It has been claimed that gossip allows participants to negotiate aspects of group membership, and the inclusion and exclusion of others, by working out shared values. This article examines instances of gossipy storytelling among young friends during which participants negotiate self- and other-identities in particular ways. Participants are found to share judgments not only about others' behavior but also about their own behavior through particular processes of othering. A range of discursive strategies place the characters in gossip-stories (even in the category called “self-gossip”) in marginalized, liminal, or uncertain social spaces. In the gossipy talk episodes examined, social “transgression” might be oriented to as a serious matter and thus pejorated, or oriented to in a playful key and thus celebrated. This ambiguity – “Do we disapprove or approve, of this ‘bad’ behavior?” – means that in negotiating the identity status of “gossipees” liminality is constant. It is argued that othering, as an emergent category, along with the particular discursive strategies that achieve it, is an aspect of gossip that deserves further attention.We thank Jane Hill, two anonymous reviewers, and especially Nik Coupland for their most helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. To clarify the title, from ex.(1), you can pull is British English; in American English perhaps the closest expression to pull is get with, proactively set up a link with someone, probably a sexual one, probably only for one evening or night.

This article is an exploration of how a group of men in the United States create homosocial (as opposed to homosexual) desire through language. In a society in which dominant discourses of masculinity provide competing scripts of male solidarity and heterosexuality, the achievement of closeness among men is not straightforward but must be negotiated through “indirect” means. It is shown how men actively negotiate dominant cultural discourses in their everyday interactions. In addition, a broadened view of indirectness, based on social function as much as denotation, is argued for.This article was initially presented in much shorter and different form at the Second International Gender and Language Association (IGALA) Conference in Lancaster, U.K., in April 2002. I would like to thank the audience there, and in particular Jennifer Coates, for their comments and lively discussion. I would also like to thank Deborah Tannen for her insightful comments and advice, and two anonymous reviewers whose comments strengthened the article considerably. I would also like to thank the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago for inviting me to have conversation about this work in their semiotics workshop, and specifically Lauren Keeler, Jonathan Rosa, and Michael Silverstein. Ultimately, responsibility for the article's contents remains with the author.

This article examines evolving linguistic practices in the Spanish-Rapa Nui (Polynesian) bilingual community of Easter Island, Chile, and in particular the transformation of Rapa Nui Spanish speech styles. The island's rapid integration into the national and world economy and a vibrant indigenous movement have profoundly influenced the everyday lives of island residents. Although community-wide language shift toward Spanish has been evident over the past four decades, the Rapa Nui have in this period also expanded their speech style repertoire by creating Rapa Nui Spanish and syncretic Rapa Nui speech styles. Predominantly Spanish-speaking Rapa Nui children who have imperfect command over Rapa Nui are today adopting a new Rapa Nui Spanish style. Ethnographic and linguistic analysis of recorded face-to-face verbal interactions are utilized to analyze the development, structure, and social significance of Rapa Nui Spanish varieties and to locate them within the complex process of language shift.I wish to express my appreciation to the Rapa Nui and other residents of Easter Island for so kindly welcoming me into their homes and allowing me to participate in their daily life. I would also like to thank my research assistant, Ivonne Calderón Haoa, who helped me record and transcribe speech events. This article is based on field research supported by the National Science Foundation (Grant No. SBR-9313658), the Wenner-Gren Foundation (Grant No. 5670), the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Yale University, and the Institute for Intercultural Studies. Parts of this article were presented at the 2004 meeting of the Linguistic Society of America and the 2004 meeting of the Association for Social Anthropology in Oceania. I thank those who offered comments on earlier versions, in particular two anonymous reviewers, Jane Hill, Robert and Nancy Weber, Christine Jourdan, Niko Besnier, Jean Mitchell, and Lamont Lindstrom.

A general address term in Communist China, the Chinese word tongzhi ‘comrade’ was appropriated by gay rights activists in Hong Kong to refer to members of sexual minorities. It has positive connotations of respect, equality, and resistance. This article focuses on the reappropriation of this word by a mainstream newspaper in Hong Kong. The parodic use of tongzhi allows journalists to ridicule gay rights activists so as to increase the entertainment value of news stories. At the same time, it mocks activists' demand for equality and may lead to the pejoration of the term. This study provides synchronic evidence for sociolinguistic accounts that explain how lexical items may undergo pejoration because of the context of their use. It shows that because the meaning potential of a word is not bounded by the intentions of its users, words that marginalized groups have appropriated can be resignified yet again in hateful contexts.An earlier version of this article was presented at the First IGALA (International Gender and Language Association) Conference at Stanford in May 2000 and was published in the proceedings of that conference. I would like to thank Penny Eckert, Jane Hill, Miyako Inoue, Don Kulick, Sally McConnell-Ginet, John Rickford, and two anonymous reviewers for their comments and suggestions.

R. M. W. Dixon, Australian Languages: Their nature and development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. xlii, 734. Hb $95.00.

Australian languages is a typological approach to the description and historical study of the Aboriginal languages of Australia. Together with its planned companion volume, Australian languages: A complete catalogue, a collection of sketches of some 250 languages, it is intended to present non-Australianist scholars with comprehensive information about Aboriginal languages and to offer specialists a summary and an agenda for future research. There are 14 chapters: “The language situation in Australia,” “Modelling the language situation,” “Overview,” “Vocabulary,” “Case and other nominal suffixes,” “Verbs,” “Pronouns,” “Bound pronouns,” “Prefixing and fusion,” “Generic nouns, classifiers, genders and noun classes,” “Ergative/accusative morphological and syntactic profiles,” “Phonology,” “Genetic subgroups and small linguistic areas,” and “Summary and conclusion.”

A panel at the 1998 International Pragmatics Conference in Reims provided the impetus for the book Telephone calls: Unity and diversity in conversational structure across languages and cultures, edited by Kang Kwong Luke and Theodossia-Soula Pavlidou. Six of its chapters were first presented at that panel. The book covers several languages, including Cantonese, Danish, English, German, Greek, Japanese, Korean, and Persian.

Discourse constructions of youth identities is an eclectic collection of 12 papers which examine the language of youth in England, Greece, Turkey, Germany, Sweden, Denmark, and Japan. The authors use various methodologies, including narrative analysis, conversational analysis, sociolinguistics, and Critical Discourse Analysis, to look at the language practices of youth ranging in age from nine years to the early twenties. In addition to studies of spontaneous peer group interaction in schools and youth centers, the volume also includes work on various kinds of expressive culture, focus group interactions, and interviews.

Kate Beeching's stated purpose is to investigate to what degree men and women differ in the way they render utterances more polite in contemporary spoken French, by means of an in-depth study of the functions and the distributional frequency of four pragmatic particles: c'est-à-dire, enfin, hein, and quoi. The analysis is anchored within Robin Lakoff's theory of politeness as described in Language and woman's place. On balance, and even though the author herself emphasizes the limitations of her corpus and framework, Beeching should be given credit for having put together a much-needed pragmatic study on gender and the French language.

This book reviews studies that have utilized corpus analysis of oral Spanish, in order to introduce the field of oral discourse. The work focuses on social and contextual varieties, emphasizing an approach that tackles the analysis of linguistic blocks restricted to an interactional unit. The plan of action is explained in chap. 1. Chap. 2 deals with the 1950–1965 period (dialectology and stylistics); chap. 3 discusses the 1966–1979 period and focuses on quantitative studies (social dialectology, sociolinguistics, and developmental psycholinguistics); chap. 4 corresponds to 1980–1989 and deals with discourse analysis; and finally, chap. 5 treats the 1990–1999 period and examines the different types of oral discourse, genre, registers, social dialects, and textual models. The works collected for this study cover 4,241 bibliographical entries that are cross-referenced with the CD-ROM, which displays the bibliography as a Microsoft Word document. The types of analysis are (A) intraenunciativo, (B) enunciativo, and (C) superenunciativo. We believe that by A, the author refers to components of the sentence within the sentence or intrasentential; by B he may refer to discourse at the level of the utterance, which is the result of the speech act; and by C he may refer to the level of the discourse, which is made of turns.

The U.S. government tested 67 atomic and thermonuclear bombs in the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1958, one hundred times more megatonnage than was detonated at the Nevada test site. While these facts are relatively well known, the numerous and varied effects of these experiments on the Marshallese people are not. Holly Barker's book Bravo for theMarshallese: Regaining control in a post-nuclear, post-colonial world addresses the medical, social, economic, linguistic, and psychological impact that America's nuclear testing program had and continues to have on the lives of the Marshall Islanders. Barker bases her discussion on a rich assortment of ethno-historical data that include extensive interviews, fieldwork, and recently declassified documents. Probably the greatest strength of this book is that it gives voice to the radiation survivors. Her ability to convey the survivors' most intimate and tragic experiences with sensitivity and clarity can, in part, be attributed to her 15-year collaborative relationship with the people of the Marshall Islands. Barker frames the ethnographic material within a historical and descriptive discussion that gives context to the narratives and grounds the data. Yet, despite the many strengths of this book, Barker's analysis of the data presented falls short of its promise.

Publications received.

This is the last issue of Language in Society for which I have exclusive editorial responsibility. In this issue I've exploited my editorial privilege to publish a book review out of order received. Normally I publish book reviews in the order that they come in (with minor deviations when a short review will fit into an issue and a longer one won't). In the last few months I have accumulated a backlog of book reviews, which will be forwarded to Barbara Johnstone for editing. Only a few days ago, however, Barry Alpher submitted an exemplary scholarly review of a very important publication by R. M. W. Dixon. Alpher and Dixon have fundamental theoretical differences that go to the heart of our understanding of the modes of language change. This is a controversy that I find especially exciting, and I have taken the liberty of jumping Alpher's review to the front of the queue, reflecting my own interest in issues and languages that some might find to lie at the margins of sociolinguistics, and bringing these issues and languages forward for an appearance on center stage under my editorship.