Is language simply a medium for the expression of intentions, motives, or interests, or is it also a site for uncovering the method through which ordered activity is generated? This question has wide-ranging implications for the study of bilingual interaction in particular, and for sociolinguistics generally. This article attempts to explicate the principles behind the Conversation Analysis (CA) approach to bilingual interaction. It addresses some of the criticisms that have been leveled against the CA approach, using both new data and new analyses of previously published examples. (Keywords: Conversation Analysis, bilingual interaction, code-switching).*

Is language simply a medium for the expression of intentions, motives, or interests, or is it also a site for uncovering the method through which ordered activity is generated? This question has wide-ranging implications for the study of bilingual interaction in particular, and for sociolinguistics generally. This article attempts to explicate the principles behind the Conversation Analysis (CA) approach to bilingual interaction. It addresses some of the criticisms that have been leveled against the CA approach, using both new data and new analyses of previously published examples. (Keywords: Conversation Analysis, bilingual interaction, code-switching).*

Adult speakers constantly offer young children new terms, conventional words for the events and objects being talked about. They make direct offers of unfamiliar words, using deictics or other forms that signal that the upcoming term is new, and they make indirect offers on the assumption that the relevant meaning is computable on that occasion. Adults also present young children with information about how words are related to each other through such connections as is a part of, is a kind of, belongs to, or is used for. These pragmatic directions provide children with essential information about language and language use as they make inferences about possible meanings for unfamiliar words. They also offer support for an alternative to constraints-based accounts of lexical acquisition by providing a conversation-based approach more consistent with the findings from spontaneous speech and from experimental results.

Adult speakers constantly offer young children new terms, conventional words for the events and objects being talked about. They make direct offers of unfamiliar words, using deictics or other forms that signal that the upcoming term is new, and they make indirect offers on the assumption that the relevant meaning is computable on that occasion. Adults also present young children with information about how words are related to each other through such connections as is a part of, is a kind of, belongs to, or is used for. These pragmatic directions provide children with essential information about language and language use as they make inferences about possible meanings for unfamiliar words. They also offer support for an alternative to constraints-based accounts of lexical acquisition by providing a conversation-based approach more consistent with the findings from spontaneous speech and from experimental results.

Written school advertising in Banaras, a North Indian city, creates correspondences between a language activity and central and peripheral places. In spoken discourse, complex relationships inhere between ways of describing languages as varieties and the sociological value that is said to exist in the fit between a language variety and its domain of use. Education is one such domain because the educational system itself is organized in popular discourse by medium, Hindi or English. In spoken discourse, Hindi- or English-medium schools can indicate central or peripheral dispositions. Advertising, however, includes a meaningful element unavailable to speakers in the flow of interaction – a distinction between lexical designation and its rendering in Devanagari or roman script. Therein lies its power to establish English as central and Hindi as peripheral.

Written school advertising in Banaras, a North Indian city, creates correspondences between a language activity and central and peripheral places. In spoken discourse, complex relationships inhere between ways of describing languages as varieties and the sociological value that is said to exist in the fit between a language variety and its domain of use. Education is one such domain because the educational system itself is organized in popular discourse by medium, Hindi or English. In spoken discourse, Hindi- or English-medium schools can indicate central or peripheral dispositions. Advertising, however, includes a meaningful element unavailable to speakers in the flow of interaction – a distinction between lexical designation and its rendering in Devanagari or roman script. Therein lies its power to establish English as central and Hindi as peripheral.

This study investigates the employment in modern Hebrew of an element having a lexical source involving comparison (k(e)-, ‘like’) that has proliferated over the past decade or so in Israel; ke′ilu ‘like’, lit. ‘as if’. The data come from audio recordings of casual conversations of college-educated Israelis with their friends and relatives, totaling approximately 78 minutes of talk among 72 speakers, transcribed in full and segmented into intonation units. A qualitative analysis of talk-in-interaction reveals four nonliteral functions of this expression: hedging, self-rephrasal, focus-marking, and quotation. A quantitative perspective on the distribution of these functions is presented, and these qualitative and quantitative analyses lead to an examination of the functional itinerary of this word in Hebrew discourse. A comparison with two “equivalents” of ke′ilu, English like and French genre leads to a discussion of functional parallelism across languages and yields further support for Hopper's principle of “persistence” in grammaticization. (Hebrew talk-in-interaction, grammaticization, cross-language pragmatics, discourse particles, hedging, self-rephrasal, focus-marking, quotatives.)* In memory of Suzanne Fleischman

This study investigates the employment in modern Hebrew of an element having a lexical source involving comparison (k(e)-, ‘like’) that has proliferated over the past decade or so in Israel; ke′ilu ‘like’, lit. ‘as if’. The data come from audio recordings of casual conversations of college-educated Israelis with their friends and relatives, totaling approximately 78 minutes of talk among 72 speakers, transcribed in full and segmented into intonation units. A qualitative analysis of talk-in-interaction reveals four nonliteral functions of this expression: hedging, self-rephrasal, focus-marking, and quotation. A quantitative perspective on the distribution of these functions is presented, and these qualitative and quantitative analyses lead to an examination of the functional itinerary of this word in Hebrew discourse. A comparison with two “equivalents” of ke′ilu, English like and French genre leads to a discussion of functional parallelism across languages and yields further support for Hopper's principle of “persistence” in grammaticization. (Hebrew talk-in-interaction, grammaticization, cross-language pragmatics, discourse particles, hedging, self-rephrasal, focus-marking, quotatives.)* In memory of Suzanne Fleischman

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.

An important addition to the growing literature on language ideology, this volume is the fruit of an advanced seminar held in Santa Fe in 1994 at the School of American Research. The seminar brought together some of the leading scholars in language ideology research: Richard Bauman, Charles Briggs, Joseph Errington, Susan Gal, Jane Hill, Judith Irvine, Paul Kroskrity, Susan Philips, Bambi Schieffelin, and Michael Silverstein. Regimes of language consists of revised versions of the papers presented at the seminar.

This book is an outcome of a colloquium, held in 1997, on ideology and language policies with special focus on English. There are nine chapters, with a lucid introduction by Ricento and a bibliography at the end. Ricento also contributes a chapter on the theoretical aspects of language planning and policy. The other chapters touch on language policies in Australia (Helen Moore); colonial language policies (Chaps. 3 and 7, by Alastair Pennycook); language ideologies in the US (Terrence G.Wiley); linguistic imperialism with reference to English (Robert Phillipson); and policies and the role of English in Sri Lanka (Suresh Canagurajah), North India (Selma K. Sonntag), and South Africa (Stanly G. M. Ridge).

Recent years have witnessed an increased interest in pidgin and creole languages. One consequence of this is the growing demand for introductory textbooks. Singh's book joins similar introductions by, among others, Arends, Muysken & Smith 1995, Mühlhäusler 1997, and Sebba 1997.

When the Yiddish atlas project was initiated in the late 1950s by Uriel Weinreich, the prevailing view was that Yiddish was born in the Rhineland in the 9th and 10th centuries when French and Italian Jews adopted and adapted German; it then expanded to the Judeo-Italian settlement in Bavaria and reached monolingual Slavic territory in the 13th century. This third volume (volumes 1–2, 1992, 1995), subtitled The Eastern Yiddish – Western Yiddish continuum, is predicated on the belief that Eastern Yiddish (spoken in central and eastern Europe) is a “colonial” offshoot of Western Yiddish, remnants of which survive in Holland, Alsace, and Switzerland. The 148 linguistic and cultural maps permit the exploration of many questions – including the continuum hypothesis itself; paradoxically, considerable data here seem to disconfirm the hypothesis. The occasional commentary, though not customary in most atlases, is very welcome, though more could have been presented, given the blank space on many pages.

Stevenson's & Theobald's volume, the outcome of a 1998 Southampton conference entitled Disunification: Competing constructions of contemporary Germany, is a rich and diverse collection of current sociolinguistic and discourse-analytic research into the German language. It aims to explore Germany's continued cultural and linguistic East/West divide, a decade after unification. The volume's 13 contributions are divided into two parts: critical discourse-analytic approaches to public discourses, and micro-analytic approaches to private or semi-public speech genres and communicative practices. The contributions in the first part are presented as “part of the analytical creation of … discourses” which seek to “punctur[e] the dominant western story, and by this very act, creating space for the expression of other memories, experiences and historiographies, and the emergence of alternative discourses” (p. 8). In contrast, the chapters in the second part have the more descriptive aim of documenting linguistic difference in East and West. The editors contend that “profound differences in communicative practices and behaviours between east and west Germans” exist, or are perceived to exist, and that these differences “constitute a significant barrier to the project of bringing a united … Germany into existence”.

This book makes an important contribution to understanding the complexity of the sources of power that govern Chinese politeness behavior in different settings. To answer the question of why Chinese seem to be inconsistent in their politeness behavior, the author conducted ethnographic research in southern China over a period of eight years in the 1990s. Through discourse analysis of data in both Cantonese and Mandarin, Pan describes Chinese politeness behavior across three social settings – business encounters, official meetings, and family gatherings – that represent a variety of situations and power structures. Taking into account the social factors of age, gender, rank, ingroup identity, and setting, Pan brings in the perspective of situational variation and looks at Chinese politeness practice in the larger framework of social context.