Norman Fairclough,Analyzing discourse: Textual analysis for social research. London: Routledge, 2003. Pp. vii + 270. Hb $135.00, Pb $31.95.

This latest book by Norman Fairclough is an extension of his earlier work on critical discourse analysis (CDA) (e.g., Fairclough 1989, 1995, 2001). Relying on systemic functional linguistics (SFL) as his linguistic theoretical standpoint on one hand, and on social theoretical themes presented by critical theorists like Bourdieu and Habermas on the other, the author attempts to present a detailed framework of linguistic analysis that links the “micro” analysis of texts to the “macro” analysis of social relations (p. 16). In his introductory chapter, Fairclough specifies two types of audience for the book who may find this framework relevant to their own research: students and researchers in social sciences and humanities with little or no knowledge of language analysis, and those specializing in language studies.

This article explores the semiotic spaces occupied by organizations working against discrimination in Sweden. Expressions of identity, norm critique, and political goals are studied in relation to word production and language policy and planning. The study departs from interviews with representatives from three organizations within the hbtqi, antiracist, and disability movements. Other resources connected to them have also been analyzed, such as glossaries. Theoretically, this study draws on Yuri Lotman's concept of semiospheres, allowing the analysis to weigh in the whole semiotic process, including meaning production, policy work, and concrete word production. This approach completes an analysis of indexical orders. The results show that (a) organizations are aware of the importance of linguistic choices, (b) when new concepts and words are spread to the public, tension can arise and sometimes objections, and (c) word meanings change when used in public discourse. (Language policy and planning, semiosphere, indexical order, hbtqi, antiracism, disability, discrimination)

Recent studies documenting minority linguistic space in urban settings have focused on cities' linguistic landscapes, and external signage is often taken to index linguistic practices within businesses, government offices, and other establishments. To shed light on linguistic practices in culturally significant spaces of this sort, it is helpful to consider social actors' discursive construction of the spaces themselves. This article describes discourses of minority francophone space elicited from members and associates of Moncton, New Brunswick's Centre culturel Aberdeen. The data are analyzed according to Lefebvre's (1974/1991) conceived, perceived, and lived spaces and Heller & Labrie's (2004) modernizing and globalizing discourses. The present findings demonstrate that, while Aberdeen's conceived space is francophone, other languages are spoken in Aberdeen's perceived space. Participants also describe Aberdeen's lived space as bilingual, mediating between anglophones and francophones. These discourses, coupled with changes in the Centre's charter, suggest an emergent, plural conception of minority francophone space. (Francophone, minority, Canada, Acadian, discourse, social space)*

In this study, two groups of students were asked to listen to recordings made of Senegalese Wolof speakers and make deductions about their social and caste status. The responses of the first group, made up of Senegalese students, did not go beyond the threshold of chance with regard to caste status, but were 65.7% correct regarding the speakers' social status. The second group, who were European students with no prior knowledge of the Wolof language, achieved percentages of correct answers similar to those of the Senegalese listeners with regard to social status. The imposed norm hypothesis, which predicts that sociolinguistic features cannot be gauged by those who have had no previous contact with the community, should thus be reconsidered and enlarge its scope to include a more general, and therefore nuanced, view of language. (Imposed norm hypothesis, inherent value hypothesis, social stratification of language, social identification, Wolof, Senegal, castes)*

Previous work has shown that stance—the way speakers position themselves with respect to what they are talking about and who they are talking to—provides powerful insights into why speakers choose certain linguistic variants, beyond correlations with macro-social categories such as gender, ethnicity, and social class. However, as stancetaking moves are highly context-dependent, they have rarely been explored quantitatively, making the observed variable patterns difficult to generalize. This article seeks to contribute to this methodological gap by proposing a formal guide to coding stance and demonstrating how it can be operationalized quantitatively. Drawing on a corpus of eight individuals, self-recorded in three situations with varying levels of social distance, we apply this method to variation between English complementizers that and zero (i.e. no overt complementizer), providing a replicable and theoretically grounded protocol that incorporates both quantitative and qualitative analyses in a variationist sociolinguistic study. (Stance, complementizers, that, English)*

agency, bricolage, deconstructionism, demystification, demythologization, difference, discursively constructed subject positions, duality of structure, essentialism, anti-essentialism, hybridity, ideology, intertextuality

What do these terms from the discipline of cultural studies mean? Do they have any relevance to the study of language and identity? If these are questions you have found yourself pondering, then Cultural studies and discourse analysis (CSDA) is a book you should read. This work is a productive collaboration between a cultural studies scholar (Barker) and a critical discourse analyst (Galasinski) who hope to “forge a useful interdisciplinary dialogue” (1). Although their book is written with the specific aim of showing cultural studies (CS) scholars how critical discourse analysis (CDA) can be used as an analytical tool in investigating identities, for sociolinguists it is also a good introduction to the way identity is theorized in CS. The identities analyzed in the data-based chapters are masculinity (chap. 4), ethnicity and nationality (chap. 5), and masculinity together with ethnicity (chap. 6).

This article explores the shift to non-rhoticity in Oldham (UK), using oral history interviews recorded in the 1980s, with speakers born between 1893 and 1929. We first account for the linguistic constraints on /r/ use and explore macro-level social patterns, where the women were more advanced in the change. We investigate this finding further using a modified version of the lectal focusing in interaction method (Sharma & Rampton 2015), tracking two speakers’ variation through the course of an interaction, and providing insight into the social meaning of rhoticity for these speakers. We suggest that, for them, rhoticity may be ideologically linked to tradition and older ways of life, and non-rhoticity may be ideologically linked to modernity and mobility, and the gender split may partly reflect the men and women's differing orientations to these concepts. We also evaluate the effectiveness of applying modern methods, such as LFI analysis, to archival data. (Rhoticity, social meaning, language variation and change, gender, sociophonetics)*

The first quotation on the back cover of this book begins, “This long-awaited volume demonstrates that Eckert is the sociolinguist.” Some people have expressed the view that this is an unusually strong statement. Since I wrote it myself, I am faced with the clear choice in this review of defending it or apologizing for it.

This paper describes some cases of inter- and intra-informant variability which cannot be explained in terms of social and contextual factors, and which do not seem to require probabilistic models to account for them. Analysis of several Zinacanteco speech taxonomies suggests that what are called variant responses are often only incomplete responses, and that if the cognitive system is represented as a taxonomy, then it is a taxonomy which is made up of a number of partial taxonomies, each of which is produced by a different informant or group of informants or by the same informant on different occasions. A frequently used method of ‘controlled eliciting’ is shown to be inherently incapable of guaranteeing the elicitation of complete taxonomies in every interview. For this reason, it is urged that before constructing a model of a cognitive system it is first necessary to establish what is ‘real’ cognitive variation by recognizing and eliminating that variation which results from methodological indeterminacy. (Ethnoscience, cognition, variability, methodology, controlled eliciting, folk taxonomy, speech, Maya languages.)

Marbles games (“pitch”), perhaps the most widely played of all traditional boys' games in Trinidad and Tobago, have declined precipitously in the last two decades. This article documents close to 200 marbles terms found in Trinidad and Tobago English Creole. Although most are British in origin, there are East Indian, French Creole, and possible African influences on this lexicon. An analysis of the discourse of marbles talk in its sociocultural context was prompted by its high affect for men who had played pitch as boys. Using frameworks from the sociology of games and from studies in language and gender, marbles talk is shown to demonstrate features of ”masculine“ gender-linked use of language and games, including highly elaborated rules and strategies, and competitive and confrontational use of language. (Caribbean, change, Creole, discourse, games, gender, marbles, obsolescence)

This article examines how the political manipulation of Covid-19 statistics was opposed in 2020. It does this by studying in detail the language used in a public exchange of letters in the UK. The exchange was between the chair of the United Kingdom Statistics Authority (UKSA), a statutory body to prevent statistical malpractice, and the Minister of Health, who had been manipulating Covid statistics. The exchange reflects the greater power of the government minister. Initially, the UKSA chair used diplomatic language, marked by paratactic constructions, unspecified arguments, and impersonal structures that did not threaten the minister's face. The minister ignored these and the UKSA chair had to go beyond diplomatic language by re-specifying his arguments and upgrading his critical terminology. Only by catching the press's attention did the chair succeed in making the minister rectify, at least partially, the manipulated statistics. Implications for understanding today's political values are discussed. (Opposing statistical manipulation, manipulating Covid statistics, diplomatic language, parataxis and hypotaxis)

This article is a case study on how Singaporean intellectuals articulate resistant language ideologies by enregistering the local vernacular, Singlish. The case in point is Gwee Li Sui's 2018 companion Spiaking Singlish, lauded as the first book to be written in Singlish about Singlish. It is argued that in tactically leveraging Singlish in a folk-lexicographical project, Gwee takes the vernacular to the third indexical order; and in so doing, he performs a ludic and extreme form of Singlish through which an everyday tongue turns into a fetish object. Contextualising Gwee's polemics within his tension with the language establishment in Singapore, the article highlights the ethical dilemma implicit in the celebration of languages speaking to an egalitarian ethos, suggesting that in enunciating a vernacular on the order of reflexive performance, intellectuals may inadvertently fashion it into a more elitist language than that which is spoken on the streets. (Singlish, Singapore, enregisterment, performativity, indexicality)

This article demonstrates how mediatization facilitates the (re)production of mock language. Through an examination of Chinese netizens’ reactions to a series of viral internet commercials that feature three Hong Kong actors speaking nonstandard Mandarin, it uncovers the processes whereby Gangpu (Hong Kong Mandarin) has become increasingly perceived in China as funny. The vast scale of uptake formulations enabled by mediatization has made it possible for Chinese netizens to engage in a collaborative effort not only in highlighting certain features of Gangpu and certain elements of the commercials but also in presenting them in ways that evoke specific meanings and interpretations. Ultimately, it is through the parodic revoicing of Hong Kong celebrities speaking nonstandard Mandarin that this non-native variety has come to be keyed as humorous. This study shows that we gain a better understanding of how mock practices reinforce and build on each other by tracing their uptake and circulation. (Mediatization, mock language, parody, listening subject, Mandarin Chinese, Hong Kong, China)*

Bilingual speech takes research on code-mixing a step further toward achieving a better understanding of the differences in what in the past has been referred to simply as the mixing of two languages in the sentence (or intrasentential code-switching). In addition, Muysken presents the state of the discipline of language contact in the year 2000 from the perspective of the grammar and structure of language contact phenomena. He brings together and analyzes an extensive set of language pairs from a wide variety of communities and social contexts. Good familiarity with such varied multilingual data provides the author with a strong base on which to support his three-way classification (insertion, alternation, and congruent lexicalization) of code-mixing phenomena at the sentence level.

This article is an examination of the interaction between evangelists and participants of a demonic deliverance (exorcism) ceremony in a London, UK Pentecostal church. The data is taken from an online recording and transcribed using conversation analysis conventions. A familiar feature of exorcism practice is the initial demand for the demon's identity. This study suggests that the importance of asking this question is due to it being procedurally strategic in modelling a performative path of the deliverance ceremony, which results in ritual efficacy. In particular, it is proposed that the omission of the question asking for the identity of the demon causes the deliverance path to become temporarily disrupted. This disruption is the result of a loss of thematic mapping between adverse life events and the causal agency within this specific sphere of sociocultural activity. (Religion, exorcism, possession, diaspora, spirits)*

An ethnographic approach to language aims at explaining the organization of a verbal culture, understood as the result of speakers' practices and agency. The instrument of this research is fieldwork. For the verbal cultures of bygone societies, only examination of written records helps us to guess how speaking worked at the time. This general issue is addressed by scrutinizing a medieval Catalan chronicle. Ethnographic and pragmatic concepts are projected backward on data informative on face-to-face communication and the interactional construction of a social order. Speakers' rights and obligations, their metalinguistic and metapragmatic management of verbal resources (genres, texts, codeswitching), and the link between linguistic management and ideologies are uncovered. The article focuses on the relationship among evidence, knowledge and reporting of events, and the production and reproduction of authority in Catalan medieval society, as well as the different types of responsibility in discourse and their patterns of social distribution. Concentration is on three types of discourse events: delegated discourse, mediated communication, and a specific type of codeswitching in political oratory, quotation cum auctoritate.The research on which this article is based was funded by the Department of Research, Universities and Information Society, Generalitat de Catalunya, and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology, Research Fund BFF2003-02954. I benefited from a visiting scholar stay at the University of California, Berkeley (spring–summer 2003). I am indebted to two anonymous reviewers who helped to imprive this article. Particular thanks go to Jane McGary, who patiently helped in editing the manuscript and making it a more readable text.