Stories of personal experience have been a staple of research on narrative, while stories of vicarious experience have remained largely ignored, though they offer special insights into issues of epistemic authority, telling rights, and evaluation. This article seeks to show that stories of vicarious experience can fulfill the same functions as stories of personal experience in conversation, illustrating a point in an argument, sharing news, and for their entertainment value. Discrepancies between stories of vicarious experience and stories of personal experience follow from the distinction between third person and first person narrative along with corresponding differences in their participation frameworks in the sense of Goffman (1981): conversationalists cannot deploy third person stories of vicarious experience in functions such as mutual self-disclosure or to display resistance to troubles; conversely, stories of vicarious experience offer greater opportunities for co-narration. (Epistemic authority, evaluation, identity, narrative, participation frameworks, telling rights, vicarious experience)

The most uniform and characteristic variety of Black English is the grammar used by members of the vernacular culture in pre-adolescent and adolescent years: the ‘Black English Vernacular’. Less regular varieties which show the influence of other dialects, are used by isolated individuals within the community (‘lames’) who are less familiar with vernacular norms. Rules that are categorical for the vernacular are often variable for lames. Within the vernacular peer groups, core members show the most regular or frequent use of characteristic rules such as the deletion of is. Since most linguists grow up relatively isolated individuals within their own communities, it is important that they become aware of the linguistic consequences of being lame, and apply this knowledge in their methodology.

Who's the lame who says he knows the game

And where did he learn to play?

– The Fall

Every language has its own key words, which reflect the core values of the culture. Consequently, cultures can be revealingly studied, compared, and explained to outsiders through their key words. But to be able to study, compare, and explain cultures in terms of their key words, we need a culture-independent analytical framework. A framework of this kind is provided by the natural semantic metalanguage developed by the author and colleagues over the last two decades. In the present article, the author explores and analyzes six Japanese concepts widely regarded as being almost more that any others culture-specific and culturally revealing – amae, enryo, wa, on, giri, and seishin – and shows how the use of the natural semantic metalanguage (based on universal semantic primitives) helps to make these concepts clear and how it facilitates better insight into Japanese culture and society (Japanese language, Japanese culture, cross-cultural semantics, key words, core values)

Simultaneous speech is neither necessary nor sufficient for the recognition of “interruption” by interlocutors. A peaker's “completion right” is vitiated by how long she has been speaking, how often she has spoken, the number of “points” made in a speaking turn, and the special rights of some speakers to speak about some topics. There are no absolute syntactical or acoustical criteria for recognizing an occurrence of “interruption” available either to those involved in a speech event nor to analysts. (Turn taking, California English conversation)

This article argues that certain aspects of language use may be more resistant to change than is language code. In communities undergoing language shift, researchers have noted ways in which indigenous patterns of interaction may be retained after the language used has shifted to English. It is argued that aspects of a speech community's interaction that are most tacit are also the most resistant to change, and are maintained through mundane routines and forms of everyday interaction. Such contexts for language use typically are the focus in studies of language socialization, which bring the theoretical perspectives of both practice theory and Bakhtinian dialogicality to bear on the question of how interactional and linguistic routines are maintained and transmitted across generations. Analysis here focuses on one particular interactional routine: the giving of directives involving a triadic participation structure, between caregivers and children in a Navajo community.

Despite the relevance of language use in expert testimony, researchers have rarely scrutinized the linguistic and interactional processes of constructing an expert identity. This study, rather than reifying the concept of expert and leaving it as an unproblematic legal argument, examines how this institutional identity emerges in and through discursive interaction between the prosecuting attorney and a physician (who is also the defendant) in trial cross-examination. Using Goffman's notion of footing, the article examines how both prosecutor and defendant mobilize direct and indirect quotes, repetitive parallelism, epistemic modality, counterfactuals, evidentiality, sequencing, and specialized tokens of the medical register to contextualize shifting into and departing from an expert identity. I would like to thank the Office of Social Science Research at the University of Illinois at Chicago for financial help. Don Lance (as always) and Richard Cameron provided detailed comments and guidance throughout the course of writing. Thanks are due to Wayne Kerstetter, Mike Maltz, Pat McAnany, Joe Peterson, and Sarah Ullman for comments at an early presentation. Finally, I deeply appreciate the very detailed comments of Elizabeth Mertz and W. M. O'Barr, which I have tried to incorporate as much as possible.

The search for explanatory coherence in language and gender research has fostered a variety of research methods and analyses; this article evaluates the contributions of the Communities of Practice approach, with its focus on the constructive practices of a group – especially mutual engagement of learning a jointly negotiated practice of gender. Rather than presupposing gender differences as a starting point, CofP emphasizes the learning and mutability in gendered linguistic displays across groups; CofP theory thus naturalizes intragroup variation, not marking it as deviant. However, while the CofP approach focuses much-needed attention on the social construction of gender as local and cross-culturally variable, gender research must be augmented by critical study of two other facets of gender: ideology and innateness, which are critical components of a more comprehensive theory of gender for language research. I would like to give thanks to Janet Holmes for organizing the original forum in which the paper developed, and for her very helpful comments; to Sally McConnell-Ginet and Penny Eckert for their sustained support, through their work, of me and others in the field; and to all three of them – plus Alice Freed, Miriam Meyerhoff, and Susan Ehrlich – for stimulating comments and discussion of these issues. Thanks also go to Mary Talbot and Craig Waddell for comments on an earlier draft. All errors remain my own responsibility.

The study of dialect distribution has generally focused on the performance of speakers rather than on their perception of speech variation. The exceptions in so-called attitude studies do not further our understanding of where ordinary speakers believe dialect boundaries exist. Hand-drawn maps from five areas (Hawaii, southeastern Michigan, southern Indiana, western New York, and New York City) are converted into generalized maps of local perceptions of dialect areas of the United States. The maps are compared with one another, with traditional maps of U.S.dialect areas, and with maps of cultural and regional zones of the United States. The maps are shown to be of value in calculating attitudinal factors and may be of considerable importance in determining the existence and scope of such notions as “speech community.” (Dialect geography, language standards, American speech, language attitudes)

In a study of dyadic conversations between four female and four male pairs of friends, the use of the phrase you know and questions are examined within three types of discourse. Women and men are found to use these features with equal frequency; and all speakers, regardless of sex or gender, use them in comparable ways. Although these particular discourse features have been previously associated with a female speech style, the results of this study show that it is the particular requirements associated with the three types of talk that motivate their use, and not the sex or gender of the individual speaker. The problems of generalizing about the characteristics of female or male speech, outside of a particular conversational context, are discussed; and it is shown that a gendered style cannot be adequately defined by counting individual speech variables removed from the specifics of the talk context. (Gender, questions, tag questions, discourse analysis, conversation analysis)

In this study we address ethnolinguistic identity using Bakhtin's (1981) notion of chronotope. Taking an ethnographic approach to linguistic data from Azerbaijani and Uzbek communities, we trace the impact of various chronotopes on our participants’ acts of ethnolinguistic identification. Building on Blommaert & De Fina (2017), we illustrate how ethnolinguistic identification is an outcome of the interaction between multiple levels of large- and small-scale chronotopes. Furthermore, we argue that chronotopes differ in terms of their power, depending on the ideological force behind them. We demonstrate how power differentials between chronotopes can account for certain interactional and linguistic patterns in conversation. The power inherent in chronotopes that link nationhood with specific languages makes the notions of discrete languages and static identities ‘real’ for our participants. Therefore, discussions of language and identity as flexible and socially constructed, we argue, must not obscure the power of these notions in shaping the perceptions of sociolinguistic subjects. (Chronotope, ethnolinguistic identity, power, Uzbek, Azeri/Azerbaijani, nationalism, language mixing, language ideology)*

This article demonstrates how cultural ideologies of language, and the semiotic processes that mobilize them, manifest in contemporary American drug treatment. Drawing from an ethnographic study of an outpatient program in the Midwestern United States, it focuses on therapists' claims about what constitutes “healthy language.” It is argued that these claims both stem from and actively reproduce an “ideology of inner reference,” which presumes that “healthy” language refers to preexisting phenomena, and that the phenomena to which it refers are internal to speakers. By formally discouraging talk that could point outside the parameters of the individual psyche, the treatment program effectively insulates itself from clients' critiques and challenges. A broad attempt is made to elucidate the connection between a language ideology that enjoys wide cultural circulation as well as significant currency in contemporary clinical practice, and a particular political effect called “institutional insulation.”My thanks to Barbara Johnstone and two anonymous reviewers for their insightful, critical comments on an earlier version of this article. I am especially grateful to James Wilce for his keen advice on how to refine central elements of the argument and his guidance toward relevant, fruitful literature. The following people contributed significantly to the essay's development (though its remaining flaws are very much my own): Giorgio Bertellini, Webb Keane, Daniel Listoe, Beth Reed, Douglas Rogers, Michael Sosin, and Sarah Womack. I'd also like to thank the University of Chicago Anthropology Department, Center for Gender Studies, Committee on Human Development, and School of Social Service Administration for opportunities to present (and rethink) earlier versions. The research reported here was conducted with the support of a training fellowship from the National Institute of Mental Health and various grants from the Department of Anthropology, the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, the Program in Women's Studies, Rackham Graduate School, and the School of Social Work, all at the University of Michigan. This essay is for “Lila.”

Ferguson's concept of diglossia and its later extension and coupling with bilingualism (Fishman et al.) is developed further into the concept of polyglossia with multilingualism by discussion of various speech communities where these phenomena are in evidence. A general model is suggested which could cope with cases of polyglossla by a continuum ranging from H(igh) varieties through M(edium) varieties to L(ow) varieties. Devices for status ranking of speech varieties are discussed and established. The general matrix is then applied to two of the special cases discussed previously, namely the English-educated Chinese communities of Singapore Malaysia.

This article examines the text-metrical (“poetic”) organization of epistemic stance-taking in discourse, focusing on epistemic stance in a form of argumentation, Tibetan Buddhist ‘debate’ (rtsod pa) at Sera Monastery in India. Emergent text-metrical structures in discourse are shown to reflexively map utterance-level propositional stance into larger-scale, fractionally congruent models of interactional stance. In charting the movement from epistemic stance to interactional stance by way of poetic structure, the article argues for and clarifies the place of poetics in the study of stance.

A social dialect survey of a working-class suburb in New Zealand provides evidence that eh, a tag particle that is much stereotyped but evaluated negatively in NZ English, may persist in casual speech because it plays an important role as a positive politeness marker. It is used noticeably more by Maori men than by Maori women or Pakehas (British/European New Zealanders), and may function as an in-group signal of ethnic identity for these speakers. Young Pakeha women, though, seem to be the next highest users of eh. It is unlikely that they are using it to signal in-group identity in the same way; instead, it is possible that they are responding to its interpersonal and affiliative functions for Maori men, and are adopting it as a new facet in their repertoire of positive politeness markers. (Gender, ethnicity, politeness, New Zealand English, intergroup and interpersonal communication)

To investigate forms and functions of imprecise numerical expressions in biomedical slide talks, tokens were extracted from fifty-two talks presented at the 1979 annual meeting of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology. Imprecise expressions include rounding, extreme rounding (to multiples of five or ten), ranges (both explicit and implicit), common fractions, and common multiples, all of which can be hedged, either simply or multiply. Imprecision can be occasioned by factors such as preliminary nature of results, small number of experimental animals, questionably applicable technique or apparatus, and inability to measure all members of a class. Rhetorically, imprecision foregrounds other, more precise quantities which the experimenter considers important, and thus, it can be seen as modality. Imprecision marks the talks as preinformation in Ziman's model of the social production of science and also as simultaneous popularization and peer communication. (Biomedical slide talks, imprecise numerical expressions, scientific rhetoric, modality, Zimanian social production of science)

This study investigates cases of language ‘policing’ as educational language policies, and the way that these are represented across different policy levels. Focusing on UK schools and using discursive approaches to language policy as a theoretical framework, I critically examine the motivations and justifications that institutions provide for designing and implementing policies whereby nonstandardised forms are ‘banned’, and how these are reported in metalinguistic discourse. Drawing on a range of data including media discourse, policy documents, teacher interviews and linguistic landscapes, I textually trace how educational language policies (re)produce prescriptive and linguicist ideologies, often using metaphors of crime, and often using language as a proxy for social factors such as academic achievement, employability, and standards. Overall, I argue that micro- and meso-level language policies are a partial product of the linguistic conservatism as found within current macro-level educational policy. (Language policy, language policing, schools, language ideologies)*

The present study demonstrates how prosody – specifically, onset level – is deployed in situated interaction to cue frames of interpretation for talk. It shows not only that final pitch level in intonational contours is a relevant parameter, but also that, under certain conditions, initial pitch level may provide a situationally specific contextualization cue. In calls to radio phone-in programs, for instance, there is a so-called anchor position where callers can be expected to announce the reason for their calls. Close empirical analysis of data from such a program reveals that it is here that the first turn-constructional unit is routinely formatted with high onset. The studio moderator displays an orientation to this kind of prosodic formatting by withholding further talk until the caller has made a recognizably complete statement of the reason for the call. On occasion, turn-constructional units in anchor position are heard to lack a high onset. When this happens, the moderator responds in a way that shows he is not treating callers' talk as the reason for the call, but rather as a preface to the statement of reason.

After nearly two centuries of contact with Europeans, the Māori language of New Zealand was, by the 1960s, threatened with extinction. Accompanying a movement for ethnic revival, a series of grassroots regeneration efforts that established adult, preschool, and autonomous school immersion programs has over the past two decades increased substantially the number of Māori who know and use their language, but this has not yet led to the reestablishment of natural intergenerational transmission. More recently, responding to growing ethnic pressures, the New Zealand government has adopted a Māori language policy and is starting to implement it. Seen in its widest social, political, and economic context, this process can be understood not as colonial language loss followed by postcolonial reversing language shift activities, but as the continuation of a long process of negotiation of accommodation between autochthonous Māori and European settlers.

The distribution of raised, nasalized variants of /æ/ in such words as hat, bag, and back in the speech of many Illinoisans cannot be explained by geographical or historical processes; rather the correlations are nearly isomorphic between raised variants of /æ/ and the size of the community in which the speaker was raised. Generally, the higher the variants, the more urban the speaker's background. Raised variants of /æ/ are discussed as they relate to contemporary sound change, to urban distributions, and to phonological context. (Urban dialects, sound change, American English, Illinois.)

Do linguistic identities formed in high school endure after adolescence? Do age-related linguistic differences represent community trends over historical time, or are they age-graded practices that change over biographical time? Catalan advocates worry that perceived Castilian dominance in adolescents' peer relations and media consumption forecasts the community's sociolinguistic future. To investigate the possibility of change in bilingual repertoires after adolescence, participants in a 1987 ethnographic study of high school students in metropolitan Barcelona were reinterviewed after twenty years. The reinterviews of L1 Castilian-speakers showed increased mastery and use of Catalan even among those who had been functionally monolingual and most resistant to Catalan in high school. Higher education, the workplace, romance, cosmopolitan travel, and parenthood were triggers of such postadolescent change in the linguistic repertoire. Informants produce a common narrative attributing linguistic transformations to maturational processes that reduce the shame and intolerance of difference that inhibit adolescent second language use. (Bilingualism, second language acquisition, longitudinal research, language and identity, adolescence, Catalan, Catalonia)*