This study examines the use of words per pause (W/P) as a practical means for identifying solidarity in everyday conversation. Eight listeners recorded the narratives of a female and a male, either friends or strangers. Ten speakers were categorized as friends and six as strangers; they talked about a good and a bad experience. Average reliability of coding pauses was .83. The results indicated a statistically significant difference in W/P of speakers who were friends and those who were strangers. Statistical results support the conclusion that friends are more likely to employ many W/P and strangers few W/P. One practical implication of this study is that W/P can be employed by researchers with relative ease and a high degree of reliability for investigations of speaking style in a variety of contexts. A second practical implication is that W/P is a diagnostic device that can serve as a social litmus test in everyday conversation to identify the expression of sympathy and estrangement. (Expressive language, nonverbal communication, paralanguage, pauses, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, solidarity, speech and personality)

Applying the functional approach to language developed by Halliday and Hasan, this study delineates the criterial and characteristic features of language used in 13 peer review letters from a graduate seminar by native speakers of English, with an average length of 300–350 words. Examining discourse goals, global text structure, obligatory and optional elements, sequence and co-occurrence of discourse elements, verb types, modalized directives, and lexical choice, this article demonstrates that peer review texts are shaped by the institutional and situational contexts within which they are embedded, and at the same time contribute to these contexts. (Genre studies, interactive discourse analysis, written communication, systemic linguistics, peer review, classroom discourse)

Generic expressions play a key role in the interactional articulation, social circulation, and temporal reproduction of ideology. Here I examine fragments from a conversation between four middle-class participants which took place at a café in Hanoi. After briefly describing the particular grammatico-textual patterns by which specific and generic references are accomplished in Vietnamese, I turn to consider two extended stretches of talk in which these people weave generic reference into the warp and weft of their interaction. I argue that generic reference is intimately tied to social ontology which consists, in part, of ideas about distinct and essentialized ‘kinds of persons’. Deployed in what appears, on the surface at least, as ordinary, mundane conversation, not only does such generic reference serve to position those referred to as ‘ontological other’ (Wynter 1987), it also constitutes an ‘act of alterity’ (Hastings & Manning 2004) by which the participants tacitly characterize themselves. (Reference, Vietnamese, social ontology, alterity, stereotype, essentialism)*

This study argues for the analytical validity of the chronotope in research on context by examining a conversational narrative between Taiwanese and Taiwanese Americans. It offers an endogenous view of context in the sense that chronotopes are anchored by how participants invoke specific time-space representations relevant to the active shaping of context. Furthermore, it adds a historical dimension to the understanding of context as multi-layered in meaning. In the data, participants’ discussion of Taiwanese loanwords creates three connected chronotopes that draw on Taiwan's transnational history for the narrative co-construction. Finally, the chronotopic analysis demonstrates how identities emerge as time-space coordinates—seventeenth-century Dutch in Taiwan and twenty-first-century Taiwanese in the US—and are used as resources to map a shared background with a Taiwanese origin. The study applies the notion of the chronotope outside of the interview setting and contributes to a more laminated theorization of context in naturally occurring conversation. (Chronotope, context, narrative, historicity, Taiwanese American, identity)*

This article examines semiotic resignifications undertaken in ‘peripheral’ cultural production through an ethnographic analysis of the trajectory of the Amazonian artist, Jaloo. Jaloo occupies multiple positions of marginality in Brazilian society and artistic scenes, which he connects to other global peripheries in his performances, aesthetics, and self-narratives. Building on anthropological and sociolinguistic scholarship, we show how ‘peripheral’ status is managed by Jaloo in the context of a growing and politicised audience for outsider and alternative cultural production. We theorise Jaloo's negotiation of his relationship with audiences and the media as rescaling. Further, we argue that this rescaling entails the ordering of semiotic resources into a social imaginary that reconfigures peripheral territories and identities, which we consider in terms of a transperipheral chronotope. (Inequality, chronotopes, indexicality, race, coloniality, scales, periphery)

American Stuttering English (ASE) speakers (or ‘persons who stutter’ in pathological perspectives) have historically had tense relationships with comedic representations of their speech. Mainstream representations pathologize and ridicule stuttering, rather than appreciate it as a legitimate language variety. These depictions also increase non-ASE speakers' ‘possessive investment’ (Lipsitz 1995) in Standard American Fluent English as the dominant language variety. Recently, some ASE speakers have reinterpreted ASE and comedic portrayals of their speech using stand-up comedy. This article analyzes the comedic work of Rona B, an ASE comedienne. Using data on her YouTube channel, I argue that Rona B draws on her intersectional experiences as a female ASE speaker to construct a voice that critiques both the political agendas of anti-linguistic discrimination, which downplays gender, and of antisexism, which minimizes sociolinguistic differences. This study expands on contemporary calls in sociolinguistics that position intracategorical intersectionality as key for analyzing performances on language variation. (Gender, variation, American Stuttering English, performance, stand-up comedy, language ideologies)*

This article examines struggles related to the recasting of the collective memory connected to Danish colonialism, through analyses of exhibitions in, and communication from, the Danish National Museum. By use of multimodal and semiotic landscape analysis, we show how the Danish National Museum works to reformulate the historical relationship between Greenland and Denmark in ways that avoid the colonizer's language and at the same time describe and construct complex relations of past and present. The analysis demonstrates how a temporal ambiguity is present in the museum exhibitions, not offering a conclusive understanding of the colonial period. At the same time, we show how the presence and absence of colonial language in public space is inscribed into temporal frames legitimizing or problematizing their status. (Semiotic landscape, colonialism, language and nation, temporality)*

Anthropologists have long recognized that Australian aboriginal cultures have a rich repertoire of cognitive achievements, and they have contrasted this richness with the relative impoverishment of their technological repertoire. However, despite the richness of the cognitive repertoire, the anthropological literature contains no overall inventory for any aboriginal cultural group. McKnight's monograph is the first work that covers everything: social structure (including kinship), myth, ritual, dancing, property structure, and biological classification. The quality of the scholarship is very high. At the time of writing, McKnight had worked with the Lardil for 30 years, including 16 field trips, with a total time of residence among the Lardil of more than five years. After completing an MA on West African materials under Darryl Forde, he switched to Australia, where he also worked with the Wik-mungkan and a number of other groups. The present monograph is the first of a projected trilogy; work is under way now on the second volume, a monograph on marriage, sorcery, and violence. In recent years, McKnight has been involved, on behalf of the Lardil, in negotiations with the Australian government for land claims.

This article examines an interactive strategy of invited guessing in Chinese telephone conversations. Oriented toward affect bonding between the participants, invited guessing both indexes and strengthens their relationship. Caller identification, typically perceived as a procedural component in telephone conversation, is shown to be constructed as an interactive process serving social functions as well as a discourse-structural function. Its primary purpose is to signify and enhance rapport-building. The observed interactions present patterns of variation from the proposed universal sequence of telephone conversation openings, suggesting that this discourse structure can respond to variables such as the purpose of the interaction and the relationship between participants in the Chinese context. Finally, invited guessing indicates that relationship constitutes an important cultural variable shaping discourse and interaction in Chinese society.

The Catalogue of Endangered Languages (ELCat) is one of several similar responses to a perceived need for better data on language vitality. My remarks here are framed as a direct reply to Lee & Van Way's article, but really address larger issues in the ongoing debate about a perceived need to classify, inventory, and enumerate endangered languages. Lee & Van Way focus on one aspect of ELCat, the Language Endangerment Index (LEI), discussing a number of shortcomings in other current models. As an instrument for determining the level of language endangerment, the LEI is presented as a preferable alternative to other metrics, including Fishman's (1991) Graded Intergenerational Disruption Scale (GIDS), or EGIDS, the Expanded scale, based on the work of Lewis & Simons (2010), or UNESCO's (2003) expert scale. Lee & Van Way's discussion presupposes that such metrics are needed, and that it is beneficial to have a method for measuring vitality. Specifically, they argue that ‘for those concerned with preserving the world's fragile linguistic diversity, it is desirable to be able to quantify language vitality’. This is the underlying assumption of not only ELCat and LEI, but of other language catalogues, such as the Ethnologue (Lewis, Simons, & Fennig 2015), UNESCO's Atlas (Moseley 2010), and other vitality metrics, as discussed in Lee & Van Way.

Interest in Hugo Schuchardt (1842–1927) has recently grown and broadened. A number of recent studies and collections of his work are reviewed. The conventional historiographical portrait of him shows an isolated, marginal dilettante intransigently opposed to the neogrammarian hypothesis of regular sound change. A closer look shows a large body of important work oriented around themes of language mixture, lexicalism, and the importance of the social matrix of language. His sustained work on these topics as they weave in and out of a selected group of language families, his claims to first or early priority in the wave theory, the continuum hypothesis, the creole origin of Black English, a variety of ethnoscience research, and other aspects of sociolinguistics make him a commanding figure in the history of modern linguistics. A reappraisal is called for; resources for it are noted.

Analysis of the vowel/consonant patterns in a world sample of folk songs indicates that some speech sounds vary regularly with certain aspects of social structure. Consonant frequencies shift in relation to technological level: mid stops, fricatives and laterals increase in relative frequency along a scale of productive range. Alteration in the vowel map, on the other hand, seems to be related to cross-cultural differences in sex role. Thus changes in phonology, familiar to the linguist, may be symbolic of and explained by familiar societal phenomena. These suppositions are, it is true, based on the analysis of sung languages and remain to be confirmed for speech. However, the power of expressive style as a general diagnostic of the layout of culture implies that they will be so confirmed, since expressive patterns often turn out to be a sort of heightened and extra-redundant version of everyday behavior. Moreover, collections of recorded song performances provide a world-wide resource of ‘unselfconscious’ and culturally validated language data that is simply unavailable for other kinds of speech activity. (Phonology; variation; expressive (stylistic) function; song style; mode of production and se role; cross-cultural sample.)

Bloom (1981, 1984) linked the existence of specific grammatical constructions – for example, the counterfactual conditional in English – to the development of a labeled cognitive schema specific to counterfactual thought. He claimed that because the Chinese language lacks an equivalent grammatical marker, Chinese speakers do not develop the corresponding cognitive schema and thus process counterfactuals “less naturally” (1981:22) than English speakers. Whereas attempts to replicate Bloom (Au 1983, 1984; Liu 1985) questioned the extent to which such differences exist, this article demonstrates that where differences in counterfactual response patterns clearly do exist, they cannot be attributed to the presence/absence of a linguistic “counterfactual” construction.

Stylistic analysis takes account of the dynamic continuities in communication behavior. It is concerned with how people talk or sing or move in relation to each other, rather than what it is they say or sing or do to or with each other. The presence of these styling qualities can, we discover, be reliably assessed; and, as they cluster together, giving each cultural tradition its distinctive performance models, they have remarkable stability through time. However, these patterns of style are not inflexible: they are models comprising a stable set of ranges within which performers can adjust their behavior to the demands of a genre, of a familiar situation, of sex, age or status roles, and to the unexpected. The comparison of these performance models, cross-culturally, reveals factors that tie communication to social structure on the one hand and to cultural traditions on the other.