Discourse markers (like, I don't know, etc.) are known to vary in frequency across English dialects and speech settings. It is difficult to make meaningful generalizations over these differences, since quantitative discourse-pragmatic variation studies ‘lack [a] coherent set of methodological principles’ (Pichler 2010:582). This has often constrained quantitative studies to focus on the form, rather than the function of discourse-pragmatic features. The current article employs a novel method for rigorously identifying and quantifying the referential function (set-extension) of general extenders (GEs), for example, and stuff like that, or whatever. We apply this method to GEs extracted from three corpora of contemporary North American English speech. The results demonstrate that, across varieties, (i) referential GEs occur at a comparable proportional rate in vernacular speech, and (ii) referential GEs are longer than nonreferential GEs. Collectively, these findings represent a step towards comparative quantitative studies of GEs' functions in discourse. (Discourse-pragmatic variation, general extenders, methodological approaches, American English, Canadian English)

This article examines the discourse about race and racism that ensued in the US media after the shooting death of an African American youth, Trayvon Martin, by a neighborhood watch volunteer, George Zimmerman, in February 2012. The analysis examines news programs from the three major cable television channels in the United States: CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC. The theoretical framework builds upon Hill's (2008) discussion of the ‘folk theory of race and racism’ in contrast to critical race theory, and asks, to what extent does the mainstream media's discourse about race remain embedded in folk ideas and to what extent (if at all) does the conversation move beyond those ideas? The paper aims to unpack the ideologies of race and language that underpin talk about race and racism in an effort to expose the hidden assumptions in the discourse that hinder more productive dialogue on the topic. (Critical race theory, folk theory of race and racism, George Zimmerman, ideology, language ideology, media discourse, race, race talk, racism, slurs, Trayvon Martin)*

We analyze how France-based YouTube comedic performers Ro et Cut enact the stylized figure of a Portuguese migrant in France, Antonio, in their most popular video, Carglouch. We then examine how commenters respond to the enactment. Specifically, we apply Irvine and Gal's notion of semiotic differentiation to study how participants use language to construct and apply polycentric notions of modernity/nonmodernity. This allows us to analyze how YouTube performers and commenters produce their own and Antonio's relative (non)modernity, as they orient to different versions of a modern/nonmodern axis of differentiation, situated in multiple ‘centers’: France, Portugal, or Europe. That is, participants either interpret Antonio as a nonmodern immigrant in France, a nonmodern emigrant from Portugal, or an international representative of Portugal, spreading nonmodern images of Portugal abroad. We then consider how participants bring these differently centered images of the nonmodern Other into dialogue with each Other, with different outcomes for variously positioned participants. (Migration, heteroglossia, YouTube, transnationalism, Luso-descendants, (non)modernity, France, Portugal)*

This article analyses the ways in which stand-up comedy has been taken up by French comics of North and sub-Saharan African origins as a space of visibility and hearability. Following Bakhtin (1986), who argues that a genre reflects the social changes taking place in a society, I argue that such an appropriation should be considered as an important sociolinguistic fact that gives us privileged access to Hexagonal France's contemporary sociopolitical dynamics. I show that through their display of heteroglossic repertoires (viz. Maghrebi Arabic, several varieties of vernacular French, Hexagonal standard French, mesolectal African French, stylized chunks of English) comics challenge, at least symbolically, France's monoglot and highly centralized linguistic ideology. They also contribute to unsettling France's Republican model, which is marked by the institutional denial of the social and cultural diversity of the French population. The comics use heteroglossic resources to align with and disalign from multiple chronotopes associated with different social personae. From this emerges a new identity, urban, which both encompasses and transcends racial and ethnic categories. By contrast, I show that this identity is constructed through and received by the nonratified audience with ambivalence. (France, stand-up comedy, genre, urban, identity, chronotope, intertextuality.)*

Haas's (1944) typology of nonreferential gender indexicality attested three basic varieties: speaker indexing, addressee indexing, and ‘mixed’ (or relational) speaker-addressee gender indexing. In an earlier publication in Language in Society this author adopted the same framework for the treatment of a large sample of cases of categorical gender indexicality. However, subsequent review of cases where gender indexicality seemingly interacts with sex-based semantic gender suggests that Haas' typology is incomplete. A relational speaker-referent indexing type is proposed. Focusing on gender indexicality in Chiquitano (Bolivia) and Yanyuwa (Australia), the author argues that these cases have been erroneously treated as systems in which speaker gender is indexed in the denotation of referent gender. It is shown that a more parsimonious analysis can account for these cases by means of a single purely pragmatic gender feature distributed over a relational speaker-referent indexical focus. (Gender, indexicality, deixis)*