This article examines the blunt conceptual instrument of dehumanizing American military terms for the enemy in the context of the Vietnam War and the Global War on Terror. I examine language that dehumanizes American service members themselves, who are semiotically framed as expendable. Next, I explore the essentialist, semi-propositional qualities of derogatory epithets for the enemy and the affectively charged, deadly stances they encourage. I examine how generic references to the enemy during training make totalizing claims that risk encompassing civilians in their typifications. And I show that, in the context of war, the instability of derogatory epithets can manifest itself when the servicemember is confronted with the behavioral idiosyncrasies and personal vulnerabilities of actual ‘enemies’ on the ground. The putative folk wisdom found in generic references to the enemy can thus fall apart when confronted with countervailing experience; in such cases, service members may shift stance by renouncing military epithets. (Military language, epithets, slurs, generics, othering, dehumanization, necropolitics)*

This article reports on a study of standardization and language change in the Basque town of Oiartzun. It presents apparent time evidence suggesting that, while certain local features are giving way to competing standard forms, other emblematic features of the local dialect are not undergoing change. It is argued that the absence of change in the case of emblematic local forms is related to community members' ambivalence toward recent economic and social changes in the town. In particular, in the spirit of Labov's Martha's Vineyard study, it is argued that younger Oiartzuners' retention of emblematic local forms is a way of staking a claim to a local identity undercut by recent housing development and suburbanization. In so doing, this article contributes to a growing body of work on the often unique behavior of emblematic local features in language change, particularly in speech communities undergoing rapid social and economic change.I am grateful to the people of Oiartzun for their support and hospitality during the fieldwork portion of this study. I am also grateful to John Singler, Renée Blake, Ricardo Etxepare, Gregory Guy, Richard Kayne, Bambi Schieffelin, Jaqueline Urla, Koldo Zuazo, an anonymous reviewer, and audiences at the University of York, the University of Ottawa, and NWAV 34 for comments pertaining to some of the data presented here. Special thanks also to Iñaki Arbelaitz, Maider Lekuona, Jabi Elizasu, Ana Arruti, and José Luis Erkizia. All errors are my own. This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. 0317842 and by a Fulbright grant. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

This article presents a case study of the discursive construction of sexual orientation obsessive-compulsive disorder (SO-OCD) as it surfaces in posts to an online mental health forum. SO-OCD is an anxiety disorder that involves having unwanted, intrusive thoughts as a consequence of conflict with normative sexual beliefs. The study focuses on the way normativity regulates communication about sexual identities, desires, and practices in a corpus of online posts by heterosexual men who pathologically doubt their sexual identity. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative corpus linguistic methods, we investigate how writers linguistically orient to normativity in their posts. More specifically, analyses of keywords, n-grams, and concordances are used to uncover linguistic mechanisms that play a central role in users’ orientation to normativity and in the obsessive-compulsive behaviours associated with SO-OCD. (Sexual orientation obsessive-compulsive disorder (SO-OCD), heterosexuality, masculinity, normativity, heteronormativity, critical discourse analysis, corpus linguistics)

Studies of the social organization of adolescent groups may not have always taken into account sufficiently the dual reality of the groups in which much of the youths' activities occur. Peer terminology is useful in locating and describing the associational patterns and activities of the youth, but only if the range of possible terms is considerably broadened. It was found in a study of a Harlem street gang that such language may appear ambiguous, but when studied systematically in the interaction between interviewer and members, the misunderstandings become transparent. Peer terminological practices can be used to provide further knowledge of the reality of the social organization of adolescent primary groups. (Peer terminology, primary groups, misunderstanding, interviewing, juvenile delinquency, urban black adolescent language; verbal tags.)

Continuing a line of thought begun by Havelock and Goody, often called the “literacy thesis,” Olson has proposed in a series of articles several new ideas about how literacy may have altered human cognition to make modern scientific thinking possible. He attributes to literacy the development of explicit, autonomous prose, the ability to distinguish data from interpretation, and the growth of metalanguage, all of which are held to be essential to systematic thought. An examination of these proposals indicates that they lack sufficient evidence, coherence, and substance to support a case for any significant “cognitive consequences“ of literacy. (Literacy and cognition, orality and literacy)

This article examines Vietnamese ethnic minority students’ language practices under the influence of external interventions from a language management perspective. It focuses on the ways the students engage with various levels of interventions in their language practices. The study mainly draws on a group of college-age minority students’ experiences and perspectives collected through semistructured interviews. Findings suggest that the students, in making decisions to use their ethnic language and Vietnamese, the mainstream language, responded to interventions by the school and the ethnic community by adapting to the latter's language policy, while reinterpreting to conform to/deviate from interventions by other individuals such as their parents, their teachers, or their peers. In that process of managing their language practices, they reframed their identity in which both maintenance and transformation orientations were active. Implications related to minority language policy and language maintenance are then suggested. (Language management, individual language management, language practices, language choice, language policy, language maintenance, ethnic minority)*

This study investigates how the descriptor ‘broken English’ is used to construct speakers as nonnative within standard language ideology. In-depth analysis of examples found through WebCorp, used to search US websites, and the Corpus of Contemporary American English found that the term was largely used to refer to comprehensible English identified as nonnative. Users of such English were constructed as Other, usually highly negatively. The rarer cases of more positive descriptions referred to encounters outside English-speaking countries, consistent with monolingualist ideology, and when used for a more distantly superior person, made them more attractive through greater apparent accessibility. Four mechanisms are discussed by which use of the term naturalizes ideologies. Crucially, its ambiguity promotes slippage between ‘neutral’ and negative uses, allowing any English identified as nonnative to be characterized as ‘broken’, slipping into ‘not English’, with such descriptions treated as an acceptable way to identify nonnative speakers as public menace. (Standard language ideology, ideology of nativeness, monolingualist ideology, Othering, corpus-informed research)*

Philippine Creole Spanish, formed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, underwent partial decreolization toward the end of the Spanish presence in the Philippines, particularly in the city of Zamboanga. Following the American occupation of the Philippines, virtually all Spanish linguistic influence has disappeared, but contemporary Zamboangueño continues to exhibit continuing incorporation of elements of standard Spanish, in the nearly total absence of a pool of Spanish speakers. The present study explores the status of the Zamboangueño dialect, discusses the various stages of decreolization in the direction of Spanish, and suggests possible avenues for the continued introduction of elements from an acrolect which, for all intents and purposes, is no longer generally available to residents of Zamboanga. (Creole studies, contact vernaculars)

Using conversation analysis as methodology, this article provides a link between the local organization of talk and larger societal issues by investigating specific conversational sequences in which French speakers from different speech communities interact. It is argued that in addition to dealing with problems of speaking, hearing, and understanding, repair can simultaneously be used to negotiate linguistic membership. Repair can be used to establish, confirm, or insist on speakers' belonging to one particular speech community over another. Moreover, participants can use repair to express affiliation and disaffiliation with each other. The implications of this research are discussed, linking the organization of conversation with issues of language and identity, specifically with the social meaning of dialect variety in the Francophone world. Thus, this article demonstrates how phenomena commonly discussed on the macro level are realized and negotiated on the micro level.

Herein I examine the parallel, contrasting analyses of expressive patterns proposed by Bernstein for language, by Lomax for song, and by my interpretation of the arts and cultures of two Melanesian societies. The general thesis of this paper is that expressive patterns are related to cultural patterns in systematic ways, and that analysis of societies in terms of a contrast between individualism and group orientation reveals and documents one of those ways. Description of social structures in relation to this contrast is old, but its extension to expressive patterns is recent in anthropology. I argue that this model accounts for fundamental structural distinctions which underlie cultural contrasts in expressive patterns. (Sociolinguistics, conversational analysis, Melanesia, anthropological linguistics, ethnography of speech, isomorphism of expressive forms and social structure)

This study provides a qualitative examination of African American Language (AAL) in use and explores the interaction between phonological, syntactic, and rhetorical features of AAL and situational factors related to event structuring, speaker goals, and audience composition. Data for this research is derived from the speech of four prominent African Americans who spoke during the 2008 State of the Black Union. Analysis of their speech suggests that switches to black preaching style help speakers to redefine their relationship with audience members. Overall, shifts in style correspond to shifts in interactional framework, suggesting that black preaching style allows the speakers in this study to temporarily cloak themselves with the status and respect associated with black preachers, providing a favorable context for the reception of their message while allowing for the display of their ethnic affiliation with the black community. (African American Language, style, audience design, rights and obligations, black preaching)*

In this paper, a preschool children's game is analyzed with reference to patterns of address used by intimates in beginning utterances. The findings reveal that the alternation between real and pretend names functions to mark context shifts in the nature of the activities, and to delineate role relationships among the participants along the dimensions of power and affiliation. It is suggested that variations in how children address one another provide insight into their understanding of a system of social relations. (Peer interaction; developmental sociolinguistics; social behavior, children's address patterns; American English).

Friendship is studied as a culturally and contextually embedded entity. Focusing on the interactions between network marketers and their prospects, this article proposes four key central elements through which participants make sense of themselves when their identities are in transgression and conflict. Instead of being essentialist, the four elements of friendship – intimacy, control, trust, and positiveness – are highly interactional and dynamic elements that can be negotiated by participants in a conversation. It is argued that Grice's Cooperative Principle is valid, but this should be enhanced by participants' specific culture and prior experience. The notion of “face” in politeness models should be expanded in light of its dynamic characteristics in interaction.

This article examines two interrelated issues: (i) how considering generics within their social contexts of use contributes to theories of generics, and (ii) how contemporary work on generics provides promising directions for the study of language as an aspect of social life. Examining the function of generics in meaningful interactions stands in contrast to standard treatments, which consider generics as isolated, context-free propositions. Additionally, recent psychological approaches suggest new questions that can enrich sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological research. These include, for example, when and why generics serve not just negative functions (such as stereotyping) but also positive functions (such as meaning-making), how generics gain their power from what is unstated as opposed to stated, and how generic language distorts academic writing. Ultimately, the study of language in society has the potential to enrich the study of generics beyond what has been learned from their study in linguistics, philosophy, and psychology. (Generics, concepts, categories, stereotyping, induction)*

Advertisements employ multimodal configurations of semiotic resources in an effort to lead consumers to draw particular meanings from desired consumption behaviors. This analysis examines the deployment of such resources in advertising during the global Covid-19 pandemic, focusing on the Southeast Asian nation of Singapore. We identify five discourses that offer distinct framings of Covid-19 as a challenge for workers, a wellness issue, a threat to home and family, a challenge for women, and a threat to the Singapore lifestyle. Undergirded by neoliberal notions such as the productivity imperative, these discourses rationalize a range of consumer behaviors as necessary and justified in the struggle to defeat the virus. Advertisements are argued to place the burden of navigating the pandemic primarily on women via the evocation of power femininity. We propose a new framework, crisis commodification, as a means of understanding the ideological mechanisms at play in Covid-19 advertising. (Critical discourse analysis, crisis commodification, semiotic analysis, advertising, public health, Southeast Asia)*

This article investigates the academic speech of humanities and natural science instructors and students in 32 lectures and interactional classes at a U.S. university. It examines how structural markers, questions, question tags, and turn-initial response tokens contribute to variations of style in response to academic division, context, gender, and communicative role in academic discourse. Data analysis couples qualitative discourse analytic methods with a quantitative sociolinguistic analysis. The quantitative analysis shows the factors of communicative role, academic discipline, and speech mode – not gender – to be the most influential in the use of the structures investigated. It is argued that the lack of significant results for gender arise from global discourse restrictions in academic speech. However, despite the global restrictions shown by quantitative analysis, qualitative analysis suggests that such restrictions can be overridden, especially in contexts of structural breaks and disruptions of information flow, and that features that contribute to more interactional and cooperative speech styles, frequently linked to females, can emerge.

This brief note describes a study of Montréal French presently being conducted by a group based at the Université de Montréal, and directed by Gillian Sankoff and Henrietta Cedergren. A pilot project, carried out during June, July and August of 1970, and made possible by a grant from the Ministère de l'Education (Québec), enabled us to make a series of recordings which were studied in order to identify speech variables, as well as invariant dialect characteristics. In addition, interviewers were trained in eliciting conversation on a number of topics.

Sociolinguists disagree on how to characterize diglossia with respect to the structural relatedness of the H(igh) and L(ow) varieties: Ferguson 1959, 1991 holds that H and L should be distinct but related varieties of language, while others maintain that a continuum model is more appropriate. Both discrete models (Gair 1968, 1992) and continuum models (De Silva 1974, 1979) have been proposed for Sinhala, as spoken in Sri Lanka. In this article, I employ a computer-generated multidimensional graph of relations between varieties of Sinhala to show that the distribution of H and L grammatical features in a sample of naturally occurring texts supports the discrete H and L model more than the continuum model. A rigorous characterization of diglossia as a distinct type of language situation is proposed, based on the notion “functional diasystem.” (Diglossia, Sinhala, Sri Lanka, diasystem, hybridization, continuum, South Asia, standardization)

This study investigates children's real time incrementation of language change as it is impacted by community-wide patterns of linguistic variability. The investigation combines apparent time analyses across an age-stratified sample of adult speakers, with real time analyses across a panel of speakers spanning childhood to adolescence. Three variables are analysed: GOOSE-fronting, a socially unmarked change; TH-fronting, a socially stigmatised, rapidly expanding change; and T-glottaling, a socially stigmatised, steadily shifting change. Variables are selected based on their social and generational profiles which present learners with more or less challenging community patterns to extract. Real time analyses confirm that community variance impacts on speakers’ ability to increment change in real time. Findings provide support for the momentum-based model of language change and builds on Labov's (2012:267) theory of the ‘outward orientation’ of children, which views learners as capable of extracting age vectors from generational differences. (Language change, incrementation, real time, GOOSE-fronting, TH-fronting, T-glottaling)*