emanate symbolic value through a set of enregistered semiotic features. Drawing upon a set of globally sourced citations of HOLLYWOOD, the circulation and stratified bundling of size, emplacement, alignment, typeface, and color indicates how the citation of language objects is mediated by political economy. A process of diffuse citation is further observed, in which the quotation of language features is not overt, but the source of emanation is still tangible, revealing HOLLYWOOD as the source of a global linguistic-semiotic register. As this register circulates in citations overt and diffuse, language objects are revealed as key sites for the reproduction of commodity values. (The Hollywood sign, language object, citation, enregisterment, global emblems, recontexualization)*

The first quotation on the back cover of this book begins, “This long-awaited volume demonstrates that Eckert is the sociolinguist.” Some people have expressed the view that this is an unusually strong statement. Since I wrote it myself, I am faced with the clear choice in this review of defending it or apologizing for it.

In this article, I ask how the body is discursively constructed within the wellness industry. I analyze a corpus of articles from the Goop franchise, examining how bodies are constructed, and how subjects are impelled to act within contemporary neoliberal risk culture. Corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis reveals that the body is ultimately constructed as unwell and at risk, by virtue of its presence in the environment. Faced with this inescapable risk, the neoliberal citizen is responsible for managing the self in ever-increasing domains. I link the particularities of this discursive embodiment to larger cultural imperatives of self-surveillance, discipline, and control, and argue that it is particularly a white female subject who is interpellated within this discourse. Throughout, the wellness industry is revealed as propelling the interminable cycle of the project of the self, and as a contemporary mechanism for the reproduction of docile white female bodies. (Discursive embodiment, neoliberal ideology, risk society, corpus analysis, critical discourse analysis, feminist critique)*

This study examines the use of words per pause (W/P) as a practical means for identifying solidarity in everyday conversation. Eight listeners recorded the narratives of a female and a male, either friends or strangers. Ten speakers were categorized as friends and six as strangers; they talked about a good and a bad experience. Average reliability of coding pauses was .83. The results indicated a statistically significant difference in W/P of speakers who were friends and those who were strangers. Statistical results support the conclusion that friends are more likely to employ many W/P and strangers few W/P. One practical implication of this study is that W/P can be employed by researchers with relative ease and a high degree of reliability for investigations of speaking style in a variety of contexts. A second practical implication is that W/P is a diagnostic device that can serve as a social litmus test in everyday conversation to identify the expression of sympathy and estrangement. (Expressive language, nonverbal communication, paralanguage, pauses, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, solidarity, speech and personality)

Bilingual speech takes research on code-mixing a step further toward achieving a better understanding of the differences in what in the past has been referred to simply as the mixing of two languages in the sentence (or intrasentential code-switching). In addition, Muysken presents the state of the discipline of language contact in the year 2000 from the perspective of the grammar and structure of language contact phenomena. He brings together and analyzes an extensive set of language pairs from a wide variety of communities and social contexts. Good familiarity with such varied multilingual data provides the author with a strong base on which to support his three-way classification (insertion, alternation, and congruent lexicalization) of code-mixing phenomena at the sentence level.

This article examines the intersections between migrant experiences, multilingual practices, and the creation of space. It does so by focusing on Italians who migrated to Tasmania, a group that has long been isolated from the rest of the Italian diaspora. Using an ethnographic approach within a constructivist framework, this research shows that when experiences of movement are recounted in interaction they bring about spaces of speech that are possible thanks to the articulation of local and transnational ‘centres’, which in turn are intertwined with a rich set of linguistic resources. These resources include code-choice, codeswitching, and intentional exposure of phonological variation, and are variously combined to allow the emergence of spaces for people to move through. Spaces of speech are thus situated interactional spaces where acts of (re)telling are related to centres as spatial resources through which not only social meaning is created but also location and locution are mutually constitutive. (Spaces of speech, centres, cultural presence, Italian, Tasmania)*

An ethnographic approach to language aims at explaining the organization of a verbal culture, understood as the result of speakers' practices and agency. The instrument of this research is fieldwork. For the verbal cultures of bygone societies, only examination of written records helps us to guess how speaking worked at the time. This general issue is addressed by scrutinizing a medieval Catalan chronicle. Ethnographic and pragmatic concepts are projected backward on data informative on face-to-face communication and the interactional construction of a social order. Speakers' rights and obligations, their metalinguistic and metapragmatic management of verbal resources (genres, texts, codeswitching), and the link between linguistic management and ideologies are uncovered. The article focuses on the relationship among evidence, knowledge and reporting of events, and the production and reproduction of authority in Catalan medieval society, as well as the different types of responsibility in discourse and their patterns of social distribution. Concentration is on three types of discourse events: delegated discourse, mediated communication, and a specific type of codeswitching in political oratory, quotation cum auctoritate.The research on which this article is based was funded by the Department of Research, Universities and Information Society, Generalitat de Catalunya, and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology, Research Fund BFF2003-02954. I benefited from a visiting scholar stay at the University of California, Berkeley (spring–summer 2003). I am indebted to two anonymous reviewers who helped to imprive this article. Particular thanks go to Jane McGary, who patiently helped in editing the manuscript and making it a more readable text.

Anthropologists have long recognized that Australian aboriginal cultures have a rich repertoire of cognitive achievements, and they have contrasted this richness with the relative impoverishment of their technological repertoire. However, despite the richness of the cognitive repertoire, the anthropological literature contains no overall inventory for any aboriginal cultural group. McKnight's monograph is the first work that covers everything: social structure (including kinship), myth, ritual, dancing, property structure, and biological classification. The quality of the scholarship is very high. At the time of writing, McKnight had worked with the Lardil for 30 years, including 16 field trips, with a total time of residence among the Lardil of more than five years. After completing an MA on West African materials under Darryl Forde, he switched to Australia, where he also worked with the Wik-mungkan and a number of other groups. The present monograph is the first of a projected trilogy; work is under way now on the second volume, a monograph on marriage, sorcery, and violence. In recent years, McKnight has been involved, on behalf of the Lardil, in negotiations with the Australian government for land claims.

This article examines semiotic resignifications undertaken in ‘peripheral’ cultural production through an ethnographic analysis of the trajectory of the Amazonian artist, Jaloo. Jaloo occupies multiple positions of marginality in Brazilian society and artistic scenes, which he connects to other global peripheries in his performances, aesthetics, and self-narratives. Building on anthropological and sociolinguistic scholarship, we show how ‘peripheral’ status is managed by Jaloo in the context of a growing and politicised audience for outsider and alternative cultural production. We theorise Jaloo's negotiation of his relationship with audiences and the media as rescaling. Further, we argue that this rescaling entails the ordering of semiotic resources into a social imaginary that reconfigures peripheral territories and identities, which we consider in terms of a transperipheral chronotope. (Inequality, chronotopes, indexicality, race, coloniality, scales, periphery)