This report extends earlier context-free treatments of turn-taking for conversation by describing the context-sensitive operation of the principal forms of addressing employed by current speakers to select next speakers. It first describes the context-specific limitations of gaze-directional addressing, and the selective deployment and more-than-addressing action regularly accomplished by address terms (most centrally, names). In addition to these explicit methods of addressing, this report introduces tacit forms of addressing that call on the innumerable context-specific particulars of circumstance, content, and composition to select a next speaker.

This study into the nature of “the floor” actually began as an open-ended inquiry into sex differences that might occur beyond the sentence level in the multi-party interaction of five informal committee meetings. Technical difficulties prompted the trying out of several different transcription displays, most of which failed to capture the “feel” of the interaction and each of which biased (in its own way) the perception of what had actually gone on. The type of unconventional display eventually used was intended to show the floor holder in the center of the page, flanked by co-occurring talk. Because there were many episodes for which a single floor holder could not be identified, the primary focus of the study shifted to the nature of the floor itself. Questions about sex differences became a secondary and succeeding focus.

In the analysis, “floor” and “turn” were distinguished on the basis of “participant-sense” rather than technical criteria. Two kinds of floors were subjectively identified: F1, a singly developed floor; and F2, a collaborative venture where several people seemed to be either operating on the same wavelength or engaging in a free-for-all. The two kinds of floors were differentiated objectively by such features as quantity and frequency participation, language functions, number of nonturn utterances, overlaps, and pauses. There were indeed sex/language differences, but these were related to the type of floor being developed. Men took more and longer turns and did more of the joking, arguing, directing, and soliciting of responses F1 's. Turn length and frequency differences were neutralized in F2's, and certain language functions were used by women to a greater extent in F2's than in F1 's. (Conversational analysis, gender and language, qualitative research methodology.)

The article begins by exploring briefly the role of the elderly in sociolinguistic theory and research. After an outline of the parameters of speech accommodation theory together with a new schematic model, it is argued that speech accommodation theory is a profitable framework for elucidating the sociolinguistic mechanics of, and the social psychological processes underlying, intergenerational encounters. A recent conceptual foray in this direction, which highlights young-to-elderly language strategies, is then overviewed with some illustrations. Contrastive data from a case study are then introduced, a discourse analysis of which allows us to conceptualize various elderly-to-young language strategies. This interpretive analysis suggests important avenues for extending speech accommodation theory itself. A revised, more sociolinguistically elaborated version of this framework is then presented which highlights strategies beyond those of convergence, maintenance, and divergence and leads to the conceptualization of over- and underaccommodation. Finally, and on the basis of the foregoing, a new model of intergenerational communication is proposed and Ryan et al.'s (1986) “communicative predicament” framework duly revised. (Accommodation theory, elderly, overaccommodation, case studies, discourse management, stereotypes, underaccommodation, interdisciplinary)

The field of language and sexuality has gained importance within socioculturally oriented linguistic scholarship. Much current work in this area emphasizes identity as one key aspect of sexuality. However, recent critiques of identity-based research advocate instead a desire-centered view of sexuality. Such an approach artificially restricts the scope of the field by overlooking the close relationship between identity and desire. This connection emerges clearly in queer linguistics, an approach to language and sexuality that incorporates insights from feminist, queer, and sociolinguistic theories to analyze sexuality as a broad sociocultural phenomenon. These intellectual approaches have shown that research on identity, sexual or otherwise, is most productive when the concept is understood as the outcome of intersubjectively negotiated practices and ideologies. To this end, an analytic framework for the semiotic study of social intersubjectivity is presented.We are deeply indebted to Rusty Barrett, Jennifer Coates, Rudi Gaudio, Donna Goldstein, Jane Hill, Sally McConnell-Ginet, Bonnie McElhinny, Robin Queen, and Sara Trechter for their incisive comments on an earlier version of this article. In-depth conversations with Stacey Duke, Deena Hill, Anna Livia, and Jon McCammond helped us work through many thorny issues. For helpful feedback on oral presentations of some of this material, we are also grateful to audiences at the International Gender and Language Association Conference in Lancaster, the Lavender Languages and Linguistics Conference, the Department of Linguistics at Stanford University, and the Department of Anthropology at the University of Chicago; special thanks to James Fernandez for detailed suggestions. Any remaining weaknesses are our own responsibility.

This paper examines conversational dialogue. It is divided into four parts. The first presents arguments for dialogic analysis, the second lists some failings, the third applies this critical view to the notion of a ‘reply’; the final part is an overview.

The study was designed to investigate the process of speech accommodation between bilinguals from two ethnolinguistic groups. It was hypothesized that the greater the amount of effort in accommodation that a bilingual speaker of one group was perceived to put into his message, the more favourably he would be perceived by listeners from another ethnic group, and also the more effort they in turn would put into accommodating back to him. Eighty bilingual English-Canadians were divided into four groups and individually tested. Ss heard on tape a French-Canadian describe a picture and they were required to sketch this while listening. Ss were made fully aware that their speaker had a choice of language for his description. The four groups heard the same male speaker describe the drawing but each in a different guise: (1) French, (2) Mix-mix, (3) Fluent English and (4) Nonfluent English. Ss were then requested to rate their speaker and his performance, and to record a description of another picture themselves for that same French-Canadian to draw later. From analyses of the ratings and the Ss' tapes, the hypotheses were confirmed and different types of accommodation noted. A theoretical framework for these results and other forms of interpersonal accommodation was suggested. (Bilingualism; social interaction; accommodation theory; Canadian French, Canadian English.)

This paper considers some small errors which occur in natural talk, treating them as matters of competence, both in the production of coherent speech and the conduct of meaningful interaction.

Focusing on a rule-governed occurrence of the interjection ‘uh’, a format is described by which one can display that one is correcting an error one almost, but did not, produce. It is argued that there are systematic ways in which someone who hears such talk can find that an error was almost made and what that error would have been.

Two broad classes of error are considered, both of which can be announced by and extracted from the occurrence of an error correction format. These are ‘production’ errors; i.e. a range of troubles one encounters in the attempt to produce coherent, grammatically correct speech, and ‘interactional’ errors; i.e. mistakes one might make in the attempt to speak appropriately to some co-participant(s) and/or within some situation.

Focusing on interactional errors, it is proposed that the error correction format (and other formats for events other than error) can be used to invoke alternatives to some current formulation of self and other(s), situation and relationship, and thereby serve as a resource for negotiating and perhaps reformulating a current set of identities. (Conversational analysis, discourse devices (metalinguistic, attitudinal markers), U.S. English.)

A number of Conversation Analytic studies have documented that question recipients have a variety of ways to push against the constraints that questions impose on them. This article explores the concept of transformative answers – answers through which question recipients retroactively adjust the question posed to them. Two main sorts of adjustments are discussed: question term transformations and question agenda transformations. It is shown that the operations through which interactants implement term transformations are different from the operations through which they implement agenda transformations. Moreover, term-transforming answers resist only the question’s design, while agenda-transforming answers effectively resist both design and agenda, thus implying that agenda-transforming answers resist more strongly than design-transforming answers. The implications of these different sorts of transformations for alignment and affiliation are then explored.*

This article is a conversation-analytic investigation of the forms of organization that allow specific items of classroom discourse – words, phrases, up to whole turns at talk – to be altered by subsequent items. Central to the article is an analytic distinction between self-correction and other-correction, that is, between repair sequences in which the speaker of the initial item (the “trouble source”) makes the correction and instances in which this is performed by one of her or his interlocutors (cf. Jefferson 1974; Schegloff et al. 1977). The classroom case is analytically interesting both for its own sake and also on account of research speculations that other-correction should be more frequent in adult-child talk than in other genres of conversation. However, in order to provide an analysis of the problem sensitive to the particularities of the classroom, it is necessary to look not merely at corrections, but at the larger repair trajectories in which they occur. These trajectories consist of corrections plus their prior initiations, the latter being means by which speakers mark out some item as requiring correction. Once the social identities of teacher and student are mapped against self-and other-forms of initiation and correction, it is possible to discern some of the structural preferences of classroom discourse along the general axis of repair. The materials are taken from geography lessons in Australian high school classrooms. (Repair and correction, question and answer, clue-giving, expansion sequences, modulation, classroom discourse, everyday language use, Australian English, conversation analysis, sociology of education)

In 1972 Labov described the basic sociolinguistic question as the one ‘posed by the need to understand why anyone says anything’ (1972:207). Clearly the aim is very different from that of specifying the form of a grammar that generates all and only the well-formed sentences of a language. The goal is a theory of utterances. Moreover, the ‘why’ question can also be read as ‘what for’. What does anyone say anything for? I think we can safely say that this question places sociolinguistic analysis in a functional framework. If sociolinguistics looks for answers to the ‘why’ of saying something, it is seeking functional explanations.

This article provides an introduction to this issue of Language in Society by exploring the relationship of the concept of Community of Practice (CofP) to related terms and theoretical frameworks. The criterial characteristics and constitutive features of a CofP are examined; the article points out how a CofP framework is distinguished from other sociolinguistic and social psychological frameworks, including social identity theory, speech community, social network and social constructionist approaches.

This article attempts to align a familiar task of classroom teaching, eliciting from students correct answers about their lessons, with a major organizational domain in studies of natural conversation, that of conversational repair. Numerous studies have analyzed correction sequences in classroom discourse, and our discussion pays special attention to McHoul's (1990) treatment of “repair in classroom talk.” McHoul directly measures the findings on repair in studies of natural conversation to the regularities of correction sequences in classroom lessons. It is argued, contra McHoul, that repair is a different, and prior, order of discursive work, and one that premises the very possibility of classroom correction. Further, the difference may have wider relevance for understanding repair and correction as “co-operating” organizations of talk-in-interaction more generally.

Koineization – the development of a new, mixed variety following dialect contact – has well-documented outcomes. However, there have been few studies of the phenomenon actually in progress. This article describes the development of a new variety in the English New Town of Milton Keynes, designated in 1967. The article is structured around eight “principles” that relate the process of koineization to its outcomes. Recordings were made of 48 Milton Keynes-born children in three age groups (4, 8, and 12), the principal caregiver of each child, and several elderly locally born residents. Quantitative analysis of ten phonetic variables suggests that substantial but not complete focusing occurs in the child generation. The lack of linguistic continuity in the New Town is demonstrated, and the time scale of koineization there is discussed. Finally, it is shown that demography and the social-network characteristics of individuals are crucial to the outcomes of koineization.

In sociolinguistics, approaches that use the variables of socioeconomic class and social network have often been thought to be irreconcilable. In this article, we explore the connection between these variables and suggest the outlines of a model that can integrate them in a coherent way. This depends on linking a consensus-based microlevel of network with a conflict-based macrolevel of social class. We suggest interpretations of certain sociolinguistic findings, citing detailed evidence from research in Northern Ireland and Philadelphia, which emphasize the need for acknowledging the importance of looseknit network ties in facilitating linguistic innovations. We then propose that the link between network and class can be made via the notion of weak network ties using the process-based model of the macrolevel suggested by Thomas Højrup's theory of life-modes. (Sociolinguistics, sociology, quantitative social dialectology, anthropological linguistics)

Penelope Brown and Stephen Levinson (1987) have proposed that power (P), distance (D), and the ranked extremity (R) of a face-threatening act are the universal determinants of politeness levels in dyadic discourse. This claim is tested here for Shakespeare's use of Early Modern English in Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and Othello. The tragedies are used because: (1) dramatic texts provide the best information on colloquial speech of the period; (2) the psychological soliloquies in the tragedies provide the access to inner life that is necessary for a proper test of politeness theory; and (3) the tragedies represent the full range of society in a period of high relevance to politeness theory. The four plays are systematically searched for pairs of minimally contrasting dyads where the dimensions of contrast are power (P), distance (D), and intrinsic extremity (R). Whenever such a pair is found, there are two speeches to be scored for politeness and a prediction from theory as to which should be more polite. The results for P and for R are those predicted by theory, but the results for D are not. The two components of D, interactive closeness and affect, are not closely associated in the plays. Affect strongly influences politeness (increased liking increases politeness and decreased liking decreases politeness); interactive closeness has little or no effect on politeness. The uses of politeness for the delineation of character in the tragedies are illustrated. (Politeness theory, speech act theory, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, theory of literature, Shakespeare studies)

Contemporary social identities are hybrid and complex, and the media play a crucial role in their construction. A shift from political identities based on citizenship to economic ones based on participation in a global consumer market can be observed, together with a concomitant shift from monolingual practices to multilingual and English-dominant ones. This transformation is here explored in a corpus of German advertisements. Multilingual advertisements accounted for 60–70% of all advertisements released on various television networks and in two national newspapers in 1999. The subject positions that are created by multilingual narrators and multilingual narratees are characterized by drawing on the Bakhtinian concept of dialogism, and on point-of-view more generally. In order to test the acceptance of or resistance to these identity constructions outside the discourse of commercial advertising, the uses of multilingualism in nonprofit and personal advertising are also explored. All these discourses valorize German–English bilingualism and set it up as the strongest linguistic currency for the German business elite.

Linguistic geography has remained relatively unaffected by recent developments in sociolinguistic theory and method and theoretical geography. In this paper it is argued that insights and techniques from both these disciplines will be of value in improving descriptions of geographical variation in language, and that these improvements will in turn lead to more adequate explanations for certain of the social and spatial characteristics of linguistic change. Evidence in favour of a sociolinguistic methodology and new cartographic techniques in dialect geography is drawn from empirical studies in urban dialectology, in East Anglia, England, and rural dialectology, in Norway. (Sociolinguistic variation, dialectology, linguistic change, British English, Norwegian.)

Talk that is argumentative in form can have sociable functions for members of some groups. In sociable argument, speakers repeatedly disagree, remain nonaligned with each other, and compete for interactional goods. Yet they do so in a nonserious way, and in ways which actually display their solidarity and protect their intimacy. The analysis raises questions about the adequacy of many current views about conversational cooperation, showing that the levels at which cooperation (and competition) exist are not always overt. The analysis also demonstrates the cultural relativity of norms of evaluation about dispute. (Conflict, conversation, cooperation, culture, evaluation, frames, key, pragmatics, rhetoric)

The British news interview turn-taking system operates through a simple form of turn-type preallocation. This article shows that a large number of the systematic differences between the news interview and mundane conversation are a product of these constraints on the production of types of turns. It then explores the relationship of turn-type preallocation in news interviews to the background legal and institutional restrictions on British broadcast journalists. In so doing, it notes how the organisation of turn-taking in two other types of broadcast interview can differ from that in the news interview due to differences between the institutionalized footings that the interviewers are conventionally required to maintain within them. (Conversation analysis, mass communication, British speech, turn-taking systems, institutional talk)

Though many linguists have shown a strong concern for social issues, there is an apparent contradiction between the principles of objectivity needed for scientific work and commitment to social action. The Black English trial in Ann Arbor showed one way in which this contradiction could be resolved. The first decade of research on Black English was marked by violent differences between creolists and dialectologists on the structure and origin of the dialect. The possibility of a joint point of view first appeared in the general reaction of linguists against the view that blacks were linguistically and genetically inferior. The entrance of black linguists into the field was a critical factor in the further development of the creole hypothesis and the recognition of the distinctive features of the tense and aspect system. At the trial, linguists were able to present effective testimony in the form of a unified view on the origins and structural characteristics of the Black English Vernacular and argue for its alidity as an alternate to standard English. (Black English, language and the law.)