This article explores an underappreciated pragmatic constraint on the expression of opinions: When expressing an opinion on a topic that has been previously discussed, a speaker should correctly indicate the cultural standing of that view in the relevant opinion community. This Bakhtinian approach to discourse analysis is contrasted with conversation analysis, politeness theory (Brown & Levinson, 1987), and analysis of epistemic modality. Finally, indicators of four points on the cultural standing continuum (highly controversial, debatable, common opinion, and taken for granted) are illustrated with examples from American English usage.I am grateful for helpful comments from Jane Hill and two anonymous reviewers for Language in Society as well as Justin Beck, Paul Ireland, Ronald Macaulay, Naomi Quinn, Daniel Segal, James Van Cleve, other students in Methods of Discourse Analysis (spring 2001) and Language and Power (spring 2003), and other colleagues who commented on the paper when I presented it at Pitzer College in February 2000.

This study of bilingual competence, linguistic attitudes, and language choice among secondary students in Valencia explores the effects of linguistic normalization since the removal of Franco's repressive measures against the Valencian language variety. The introduction of Valencian into the educational system and other measures have substantially reversed the decline of levels of competence and expanded its domains of usage but have only marginally decreased the dominance of Castilian. A survey of attitudes toward Valencian, Catalan (Barcelona variety) and Castilian reveals two distinct groups of patterns. One ascribes status and integrative value chiefly to Castilian, the other to Valencian and Catalan. Identifying the students manifesting the variants of these patterns according to socio-demographic, ideological, and behavioral factors shows how the current political dynamic between progressive nationalist forces and anti-Catalanist, Castilian-speaking forces is reflected in ongoing attitudinal divergence.Research was supported in part by grants from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada. Sankoff is a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and holds the Canada Research Chair in Mathematical Genomics.

The field of language and sexuality has gained importance within socioculturally oriented linguistic scholarship. Much current work in this area emphasizes identity as one key aspect of sexuality. However, recent critiques of identity-based research advocate instead a desire-centered view of sexuality. Such an approach artificially restricts the scope of the field by overlooking the close relationship between identity and desire. This connection emerges clearly in queer linguistics, an approach to language and sexuality that incorporates insights from feminist, queer, and sociolinguistic theories to analyze sexuality as a broad sociocultural phenomenon. These intellectual approaches have shown that research on identity, sexual or otherwise, is most productive when the concept is understood as the outcome of intersubjectively negotiated practices and ideologies. To this end, an analytic framework for the semiotic study of social intersubjectivity is presented.We are deeply indebted to Rusty Barrett, Jennifer Coates, Rudi Gaudio, Donna Goldstein, Jane Hill, Sally McConnell-Ginet, Bonnie McElhinny, Robin Queen, and Sara Trechter for their incisive comments on an earlier version of this article. In-depth conversations with Stacey Duke, Deena Hill, Anna Livia, and Jon McCammond helped us work through many thorny issues. For helpful feedback on oral presentations of some of this material, we are also grateful to audiences at the International Gender and Language Association Conference in Lancaster, the Lavender Languages and Linguistics Conference, the Department of Linguistics at Stanford University, and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago; special thanks to James Fernandez for detailed suggestions. Any remaining weaknesses are our own responsibility.

Ntam ‘reminiscential oath’ among the Akan of Ghana is a commissive form that has statutory force. In it, the oath-taker evokes the memory of historical events that are dangerous and unpleasant to mention. The statutory force of the oath is accomplished by the evocation of these memories in the community which shares them. This article reviews the types of ntam oaths, the contexts for their use, and their structure.

This article analyzes a set of handwritten documents produced by a Burundese asylum seeker in Belgium. The documents are instances of “grassroots writing”: their authorship is collective, and they display considerable problems with “remembering.” They are also rather typical text-artifacts of globalization processes, in which literacy products from one part of the world meet literacy expectations from another part. Two general points are derived from the analysis. (i) The function of documents such as these is not “reading,” but rather a complex of reading, viewing, and decoding. The documents are at least partially visual bearers of information. Such functions need to be investigated ethnographically. (ii) The reason for this is the fact that the production and reception of such documents has to be set against the background of widely different economies of literacy. Consequently, the differences between text production and text reception are grounded in worldwide patterns of inequality. This casts doubt on a number of popular theses about the nature of contemporary societies and the role of discourse in late modernity.I was able to write this article in the excellent, generous research environment offered to me by the Department of Anthropology of the University of Chicago in the winter quarter of 2003. A preliminary version was presented at the African Studies Workshop, University of Chicago, February 2003. I am grateful to participants of that workshop as well as to Jane Hill and an anonymous reviewer for very useful comments. Research for this article benefited from a personal research grant from the National Science Foundation-Flanders (FWO-V), Belgium.

Sociolinguistic debates about the fate of the Welsh language have since at least the mid-20th century posited the relationship between language and political economy as a central factor in the death or rebirth of the Welsh language since the Industrial Revolution. Such studies have been concerned primarily with empirical head counts of actual speakers and the movements of populations and distributions of languages as determined by political economic independent variables. This article argues that the relationship between language and political economy was also crucially and consequentially construed in the 19th century in terms of “imagined” exemplary speakers of Welsh. In the imagined voice of the Welsh slate quarrier, Welsh elites of the 19th century found a “modern” Welsh-speaking figure who participated in industry while remaining Welsh, both linguistically and culturally, thereby associating the Welsh language itself with the desirable properties of modernity, particularly industrial productivity, and this allowed it to be imagined as a language at home in modernity.The research for this paper was made possible by a Reed College faculty grant and the friendship and generosity of Dylan Morgan and his family. Versions of this material have been presented at the AAA in San Francisco and Bard College, and I would like to thank my fellow participants and audiences there for their helpful comments. I would like to thank Richard Bauman, Mario Bick, Steve Coleman, Elizabeth Duquette, David Garrett, Alex Hrycak, and Rupert Stasch for comments and encouragement, as well as Jane Hill and the anonymous reviewers provided by Language in Society. Errors are my own.

This study explores a phenomenon in Japanese conversation that might be regarded as “discourse-within-a-sentence,” or interpolating a sequence of talk during ongoing sentence construction. It explicates the way in which Japanese speakers use postpositional particles as a resource to incorporate an element in a parenthetical sequence into the syntax of a sentence-in-progress. It is shown that the usability of postpositions for achieving discourse-within-a-sentence comes from the situated workings of postpositions used in a wider range of interactional contexts. Through a detailed examination of relevant instances from transcribed Japanese conversations, this study addresses such issues as (i) “sentences” in interaction as both a resource for, and an outcome of, intricate interactional work; (ii) postpositions as resources for retroactive transformations of turn-shapes in Japanese; and (iii) the relationship between typological features of the grammar of a language and forms of interactional practices.I wish to thank the following people for valuable comments at various stages in the development of this article: William Bright, Cecilia Ford, Barbara Fox, Noriko Fujii, Charles Goodwin, Jane Hill, Junko Mori, Tsuyoshi Ono, Jerome Packard, Hiroko Tanaka, and Sandra Thompson. Remaining shortcomings are my responsibility.

This article investigates children's procedures for constructing oppositional stances in argumentative exchanges. While most previous research on children's arguments entails a monolingual bias, the present analysis focuses on bilingual practices of code-switching in disputes emerging during play activities. Drawing on more than ten hours of video-taped play interaction in a bilingual school setting, it is shown how the language contrast arising through code-switching displays and highlights the affective intensity of oppositional stances. Sequential analyses show how code-switching works to escalate social opposition, often to the peak of an argument, resulting in subsequent backdown or full termination of the dispute. Moreover, in certain participant constellations code-switching may be used to constrain opponents' opportunities to engage in further adversative interaction. Finally, it is argued that an approach to play discourse concerned with children's methods for accomplishing accountable actions allows for a view of bilingualism as socially distributed; that is, as an emergent and interactionally managed feature of discourse.An early version of this article was presented at the 9th European Conference on Second Language Acquisition (EUROSLA 9) in Lund, Sweden, June 1999. Thanks are due to Karin Aronsson and Micke Tholander for comments and discussion on an earlier draft. Financial support from the Bank of Sweden Tercentenary Foundation (Grant No. 96-0639:01-02) and from the Swedish National Agency for Education (Grant No. U2001/1912/S) is gratefully acknowledged.

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.

A quantitative/interpretative approach to the comparative linguistic analysis of media texts is proposed and applied to a contrastive analysis of texts from the English-language China Daily and the UK Times to look for evidence of differences in what Labov calls “evaluation.” These differences are then correlated to differences in the roles played by the media in Britain and China in their respective societies. The aim is to demonstrate that, despite reservations related to the Chinese texts not being written in the journalists' native language, a direct linguistic comparison of British media texts with Chinese media texts written in English can yield valuable insights into the workings of the Chinese media that supplement nonlinguistic studies.

This article explores the concept of relational practice, the wide range of off-line, backstage, or collaborative work that people do which goes largely unrecognized and unrewarded in the workplace (Fletcher 1999). The analysis identifies a range of different ways in which people do relational practice in workplace discourse, and critically examines the proposal that, as subtle support work, relational practice is considered “women's work.” Drawing on the large Wellington Language in the Workplace database, it explores a variety of ways in which such relational work is manifested in workplace discourse; the analysis focuses on specific instances of relational practice, illustrating how such support work is backgrounded and typically discounted in New Zealand workplaces. The implications of the analysis for the gender/power dynamic are explored. Discussed in particular is the hypothesis that manifestations of relational practice differ in distinct communities of practice, and the validity of the equation of relational practice with “feminized” discourse is questioned.This article is based on a plenary paper presented at IGALA2, the second International Gender and Language Conference, held at Lancaster University in April 2002. It has benefited from comments received there as well as from other colleagues. We are also grateful to the anonymous reviewers and to the editor for helpful suggestions for improving it. We express our appreciation to other members of the Language in the Workplace team who have been involved with the project's development, data collection, processing, and transcription, including Maria Stubbe (research fellow), Bernadette Vine (corpus manager), and a number of research assistants. We also thank those who allowed their workplace interactions to be recorded. This research is supported by a grant from the New Zealand Foundation for Research Science and Technology. More information on the project can be viewed on our website, 〈www.vuw.ac.nz/lals/lwp〉.

This article attempts to align a familiar task of classroom teaching, eliciting from students correct answers about their lessons, with a major organizational domain in studies of natural conversation, that of conversational repair. Numerous studies have analyzed correction sequences in classroom discourse, and our discussion pays special attention to McHoul's (1990) treatment of “repair in classroom talk.” McHoul directly measures the findings on repair in studies of natural conversation to the regularities of correction sequences in classroom lessons. It is argued, contra McHoul, that repair is a different, and prior, order of discursive work, and one that premises the very possibility of classroom correction. Further, the difference may have wider relevance for understanding repair and correction as “co-operating” organizations of talk-in-interaction more generally.

Through an analysis of arguments in two different sets of university faculty meetings, this article attempts to demonstrate that episodes of conflict in Japanese can be treated as accomplishments at a local, interactional level. The analysis focuses on turn-taking organizations used by faculty member participants in two meetings to show how talk in one set of meetings was designed to facilitate the onset of arguments, while talk in the other set was constructed to discourage participants from exchanging statements of opposition; and that the organization of talk in the meetings, precisely because it either enabled or constrained the occurrence of arguments, was essential to the institutional work being accomplished by participants. Discussion of the analysis focuses on the tendency in research on Japanese discourse to treat conflict as an inherently disruptive phenomenon that needs to be accounted for in terms preestablished concepts such as harmony and social hierarchy.I want to express my appreciation to two anonymous reviewers for detailed comments and criticisms that were of tremendous help in revising this article. I also would like to thank Jack Bilmes, Dina R. Yoshimi, Jane Hill, and Yumiko Ohara for their valuable suggestions. In addition, I want to acknowledge the assistance of Takehiro Goto, Masaaki Hattori, Dai Kamimaru, and Toshiki Sato in gathering and transcribing the data. I alone am responsible for any errors which may remain.

A number of studies have been conducted on “dominance” as reflected in spoken interactional features, most of which deal with English. Many of these studies adopt a quantitative approach, examining the amount and distribution of interactional features such as amount of talk, interruptions and overlaps, turn-taking, questions, and topic initiations, and they have drawn conclusions on “dominance” accordingly. The present study explores gender dominance in conversation by analyzing conversational data from eight Japanese dyads by integrating quantitative and qualitative analyses. The quantitative analysis of two dimensions of conversational dominance, sequential dominance and participatory dominance, does not show any obvious gender dominance; however, the qualitative analysis of three of the dyads finds a clear pattern of male speakers' self-oriented conversational style, which is manifested in their storytelling and claiming expertise, and this is supported by female speakers' other-oriented conversational style. Gender dominance therefore is seen as a mutual construction. The conclusion discusses the importance of integrating findings from both quantitative and qualitative analyses in situated contexts to deepen understanding of the complexity of gender dominance.The authors wish to thank Dwight Atkinson, Andy Curtis, Jane Hill, and two anonymous reviewers for their encouragement and valuable comments on earlier drafts of the paper. They also wish to thank Simon Lai, senior research assistant, for his help in conducting the statistical test.

Language is involved in processes of group identification in that it provides a focus for explicit discourses of identity and constitutes a field of less overt practices for creating groupness. Drawing on examples from Mauritian television broadcasting, this study traces the ethnicization of Mauritian Bhojpuri as a “Hindu language” through the hierarchization and subsuming of linguistic practices under larger language labels with ethno-national significance. Purist forms of Mauritian Bhojpuri that are locally perceived as “intermediate” registers between Hindi and Bhojpuri are used to represent Hindi as a language spoken in Mauritius, and at the same time to link Mauritian Bhojpuri ideologically to Hindu identity. This blurring of language boundaries serves a Hindu nationalist agenda in a diasporic location by establishing new links between linguistic forms and ethno-national values.Fieldwork in Mauritius was carried out in 1996 and 1997–1998 and was supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation and the University of Chicago Council for Advanced Studies in Peace and International Cooperation (CASPIC). I would like to extend my sincere thanks to these institutions. Research in Mauritius was also facilitated by the University of Mauritius, where I would especially like to thank Vinesh Hookoomsing. Earlier versions of this article were presented at the Second University of Chicago/University of Michigan (“Michicagoan”) Graduate Student Conference in Linguistic Anthropology and at the Working Group for Urban Sociolinguistics at New York University. My thanks go to the organizers and participants of these events, from whose comments I greatly benefited. I am also indebted to Lou Brown, Sara Friedman, Susan Gal, Vinesh Hookoomsing, Judith Irvine, Michael Silverstein, and two anonymous reviewers for Language in Society for their careful readings and helpful suggestions at different stages in the writing of this article. Of course, any mistakes are my own. Most of all, I am indebted to the many Mauritians without whose help and friendship my research would have been impossible.

This article addresses the issue of the conversational floor. Using data from classroom discourse, covering a wide range of floor related phenomena, the authors propose a concept of the floor that ties it to the activity in hand, and the local flexible organization of talk within that activity. After beginning with a short review of current work relating to the conversational floor, discussion turns to extracts from data as examples of various types of activities requiring different structures of participation. The aim is to move from binary definitions of the floor, particularly the opposition between one-at-a-time and collaborative, and toward a conceptualization of the floor as a continuum between “tighter” and “looser” organizations of talk in the activity.

This article analyzes seven Japanese all-male friendly conversations, focusing on stereotypically gendered sentence-final particles to ascertain whether and how Japanese men native to the Kansai (western) region of Japan, aged 19–68 years, use these features to create a gendered identity. Quantitative methods are employed to establish the frequency with which such stereotypically gendered forms are used. A close discourse analysis investigates how the men use these forms in particular contexts to index particular identities, which may or may not correspond to traditional notions of Japanese masculinity.Earlier versions of this article were presented to the Department of Anthropology at the University of Iowa and to the Stanford Sociolinguistics Research Group at Stanford University. I thank the members of those audiences for their vital feedback. I am indebted to Janet S. (Shibamoto) Smith, Michael Silverstein, Miyako Inoue, Shigeko Okamoto, Laura Graham, Scott Fabius Kiesling, Rudi Colloredo-Mansfeld, Hari Kanta Ogren, Jane Hill, and an anonymous reviewer for carefully reading and commenting on drafts. Without the support of the Kobe College Corporation and the National Science Foundation (Grant # BCS9817943) this article and its larger project would not have been possible.

For indigenous Tzotzil Protestants in Chiapas, the emergence of a new discourse about God is restructuring social interactions. Discourse data point to an arresting intersection of Protestant beliefs, discourse strategies, and gender. This case study supports recent theorizing in language and gender concerning the need to attend to shifting identities and contexts where gender can become less salient. The performance of a Protestant identity in which gender is transcended opens up new possibilities for agency, particularly for women who otherwise lack sanctioned authority. Strategic manipulation of Protestant discourse in verbal performances allows one woman to enact a position of moral authority that empowers her to pursue an innovative plan. As an important means through which Tzotzil Protestants dictate and create their lives, praying in the evangelical world provides a useful site for the study of unusual kinds of performative utterances.This article benefited greatly from pointers and suggestions from Laada Bilaniuk, Anne Curzan, and John Haviland. I am deeply grateful for all their encouragement. Heartfelt thanks to Lourdes de León for sharing her connection to and past knowledge of my Tzotzil family with me; without her prior friendship there, I would never have met them. Kami Ahmad unfailingly reads my work with the exacting eye of a scientist; his endurance makes miracles happen. All translations were aided by consultation of Laughlin, 1975. This work was supported by NSF grant #SBR-9222394 and a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship. Any opinions, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in this publication are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

It has been claimed that women and men use language quite differently in social interaction. Combining a functional and cognitive approach to grammar, this article explores the ways in which men and women use the optional pronominal form of the Spanish verb salir(se) ‘to leave’ in Mexican Spanish. It is found that women use the pronominal form notably more than men, and that, diachronically, this form has traditionally been applied to women's behavior. It is hypothesized that these patterns demonstrate both the relative expressive freedom of women's speech and the socially constrained nature of expectations for female behavior in colonial and contemporary Mexican society. It is shown how culturally shaped conventional construals of gender can both be reflected in and influence morphosyntactic phenomena.I would like to thank Melissa Axelrod, Kathy McKnight, Language in Society editor Jane Hill, and two anonymous referees for their helpful suggestions on this article.

Since linguistic and anthropological study of sign languages began in the 1960s, most research has focused on national sign languages, with scant attention paid to indigenous and original sign languages. Vulnerable to extinction, the latter varieties can expand our understanding of language universals, language typologies, historical comparative linguistics, and other areas. Using Thailand as a case study and drawing on three examples – a rare phonological form, basic color terminology, and baby talk/motherese – from Ban Khor Sign Language, an indigenous signed code, this article describes the problem of benign neglect of sign languages in current discussions of language endangerment and argues for the importance of expanding such discussions to include codes expressed in the manual-visual channel.The linguistic field research upon which this article is based was funded by the Endangered Language Fund, the Explorers Club, IIE Fulbright, Sign Language Research Inc., the Thai-U.S. Educational Foundation, the UCLA Department of Anthropology, the UCLA Office of International Studies and Overseas Programs, the UCLA Wagatsuma Memorial Fund, and the Wenner-Gren Foundation. I wish to thank the following individuals and groups for their assistance in various phases of the project: Alexis Altounian, Poonpit Amatyakul, Jean Ann, Wendy Belcher, Ursula Bellugi, Steve Bickler, Ken Kamler, Peter Ladefoged, Tuanvu Le, Chettah Madminggao, Nutjaree Madminggao, Marina McIntire, Carmella Moore, Pam Munro, Carol Padden, Diana Pash, Nilawan Pitipat, Claire Ramsey, Chip Reilly, Olga Solomon, Kelly Stack, Laura Sterponi, Viphavee Vongpumivitch, and Akira Yamamoto. Special thanks belong to Vien Champa, Lahsee Khammee, Jintala Anuyahong, Anucha Ratanasint, Khwanta Sukhwan, Nipha Sukhwan, Phaiwan Sukhwan, Kampol Suwanarat, Thanu Wongchai, James C. Woodward, the Ratchasuda Foundation, the National Association of the Deaf in Thailand, and, of course, the community of Ban Khor.