In this article, we examine the way citizens' descriptions of troublesome occurrences in reports to emergency dispatch personnel are vulnerable to suspicion and doubt. The vulnerability of description in these cases involves callers' categorization of, visual or aural access to, and involvement in the reported “trouble.” It is through displays of what we term practical epistemology – displays of how one has come to know about a particular event – that these vulnerabilites emerge and are tested and negotiated in the request for and dispatch of emergency assistance. (Conversation analysis, language in institutional settings, pragmatics)

People sometimes extend invitations they don't intend to be taken seriously. We call these ostensible invitations. From a collection of spontaneous examples, we argue that they require: a pretense of sincerity by the speaker; mutual recognition of the pretense by speaker and addressee; collusion on the pretense by the addressee; ambivalence by the speaker about its acceptance; and an off-record purpose by the speaker. We describe seven techniques speakers use in fulfilling these requirements. We also show that speakers try to achieve their off-record purpose by getting addressees to recognize the expectable effects of the invitation, the situation, and the fact that they chose to extend an ostensible invitation. Finally, we argue that ostensible invitations are part of a class of ostensible speech acts, and these in turn are related to other types of nonserious language use. (Speech acts, pragmatics, off record, pretense, nonserious language use)

The evidence is practically unequivocal that left-branching (LB) sentences are more difficult to process than right-branching (RB) sentences. In this study, the hypothesis was tested that LB sentences are judged to be more formal than RB ones and that center-branching (CB) sentences would behave like LB ones. Three groups of subjects, university students in England, Wales, and the United States, ordered three versions of 18 sentences in terms of their formality. LB and CB sentences were considered more formal than RB ones by all three groups of students. LB and CB types did not differ from each other. In a second study, American students choose from the group of three sentences the one they would say to a formal listener (professer/employer) or to an informal listener (brother/sister or close friend). RB sentences were attributed to informal listeners and LB and CB sentences, to formal listeners. (Grammar, formality, sociolinguistics)

We examined the effect of general statements against sexist usage in the style manual for The Washington Post. We selected a minor usage pattern that was not the subject of an explicit rule, namely, the difference in the use of a middle initial in references to men and to women. This usage was taken as an index of the possible effect of a general policy statement on newswriting practice. We found significantly less difference by sex in this usage subsequent to the publication of the style manual. We take the difference as support for the effectiveness of language planning in this instance, although the significance of our results as evidence of real equality of treatment remains somewhat problematic. There are different points of view in sociolinguistics about the relative value of quantitative versus more directly interpretive methods. We present in some detail the reasoning behind the use of quantitative methods to support an investigation such as ours. (Language planning, language treatment, language and sex, language and the media, style and usage, forms of reference, statistical methods)

A critical examination of the findings of Valentine (1985, 1986), studies devoted to cross-sex communication in Hindi and Indian English, is shown to reveal that the assumptions of the models on which such descriptions are based are not only nonexplanatory but also untenable. They fail because they ignore hierarchical power. Their failure “abroad” must be seen as an invitation to reflect on their alleged success back home. (Discourse, discourse strategies, cross-sex communication, Hindi, Indian English, English, sociolinguistics)