The notion of Turn-Constructional Unit (TCU) in Conversation Analysis has become unclear for many researchers. The underlying problems inherent in the definition of this notion are here identified, and a possible solution is suggested. This amounts to separating more clearly the notions of TCU and Transition Relevance Place (TRP). In this view, the TCU is defined as the smallest interactionally relevant complete linguistic unit, in a given context, that is constructed with syntactic and prosodic resources within their semantic, pragmatic, activity-type-specific, and sequential conversational context. It ends in a TRP unless particular linguistic and interactional resources are used to project and postpone the TRP to the end of a larger multi-unit turn. This suggestion tries to spell out some of the assumptions that the seminal work in CA made in principle, but never formulated explicitly.

Upon engaging in a speech event, participants mutually try to create the most appropriate speech register for that occasion. Special formality-marking particles, pronominals, names, kin terms, titles, and pragmatic particles are some linguistic signs that are available for Thai speakers for this purpose. Through varied frequencies and combinations of different signs, various shades of speech register are created. The type and quality of speech register are largely predictable when the participants are familiar with the speech situation because of their past interactional history, or with the protocol required for a particular type of interaction. However, when the participants are thrown into an unfamiliar situation with strangers, they must find a middle ground in their register and adjust their speech behavior to achieve a balanced speech interaction. In this essay, we analyze four different conversations, both quantitatively and qualitatively, in order to observe how speech register is created in different types of interaction, thereby going beyond simple taxonomic description of sociolinguistic signs.

The ethnolinguistic terms in which the children of Dominican immigrants in Rhode Island think of themselves, i.e. as “Spanish” or “Hispanic,” are frequently at odds with the phenotype-based racial terms “Black” or “African American,” applied to them by others in the United States. Spanish language is central to resisting such phenotype-racial categorization, which denies Dominican Americans their Hispanic ethnicity. Through discourse analysis of naturally occurring peer interaction at a high school, this article shows how a Dominican American who is phenotypically indistinguishable from African Americans uses language, in both intra- and inter-ethnic contexts, to negotiate identity and resist ascription to totalizing phenotype-racial categories. In using language to resist such hegemonic social categorization, the Dominican second generation is contributing to the transformation of existing social categories and the constitution of new ones in the US.

As noted in this volume's Introduction by two of the editors, Jennifer Dickinson and Mandana Limbert, their collection displays work by students, alumni, and faculty of the University of Michigan Linguistic Anthropology Program, founded in 1991. The program's nature and development is evident in the coherence of the contents of the book, which consistently address the nature of the connections of immediate, ethnographically detailed (micro-level) deployment of linguistic form with the (macro-level) processes, institutions, and structures that frame such deployment as linguistic action. The essays generally fall into three categories: those focusing on a single speech event, those dealing with linguistic ideology, and those examining the ways in which language structure influences the form taken by social action. All these are framed by contemporary work on participation frameworks, on contextual structure and process, on dialogic emergence of meaning, on indexicality, and on linguistic ideology as cultural process played out in linguistic action. Stressing the emergent nature of structures and the continual, complex processes of indexical creativity, the authors develop in various and connected ways the linguistic ecology frame, as initiated by Einar Haugen and developed in much contemporary work in linguistic anthropology.

Linell argues that dialogism is the crucial path to theorizing and understanding discourse, cognition, and communication – particularly the study of conversation and other kinds of talk-in-interaction. One of the goals of his book is to develop an “empirically valid form of dialogism,” as opposed to an idealistic one, through the empirical investigation of communication. Linell develops a theory of “communicative projects,” a notion which incorporates aspects of individual agency as well as the idea of talk as emergent, collaborative work by co-present individuals. The notion of “communicative projects” is meant as a bridge across the oft-cited polarity between “micro” and “macro” – or as Linell formulates it, between “elementary contributions and local sequences on the one hand, and the global and more abstract notions of activity types and communicative genres.”

In his Introduction to Volume I of Sacks's Lectures on conversation (1992), Emmanuel Schegloff observes (1992:lviii) that his own effort at overview was “truly daunting,” mostly because of “the extraordinary richness and multi-facetedness of Sacks's corpus … In its variety, depth, and freshness of vision it defies domestication into convenient guidelines to a reader.” Such a statement – indeed, any reading of the two-volume set of Lectures – should give pause to someone attempting a textbook rendering of Sacks and his work. But such a text is precisely what Silverman has produced, and the effort is remarkably successful on its own terms.

Until recently, legal anthropologists have treated talk as a source of information about conflict rather than as a techno-political device used by participants in the conflict. From Malinowski to Gluckman to Bohannan, conflict – between social classes, ethnic groups, individuals and society, or individual interactants – has always been one of the major concerns of socio-cultural anthropology. Yet the classic studies yielded very little knowledge of how people actually manage conflict in interaction. They suffered from an absence of detailed primary data and elected to present summaries, reports by native sources, or reports from meetings held to resolve the conflict. In sum, those studies analyzed the law as a set of cases and rules, rather than a contested field of linguistic practices.

In the past fifteen years, there has been an upsurge of interest in matters social-gerontological within both sociolinguistics and communication science. This is manifest in an abundance of books, and particularly special journal issues, in an international series of conferences (at its fifth venue in Vancouver, 2001), and in a handbook on the topic (Nussbaum & Coupland 1995). Paoletti's concise paperback – the eighth in a series, “Everyday communication: Case studies of behavior in context,” edited by Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz and Stuart J. Sigman – contributes to this growing literature in important ways, not least of which are its focus on the active elderly and its recourse to Italian data.

The authors have compiled a truly impressive amount of information pertaining to bilingualism and bilingual education in this single-volume, full-color encyclopedia. Attractively produced on high-quality paper, the book contains 117 main topics, 390 text boxes, 340 pictures, 35 maps, 98 graphs, and 14 diagrams. There are also a glossary, a bibliography containing more than 2,000 entries, and an index. The book is organized into four sections – “Individual bilingualism,” “Languages in society,” “Languages in contact in the world” (with “Language maps of the world”), and “Bilingual education” – each with many subsections.

The assumptions made by readers of Language in Society and other English-language academic publications, when they begin to read, are so widely shared that they are seldom reflected on or made explicit. These assumptions have to do with European traditions of scholarship; and over time, they have made their way around the world because of the unquestioned belief in their universal applicability. But other approaches do exist, although most are never featured in publications in Western languages. I commented on this situation long ago, but it persists to this day: “The work done by Japanese sociolinguists is virtually unknown to non-Japanese readers. The reason is probably that this work has developed independently of the Western disciplines. The fact that Japanese researchers have worked independently of the Western tradition has inevitably resulted in unique assumptions, orientations or approaches when viewed from an international perspective”.

Anthropologists have long recognized that Australian aboriginal cultures have a rich repertoire of cognitive achievements, and they have contrasted this richness with the relative impoverishment of their technological repertoire. However, despite the richness of the cognitive repertoire, the anthropological literature contains no overall inventory for any aboriginal cultural group. McKnight's monograph is the first work that covers everything: social structure (including kinship), myth, ritual, dancing, property structure, and biological classification. The quality of the scholarship is very high. At the time of writing, McKnight had worked with the Lardil for 30 years, including 16 field trips, with a total time of residence among the Lardil of more than five years. After completing an MA on West African materials under Darryl Forde, he switched to Australia, where he also worked with the Wik-mungkan and a number of other groups. The present monograph is the first of a projected trilogy; work is under way now on the second volume, a monograph on marriage, sorcery, and violence. In recent years, McKnight has been involved, on behalf of the Lardil, in negotiations with the Australian government for land claims.

Saint Barthélemy (SB) has long remained a linguistic enigma. This islet – home of an indigenous, mostly White population of about 3,000 – is divided into at least three linguistic zones: one whose vernacular is a French-based creole; the second, a northern French (oïl) dialect; and the third, English. Calvet, a leading French sociolinguist, and Chaudenson, an eminent French creolist, have set out to explain how, as a result of social insularity triggered by intertwined geographical and economic factors, an apparently ethnically homogeneous population, established on a 25-sq.-km. isolate, became so linguistically diverse. They also provide a brief comparative description of the French-related varieties used by this population, and an indication of its linguistic attitudes (as reflected by the testimony of teenage members of its two subcommunities).

All researchers observe a balance between continuity with prior tradition (so others will know enough to understand and value the work) and innovation (such that only new contributions are generally deemed publishable). This balance can be difficult to recognize at times of disciplinary revolution, when a previously accepted paradigm is rejected in favor of a newer one – the sort of change in assumptions described by Kuhn 1962. At such times, it requires considerable subtlety for the disciplinary historian to unearth the substantial influence of previous research generations, since the rhetoric emphasizes revolution and change to the exclusion of all else. In the present book, Darnell studies one such critical point: the shift to professionalization within anthropology that occurred at the beginning of the 20th century. It is to her credit that she documents substantial continuities between the research conducted in the immediately pre-professional stage by John Wesley Powell and others in the Bureau of American Ethnology (BAE), and that of Franz Boas and his students, despite decades of rhetoric – from the participants, as well as their students – that have emphasized only the differences. Despite the fact that “oral histories of American anthropology have generally assumed that … professional anthropology in America sprang forth full-blown about 1900 when Boas began teaching at Columbia” (p. 6), Darnell demonstrates that professionalization was a more gradual process.

This excellent collection of twelve papers is sure to be of keen interest to Andean scholars from a range of disciplines. Howard-Malverde has succeeded at two difficult tasks: compiling a substantial number of academically outstanding papers and, perhaps a greater challenge for an editor, creating a volume which reads as a coherent whole. The latter feat is even more impressive given the breadth and depth of the contributions and the varied academic backgrounds of the contributors. The volume's authors are scholars of anthropology, linguistics, history, and literature, reflecting the academic traditions of nations both in Europe and in North and South America. All but two papers were originally presented at the 1991 conference, “Textuality in Amerindian cultures,” convened by RHM and William Rowe.