William Bright, friend and colleague, died on October 15, 2006, near Boulder, Colorado. Bill received his Ph.D. in linguistics from Berkeley in 1955. He taught linguistics and anthropology at UCLA for 29 years until his retirement in 1988. Up to the time of his death he was adjunct Professor at the University of Colorado. He wrote more than 200 books, articles, and reviews, of relevance to many disciplines, including linguistics, anthropology, literature, psychology, and sociology. He was the editor of Language, the journal of the Linguistic Society of America, from 1965 to 1987. He was a leading figure in the field of sociolinguistics, and he edited Language in Society from 1993 to 1999.

When offered unfamiliar words, do children attend to them? Examination of 701 offers of new words drawn from the longitudinal records of five children provides extensive evidence of attention to the new words: Children repeated the new word in the next turn 54% of the time; they acknowledged it in the next turn with markers like yeah or uh-huh 9% of the time, or made a relevant move-on by alluding to some aspect of its referent, again in the next turn, 38% of the time. By comparison, the repeat-rate in new-to-given shifts in conversation is significantly lower. The present data provide strong evidence for some immediate uptake. When children register that new words are new, they can assign them some preliminary meaning and begin to use them right away from as young as age two.This research was supported in part by grants from the National Science Foundation (SBR97-31781), the Spencer Foundation (199900133), and the Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University. I am indebted to Andrew D-W. Wong for help with the data analysis, to Karin Kastens for locating elusive articles, and to Bruno Estigarribia, Barbara F. Kelly, David A. McKercher, and Edy Veneziano for discussion and comment.

The sequence that begins a story may be a rather small segment, but how one performs the segment may affect whether one achieves the goal of telling the story. The participants in this study are native speakers of Australian English and Japanese, and the stories were collected in both languages. In recipient-initiated stories, Australian speakers begin a story in concert with the recipient's topic presentation, but Japanese speakers build momentum through the building of rapport and trust. In speaker-initiated stories, Australian speakers use a conventional story preface to claim the conversational floor, but Japanese speakers insinuate a story in subtle ways. Such differences may be related to differences between Australian and Japanese social and cultural structures. The final section discusses implications for conversation analysis in addition to cross-cultural issues.I am pleased to acknowledge the assistance of Felicita Carr and Pascale Jacq for their help with transcripts, and Gavin Fryer, Malcolm Mearns, Johanna Rendle-Short, and the editor and anonymous referees of Language in Society for their comments, input, and encouragement.

This article demonstrates how the field of Jewish interlinguistics and a case study of Jewish Russian (JR) can contribute to the general understanding of ethnolects. JR is a cluster of post-Yiddish varieties of Russian used as a special in-group register by Ashkenazic Jews in Russia. Differences between varieties of JR may be explained in terms of differing degrees of copying from Yiddish. The case of JR allows the general conclusions that (i) the diffusion of ethnolectal features into mainstream use is facilitated not only by a dense social network but also by a relatively sufficient number of speakers with a variety of occupations; and (ii) in addition to matrix language turnover and lexical and prosodic features, an ethnolect may be characterized by new combinability rules under which stems and derivational suffixes belong to the target language (here Russian) but their combination patterns do not.

In the airline cockpit it is critical to say and do things at the appropriate time and in the appropriate order. When a pilot is responsible for initiating a next action but has not yet done so, the pilot not responsible can prompt or perform the action with talk that is prefaced with and. Rather than make conspicuous another's possible lapse, and-prefaced talk presents the not-yet-initiated action as timely and merely occurring routinely next in sequence. And occurs in talk for monitoring another's conduct and for maintaining accountability in the temporal organization of work by situating actions acceptably in time. This article points to the value of seeing grammatical forms as consequential for just how work gets done in particular settings, and especially for identifying local means of creating order for agenda-based activities. The article analyzes transcriptions of pilots interacting in the cockpit on actual scheduled passenger flights.

Elizabeth Couper-Kuhlen & Cecilia E. Ford (eds.) Sound patterns in interaction: Cross-linguistic studies from conversation. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 2004. Pp. 404. Hb $156.00.

A successor to Couper-Kuhlen & Selting 1996, this volume contains a similar collection of papers at the interface between phonetics and conversational interaction. There is a lengthy introductory essay by the editors, followed by 12 chapters grouped into three broad sections: “Turn-taking,” “Projecting and expanding turns,” and “Connecting across turns.” Each chapter has a separate bibliography, and the volume has a general index. Seven of the contributions describe British or American English, while a further five address the features of German, Finnish, and Japanese. All the contributions represent work carried out strictly within the theoretical framework of Conversation Analysis (CA), an approach that lends itself well to the study of turn-taking.

Carol A. Padden & Tom L. Humphries, Inside Deaf culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Pp. 224. Hb $22.95.

Since its publication in 1988, Padden & Humphries's book Deaf in America: Voices from a culture (Harvard University Press) has been an important resource for people studying American Sign Language, Deaf studies, and the linguistics of signed languages. The book sheds light on the Deaf experience and on how American Deaf people construct themselves through stories and language play, including poetry and jokes. It is a positive, at times humorous window into Deaf culture and identity. Harvard University Press has just released the authors' much-anticipated second book, reviewed here. Although it is just as informative, engaging, and well-researched as their first book, Inside Deaf culture examines a much bleaker aspect of Deaf America: its encounter with hearing hegemony.

Kwok-kan Tam & Timothy Weiss (eds.), English and globalization: Perspectives from Hong Kong and mainland China. Hong Kong: China University Press, 2005. Pp. ix, 276. Hb $35.00.

“Has English become the ‘cultural SARS’ and ‘king of terrorists’ for Chinese people? Are we Chinese really facing a new ‘Opium War’ against English?” ask the authors of a recently published book, The English demon (Zhu & Yang 2004), which denounces English as a new form of opium, invoking the painful image of the history of Western invasion of China. Comparing English to opium, a substance that is believed to have been used by the Western imperialists to intoxicate the Chinese people and to have caused two wars between China and Britain, is a clear indication of growing hostility toward English in China. At a time when China has just joined the World Trade Organization, has successfully competed for the opportunity to host the 2008 Olympic Games, and is rapidly growing into a powerful global economy, the hostility toward English seems puzzling. After all, English is the language for international trade and communications and thus a necessary medium for China to express its desire for globalization. Why this resentment, then?

Viv Edwards, Multilingualism in the English-speaking world: Pedigree of nations. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004. Pp. viii, 253. Pb $29.95.

Amid widespread talk about the dominance of English across the world, this volume is a reminder that even at the core of the English-speaking world, English monolingualism is not as universal as is often assumed. The book's subtitle, Pedigree of nations, conveys that, in fact, multilingualism is not only an important element of contemporary daily life in the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Australia, and Aotearoa/New Zealand, but also an essential thread in these nations' ancestral lines, indeed part of what has made them what they are today. In this comprehensive effort to dispel the “myth of monolingualism” (p. 3), Viv Edwards has assembled copious evidence of the use and significance of minority languages in English-dominant countries. Readers will find themselves better equipped to counter not only this general misconception but also the pervasive corollaries that position other languages and their speakers as problematic, outside the mainstream, and therefore outside the range of what is valued.

Ronald Carter, Language and creativity: The art of common talk. London: Routledge, 2004. Pp. xiii, 255. Hb $99.95, Pb $29.95.

The central idea of Carter's wonderful new book is that “Creativity is a pervasive feature of spoken language … a key component in interpersonal communication, and … is a property actively possessed by all speakers and listeners” (p. 6). Carter is a scholar with a long history of solid work, both as one of the leaders of the CANCODE corpus effort (the Cambridge and Nottingham Corpus of Discourse in English), and as the author of two books on English grammar (Carter, Hughes, & McCarthy, 2000; Carter & McCarthy, 2006). During countless hours reviewing transcripts from the CANCODE corpus of spoken English (5 million words, collected between 1993 and 2001), he repeatedly noticed that “patterns and forms of language which as a student of literature I had readily classified as poetic or literary can be seen to be regularly occurring in everyday conversational exchanges” (10).

Eija Ventola, Cassily Charles, & Martin Kaltenbacher (eds.), Perspectives on multimodality. (Document Design Companion Series.) Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 2004. Pp. x, 250. Hb eur. 95.00/$114.00.

This sixth volume in the Document Design Companion Series, like its predecessors, is devoted to issues of written, spoken, and visual (electronic) discourse as a contextual undertaking. While other volumes have roots in social semiotics, this one is unique for the breadth of its multimodal curiosity. Its cross-section of essays emerged from discussions that took place during the First International Symposium on Multimodal Discourse at the University of Salzburg. The symposium's organizers, who are also this book's editors, hope their work will foster discussion encompassing theory, method, and an eclectic array of applications, from the multisemiotic construction of mathematics to visual/verbal humor in comics. From their point of view, this work suggests possibilities for future study rather than fully realized principles in a field where nonlinguistic meaning making is only beginning to be incorporated into linguistic analysis. Therefore, one can often forgive the uneven nature of this undertaking. Stronger concerns arise when problematic or missing information affects a central claim.

Michael Bamberg and Molly Andrews (eds.), Considering counter-narratives: Narrating, resisting, making sense. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2004. Pp. x, 381. HB $126.00.

Growing out of two special issues of the journal Narrative Inquiry, this volume assembles six chapters that “contemplate the meaning of counter-narratives and their relationship to master or dominant narratives” (p. x). The book also contains six clusters of commentaries written in response to each of the focal chapters, along with rejoinders by the six “primary” authors. As the editors point out in their introduction to the book, the format of dialogue and contestation is meant to synergize with the main subject of the volume, since the concept “counter-narrative” is itself “a positional category, in tension with another category” (x). By and large, the organization of the volume is effective and makes for stimulating reading; occasionally, however, commentators treat the chapter to which they are ostensibly responding less as an opportunity for dialogue than as a platform for showcasing their own explanatory frameworks or descriptive nomenclatures (see, e.g., the commentary by Jaan Valsiner, 245–76). More generally, the range of issues explored by the 29 different contributors to the volume – the range of contexts in which the authors and commentators show narrative and narrative analysis to be pertinent concerns – suggests the extent to which the “narrative turn” has taken hold in fields such as social psychology, gender studies, sociolinguistics, public health, and the other domains of research represented in the book. But by the same token, the volume raises the question of whether the contributors share a sense of what narrative is and how it functions – that is, whether they are in fact investigating a common object (or set of common objects: narrative, master narrative, counter-narrative), or rather operating with more or less distinct conceptions of stories and methodologies for studying them.

Helen Kelly-Holmes, Advertising as multilingual communication. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Pp. xiv, 206. Hb $69.95.

Language choices in advertising are never random. They represent an attempt to use language to achieve a particular goal. In commercial advertising the goal is, ultimately, to sell. The words that are present in advertisements are the product of a very conscious decision to put those particular words there rather than other words. Helen Kelly-Holmes in her fascinating book examines choices that have resulted in the use, non-use or, as it turns out, abuse of features from more than one language in commercially driven discourses. The object of her study is multilingual advertising communication, defined as the appearance of a number of different languages or voices in a market-discourse situation. For Kelly-Holmes, the market-discourse situation, deliberately chosen as the context of analysis instead of more narrow frames like the speech act, covers a range of possibilities from advertising texts to TV channels and Internet sites. The manifestations of languages or voices in these situations can range from single words to entire texts. Thus, taking examples from my own everyday context, a Finnish-language TV advertisement for a car ending in the English slogan Fresh thinking – better cars would count as a multilingual market-discourse situation, as would a setting where a TV ad entirely in Finnish is followed by an all-English advertisement for a particular cider, a perfume ad with only one word of French in an otherwise Finnish publication, or an advertisement where the “language” is an accent or a dialect, such as the use of Italian-accented Finnish to advertise pasta sauce.

Deborah Levine Gera, Ancient Greek ideas on speech, language and civilization. Great Clarendon, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003. Pp. vii-xii, 252. Hb $94.88.

In her Preface to this book the author calls it a survey, and it is indeed a survey, but a very welcome one. Even though the sources on which Gera builds are numerous and heterogeneous, suggesting that there has been work done in this direction previously, we have not had in the past a book-length treatment focused exclusively on linguistic ideologies in ancient Greece. The book is useful and timely in helping us reexamine and deconstruct some inherited ideas concerning the role that we imagine ancient Greek ideas have played in shaping a large part of Western thinking. But a basic value of this work is also its major implication, and not merely what is explicitly stated on its pages, for the simple reason that the author does not make a commitment to any large-scale theory or paradigm. This way of approaching the subject is a warning against crediting ancient Greeks with an internally coherent philosophical scheme, which has been frequently imagined as lying at the roots of later rationalist thinking prioritizing reference and leading to Cartesian and modern linguistic rationalism-positivism. Not that such lines of theorizing are absent from ancient Greek thinking, but they do not stand alone, and the actual situation must have been more complex. The situation described by Gera resembles the one put forward by Dodds (1951:180) in his treatment of the rational and irrational elements of Greek thought with regard to the “soul” or “self”: “On questions like that [pictures of soul, self, shadowy image in Hades, etc.] there was no ‘Greek view’, but only a muddle of conflicting answers.” In Gera's book the same holds true for matters linguistic and ideological, implying that later treatments of the subject have constructed Greek thought as being of this or that kind, reading in it a more monolithic and internally coherent content than it actually had. The powerful process of erasure, a selective ideological reading (Gal & Irvine 1995), has played a decisive role in giving shape to what Greek metalinguistic thought has been or should have been, according to the historical contingencies and interests of each era and each individual thinker. Nevertheless, even though Gera deserves a credit for not allowing homogenizing readings to influence a realistic assessment of the variety of ancient Greek views of language, one would expect her to provide at least a basic understanding of her own of what kind of social species linguistic ideologies are.

Neal Hutcheson (producer and director). Mountain talk. Raleigh, NC: North Carolina Language and Life Project, 2003. DVD $20.

Twenty years ago, I met many of my grandmother's fifty-odd cousins for the first time. Born in Panther Hollow, North Carolina (pronounced “Painter Holler”), my grandmother moved to the nearest town, Asheville, when she was a child. On the occasion of her seventieth birthday, many of the cousins she left behind came down out of the mountains to celebrate with her. A few of them spoke in a unique dialect, a “brogue” riddled with odd turns of phrase and vocabulary.

Juan Manuel Hernández Campoy & Manuel Almeida, Metodología de la investigación sociolingüística. Málaga: Comares, 2005. Pp. xv, 349.

In the Prologue (pp. ix–x), Peter Trudgill rightly acknowledges the authors as “highly experienced” in carrying out sociolinguistic research and as “first-class practitioners.” In the Introducción (xi–xiv), Hérnandez Campoy and Almeida (HC&A) state that their work is an attempt to compensate for the scarcity of “introductory manuals dedicated to present the methodology and procedures in sociolinguistic research” (xi), as opposed to the large number of theoretical books on the discipline.

Noriko O. Onodera, Japanese discourse markers: Synchronic and diachronic discourse analysis. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 2004. Pp. xiv, 253. Hb $132.00.

Onodera's work is one of the first historical-pragmatic studies of Japanese, which is typologically dissimilar to Indo-European languages. After providing background information (Ch. 1 and 2), Onodera (hereafter O) presents her latest thoughts on the evolution of Japanese discourse markers (DMs), dealing with two types coming from different sources: demo type connectives (so-called adversative conjunctions), originally from clause-final connecting devices (Ch. 3 and 4), and na elements (often called sentence-final particles (SFPs)/interjections of agreement), originally from SFPs (Ch. 5 and 6), followed by the conclusion.

Samy Alim. You know my Steez: An ethnographic and sociolinguistic study of styleshifting in a Black American speech community. Duke University Press, 2005. pp. Xi, 309. Hb $20.00.

Samy Alim's book is a balanced blend of hip hop linguistics, ethnography, and advocacy. There is an underlying intensity to his writing that challenges all researchers to become more active in applying their research to the benefit of the community. Most impressively, Alim puts his money where his mouth when it comes to linguistic advocacy. Paying lip service to the idea that African American English or Black Language is linguistically and socially legitimate is one thing; it is another to employ it in written form in a scholarly text. Yet Alim seamlessly shifts back and forth between a hip hop form of Black Language and Standard English, alerting the reader to his own stylistic range while serving to legitimize the language he uses. Furthermore, he does so in a style that is both lucid and transparent for readers less familiar with linguistic jargon.

Ronald K. S. Macaulay. Talk that counts: Age, gender, and social class differences in discourse. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2005. Pp 3–225.

In Talk that counts: Age, gender and social class differences in discourse, Ron Macaulay tackles two contentious but very different issues within Labovian Sociolinguistics. The first is the analysis of discourse level phenomena, specifically how to deal with ‘higher level’ variation within a quantitative paradigm. The second is Bernstein's (1971) restricted vs. elaborated code and the claim that middle class speakers have access to a more complex range of discourse structures when compared to lower class speakers. His findings on both are revealing.

Joan A. Argenter and R. McKenna Brown (eds.) Endangered Languages and Linguistic Rights: on the Margins of Nations. Proceedings of the Eighth FEL Conference, Barcelona (Catalonia), Spain, 1–3 October, 2004. Bath: Foundation for Endangered Languages, 2004. 228 pp. Pb £17/US$32.

Endangered Languages and Linguistic Rights: On the Margins of Nations is a collection of papers originally presented at the Foundation for Endangered Language's (FEL) annual conference; the 2004 meeting was held in Barcelona. The great majority of the papers are written in English, with a few in Spanish and one in Catalan.