The structure of speaker–auditor interaction during speaking turns was explored, using detailed transcriptions of language, paralanguage, and body-motion behaviors displayed by both participants in dyadic, face-to-face conversations. On the basis of certain observed regularities in these behaviors, three signals were hypothesized: (a) a speaker within-turn signal, (b) an auditor back-channel signal, and (c) a speaker continuation signal. These signals were composed of various behaviors in language and in body motion. It was further hypothesized that the display of appropriate ordered sequences of these signals by both participants, served to mark ‘units of interaction’ during speaking turns. (Conversational analysis; speaking turns; back-channel behaviors; interrelations of verbal and nonverbal behavior; American English (Chicago)).

The sociolinguistic survey of Cayo District, British Honduras is here further reported upon (cf. LinS i. 155–72 (1972)). We are concerned with acquisition of language habits in a situation in which the child' verbal behaviour reflects its search for identity and social role. For 280 children, the incidence of five linguistic features in from three to five sections of an interview has been calculated. The linguistic profiles of the children were examined by a computer-programmed cluster analysis. In addition, each child' family and each child were interviewed at home, providing socio-economic data. Analysis is incomplete but does suggest an analogue to the child' acts of identity. The paper illustrates a methodological approach that may be useful in other social situations. (Sociolinguistic identity, multilingualism, creole languages, sociolinguistic survey, cluster analysis, British Honduras.)

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, the author wishes to suggest an evolutionary typology of languages (early modern, modern, contemporary, etc.) and to specify the position of present day Japanese on this evolutionary scale. Secondly, it suggests a way to integrate the concept of linguistic modernization with a theory of language problems, and shows that for modernization at least two types of processes, macro-modernization and micro-modernization, must be distinguished. The former concerns such tasks as the establishment of a modern national language and as far as Japan is concerned this process has been completed. The latter process concerns problems such as the individual's use of language. It still awaits its completion. (Sociolinguistic typology, language evolution, linguistic modernization, Japan.)

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.)

The ecological vocabulary of the Bella Coola, who speak a Salish language of the American Northwest Coast, shows a larger proportion of loanwords than of forms retained from the parent language. Over a period of centuries the Bella Coola were in contact with many non-Salish tribes, but the direction of their borrowing was highly selective. Although their most intimate contacts were with speakers of Athapaskan and Wakashan, the overwhelming proportion of their ecological loans are Wakashan. This selectivity is explained by cultural affinity rather than intimacy of contact. (Language and cultural history, sociolinguistics, lexical borrowing, ecological vocabulary, Northwest Coast, Bella Coola Indians.)

Metaphorical statements about speech are shown to embody implicitly certain indigenously named semantic dimensions. Hayas use these dimensions to conceive of and evaluate their own speech behavior. The dimensions are specified first through indigenous literal statements about speech, then through one-word metaphors applied to speech, and finally through ten proverbs about speech interactions that link metaphorically a named category of speech act with the alimentary act of expelling a flatus. (Metaphor, humor, componential analysis, folklore, proverbs, speech acts, ethnography of communication.)

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.)

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.)

Sociolinguists have not much attended to participants' terminology for events. For this, the usual ethnosemantic focus on relationships of inclusion within a taxonomic structure is insufficient. Stage-process relationships and case-grammar notions of agent, object, instrument and result are used to account for the conceptual structure encoded in a set of addict's argot terms. It is suggested that the addict's argot functions as a needed, standardized terminology, not just for concealment. (Ethnosemantics, cognitive anthropology, case grammar, generative semantics, argots.)