Patterns of age‐based linguistic variation in American English1

In prior sociolinguistic research, speaker age has been considered the principal correlate of language change, but it ‘has not yet been explicitly studied as a sociolinguistic variable’ ( Eckert 1997 : 167). Consequently, little is known about how language varies across the life span. The present study employs key word analysis on a large corpus of casual conversation in American English to explore age‐based linguistic variation in spontaneous conversation. Analyses of the key words point to two major patterns of age‐based lexico‐grammatical variation: use of slang, and use of stance and involvement markers. Younger speakers' talk is characterized by an unusually frequent use of slang and swear words, and by a marked use of features indexing speaker's stance and emotional involvement, including intensifiers, stance adverbs, discourse markers, personal pronouns, and attitudinal adjectives; older speakers favor modals. These patterns are suggestive of functional differences in the discourse of youth and adults. It is argued that the expression of personal stance is more explicit and plays a key role in younger speakers' discourse.     

Custom,Law and Ideology in Papua New Guinea

This paper seeks to illustrate some of the distinctive national features of the relationship between custom, law, and ideology in Papua New Guinea. While the concept of ‘native custom’ was initially the creation of Australian colonial law, the relationship between custom and law acquired a new complexion around the time of national independence in 1975, and the political use of the Tok Pisin words kastom and lo, both then and since, reveals that their relationship is not like that of the two things commonly known as ‘custom’ and ‘law’ in the English language or the political discourse of a country like England or Australia. Instead, their relationship has to be understood through an exploration of the metaphorical use of the Tok Pisin word rot (‘road’), which seems to stand for something midway between a ‘cult’ and an ‘ideology’, and through an understanding of the way in which the social relations of large-scale resource development have transformed the post-colonial political landscape.     

Phonotactic Constraints on Infant Word Learning

How do infants use their knowledge of native language sound patterns when learning words? There is ample evidence of infants’ precocious acquisition of native language sound structure during the first year of life, but much less evidence concerning how they apply this knowledge to the task of associating sounds with meanings in word learning. To address this question, 18‐month‐olds were presented with two phonotactically legal object labels (containing sound sequences that occur frequently in English) or two phonotactically illegal object labels (containing sound sequences that never occur in English), paired with novel objects. Infants were then tested using a looking‐while‐listening measure. The results revealed that infants looked at the correct objects after hearing the legal labels, but not the illegal labels. Furthermore, vocabulary size was related to performance. Infants with larger receptive vocabularies displayed greater differences between learning of legal and illegal labels than infants with smaller vocabularies. These findings provide evidence that infants’ knowledge of native language sound patterns influences their word learning.     

Parenting Disputes After Separation and Divorce: Who Needs a Family Lawyer?

Australia's family law system continues to be plagued by serious delays. This article acknowledges the need for legal interventions in post‐separation parenting disputes in which individuals may be at risk, or in cases of genuine emergency. The article next contrasts cases involving significant risk or urgency with the many ‘ordinary’ (even if sometimes complex) post‐separation disputes over parenting in which these circumstances are not present. I argue that in such cases, legal advice, legally informed dispute processes, and court hearings are remnants from earlier attitudes to separation and divorce. These interventions are expensive, frequently destructive of ongoing parental relationships, and at their heart, inappropriate for considering the needs of children. They also divert time and resources from the critical investigative and legal decision‐making processes needed in urgent or risk‐related cases. I propose that legal narratives in ‘ordinary’ post‐separation parenting disputes be replaced by narratives focused on the main drivers of these disputes, which are invariably expressed in terms of relationship difficulties. Such narratives are amenable to facilitative, therapeutic, and systemic interventions aimed at achieving self‐determined resolutions. They contrast markedly with narratives reflecting common law notion of normative resolutions derived from the application of legal precedent. Key issues in the first section of the article are then teased out via the reflections of an imaginary separated parent in an ‘ordinary,’ albeit difficult and emotionally intense, dispute about how to care for the children. In the final section, I offer brief clinical and systemic reflections on past practice and on future narratives focused on individual self‐determination.     

Translating ‘Sustainability’ in Hawai'i: The Utility of Semiotic Transformation in the Transmission of Culture

This paper examines how businessmen and educators in Hawai'i have semiotically ‘translated’ sustainability to promote sustainability practices. Using data gathered from an educational institute that was co-founded by a corporation and a college, I analyse how the source discourse was, using Silverstein's term, ‘transformed’ so that the target discourse (or the signs used in the target discourse) invokes Hawaiian imageries rather than imageries of capitalism. Analyses reveal that changes to keywords of sustainability occur in a way that shifts possible local interpretations of them as cultural heritage, that is, as something ‘of Hawaiian’ and not ‘of white capitalists’. I argue that this translation effort assisted the concept's transmission by making ‘sustainability’ an inhabitable category of identity and by providing a model of a future in which locals can participate because it is now interpretable as having been modelled on the narrated past.     

‘Taking it Like a Man’: Masculinity,Subjection and Resistance in the Selling of Life Assurance

This article examines the operation of mechanisms of control and modes of resistance within work organizations and interrogates the role of subjectivity in such mechanisms. Specifically, I mean to examine how forms of resistance are influenced by the masculine ‘mystique’ ( Collinson, 1988 ) of given occupations, focusing on that which pervades the field of Sales. Theoretically, the work of Foucault on ‘the self’ is adopeted (1985, 1986) to examine how control at work is attempted and occasionally effected through the construction of a specifically gendered identity of ‘the salesman’. With material from an 18‐month study of a UK life assurance institution, Lifelong Assurance ( Hodgson, 2000 ), I describe the operation of a bureaucratic technology of surveillance within the Sales division. In particular, I focus on the way in which employees’ responses to this system were structured by the specific masculine identities promoted and reproduced within sales, centring on an ideal of autonomy and self‐reliance. While the masculine discourse of autonomy frequently resulted in resistance to technocratic systems of surveillance, it was also clear that such discourses left employees isolated and vulnerable to more profound mechanisms of control through their engineered dependence upon their managers for security and the affirmation of their identity.     

Which is the ‘self’ in ‘self‐interest’?

This article contends that homogenisation of the term ‘self‐interest’– in sociological and economic discourse – has resulted in many misconceptions about what particular doctrines of ‘self‐interest’ were instituted to achieve at certain historical periods and in specific cultural milieux. At its worst, the article argues, this has led to a misunderstanding of the import of particular doctrines of self interest,which are read in terms of general tradition – such as that which views self‐interested conduct as a natural faculty – rather than in terms of the context specific aims of those advocating them. The article attempts to show how, historically, there have been quite significant changes in the characterisation of the ‘self’ deemed to be ‘self‐interested’. In particular, it focuses on the ‘self’ of certain early modern conceptions of self interest, and suggests this creation is best viewed not as a subjectivity transcendentally presupposed by experience, but as one historically cultivated to counter the exigencies of particular circumstances – the disaster of perpetual ‘warre’ in 17th century Europe – and to meet the purposes of a certain way of life – existence in the civitas.     

On ‘flip‐flopping’: Branded stance‐taking in U.S. electoral politics1

This article examines stance in U.S. political discourse, taking as its empirical point of departure Democratic candidate John Kerry's epistemic stance‐taking in the televised 2004 presidential debates. Kerry's stance‐taking is shown to help display the characterological attribute of ‘conviction’ and serve as a rejoinder to critics who had branded him as a ‘flip‐flopper.’ His stance‐taking is thus not primarily ‘to’ or ‘for’ copresent interactants, but is largely interdiscursive in character. ‘Conviction’ and its opposite, ‘flip‐flopping,’ suggest further how stance‐taking itself has been an object of typification in the agonistic dynamics of candidate branding and counter‐branding. In moving from epistemic stance‐taking in discourse to models of the stance‐taker as a social type, this article addresses questions about the units and levels of analysis needed to study stance in contemporary political discourse.     

Breast‐Feeding Advocacy,Risk Society and Health Moralism: A Decade’s Scholarship

This article reviews research published this century that engages critically with the mantra ‘Breast is Best’ and the associated expansion of official breast‐feeding promotion programmes. In recent years there has been a marked increase in the number of such studies published. They mostly explore experience in English speaking, industrialised countries (the US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and Great Britain) which are in some social and cultural respects dissimilar, yet where very similar developments and problems are detected in regards to breast‐feeding promotion. We highlight how this exploration of breast‐feeding promotion internationally has developed understanding of wider sociological themes. This scholarship, we suggest, has provided a powerful illustration of the relation between risk society (more particularly a heightened consciousness of risk) and the evolution of a code of conduct that regulates behaviour, that has been termed ‘health moralizm’. The article covers three themes: ‘Science, risk society, authority and choice’; ‘Public health policy and infant feeding’; and ‘Moralization and women’s identity work’. We conclude that the research discussed shows how the sociological imagination continues to shed light on the relation between private troubles and public issues. We also suggest one conclusion that can be drawn from this research is that official discourse and everyday maternal experience appear increasingly distant from each other.     

Small Worlds and the New ‘Social Physics’

Abstract In this article I explore the increasing overlaps between ‘sociology’ and ‘physics’ through analysing recent contributions to the social network literature concerned with exploring and explaining the so‐called ‘small world’ phenomenon. I show that this new social network literature, while very provocative, is insufficiently sociological and insufficiently complex. With regard to the former it is demonstrated that a key issue is that of meetingness and hence of travel in order to effect meetingness. Networks have, in other words, to be performed, and they have to come together from time to time, especially to talk. I further show that the small worlds literature is insufficiently complex. Social networks often involve combinations of mobilities and highly structured material immobilities. I conclude the article with an analysis of how a new ‘social physics’ based around the notion of ‘network’ might be established in an era in which time and space seem increasingly warped, bent and twisted into strikingly new topologies.     

Struck by speech revisited: Embodied stance in jurisdictional discourse1

This paper illustrates how stance functions as a semiotic resource that feeds into and mediates institutional context. I consider stance not only as linguistic expression but as interactive, bodily engagement, synchronized in multimodal layers of participation. Using data from a focus group interview, I examine how stance emerges in the collaborative rhythms of linguistic, paralinguistic and, most prominently, embodied conduct between speaker and listener to index socio‐cultural knowledge about the jurisdictional division of labor among legal professionals. Drawing on Charles Frake's classic ‘Struck by speech,’ I illustrate not only how a speaker strikes his listener with speech, but also how the body of the listener displays being struck.     

Immigration,trade and ‘ethnic surplus value’: a critique of Indo–Canadian transnational networks

It is often argued that countries hosting large populations of skilled immigrants might benefit from their cultural and economic competencies in the development of international trade networks. Yet, in so doing, the state can be criticized for fetishizing the ethnic immigrant in market terms in order to extract ‘ethnic surplus value’. In this article, I examine these debates empirically in the case of India–Canada immigration and trade using interviews with traders, officials and immigrant entrepreneurs in British Columbia, Canada. Findings suggest that the supposedly positive relationship between trade and immigration is not obvious in the India–Canada case and there is no convincing evidence of the state managing successfully to extract ‘ethnic surplus value’. Rather, what appears most compelling is evidence of what can be termed a discourse of regional disadvantage circulated by immigrant and non‐immigrant business actors alike regarding the nature of India–Canada relations. Interview respondents link this discourse of disadvantage to the regional history of Indian immigration to Canada, which has traditionally comprised Sikhs from rural Punjab, and it functions to essentialize Indian immigrant ethnicity spatially within both the Indian and Canadian contexts. I focus on the theme of the extraction of ‘ethnic surplus value’ and regional disadvantage to reveal the limitations of both arguments about the economic nature of immigrant‐led network development. In both cases, I challenge these ideas with a critical emphasis on the role of immigrant agency and offer a more nuanced and complicated reading of the role of the state. As a result, I offer a detailed reading of how socio‐spatial immigrant networks are formed and operate at the regional scale, and how this complicates more abstract theoretical formulations regarding the trade and immigration nexus.     

Reprogramming Femininity? The Construction of Gender Identities in the Israeli Hi‐tech Industry between Global and Local Gender Orders

Based on the study of gender identities in the Israeli hi‐tech sector, this article sets out to explore the doing of gender in a context comprised of two cultural repertoires characterized by divergent and contradictory fundamental assumptions: the new masculine transnational economy and pro‐natalist Israeli society. The article demonstrates how, by manoeuvering and moving between these global and local cultural repertoires, privileged Israeli hi‐tech women enact and construct a ‘new femininity’ that simultaneously challenges both the discourse of the ‘ideal hi‐tech worker’ and that of traditional Israeli femininity. This new femininity, I argue, is grounded in a local translation of the ‘family friendly organization’ discourse.     

Starting somewhere different: methodological cosmopolitanism and the study of world politics

In this article, I contribute to the debate on Ulrich Beck's idea of ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’ from a political science perspective. How fruitful is Beck's idea for the study of world politics? How can a political science perspective turn ‘methodological cosmopolitanism’ into a more transdisciplinary subject of debate? Guided by these questions, I speak to two audiences. First, I offer political scientists a distinct strategy for empirical ‘cosmopolitan political science’ research. At the heart of this strategy is a novel object of research, the ‘cosmopolitan outlook’, understood as a discourse that breaks with the ‘national outlook’ to open possibilities for a world beyond ‘reflexive modernization’. With that, I shift the perspective from structure to discourse and broaden the normative grounds on which to assess cosmopolitan reality. Rather than just considering the emergence of normative cosmopolitan ideals, I build into cosmopolitan research the normative, empirical question of whether we see an emergence of a world beyond reflexive modernization. Second, I address scholars outside the field of political science who are interested in methodological cosmopolitanism by offering the ‘cosmopolitan outlook’ as a novel object of study that could also be explored from other disciplinary perspectives and by proposing they put the question of the purpose of methodological cosmopolitanism centre stage. This question can, I argue, constitute grounds for substantial debates on methodological cosmopolitanism not already precluded through disciplinary premises and concerns. Contributing to such a transdisciplinary debate, I distinguish between the long‐term and immediate purpose of methodological cosmopolitanism, the former being about the development of a cosmopolitan language and grammar and the latter about empirical explorations of the reality of the ‘cosmopolitan outlook’, eventually and in a collective and transdisciplinary endeavour building up to contribute to the former.     

Migrants' minority‐language newspeakerism: The pervasiveness of nation‐state monolingual regimes in transnational contexts

From a critical sociolinguistics perspective, this paper investigates processes of minority‐language newspeakerism among 23 migrants from heterogeneous socioeconomic and language backgrounds. Informants networked in a cybercafé and a bench in Catalonia, a European society with a majority and a minority language, Spanish and Catalan. Drawing on audio‐recorded interviews, naturally‐occurring interactions and four‐year ethnographic data, I analyze how informants' language practices and ideologies interplay with self‐/other‐ascribed Catalan newspeakerhood. The results show that migrants do not envision themselves as Catalan newspeakers. They employ ethnicist constructions of Catalan as ‘the locals’’ language, and inhabit fluid identities whereby ‘Catalanness’ is vindicated through global Spanish. They invest in Spanish newspeakerhood instead, presenting Spanish as the language of ‘integration’. I conclude that newspeakerism contributes to understanding migrants’ roles in the linguistic conflicts of minority‐language societies; particularly, the ways in which they invest in majority languages, following nation‐state monolingual regimes which pervade as gatekeepers to post‐national citizenship.     

If we practice posthumanist research,do we need ‘gender’ any longer?

This article offers a reflection around the question of ‘do we need ‘gender’ any longer?’ In taking up this problem and inspired by the way in which postqualitative inquiry has opened a conversation with Deleuzian philosophy and formulated a ‘concept as/instead of method’ line of thought, I wonder whether new images of thought might give the concept of gender ‘the forces it needs to return to life’ or the forces to abandon it. I propose four different images that might provoke the desire to experiment with a new image of thought in relation to the problem: a vegetal mode of thought, a musical mode, a fleshy mode as labiaplasty, a nonliving mode. This choice is connected to the dualities they target: the human/vegetal living world, the rational/artistic production of knowledge, the dis‐embodied/corporeal being in the world, the life/nonlife hierarchization. Each way of thinking of ‘gender’ stages, enacts, performs a different material reality of the concept that shifts the focus from linguistic representations to discursive practices. Hence, if gender has become a dominant discourse, it may be that positive repetition of this discourse might become a way of opening a new site inside it, by de‐territorializing it and re‐territorializing it otherwise.     

From FOB to cool: Transnational migrant students in Toronto and the styling of global linguistic capital

Globalization and the rise of ‘Korean cool’ provide middle‐class Korean yuhaksaeng (visa students) in Toronto with resources they can mobilize as strategies of distinction. In their construction of themselves as new transnational subjects with hybrid identities that are simultaneously global and Korean, yuhaksaeng deploy re‐valued varieties of Korean language and culture as stylistic resources in the globalized new economy. In this process, yuhaksaeng contest their marginal positions as ‘FOBs’ (Fresh‐Off‐the‐Boats) and ‘Nerds’ in dominant Western racial discourse, and construct themselves as wealthy, modern, and cosmopolitan ‘Cools’vis‐à‐vis long‐term immigrants in local Korean diasporic communities as well as Canadians. The stories of yuhaksaeng illustrate how notions of ‘global’ and ‘local’ linguistic resources are transformed under the material conditions of globalization and its structures of inequality. ???? ‘??? ?’? ??? ???? ???? ??? ?? ????? ???? ?? ???? ?? ??? ????. ????? ???? ?? ??? ?????? ??? ????? ?? ??? ???, ???? ??????? ??? ???? ??? ???? ?? ??? ???? ??? ?????? ?? ???? ????. ? ???? ????? ??? ??? ?? ?????? ‘FOBs’ (Fresh‐Off‐the‐Boats) ? ‘Nerds’ ? ?? ??? ???? ????, ???? ???? ???? ?????? ??? ??? ??????? ????, ???? ???? ???????? ‘?’? ???? ????. ? ?? ??? ????? ???? ???? ??? ??? ? ???? ?? ??? ????? ???? ???? ??? ?????? ??? ????. [Korean]     

‘Behind Closed Doors’: Debt-Bonded Sex Workers in Sihanoukville,Cambodia

In the trafficking discourse and international law, debt-bonded sex workers have been defined as ‘victims of trafficking’. The hyperexploitative contractual arrangements faced by debt-bonded sex workers may be the most common form of contemporary forced labour practices in the modern industry. However, in this paper, I present women's individual experiences working under indenture in Sihanoukville, Cambodia. I do so because women's narratives raise many questions about ‘consent’ and ‘coercion’ that, to date, remain unanswered. By examining women's own perceptions of the situation, the present paper attempts to address issues related to ‘consent’ and ‘coercion’ in order to highlight some of the possible implications this has for both how we theorise about and respond to the issue of indenture.