The present article reflects on the concept of ‘spatial repertoire’ through a ‘trans’-perspective in order to explain the trans-formation of migrants’ homescapes during the pandemic—a time of restricted mobility. In the context of translocal im~mobility, this ethnographically informed multiple case study explores how three Greek ‘brain drain’ immigrants performed homescapes in the online-offline nexus from October to February 2020. Employing a critical discourse analytic approach, the findings showcase the pandemic biopolitics that have resulted in the de/reterritorialisation of everyday sociospatial activities, thus creating heterotopic places within the home. Specifically, the integration of work and political activity into the homescape has led to the resemiotisation of the linguistic landscape of homes and the dissolution of boundaries between ‘named’ spaces in homes. The concept of ‘transpatial repertoire’ captures the hybridisation of the pandemic-affected homescape, taking into consideration the vulnerabilities and emergent resistances to biopolitical control. In other words, it sheds light on the emergent heterotopias of im~mobility. (Pandemic, heterotopia, transpatial repertoire, linguistic landscape, homescape)*

Optimality Theory (OT) has been a major force driving developments in formal linguistics during the past decade. Like parameter-setting accounts, OT seeks to describe the range within which languages can vary; but instead of fixing parameters, OT proposes that languages, and children learning languages, arrange a set of constraints in a hierarchical order of strength that determines specific linguistic characteristics. The constraints proposed by OT are constraints on the well-formedness of the output of a grammar, and they are of two types: (i) markedness constraints, which exert pressure toward unmarked types of structure such as CV syllables or voiceless final obstruents; and (ii) faithfulness constraints, which maintain lexical contrasts such as CV and CVC syllable types, or voicing distinctions in final obstruents. The two types of constraints are in conflict, so that no particular constraint can be satisfied without violating others. In OT, “satisfaction” and “violation” are not absolute but a matter of degree, because all constraints play a role in the grammar of each language, though in a different order of strength or priority within a dominance hierarchy.

My theoretical aim in this article is to focus on an examination of processual enactments of scale in light of the technological affordances that are currently at the disposal of a significant majority of humans. I offer the terms algorithmic scales and algorithmic scalar affordances to describe one activist's engagement of practical theories of scale—her ‘algorithmic imagination’ (Bucher 2017)—which led her to design her audience in ways intended to algorithmically scale up, or amplify, her activities on Facebook—to enhance their spread numerically, rapidly, and translocally, making use of the algorithmically constructed communicative possibilities or affordances available to her on the site. (Social media, scale, algorithms, audience design, Facebook, activism, nation, politics)

Enfield's The anatomy of meaning is a pathbreaking exploration of multimodal communication based on Lao video recordings and fieldwork. Of special interest is his notion of composites, through which he addresses the question of cross-modal integration—how it is that signs in different modalities cohere, speech and gesture being his focus. For whom, to what degree, and through what means do composites coalesce? Does this notion denote a kind of cross-modal orderliness or the achievement of orderliness—perhaps through heuristics and inference-making? As I detail the book's engagement with this issue and compare it with others—especially recent discussions of “textuality” in linguistic anthropology and older structuralist approaches to behavioral events—I suggest that Enfield's notion is best viewed as a methodological operator. It is a notion that performs a kind of methodological displacement, pushing against an entrenched logocentrism while spurring us to view communicative events as multiplex, cross-modal assemblages. (Multi-modal, cross-modal, gesture, interaction, video, Lao)

This article describes the range of discursive strategies in the socializing messages of a mother and daughter interaction. The analysis draws on the work of Bakhtin (1981) and Tannen (2007) to interrogate the role of a physically absent but discursively present sister-in-law, ‘Mami Ji’, across three speech events. Following Tannen, we show how the characterisation of the sister-in-law, Mami Ji, has chronotopic value that connects mother and daughter in the present and makes links across family histories. Through the discursive strategies of repetition, dialogue, detail, and translanguaging, ‘Mami Ji’ becomes an iconic benchmark of how not to speak, how not to dress, and how not to behave. Drawing on material from a linguistic ethnography approach, we present three discourse analyses from a much larger international project that also looked at classroom interaction and break-time conversations. The article contributes to the under-researched topic of the representation of sisters-in-law in discourse, theorises the chronotope in everyday conversation, and demonstrates how mother and daughter solidarity is achieved through opposition to another female family member. (Chronotope, linguistic involvement strategies, translanguaging, socialisation, sister-in-laws, mothers and daughters)

This issue of Language in Society has been designed to explore the relevance of the concept of Community of Practice (CofP) – as presented by Lave & Wenger 1991 and by Wenger 1998 – to research in sociolinguistics, with a particular focus on its value in language and gender research. The contents of the issue grew out of a symposium at the Sixth International Conference on Language and Social Psychology, held at the University of Ottawa in May 1997. I invited the contributors whose work is represented in this issue to join me in exploring the usefulness of the CofP framework in relation to their own research.

This article explores racial ‘privilege’ through the lens of temporalized landscapes. Specifically, I examine chronotopes of class-inflected ‘Chinese’ privilege on advertising hoardings for ‘Jadescape’, a condominium development in multiracial Singapore. Two chronotopic dimensions are discussed. The first, pertaining to representations inscribed on the hoardings, manifest a ‘chronotopic bricolage’, involving the fusion of a ‘traditional racial-cultural chronotope’ of a historicised ‘Chineseness’, and a ‘modern cosmopolitan chronotope’ of contemporariness and transnationalism. Embedded in this mix are further multiplicities of time, which altogether create a Sinocentric ‘neo-traditional’ aesthetic. The second dimension relates to the impermanence of the semiotic-materiality of the hoardings installed along the perimeter of the construction site only while the condominium is being built. The temporariness of hyper-visible representability of ‘Chineseness’, read against other similar media and communication practices in multiracial public spaces, secures a ‘semiotic-material immunity of privilege’, which renders racialized Chinese privilege in Singapore both elusive and normalised. (Chronotopes of privilege, ‘Chinese privilege’, ‘chronotopic bricolage’, neo-traditional aesthetic, condominium advertising, critical semiotic landscape studies)*

In this book, author Salikoko Mufwene offers a chronology of his views on language evolution as they have developed over the past 12 years. Mufwene understands the linguistic evolutionary process in terms of a language's external ecology – that is, its position relative to other languages with which it moves in and out of contact, the power relations among groups of different language varieties in the setting, and so on – as well as its internal ecology, or the coexistence in a given setting of the linguistic features, and their relative weight. Although Mufwene uses creole languages as a starting point, his purpose is to highlight general characteristics of language evolution; he argues that, in the essentials of language change, varieties such as pidgins and creoles differ little if at all from non-pidgins and non-creoles. To build his case, Mufwene draws from population genetics, seeing any given language not as an organism but rather as its own “species.”