The style dimension of language variation has not been adequately explained in sociolinguistic theory. Stylistic or intraspeaker variation derives from and mirrors interspeaker variation. Style is essentially speakers' response to their audience. In audience design, speakers accommodate primarily to their addressee. Third persons – auditors and overhearers – affect style to a lesser but regular degree. Audience design also accounts for bilingual or bidialectal code choices. Nonaudience factors like topic and setting derive their effect by association with addressee types. These style shifts are mainly responsive – caused by a situational change. Speakers can also use style as initiative, to redefine the existing situation. Initiative style is primarily referee design: divergence from the addressee and towards an absent reference group. Referee design is especially prevalent in mass communication. (Sociolinguistic variation, code-switching. bilingualism, accommodation theory, ethnography of communication, mass communication)

A description of the verbal and nonverbal characteristics of the language of stock auctioneers and a comparison with oral poetry show that these auctioneers use an oral formulaic technique. It is suggested that this technique is a response to performance constraints which place a heavy load on short term memory. This hypothesis accounts for features of stock auction speech which are not recognized as characteristically oral formulaic as well as those which are. It also sheds light on two problems that have exercised students of oral literature: the effect of literacy and the role of memorization. These findings support the view that the difference between traditional oral formulaic and ordinary spoken language is one of degree, not kind. (Oral literature, register, stylistics, situational constraints, psychological constraints, formulae)

There is a lack of perception of the interrelatedness of the three fish-naming systems: the scientific, the common, and the folk naming systems. Ichthyologists and regulators of fish names do not sufficiently appreciate the motivations and intricacies of folk naming systems or problems of professional and commercial use of names. At the common name level, there seems to be little exchange of information concerning problems and solutions, objectives, and procedures. Also, communities and networks that use the same language(s) seek different solutions to the same or equivalent naming problems. The authors list some common problems and offer a tentative classification. (Taxonomy, naming, language planning, fisheries)

An analysis of the salutations of seventy-five letters of application for an academic position at a large southwestern university showed that a majority of the writers (forty-seven as compared to twenty-eight) had become sensitive to the problems of beginning a letter to an unknown person or group with a masculine greeting. The twenty-eight applicants who used masculine greetings used only four different forms. But the forty-seven applicants who chose to use sex-neutral greetings had no well-established pattern to follow. Hence, they used nineteen different forms, which shows that the matter is currently in a state of experimentation. From an analysis of the candidates' supporting data, it was clear that the writers who used the sex-neutral greetings were the better qualified candidates. Females were more inclined than males to use sex-neutral greetings. And there was a correlation between the part of the country where a candidate lived and whether or not a sex-neutral greeting was chosen. (Sexism, diachronic linguistics, regional dialectology)