bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Communication in a multilingual society: Some missed opportunities
Authors: Singh Rajendra , Lele Jayant , Martohardjono Gita 
Published: December 2008

ABSTRACTThis article critically examines contemporary interactional studies of the cultural specifity of human language, conducted mostly in modern, multiethnic, industrialized societies (e.g., Clyne 1979; Gumperz 1982a, 1982b; Valdés & Pino 1981). What is often presented as the “linguistic evidence” for miscommunication in such contexts is in fact, we argue, the locus of the violations of the cooperative principles of discourse and human interaction, such as the Principle of Charity (Davidson 1974) and the Principle of Humanity (Grandy 1973). The conclusions these studies arrive at are vitiated by the fact, for which considerable empirical evidence exists, that the native speaker's repairability threshold depends crucially on nonlinguistic variables (Hackman 1977). Only a cross-cultural analysis of how or whether these misconstruals entail analogous consequences, regardless of who is being misunderstood by whom, can, we argue, produce the sort of evidence these studies claim to unearth.
Language shift and narrative performance: On the structure and function of Arvanítika narratives
Authors: Tsitsipis Lukas D. 
Published: December 2008

ABSTRACTLiterature on language death offers abundant information on the grammatical, phonological, lexical, and sociolinguistic processes that a dying speech form can undergo. However, work remains to be done in the area of narrative skills and performance. This article examines the creative manipulation of certain narrative devices, including bilingual lexical resources from modern Greek and Tosk Albanian in stories offered by a residual group of fluent Albanian speakers in Greece. In a community, which is highly variable from the point of view of the allocation of its Arvanítika (Albanian) linguistic and sociolinguistic skills to various population segments, fluent speakers manage to achieve a significant performance breakthrough by foregrounding and evaluating information important for their attitude building and vital to their social existence. Narrative performances become ways of relating historical events and past experiences in present-day life. The article makes the point that in studies of language death a more intensive use of the ethnography of speaking paradigm can be of great value for the detection of sensitive areas of speech behavior and change. (Narrative performance, language death, ethnography of speaking, Balkan sociolinguistics, Tosk Albanian, Greek)
The concept of preference in conversation analysis
Authors: Bilmes Jack 
Published: December 2008

ABSTRACTPreferenceis treated as a single concept in conversation analysis, but it has in fact developed into an assemblage of loosely related concepts. It has also been construed in a variety of mutually incompatible, and sometimes meth-odologically questionable, ways. This is due, at least in part, to a confusion betweenpreferencein its everyday usage andpreferenceas a technical notion. This paper attempts to present a clear and unitary concept of preference and investigate the properties of that concept, differentiate related concepts (including conversational implicature), and reveal common confusions. (Conversation analysis, preference, methodology, implicature)
The context of oral and written language: A framework for mode and medium switching
Authors: Murray Denise E. 
Published: December 2008

ABSTRACTThis article demonstrates that our descriptions of orality and literacy – from the traditional dichotomy to the more recent continuum – are inadequate, largely because they are grounded in the Western positivist tradition and use as their typical texts casual conversation and academic writing. The introduction of a new medium of communication, the computer, into the workplace clearly demonstrates that medium of communication is itself a linguistic choice, depending on the context of situation. The article presents a case study identifying those aspects of the context of situation that affect both choice of mode/medium and mode/medium-switching. The article then proposes a framework that expands on previous work that has sought to describe the dimensions involved in the choice of language (e.g., Halliday 1973; Hymes 1972; Jakobson 1960). This framework suggests an integrated approach for examining oral and written language, an approach grounded in the view that literacy and orality are social practices whose forms and functions vary for different social groups. (Literacy, dimensions of sociolinguistics, discourse)
Spanish language use and attitudes: A study of two New York City communities
Authors: García Ofelia , Evangelista Isabel , Martínez Mabel , Disla Carmen , Paulino Bonifacio 
Published: December 2008

ABSTRACTThis article presents the results of a comparative study of two Hispanic communities in New York City: Washington Heights and Elmhurst/Corona. Our data on language proficiency, language use, and attitudes were gathered using a sociolinguistic questionnaire. However, the study benefited from the interactive process established between the researchers and the communities which they studied and in which they live and work.Our data are analyzed along three dimensions. First, we compare data for the two Spanish-speaking communities. We discuss how the social status and the ethnic configuration of the community affect linguistic and attitudinal behaviors. Then, we analyze the data according to national origin. We discuss how the five nationality groups included in our study – Central Americans, Cubans, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, and South Americans – differ in language proficiency, language use, and language attitudes. Finally, we compare the data for Dominicans in Washington Heights to that of Dominicans in Elmhurst/Corona. We examine how national origin and the language surround of the ethnic community interact in order to determine language use and attitudes. Some of the findings here differ from what may be supposed of such cases.We suggest socioeducational and language policies for Hispanics in the United States based on the results of this study. (Sociology of language, sociolinguistics, language planning, ethnic studies, sociology, education of language minorities, language education, Central American, Cuban, Dominican, Puerto Rican, South American Spanish in New York City)
How Black EnglishPastgot to the present: Evidence from Samaná
Authors: Tagliamonte Sali , Poplack Shana 
Published: December 2008

ABSTRACTThis article examines the tense system of Samaná English, a lineal descendant of early nineteenth-century American Black English. Independent evidence from quantitative phonological, grammatical, and narrative analyses reveals the existence of a past tense marker comparable in surface form, function, and distribution to that of Standard English. In addition, we establish the presence of a narrative Historical Present, thus far unattested in Black English Vernacular (BEV), which appears in proportions and patterns of alternation with the past tense nearly identical to those associated with middle-class white American narrators. Comparison with varieties of contemporary BEV and English-based creoles shows a structural resemblance between Samaná English and the former, but not the latter. These findings have important implications for understanding the development of contemporary BEV. (Linguistic variation, narrative analysis, Black English Vernacular, pidgin and creole linguistics, Dominican Republic)
Women and politeness: The Javanese example
Authors: Smith-Hefner Nancy J. 
Published: December 2008

ABSTRACTThis article explores the relationship between the status of Javanese women and the politeness or formality of their speech. I examine the hypothesis that, cross-culturally, women will speak more politely than men as an expression of their secondary status. Ethnographic research from East Java reveals that Javanese women are required to be more polite within the family where they receive less polite speech and offer more. In the wider context of Javanese culture, however, it is Javanese men who strive to cultivate politeness for the purpose of expressing their superior status and authority. The potentially coercive or political power of politeness in Javanese is related to the ambiguity of the polite codes themselves, which may be used to express both deference or humility on the one hand and status, refinement, and power on the other. Speech patterns are linked to a number of social-structural variables: patterns of socialization, models of appropriate male and female linguistic behavior, and men's and women's social roles and typical spheres of interest. Where, as in Java, polite codes are associated with public power and control, we should expect that men may be especially concerned with the cultivation of polite styles of speech. (Politeness, gender roles, linguistic socialization, Indonesia)
“It's cookin' now”: A performance analysis of the speech events of a Black teacher in an urban community college
Authors: Foster Michèle 
Published: December 2008

ABSTRACTEthnographic research conducted in the classroom of a Black woman teacher in an urban community college reveals the presence of two distinct but culturally appropriate ways of speaking. Drawing on performance theory, this article analyzes two speech events through which the teacher establishes and maintains congruent face-to-face interaction. It compares the speech events and discusses their effect on student participation and the interpretations and meanings that the participants attach to each. (Performance, ways of speaking, speech events, ethnography of communication)
Politeness theory and Shakespeare's four major tragedies
Authors: Brown Roger , Gilman Albert 
Published: December 2008

ABSTRACTPenelope Brown and Stephen Levinson (1987) have proposed that power (P), distance (D), and the ranked extremity (R) of a face-threatening act are the universal determinants of politeness levels in dyadic discourse. This claim is tested here for Shakespeare's use of Early Modern English inHamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, and Othello. The tragedies are used because: (1) dramatic texts provide the best information on colloquial speech of the period; (2) the psychological soliloquies in the tragedies provide the access to inner life that is necessary for a proper test of politeness theory; and (3) the tragedies represent the full range of society in a period of high relevance to politeness theory. The four plays are systematically searched for pairs of minimally contrasting dyads where the dimensions of contrast are power (P), distance (D), and intrinsic extremity (R). Whenever such a pair is found, there are two speeches to be scored for politeness and a prediction from theory as to which should be more polite. The results for P and for R are those predicted by theory, but the results for D are not. The two components of D, interactive closeness and affect, are not closely associated in the plays. Affect strongly influences politeness (increased liking increases politeness and decreased liking decreases politeness); interactive closeness has little or no effect on politeness. The uses of politeness for the delineation of character in the tragedies are illustrated. (Politeness theory, speech act theory, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, theory of literature, Shakespeare studies)
Social network integration and language change in progress in a rural alpine village
Authors: Lippi-Green Rosina L. 
Published: December 2008

ABSTRACTThe quantification of communication network integration can provide information valuable to the study of language change in very small rural communities. The adaptation of urban and communication network methodology for rural alpine social structures establishes a framework for the study of variation leading to change based on individual usage for the dialect of Grossdorf in Vorarlberg, Austria's western-most province. This approach is particularly relevant when study of aggregate group behavior has failed to yield results due to small sample size or group internal inconsistency. (Field methods, language networks, variation and change)
Pseudoquotation in current English communication: “Hey, she didn't really say it”
Authors: Dubois Betty Lou 
Published: December 2008

ABSTRACTTo investigate discourse and interactive functions ofquote formula+hey+pseudoquotation, that is, invented quotation, in current English communication, tokens were collected from public and commercial broadcasts and miscellaneous readings during a four-month period. In addition, all instances ofheywith context were extracted from the Brown Corpus of American English. Only 26 possible tokens, the majority from radio and television, were located; one instance inBrownindicates existence as early as 1961. A speaker uses quote formula +hey+ pseudoquotation to dramatize and thereby give emphasis to an important point (in these examples, generally in an expository discourse), a practice reported for both sophisticated and folk discourse. Instead of a rhetorical question, the device makes arhetorical answerto an unasked question. Although pseudoquotation can be found either without discourse marker or with other discourse marker,heyis an appropriate marker for pseudoquotation, simultaneously to mark an important point in a discourse and to bind listeners to the ongoing interaction by (re)capturing their attention. (Discourse markers, conversational interaction, pragmatics, dramatization,hey, quotation)
Are Iraqi women more prestige conscious than men? Sex differentiation in Baghdadi Arabic
Authors: Abu-Haidar Farida 
Published: December 2008

ABSTRACTInvestigators have found in Arabic-speaking communities that men's speech, and not women's, approximated the standard variety. More recent studies have challenged the assumption that prestige and standard spoken Arabic are one and the same. These studies have found that there are, in some Arab communities, prestige varieties of spoken Arabic which are not in the direction of standard Arabic, and that, contrary to what had been previously concluded, it is mostly women who speak the prestige dialects. This article, based on an investigation of the speech of a group of Baghdadi men and women, shows that in Baghdad the prestige variety of spoken Arabic is in the direction of the standard, and that women, more than men, tend to favor this variety. Using the findings of a previous research project in Baghdad, the article also draws attention to the fact that in the past, when Baghdadi women did not have the same access to standard Arabic as men, it was men, and not women, who spoke a dialect approximating the standard variety. (Standard literary Arabic, dialectal Arabic, linguistic prestige norms, style shifting)
Penguins don't care, but women do: A social identity analysis of a Whorfian problem
Authors: Khosroshahi Fatemeh 
Published: December 2008

ABSTRACTThe Sapir–Whorf hypothesis is often implicitly assumed to be true independent of its empirical status. Feminist attempts to eliminate the generic he must assume that language somehow affects thought, since there is no intrinsic harm in the word itself. Research to date has, in fact, shown that generic he tends to suggest a male referent in the mind of the reader. This study asks whether people's interpretation of a generic sentence varies depending on whether or not they have followed feminist proposals and reformed their own language. Fifty-five college students read sex-indefinite paragraphs involving either the generic he, he or she, or they, and made drawings to represent the mental images evoked by what they read. The sex of the figure drawn was the dependent variable. Students' term papers were used to determine whether their own language was “reformed” or “traditional.” He was found to be least likely to evoke female referents, he or she most likely, and they in between. However, regardless of the pronoun, men drew more male and fewer female pictures than women. Moreover, whereas men did not differ in their imagery, whether their language was reformed or traditional, women did. Traditional-language women had more male images than female. Reformed-language women showed the opposite. Results are discussed in terms of the theory of social identity (Tajfel 1981), and it is concluded that the weak, correlational form of Whorf's thesis applies to women, the group that initiated the reform in the first place. (Gender and language, pronouns, social psychology of language, Sapir–Whorf hypothesis)
On the telephone again! Differences in telephone behaviour: England versus Greece
Authors: Sifianou Maria 
Published: December 2008

ABSTRACTThis article investigates differences in telephone behaviour in England and Greece in the light of Brown and Levinson's model of interaction. It focusses upon differences both in verbal telephone call behaviour and in the attitudes and values attached to telephone usage. Explanations are placed within a broad framework of cultural differences in the preferred interactional strategies of the two societies. (Sociolinguistics, culturally determined variations in telephone behaviour, politeness phenomena, Greece versus England)
Antitotalitarian language in Poland: Some mechanisms of linguistic self-defense
Authors: Wierzbicka Anna 
Published: December 2008

ABSTRACTThis article explores the concept of political diglossia, a phenomenon arising in totalitarian or semitotalitarian countries, where the language of official propaganda gives rise to its opposite: the unofficial, underground language of antipropaganda. The author studies one semantic domain – the colloquial designations of the political police and security forces in contemporary Poland – and compares them with the official designations. The semantics of the relevant words and expressions is studied in great detail so that the social attitudes encoded in them can be revealed and rigorously compared. To achieve this, the author relies on the natural semantic metalanguage that she has developed over the last two decades, which has already been applied in the study of many other semantic domains, in many different languages. The social and political attitudes encoded in the Polish expressions referring to the security apparatus are discussed against the background of Poland's history. The author shows that language is not only the best “mirror of mind” (Leibniz) and “mirror of culture” and “guide to social reality” (Sapir), but also a mirror of history and politics. (Sociolinguistics, pragmatics, semantics, language of propaganda, expressive language)
Apologies in New Zealand English
Authors: Holmes Janet 
Published: December 2008

ABSTRACTThe function of apologies is discussed within the context of a model of interaction with two intersecting dimensions – affective and referential meaning. Apologies are defined as primarily social acts conveying affective meaning. The syntactic, semantic, and sociolinguistic features of apologies are described, based on a corpus of 183 apologies. While apology exchanges divided equally between those which used a combination of strategies and those where a single strategy sufficed, almost all apology exchanges involved an explicit apology. An account is provided of the kinds of social relationships and the range of offenses which elicited apologies in this New Zealand corpus.Apologies are politeness strategies, and an attempt is made to relate the relative “weightiness” of the offense (assessed using the factors identified as significant in Brown and Levinson's model of politeness) to features of the apology strategies used to remedy it. Though some support is provided for Brown and Levinson's model, it is suggested that Wolf-son's “bulge” theory more adequately accounts for a number of patterns in the data. In particular, the functions of apologies between friends may be more complex than a simple linear model suggests. (Apologies, politeness, speech functions, New Zealand English, sociolinguistics, pragmatics)
Sex-based differences in compliment behavior
Authors: Herbert Robert K. 
Published: December 2008

ABSTRACTSex-based differences in the form of English compliments and in the frequencies of various compliment response types are discussed. Based on a corpus of 1,062 compliment events, several differences in the form of compliments used by women and men are noted. Further, it is found that compliments from men are generally accepted, especially by female recipients, whereas compliments from women are met with a response type other than acceptance. These findings are set within a broader discussion of male–female differences in speech and the sociology of compliment work. Parallels are drawn between these sex-based differences and differences in norms for national varieties of English relating to the function and frequency of compliments as speech acts and to different response types elicited by diverse functional exploitations of compliment formulas in discourse. (Sex-based differences in language use, socioprag-matics, compliments/compliment responses, ethnography of speaking)
Changing language policies and attitudes in autonomous Catalonia
Authors: Woolard Kathryn A. , Gahng Tae-Joong 
Published: December 2008

ABSTRACTThe effects of language policies on the symbolic value of the linguistic repertoire merit consideration in needed studies of the consequences of language status planning. Since achieving political autonomy within Spain in 1979, Catalonia has instituted a number of policies, particularly in education, to enhance the status and use of Catalan. A matched guise test was conducted among students in Barcelona in 1980 and again in 1987 to gauge changes in attitudes toward Catalan and Castilian. Conflict between positive status and negative solidarity values of Catalan for nonnative speakers found in 1980 appears to be resolved in 1987. Three aspects of public language policy have attenuated ethnic constraints against nonnative use of Catalan, but further changes in social relations may be necessary to alter patterns of language choice. (Language attitudes, language policy, Catalonia)
Appalachian English stereotypes: Language attitudes in Kentucky
Authors: Luhman Reid 
Published: December 2008

ABSTRACTNonstandard language varieties typically become social markers of the social groups that use them. Through this connection, the varieties reflect commonly held stereotypes of those groups from the perspective of outsiders, as well as symbolize group membership for their speakers. This study employs the matched guise technique to compare attitudes toward Appalachian English and Standard American English held by speakers of both language varieties. Most studies of nonstandard language varieties have shown an acceptance by nonstandard speakers of dominant negative stereotypes of their groups. By varying content of speech samples evaluated, this study suggests that speakers of Appalachian English partially accept low status evaluations of their dialect, but reject other negative stereotypes of their speech community in terms of integrity and social attractiveness of its members. In particular, results suggest significantly higher evaluations of male speakers of Appalachian English that are shared by Standard English speakers. (Appalachian English, speech community, language variety, language markers, language stereotypes, dialects, social status)
Describing trouble: Practical epistemology in citizen calls to the police
Authors: Whalen Marilyn R. , Zimmerman Don H. 
Published: December 2008

ABSTRACTIn this article, we examine the way citizens' descriptions of troublesome occurrences in reports to emergency dispatch personnel are vulnerable to suspicion and doubt. The vulnerability of description in these cases involves callers' categorization of, visual or aural access to, and involvement in the reported “trouble.” It is through displays of what we term practical epistemology – displays of how one has come to know about a particular event – that these vulnerabilites emerge and are tested and negotiated in the request for and dispatch of emergency assistance. (Conversation analysis, language in institutional settings, pragmatics)