The present study's aim is to pinpoint the characteristics of verbal socialization in family interaction in five different sociocultural contexts. Families with early adolescent children (M = 11.5 years) were compared with regard to regulatory comments issued during family mealtimes. Three monocultural groups consisted of 20 Estonian, 20 Swedish, and 20 Finnish families living in their countries of origin; two bicultural and bilingual groups consisted of 20 Estonian and 20 Finnish families residing in Sweden. Regulatory comments were defined as utterances aimed at influencing the conversational partner to behave according to social and conversational rules. Contrary to expectations, cultural differences were not found in discussions dealing with table manners and conversational rules, but the number of comments on perceived violations of moral rules was much greater in the Swedish material. Swedish early adolescents commented significantly more than their Estonian and Finnish counterparts, indicating more asymmetrical communication in Estonian and Finnish families.

This study investigates framing in discourse while considering spontaneous role-play between a young child (age 2 years 11 months) and her mother, wherein the participants reverse roles from real life and reenact shared prior experiences. Data consist of two tape-recorded naturally occurring pretend-play episodes and the real-life interactions on which they are based, all of which took place at home. Analysis of the role-play episodes illustrates how framing occurs from moment to moment in interaction in this context, showing that the participants use both play and non-play utterances collaboratively to evoke, maintain, and embed multiple play frames with increasingly specific, and at times blended, metamessages. By linking the role-play interactions back to their real-life counterparts, I explore the relationship between framing and “prior text.” This analysis adds to our understanding of framing by showing how frames are layered in discourse. Additionally, it links frames theory to the notion of intertextuality by illustrating how prior text can be used as a resource for framing.

The present investigation concerns language ideology and language practices in relation to a language shift – from Quichua-Spanish bilingualism to Spanish monolingualism – that seems to be under way. The analyses are based on fieldwork in an Ecuadorian sierra community characterized by ethnic revitalization. Among adult comuneros, the vernacular is seen as an essential part of their Indian cultural heritage. In the children's daily lives, the adults, particularly women and the elderly, speak Quichua among themselves, yet children are not addressed in the vernacular by either parents or elder siblings, and those under 10 years of age are generally more or less monolingual in Spanish. The paradoxical mismatch between ideology and daily practices – the ethnic revitalization paradox – is analyzed in light of Quichua speaking practices in intergenerational encounters, and in children's play dialogues. Ultimately, being Quichua means something different to members of each generation.

The investigation of isolated African American enclave communities has been instrumental in reformulating the historical reconstruction of earlier African American English and the current trajectory of language change in African American Vernacular English (AAVE). This case study examines a unique enclave sociolinguistic situation – a small, long-term, isolated bi-ethnic enclave community in the mountains of western North Carolina – to further understanding of the role of localized dialect accommodation and ethnolinguistic distinctiveness in the historical development of African American English. The examination of a set of diagnostic phonological and morphosyntactic variables for several of the remaining African Americans in this community supports the conclusion that earlier African American English largely accommodated local dialects while maintaining a subtle, distinctive ethnolinguistic divide. However, unlike the situation in some other African American communities, there is no current movement toward an AAVE external norm for the lone isolated African American teenager; rather, there is increasing accommodation to the local dialect. Contact-based, identity-based, and ideologically based explanations are appealed to in describing the past and present direction of change for the African Americans in this receding community.

Key terms in language and culture (hereafter Key terms) is an ambitious collection of 75 short essays on concepts central to linguistic anthropology and related fields. This book began as an informational session at the American Anthropological Association meetings in 1998 and was first published as a special issue of the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology (vol. 9, no. 1–2, 1999). Alessandro Duranti, Key terms' chief editor and architect, is an experienced navigator in the varied terrain of language and culture research; he is also the author of Linguistic anthropology, a comprehensive textbook that covers the discipline's major theoretical and methodological contributions. In Key terms, Duranti appeals to the expertise of 74 other scholars working on questions central to language and culture research. The result is a powerful and eclectic volume that brings together core concepts from anthropology, linguistics, folklore, philosophy, sociology, and psychology, among other fields.

In this clearly wrought translation from Italian, the philosopher Patrizia Violi analyzes and criticizes in exacting detail the development of lexical semantics from the classical models through structuralism, prototype theory, and frame semantics, to end at the threshold of cognitive semantics (cf. Violi 1997). Her critique expounds on both well-known and little-known concepts, but she does not innovate theory. Her account could be useful as a handbook to anyone who teaches lexical semantics or who wishes to match his or her overview of this field with that of an accomplished academic who has given it vast thought; the work is too advanced for most students. The reader likely will disagree with some of Violi's explications, all of which, nevertheless, are sufficiently informed to force clarification of any contrary position. The book rivals the main synopses published in English (Durbin & Radden 1987, Hjelmslev 1953, Johnson-Laird 1983, Taylor 1989), but it adds a semiotic facet derived mainly from works of Umberto Eco, Diego Marconi, and Algirdas J. Greimas. Of its references, 248 are in English, 24 in Italian, 24 in French, and 16 in other languages; all but two are generally available. Many of the 277 notes are immediately germane to the text, although others are dispensable distractions. The nine-page index is taxonomic but cryptic; for example, externalism appears under both Linguistics and Meaning, each appearance with different pages, but intension and extension are elusive; because the book is a review of concepts, this handicap is grave.

This book aims to explore discursive representations of childhood and how they contribute to create the social categories of ‘children’ and ‘childhood’. It uses a combination of approaches and methods that range from textual analysis, to elicitation of utterances, to data from natural interactions. Although the title suggests that the study covers general phenomena, it is based exclusively on British English. Some of the findings may resonate in the wider cultural area of the First World, and there may be parallels with more global notions of ‘children’; however, the subtitle should have made clear that the study is restricted to British English.

Many authors write books and papers about deficits in second language teaching and competence, shining a spotlight on what teachers are doing “wrong” or what students are lacking. In this volume, Diane Belcher and Ulla Connor set out to provide a model that bypasses these negative perspectives and showcases success stories in second (or nth) language learning. The result is a compilation of auto-ethnographies from 18 adults with successful professional careers who were asked to provide their “L1/L2 literacy autobiograph(ies)” (p. 209).

The two books under review, Motivation in language planning and language policy (MLPP) and Multilingualism and government (M&G), are both about language policy, at least at one level, and both are, or claim to be, based on case studies. That is the end of any similarity between them.

As stated in the title, the topic of this book is the relationships between language and nationalism in Europe, and particularly the “significance of language for nationalism and national identity” (p. 9) – a topic qualified as “fascinating” by the editors (v) and in Barbour's initial chapter (16, 17). A question arises in the reviewer's mind: Is this a unitary, unequivocal subject? Of course, in a certain rather philosophical way it is unitary – which does not mean general agreement even from this philosophical view, but at least it may be identified as “a proper subject.” However, it is not at all unequivocal insofar as the terms of the relationship are not clarified. This is precisely what Barbour's opening chapter intends.

The strength of this book (henceforth LPLCJ) is that it is filled with information about an important but little-understood aspect of Japanese culture: Japan's stance toward its own language. It takes as its point of departure “the study of language planning as a branch of the sociology of language” (p. 10). For reasons that I will outline below, I find this particular approach unsatisfying, but the book's strengths far outweigh its weaknesses, and I will outline the former here before offering my own opinion on how this topic should be approached.

Both volumes under review cover the same topic, turn-taking in Japanese in comparison with English. While Furo compares Japanese and English data, Tanaka focuses on the analysis of Japanese data, but nonetheless keeps a cross-cultural perspective on turn-taking. Both are dealing with a now flourishing area, the interface of grammar and interaction, based on the model of turn-taking proposed by Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson 1974 and the work by Ford & Thompson 1996. Through the study of turn-taking, Tanaka aims at exploring the interrelationship of grammar and interaction, and Furo attempts to reveal how aspects of language – grammar, intonation, and semantics – and interaction influence one another, and how they are intertwined in discourse. Both volumes emerged from doctoral dissertations, Tanaka's at Oxford and Furo's at Georgetown University. Despite many similarities, including some of the findings, their approaches and presentations are quite different.

Many linguists believe that the revitalization of moribund languages, where there may only be a handful of elderly fluent speakers left, is a noble – if perhaps nearly impossible – ideal for native communities involved in such work. Even more challenging is the reintroduction of a long-dead language such as the South Australian language Kaurna (pronounced [ga:na]), spoken on the Adelaide plains until the last native speaker, Ivaritji (a.k.a. Amelia Taylor), died in 1929. Rob Amery challenges the standards by which language revitalization programs are judged as successful, while giving us a step-by-step method for the reintroduction and revalorization of an extinct native tongue, which he calls the Formulaic Method. This detailed case study of what is, after all, just the beginning stages of Kaurna language revival will be of interest not just to linguists involved in the field, but especially to community members and other nonspecialists who are somehow connected with lesser-used languages and language revival efforts. Amery's work is also an important contribution to the emerging field of ecological linguistics and its application to language planning.

The relationship between language and the body has become an increasingly prominent area of research within linguistics and related disciplines. Some investigators of this question have examined how facts about the human body are encoded in linguistic structure, while others have explored the use of the body as a communicative resource in interaction. Surprisingly little, however, has been written about the role of language in constructing the body as a social object. In Fat talk, Mimi Nichter, a medical anthropologist, addresses this issue by examining the discourse of dieting among American teenage girls. Although language itself is not the center of the analysis, Nichter draws on a wide range of sociolinguistic research to investigate how the body is constructed through talk – a question that will be of equal interest to scholars of language, culture, and society.