This article explores the concept of political diglossia, a phenomenon arising in totalitarian or semitotalitarian countries, where the language of official propaganda gives rise to its opposite: the unofficial, underground language of antipropaganda. The author studies one semantic domain – the colloquial designations of the political police and security forces in contemporary Poland – and compares them with the official designations. The semantics of the relevant words and expressions is studied in great detail so that the social attitudes encoded in them can be revealed and rigorously compared. To achieve this, the author relies on the natural semantic metalanguage that she has developed over the last two decades, which has already been applied in the study of many other semantic domains, in many different languages. The social and political attitudes encoded in the Polish expressions referring to the security apparatus are discussed against the background of Poland's history. The author shows that language is not only the best “mirror of mind” (Leibniz) and “mirror of culture” and “guide to social reality” (Sapir), but also a mirror of history and politics. (Sociolinguistics, pragmatics, semantics, language of propaganda, expressive language)

From the hypothesis that routine formulae code cultural norms, it follows that social change will reveal itself in the formulaic inventory of a language. We test this prediction by looking at some of the changes to formulaic speech which took place in postrevolutionary China, particularly during the Chinese Cultural Revolution. We first examine some generally used politeness formulae, comparing them with prerevolutionary equivalents. We then examine the Public Criticism Meeting as a revolutionary ritual and show that its structure and formulaic language arose directly out of revolutionary imperatives. We attribute the changes in the formulaic inventory of Chinese directly to the need to code new social facts, although old social norms can also be discerned in the new formulae, thus showing that social changes are built on a previous social order. (Oral formulaic performance, routine formulae, situational constraints, Cultural Revolution)

This study examines the use of words per pause (W/P) as a practical means for identifying solidarity in everyday conversation. Eight listeners recorded the narratives of a female and a male, either friends or strangers. Ten speakers were categorized as friends and six as strangers; they talked about a good and a bad experience. Average reliability of coding pauses was .83. The results indicated a statistically significant difference in W/P of speakers who were friends and those who were strangers. Statistical results support the conclusion that friends are more likely to employ many W/P and strangers few W/P. One practical implication of this study is that W/P can be employed by researchers with relative ease and a high degree of reliability for investigations of speaking style in a variety of contexts. A second practical implication is that W/P is a diagnostic device that can serve as a social litmus test in everyday conversation to identify the expression of sympathy and estrangement. (Expressive language, nonverbal communication, paralanguage, pauses, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, solidarity, speech and personality)