The notion of Turn-Constructional Unit (TCU) in Conversation Analysis has become unclear for many researchers. The underlying problems inherent in the definition of this notion are here identified, and a possible solution is suggested. This amounts to separating more clearly the notions of TCU and Transition Relevance Place (TRP). In this view, the TCU is defined as the smallest interactionally relevant complete linguistic unit, in a given context, that is constructed with syntactic and prosodic resources within their semantic, pragmatic, activity-type-specific, and sequential conversational context. It ends in a TRP unless particular linguistic and interactional resources are used to project and postpone the TRP to the end of a larger multi-unit turn. This suggestion tries to spell out some of the assumptions that the seminal work in CA made in principle, but never formulated explicitly.

This study investigates the evidence of Australian Aboriginal witnesses in a New South Wales country courthouse, focusing on how and why witnesses are silenced in examination-in-chief, both by their own lawyer and by the judge. The analysis questions the assumption in previous sociolinguistic research that the syntactic form of questions is inherently related to the way in which power is exercised in court. Further, the article highlights how witness silencing in these cases appears to occur particularly in situations where legal professionals are seriously ignorant about fundamental aspects of the everyday cultural values and practices of Aboriginal people. Sociolinguistic microanalysis gives a glimpse of one aspect of the process by which the powerlessness and domination of Aboriginal people is perpetuated through the legal system.

Despite extensive research over the past four decades, a number of issues concerning the historical and current development of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) remain unresolved. This study utilizes a unique sociolinguistic situation – a long-standing, isolated, biracial community situated in a distinctive dialect region of coastal North Carolina – to address questions of localized dialect accommodation and ethnolinguistic distinctiveness in earlier African American English. A comparison of diagnostic phonological and morphosyntactic variables for a sample of four different generations of African Americans and a baseline European American group shows that considerable accommodation of the localized dialect occurred in earlier African American speech. Nonetheless, certain dialect features – e.g., copula absence and 3rd person verbal s marking – were distinctively maintained by African Americans in the face of localized dialect accommodation; and this suggests long-term ethnolinguistic distinctiveness. Cross-generational change among African Americans indicates that younger speakers are moving away from the localized Pamlico Sound dialect toward a more generalized AAVE norm. Contact-based and identity-based explanations are offered for the current trend of localized dialect displacement.

This article provides an empirically grounded account of what happens when more persons than one talk at once in conversation. It undertakes to specify when such occurrences are problematic for the participants, and for the organization of interaction; what the features of such overlapping talk are; and what constraints an account of overlapping talk should meet. It describes the practices employed by participants to deal with such simultaneous talk, and how they form an organization of practices which is related to the turn-taking organization previously described by Sacks et al. 1974. This “overlap resolution device” constitutes a previously unexplicated component of that turn-taking organization, and one that provides solutions to underspecified features of the previous account.

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.

Upon engaging in a speech event, participants mutually try to create the most appropriate speech register for that occasion. Special formality-marking particles, pronominals, names, kin terms, titles, and pragmatic particles are some linguistic signs that are available for Thai speakers for this purpose. Through varied frequencies and combinations of different signs, various shades of speech register are created. The type and quality of speech register are largely predictable when the participants are familiar with the speech situation because of their past interactional history, or with the protocol required for a particular type of interaction. However, when the participants are thrown into an unfamiliar situation with strangers, they must find a middle ground in their register and adjust their speech behavior to achieve a balanced speech interaction. In this essay, we analyze four different conversations, both quantitatively and qualitatively, in order to observe how speech register is created in different types of interaction, thereby going beyond simple taxonomic description of sociolinguistic signs.

Since the 1970s, it has been assumed that the diverse languages of plantation laborers in Hawai‘i had little effect on the development of Hawai‘i Creole English (HCE); this view supported theories that emphasize the role of innate linguistic universals in creolization. But recent research has revealed (a) widespread bilingualism among locally born children of laborers before HCE emerged, and (b) the dominance of two ethnic groups at the time – the Chinese and Portuguese. This article re-examines the issue of substrate influence in HCE by concentrating on these two groups. Socio-historical and linguistic evidence is presented to show the likelihood that the Cantonese and Portuguese substrates reinforced and expanded various features of existing pidgins that had diffused to Hawai‘i. Portuguese also appears to be the origin of several key features of HCE which differ from those of other creoles. The implications of these findings for universalist theories of creole genesis are discussed.

Some of the recent work in the field of media discourse has been concerned with various levels in the organization and structure of audience participation programs on radio and television; other approaches to the analysis of talk in these settings have focused on the interactional frameworks at play in the talk. The aim of this article is to develop the interactional approach by looking at the production of narratives in a mediated context: specifically, the production of a story from two different, and conflicting, points of view. The stories I analyze occur within two different program genres (talk show and television court) where lay members of the public are often called upon to produce accounts of events which are then contested by another participant. This article discusses the significance of tense shifting in these second versions, from narrative past to conversational historic present, in the public construction of believable alternative stories.

Stories provide rich environments for understanding how invitations to action, and responses to them, are delicately managed and consequential for shaping just how “the story” evolves as a form of social organization. The present analysis focuses on seventeen invited collaborations, as “Two guys” co-author gossip about an absent woman, and on the distinct interactional dilemmas that arise as morally indignant references are occasioned, initially avoided, and yet gradually pursued as resources for escalating affiliation and intimacy. At noticeably risky moments, as the story gets reconfigured – from a reporting about “last night,” to sexualized fantasy enacted through stereotypic portrayals of uneducated Southern males – speakers' intoned and animated voices are revealed as methodically deployed, prosodically constructed, and increasingly choral practices for shaping story trajectories: artfully crafted resources for contextualizing and negotiating concerted actions in ordinary conversation. The analysis concludes by addressing the question: Are these gossiping actions “sexist”?

The ethnolinguistic terms in which the children of Dominican immigrants in Rhode Island think of themselves, i.e. as “Spanish” or “Hispanic,” are frequently at odds with the phenotype-based racial terms “Black” or “African American,” applied to them by others in the United States. Spanish language is central to resisting such phenotype-racial categorization, which denies Dominican Americans their Hispanic ethnicity. Through discourse analysis of naturally occurring peer interaction at a high school, this article shows how a Dominican American who is phenotypically indistinguishable from African Americans uses language, in both intra- and inter-ethnic contexts, to negotiate identity and resist ascription to totalizing phenotype-racial categories. In using language to resist such hegemonic social categorization, the Dominican second generation is contributing to the transformation of existing social categories and the constitution of new ones in the US.

In this “idiosyncratic personal essay,” Haiman applies his formidable erudition and powers of social observation to questions that North American linguists in general are, unfortunately, content to ignore: the evolutionary origins and historical development of metalanguage, i.e. the property of language that allows us to say “that which is not,” including something other than what we “really” mean. The interdisciplinary nature of this project – engaging evolutionary biology, anthropology, and psychology, in addition to virtually all the traditional subfields of formal/theoretical linguistics – makes it an especially pioneering work, and represents a theoretical overture which, I hope, other linguists and social scientists of all stripes will follow up.

Creole identity in Louisiana acquired diverse meanings for several ethnic groups during the French and Spanish regimes, before and after the purchase of the Louisiana Territory, and through the last part of the 20th century. In spite of a strong shift toward “Black” identity by many African Americans in the state, those who are fluent Creole French speakers now seem to be the repository of Louisiana Creole identity. This article presents a diachronic study of the different meanings applied to Creole identity which resulted from dramatic social, political, and economic changes. It also delimits and defines the actual attributes of Creole identity within two representative African American communities. Because of the historical and political conditions underlying Creole identity, African Americans who still identify as Creoles insist on linguistic attributes, rather than on the criterion of race, as essential characteristics of their ethnic identity.

As noted in this volume's Introduction by two of the editors, Jennifer Dickinson and Mandana Limbert, their collection displays work by students, alumni, and faculty of the University of Michigan Linguistic Anthropology Program, founded in 1991. The program's nature and development is evident in the coherence of the contents of the book, which consistently address the nature of the connections of immediate, ethnographically detailed (micro-level) deployment of linguistic form with the (macro-level) processes, institutions, and structures that frame such deployment as linguistic action. The essays generally fall into three categories: those focusing on a single speech event, those dealing with linguistic ideology, and those examining the ways in which language structure influences the form taken by social action. All these are framed by contemporary work on participation frameworks, on contextual structure and process, on dialogic emergence of meaning, on indexicality, and on linguistic ideology as cultural process played out in linguistic action. Stressing the emergent nature of structures and the continual, complex processes of indexical creativity, the authors develop in various and connected ways the linguistic ecology frame, as initiated by Einar Haugen and developed in much contemporary work in linguistic anthropology.

This volume encompasses work by researchers from three distinct but related areas of inquiry: functional linguistics, linguistic anthropology, and conversation analysis. Edited collections sometimes strain to provide a unifying theme connecting diverse contributions into a coherent whole. Happily, the editors and contributors to Interaction and grammar (the list of authors is impressive) have to a large extent solved this problem; and in the process, they have provided an important contribution that should have major impact in all three areas.

Somewhere sociolinguistics must be flourishing. Here we have the second edition of a volume that first appeared in 1984, and the third edition of one that was first published in 1986. It is not as though there are no competing works in print. Hudson 1996 is a revision of a 1980 work, while Trudgill 1995 is the third version of a work that first appeared in 1974. Still in their first manifestation are Holmes 1992 and Romaine 1994. Clearly, there must be a market for these works, since altruism is hardly a common feature of the modern publishing world.

In the mid-1960s, the late sociologist Harvey Sacks initially developed the concept of “membership categorization devices” as a means of analyzing how people identify, describe, and refer to one another. In his now canonical treatment of a child's story, “The baby cried. The mommy picked it up,” Sacks (1972) explored the possibilities for formal analyses of references to and descriptions of persons, as implemented in written texts and talk-in-interaction.

The past decade has seen a healthy increase in the number of studies in the areas constituting language contact research. Prominent among these have been investigations into grammatical aspects of “code-switching,” often covering pairs of languages not previously investigated. Many of the chapters in the book under review are based on papers read at a conference in Bielefeld, Germany, in 1994. While this gives the papers coherence, it means that some of the points made have already been left behind in later publications by the same and other authors.

Linell argues that dialogism is the crucial path to theorizing and understanding discourse, cognition, and communication – particularly the study of conversation and other kinds of talk-in-interaction. One of the goals of his book is to develop an “empirically valid form of dialogism,” as opposed to an idealistic one, through the empirical investigation of communication. Linell develops a theory of “communicative projects,” a notion which incorporates aspects of individual agency as well as the idea of talk as emergent, collaborative work by co-present individuals. The notion of “communicative projects” is meant as a bridge across the oft-cited polarity between “micro” and “macro” – or as Linell formulates it, between “elementary contributions and local sequences on the one hand, and the global and more abstract notions of activity types and communicative genres.”

Designing for the first time an undergraduate Cross-Cultural Communication course for a liberal arts college, I was faced with the quandary of how to communicate to my students all that I wanted to teach them about face, politeness, power, communicative style, and discourse – without having to ask them to purchase a very expensive packet of readings. It seems that academic providence took care of me, because at that point the Scollons' book was published. Since then I have used it with great success in my class, which serves students across the spectrum of disciplines.

As a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania in the 1970s, I took what everyone called the “Grandfathers” course, which provided an overview of the field through the work of individual scholars (Dell Hymes was the professor). It had a more proper title we all ignored, probably “History of linguistics.” Now, The early days of sociolinguistics provides an updated and more complete version of that course, except that it emphasizes sociolinguistics rather than all of linguistics; it presents substantial information about the development of the field, as seen through the eyes of one scholar after another. As we enter the new millennium, the discussion appropriately now includes “grandmothers” as well as “grandfathers.” This has the flavor of salvage linguistics: get the elders to report what they know before they die (or forget), in order to preserve the details for future generations. This goal is perhaps most obviously visible in the selection by Charles Ferguson. It is not a piece he actually contributed; rather, it is constructed from interviews conducted by his friends, colleagues, and students during his recuperation from a series of severe strokes (77). Given the centrality of Ferguson in the history of sociolinguistics – he is “identified by a majority of the contributors as the principal architect for the field” (321) – his inability to write his own summary of events justifies the remainder of the individual histories.