The language of sports casting is analyzed in terms of register variation. First the register is “located” by successive approximations to a characterization of its occasions of use, then selected syntactic characteristics are identified: simplification (deletion of copula and sentence initial nominals), inversions, heavy modifiers, result expressions (for + noun, to + verb), routines (e.g., giving the “count”). Some of these are discussed in relation to possible communicative functions, but all are seen as register markers. Sports announcer talk (SAT) is described as a promising topic for comparative, historical, and acquisitional studies of register variation. (Register, mass media, performance; American English, Japanese.)

Creolists have been showing that the use of codes in Creole societies is linguistically motivated, but these scholars have neglected the social principles informing the use of language varieties in these societies. This paper takes the position that the use of Creole and English varieties in Guyana is socially motivated. The typical Guyanese speaker uses linguistic items which are socially appropriate or mandated in the social context or cultural milieu he finds himself in, and uses items from both English and Creole. The speaker's use of linguistic forms seems to be related more to his conscious or subconscious social intentions than to linguistic principles which inhere in the basilect to acrolect continuum model with which many creolists work. The linguistic behavior of nine groups of individuals from three communities in Guyana is examined within a theoretical framework proposed by R. B. LePage (1972, 1973, 1977). This framework allows us to see these groups, and individuals within them, as exploiting the codal resources of their society to their social advantage. (Sociolinguistics, Creole linguistics, language contact)

This paper addresses the relevance of a functional approach to the study of speech genres. The range of variation found in spontaneous performances of a traditional genre of Samoan speechmaking (lāuga) can be explained and partly predicted by referring to the social and cultural context of speaking. Particular features of variation are attributed to the following factors: (1) the purposes of the social events, (2) the temporal setting of its performance, (3) the range and social identities of the participants, and (4) the weight given to performance as a key for delivering and interpreting speechmaking. (Oratory, ethnography of communication, cross-contextual variation, performance, Samoan language and culture.)

The Arabic-speaking speech communities of the Persian Gulf state of Bahrain are undergoing a special kind of sociolinguistic change which requires the recognition of both dialectal and supradialectal prestige systems. Variation can be accounted for in terms of the articulation/conflict of these two systems. Although it appears at first sight that all of the observed variation could be explained at the phonological level, a closer analysis of the data suggests that, psycholinguistically and sociolinguistically, a lexical explanation fits part of it better. (Variation studies, standard and nonstandard languages)

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.)

Most studies of sound change in the United States have focused on the social strata of urban societies. In the American cornbelt, however, the most important social distinctions are horizontal rather than vertical. A fundamental ethnic division dating back to original settlement of the area opposes town and countryside dwellers. A study of fifty-one speakers in a rural area of Illinois shows fronting and raising of (aw) to be considerably more advanced among countryside dwellers than among town residents. Furthermore, the countryside population underwent a profound social and economic change during the past half century as large numbers of subsistence farmers abandoned the land and rural life altogether, leaving behind a smaller number of farmers whose larger operations meant that the economic and social status of the average farmer considerably improved. An examination of town and countryside age groups from the data base shows that an increase in the fronting and raising of (aw) took place primarily in a single generation most affected by the change in the farm population. At least temporarily, fronted and raised (aw), despite an overt nonstandard status documented in more than a century of speech and language textbooks, suddenly acquired a new prestige – spreading even to town populations – along with a reassertion of rural values and rural life. (Sound change, social structure, rural society, American English, sociolinguistics, dialectology)

Recent studies of socially situated ways of speaking have reflected a growing uneasiness with the tidy dichotomies (for example, formal/informal, polite/casual) that have informed sociolinguistic inquiries in the past. The ritual language of the Kamsà indigenous community of Andean Colombia presents a serious challenge to these familiar conceptual molds. In elaborating a semiotic constitution for this speech variety, I articulate a model founded on three interrelated variables – accessibility, formalization, and efficacy – that may prove relevant to the discussion of ritual and ceremonial languages elsewhere. (Ritual and ceremonial languages, South American Indian speech forms, semiotics.)

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)

William Labov formulated rules for sounding (black verbal dueling) that saw ritual insults, but not personal insults, as properly falling within the framework of black verbal play. Other researchers interested in contrasting play and fact-oriented dispute genres within more general discussions of keying have used Labov's analysis as a basis for drawing conclusions as to where play ends and the serious begins within this activity. However, Labov's decision to place personal insults outside the framework of the game of sounding is incorrect. Consequently, so too is the boundary line established by these other researchers to distinguish play from nonplay within the context of black verbal dueling. The present paper proposes to establish the correct black cultural perspective on the role and function of personal insults in sounding and the boundary between play and nonplay within the context of that activity. It also considers the different cultural consequences that would stem from regarding personal insults to be part of verbal play or not. Finally, it shows similarities in the structure and function of two speech actions – accusations and denials – that are used in both play and nonplay disputes to demonstrate more closely the nature of reciprocal influence of play and nonplay interactions. (Black verbal dueling, keying, discourse analysis, play and nonplay dispute genres, interethnic communication)

The relationship between linguistic processes, cognitive activities, and social structures is explored by examining the decision making of committees of educators as they decide to place students into special education programs or retain them in regular classrooms. Often, different committee members enter committee meetings with different views of the student's case and its disposition, e.g., classroom teachers and parents provide accounts of the student's performance that compete with the view of the psychologist or district representative. Yet by the meeting's end, the version of the student's case provided by the psychologist or the district representative prevails.

This paper discusses the use of the title of address, tóngzhì ‘comrade’, in the People's Republic of China today. Empirical data are presented which were gathered to test a set of hypotheses about the unmarked and marked uses of this term. In its unmarked sense, it is a neutral term of address implying conventionalized solidarity. However, in its marked sense its use becomes a negotiation to change the social distance between Speaker and Addressee. We argue that tóngzhì has variable meanings and uses because its usage represents a language change in progress. Finally, we propose a general hypothesis that variation in linguistic forms such as tóngzhì is exploited by speakers to negotiate rights and obligations within a talk exchange. Speakers use the ambiguity which variable meanings and uses create as a cover for negotiating interpersonal position without going on record. We suggest that this possibility to exploit variation may explain how certain structures evolve in language and why they are maintained. (Sociolinguistics, conversational analysis, language change, terms of address, markedness, Chinese)

In acquiring language, children must acquire not only the structure of the language, but also the rules for using language appropriately in a wide variety of situations. Routines, or rituals, which occur in language provide a special opportunity for studying children's acquisition of this aspect of language because routines emphasize the rules of use over the lexical meaning. Furthermore, routines are limited in terms of the structures which are acceptable, thus naturally controlling for this variable. With the aim of expanding our knowledge of the process of acquisition of routines, this study reports the acquisition by children of a routine used at the end of meals by Cakchiquel-speaking Indians in Guatemala. (Routines, politeness formulas, linguistic socialization, linguistic input to children; Cakchiquel.)

The paper is concerned with the changing address norms in China since the founding of the People's Republic in 1949. The first part of the paper deals with the term tóngzhì ‘comrade’ as well as some other address terms relevant to it. Emphasis is on the discussion of why official titles rather than tóngzhì are preferred by certain Chinese officials. The second part focuses on how traditional address terms such as xiānsheng ‘Mr.’, tàitai ‘Mrs.’ and xiaojie ‘Miss’ have undergone changes; and the third part refers to the use of the second singular pronouns of both the regular form ní and the honorific ním. The paper also reports on the changes in some other aspects including address terms to women and some proper names relevant to address. (Address, language change, Chinese linguistics, anthropological linguistics, politics of language)

Standardization of terminology is a process calling for a thoughtful combination of adherence to linguistic principles and awareness of the sociocultural issues involved. The case of Serbo-Croatian linguistic terminology currently used in Yugoslavia may serve as an example of the different dimensions of sociolinguistic variation in this area. Especially in culturally heterogeneous societies, the distinction between standardization and unification must be observed. (Terminology, language standardization, sociology of language, applied linguistics; Serbo-Croatian.)

A previously unreported Amharic argot, that of a clique of unattached young women in a bar district of Addis Ababa, is described and traced to its source in a schoolboy argot of some dozen years earlier. The argot rules are simple, ingenious, and effective. A brief comparison is made of this argot and others in terms of social setting and uses. (Amharic, argots, Ethiopia, expressive language, language in context, language play, sociolinguistics)

This paper introduces the theory of the lexical bar. It reports research studies conducted in England and Australia. A semantic barrier exists in the English lexicon that emerges from socio-historical factors and is reinforced by the socio-occupational orderings of contemporary society. This barrier separates the lexes of conservative peripheral social dialects from the lexes of dominant central dialects. It serves to produce differential attainment rates in education and to reproduce a social class-based division of labour in English-speaking societies. (Language and thought; language and knowledge; language and education; diachronic linguistics and the sociology of language; the lexes of social dialects; semantic field theory; measures of semantic complexity; the priority of words in meaning; history of English.)

Gumperz (1976) claims that the direction of a code-switch provides important clues regarding the intended illocutionary force of an utterance and that oppositions like warning/personal appeal and casual remark/personal statement can be seen as metaphoric extensions of the we/they code opposition. “What at the societal level,” he observes, “are seen as norms of language usage or symbolic affirmations of ethnic boundaries are transformed here and built upon in conversation to affect the interpretation of speakers' intent and determine effectiveness in communication” (39–40). His hypothesis was corroborated by his Hindi-English bilingual speakers who felt that whereas a shift to the “they” code (English) suggested more of a threat, a shift to the “we” code (Hindi) signified more of a personal appeal. Code choice, according to Gumperz, is a device that determines the interpretation of an utterance (at least as far as its illocutionary force is concerned).

The title of this review article is inspired by Jean Aitchison's (1981) textbook, Language change: Progress or decay?, although I do not intend to discuss her book here. By including historical linguistics, I want to focus attention on the question of whether there has been any progress in the discipline of historical linguistics rather than whether, as Aitchison queries, language change can be thought of in terms of progress or decay (although that question, too, had its heyday [see, for example, Jespersen 18941]). I will start with a simplistic view of “progress” and assume that the notion can be coherently applied to a discipline or research paradigm: assuming that a central goal of historical linguistics is to “explain” language change, if historical linguistics can provide an answer to this question, then the discipline has “progressed.” The two books which I will discuss here, David Lightfoot's Principles of diachronic syntax (1979) and Roger Lass's On explaining language change (1980), bear on this issue although in rather different ways.