This article examines the organization and function of information-withholding sequences, a conversational strategy used by participants in gossip interactions on Nukulaelae, a Polynesian atoll of the Central Pacific. A withholding sequence is a three-turn sequence whereby a piece of information is withheld in the first turn, an other-repair is initiated in the second turn, and the withheld material is provided in the third turn. Information-withholding sequences thus involve moves that in other contexts would be construed as face-threatening. They have a dual function: they provide speakers an opportunity to manipulate their audiences into becoming coproducers of the gossip, and they reinforce the status of their initiator as controller of the floor. Withholding sequences illustrate how ambiguity and repairs can be exploited to meet the communicative demands of particular interactional contexts. They also illustrate how gossip may be framed simultaneously as group-cohesive behavior and self-serving behavior. (Conversation analysis, ethnography of speaking, gossip, conversational repair, Polynesia, Nukulaelae Tuvaluan)

To investigate discourse and interactive functions of quote formula + hey + pseudoquotation, that is, invented quotation, in current English communication, tokens were collected from public and commercial broadcasts and miscellaneous readings during a four-month period. In addition, all instances of hey with context were extracted from the Brown Corpus of American English. Only 26 possible tokens, the majority from radio and television, were located; one instance in Brown indicates existence as early as 1961. A speaker uses quote formula + hey + pseudoquotation to dramatize and thereby give emphasis to an important point (in these examples, generally in an expository discourse), a practice reported for both sophisticated and folk discourse. Instead of a rhetorical question, the device makes a rhetorical answer to an unasked question. Although pseudoquotation can be found either without discourse marker or with other discourse marker, hey is an appropriate marker for pseudoquotation, simultaneously to mark an important point in a discourse and to bind listeners to the ongoing interaction by (re)capturing their attention. (Discourse markers, conversational interaction, pragmatics, dramatization, hey, quotation)

The results of the reintroduction and renativization of Hebrew are highlighted, and some commonly made assumptions about Hebrew and its place in Israeli life examined. The main topics are (a) the debatable equation of an ideal nation-state with a single and exclusive language, (b) the long history of Hebrew as a component of Jewish multilingualism, (c) the Hebraist movement, (d) the extent of its success and its advantages and disadvantages, (e) linguistic rights in Israel. (Language revitalization, language and nationalism, language policy and planning)