Studies in Interactional Sociolinguistics – serie

Gender and Politeness challenges the notion that women are necessarily always more polite than men as much of the language and gender literature claims. Sara Mills discusses the complex relations between gender and politeness and argues that although there are circumstances when women speakers, drawing on stereotypes of femininity to guide their behaviour, will appear to be acting in a more polite way than men, there are many circumstances where women will act just as impolitely as men. The book aims to show that politeness and impoliteness are in essence judgements about another's interventions in an interaction and about that person as whole, and are not simple classifications of particular types of speech. Drawing on the notion of community of practice Mills examines the way that speakers negotiate with what they perceive to be gendered stereotypes circulating within their particular group.

The news interview has become a major vehicle for presenting broadcast news and political commentary, and a primary interface between the institutions of journalism and government. This much-needed work examines the place of the news interview in Anglo-American society and considers its historical development in the United States and Britain. The main body of the book discusses the fundamental norms and conventions that shape conduct in the modern interview. It explores the particular recurrent practices through which journalists balance competing professional norms that encourage both objective and adversarial treatment of public figures. Through analyses of well-known interviews, the book explores the relationship between journalists and public figures and also how, in the face of aggressive questioning, politicians and other public figures struggle to stay 'on message' and pursue their own agendas. This comprehensive and wide-ranging book will be essential reading for students and researchers in sociolinguistics, media and communication studies.

The study of teenagers in the classroom, and how they interact with one another and their teachers, can tell us a great deal about late-modern society. In this revealing account, Ben Rampton presents the extensive sociolinguistic research he carried out in an inner-city high school. Through his vivid analysis of classroom talk, he offers answers to some important questions: does social class still count for young people, or is it in demise? Are traditional authority relationships in schools being undermined? How is this affected by popular media culture? His study, which provides numerous transcripts and three extensive case studies, introduces a way of perceiving established ideas in sociolinguistics, such as identity, insecurity, the orderliness of classroom talk, and the experience of learning at school. In doing so, Rampton shows how work in sociolinguistics can contribute to some major debates in sociology, anthropology, cultural studies and education.

This study identifies key mechanisms through which a young child operates with external knowledge in her immediate social context. Central to this is the child's capacity to draw on discourse-based understandings which have become evident in prior interaction. These understandings are shown to inform and shape various aspects of the child's behaviour, notably request selection, the emergence of new request forms and various kinds of child distress, and they form the 'context' to which the child's actions come to be increasingly sensitive. In contrast to studies which analyse development under different headings, such as language, emotions and cognition, Tony Wootton links these aspects in his examination of the state of understanding which exists at any given moment in interaction. The result is a distinctive social constructivist approach to children's development.

Conversations between AIDS counsellors and their clients bring delicate and potentially threatening issues into play. In this study Anssi Peräkylä applies the principles of conversation analysis to his exploration of AIDS counselling, using data from video-recorded counselling sessions in a London teaching hospital. He meticulously analyses this data to show how various questioning techniques, in this case arising from the Milan School Family Systems theory, operate in these situations, and how counsellors attempt through the design and placement of their questions to achieve the cooperation of their clients, with varying success. His conclusions provide a timely and illuminating insight into the management of a sensitive topic through various techniques of indirectness.

Cecilia E. Ford explores the question: what work do adverbial clauses do in conversational interaction? Her analysis of this predominating conjunction strategy in English conversation is based on the assumption that grammars reflect recurrent patterns of situated language use, and that a primary site for language is in spontaneous talk. She considers the interactional as well as the informational work of talk and shows how conversationalists use grammar to coordinate their joint language production. The management of the complexities of the sequential development of a conversation, and the social roles of conversational participants, have been extensively examined within the sociological approach of Conversation Analysis. Dr Ford uses Conversation Analysis as a framework for the interpretation of interclausal relations in her database of American English conversations. Her book contributes to a growing body of research on grammar in discourse, which has until recently remained largely focused on monologic rather than dialogic functions of language.

Chinese and Americans often unwittingly communicate at cross purposes because they are misled by the cultural trappings of talk. This book aims to clarify their misunderstandings by examining their different ideals and strategies of talk. It draws on cultural, philosophical, and linguistic insights and traces the development of Chinese communicative strategies from Confucius through the 'eight-legged essay' to the boardrooms and streets of Hong Kong. Its formal analysis of taped interchanges and in-depth interviews reveals Chinese speakers' distinctive ways of communicating and relating. Crosstalk and Culture in Sino-American Communication will alert people to the pitfalls of cultural misunderstandings and the hidden assumptions and expectations underlying talk.

The essays in this volume are all original contributions dealing in one way or another with the analysis of prosody - primarily intonation and rhythm - and the role it plays in everyday conversation. They take as their methodological starting point the contention that the study of prosody must begin with genuine interactional rather than pre fabricated laboratory data. Through close empirical analysis of recorded material from genuine English, German, and Italian conversations, the prosody emerges here as a strategy deployed by interactants in the management of turn-taking and floor-holding; in the negotiation of conversational activities such as repair, assessments, announcements, reproaches, and news receipts; and in the keying of the tone or modality of interactional sequences.

Matters of Opinion offers an interesting insight into 'public opinion' as reported in the media, asking where these opinions actually come from, and how they have their effects. Drawing on the analysis of conversations from focus groups, phone-ins and broadcast interviews with members of the public, Greg Myers argues that we must go back to these encounters, asking questions such as what members of the public thought they were being asked, who they were talking as, and whom they were talking to. He reveals that people don't carry a store of opinions, ready to tell strangers; they use opinions in order to get along with other people, and how they say things is as important as what they say. Engaging and informative, this book illuminates debates on research methods, the public sphere and deliberative democracy, on broadcast talk, and on what it means to participate in public life.

Laughter in Interaction is an illuminating and lively account of how and why people laugh during conversation. Bringing together twenty-five years of research on the sequential organisation of laughter in everyday talk, Glenn analyses recordings and transcripts to show the finely detailed co-ordination of human laughter. He demonstrates that its production and placement, relative to talk and other activities, reveal much about its emergent meaning and accomplishments. The book shows how the participants in a conversation move from a single laugh to laughing together, how the matter of 'who laughs first' implicates orientation to social activities and how interactants work out whether laughs are more affiliative or hostile. The final chapter examines the contribution of laughter to sequences of conversational intimacy and play and to the invocation of gender. Engaging and original, the book shows how this seemingly insignificant part of human communication turns out to play a highly significant role in how people display, respond to and revise identities and relationships.

The Camorra criminal trials, held in Naples, involved more than a thousand people charged with belonging to a criminal organisation, the Nuova Camorra Organizzata (NCO). In the winter of 1982-3 the NCO suffered the desertion of some of its key men who, once arrested, broke the code of silence (omert...), turned against their former associates, and collaborated with the Justice Department. In the initial set of trials their testimony was found sufficiently reliable and convincing to determine the convictions of more than 800 defendants, but in the appeal their credibility was destroyed and the majority of people convicted solely on these witnesses' testimony were acquitted. This study documents the shifting relationship between these witnesses - called pentiti - and the Justice Department. To investigate this dramatic reversal of the defendants' convictions Marco Jacquemet combines analysis of talk and power technologies with a reflection on truth and credibility as communicative representations.

Reported speech, whereby we quote the words of others, is used in many different types of interaction. In this revealing study, a team of leading experts explore how reported speech is designed, the actions it is used to perform, and how it fits into the environments in which it is used. Using contemporary techniques of conversation analysis, the authors show how speech is reported in a wide range of contexts - including ordinary conversation, storytelling, news interviews, courtroom trials and medium-sitter interactions. Providing detailed analyses of reported speech in naturallyoccurring talk, the authors examine existing linguistic and sociological studies, and offer some insights into the phenomenon. Bringing together work from the most recent investigations in conversation analysis, this book will be invaluable to all those interested in the study of interaction, in particular how we report the speech of others, and the different forms this can take.

Each time we take a turn in conversation we indicate what we know and what we think others know. However, knowledge is neither static nor absolute. It is shaped by those we interact with and governed by social norms - we monitor one another for whether we are fulfilling our rights and responsibilities with respect to knowledge, and for who has relatively more rights to assert knowledge over some state of affairs. This book brings together an international team of leading linguists, sociologists and anthropologists working across a range of European and Asian languages to document some of the ways in which speakers manage the moral domain of knowledge in conversation. The volume demonstrates that if we are to understand how speakers manage issues of agreement, affiliation and alignment - something clearly at the heart of human sociality - we must understand the social norms surrounding epistemic access, primacy and responsibilities.

To understand the role of language in public life and the social process in general, we need first a closer understanding of how linguistic knowledge and social factors interact in discourse interpretation. This volume is a major advance towards that understanding. Professor Gumperz here synthesizes fundamental research on communication from a wide variety of disciplines - linguistics, sociolinguistics, anthropology and non-verbal communication - and develops an original and broadly based theory of conversational inference which shows how verbal communication can serve either between individuals of different social and ethnic backgrounds. The urgent need to overcome such barriers to effective communication is also a central concern of the book. Examples of conversational exchanges as well as of longer encounters, recorded in the urban United States, village Austria, South Asia and Britain, and analyzed to illustrate all aspects of the analytical approach, and to show how subconscious cultural presuppositions can damagingly affect interpretation of intent and judgement of interspeaker attitude. The volume will be of central interest to anyone concerned with communication, whether from a more academic viewpoint or as a professional working, for example, in the fields of interethnic or industrial relations.

Throughout Western society there are now strong pressures for social and racial integration but, in spite of these, recent experience has shown that greater intergroup contact can actually reinforce social distinctions and ethnic stereotypes. The studies collected here examine, from a broad sociological perspective, the sorts of face-to-face verbal exchange that are characteristic of industrial societies, and the volume as a whole pointedly demonstrates the role played by communicative phenomena in establishing and reinforcing social identity. The method of analysis that has been adopted enables the authors to reveal and examine a centrally important but hitherto little discussed conversational mechanism: the subconscious processes of inference that result from situational factors, social presuppositions and discourse conventions. The theory of conversation and the method of analysis that inform the author's approach are discussed in the first two chapters, and the case studies themselves examine interviews, counselling sessions and similar formal exchanges involving contacts between a wide range of different speakers: South Asians, West Indians and native English speakers in Britain; English natives and Chinese in South-East Asia; Afro-Americans, Asians and native English speakers in the United States; and English and French speakers in Canada. The volume will be of importance to linguists, anthropologists, psychologists, and others with a professional interest in communication, and its findings will have far-reaching applications in industrial and community relations and in educational practice.

This study is about the principles for constructing polite speeches. The core of it first appeared in Questions and Politeness, edited by Esther N. Goody (now out of print). It is here reissued with a fresh introduction that surveys the considerable literature in linguistics, psychology and the social sciences that the original extended essay stimulated, and suggests distinct directions for research. The authors describe and account for some remarkable parallelisms in the linguistic construction of utterances with which people express themselves in different languages and cultures. A motive for these parallels is isolated and a universal model is constructed outlining the abstract principles underlying polite usages. This is based on the detailed study of three unrelated languages and cultures: the Tamil of South India, the Tzeltal spoken by Mayan Indians in Chiapas, Mexico, and the English of the USA and England. This volume will be of special interest to students in linguistic pragmatics, sociolinguistics, applied linguistics, anthropology, and the sociology and social psychology of interaction.

Discourse markers - the particles oh, well, now, then, you know and I mean, and the connectives so, because, and, but and or - perform important functions in conversation. Dr Schiffrin's approach is firmly interdisciplinary, within linguistics and sociology, and her rigourous analysis clearly demonstrates that neither the markers, nor the discourse within which they function, can be understood from one point of view alone, but only as an integration of structural, semantic, pragmatic, and social factors. The core of the book is a comparative analysis of markers within conversational discourse collected by Dr Schiffrin during sociolinguistic fieldwork. The study concludes that markers provide contextual coordinates which aid in the production and interpretation of coherent conversation at both local and global levels of organization. It raises a wide range of theoretical and methodological issues important to discourse analysis - including the relationship between meaning and use, the role of qualitative and quantitative analyses - and the insights it offers will be of particular value to readers confronting the very substantial problems presented by the search for a model of discourse which is based on what people actually say, mean, and do with words in everyday social interaction.

In the first collection of its kind, Paul Drew and John Heritage bring together the latest advances in the application of conversation analysis to the study of language and interaction in institutional settings. Leading American and European scholars contribute to Talk at Work original empirical research into the interactions between professionals and 'clients' in a wide variety of settings, including doctor-patient consultations, legal hearings, news interviews, visits by health visitors, psychiatric interviews, and calls to the emergency services. Taken together, their reports are an illuminating exploration of how key aspects of an organisations' work are managed through talk and of the distinctively asymmetric character of institutional discourse. The use of a method at the forefront of research, on recordings of naturally occurring interactions in the settings under scrutiny, uncovers the relationships between social contexts and social actions and offers invaluable insight into the traditional concerns of the sociology and ethnography of organisations, sociolinguistics and pragmatics.

This book makes available five classic studies of the organisation of behaviour in face-to-face interaction. It includes Adam Kendon's well-known study of gaze-direction in interaction, his study of greetings, of the interactional functions of facial expression and of the spatial organisation of naturally occurring interaction, as recorded by means of film or videotape. They represent some of the best work undertaken within the 'natural history' tradition of interaction studies, as originally formulated in the work of Bateson, Birdwhistell and Goffman. Chapter 2, written especially for this new book, provides an historical and theoretical discussion of this tradition, and a new final chapter takes up the theme of the organisation of attention in interaction. The introduction provides details of the circumstances of how each paper came to be written. Each of the papers reprinted is accompanied by a short postscript, placing the work in the context of more recent research. Several of the papers presented in this volume, although widely referred to, have long been difficult to obtain. Their republication will be warmly welcomed by all students and teachers who are concerned with face-to-face interaction.

Chinese and Americans often unwittingly communicate at cross purposes because they are misled by the cultural trappings of talk. This book aims to clarify their misunderstandings by examining their different ideals and strategies of talk. It draws on cultural, philosophical, and linguistic insights and traces the development of Chinese communicative strategies from Confucius through the 'eight-legged essay' to the boardrooms and streets of Hong Kong. Its formal analysis of taped interchanges and in-depth interviews reveals Chinese speakers' distinctive ways of communicating and relating. Crosstalk and Culture in Sino-American Communication will alert people to the pitfalls of cultural misunderstandings and the hidden assumptions and expectations underlying talk.

Cecilia E. Ford explores the question: what work do adverbial clauses do in conversational interaction? Her analysis of this predominating conjunction strategy in English conversation is based on the assumption that grammars reflect recurrent patterns of situated language use, and that a primary site for language is in spontaneous talk. She considers the interactional as well as the informational work of talk and shows how conversationalists use grammar to coordinate their joint language production. The management of the complexities of the sequential development of a conversation, and the social roles of conversational participants, have been extensively examined within the sociological approach of Conversation Analysis. Dr Ford uses Conversation Analysis as a framework for the interpretation of interclausal relations in her database of American English conversations. Her book contributes to a growing body of research on grammar in discourse, which has until recently remained largely focused on monologic rather than dialogic functions of language.

Conversations between AIDS counsellors and their clients bring delicate and potentially threatening issues into play. In this study Anssi Peräkylä applies the principles of conversation analysis to his exploration of AIDS counselling, using data from video-recorded counselling sessions in a London teaching hospital. He meticulously analyses this data to show how various questioning techniques, in this case arising from the Milan School Family Systems theory, operate in these situations, and how counsellors attempt through the design and placement of their questions to achieve the cooperation of their clients, with varying success. His conclusions provide a timely and illuminating insight into the management of a sensitive topic through various techniques of indirectness.

The essays in this volume are all original contributions dealing in one way or another with the analysis of prosody - primarily intonation and rhythm - and the role it plays in everyday conversation. They take as their methodological starting point the contention that the study of prosody must begin with genuine interactional rather than pre fabricated laboratory data. Through close empirical analysis of recorded material from genuine English, German, and Italian conversations, the prosody emerges here as a strategy deployed by interactants in the management of turn-taking and floor-holding; in the negotiation of conversational activities such as repair, assessments, announcements, reproaches, and news receipts; and in the keying of the tone or modality of interactional sequences.

What we say always consists of prior words, structures and meanings that are combined in new ways and re-used in new contexts for new listeners. In this book, Deborah Schiffrin looks at two important tasks of language - presenting 'who' we are talking about (the referent) and 'what happened' to them (their actions and attributes) in a narrative - and explores how this presentation alters in relation to emergent forms and meanings. Drawing on examples from both face-to-face talk and public discourse, she analyses a variety of repairs, reformulations of referents, and retellings of narratives, ranging from word-level repairs within a single turn-at-talk, to life story narratives told years apart. Bringing together work from conversation analysis, interactional sociolinguistics, cognitive semantics, pragmatics, and variation analysis, In Other Words will be invaluable for scholars wishing to understand the many different factors that underlie the shaping and re-shaping of discourse over time, place and person.

Literacy - the ability to produce and interpret written text - has long been viewed as the basis of all school achievement; a measure of success that defines both an 'educated' person, and an educable one. In this volume, a team of leading experts raise questions central to the acquisition of literacy. Why do children with similar classroom experiences show different levels of educational achievement? And why do these differences in literacy, and ultimately employability, persist? By looking critically at the western view of a 'literate' person, the authors present a perspective on literary acquisition, viewing it as a socially constructed skill, whereby children must acquire discourse strategies that are socially 'approved'. This extensively-revised second edition contains an updated introduction and bibliography. This volume will continue to have far-reaching implications for educational theory and practice.

The relationship between language, discourse and identity has always been a major area of sociolinguistic investigation. In more recent times, the field has been revolutionized as previous models - which assumed our identities to be based on stable relationships between linguistic and social variables - have been challenged by pioneering new approaches to the topic. This volume brings together a team of leading experts to explore discourse in a range of social contexts. By applying a variety of analytical tools and concepts, the contributors show how we build images of ourselves through language, how society moulds us into different categories, and how we negotiate our membership of those categories. Drawing on numerous interactional settings (the workplace; medical interviews; education), in a variety of genres (narrative; conversation; interviews), and amongst different communities (immigrants; patients; adolescents; teachers), this revealing volume sheds light on how our social practices can help to shape our identities.

Many scholars of language have accepted a view of grammar as a clearly delineated and internally coherent structure which is best understood as a self-contained system. The contributors to this volume propose a very different way of approaching and understanding grammar, taking it as part of a broader range of systems which underlie the organisation of social life and emphasising its role in the use of language in everyday interaction and cognition. Taking as their starting-point the position that the very integrity of grammar is bound up with its place in the larger schemes of the organisation of human conduct, particularly with social interaction, their essays explore a rich variety of linkages between interaction and grammar.

The Camorra criminal trials, held in Naples, involved more than a thousand people charged with belonging to a criminal organisation, the Nuova Camorra Organizzata (NCO). In the winter of 1982-3 the NCO suffered the desertion of some of its key men who, once arrested, broke the code of silence (omert...), turned against their former associates, and collaborated with the Justice Department. In the initial set of trials their testimony was found sufficiently reliable and convincing to determine the convictions of more than 800 defendants, but in the appeal their credibility was destroyed and the majority of people convicted solely on these witnesses' testimony were acquitted. This study documents the shifting relationship between these witnesses - called pentiti - and the Justice Department. To investigate this dramatic reversal of the defendants' convictions Marco Jacquemet combines analysis of talk and power technologies with a reflection on truth and credibility as communicative representations.

Many scholars of language have accepted a view of grammar as a clearly delineated and internally coherent structure which is best understood as a self-contained system. The contributors to this volume propose a very different way of approaching and understanding grammar, taking it as part of a broader range of systems which underlie the organisation of social life and emphasising its role in the use of language in everyday interaction and cognition. Taking as their starting-point the position that the very integrity of grammar is bound up with its place in the larger schemes of the organisation of human conduct, particularly with social interaction, their essays explore a rich variety of linkages between interaction and grammar.