As Coupland and others show, Bauman’s account of “performance” provides a valuable perspective on speech stylization across a range of public contexts. This article explores the limitations of performance as a window on crossing and stylization in everyday practice, and although recognizing other frames as well, it dwells on Goffman’s interaction ritual, cross-referring to two studies of adolescents in England. In the first, race and ethnicity were controversial, and the performance of other-ethnic styles was risky. But interaction ritual constructed crossing and stylization as urgent responses to the exigencies of the moment, and this made them more acceptable. In the second, performance implies a reflexive composure that is hard to reconcile with informants’ experience of social class as an uncomfortable but only half-articulated issue, whereas interaction ritual provides a sharp lens on how youngsters used stylized “posh” and Cockney varieties to register their apprehension of ongoing stratification. (Interaction ritual, stylization, crossing, performance)1

This study explores how agency emerges and is negotiated moment by moment in interaction by applying Erving Goffman’s notion of production format to an extended sequence of discourse that revolves around accomplishing a conjoint action: the rewriting of an official letter. Deconstructing the participants into the social roles they undertake in accomplishing this task illustrates what is involved in exercising agency: interactively negotiating production format roles and footing shifts through several linguistic strategies aimed at either claiming, ratifying, or rejecting the participants’ agency. These include providing options, negotiating production format roles, asking questions, speaking for another, questioning and asserting expertise, providing counter-arguments, and asserting past agentive selves. This study, thus, contributes to an understanding of agency as co-constructed, mediated, and continually negotiated, while also identifying specific linguistic strategies through which agency is negotiated in interaction. (Agency, disability, production format, social actor, conjoint action, linguistic strategies)*

This article addresses data that reside at the confluence of three types of linguistic “crossing” (Rampton 1995) among working-class French teens of predominantly Algerian descent. Strategically using the microphone of the researcher to imitate an elite French television show host, performers create indirect reported speech and direct stylized voicing for present peers and thereby mock them as show “guests.” Through analysis of such data, this article contributes to scholarship that extends and refines Goffman’s notions of footing and participation frameworks, and the relationships imaginable between them. It is argued that the notions of noncongruent voicing effects and generalized footing can lead to a more sophisticated understanding of the relationship between language crossing and participation frameworks. More specifically, analyzing language crossing in terms of the resultant voicing effects sheds light upon the nuanced ways that speakers manage participation frameworks. (Register, crossing, footing, participation frameworks, voicing)

This article relates the language ideologies of Pakistan in general, and its call centers in particular, with the language policies and practices of the latter. The specific policy focused upon is the commodification of English with a near-native (American or British) accent as linguistic capital. These accents are indexed to the desired foreign identities which the workers of call centers perform in telephonic interaction with clients as part of their sales strategy. This crossing over to native-speaker linguistic identities is not always successful. When successful, however, some workers in the call centers pass as native speakers in certain contexts and for certain purposes. Such practices and the policies upon which they are contingent are consequences of language ideologies that entail language discrimination against the workers of the call centers by the Pakistani English-using elite, and vice versa. (English, commodification of language, accent, linguistic capital, language policy, identity, passing, crossing, call centers, Pakistan)