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.     

The green leaves of love: Japanese romantic heroines,authentic femininity,and dialect1

How is ‘authentic’ linguistic femininity in Japan manifested in popular texts? We analyze the dialogue of female characters in Wakaba, a 2005 Japanese drama set in two very different parts of ‘regional’ Japan – Miyazaki and Kobe. Through this analysis, we examine two contradictory discourses circulated through popular media. The first is that linguistic femininity is based in Standard Japanese – a surprisingly persistent ideology despite a current trend to examine cases in which language ideology and practice do not match. Other studies reflect another dominant discourse, that of the ‘authentic’ dialect speaker, who expresses local alignment by using dialect forms outside the bounds of ideologically modern linguistic forms. The tension between acting linguistically feminine and ‘authentically’ local raises some interesting questions for Japanese language and gender studies, including studies of gendered representations: are women who are speakers of regional dialects authentically ‘feminine’? Can they be? Do some dialects express femininity better than others?     

Metrolingual multitasking and spatial repertoires: ‘Pizza mo two minutes coming’

Drawing on data from two restaurants in Sydney and Tokyo, this paper describes the ways in which linguistic resources, everyday tasks and social space are intertwined in terms of metrolingual multitasking. Rather than the demolinguistic enumeration of mappable multilingualism or the language‐to‐language or language‐to‐person focus of translingualism, metrolingualism focuses on everyday language practices and their relations to urban space. In order to capture the dynamism of the urban linguistic landscape, this paper explores this relationship between metrolingual multitasking – the ways in which linguistic resources, activities and urban space are bound together – and spatial repertoires – the linguistic resources available in a particular place – arguing that a focus on resources, repertoires, space, place and activity helps us understand how multilingualism from below operates in complex urban places.     

Styling the periphery: Linguistic and cultural takeup in Bangladesh and Mongolia

Focusing on online interactions among young adults in Bangladesh and Mongolia – two countries located politically, culturally and economically on the Asian periphery – this paper looks at how young adults use linguistic and cultural resources in their online interactions as part of a complex and emergent stylization of place. On the one hand, they appropriate the cultural and linguistic flows according to their locations and engage in a playful stylization and reconfiguration of what the local means. On the other hand, they engage in stylization and reflexive language use, often involving exaggerated linguistic variation, mixing, and other semiotic resources in order to produce and perform a range of social and cultural identities. The paper hence shows how the circulation and takeup of popular cultural flows around Asia can involve diverse processes of linguistic and cultural stylization.     

Playful Seriousness: The Virtue of Eutrapelia in Dialogue

In Nichomachean Ethics Aristotle identified three moral spheres associated with human communication: speaking with decorum, conversation, and social conduct. Each sphere has a corresponding virtue. The virtue in speaking with decorum is truthfulness, the virtue in conversation is eutrapelia (refined, playful wit), and the virtue in social conduct is friendliness. Eutrapelia is gained in part by education and in part by personal experience. One learns to habituate oneself in conversation to avoid the excessive vice of bomolochos and the deficient vice of agroikos. A communicator enacts phronesis to deliberate good communicative choices, relying on one’s awareness of ethics, tact, and ingeniousness. Eutrapelia functions in dialogue to reveal unexpected connections in language, to open new interpretations in linguistic speculation, to negotiate meaning in the play of language, and to potentially shift one’s horizon of understanding about the content under consideration. Enacting eutrapelos as both refined humor and keen insight offers a place of respite that allows one to engage in the playful seriousness that is the hermeneutic work of dialogue.     

New York City's Latino ethnolinguistic repertoire and the negotiation of latinidad in conversation

Latino collective politics has received greater attention from scholars and policy analysts than the micro‐processes of everyday interaction among U.S. Latinos – the stuff with which collective efforts are constructed. In this article, I argue that latinidad – a sense of shared Latino identity – is best understood by taking into account the negotiations of collective identities in everyday, situated social practices. I ask: how do Latinos invoke latinidad in their everyday interactions, and to what end? In doing so, I present a conversation between two New York City Latinos, Roberto and William, who subtly invoke latinidad as they explore a possible business connection. Through discourse analysis of their exchange, I show that within one conversation two people can invoke latinidad through the adoption of different strategies of affiliation. Drawing on Benor's ( 2010 ) ethnolinguistic repertoire framework, I show some of the linguistic resources that New York City Latinos access to index latinidad. I find that Benor's framework could be expanded to account for the arsenal of distinctive linguistic features used by members of panethnic groups. For U.S. Latinos, such an arsenal includes features of multiple varieties of both Spanish and English. The results further suggest that shared Latino identity implies a basis for cooperation, in this case, cooperation with the potential to yield economic benefits.     

Movers as early adopters of linguistic innovation

Long‐distance migration is a primary source of language contact. Those who voluntarily migrate, though, may not resemble the broader population: psychological research suggests some factors that predispose people to become migrants also tend to lead to more openness to trying new things, potentially including linguistic features. This implies differential reactions to language contact, so inferences drawn from migrants may not generalize to the language‐contact process more generally. To test this hypothesis, this article examines lexical patterns in the 1940 United States census, focusing on who used the title mortician or funeral director rather than the traditional undertaker. Individuals who had moved from their state of birth were particularly likely to use the newer terms, even when explicitly controlling for the distribution of titles among the states from which the movers relocated. The personal characteristics leading people to encounter new linguistic environments may also independently affect their choices within those environments.     

Governing the liberal self in a ‘post-truth’ era: science,class and the debate over GMOs

ABSTRACT

This essay examines four case studies in which prominent commentators in media sites that target the liberal-leaning, educated class – The Daily Show, Slate magazine, the New York Times, and Real Time with Bill Maher – announced that they had changed their minds on the issue of genetically modified foods (GMOs). Though each had previously been sceptical of the technology, they now embraced it in the name of science and humanitarianism, and urged audiences to do the same. These cases were flashpoints in a broader shift in which the liberal, educated middle class – a formation historically critical of GMOs–has increasingly denounced scepticism about biotechnology as a pernicious ‘anti-science’ conservatism. This liberal pro-GMO discourse posits itself as a matter of truth versus lies. We argue, however, that the manner in which it framed GMO opposition as irrational and immoral threatened attachments that have long been central to liberal, educated middle class selfhood and capital – attachments to being a caring and rational self. Moreover, this discourse intensified as this class was experiencing heightened cultural and economic instability under neoliberalism, the post-industrial labour economy, and the aftermath of the Great Recession. Through their narratives of coming to believe in GMOs, our case studies provide their audiences with technologies, in the Foucauldian sense, for making classed selves and shoring up this class’ claims to authority under these conditions. We suggest that this swell of cultural technologies aiming to cultivate liberal support for GMOs has a great deal to teach us about the class dynamics of the so-called ‘post-truth’ era.     

Performing India in America through Pragma-Cultural Markers

Intercultural Communication is marked in literary discourse in numerous ways. Diasporic literary discourse representing intercultural communication uses pragma-cultural markers such as food and music as tools of intercultural communication. This paper attempts to examine intercultural communication foregrounding these pragma-cultural markers as represented in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Queen of Dreams within the framework provided by Relevance Theory (:249). This paper foregrounds the manner in which writers like Divakaruni deploy pragma-cultural markers to express multiple linguistic and cultural perspectives in their literary narratives, thereby portraying an amalgamation of America and India and facilitating intercultural communication which is a dialectical process, as on the one hand the “America” that is in the hearts, minds, and words of these writers shapes their expressions and on the other, their growing presence in terms of their literary output is changing the definition of American art and culture.     

Discourse variation,grammaticalisation and stuff like that1

General extenders (such as and stuff) are analysed here in the speech of adolescents from three English towns. There were no consistent patterns of gender or social class variation in their use, but a clear social class difference in the use of certain forms, with and that favoured by the working‐class speakers and and stuff and and things preferred by the middle‐class adolescents. The most frequent forms were analysed in terms of phonetic reduction, decategorisation, semantic change and pragmatic shift, changes that together make up the process of grammaticalisation. And that and and everything were the most grammaticalised, followed by or something, with and stuff and and things lagging behind. The multifunctionality of the general extenders caused problems for a rigorous analysis of their pragmatic functions. The paper argues that we must consider their functions within the local contexts in which they occur, to take account of their interaction with other linguistic forms. It is also important to avoid generalising about their functions and, instead, to prioritise the fact that as pragmatic particles they are multifunctional. In this data the general extenders had functions in every communicative domain, often simultaneously. The implications for the quantitative analysis of discourse forms are also considered.     

The backstage work negotiators do when communicating with persons in crisis

When a person in crisis threatens suicide, police negotiators engage them in a conversation to prevent death. Working in small teams, the primary negotiator's role is to talk directly to the person in crisis. A secondary negotiator, working “behind the scenes,” supports the ongoing negotiation. Using 31 hours of audio‐recorded British negotiations, we uncover the backstage work of secondary negotiators. We use conversation analysis to identify the sequential position, linguistic form, and action of the secondary negotiator's interventions on (1) the delivery (e.g. “sound angry”) and (2) next actions (e.g. “say please,” “try asking them to move”) of the primary negotiator, and how the primary incorporates them into the negotiation. Our analysis shows that, while some suggestions were effective, others disrupted the flow of the negotiation as well as the alignment between primary negotiator and person in crisis. The paper augments current sociolinguistic understandings of the high‐stakes language activity of crisis negotiation and highlights the importance of attending to linguistic features of interaction when training negotiators to work better as a team.     

The linguistic sense of placement: Habitus and the entextualization of translingual practices in Swedish academia

This paper adopts a Bourdieusian approach to discourse in contemporary Swedish academia. Habitus, entextualization, and translingual practice are employed as epistemological perspectives for investigating the place of Swedish in the text trajectories of two disciplines where English prevails in publishing. Data from meeting recordings, email correspondence, and interviews show that Swedish is the legitimate language throughout in the text production and that discipline‐specific Swedish is practiced so long as it encompasses all participants’ repertoires. In fact, the researchers point to an almost physical awkwardness linked to the unwarranted use of English among themselves. Following Bourdieu, it is argued that these sensibilities pertain to the linguistic sense of placement of socialized agents and that the unease of being out of place prevents them from lapsing into what is socially perceived as unacceptable discourse in their translingual practices.     

Following the River’s Flow: A Conversation about Single Session Approaches with Aboriginal Families

Alison Elliott and James Dokona were interviewed by Henry von Doussa, and this article is the written version of that interview. In it, Alison and James separately refer to issues such as early skepticism about the applicability of a single session therapy approach with Indigenous families (Alison), a growing experience of its ‘fit,' philosophically and culturally, and the hope that can be engendered in one conversation. They underline the importance of the oral tradition, and other cultural concepts such as Dadirri (deep listening) as well as the trauma-informed principles of choice, collaboration, and empowerment, through using their language, asking permission, working together on solutions, and not coming across as an expert. The article is infused with the practical ideas and the values inherent in the authors’ work, including permission-seeking, reflection, containment, and their use of a whiteboard as a resource to capture multiple perspectives, a genogram (including pets), and to facilitate yarning. The flow of this conversation in itself reflects James’ imagery of the therapeutic conversation being like a river running – you don’t know which way it’s going to go.     

Was Cicourel’s critique in Methods and Measurement in Sociology too radical?

This article is a contribution to a mini symposium on the 50th anniversary of the publication of A V Cicourel’s Method and Measurement in Sociology (1964). The central theme of the book is reviewed – the problem of the relationship between everyday language and cultural meanings, and the language of measurement in social research – and the lack of an adequate ontology of social actors is identified as being the cause of the problem. The solution offered by Alfred Schütz – that social scientific language should be derived from everyday language – is discussed and it is argued that this was probably too radical at the time the book was published, and is still generally neglected in the social sciences.